Many companies focus on technology innovation: New high-tech breakthroughs for delivering data to global networks; novel approaches to bioscience; original methods for diagnostics or analysis. This all leads to products and services that create more and more value.

Ironically, the quest for innovation seems to be limited primarily to a company’s products – relegating our selling and marketing approaches to those of yesteryear. Sure, we do a great deal online these days (ahem…this blog, for instance), but it strikes me that marketers may be underperforming because we haven’t thought about sales and marketing as domains for process innovation. Why don’t we spend as much time on developing and deploying new marketing and sales approaches as we do our products?

How much is spent on printing brochures? How much time spent on tweaking PowerPoint or Keynote presentations? How much money is spent shipping products to trade shows? How often is the marketing budget examined from the perspective of ROI? (Can we really justify drayage costs at $60/100 lbs? Where is the return on that expenditure?)

Marketing innovation is not just about new marketing technologies. It’s about adopting new technologies in new ways to achieve better results. We should all focus on finding ways to deliver superior results for our marketing and sales investment. Better qualified leads. Shorter sales cycles. Higher close rates. Don’t expect better marketing and sales results with the same old brochures and PowerPoint presentations.