One of the reasons marketers don’t get the same level of respect as developers, accountants, and other professional roles is because marketers don’t have a standard professional degree, certification, or set of technologies that others understand “qualify” them to do their jobs.

This is why EVERYONE thinks they are a marketer.

If I ever make it to CMO, these are the 5 technologies/certifications that every single team member will have to know:

• CRM – Salesforce
• MAP – Marketo or HubSpot
• CMS – WordPress
• Analytics – Google Analytics
• Project Management – Any

I find that a lot of existing CMOs don’t think the entire team needs to have these skills / certifications and relegate the production, execution, and measurement of day-to-day marketing activities to those that DO have the skills… typically marketing operations, demand gen, and digital marketing.

That’s errrr fine… whatever…. but with digital becoming more and more important, if you’re not learning, getting certified in, and actively using the above technologies you probably don’t have a bright future in marketing.

Field marketing, event marketing, pr, and other more “traditional marketing” roles lag far behind their counterparts in the marketing department.

Here are the skills…..

CRM – Salesforce

The CRM is the system of record and medium through which data flows at a lot of enterprise B2B software companies. It’s also the single biggest bridge between marketing and other functions like sales and customer success.

You need to know how to manage leads / contacts / opps / accounts, report on any number of metrics related to these objects, and understand how this central system of record connects to other systems.

It’s embarrassing if you can’t say whether or not a campaign was a success, how it influenced any opportunities, and where the leads for that campaign came from.

MAP – Marketo / HubSpot

If I’m a VP of sales and I ask my regional field marketer to send out an email about something in the next couple of hours, and they admit that they don’t know how I’m going to immediately lose respect for them.

All marketers need to understand how to create emails, set up automated workflows to eliminate busy-work, and manage campaigns in a standardized and scalable fashion.

CMS – WordPress

A PR person should be able to update a grammar issue in a press release, a field marketer should be able to change a date on an event, and an analytics person should be able to update the permalink of a landing page.

If you can’t get into your CMS and update something on any given page then you’re not set up for marketing success. The CMS is arguably the single most important medium through which marketing communicates its value externally AND internally. Everyone needs to be able to access and update it.

Analytics – Google Analytics

If you can’t answer a question like “how much traffic did we get on the website last month” to another team member…. are you really a marketer? Not in their eyes.

What if the question relates to your specific marketing function, “how much traffic are we getting on the annual conference page?”.

If you can’t answer simple questions around analytics related to your function, that’s embarrassing and it makes all marketers look bad.

Project Management

You should NOT still be communicating via email threads/chats, storing assets in Sharepoint, and cutting corners when it comes to campaign execution.

What happens if an employee leaves mid-campaign and a new hire can’t access anything related to campaigns? What if it happens twice? What if you have to report to the C-level on all campaigns or projects being worked on and where they are?

You should be able to lose a team member or two, swap someone in on short notice, and be able to operate at almost the same level as before. You should be able to report on your activity at any given moment.

You get this flexibility with a project management system. There are a million out there, but only some have certifications like Wrike.

There are plenty of other systems, technologies, and associated skills out there that I think EVERYONE in marketing should be familiar with, but those were the important ones.

If I had to add one more I think it would be an ABM-related platform/competency.

What would you add?