Marketing mentoring vs training: how to develop the marketer you already have

Training, consultancy and mentoring are three different purchases

They get used interchangeably and they should not be. Each solves a different problem, and buying the wrong one is how businesses end up disappointed with all three.

The practical difference:

• Training transfers knowledge. Fixed curriculum, fixed outcome, someone else's examples. Best when there is a genuine skills gap: your marketer has never run an email programme and needs to learn how.
• Consultancy delivers an answer. You buy the thinking and the document. Best when you need a strategy, an audit or a plan and you need it to be right first time.
• Mentoring builds judgement. No curriculum, because the agenda is whatever is live that month. Best when the person is capable but isolated, or stepping up faster than their experience.

A useful test: if the answer to the problem exists in a book, buy training. If you need the answer itself, buy consultancy. If your marketer could probably get there but keeps second guessing themselves, buy mentoring.

What actually happens in a mentoring session

This is the part people find hardest to picture, because unlike a course there is no syllabus to show you. In practice a session is structured, just not pre written.

A typical two hour session:

• Fifteen minutes on what has happened since last time, including what did not get done and why
• The live problem: a campaign that is underperforming, a brief that keeps coming back wrong, a board paper that needs writing
• Working it through together rather than me handing over an answer, so the reasoning sticks and the same problem is easier next time
• A short piece of stretch work: something slightly beyond current comfort, with a safety net
• Three agreed actions before the next session, written down

The rhythm matters more than the length. Monthly is the minimum that keeps momentum. Fortnightly suits someone newly promoted or newly alone in the role.

What SME marketers actually bring to sessions

Over time the same themes come up, and almost none of them are about channel technique. The technical knowledge is usually there. What is missing is the confidence to act on it and the language to defend it upwards.

• Prioritisation: a list of twenty good ideas and the time for four, with no principled way to choose
• Saying no to the sales director, the MD's LinkedIn contact, or whoever had the idea in the shower
• Briefing agencies and freelancers so the work comes back right, and reviewing it properly when it does not
• Measurement that survives a board meeting, rather than impressions and reach
• Making the case for budget in commercial language instead of marketing language
• Career direction, including CIM study and whether the next move is depth or breadth

How to tell which one your marketer needs

Choose training when:

• There is a specific, nameable skill gap: analytics, email automation, paid media buying
• The person is new to marketing rather than new to seniority
• A qualification matters for their progression, in which case the CIM route is worth looking at

Choose mentoring when the work is broadly competent but nothing lands with confidence, when your marketer is the only marketer, when they have just been promoted into a gap nobody prepared them for, or when you find yourself being asked to approve decisions you are not qualified to judge. And choose consultancy when the business needs a plan or an audit now, not a person developed over six months. Those are not mutually exclusive, and a common pattern is a strategy engagement first so there is a plan worth executing, then mentoring to support the person executing it.

Mentoring an owner who ended up running marketing

A lot of SME owners did not choose to run marketing. It landed on them because nobody else would take it, and they are making reasonable decisions without a way of knowing whether they are the right ones.

The sessions look different here. Less career, more judgement: is this agency proposal good value, is this rebrand necessary, should we be at that exhibition again, is the website the problem or is the positioning. The aim is not to turn an owner into a marketer. It is to make them a better buyer and a better judge of the work, which is usually worth more.

What it costs and how to structure it

Mentoring and coaching is from £500 a day, in house or online, priced on how many people are involved. Most SMEs do not buy whole days. A half day a month, or a pair of two hour sessions, is the usual shape and keeps the rhythm without eating the budget.

Tactical delivery days, where I do the work rather than develop the person, are from £300 a day. They are a different purchase and it is worth being clear which one you are buying, because mixing them tends to mean the mentoring quietly turns into me doing the work.

There is no minimum engagement. Three months is usually enough to tell whether it is working, and the honest measure is whether your marketer brings you fewer decisions to make rather than more.

Working with SLD Marketing

I mentor marketing managers, executives and owners across the UK, in house or online. I am a Chartered Marketer and a Fellow of the CIM, and I have been through the CIM route myself, so study support is part of it where that is relevant.

If you are not sure whether the gap is the person, the plan or the measurement, the free marketing health check takes about five minutes and gives you a score with the priorities behind it. That is usually a better starting point than guessing.