Marketing is at the heart of every enterprise. It's the process of efficiently finding, attracting, and retaining profitable customers - the lifeblood of all businesses, whether they're self-funded, venture-backed or publicly held.

Unfortunately, the word "efficiently" wasn't in many venture-backed companies' vocabularies last year. In fact, marketing "inefficiency" too often was the order of the day. Ironically, the oversupply of venture capital was a major culprit. It overwhelmed common sense. Firms spent irresponsibly high percentages of their bloated marketing budgets against the so-called "investment community," often at the insistence of their funders. New-economy magazines and The Wall Street Journal got fatter, but corporate coffers didn't. All too often, what was left over for customer creation was spent too late and against too many moving targets. Also typical of unsophisticated marketers, too little was spent on customer learning and way too much was spent on advertising, even in the B2B space.

Hopefully, everybody who's still in business has learned from last year's excesses and resolved to be efficient marketers this year. Here are some basic guidelines: