| In
my article, "Marketing Operations: Solving
Marketing's Seven Deadly Sins", I provided a glimpse into the motivation
of admired technology companies to address their biggest marketing challenges
by employing an integrated, end-to-end Marketing Operations (M.O.) methodology
M.O. is an emerging discipline with the potential to significantly increase
performance and accountability in complex marketing organizations. It addresses
the "seven deadliest marketing sins" that plague organizations of all
types and sizes by leveraging a strong front-end infrastructure to reinforce marketing
strategy and back-end programs and tactics. This article identifies those characteristics
that signal your organization's readiness for M.O. and answers these questions:
What does that organization look like? What are its primary pain points? What
is its vision for the future? What pressures are driving it to consider undergoing
substantial change? M.O. Readiness: A Checklist for Your CompanyTo
see if your company is a good candidate for M.O., check all the characteristics
listed below that apply. - My company is mid-size or larger.
- My
company's marketplace is dynamic and highly competitive.
- My company's
marketing has evolved into a complex and multi-dimensional function.
- My
company has a significant marketing budget
- A diverse mix of programs
and resources are funded to reach a breadth of audiences (segments, sales channels,
internal and external stakeholders, etc.).
- My company faces government
and regulatory compliance pressures.
- My company's marketing processes
have evolved to the point that they are no longer well coordinated or even well
understood.
- My company values best practices but lacks process, technology
and metrics to achieve them.
- My company is pressuring marketing to
assume a more strategic role.
- Within my company, many believe that
marketing must deliver greater value for the company's investment.
If
you checked half or more of the above statements, your company is a great candidate
to benefit by leveraging the power of Marketing Operations. M.O. Readiness:
Where Do You Feel the Pain?If your company is feeling some pain, you're
probably acutely aware of it. Arriving at an accurate diagnosis, however, requires
a careful examination. Before reviewing the checklist below to identify localized
pain points, first consider the general health of your marketing effort. Does
marketing currently receive wide recognition for its strategic leadership and
bottom-line contribution? Is marketing in complete alignment with your company's
strategic goals and other key functions? Can marketing clearly measure its success
and demonstrate ROI to your executive team? Marketing Operations is specifically
designed to address these corporate pain points: - Marketing focused
on firefighting and tactics rather than on strategy.
- Marketing experiencing
difficulty measuring ROI and demonstrating value, causing it often to be on the
defensive, needing to justify its role and contribution to C-level executives
and investors.
- Marketing success tied to other groups that have different
or even conflicting goals.
- A corporate environment that fails to support
collaboration and consequently loses opportunities for synergy.
- Employee
defections that jeopardize continuity, place at risk institutional knowledge and
expertise, and contribute to high customer churn.
- Marketing processes
that too often constrain internal efficiencies and effectiveness instead of enabling
them.
- Poor coordination of shared processes across functions.
- Difficulty
assimilating and integrating programs, systems and resources obtained from corporate
mergers or acquisitions, leading to leading to duplication, momentum loss, lack
of focus and resistance to change
If you resonate with two or more
of the above statements, your organization may be in enough pain to be ready to
embrace Marketing Operations. M.O. Readiness: - What's Your Vision of Marketing's
Contribution?In a perfect world, marketing operates as a very creative,
fast-paced, results-driven function that stays close to the customer and its other
stakeholders. It is not only aligned with the enterprise's strategic agenda but
also helps define it. It leads the customer experience and innovation processes.
It is well integrated with other corporate functions and takes full advantage
of the power and discipline of a strategically designed Marketing Operations infrastructure. The
M.O. infrastructure layers into the marketing function the processes, technology,
guidance and metrics required by an efficient operation that delivers outstanding
value on a consistent basis. Such an M.O. infrastructure enables informed decision-making,
accountability, sustainability, visibility, teamwork, strategic thinking, and
repeatable best practices execution.
A marketing organization is ready
to think seriously about embracing M.O. when it feels internal and external pressures
to make systemic changes because it has not been delivering on its vision and
has consistently failed to achieve its operational goals. - The CEO
considers the CMO/Marketing VP to be a valued strategic partner.
- Marketing
is fully aligned with other company functions and stakeholders.
- Marketing
efforts accelerate new product adoption, strengthen customer relationships, and
increase market penetration rate.
- Marketing leverages metrics and
dashboards to measure and track results, and continually improve them.
- Dashboards
rapidly and accurately inform decision makers.
- Metrics are aligned
with corporate goals and increasingly drive marketing expenditures.
- The
marketing team is energized and highly effective.
- Employee and customer
loyalty are consistently high.
- High return on marketing investment
is clearly recognized companywide.
Unless you've checked at least
half of the above statements, there is a large gap between your vision and your
current reality. Your company is ripe-or more than ripe-for M.O. Marketing
Operations: The Bottom LineBringing the benefits of Marketing Operations
into your marketing function should be considered an evolutionary process. M.O.
is both a serious commitment and a great opportunity. Like all change initiatives,
it requires careful and comprehensive thought and exacting implementation. Key
players in marketing and other cross-functional organizations, such as sales and
product development, need to be invited into the process early on and need to
stay involved to achieve stakeholder ownership and buy-in. The effort,
however, yields impressive rewards. As Figure 1 below shows, Marketing Operations
has the power to re-position and re-energize a company's marketing function, moving
it past stubborn barriers to unprecedented levels of performance and success.
Leveraging the discipline and rewards of an M.O. approach places marketing in
the perfect position to influence strategic decisions and help increase corporate
revenue, decrease costs, and sustain high levels of customer and employee satisfaction.
In short, Marketing Operations, when thoughtfully implemented, has the potential
to transform a "marketing function" into a "marketing powerhouse."
| Characteristic | Organizational
Pain | Desired Vision | | Substantial
marketing investment (resources, programs, budget) | Unmanageable complexity,
difficulty demonstrating ROI, Marketing on defensive | Marketing optimizes
resources to deliver substantial ROI
- Leverages processes, technology and
best practices to spur productivity, knowledge sharing
- Utilizes dashboards
and metrics to make informed spend decisions
- Is recognized by C-team for
its accountability and ROI contribution | | Dynamic,
competitive market | No or disappointing growth, Super-growth, high customer
churn, high employee turnover | Marketing aligns with other functions to
take responsibility for:
- Nurturing sales funnel
- Revenue targets
-
Innovation process
- New market penetration
- Customer experience
| Under
media or regulatory scrutiny for:
- Shareholder confidence
- Supplier to
government
- High-profile industry | Compliance pressure, impact of change
on SOX compliance, media magnifying glass | Marketing partners with Quality,
Finance, IR to meet compliance requirements
- Maps key processes
- Documents
best practices
- Applies LEAN, Six Sigma, and other methodologies
- Demonstrates
ROI through KPIs, dashboards, etc. | M&A
integration challenges
- Actual or Pending | Duplicated efforts, loss
of continuity, "everything needs attention" syndrome, difficulty getting
buy-in for change initiatives | Marketing leads M&A and other change
initiatives
- Communications leadership
- "Walking the talk"
| | More
tactical than strategic | Firefighting, CYA behavior | Marketing is
valued strategic partner to CEO and C-team |
Figure 1: Assessing
M.O. Readiness M.O. Readiness: Making the AssessmentIf you've
completed the above checklists, you probably have a good idea whether learning
more about Marketing Operations would be worthwhile. But it's also true that it
can be tough for marketing insiders to have a clear and objective view of their
own operation. That's where professional can help to assess your organization's
readiness to move forward with a new MO.
Gary M. Katz is CEO of Marketing Operations Partners (www.mopartners.com)
and CommPros Group, Inc. (www.commprosgroup.com).
He is a 20-year marketing veteran with extensive experience directing corporate
marketing, strategic planning, change management, lead generation, public relations,
investor relations and employee communications programs. |
