The cure
In a perfect world, marketing operates as a very creative, fast-paced, results-driven and accountable function that serves as the "voice of the customer" while working in lock-step with stakeholders. It is not only aligned with the enterprise's strategic agenda, but helps define it. It's well integrated with other corporate functions and takes full advantage of the power and discipline of a strategically designed marketing operations infrastructure.
In turn, a good mark-ops infrastructure adds processes, technology, governance and metrics to the marketing structure that deliver outstanding value, predictably and reliably. When in place, such an infrastructure also enables informed decision making, accountability, sustainability, visibility, teamwork, strategic thinking and best practices execution.
In this perfect world, marketing is:
- a collaborate environment where the CEO considers the CMO/marketing VP a valued partner
- fully aligned with other company functions and stakeholders
- aligning metrics with corporate goals to drive marketing expenditures
- recognized, company-wide, for high returns on its investments
- leveraging metrics and dashboards to measure and track results (and continually improving them)
- a high-energy, high-effectiveness environment with high levels of customer and employee retention
- accelerating the adoption of new products, strengthening customer relationships and increasing market penetration rates
If you're not experiencing four or more of these marketing states, you've got a pretty big gap between where you are and where you want to be. In short, a marketing organization is ready to embrace mark-ops chiefly because it hasn't been delivering on its vision and is consistently failing to achieve its operational goals. Yes, your tried-and-true methods have become unwell, and eventually you are finding that internal and external pressures are calling for systemic change.
The prescription
Like going to the doctor, introducing marketing operations to your organization can be scary. But it's also a great opportunity to incorporate the changes your whole company will need to make in order to move forward in the competitive digital landscape.
The key to incorporating marketing operations procedures is that key stakeholders across the entire organization, including sales and product development, must be brought together in a collaborative and cross-functional environment of mutual interest and buy-in -- a difficult task on any project. But fortunately, the tools of applied project management, and the project team structure itself, provide a valuable guide for starting these kinds of cross-functional efforts.
Cross-functional teams
Introducing change to an organization impacts processes, systems, organizational structure and job roles. So, marketing operations allows for "change challenges" to occur as part of its de facto role as enterprise integrator. And while project management principles help to incorporate change in the organizational processes, a subset of integration management -- known as change management -- helps facilitate the necessary personal transitions to allow real change to take place.
Managing both the technical and the people side of change, project and change management processes have evolved as symbiotic disciplines that marketing operations uses to provide both the structure and the tools for successful change.