If your marketing department is missing ROI benchmarks, churning its customers and employees or experiencing other difficulties of scale, a new operations strategy could be the salvation of your success.

There's nothing like some good old economic pain to help marketers revisit words like process, metrics, accountability and -- the mother of all business terms -- organizational alignment.   

But unlike the recessionary battle cries of the past, organizational alignment actually addresses the elephant-in-the-room space between strategy and execution: a space that is, at long last, being filled by the emergence of marketing operations.

Defined as an end-to-end operational discipline, marketing operations leverages processes, technology and metrics to run the marketing function as a fully accountable profit center. It reinforces marketing strategy and tactics with a scalable infrastructure, as well as a collaborative ecosystem -- both within and outside the marketing department -- to drive the achievement of enterprise objectives.

But how does a company achieve such idyllic, organizational heights? How do you even know if your company is ready or able to embrace marketing operations and reap its potential benefits?

The condition
Like all things in life, and especially in business, nothing changes until there's enough pain. Chances are, if you're in a mid- to large-sized organization you're probably already feeling some marketing pain. But to arrive at the proper diagnosis, first ask yourself the following questions:

In your organization, is marketing:

1. more focused on firefighting than strategy and tactics?
2. experiencing difficulty measuring ROI and demonstrating value (to C-level execs and investors)?
3. a "corporate" environment that fails to support collaboration, causing it to miss opportunities?
4. hamstrung by processes that constrain internal efficiencies instead of enabling them?
5. suffering from poor coordination of shared processes across functions?
6. experiencing employee defections that jeopardize continuity and institutional memory, leading to customer churn?
7. having difficulty assimilating and integrating programs, systems and resources obtained from corporate mergers or acquisitions leading to duplication, momentum loss, lack of focus and resistance to change?

Does any of this sound familiar? 

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