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Niko Hiljanen
When senior marketing executives evaluate how to improve marketing operations, a typical challenge they face is uncertainty of where to start from. Marketing function consists of many different parts, actions and people. It can be hard to identify which areas would require the most attention. Identifying the current state is a crucial part of the journey B2B marketing organization goes from cost center towards the profit center.
This topic generated a lot of good discussion in our previous Executive Roundtable event with marketing executives in April. To help you proceed in the profit center journey and evaluate your marketing organization’s current state, I share you 5 Core Elements for Marketing Commercial Excellence.
1. What is the role of marketing in your organization?
Is marketing positioned as an important strategic business engine or purely a supporting function in your organization? How’s the collaboration with sales and business going? Based on my experience, marketing organizations can be roughly divided into three typical situations:
- Painter: You have a clear vision of the desired role and you already act by it. Now you only need to communicate it right to your stakeholders.
- Builder: You have a vision. Now you need to prove it and give your stakeholders a reason to believe it. So before focusing on internal communication, you need to improve the action.
- Drifter: Marketing organization is drifting without a clear vision of the desired internal role and your meaning to the business objectives. This one’s obviously a long road but still doable.
There’s not a right or wrong role for marketing. More important is to identify what's the role at the moment. Once your role is clear to you, you understand how and by which actions to improve internal position of marketing – if it needs to be improved in the first place. Should you focus on marketing performance and goal-setting? Should you clarify the direction with sales and business leads? Should you only communicate the value you already provide better?
2. Make sure your team has the right capabilities and competencies
Capabilities in marketing are usually tightly related to roles and responsibilities. Or they should be. There have typically been specialists for e.g. content creation and technology. Today we see unrealistic expectations for marketing unicorns that can do anything that’s even slightly related to marketing. Marketers are also exposed to jump along to different trends such as ABM or generative AI. Non-marketers in organizations tend to assume that marketers can read a blog or two, watch a webinar and start leading ABM successfully. No wonder so many marketers feel exhausted. How do you create conditions for success for your team in these situations?
When you evaluate improving marketing from capabilities and competencies standpoint, I recommend to focus especially on following questions:
- What capabilities does your team have? What’s missing?
- How do you support improving capabilities in your organization?
- How do you know and determine what knowledge and capabilities are important to your organization?
3. Resource smarter and say goodbye to constant ad hoc and hurry
Marketing is always under-resourced. There’s a constant hurry and ad hoc. If this is always the feeling, do you know how well your team’s resources are utilized? If your team is under-resourced, can you create a good business case for increasing the resources? Vice versa, if there was a risk your budget would be cut half, how would you defend it?
As people, resources require leading. How do you plan marketing and prioritize different tasks? Based on recent studies, clear roles and goals are often lacking in marketing. How do you create clear expectations, responsibilities and goals for the entire marketing team? Ad hoc and rush don’t have to belong to marketing. There’s only bad planning and prioritization.
4. Do you only use technology for the sake of technology?
B2B marketing in complex sales environment is not a technology. However, technology provides many benefits and support to marketing operations. As a leader, you have to think and prioritize what technology is important and what’s not. I recommend you to evaluate the utilisation rate of your team’s marketing technology every now and then. It all comes down to what goal does the chosen technology support or what challenge it helps solve?
Let's take an example. Generative AI is everywhere at the moment. It will also affect the way sales and marketing operate. If you’re investing in AI, ask yourself what will change and what not? What do you want to achieve with AI? And when implementing AI to a whole organization, it’s better to start by creating a company-level AI strategy first.
5. Playbooks and operating models as a marketing function backbone
This was a main topic in our previous Executive Roundtable event in April. In the discussions with Senior Marketing Executives especially the importance of goal-setting and planning processes and capacity management were emphasized.
In terms of playbooks and operating models, most important thing is to identify the ones that have the biggest impact on team’s performance. Without identifying them, it becomes difficult to improve overall team performance. Every team member might have their own ways of working and onboarding new people is hard without jointly agreed best practices and operating models.
Documented operating models and playbooks ease marketers’ daily work. They don’t remove the creative part of it. The idea is to give frames and guidelines within which individual professionals have autonomy to operate. Based on my experience, the most important operating models in marketing teams are:
- Planning process
- Goal-setting
- Capacity management
- Collaboration with internal stakeholders
- Partner management
- Reporting
- Budgeting
I know documenting is boring. And documenting each and every process and detail is not necessary. Prioritize the most important ones. Once they are documented and implemented, you can evaluate and improve your team’s performance and scale the operations when your team grows. This way you can be sure your team operates by the best practices. Remember that documentation is not a set and forget thing. Evaluate the documented processes regularly to see if there’s room for improvement or more efficient ways to operate.
More information
Hope the framework I presented helps you lead your own team and it simplifies evaluating the marketing operations as a whole. If you’re interested in our Executive Roundtable concept, you can read more information about it on our website or you can also reach out to us directly.
