Thinking about what my perfect roster would look like got me thinking about what it takes to build a winning baseball team. How would that apply to building a great marketing operations team?

The five essential MOps roles

The mandate for marketing operations is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing department through people, process, technology and data. When building a marketing operations team, an ideal situation is to have dedicated roles focused on each of those pillars. For most marketing operations teams, that results in five essential roles:

1. Marketing Operations Manager. Oversees the entire marketing operations team and ensures that the team is working towards the overall goals of the company. They are the primary point of contact for the CMO and other senior leaders in the organization and are responsible for developing the team’s strategy, managing budgets, and ensuring that the performance of the marketing department is effective and meeting targets.
2. Marketing Technologist. Manages the marketing tech stack and ensures that all systems are integrated, as well as trains team members on how to best utilize new and existing technologies. This role must have deep expertise in platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools.
3. Marketing Automation Specialist. Manages the marketing automation platform and ensures that it is integrated with other systems in the marketing tech stack. This role creates and executes email campaigns, lead nurturing and scoring programs, and ensures that all campaign data is accurate and up-to-date.
4. Data Analyst: Analyzes marketing data and provides insights to the marketing team. This role creates dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights to the marketing department and other stakeholders in the organization.
5. Project Manager / Process Specialist: Manages the project lifecycle from start to finish and optimizes workflows. Ensures that all projects are delivered on time, within budget, and meet the quality standards set by the organization. Focuses on helping the organization meet their productivity goals. 

The size of your marketing team will likely determine how specialized these roles can be.

In a smaller organization with less headcount, you will need to have more generalists who can do a little bit of everything. For example, you may not be able to hire a dedicated data or process specialist, so everyone on the team may have to figure out optimizing their own reporting and processes. But if you are fortunate enough to be in an organization with more resources, hiring for these dedicated roles will enable those resources to dive much deeper into their areas of expertise. 

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Experience plus skill-sets

When a general manager is putting together a baseball team, they’re looking for the right mix of experience and complementary skill-sets. If there’s a shortstop that excels defensively but is a below-average offensive player, then there needs to be another above average batter in the lineup to balance out that weak spot. But no matter the players’ individual strengths, they all have to be bought into the team’s philosophy and underlying style of play.

Those same team-building philosophies apply to putting together your marketing operations team. First, you need the right blend of technical expertise and hard skills. Striking the right balance in this area is even more critical if you’re on a smaller team with more generalist roles.

For example, imagine you’re on a three-person marketing operations team that consists of a marketing operations manager, a marketing automation specialist, and a marketing technology specialist. All three of those resources have robust experience around demand generation and are skilled in campaign planning and lead generation, but everyone on the team only has basic Excel skills and lacks expertise in data analysis.

In that situation, it may prove difficult for the team to effectively communicate the impact of their demand generation programs, because they would struggle to build the type of robust reporting and dashboards that would demonstrate the positive impact they are making on the organization.

On a small team like this, hiring T-shaped employees is important, but even more critical is making sure that everyone on the team doesn’t share the exact same “T”. When building your team, you must ensure that your resources don’t overlap with their depth of knowledge concentrated on the same skill(s), thereby leaving holes in other skill-sets where you need coverage. 

Dig deeper: MarTech’s marketing operations experts to follow

Inter-personal skills are important

However, there is another aspect of team building where you do want to make sure there is heavy overlap amongst all team members, and that is in the soft skills and personal characteristics.

Going back to our baseball analogy, in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” the Oakland A’s transformed their team by ensuring that everyone on the team was focused solely on getting on base. It became their core team-building philosophy, and every player they added to the team had to embrace that style of play.

When building a marketing operations team, there are a few characteristics that everyone on the team, no matter their role, absolutely has to have.

• Business acumen and strategic thinking: Everyone on the marketing operations team has to have a solid understanding of the business objectives and be able to think big-picture about how to achieve those goals. Evaluating every decision based on its potential to impact those goals is the key to the team’s success.
• Adaptability: In a fast-paced and constantly evolving marketing environment, marketing operations team members need to be adaptable and flexible. Priorities change quickly and conflicting demands from various stakeholders requires marketing operations professionals to be able to pivot quickly.
• Problem-solving: Marketing operations teams face a lot of challenges: data cleanliness across multiple platforms; decreasing or flat budget and resources despite increasing demand for the team’s services; optimizing processes in an environment where people may be resistant to change… the list of challenges is long and constantly growing. This requires marketing operations team members to be skilled at finding creative solutions to solve complex problems.
• Customer-centricity: In order to design campaigns and experiences that will resonate with the target audience, marketing operations team members need to be focused on the customer experience and have a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences.

A team that shares these core characteristics has the right foundation in place to become a powerful marketing operations organization. If your team is still facing challenges, such as talent gaps in certain skill-sets that or being understaffed, it may be a multi-year journey to get to exactly where you want to go.

Still, you can be confident that your team is headed in the right direction.  Just like a baseball team, your team may steadily progress from being a playoff contender, to a playoff team that has an early exit, to eventually winning it all. And with the right culture in place, it might not take as long as you think. This could be the year that it all comes together for your team. After all, spring is the time for optimism.  

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For many of us, that may mean setting a personal goal of adhering to a new workout routine to get into better physical shape. But what are your new year’s resolutions for your career? For 2023, my new year’s resolution is to get my Marketing Operations team in better shape by changing the internal perception of the team. 

Too often the MOps function is thought of as a group of tacticians who are simply cranking out emails at the request of marketers. What often goes unnoticed is that Marketing Ops professionals have so much more to offer than just their technical skills. Where the team really adds value is when they can understand the goals of the business, and identify new areas of opportunity to achieve those goals. 

My resolution is to change the perception of Marketing Ops to be seen as a strategic partner that marketing leadership relies on to achieve their objectives. In order to do that, I need to market the value of my team internally. Inspired by posts from Darrell Alfonso and Ryan Gunn, here is a five-step internal marketing plan for how to achieve just that.

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

1. Define marketing objective and key results for how to measure progress

• Objective: To have marketing leadership view the Marketing Ops team as a strategic partner.
  • Key Result #1: Increase the percentage of campaigns that Marketing Ops is invited to be a part of the initial strategy planning meetings
    • Too often, the Marketing Ops team is left out of these initial planning meetings, and only brought in to execute the campaign after all the key decisions have been made. Getting included more often in the up-front planning will demonstrate that we are making tangible progress towards being seen as strategic partners.
  • Key Result #2: Track the ROI of campaigns that Marketing Ops was included up front versus campaigns where they were not
    • When Marketing Ops is included in the strategy planning early on, the team can offer suggestions of ways to use data to enhance the targeting criteria, or optimize the hand-off between marketing and sales, etc. These campaigns are going to be more effective and more efficient than campaigns where Marketing Ops is scrambling just to get something out the door after all the decisions have been made. Reporting on the difference in ROI between these two situations will demonstrate the tangible value Marketing Ops brings as a strategic partner.
  • Key Result #3: Decrease the number of “back channel” requests for campaigns or technologies that do not follow the proper intake and evaluation process
    • When our colleagues don’t follow our intake processes and go around them to get things done “quickly”, it demonstrates that they do not understand the level of effort it takes for Marketing Ops to do our jobs well. This key result will demonstrate that we are succeeding in educating the rest of the department on the value that we bring and the resources it takes to perform our jobs to the best of our ability.

2. Identify target audience

• CMO
  • Identify what the CMO is most focused on. Is it new customer growth? Current customer retention? Increasing brand awareness? Reducing costs and becoming more efficient? Identifying what her key objectives are and finding ways to help her achieve those goals will be critical. 
• Channel Marketing Leaders
  • A good tactic to take with channel marketing leaders is to find an area of opportunity that Marketing Ops can help them with that they haven’t had time to pursue yet. Is there an audience they haven’t had a chance to target yet? Or a particular product they have been wanting to try and promote? If your Marketing Ops team can help test some of these ideas that have been in the back of their mind, channel marketers are going to understand the value MOps can bring as a strategic partner.
• Sales Managers
  • While sales managers are outside of the marketing department, getting them to know your Marketing Ops team to the point where they can give your team members recognition by name is hugely important. When a sales manager mentions a Marketing Ops team member’s name to the CMO, it’s going to make an impression. Focus on finding a problem you can help sales solve. What parts of their job are the most frustrating? What is a process that is broken and needs fixing or could be automated? Find ways to make their lives easier.

3. Target audience interviews

• Each quarter identify 1-3 members of your target audience groups to interview about the following topics:
  1. Tech Stack Audit: What technologies are they using? Are these documented as part of the tech stack? What features of the tools do they use? What do they like and dislike about their tools?
     • This gives you an opportunity to see if you can empower them by training them on additional features and functionality they can get out of their existing tools, or perhaps find some cost savings by suggesting the consolidation of overlapping or underutilized tools.
  2. Process Optimization: Ask them to describe a few processes they use most frequently. Document these processes and identify areas of opportunity for improvement or automation.
  3. Data and Reporting: Ask them about how they measure their success today, and ask them to show you the reports that they currently use. Look for opportunities to either create new reports that would provide value, or find ways to enrich their existing reports.

4. Prioritize quarterly projects

• After you’ve identified the projects that could be helpful for your internal customers based on feedback from the interviews, it’s time to prioritize those projects based on what you can achieve this quarter. Design a weighted prioritization matrix to rank what projects you’ll tackle first. Determine the criteria by which you’ll evaluate your projects (ex: Business Value, Level of Effort, Customer Influence, Time to Execute, etc.) and weight each factor according to its relative importance. Then score your list of potential projects against the criteria and start tackling the projects with the highest scores first.

5. Internal promotion: Share your wins

• Find ways to communicate to your stakeholders the successes your teams have had, and the impact they are making.

• Find ways to communicate to your stakeholders the successes your teams have had, and the impact they are making.
  1. Develop a quarterly newsletter that highlights the projects you’ve tackled and the impact that you’ve achieved. Include testimonials or case studies from internal clients that have benefitted from your efforts.
  2. Hold quarterly “Lunch and Learn” meetings on different topics to showcase Marketing Ops’ capabilities. The topics could be trainings on different tools, or presenting research on trends in the industry, or a retrospective of a successful project you’ve accomplished. It’s also a great opportunity to do Q&A with your stakeholders to understand what they are most interested in.

Just as designing a workout plan to follow each week will help you achieve your personal fitness goals, developing an internal marketing plan can hold you accountable for the work that it will take to change the internal perception of your Marketing Operations team.

It will take discipline, but by staying focused and continuing to promote your team and educate your internal stakeholders on the value Marketing Operations can offer, your team will earn a seat at the table with the other marketing leaders. Once your team is seen as the strategic partner they should be, the sky is the limit for what your organization will be able to achieve.  

The post Position marketing ops as a strategic partner: A New Year’s resolution appeared first on MarTech.

My favorite part of the Stackies is observing all the different ways organizations choose to organize and catalog their martech stacks. After reviewing this year’s entries, below are three of the most common ways to consider organizing your martech stack and some of the unique benefits of each approach.

1. The customer journey

One of the most popular ways to organize your martech stack is to align your technologies with the stage they support in the customer journey. Different companies have different terminology for the different phases, but it typically goes something like “Awareness,” “Consideration,” “Purchase” and “Onboard.”

In this example, SEO tools would typically be categorized under the “Awareness” phase, whereas ecommerce platforms would easily fit under the “Purchase” phase. When categorizing your tools this way, there are two challenges you want to be sure to account for:

• Make sure you have a way to tag some technologies under multiple customer journey stages. For example, your marketing automation platform would likely be used across multiple stages, including “Awareness,” “Consideration” and “Onboard.”
• You will also want to have an entirely separate category or two for tools used for internal purposes that customers don’t necessarily directly interact with along their journey. Data and analytics tools, as well as internal workflow and collaboration tools, would fall into these categories.

And there’s an added benefit. Categorizing your tools this way gives you a great visual to see what tools are affecting multiple stages of the customer journey and, therefore, may require more investment or resources. For example, if your marketing operations team has been pushing for increased headcount, showcasing how the platform impacts nearly every stage of the customer journey may help you garner internal support from leaders even outside of marketing, such as sales or customer support.

2. Technology category or subcategory

One of the most common and popular ways to categorize your martech stack is simply by the technology category they belong to. This is how the famous Martech Landscape supergraphic, along with the new interactive MartechMap, organizes tools. When organizing your martech stack, you could choose to keep your categorization at the highest level, such as “Advertising and Promotion,” “Content and Experience,” “Social and Relationships,” “Commerce and Sales,” “Data” and “Management” or you could choose to get a step more granular and assign your tools according to their appropriate subcategories.

For example, the subcategories under “Content and Experience” may include “Email,” “Social,” and “Web” among others.

Another added benefit: One of the biggest challenges that marketing organizations face is the proliferation of technologies available. Marketing organizations struggle to take full advantage of their martech stack’s potential. According to the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey 2019, marketing leaders report utilizing only 58% of their martech stack’s potential, down from 61% in 2018.

Organizing your tools by the category they belong to can help you easily identify where there may be opportunities for consolidation within your martech stack. For example, you may discover that you are using multiple survey tools across the organization because individual teams needing a quick survey have set up free or low-cost accounts on platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. You may have a customer experience group using a more robust platform such as Qualtrics, which handles customer surveys. That could be an opportunity to consolidate onto one survey platform.

Consolidating your martech stack can help you take better advantage of your martech stack’s potential by cutting costs, reducing data silos, and ultimately enabling users to spend more time diving deep into all of the available features of one tool and sharing that knowledge with others.

3. Internal organizational structure

 Another way to organize your martech stack is by the internal teams responsible for operating those technologies. For example, an organization may typically include a data and analytics team, a marketing operations team, a content management team and an advertising team. In this situation, one team may own some tools, such as display advertising tools for the advertising team or the website CMS, which only the content management team can access. However, there are likely quite a few tools that multiple teams have access to, such as some data and analytics tools, like Google Analytics.

When categorizing Google Analytics within your martech stack, you may realize that it needs to be associated with more teams than you initially thought. Of course, the data and analytics team has access to Google Analytics, but so does the advertising team, who is using it to focus on conversion rates of their campaigns. The content management team may have access to look at page load times. The marketing Operations team may also use it to determine the highest converting pages they should incorporate into their lead scoring models.

Added benefit? Cataloging your martech stack along organizational lines helps highlight where there is shared access and ownership within certain tools. This gives you the visibility to ensure you have the right policies, procedures, and rights management in place to ensure that different teams are not stepping on each other’s toes or operating in different ways that could ultimately hurt overall efficiency.

For example, in Google Analytics, you would want to ensure that multiple teams do not share editor rights, which would allow someone in the marketing operations team to edit the default channel groupings, which could potentially break some of the ways that the advertising team is optimizing spend across channels.

Dig deeper: How startups and small companies should build their marketing stacks

If you categorize your martech stack by your organizational structure, set up regular reviews of tools with shared access to ensure that you have the right governance policies in place and that they are being followed.

There is no right or wrong way to categorize your martech stack, as each approach has its purpose and benefits. You also do not have to limit yourself to just one approach. As you can see above, taking the time to categorize your martech stack in different ways may help you achieve particular goals or better suit you when sharing that visualization with a particular leader. No matter how you categorize it, the most important thing is to ensure you regularly audit and update your martech stack. 

The post 3 ways to organize your martech stack appeared first on MarTech.

If your end-users are not embracing a tool, it will be impossible to take full advantage of its capabilities. Under-utilization of tools can hurt your martech team’s reputation and the ability to get budget for future technology implementations. Therefore, it is critical to get your end-users engaged and using new technologies early and often.

Here are five tips to help drive user adoption of new martech tools.

Tip #1: Build a super user group and make them your advocates

It is natural for end users to resist the inevitable changes when asked to adopt new technology. Even if you upgrade or replace a tool users have complained about for years, you should expect some resistance. A new technology, even a better one, requires additional work for your users to learn the tool and adjust their day-to-day routines. This is where building a super user group can be a huge asset.

• Invite a small subset of your end users to be your super users. Try and pick people that have a lot of influence over their peers.
• Include your super users as early as possible in the process to feel some ownership over the tool. If it is possible to invite them to join and weigh in on the “bake-off” between the final two tools during the buying process, all the better.
• When onboarding the tool, utilize the super user group as your main user testing group. Take as much of their feedback as possible, and take the time to explain why some customizations they ask for may not be possible. The better they understand what the tool can and cannot do, the more likely they will share those explanations with their peers once the tool is live.

Tip #2: At launch, don’t be afraid of training tactics that won’t scale

The first impression that many users have of the new technology is often the one they will stick with, regardless of how many changes or improvements you make to the tool. If your tool gets a negative reputation amongst your initial users, that negativity will spread to future groups of users in other divisions or to new employees joining the team.

That is why it is so important that you go above and beyond to make sure your users have a good first impression when launching a new tool. Do not be afraid of implementing training tactics that may not scale over the long term, like doing 1:1 sit-downs or video calls with your users and walking them through the tool personally.

These tactics may not be viable as you roll the tool out to larger and larger groups. But if the tool has a solid reputation from the initial user group, these tactics may not be needed as you grow. Future users will be looking forward to getting their chance to use it and, therefore, are more likely to take advantage of your more scalable training resources.

Tip #3: Offer a variety of ongoing training resources

A critical misstep that often befalls marketing technology implementations is taking a one and done approach to user training. Even if your initial training plan is successful, it is important to continue to offer a variety of training resources on an ongoing basis. This ensures that users will have the opportunity to upskill in the tool and take advantage of new features and offers additional opportunities for those late adopters not to be left behind.

• Short webinars and “tips and tricks” videos. Video training can be especially effective for software. Create videos that enable users to follow along and see the software interface. Break these down into five to 10 minutes snippets for specific use cases or tasks and provide a link to a library of these videos.
• Office hours. Establish regular office hours where users can drop in, ask their personal questions, and get 1:1 help from an administrator. Keep a log of what types of questions come up during office hours, and use those frequent questions as topics to create a short video training about. Offering these sessions can also encourage users to occasionally hold off on sending their questions via an email, IM, or support ticket if they know they can get them answered during office hours.
• Newsletter or Slack channel. Provide links to new training videos, offer a “tip of the week” and communicate minor updates or bug fixes via a regular newsletter or slack channel.

Tip #4: Provide rewards or recognition for top users

Show off your top users and the wins they generate from taking advantage of the tool. If your general population of users can see tangible success stories from their peers, they will be more motivated to try and create a success story of their own.

• Highlight “key win” case studies and remember to share these with your vendor. The vendor may choose to share it within their network, giving even more positive exposure to your top users.
• Write or record a fun 1:1 interview with the “user of the month.” If it aligns with your company culture, you could even create a funny, over-the-top type of trophy (perhaps take some inspiration from college football teams’ turnover gimmicks) for the user to proudly display on their desk while they hold the title.
• Offer gift cards or company swag to the top users monthly or quarterly.

Tip #5: Take advantage of vendor or outside resources to execute quick wins

One of the best ways to drive the adoption of a new tool is to generate some quick wins. If you are having trouble delivering on a particular project or idea within the tool, whether due to inexperience or lack of internal resources, do not just push that project “down the road.” Users will get frustrated hearing repeatedly that the changes they desire are coming in a future phase or at a later date. You need wins!

• Use your customer success manager. Many SaaS vendors will provide you with a dedicated customer success manager (CSM) to support your account. SaaS companies have recognized the importance of retaining clients. As a result, customer success roles grew at the sixth fastest rate in the U.S., according to LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report. Take advantage of your CSM. Don’t fall into the trap of only talking with your CSM once a quarter to get a high-level update of what’s on their product roadmap. Their role is to make you successful and turn you into an advocate who will drive referrals for their product. Use them. Meet with them frequently to talk about ideas or projects you’re working on, and ask them to pull in resources on their side to help execute. Often they will be able to call in favors with technical resources, or they can connect you with other clients who can help talk you through how they solved a similar challenge.

• Plan and budget for outside help (if possible). When making your pitch for the new technology, include some budget for your implementation partner, third-party agency or outside contractors to help administer the tool for a limited “warranty period” after launch; ideally, for 60 to 90 days. No matter how much user testing you do before the official launch of the technology, there will inevitably be bugs to fix or new ideas that you will want to be able to execute quickly. Having a plan and a budget for expert resources to help you deliver those wins will generate goodwill for the tool, ultimately increasing user adoption.

Maintaining or growing your martech budget year over year often depends upon your ability to demonstrate tool utilization and report on a strong ROI for your martech stack. Your users have to actively engage with your tools to have a chance to deliver on that positive ROI. To give your team and your tech stack the best chance at success, invest in user adoption strategies when implementing new tools.

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