Marketing Profs

Our previous article, "Marketing Operations: Solving Marketing's Seven Deadly Sins," 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 (MO) methodology

MO 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 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 an organization's readiness for MO 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?

MO Readiness: A Checklist for Your Company

To see whether your company is a good candidate for MO, check all the characteristics listed below that apply:

• My company is midsize or larger.
• My company's marketplace is dynamic and highly competitive.
• My company's marketing has evolved into a complex and multidimensional 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.

MO 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
• 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 and place at risk institutional knowledge and expertise
• 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
• Marketing often on the defensive, needing to justify its role and contribution to C-level executives

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.