Marketing Operations for Better Outcomes

Let’s talk for a minute. How’s your marketing department? Do you have one in place, and dedicated resources and budget that they’re executing on? While you’re focused on new product launches, product development, and dealer programs, is your marketing as successful as it should be?

In conversations we’ve had with business owners and leaders, they seem to wish their marketing was doing “more.” That’s not necessarily a reflection of their team—they all seem to be doing their jobs—but the results aren’t coming in. And really, what does “more” even look like?

What if you could have a set of criteria that could tell you what “more” is? And even better, could tell you:

• What to expect when your marketing strategy is capable
• Where to look when you aren’t getting results

We’ll explore this in detail later, but here’s a spoiler. The thread through this email and all its parts? It’s about marketing operations.

A cautionary tale

I used to work with a B2B organization that sold through exclusive dealers. The first few years, the head of marketing was not a marketer, per se, but still someone very experienced in the field. That person helped shape company strategy and consistently completed annual and quarterly planning for marketing with inputs from the sales team and dealers. This helped set the tone for the organization, bringing energy and focus.

Under this leadership, the marketing team invested time, focus, and resources into foundational elements (think brand creative, a tech stack, email nurture plan for both prospects and current clients), as well as campaigns to create and drive demand. There were special projects that incentivized dealers to report back on sales. And there were some bets like testing inside the dealer media program and an opportunity for dealers to work with SEO specialists.

This took work, but it resulted in trust and excitement in their dealers, a differentiated brand in the market, and gained market share. The result—which was measured in a scorecard—was record profits and dealer satisfaction.

THEN, as things happen, that leader left the organization. A new marketing leader was hired to take over, who was experienced but not mature in the operational side of marketing. A lot of the actions and activities continued for a while, but quarterly and annual planning stopped. Weekly department meetings stopped. The focus shifted from doing things with a set strategy to just doing things. Today, there are fewer dealers enrolled in the dealer program than there were six years ago. Competitors have caught up and—in their lack of differentiation—they’ve lost market share. Current customers haven’t received an email in years, and the sales close rate has been on a steady decline.

One person did not cause this. Rather, the shift away from the day-to-day operations did. Had proven processes and an outlined set of goals been in place and non-negotiable, they wouldn’t have ended up in this place.

Let’s get tactical

So what are “marketing operations?” The best way to address this is to talk about the tasks that must happen to be successful. Fair warning: these seem easy, but they’re hard to maintain. Think back to the personal story we started with. It takes discipline to keep marketing operations on the tracks.

An important note: before you dive into the day-to-day operations, the success of your marketing hinges on:

• The business strategy: what bets are we making and why.
• The brand strategy: who you are as an organization, what makes you unique, how you present that to the world

With these in place, your marketing operations need:

A plan:

Your plan should inform how marketing prioritizes their activity. Are there strategic priorities like a need to shift consumer perception toward the brand? Or a new model line coming to market? Your chosen campaigns, tactics, and channels should mirror the weight of these priorities.

How about your approach to data? Are you actively gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer data? A good plan includes how you will leverage these insights to drive activity (like differentiated campaigns for first-time and repeat buyers).

A calendar:

Without firm deadlines and a planned-out calendar, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold your team accountable to results. This calendar includes content and tradeshows—down to your planned product launches. How far ahead of that next product launch will you have enablement assets to dealers? If you’re running dealer programs, when will your creative updates to media take place? The devil is in the details.

Agreed-upon outcomes, KPIs, and a scorecard to track progress: The metrics you track and share with leadership must reflect activity and performance at the corporate level and at the dealer/distributor level. A few metrics to consider:

• Model-specific conversions and form fills
• Opportunities delivered to dealers
• Foot traffic to dealerships
• Marketing-attributable sales
• Dealership close rate and days to close
• Dealership sales distribution
• Dealer response time to opportunities

Because you are selling through distributors and dealers, much of your reporting comes from those channels, making the ability to report on sales or connect sales to marketing activities that much more difficult.

Annual and quarterly planning:

Ensuring your departmental planning lines up with the larger organization’s means you have the most up-to-date information on company strategy and have better clarity into your ability to invest across marketing. And a quarterly cadence is a must if you plan to adapt to changing marketing conditions, competitor moves, and demand fluctuations.

Regular meeting cadences:

This means a set cadence within your marketing team. With sales and product development. With customer service. Your marketing team should also regularly interface with engineering to share feedback from consumers, to get closer to the product, and to find opportunities for new marketing assets (like using engineering drawings in content).

And crucially, don’t forget dealers and distributors who, beyond sales help, require expectation setting for brand consistency and regular reporting. This touchpoint will also help you to get closer to the customer.

Daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly behaviors:

These behaviors cover high-level activities like updating content strategy to the more tactical of responding to social media comments. When your team receives that weekly report on current inventory numbers across the dealer network, do they take action on that information? Or does it sit on the shelf?

Solid project management:

Tracking, follow-ups, and accountability for your work. If you’re working with outside partners, this means ensuring your internal team provides those partners what they need, and holds those partners accountable to their action items.

Eat your vegetables

Sticking to these tactics is basic upkeep for good organizational health. Like eating your green vegetables and taking regular walks. Here’s what it looks like on the day-to-day:

• Ensuring your marketing leader and team are finding the data gaps and doing the hard work of filling them
• Getting closer to the customer
• Having a plan and writing it down
• Having the plan ladder up to the business strategy
• Creating a calendar and keeping it updated

Having objectives, grouping them into campaigns, and running those campaigns

When they’re listed out like that, they seem obvious, right? But almost no one does them. Tackling this tactical list means you’re working toward true marketing maturity.

A tale of two scenarios

With those practices in mind, let’s imagine two different scenarios.

Picture this: you need to generate demand (who doesn’t?). You have a new model line that drives the organization’s focus. Sales are lagging and more orders are needed to keep up with the production schedule.

Scenario #1

Marketing is owned by a senior leader in sales. That lead has a defined strategy. There is a marketing team and they are consistently busy. There’s great product photography, defined brand guidelines, and regular maintenance for organic social. Emails are sent to existing customers and prospects.

But no one is looking at these actions and thinking, “Wow, they’re crushing it.” There’s no excitement, no enthusiasm.

And worse, when you go to them and say, “we need to prioritize sales of a specific unit,” the outcome is an increase in activity without a lot of focus. After two months, or six, you can’t point back to the impact of their work.

Scenario #2

Marketing is still owned by a senior leader that’s in sales. Similarly, they also have a defined strategy. But there’s this: they’ve spent the last two years focused on the necessary behaviors (and corresponding marketing operations). The marketing team is doing all the things in Scenario #1—except each action is being tied to part of the strategy. When you go to them and say, “we need to prioritize sales of a specific unit,” something much different happens.

Marketing knows (and has sound reporting for) the following:

• Foot traffic to dealers
• The current inventory of unit X on dealer lots
• Dealer response time to sales opportunities
• Close rates
• Days to close
• Cost per lead

Marketing has the data to know:

• Your production is sold 6 months out. In month 7 you’ve only sold 50% of production and you know it’s a 6-month sales cycle with an average of 180 days to close. And you know your cost per lead.
• So you know how much marketing and sales effort and dollars will need to be spent now to keep fueling demand to fulfill that other 50% in month 7.

The marketing lead and team understand market conditions at the local level and can see the demand is lagging in 6 key markets, so they should focus efforts and provide additional support to those channel partners specifically with additional assets, local awareness, and demand generation.

Marketing and sales work together to spin up a campaign to fuel demand for your ideal customer profile (ICP) to generate demand to fill your pipeline. In tandem, marketing decides it’s important to also launch a campaign to a secondary audience to clear out excess inventory of an older product because recent research (that they completed) shows the more inventory of that product that’s out there the less likely your ICP is to buy the newest product, even though it’s not their preferred choice.

Before the campaigns launch, you are clear on the budget and predicted results from marketing. And two months later, you have clear reporting on impact.

Sure, these scenarios might simplify things a little. But when you really dig down? You’ll find that these scenarios pretty clearly define the differences between businesses that are struggling and those that are thriving.

Operational excellence is the difference in outcomes

You can have talent, strategy, and budget, and still find yourself struggling to make and close sales. Operational excellence is the difference between failure and success.

But you have to choose to care about this. It takes resources, focused attention, and most importantly, time. Just imagine:

• Having a CEO who is more informed and clear on marketing direction than ever before (and needing 10x fewer touchpoints to provide that clarity)
• Having the ability to enact change management and make bold (and accurate) predictions
• Always knowing that Project X is going to get Result Y for Budget Z
• That you and your leadership always know what marketing is doing, what should be expected, and what marketing is predicting

This is what’s possible for you, your brand, your customers, and your customers’ customers if you get this right.

Ashley Booth, Senior Account Director