Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Dustin Clark, I’m the Senior Director of Strategy at Element Three. I’d like to talk to you today about marketing metrics in organizations that are operations heavy or production heavy. One of the things that I think is really interesting when we talk to organizations that have heavy operations and production schedules, oftentimes we’ll get comments like, well, our production is backed up for two months, ten months, 12 months, two years, whatever the timeline is. They’ll say, we couldn’t do marketing for two months and we would still have a full pipeline. And the response that I always have to that is, okay, well, what happens after X? What happens after that pipeline comes true? You’re still going to want more things in the hopper.

And one of the things that I think is really important for smart marketers to start to do is think through, when you’re working with manufacturers or operations heavy organizations there is an operations capacity that has to be filled. We can build
X amount of plastic widgets each week and for the foreseeable future, we can see
how many widgets we need to get. We’re booked up, right? But at some point in the future, whether that’s two months or two years, the production timeline starts to thin out, right? So you might have booked orders and then you might have orders that have been placed and then not scheduled.

And that’s the thing that the production, the operations, the sales is looking at. But to me, there’s also the inverse of that, and that is what’s the available capacity. And that’s where marketing really, that’s the playground that marketing wants to play in. Right? Is that we take a look at things like what’s your average time from contact to sales qualified lead or from lead known to an actual product purchase. And using that information, we can say, okay, when in two months your assembly line is still full, but in three months you’re only scheduled to be at 85% capacity and in four months you’re only scheduled to be at 50%, and then in six months you might be at 25% capacity.

It’s marketing’s job to understand how long it takes someone to get through that known contact to a purchase point so that we can then back into how do we fill in those available buckets of capacity. Of course, it’s an imperfect science because market factors change and things happen. You might have an increase in sales, decrease in sales, you might have a sales force or assembly line that breaks down. It’s an imperfect science, but starting to think through, in production minded companies, if you’re working from a marketing perspective, don’t think of it in terms of why you need to get this many email leads or get this many paid media leads or this many organic leads.

You need to know that information, but where you’re really solving for the organization is how do I start filling up those buckets of available capacity that’s not yet spoken for, whether that’s months or years in advance.