Building a Team
Marketing is an interesting function in a startup. Small companies desperately need to build awareness to make selling easier for the sales team. Once a product is viable and has features in demand, people must know it exists. One person can create quite a bit of content and effectively build a brand if they’re skilled enough. But a company must establish a solid data infrastructure, which means capturing potential prospects and campaign activity so that future actions can be optimized and improved upon. “When you’re carving out a new function within an organization, you have to understand the needs of the business. What is your budget? What do your long-term needs look like? There could be needs that don’t justify hiring an internal staff member. Sometimes outsourcing to a consulting organization or a freelancer makes more sense,” said Brooke. But that isn’t to say you should hesitate to hire a position that will be needed soon. “Marketing operations is experiencing a talent shortage. The demand is higher than the supply, and you’re seeing many roles that are sitting open for six to nine months. “Marketing operations and marketing technology set the groundwork for so much across marketing, sales, the customer experience, and post-sale, but it’s also one of those things that when done incorrectly or left to the wild can be very costly down the road. Data cleanup and rearchitecting systems are expensive projects, and ineffective implementations will make your organization less efficient.”
Marketing Ops Should Be Your First Marketing +1
A good marketing operations professional can help your organization scale gracefully. They can architect your first MAP in a way that will migrate into your next bigger, better MAP. They’ll make sure your leads aren’t getting lost, your efforts are being tracked, and that you can actually make sense of the data to improve your go-to-market strategy. Unfortunately, executives—even marketing executives—think of marketing operations last. “The biggest help in successfully arguing for a marketing operations professional is looking at what type of impact this person can have on the organization. For example, if we can integrate our data, we can more accurately look at what marketing spend will drive in terms of revenue or pipeline. We can do a better job forecasting pipeline production. We can look at where our marketing spend is going and see what’s working and what’s not. And we can better allocate that spend into areas that will drive revenue instead of throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.” As marketers, we have to try new things. Old tactics wear out prospects and stop working effectively. Experimentation will always have a place in marketing, but data should inform the next step. If you can’t report on what you’re testing, you can’t improve your tactics. “A lot of times, investing in the right people and the right technology can come with sticker shock. Many of these tools are not cheap. But if you take a look at what you’re spending for your CRM and your MAP and then look at how big your data gap is, you can see where putting money toward fixing your data problem is necessary. You’ll get insights and forecasting information that you will need to grow and scale the business.
You Need the Right Tech AND People
Let’s say you’re at a new startup. Your board of directors wants to see sophisticated reporting. They want to tie marketing investment into revenue output. They’re asking for the age-old dollar-in-dollar-out visualization. Their appetite for metrics probably isn’t synchronized with their willingness to invest in the technology necessary to get the insights they’re asking for. I’ve seen CRM tools that don’t even have campaign member capability. They don’t allow campaign assignment to opportunities and influence reporting. They’re a mess, but sometimes they’re the only thing the business can afford. A good professional can help you get the most out of these systems possible, but they need to be versed in setting the right expectations in what can and can’t be done. Then the company needs to either decide to invest in better technology or hire talent that might squeeze a bit more out of the system with a homegrown customer data platform (which also requires a significant investment). But even the greatest tech can’t solve a severe deficit in marketing operations talent. “Another misalignment between expectation and reality is the thought that a new tool will fix all our problems. Tools don’t fix the problems. Change management and many other factors have to be in place before that tool can be used or adopted. I’ve seen many organizations that aren’t using UTM parameters or bringing spend on campaigns into their CRM or configuring their marketing automation system to feed into the CRM’s campaign membership tables. Some companies don’t even have activity associated with campaigns, making them essentially untrackable.”
For more on building a team in an early-stage startup and how to speak in a language executives respond to, listen to the full Revenue Marketing Report episode at the top of the article or anywhere you podcast.