CMOs: Drive Marketing Operations Excellence in Your Organization

When a CMO can’t effectively prove the value of marketing to the business, it becomes harder to make the case for additional resources — even if marketing is productive and over capacity. With a constant flow of stakeholder requests for high-volume, low-impact work, marketing operations leaders face growing responsibility to channel critical resources toward the work that demonstrates concrete business value.

In today’s “do more with less” climate, you can hone marketing operations to pave the way for value creation by following these five steps: 

Step 1: Empathize with stakeholders to better understand the cultural and situational reasons why marketing doesn’t or can’t spend more time on high-value work. Team dysfunction and complex martech solutions are two common culprits. To understand the barriers to efficient marketing operations, take these actions: 

• Conduct one-to-one interviews to understand the full team dynamics.
• Document roadblocks to value creation.
• Assess use cases for generative AI in marketing operations.
• Cast a vision by openly discussing how strategic, high-value marketing operations will benefit the team.

Step 2: Evaluate the potential to increase marketing operations efficiency by considering these questions:

• If the marketing team could find the equivalent of two, five or 30 extra FTEs available each week from the existing team, how would the CMO direct that time?
• How could that work impact the business and drive growth or innovation?
• How might that work improve the customer experience?
• How many more customers could be acquired or retained?
• Could marketing start that big initiative that has been deprioritized due to lack of available resources?

Step 3: Set goals for the percentage of marketing’s time spent on high-value work. Use tiering to distinguish the work that matters most to the business from work that doesn’t equate to value creation.

Step 4: Equip marketing to shift time toward high-value work. Focus marketing operations initiatives on the following areas: 

• CMO collaborations: What changes will require CMO input?
• Productivity best practices: What will force a shift from reactive to proactive marketing operations?  
• Operational martech: What actions will support and transform how marketing works and gets things done?
• Marketing training: What training is needed to ease the transition of reallocating marketers’ time toward high-value work?

Step 5: Exceed your set goals for reallocation by monitoring, measuring and optimizing systems with continuous marketing operations improvements.

A typical approach to streamlining marketing operations starts with reactive, short-term fixes to cut costs. But focusing solely on cost cutting can fragment your efforts and lead to missed opportunities to drive true operational excellence. 

Optimizing your talent mix can lead not only to cost savings, but greater efficiency and effectiveness. Use the following framework to evaluate your spend on marketing operations talent, both inside and outside of your organization. 

• Eliminate unnecessary or mismatched functions. Capability requirements change. Review the current talent mix to make sure it meets your marketing operations goals. For example, a new hire with social media management skills could remove the need for a freelance resource — or a freelancer might make an ideal new hire in a tight talent market.
• Simplify overlapping roles and responsibilities. Evaluate the full capabilities of your teams, considering both internal and external resources. Determine how much capacity you need to deliver on your marketing operations strategy and portfolio of projects.
• Use capacity planning for resource allocation. Work management platforms can help you track marketing project cycle time, team throughput and resource utilization. Also, evaluate external agencies, contractors or vendors regularly against your marketing operations performance targets.
• Standardize to reduce variability. Which roles can you standardize to boost efficiency and accountability? Standardizing the way people set objectives, measure their performance and deliver projects — and standardizing skills through training and development — can improve overall marketing operations performance and reduce the need for specialist teams, agencies and third parties.

Showcase marketing’s performance by choosing key metrics for measuring marketing operations success that demonstrate marketing’s ability to execute and set a baseline for continuous improvement. Begin with the following KPIs:

• Alignment. “Did marketing’s work move the business forward?” Use stakeholder perception metrics, including overall needs met, satisfaction and timeliness.
• Timeliness. “Did marketing deliver this output on time?” Use percentage of work delivered by promised date or end-to-end cycle time as metrics.
• Capacity. “Can marketing operations effectively forecast demand and ensure there is capacity to handle it?” Rely on forecast accuracy and capacity metrics (often based on historical utilization data).
• Quality. “Did marketing deliver the work right the first time?” Use rework, number of change requests or percentage of internal (marketing) standards met as the metric.
• Progress. “Has marketing gotten better in the past month/quarter/year?” Use metrics such as percent change in goal attainment for each of the other five marketing operations goals (alignment, timeliness, capacity, quality and consistency).
• Consistency. “Can marketing repeatedly deliver high-quality work, on time, in a predictable way?” Use end-to-end process adoption.