Month: July 2022

What’s My Role in the Shift to RevOps? 

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Hi Joe,

I’m a marketing ops professional and I’ve just been told that my company is moving towards adopting a RevOps model. I actually think it’s a great idea—I’ve read about the approach and think there are a lot of benefits to bringing typically siloed teams together under a combined goal. However, I’m not quite sure how to help make it happen. Do you have any advice?

Thanks,

Helpful Harriet

Hi, Harriet. Let me just say: it’s so great that you’re asking this question. As things keep changing in the marketing ops world, we need people that are willing to put their hands up and be enablers. Thank you.

You’re right that, while still a relatively new concept, RevOps has a lot to offer. It’s the notion that marketing, sales, and customer success teams can operate better when they’re working towards a collective goal—helping their clients and prospects succeed—rather than as disparate silos. Plus, it relies on an integrated tech stack that easily shares customer data and lets prospects flow through the customer lifecycle with a personalized experience. Sounds great, doesn’t it? 

While it might sound easy, getting to this integrated place is a long-term project. First off, you need to do a lot of work to ensure alignment between these three teams. That means a lot of conversations around goals, metrics, and performance to get rid of any discrepancies. There’s also a technology and data aspect here. To build a RevOps tech stack, you need to look into where there are gaps or redundancies, and make decisions accordingly. 

All that said, there are also things you (as a MOPs team member) can do at an individual level that will make a big difference, and help things move faster. 

 

Expand your knowledge 

If you want your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to be fully aligned, it can’t just happen at the executive level—you need alignment on the ground as well. Start this off by learning more about how things are done in those teams, including how they communicate, what their metrics are, and how they measure performance. Talk to a colleague and ask if you can shadow them for a couple of days; you can observe them as they go through their daily tasks and join them in team meetings. 

 

Become a champion for the RevOps approach

You know it, we know it: Marketing and Sales aren’t always best friends. In fact, we often find ourselves in a rather antagonistic relationship. So, once you’ve taken the time to learn more about what your sales team does, and why they do it, share that knowledge within your team. These insights should help build comradery and make it easier to collaborate better down the line. 

You’ve already done the work to learn about the benefits of the RevOps model—so make sure you share that as well. People tend to be wary of change, but a lot of the time that comes down to a lack of understanding. Empower your team with the knowledge they need and it might make for an easier transition when the time comes.

 

Keep putting your hand up

As I mentioned before, rolling out RevOps is going to be a long process—and your leaders are going to need help. Talk to your manager about how you can actively contribute to the project. You never know, they might need someone to bring the MOPs perspective to the decision-making table, or they may be looking for someone to champion the project and help communicate it’s value. Good thing you’re likely already doing that last one!

You’ve got this, 

Joe Pulse

How to Pitch a New Marketing Automation Platform to Your CIO

Posted on by admin

TLDR: Marketing automation platforms are difficult to insert and replace, which impacts teams around the business. Your CIO can allocate personnel from IT and Data Science to help implement the platform successfully, but they need to know the investment makes sense. Gather the data to forecast the impact of the platform on revenue and productivity, accounting for costs and long-term personnel demands. Position this platform as urgent for survival, and back it up with a thorough cost/benefit analysis, and you stand a strong chance of getting your CIO’s support.

 

Reading the martech landscape and identifying technologies that can add real value to the business is a key skill for Marketing Operations professionals. While MOps succeed at understanding the relevance and benefits of new technologies, it’s often tricky to translate industry know-how into persuasive arguments that convince C-Suite to invest in new tools.

This is especially difficult when talking about marketing automation platforms. These key pieces of infrastructure impact teams around the business, integrate with many other tools and require significant time and cost investments.

If you’re pitching a new marketing automation platform, that conversation will take you beyond Marketing. You’ll need to speak with your CIO, who can allocate technical personnel to implement the project successfully.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to plan and present a case for a new platform that your CIO can get behind.

 

Building your case

Before putting together a plan, it’s worth reflecting on the scale and value of the implementation. Marketing automation platforms are difficult to insert and replace. They with downstream impact on different teams in the organization — most notably IT and Sales.

 

Get cross-departmental buy-in

By nature, a platform implementation demands collaboration across disciplines. At a minimum, Sales, IT, and Data Science should support the project and contribute their expertise. Marketing might exclusively use and spend on the platform, but getting cross-departmental resources means selling the platform as a lift to productivity and/or revenue that boosts the business as a whole.

Crucially, you’ll need people outside of Marketing to handle the technical wiring and create training resources. CRM Admins, Developers, Data Scientists, and Data Warehousing Specialists are examples of key people who can bring the implementation to life, all of whom usually report to the CIO. Personnel contribution, rather than dollar investment, is why you’d approach your CIO.

To get buy-in, your CIO should understand that the platform you’re advocating is necessary for the organization’s success and survival.

Obsolescence = lights out for any business.

Frame this as a do-or-die opportunity. You can adopt this platform and transform your business, or fall behind.

 

Gather the appropriate data

Assume that your CIO isn’t plugged into the martech space. Your observations about how the platform fares in the industry and with competitors won’t persuade them alone.

Instead, numbers speak louder than words.

  • What are the hours saved and efficiency gains per month?
  • What revenue increase do you expect?
  • How does the platform make personnel quantifiably more productive?

When it comes to revenue projections, you might not have the data on-side to create a solid forecast. This is where you reach out to Sales—it’s equally in their interest to have a platform that brings in the dollars.

Sales projections can help to frame the revenue opportunities on offer with the platform. Consider projections like:

  • opportunity and win rates
  • lead types and quality gains, and
  • conversion rates for the highest-scoring leads.

Gather the data points you need to forecast the impact of the platform on revenue and productivity.

Then, accounting for the costs of implementation, walk your CIO through the hours and dollars that the business can expect to save or gain by implementing the platform.

Even when working with estimates, a thorough cost/benefit analysis is exactly what your CIO wants to see.

 

Thinking long-term

Even after digesting the benefits of the platform, one key question remains from your CIO: How is this going to be a permanently successful venture?

To answer this, you want to factor in post-implementation planning.

Users and people who experience a downstream impact from the platform need to clearly understand how it works. Account for any training sessions, change management, and the creation of educational resources that personnel under the CIO need to lead.

Realistically, the ways your Marketing team uses the platform will evolve over time. This means increased support should be available from technical staff long after the implementation.

Let’s say your current platform requires the support of two admins from IT. You might budget for a surge of 10 system administrators to implement the platform.

After working at this cadence, the demands on your business will change.

Rather than scaling back down to two admins post-implementation, you might need four admins permanently to manage the platform. This is especially likely if you’re scaling upwards to a more robust platform.

Your CIO wants this platform to succeed on a long-term basis. The more precisely you can account for the investment of personnel, during and past the implementation, the more accurately your CIO can size up the investment and commit the resources you need.

 

Selling your vision

Cross-departmental support can be tricky to secure, but it’s crucial to successfully implement a new marketing automation platform.

Come prepared to pitch the platform to your CIO as a vital and sensible move for the business. It’s necessary for survival. Prepare a thorough forecast of the revenue and productivity gains against costs and long-term personnel requirements. This is how you build a persuasive case for buy-in.

Need support implementing a new marketing automation platform? Contact us, it’s our specialty!

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