Author: rpadmin

TLDR: Demand for skilled MOPs people far outstrips the supply. To attract and retain the best talent, your recruitment process should focus on the candidate experience and the employee experience.

The struggle to attract talent: Demand for skilled Marketing Operations professionals has long outpaced the supply. The current job market is especially driven by talent. Top MOPs candidates have the bargaining power to take or stay in roles with the most attractive company cultures and compensation packages, and for as long as that’s the case, companies that hire without regard for the candidate experience will struggle to attract and retain the best talent.

What’s in this article for you? If multi-stage interview processes and a lack of long-term thinking for each hire sounds like your organization’s approach to recruitment, it’s time for a Tough Talk.

We’ll help you discuss what effective MOPs recruitment looks like with your CMO and Hiring Manager, so your team can get great candidates onside and nurture them for long-term success.

 

The candidate experience

Far too often, companies in the MOPs space operate with the assumption that the logistics of recruitment should work in their favor. Really, the process is a two-way street.

In each interaction, candidates are scoping out whether your organization is the right place for them to work, and considering the scarcity of MOPs skills, the people with real potential to excel in your roles hold all of the cards.

 

Encourage hiring teams to view their recruitment practices through the candidate’s eyes.

 

👉 Does a demanding job description position your company as a rewarding workplace?

👉 Is a string of multiple interviews with disparate stakeholders (e.g. Sales, Marketing, IT, Leadership) the most considerate use of a candidate’s time?

👉 Is it respectful to require candidates to perform free labor or attend a full-day interview while working a full-time job?

The candidate experience is not just about extending decency. Practices like these fail at selling your company as an inviting and stimulating place to be, which has real business consequences.

If you can’t attract talent, your company faces spending serious dollars on a recruitment agency. And even then, you run the risk of hiring subpar candidates.

Bottom line: The lost productivity and cost involved in fixing the mistakes of an ill-fitting hire will completely dwarf the size of investments your company should have made into

• Well-researched role requirements.
• Building a culture that your talent people advocate for.
• A recruitment process that puts the candidate’s needs first.
• An attractive compensation package.

 

To keep people, hire with a purpose

MOPs roles are often multidisciplinary by design, but many of the industry’s job descriptions read like laundry lists of scattershot and highly advanced competencies.

Just like how the right tools for your business are the ones that effectively support your goals, leadership needs to plan and design new roles around the specific needs of the MOPs team.

Before writing the job description

Before your hiring team sits down to write any section of a job description, tell them all about the skill gaps and upcoming projects in the MOPs team.

This is the basis of an intentional hire. Your hiring team can identify the experience that’s truly important for candidates to bring versus skills that transfer or can be taught.

As an example: Many roles seek experience with a particular marketing automation platform. But experience using one platform is highly transferable to another. Unless particular expertise is crucial to the position, keeping the role platform agnostic will attract a broader range of competent candidates who can learn new skills in the role.

This is essential for employee retention.

Rather than looking for a candidate who fits your requirements 100%, prioritize candidates who are 80% there.

Your hiring team can think of it this way: A 100% fit candidate has already been there and done that. Are they going to be satisfied in a job that doesn’t represent meaningful progression? You might offer them a higher salary than their current position, but there’s no telling if that’ll incentivize them to stay long-term.

 

“Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job.”

 

Your 80% fit, however, can truly gain something from taking the job. That makes them a better investment. A candidate who can say your company gave them a chance to develop their skills has motivation. That’s motivation to give their best effort, stay on the team and advocate for your brand to their network.

TL;DR: The perfect fit has room to grow.

 

Your recruitment brand

Desirable places to work all have this in common: They create environments where people want to stay.

To attract and retain the best marketing ops talent, leadership should focus the recruitment process on two things:

• The candidate experience, then
• the employee experience.

Treating your candidates and employees with empathy — practices based on candidate needs, a rewarding culture and compensation, hiring to invest in people — is how you create a workplace that people advocate for.

For any guidance you need with building a MOPs team, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Agencies help MOPs teams take on ambitious projects and meet goals, but do you know what it takes to work successfully with an agency?

How can marketers benefit from agencies? Agencies and consultancies are valuable sources of guidance and hands-on support, helping marketing teams to clear through tasks with greater efficiency and execute more ambitious projects that may otherwise be out of reach.

What homework should you do before approaching an agency? Organizations with all sorts of technical and resource needs can benefit from a strong agency partnership, but it’s best to establish clear priorities and learn how to manage the relationship before deciding to approach one.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll teach you how to work with an agency amidst various situational demands and how to communicate optimally with your partners. By the end, you’ll know how to:

➡️ See greater results from your current agency relationship

➡️ Set your expectations and communicate them to the agency

➡️ Get the most out of working with an agency

 

Determine your priorities

There’s a tendency for some organizations to hesitate when it comes to agencies, fearing the risk of being locked into a contract or pouring money into a resource they don’t use.

If the decision-makers in your marketing team have been reluctant to work with an agency for similar reasons, make this point: If your marketing ops team has more work than bandwidth, an agency is a direct solution to help you meet your goals. The investment makes sense if you know what you want to achieve.

 

“Before approaching an agency
to take on projects, establish your most pressing needs.”

 

Before approaching an agency to take on projects, leadership and MOPs must establish the most pressing needs for the team. These priorities will determine the kinds of service providers you need to look for and how you can best use them.

 

Here are a few scenarios:

Comfortable budget but short on time? Hiring an agency to take on more practical tasks frees up your team for higher-level strategic work. And if a project is particularly time-sensitive, the extra assistance makes it possible to reach your target turnaround time within an agreed scope.

Access to budget but not to headcount? Hiring an agency is a great option in this case. It gives your team the ability to achieve targets and successfully execute tasks while safeguarding their existing but limited bandwidth.

Lower budget with time to spare? Consider using an agency’s experts for advice on complex projects to maximize your time. Think of projects like implementing a new marketing automation platform or attribution. Consultants can interpret and communicate the impact of the changes you’re looking to make and guide you through the steps to take for long-term success.

Short on both? If you’re in a crunch for time and budget, your leadership team needs to establish top priorities for marketing ops and share them proactively with your agency so they’re best equipped to meet your needs within scope.

Read our post ‘Marketing Operations: In-House, Agency or Hybrid‘ for other models.

 

Realistic expectations

To build a partnership based on trust and transparency, both parties must uphold their roles and responsibilities.

Clients are right to have certain expectations of an agency:

✅ Getting work done on time to a high standard

✅ Managing internal stakeholders

✅ Pivoting when necessary to match the changing needs of your business.

But clients should also prepare to support the agency to deliver. That means being open and honest about your goals for the working relationship.

Whatever performance expectations Marketing has, team members using the agency must offer relevant information about your business, campaigns, and priorities proactively.

 

Best practices for projects:

👉 Share resources and access permissions in a timely and forthcoming manner.

👉 Be courteous in all communications and timelines you establish.

👉 Offer support and feedback to help the agency perform more effectively.

Your marketing team might approach an agency with great ambitions. But for all the help an agency can provide, they aren’t magic.

 

“Your partners are
human beings
with multiple priorities to balance…”

 

Your partners are human beings with multiple priorities to balance and many projects in MOPs involve working through a long series of steps and processes. For example, getting attribution off the ground in a matter of weeks isn’t a viable scope to present to an agency.

To keep expectations realistic, your team should acknowledge that progress takes time. Clearly communicate what you want to achieve, sharing relevant KPIs and metrics with your agency as you approach each milestone, but do so with the understanding you’ll get results gradually.

 

The bottom line

An agency’s expertise and support help to make your MOPs function successful.

Deciding to work with one is a sign that you’re delegating effectively to complete important projects to a high standard.

Collaborate with your leadership and marketing teams to identify clear goals, share them proactively with your agency, and mutually establish a realistic scope for delivery. These are the ingredients of a partnership that gets results.

Whatever your organization needs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences. MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the ease of implementation, the experience of your team, the ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack, the potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and how the tool responds to real business needs and strategic aims.

The motivation for adopting new tools: When new leaders join companies or people move internally to different teams, they take with them the technologies and practices they’re used to. New marketing leaders are often keen to implement tools they’ve had positive experiences with in the past and can be prone to thinking that having more tools makes it easier to surface ROI—more ways to analyze data, more ways to present it, more functions and features to optimize how you work.

The consequence of new tools: In practice, however, this isn’t quite the case. Adopting a new tool has a range of logistical and financial consequences for your business that require thoughtful planning to navigate.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to your CMO or CRO the problems that can arise from adopting a new tool too soon. We’ll also outline the important things your organization needs to consider before deciding to adopt new technology.

 

New tool consequences

Marketing operations people are frequently asked to take ownership of managing new tools, and so they have first-hand experience of the reality that more tools = more responsibilities.

Adding a new tool to someone’s workload has productivity consequences for what that person can feasibly deliver, especially if they need training to effectively use the tool in question.

If the department leadership is looking at a new core piece of tech—a marketing automation platform, a CRM, a content management system—it’s likely to demand a revamp of your whole MOPs infrastructure.

 

“Before adopting a new tool, you need to understand
if it’s worth it and why.”

 

Without qualified talent on board, you might need to hire someone new to lead on that piece of tech — and the hiring process costs time and money. So before adopting a new tool, you need to understand if it’s worth it and why.

Poorly-conceived additions to your stack will leak revenue, for example:

👉 Wasted subscription fees for unused tools.
👉 Unforeseen disruptions to your team’s workflow and productivity through accommodating new processes.
👉 Suboptimal implementations or maintenance that cause damage downstream.
👉 Integrations that don’t work properly, corrupted data, bloated storage.

 

The questions to ask

 

If you have a robust tech stack

If your tech stack is already robust, your first step should be to evaluate what isn’t working.

Is a new piece of software the best way to address your needs? Encourage your CMO or CRO to explore the solutions existing in your company stack — you might already have the license to a tool that fulfills a similar purpose to a good standard, and you’ll avoid the redundant expense on an overlapping solution.

If leadership’s considering a tool that can change the essential infrastructure of your MOPs/RevOps function (a MAP, a CMS, a CRM), it’s crucial to know what strategic ambitions it supports.

➡️ Are you scaling down to cut costs or simply overhead?
➡️ Are you scaling up because your CMO/CRO has a growth plan and needs the particular capabilities of more advanced tools to achieve it?
➡️ Have they planned for the corresponding investment in the MOPs team (e.g. whether that’s greater headcount, higher training budgets, or a redistribution of role responsibilities) to facilitate a more complex platform?

 

If the new tool will play a supporting role in your stack

When evaluating a tool that plays more of a supporting role in your stack, you’ll want to assess how well it integrates with your existing infrastructure.

➡️ What depth of expertise will the tool require?
➡️ How long is the implementation period? Will it require more resources on a temporary or permanent basis?
➡️ Is it best-in-class at providing the functionalities you’re looking for?
➡️ Does it have good momentum in the marketplace?

Getting to the bottom of these points is essential to come up with a realistic assessment of a tool’s total cost of ownership.

 

Questions to ask beyond those above

➡️ Is the total cost of ownership (TCO) worth paying?
➡️ Do the capabilities of the tool respond to the goals your CMO/CRO wants to achieve?
➡️ Can you reasonably estimate that its features can drive revenue and productivity in ways that justify the time, money, and work?

 

“The impact of adopting a new tool
is often poorly understood.”

 

The impact of adopting a new tool is far-reaching and often poorly understood. Remember that strategy defines your outcomes and tools help you achieve them. Read our article Connect the Dots Between Strategy and Technology for more.

Your MOPs and RevOps leaders should interrogate each potential addition to your tech stack by evaluating the:

👉 ease of implementation
👉 experience of your team
👉 ease of integration with your current or planned tech stack
👉 potential financial costs beyond the purchase price, and
👉 tool’s ability to respond to real business needs and strategic aims.

Approach each tech decisions with this degree of intentionality, and you’ll maximize the ROI you gain from your stack.

Get in touch for more guidance on assessing and implementing new technologies.

TLDR: Lead scoring can help Sales focus only on the most valuable or receptive prospects, but the project stands or falls based on the quality of Sales-Marketing collaboration.

What is lead scoring? Lead scoring is the process of evaluating the interest of a prospect and their readiness to engage with the sales process.

The problem lead scoring solves: Lead scoring helps Sales and Marketing concentrate efforts on leads that have demonstrated a higher level of interest or engagement with your brand, increasing the chances of closing deals and generating revenue.

What’s in it for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to explain the value and reality of lead scoring to Sales – what it is and is not, what it offers and requires. You can incentivize Sales to work together with Marketing with realistic expectations on a project that’s vital for both teams to grow the business.

 

Methods and data points

Companies can score leads in a variety of ways. You can ascribe numeric values, letter rankings, or descriptive terms like “warm” and “cold.” However you choose to score leads, there are several key data points that should factor into the analysis:

👉 Demographics (relevant individual characteristics, e.g. job title)
👉 Firmographics (organization profile, e.g. industry, vertical, size, location, annual revenue)
👉 Behavior (how the lead engages with your brand, e.g. visiting the webpage, interacting on social, requesting a demo)
👉 BANT qualification (the lead’s budget, authority, need, and timeline)
👉 Completeness of the data you have for each lead

There’s no objectively superior method of scoring leads and accrediting weight to different data types. Instead, your Sales team needs to work with Marketing to define the scoring methodology and establish what a “qualified” lead looks like.

An accurate view of lead quality helps Sales to focus on engaging only with the most receptive and valuable prospects. Neither team can make a complete assessment of this without ideas, data, and feedback from the other.

 

Qualify or nurture

Naturally, some leads will show a higher likelihood to buy than others. The task for Marketing and Sales is to determine how to identify and treat leads that fall into one of two groups:

1️ shows an optimal level of interest for Sales to act, or
2️ requires further nurturing by Marketing.

For this process to yield results, Sales needs to agree with Marketing on the benchmark for qualification.

Sales might expect the leads they receive from Marketing to be ready to sign, but there’s only so much your Marketing team can do in advance. As long as Marketing can unearth opportunities with a high likelihood of closure, it’s on Sales to identify where in the process to step in and how to approach each lead.

On the other hand, Sales shouldn’t encourage Marketing to pass leads over who show just enough of a pulse to open an email or click a link. Qualifying leads this way undermines the evaluative power of Marketing’s nurture process. Sales might get a couple of lucky bites, but it won’t translate to sustainable success.

 

Building lead profiles

Marketing’s nurture programs build insightful lead profiles through rich data collection, which allows Sales to approach the highest quality leads in the most engaging ways, showing awareness of their interests and the situational context. Without that basis, Sales risks burning effort on premature leads and failing to hit targets.

The point to make is that lead scoring best allows Sales to identify and win business from the highest value leads when two things are in place:

✅ clearly defined and realistic models for scoring and qualification, and
✅ time for Marketing to nurture developed engagement data from their campaigns.

 

Fuel your growth machine

To get started with lead scoring, Sales needs a good grasp of their past successes. Your reps should dig into historical data about past deals and lead journeys until they can answer these key questions:

👉 What makes a person qualified enough?
👉 What behaviors and traits did closed-won leads show?

 

The quality of collaboration

From there, lead scoring stands or falls based on the quality of your collaboration. Sales and Marketing should participate in healthy, ongoing discussions until you agree on a scoring methodology and handover process that both teams can comfortably deliver.

With that agreement in place, you stand the highest chance of seeing the benefits of lead scoring—the ability for Sales to prioritize quality leads, better insight for Marketing into the most valuable lead characteristics, and increased alignment and revenue that both halves of your growth machine can enjoy.

Want more guidance on lead scoring? Revenue Pulse is here to help.