Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: Is your company looking for a new MOPs leader? Learn the fatal flaws to avoid when designing a MOPs leadership role and the qualities to prioritize instead.

One of the growing pains of Marketing Operations is that many organizations are hiring in the dark. Hiring teams with a hazy understanding of MOPs as a discipline struggle to design roles with realistic skill requirements that candidates find fulfilling.

And nowhere is this disconnect more blatant or consequential than with leadership positions in the space.

If your hiring manager or CMO is searching for a MOPs leader, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you.

We’ll help you articulate the fatal flaws to avoid when hiring a MOPs leader, and the qualities and experience your organization should instead prioritize.

By having this conversation, you can advocate for a strong vision of what it means to lead a MOPs team, help your hiring team to identify credible candidates, and position yourself to grow into a leadership role.

 

The split problem

Many job descriptions for senior management positions in Marketing Operations tell stories of confusion.

Companies look for candidates that must have:

• current platform certifications
• a wealth of data science experience
• the ability to manage day-to-day campaign tactics, and
• suitable knowledge to own the tech stack.

So along with having the technical experience from more junior roles, these desired candidates have had time to strategically lead the same functions they performed.

 

This is both unviable and uncompetitive

Your CMO may recognize the value of stellar technical skills and reportability, and budget to offer candidates high salaries. Still, the price too often means doing three different jobs in one.

For candidates ready to set strategic direction, roles with heavy platform administration and hands-on tactical work do not represent meaningful career progression.

If your hiring team’s idea of a MOPs VP or Director resembles an “upgraded” platform admin role, encourage them to reflect on other leadership positions in the company. Do any other senior roles have a comparable share of tactical responsibilities?

Probably not, because a 50/50 split between tactical and strategic projects is simply ill-fitting for a leadership position. In a marketplace where the demand for high-level MOPs skills outstrips the supply, it’s unrealistic to attract and retain good candidates with roles that don’t play to their strengths or career goals.

 

Advice for your hiring team:

Focus your MOPs leader role on setting the strategy, and leave the tickets and data pipelines to team members who’re still learning the tools of the trade.

If forced to flip-flop between two very different sets of competencies, your unicorn candidate will become a master of none.

 

From ‘management’ to ‘leadership’

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation in many businesses. To stay resilient and competitive, companies raced against the clock to hire candidates with the digital prowess to optimize their technology and data. The urgency for MOPs skills increased in kind. Companies bumped up middle management marketing operations roles to leadership status and pitched them to candidates with around 5-10 years of experience.

Just as the tactical and strategic split in these roles is ill-fitting for prime leadership, it also does not work for those still learning about management.

Your CMO will relate to this: The transition from “manager” to “leader” encompasses more than just a change in job title. This concept holds true for individuals in MOPs as well.

Becoming a MOPs leader is a development from knowing all the corners of Marketo to understanding what drives revenue and growth in your business, setting a vision for the department’s operations and priorities with the future direction of marketing and technology. Candidates with 5-10 years of experience are, broadly speaking, still nurturing that skill set.

 

Advice for your hiring team:

Giving a leadership position with high expectations (and a steep learning curve) to someone still learning what it takes to be a leader sets them up for failure.

You have two viable alternatives:

1. Downgrade the role appropriately. Give your new manager the time and space to develop their leadership skills.
2. Hire someone who’s truly ready to lead.

 

The right MOPs leader

Your Hiring Manager and CMO may need help identifying what leadership really means in MOPs. This is where you come in.

You know that MOPs is all about efficiency. Rather than putting out fires, a leader should demonstrate proactivity to set processes up for success and prepare to mitigate risks. They also need a strong grasp of how marketing operations as a function is evolving — enough to see through the spin of vendors and get to the real value of each tool.

From your experience at the crossroads of the company, you’ll know that MOPs demands exceptional communication skills, and nowhere more so than at the leadership level. Your MOPs VP or Director will lead the team that orchestrates data, so they’ll need to interpret insights, share feedback, and sell decisions at levels from C-Suite down to Business Development reps.

In a role that’s focused specifically on setting direction for the team rather than manning the same tools, these are the traits you want to advocate for as a MOPs leader:

• a passionate student, as MOPs is constantly changing
• someone who learns through adaptation rather than prescribed beliefs about how the industry works, and
• is prepared to take new developments and apply them to current and future plans.

By having this talk with your CMO and Hiring Manager, you can set your MOPs function up to succeed with the right talent in the appropriate roles, and position yourself as someone who understands what it takes to lead.

Follow Revenue Pulse on LinkedIn for daily updates about improving communication with MOPs leadership.

TLDR: Marketing Operations and Sales Operations work better together. People in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have knowledge that mutually enriches each others’ work. For a successful RevOps function, leadership should express this clearly through culture and processes. Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights.

 

Marketing Operations and Sales Operations share many common goals and competencies. Both define processes to:

• capture meaningful engagement data
• measure the impact of Marketing and Sales activities, and
• surface actionable micro and macro insights to help marketing and sales understand their performance and progress towards goals.

 
In a perfect world: Marketing Ops and Sales Ops are tied closely together. And they have a clear understanding of each team’s responsibilities and contributions.

In the real world: Issues will arise that hinder the productivity and revenue intake of your business—poor data hygiene, inter-team friction, and fragmented customer experiences.

Sound familiar? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain to leadership why MOPs and Sales Ops alignment matters—and how to bring both teams together. This conversation will help leadership spend their time and money wisely and create team harmony.

 

How alignment breaks down

Often, the day-to-day projects of MOPs and SOPs teams don’t directly intersect, even as they both frequently use the CRM.

This lack of visibility can encourage a misconception that SOPs teams exclusively manage the CRM and have authority over all actions in the system. For comparison, while MOPs uses a CRM for things like attribution, lead lifecycles, and reporting, SOPs people typically don’t need to access a marketing automation platform.

In environments where SOPs and MOPs are siloed away from each other, the inevitable result is territorialism. Suppose Sales and Marketing leaders haven’t created a culture where SOPs and MOPs know each others’ accountabilities and haven’t incentivized regular communication. In that case, people become protective over “their” tools and systems and reluctant to share information.

In other words: Culture makes or breaks your Sales-Marketing alignment.

When SOPs and MOPs are at odds over who owns what in the CRM, both teams get things done slower and at a greater risk of creating problems with data hygiene.

With bad or outdated data, Sales and Marketing teams waste time acting on dead ends. If discrepancies build between the data in your CRM and marketing automation platform, Sales and Marketing leaders lose a single source of truth to support their decisions.

Sales and Marketing efforts become splintered as fractures emerge between Marketing content and comms versus Sales outreach. Lead gen falters without effective targeting, which causes your ROI to diminish.

The consequences are sweeping—paralysis, hostility, and stagnant growth. Fortunately, there’s a lot your leaders can do to correct course.

 

Uniting MOPs and SOPs

There are two initiatives your leadership should pursue:

1. Aligning MOPs and SOPs on goals, and
2. Encouraging them to work closer together.

First, leadership should punctuate just how much Marketing ops and Sales ops have in common. Both teams:

• capture accurate lifecycle data
• design effective lead-scoring models
• create reports that surface key insights for Sales and Marketing
• define processes to measure the impact of Sales and Marketing activities
• protect systems from data loss due to technical limitations/errors
• facilitate Sales and Marketing to review and share feedback on each others’ processes
• set Sales and Marketing funnel goals in the CRM, and
• enable cohesive customer experiences between Sales and Marketing efforts.

 
For each goal, leadership should establish which components MOPs and SOPs own. Responsibility Assignment Matrices are helpful structures to define and communicate who is responsible, accountable, informed, and controlled for each goal.

To make this work, your CRO should meet with SOPs, MOPs, and their leaders to identify the smaller processes that contribute towards achieving each goal.

For example: what’s the division of labor and impact on the lead lifecycle before and after the handover of MQLs? Use these accountabilities as a basis for joint ownership of the CRM, getting MOPs and SOPs to agree on features, dashboards, and processes that each leads.

The value of sharing information

Beyond assigning responsibilities, leadership should impart the value of sharing information on a regular basis.

Just as access to the CRM helps MOPs, MOPs people can share insights and reports from their marketing automation platform that SOPs might otherwise lack.

This deepens how SOPs people understand the customer journey and enriches the strategies and tactics they can recommend to sales.

Encouraging MOPs and SOPs to meet quarterly (at minimum) to share their opportunities and challenges—things that worked, things that didn’t, ongoing goals—also helps both teams be visible, accountable, and collaborative with each other.

 

Natural collaborators

MOPs and SOPs are natural collaborators—people in both teams have a similar mix of skills, work towards compatible goals, and have access to information that mutually enriches each others’ work.

For a successful RevOps function, your CRO should express this clearly through your culture and processes.

Set out accountabilities, clarify access to systems MOPs and SOPs needs, and make spaces for teams to share feedback and insights. The closer you align MOPs and SOPs, the more productive and profitable your business can be.

Get in touch for more guidance on making your RevOps team a success.

TLDR: Internal SLAs in RevOps define your policies and contingency plans regarding the lead lifecycle. Logical, well-understood SLAs allow you to monitor the impact of your lifecycle structure and activities, and make it easier to improve processes and resolve issues. But SLAs only work when people are incentivized to follow them. Seek feedback from people in your RevOps team when developing processes, and gamify the fulfillment of SLAs to encourage participation.

 

Service level agreements (SLAs) define a business’s deliverables and services to customers and prospects. They also serve an important purpose between internal teams. SLAs lay out your policies regarding the lead lifecycle—the actions Sales, Marketing, and RevOps should take in response to customer activities and the contingency plans in case things don’t happen as expected.

Service level agreements standardize your timelines to respond to customers and prospects at each stage of the lifecycle. Establishing and optimizing these processes is essential to move prospects along their buying journeys and prevent leads from going cold.

In other words: the quality of your SLA processes can make or break your revenue function. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to explain the impact of SLAs to your RevOps leader. You’ll help them to grasp why processes succeed or fail and encourage the implementation of strategies and initiatives with SLAs that lead to a healthy RevOps team.

 

The impact of SLAs

SLAs encourage clarity of policymaking in your business. They help people in your RevOps team to understand your default processes and corrective measures. Crucially, they give people a reference point to improve processes and resolve issues based on realistic expectations.

For each stage of the lifecycle, your team has measures to engage prospects within certain conditions. For example, if someone fills in a contact form, Sales might receive an alert minutes later alerting them to respond within 2 hours.

But if the Sales rep responsible for a particular account is away, what’s the handover process? If there’s no handover, why not? How do you escalate the situation? Given the data-crunching and people involved in responding to an inquiry, is the 2-hour turnaround time for a responsible feasible?

Effective SLAs allow your RevOps team to:

• monitor the impact of their lifecycle structure and activities
• rectify flawed processes, and
• double down on what works.

For example, if your conversion rate from sign-ups to MQLs is below a certain threshold within a particular timeframe, an SLA to insert a new nurture campaign to the relevant subset of prospects can galvanize engagement. Likewise, if you’re experiencing an exceptionally high rate of closed lost opportunities, an SLA to investigate your processes can help to identify why sales aren’t flowing (are SDRs opening opportunities prematurely? Are Sales reps not following up in time?)

Crucially, SLAs can increase the pace at which the most promising leads progress through the lifecycle.

Let’s say your sign-up page receives 1k sign-ups per day. By inserting an SLA for RevOps to review all sign-ups and measure each prospect’s fit for the business, Sales can easily identify which sign-ups to prioritize in their outreach. This responsiveness shortens your time to revenue and prevents the most compatible leads from going cold.

 

Implementing SLAs

For all the clarity and improvement opportunities that SLAs offer RevOps, they only work when people are incentivized to follow the processes—otherwise, they risk falling apart. With ineffective or absent SLAs, your RevOps team will struggle to monitor behavior and make tweaks that boost ROI. Therefore, your CRO needs to consider how to educate and encourage people to stick by them.

Firstly, involving people in your RevOps team with the development of processes will help to encourage adoption. Your CRO should consult internally when conducting a process audit, inviting people from MOPs, Sales Ops, and Customer Success to share their perspectives on what works and what doesn’t. The more your CRO engages the team, the greater insight they’ll gain about SLAs to add, improve, or eliminate, and having team feedback guide these processes will make evident the value of following them.

For devising SLAs that involve multiple departments, get people together from each team to raise issues and strategize approaches. Your CMO, for instance, might analyze the results from your NPS surveys and report back. If client satisfaction is revealed to be low, then your Customer Success team can take the lead with approaching customers to mitigate and resolve any problems while your Product team stays in the loop.

For SLAs pertaining to processes that involve just one team (e.g. web conversions in Marketing), cross-departmental counsel can be useful to focus group any proposed SLA, but only the team following and impacted by the process needs to be involved.

Once an SLA is implemented, gamification helps motivate people to fulfill the process’ objectives. Establishing weekly or monthly targets and celebrating the wins of your team reinforces the value of following SLAs and usually comes at no significant cost—considering the uplift of processes that work, the ROI of rewarding people for meeting or exceeding their SLA fulfilment targets makes sense.

 

The bottom line

SLAs in RevOps spell out how your revenue function works and why. This helps your team to coalesce around logical, cohesive processes and makes it easier to measure, refine, and improve them.

Vitally, they support your team to take timely actions that progress your leads through the lifecycle and keep the dollars coming in.

Get in touch for any guidance you need with SLAs.

TLDR: In response to customer churn, technical debt, and siloed working, moving to a RevOps team helps people in marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success collaborate and align on strategy.

 

Marketing operations as a discipline grew from necessity. Businesses need people who understand marketing automation to master the tools and processes that make marketing teams succeed. As the field develops, MOPs teams are now moving towards a new organizational structure known as Revenue Operations (RevOps for short). This transition requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire customer cycle.

If you’re a MOPs leader managing a shift to RevOps, anticipating the changes in team structure and role demands can elicit some anxiety. Your MOPs team will want to know why the shift to RevOps is happening and what it means for their jobs.

As people question their place in the new order of business, how do you inspire confidence in the team?

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to present an optimistic vision for the move to RevOps. This shift can help people in MOPs to remedy historical challenges and make more significant contributions to the business. Convey this, and you can get people excited about the opportunities ahead.

 

RevOps in context

Multiple teams play a role in the customer journey.

• MOPs’ contributions—campaign creation, data analysis, lead scoring and handover—kick off the cycle.
• After MOPs brings good leads to sales operations, SOPs creates efficient lead management processes to help sales win business.
• From there, customer success teams work to retain customers and prevent churn.

MOPs, SOPs, and customer success are responsible for engineering different stages of the funnel. Revenue Operations unites these teams to optimize the entire customer cycle.

Essentially, it means bringing all three teams under one roof to ask the same questions: How do we improve the customer experience through our tech stack, sales processes, and interactions?

 

Businesses are more vulnerable to churn

Shifting business dynamics in recent years makes integrating these three teams urgent. The rise of SaaS and subscription models have made businesses more vulnerable to churn. If customers can pay for your products and services on a rolling, short-term basis, maintaining high retention rates takes constant work. Hence, the growth of customer success.

Meanwhile, the explosion of workplace tech has caused companies to go all-in on tool adoption. As people leave roles and take their expertise, MOPs and SOPs teams are increasingly strained by technical debt and dysfunctional tech stacks.

A hard-learned truth: Tools are only as good as the people who use them.

As remote working becomes more commonplace, there is a heightened risk of siloes. Consider how connected MOPs, SOPs, and customer success are in the customer journey. These teams can’t work effectively when fragmented.

Someone in your MOPs team will recognize this one: without access to Salesforce, fixing a dataflow means pulling in someone from SOPs. When teams are disconnected, they get protective (“why are these people making changes in our tools?”). As a result, collaboration becomes difficult, even between teams that share the same goals.

 

What RevOps offers

MOPs, SOPs, and customer success all exist to support revenue generators. Integrating these teams under one banner helps people align on strategy, collaborate, and share their knowledge.

Instead of technical debt and division, you create opportunities for MOPs and SOPs to coalesce around a selection of tools and technical processes.

No longer working in isolation or with ambiguous impact, MOPs gains visibility with customer success and sales. From the very start of projects, they can work together to set goals and improve processes that translate across the whole customer cycle.

 

MOPs to RevOps

At this point, the logic of RevOps should make sense—but what does a RevOps role mean in practice?

The field is still new and fluid, but there are some guiding characteristics you can share with colleagues wondering how their roles could change.

RevOps moves away from granular tool ownership and data management towards calculating the impact of practices across MOPs, SOPs, and customer success. With more emphasis on visualizing these insights to leadership, RevOps provides opportunities to make holistic connections, identify the impact on revenue and productivity, and present these findings at high levels.

The key ingredients to RevOps

• tool knowledge
• business acumen
• strategic thinking, and
  
• a grasp of customer success and SOPs.

This presents a challenging learning curve for MOPs professionals, but it’s a chance for inquisitive people to get in on a nascent movement, develop new skills, and take ownership for finding problems and figuring out solutions.

 

Vision and change

RevOps is a team about the constant, integrated optimization of customer journey practices. It’s proactive, planned, and dedicated to winning and retaining business in the most efficient ways.

The shift from MOPs to RevOps responds to new business dynamics and demands, but it also helps MOPs people improve how they collaborate and align with SOPs and customer success.

Within a RevOps team, MOPs professionals can gain new skills and make greater strategic impacts through visibility, interconnectedness and a proactive role in optimizing the customer journey.

Invest in building a consistent experience that solves the challenges of siloes, and your MOPs team will want in on the journey.

 

Want to know more about RevOps? Get in touch for a chat.

TLDR: Disparate data occurs when teams pull, categorize, filter, and interpret data in unique ways, resulting in different numbers and conclusions.

Few things are more paralyzing for your business than data that doesn’t add up.

Bad data taxes your time, reportability, revenue, and cohesion. If your workplace lacks a holistic approach to systematizing data that teams universally follow, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. You’ll learn to explain to your CMO and CTO why disparate data occurs and how to gain clarity through data unification.

 

The roots of dirty data

Organizations at one of two stages of maturity tend to find themselves with dirty data:

• startups that have scaled fast after receiving funding, and
• legacy enterprises with a mix of offline and online data storage.

 
Startups that prioritized growth with limited resources have likely been too busy to explore strategies for systematizing data. While teams in more mature organizations have had time to develop siloed, well-entrenched methods of treating data.

In either case, there’s a lack of thinking about data holistically or creating agreed-upon systems and practices. And when it comes time to make key financial decisions (e.g., how to utilize marketing investments next quarter or year), discrepancies ripple through the processes of surfacing data.

 

No centralized repository

When teams use data transformation tools to visualize their numbers, data yields can wildly vary without a centralized repository for calculations.

For example, let’s say marketing and sales use different standard and customized filters to denote types of opportunities, leads, and revenue.

Teams might use different datasets from their CRM vs. their marketing automation platform to answer the same business question and further obscure the analysis by classifying comparable fields in distinct ways (e.g. region vs. country).

 

No shared understanding

Around the business, departments might use particular tools and systems that allow for reporting to varying degrees of sophistication.

Let’s assume your business has an agreed definition of Conversion: the movement of a person between the Inquiry and Active Opportunity stages of your database.

Your leaders must ensure that different teams have a shared understanding of calculating this. Trouble occurs when:

• one team uses Tableau to calculate conversion rates using a cohort analysis — looking at a selection of your audience that shares a behavior, and
• another team uses Salesforce to divide the number of MQLs by the number of opportunities per calendar month.

 
The time it takes for a lead to go from an MQL to an opportunity is calculated per number of days. Unless the velocity of leads is extraordinarily fast, converting to opportunities in a number of days, you won’t calculate an accurate conversion rate by dividing the number of MQLs by the number of opportunities in the same month.

Let’s say you have 50 opportunities and 100 MQLs active in October.

Taking a monthly view would suggest that your conversion rate is 50%. But there’s no evidence that these opportunities came from October’s MQLs. By contrast, a cohort view would allow you to look back and see of those people who had MQL status in July, who became an opportunity since then?

Alternatively, if you have 50 opportunities in October as a cohort, you can see the 30 MQLs who resulted down-funnel in opps, and these are the parameters you can use to accurately calculate conversion.

 

The bottom line

You get disparate data when teams pull, categorize, filter, and interpret data in unique ways, with particular mechanisms for reporting and analytics.

Let’s bring it together.

 

Enter data unification

Data unification requires a maturity of thinking about and organizing your data. Culturally, it means acknowledging disparate data as a systemic problem in your workplace.

If leadership isn’t convinced that addressing this is a priority, punctuate the range of competencies that disparate data puts at stake: reportability, decisiveness, time, cohesion, revenue, and clarity. People across the organization gain those benefits from data unification—a compelling basis to incentivize people internally.

 

The best practice for data unification

Think of your data as holistic, within a clearly defined and universally adopted structure. This is both theoretical and practical.

For example, different departments need to agree upon and reference the same definitions in their analytics and reporting—they shouldn’t use their own methods to filter and calculate things.

Streamline your data storage by pulling it from decentralized repositories and siloes into a data warehouse. From there, build out a central repository of definitions and calculations that everyone then references (e.g. all teams adopt the same definition of sales velocity and reference the same cohort structure and conversion math).

With regards to tech, it’s sensible to consolidate the platforms your organization uses to analyze, store, transform, and visualize data. This ensures teams can access, surface, and parse data consistently and narrows the scope for discrepancies. Learn more steps by reading our post ‘How To Create a Data Hygiene Plan That Works.’

 

Looking forward

Disparate data is not an insurmountable problem, but it’s more insidious to fix the longer you leave things broken.

If your workplace has lacked the resources or foresight to structure data holistically, or you’ve sat in one too many meetings where different teams make the case for their numbers, now’s the time to act.

Data unification is a project that will strengthen the integrity of your data and decisions and help to drive your business forward.

Get in touch for guidance on systems and practices that make data work.

TLDR: Is leadership considering a new structure for your marketing operations team? Learn about the suitability of in-house, agency, and hybrid marketing ops models.

You have three models to consider when structuring a marketing operations (MOPs) function:

• building a fully in-house team
• outsourcing MOPs entirely to an agency, or
• a combination of the two.

 
Each approach can suit the ambitions and needs of your business. The best fit depends on the resources at your disposal and the scale of your MOPs maturity.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how each operational model can suit your business.

If your organization’s responding to changes in budgets and personnel, or your marketing leaders are redefining what they want MOPs to accomplish, now’s a great time to discuss the strategic aims that each model supports and the circumstances in which they can work.

 

Why change business models?

There are several scenarios where exploring different ways of structuring a MOPs function makes sense.

For example, let’s say:

• Your current setup isn’t yielding the results your CMO wants to achieve. But, your competitor – who uses another operational model – is solving relevant problems and gaining the benefits you desire.
• Your MOPs team might perform well, but tighter budgets, staff changes, or new growth prospects make it favorable to shift business models.
• MOPs is an emerging area for your business, without much being established. You’ve completed some projects and have a few pieces of marketing technology. Your marketing leadership see potential to further develop your capabilities.

 

“A structural shift can help to accomplish your goals.”

 

A structural shift can help to accomplish your goals if leadership wants to:

👉 troubleshoot performance issues

👉 adapt to financial and operational circumstances, or

👉 increase the caliber of your MOPs function and its contributions to growth.

 

The three MOPs models

1. The in-house marketing operations model

Structuring MOPs solely as an in-house operation will likely need the most substantial support from your organization. This includes cultural recognition and financial backing.

Internal MOPs teams thrive in environments that perceive and respect marketing operations for its inherent value.

In other words: Your organization doesn’t undermine the marketing ops team with the continual expectation to prove the ROI of its existence.

Otherwise, the team needs a proven leader within the company and industry who can effectively establish the value of MOPs. This internal recognition is critical as it means healthy budgets for investment in digital maturity and growing the team’s headcount and skillset.

Key benefit: Greater access to key stakeholders within the organization which can influence the direction of a campaign or streamline communication.

 

2. The full-agency marketing operations model

Changing the status quo early in your MOPs maturity is a tall order.

Marketing operations concerns the analysis of marketing behaviors and their impact on revenue. It’s a distinct extension of Marketing that overlaps with Revenue, Operations, and IT.

As a result, many organizations are uncertain where MOPs should sit internally, and in some cases, they’re playing catch-up with the value that MOPs provides.

Sounds familiar? Consider a full-agency model to reach your full your MOPs function potential.

Businesses often have larger budgets for agency assistance than for building internal teams. While leadership may recognize the need to develop your marketing ops capabilities, outsourcing the function is likely an easier sell financially.

Key benefit: Using an agency partner to get projects off the ground provides evidence of the true value MOPs can bring. You can use this evidence to justify the headcount budget to build a team in-house.

Going the agency route also makes sense if your company has struggled to fill open, in-house MOPs positions.

In a job market where the demand for MOPs professionals outstrips the supply, in-house teams are often stretched thin across a breadth of strategic and tactical responsibilities.

 

3. The hybrid marketing operations model

Hybrid models can benefit small teams short on bandwidth and facing skill gaps. Partnering with an agency means accelerating your work and extending your reach to more ambitious projects. You can drive growth and develop the sophistication of your MOPs function.

Another choice to consider is between centralized and decentralized structures.

In a centralized function, one team manages the entirety of your company’s MOPs, whether that takes place in-house or at an agency.

Decentralized structures see multiple business units or departments use marketing technology to execute on their particular MOPs needs. Marketers around the business may use software like Knak to build their own emails, or have access to a marketing automation platform to build or even deploy their own programs.

Key benefit: In this scenario, an agency can provide additional lift for the single person or lean team running point on a department’s projects. Agencies can also help to create stronger connections and alignment between MOPs and an organization’s general Marketing team or support the work that marketing end users do in a platform.

 

Assessing the fit

Many organizations see their MOPs maturity begin with either a sole in-house or full-external model.

 

“The most viable path depends on the resources and hours you have available.”

 

Based on past experience, your marketing leadership might be strongly for or against using an agency. The most viable path depends on the resources and hours you have available.

Factor in your budgets for hiring and agency support, the expertise of your in-house team, and the available time your team can use to branch out into new MOPs initiatives and capabilities.

From there, businesses typically blend in-house and agency marketing operations, then fluctuate between a hybrid model and a sole in-house team.

You’ll experience a natural ebb and flow of agency needs as your MOPs maturity develops. After you’ve established MOPs to a point where you can bring someone in-house or grow your team, a marketing ops agency can still support you when your team ramps up enough to again need extra help.

At any given time, the ‘best’ model of structuring Marketing Operations is the one you deem most likely to achieve your growth ambitions within your financial situation. And this will shift over time.

Wherever you are on your MOPs journey, agencies can support your business at scale, within the budget and headcount on your side.

Need some help? Get in touch

 
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TLDR: Data privacy regulations are evolving fast, and businesses in breach face harsh financial penalties and reputational damage. Bring RevOps, legal, sales, and marketing together every quarter to set the agenda for your data privacy strategy, review your processes, and plan around new compliance requirements. Hiring a data privacy officer and investing in cybersecurity are strong measures to properly process and protect customer data.

The data privacy landscape moves fast. As regulations emerge worldwide, businesses that collect, store, and use customer data face a complex web of compliance responsibilities.

Businesses that breach data privacy regulations, even unintentionally, face steep consequences. Regulators can place data handling restrictions on companies and issue sharp fines. To date, EU regulators have enforced over €1.5 billion in penalties to organizations in breach, with an average of €1.4 million per fine.

In a time when people are more conscious than ever about how businesses handle their data, falling foul of regulations is an easy way to shatter customer trust.

Now is the time to act. To stay compliant, your RevOps team needs to know how the interlocking data privacy regulations apply to the territories where you handle customer and prospect data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to identify where the challenges and blind spots lie within your company, and the processes you should implement to keep on top of your responsibilities.

 

Challenges with data privacy

Companies tend not to proactively review their data privacy policy, which causes them to fall behind the times and incur fines. Many major markets (EU, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil, and some US states) have regulations that place responsibility on the organizations operating in these territories or collecting data on their residents.

While data privacy is more complex for organizations operating internationally, multiple regulations can apply even when doing business in one local market.

As the regulatory landscape evolves, it’s important to stay in the loop with how these frameworks shape your legal obligations and data practices. It’s particularly crucial if your business is considering expanding into international markets.

Organizations typically focus on online practices when designing a data privacy strategy, sometimes, to the detriment of offline behavior. The age-old challenge of sales and marketing alignment becomes relevant to compliance here.

Important: As Sales Ops and MOPs send customer and prospect data between platforms, both teams should know how they’re allowed to use and store this data to avoid taking actions that violate the privacy rights of people in the dataset.

 

Measures to take

To set the agenda for data privacy strategy, RevOps should get together with legal, sales, and marketing every three to six months. Across teams, you want everyone to have a good grasp of their responsibilities and have an eye on the regulatory movements that could impact their work.  

 

First, answer these questions during an initial meeting:

• How are privacy and cookie policies evolving?
• What are our regulatory requirements for each market we do business in?
• How might our usage of tools and the web need to shift to meet new requirements?
• What gaps do we have in implementing compliance policies?

 

Next, review your data processes:

From there, review your data capture, storage, and deletion processes. When capturing data, timestamp the date and time people submit contact forms, why they’re contacting your business, and whether they’ve opted in to receive marketing communications. For logging and auditing purposes, this creates evidence that you’ve lawfully obtained the authorized data.

For sales ops and marketing ops, set up filters to segment the people in your dataset based on the communications they’ve opted in or out of receiving. Read our piece on data hygiene to learn more.

For prospects who’ve unsubscribed from your communications, check in with legal to decide when to delete their data entirely. And it helps to test regularly that your measures are working as planned. Are your filters and timestamps working correctly? Are you deleting data when required? Are you storing it in secure places that don’t violate compliance policies?

 

Finally, hire a data privacy officer:

Hiring a data privacy officer is a smart move. DPOs are experts in:

• keeping up with regulatory evolution
• guiding policies and processes, and
• educating people on the risks of non-compliance is a smart move to advocate.

 
If the budget to hire for such a role is a concern, it’s worth mentioning the penalties that regulators can apply. E.U. authorities, for instance, can enforce the GDPR with fines of up to €20 million, or up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover.

For similar reasons, cybersecurity training and tools are worth pushing for. Data breaches decrease customer confidence and brand strength while making fines and legal action all the more likely—so by investing in data protection, you invest in protecting your customers and your reputation.

 

Create trust

People want to do business with organizations they trust.

By making a cultural and financial investment in data privacy, you get to:

• keep your business from appearing under the limelight for the wrong reasons
• avoid fines and restrictions on how your RevOps team uses data, and
• better understand the processes to implement if you’re expanding into new markets.

 
Want to learn more about the actions you can take to remain GDPR compliant? Get in touch with us.

TLDR: Account-based marketing (ABM) can help your business land lucrative deals, but does your marketing leadership know how to make an ABM strategy successful?

Account-based marketing (ABM) took the B2B world by storm several years ago and with tight economic times ahead, it’s being called the breakout star of 2023 by Adweek.

ABM gained recognition for its potential to land deals with high ROI. That’s a naturally exciting prospect for any business, but ABM gets results by execution, not magic.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you talk to your marketing leadership about ABM. You’ll learn to explain how it really works, the circumstances in which it succeeds, and the preparation ABM takes to pull it off.

 

What is ABM?

ABM is a strategy for producing marketing campaigns that target particular accounts.

In doing so, ABM flips the traditional marketing funnel on its head. Rather than distributing your content and messaging far and wide to attract as many leads as possible, your first step is to narrow down a subset of customers and prospects to focus on with personalized campaigns.

The rationale is that dedication to specific accounts with specific personalization will yield more highly qualified leads and lucrative deals. If your broad-based marketing efforts are resulting in limited growth, ABM offers a fresh alternative with a trade-off: it takes work to choose the best accounts to target and find the most effective methods of engaging them.

Various models exist for targeting accounts and personas with just one universal truth to the process: marketing and sales need to integrate deeply together.

A more traditional campaign might see marketing and sales work as separate islands. With ABM, the focus on specific accounts demands joint strategic input. Although each sales rep would love marketing to increase their personal list of existing and new business, your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to support everyone with targeted campaigns.

Therefore, ABM begins with a conversation between your marketing and sales leaders. Your VP needs to sit with their sales counterpart and agree on a set of accounts to prioritize. A strong mutual directive is the first spark of life for any ABM campaign. From there, both teams should work together on more in-depth targeting.

 

Unlock the power of ABM

In planning the finer details of an ABM campaign, the idea is to replicate past successes with a fresh twist. To do this, marketing needs to determine how existing personas, content, and tactics can apply to each chosen account.

As with choosing accounts, the types of people you target in each account should share characteristics (e.g., job role, region, vertical) with stakeholders who responded positively to past campaigns and brought in business.

You’ll need data from sales and marketing to identify:

• the decision makers at each account
• any individuals who’ve previously interacted with your brand, and
• the campaigns that got similar personas to sign on the dotted line.

This data is your guiding light for the best tactics to try.

Whether it’s a personalized web experience or a custom event invite, knowing what worked for comparable personas puts you in a good position to engage your chosen stakeholders. Your past campaigns provide a good basis to repurpose content, but the real task is to customize pieces to show an understanding of each individual’s interests and pain points.

In our post ‘The Principles of a Successful ABM Strategy,’ we highlight the platform considerations you’ll need to make as well.

The key to success here is commitment, data maturity, and inter-team communication.

For ABM to really work, marketing and sales need to collaborate closely on various campaign pieces, invest time and effort to research and develop your audience, and share insights about past account success.

Here’s what your team needs to execute ABM:

• sufficient time resourced to do the work within their bandwidth
• clear synchronicity with sales, and
• a wealth of historical data available to cite points of success with similar companies.

Consider your business ready to try ABM once these elements are in place.

 

Continuous improvements

One thing ABM has in common with more traditional campaigns is you want to go the distance. For all your calculated targeting efforts, doing ABM for the first time is still an experiment.

It’s important to remember the results are unlikely to be instant, but instead a product of gradual discoveries and tweaks based on feedback from your campaign performance.

For that reason, frame your first outing with ABM as proof of concept. Your personas, tactics, content, and criteria for targeting accounts are all elements to refine as reports come in from your activity. For continuous success, everyone involved in your ABM campaign—from sales to your marketing VP—must share and respond proactively to feedback and make strategic changes to chase opportunities.

Both your marketing and sales leaders want growth. If the results from your traditional campaigns are tapering off, ABM can help you net those “white whale” accounts, but your leadership should facilitate the things ABM needs. Those needs include joint investment from sales and marketing, accessible historical data, and the will to keep refining it until you strike gold.

For any guidance you need with ABM, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: To date, France, Italy, Denmark and Austria have banned Google Analytics—a trend that could continue throughout the EU. If your business depends significantly on Google Analytics or EU markets, your analytics practices and revenue could be at stake. Wherever the ROI makes sense, focus on using owned data for the countries affected by the ban, explore alternative tools that are GDPR-compliant, and invest in the education of a Data Privacy Officer to adapt to new and emerging regulatory developments.

Several key EU markets recently moved to ban Google Analytics. Data protection authorities in Italy, France, and Austria have deemed the practice of transferring user web activity and IP data to the US a violation of data protection laws. The bodies found the US lacks adequate safeguards to preserve personal data anonymity.

Businesses whose products, services, operations, and infrastructure rely significantly on Google Analytics would do well to explore alternative strategies and software, planning around the likely consequences of the ban and potential developments in regulation. This also applies if your business takes significant revenue from EU countries.

A potential move away from Google Analytics could make your data less accurate and accessible. It would also require setting up alternative web optimization and tracking mechanisms. Therefore, your CMO and CTO are chief among the people who should know the score.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you talk them through the impact and outlook of the ban, along with some solutions to consider. The better educated your leaders are, the better prepared you’ll be to weather any disruption.

 

The impact of the ban

The gravity of the situation depends on how much Google Analytics drives your business. If your MOPs and RevOps teams use it greatly, your data collection, reporting, and forecasting powers are at stake.

No longer able to track web activity and IP data created from top-of-funnel initiatives, MOPs and RevOps will need to refocus analytical practices exclusively onto data they already own (e.g., captured leads living inside their system with consent expressed in compliance with the GDPR).

For now, the Google Analytics ban applies only to France, Italy, Denmark and Austria. To keep doing business in these countries, you’ll need to adapt your website and introduce new processes and tools as necessary to comply with both the GDPR and any local requirements. If your business is based outside of these countries, the ban equally affects your ability to use Google Analytics to process data from users in France, Italy, Denmark and Austria.

The key thing to remember: to stay compliant with the GDPR, you cannot transfer web and IP data from these citizens and countries to the US.

Actionable takeaways

Your CMO and IT will need to investigate the changes required to your website, subdomains, and data analytics processes to stop the tracking and transference of website data for these countries and their citizens.

Your CTO should consider the ROI of tools that offer similar capabilities to Google Analytics. Examples include:

• Simple Analytics
• Adobe Analytics
• Mixpanel
• Amplitude, and
• Pendo.

Any new tool you consider should allow you to process data from France, Italy, Denmark and Austria in compliance with the GDPR and any country-specific regulations. Your Data Protection Officer (or a consultant with GDPR expertise) is also a good source of counsel on potential changes to your tech stack and infrastructure.

Of course, these changes take time, effort, and resources. If your CMO and CTO need a hand assessing the ROI of making adjustments and implementing more advanced processes, look at how much revenue your business sees from the countries impacted. If less than 5% of gross revenue comes from France, Italy, Denmark and Austria (and their citizens in other countries), it might make sense to rely solely on the data you own.

 

Future EU bans?

While the ban currently applies to just three countries, it’s sensible for leadership to think about how the regulatory landscape might evolve.

EU countries could increasingly move to ban Google Analytics and restrict the transfer of user data from the EU to the US, potentially leading to an EU-wide ban to streamline regulations in the bloc.

A sweeping EU-wide ban would take considerable time to enforce, though it would be a massive blow to companies whose data storage infrastructure is based in the US.

As a means of ensuring GDPR compliance, US companies wouldn’t see much success from storing their user data in the EU.

Companies exempting themselves from transferring data back to the US would ultimately violate the CLOUD Act, which asserts that US businesses must, at request, provide authorities in the US with data stored in their servers, regardless of where those servers are stored.

One emerging piece of legislation to watch is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. If codified, the bill would ban large tech companies such as Google from using non-public data generated by business users to benefit the covered platform’s own products. The enforcement of new antitrust practices in the US could result in data transfers to the US being deemed acceptable in accordance with the GDPR.

Amidst it all, businesses that prioritize EU markets or have a significant EU presence may increasingly turn away from Google Analytics and adopt tools that guarantee GDPR compliance. A resulting rise in demand and availability of solutions that ensure GDPR compliance can help your CTO identify an alternative that allows you to keep doing business in the EU in the most optimal way.

 

The bottom line

The Google Analytics ban in various European countries is likely not an existential threat to your business—but if your services, operations, and infrastructure relies on the software or you get a significant portion of your revenue from the EU, it’s a situation that demands building resilience.

Wherever the ROI makes sense, turn your focus towards owned data for the countries affected by the ban, explore GDPR-compliant alternatives to Google Analytics, and invest in the education of a Data Privacy Officer to adapt appropriately to new and emerging challenges with data regulation.

Get in touch for more guidance on navigating your RevOps team through the data privacy landscape.

TLDR: Technical debt arises from rushed responses to problems created by poor planning. Think long-term about your projects, and you won’t have to choose between speed and execution. 

Technical debt describes the implied cost of making “quick fixes” to your tech stack or IT infrastructure.

Technical debt accumulates when the people building your software take suboptimal shortcuts to complete projects over more effective approaches that take longer. Doing so entrenches flaws into your tech that become more troublesome to fix as time goes on, leading to higher rework costs later.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to discuss the causes and consequences of technical debt with your CMO and suggest cultural changes to prevent it from building.

 

Why technical debt builds

During projects like platform migrations and implementations, a CMO and VP generally focus on contract negotiations.

Their efforts to get the best deal. This focus can, inadvertently, eat into the time needed for the technical work.

When projects start too late, those responsible for building the project will face pressure to make up for lost time and choose “quick fixes” to hit deadlines and achieve results.

While CMOs aim to make the most cost-effective decisions, they often account just for the purchase cost of a new application or platform.

For instance, your CMO may choose a marketing automation platform license cheaper than its competitors without considering the extra admin, consultation, and custom development necessary to make it work.

Add in the cost of training personnel and additional support, however, and you could well face a higher total cost of ownership. Especially if you don’t plan from the beginning to bring these resources on board, or if the project is already running behind schedule.

Short-sighted thinking leads to these negative outcomes:

• compressed timelines
• bloated costs and scope, and
• increased project vulnerability due to mistakes and substandard workarounds.

These decisions compromise a project’s execution and encourage technical debt, making subsequent improvements more challenging to make.

 

Preventing technical debt

Influencing upwards is an impactful approach against technical debt.

Depending on the dynamics of your organization, a direct line to your CMO or Marketing VP might not be possible. In that case, look to your Operations Manager or Marketing Director as allies with the access and technical expertise to impart the urgency of starting on time.

While it’s impossible to identify every gap a solution has until it’s in-house, you can confidently speak to the consequences of a late start.

Here’s how to sell your boss on the respect the project deserves:

“If negotiations drag out and leave us behind schedule, it will impact our ability to deliver this project on time, on budget, and to the level of competency you want. X will happen if we don’t start as planned, and it’ll take Y additional costs to fix.”

 

Implementations and migrations

Implementations and migrations are demanding initiatives. The planning phase is crucial to map out all your anticipated costs and labor needs.

Your CMO/Marketing VP can’t expect key contributors to carry their full workload and give their all to an implementation or migration—people who are stretched take shortcuts, and that just leads to technical debt proliferating.

Freeing up key team members to commit and provide the necessary focus to the project gives them space to contribute to the best of their ability, without incurring rework costs.

For instance, sales and marketing leadership could reduce the quarterly targets of the sales reps involved, or lessen the day-to-day campaign execution responsibilities of contributors from marketing.

 

Create a change management team

The creation of a change management team is a particularly progressive solution to technical debt.

Technical debt arises from rushed responses to problems created by short-sighted planning.

Advocate for a dedicated team of people to support the project from conception, mapping out the ramifications of any change in:

• costs
• timelines
• resource requirements, and
• post-implementation training.

This increases the project’s resilience to disruption and lessens the risk of technical debt.

 

Long-term thinking

If projects are delayed at the early stages, you’ve ultimately got a choice between paying upfront or later on.

Do you use the most effective methods to build a new implementation or migration, accepting you’ll be up and running later than planned? Or do you take shortcuts to make your initial launch date, at risk of introducing flaws into the project that carry large rework costs and compromise how effectively it works?

Between the two, it’s not an even trade.

The cost of technical debt often outweighs the agility of completing a project as fast as possible.

Steps to avoid technical debt:

1. Reinforce the importance of making a plan and sticking to it with leadership.

2. Scope out your timelines, labor needs, and total cost of ownership upfront—when things need to progress to meet your deadline, the people you’ll need to be involved in the project, and its real financial cost.

3. Advocate for a change management team to reinforce the consequences of starting late or making changes, and to find solutions in a proactive, planned manner.

4. Take the demands of your project seriously, and you shouldn’t have to choose between speed and execution.

Need more guidance? Get in touch — we’re always here to help.

 

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