Where should Marketing Operations fit into the Marketing and Sales ecosystem in three years?

(and steps you can take now to prepare)

Getting Better at Getting Better

D'où Venons Nous Que Sommes Nous Où Allons Nous.Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are

We Going?

What am I talking about? What is Marketing Operations?

• A developing practice comprising 8 or more distinct areas• The ways we do things, so we get more out of them and they stick!• A set of methods – ecosystem processes – enabling Marketing (and

Sales) to deliver competitive advantage

Who am I talking to? Who cares about Marketing Operations?

• Practitioners – My former team mates• CMO and other members of the C-Suite – My managers• Adjacent colleagues – My colleagues like IT and Finance governed key

processes and organizational structures. Also Marketing who needed and benefitted from M.O. so much.

What we’ll cover today – Getting better at getting better

• Not everything• Sirius, Forrester, Martech and Raab cover specifics in more detail• 3 broad observations with recommendations that are complementary to

those

• Reasonable Assertions & Experiential Insight • Real Gaps & Realistic Opportunities• 9 actions any M.O. org can take that will help it flesh out its 2018

ecosystem, better prepare for it and fit into it more productively

“Throw out the idea of Left Brain/Right Brain” – S-J Blakemore, Kings College Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Experience becomes product, ecosystem shifts, where to M.O.?

• Responsiveness is not enough. You will have to know the market, the customer, the nature of competition itself. • Change becomes a feature. You will need to design in plasticity, to

methods, processes, solutions• Change-readiness becomes an attribute, a measure. Alternative

scenarios, what ifs, organizational flows … relationships

In 2015 …• Uber, the world’s largest taxi service owns no vehicles• Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner creates no content• Alibaba, the world’s most valuable retailer has no inventory• Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider owns no real estate

(citation unknown – good observations though!)

You can have come from anywhere, but …

• Culture given: You must be Integrative at all times• Cultural evolution: Going forward, you must support more change

and the innovation to derive value from it• Examples• Experienced Oppies• Younger MAPpies

Technology should make everything easier. Shouldn’t it?

Making it easier: What do we really know? What should we really do?

• Fact: Technology only moves in two directions• Towards new categories – Blue ocean – So what do you really need?• Towards consolidation – Red ocean – So who should you bet on?

• Fact: Some companies attempt too much yet achieve too little

• Fact: Some companies attempt too little so they achieve too little

• Assertion: To be competitive, your ecosystem – your business system -- must enable competitiveness. It must enable more change. It must support more innovation.

How to make everything easier. That’s where you come in.

• Become experts. Expand your learning agenda to cover relevant blue and red oceans. Look closely at parallel trends. Study Consumer.

• Build learning facilities. Partner with Finance, Procurement, IT et al to make it easier to test ideas out and to reduce the professional risk of experimentation.

• Articulate the needs, the possibilities and their implications. With adjacent constituencies, envision evolving requirements and draft roadmaps forward and back

Wherever you are, wherever you’re going, start here.

Vision

History

Marketing Ops

Know where you are, start there, look forward, reason back

• Baseline your cultural history. Then carve out clear spaces in the plan where innovation lives.• Establish your transparency methodology. Show clearly how priorities

were selected/de-selected; show WIP and results. More learning & innovation come from seeing and trying, and trying again• Celebrate the trying. Incentivize necessary behaviors and actions with

evolved objective setting, reporting and recognition methods• Examples• Walls of fame and shame• Transparency with cadence• Presence

So where is the M & S ecosystem headed over the next 3 years?

• Knowledge & Speed• Big Data analytics will get easier and cheaper – We will know a lot more about target audiences

and individuals – but will we be better able to act appropriately?• Programmatic automation – iterative optimization – will converge Owned, Earned and Paid –

example: Social, SEM and MAP – Platform is less important/Content, more

• Function & Access• Customers – Enabled to do more, know more, “see” more• Roles – Access to function can drive federation, how do we aid yet integrate?

• Experience trumps everything• Feature-function and price still matter, but• TCO continues to morph; experience continues to extend• Change-ability matters!

And where should Marketing Operations fit in?

It depends on where you’re coming from and where you are, but know this:• You must target competitive (out-) performance• You must continue to support integration and you must better enable

productive innovation• You must invest where your gaps can’t support obvious & proven needs• You will become instrumental in gaining and maintaining alignment &

momentum and in stimulating innovations for leverage• Aspire to peer-to-peer relationships in priority areas, and you can earn

yourself a seat at the table!