Building a world-class marketing team: six concrete operating models

In this blog I present six concrete operating models that help you support your marketing team to achieve top performance. I introduce the importance of world-class operating models; target group management, customer understanding, goals and metrics, planning process, collaboration models with stakeholders, as well as skills and capabilities in a complex sales environment.

01. Target group management

Shared target group with business, sales and marketing is a prerequisite for success in a complex sales environment. 

The buying process is long and complex. Thus, it’s vital to target your resources to the most potential accounts whether it’s winning, expanding or retenting them.

ICP and Most Wanted are unbeatable tools in B2B to identify and prioritize ideal customers. Clarifying the common direction not only helps determine target audience for marketing but also helps solve many typical problems related to, for example, complex lead validation processes.

The target group is not stable. Key decision-makers, organizations and operating environments are changing constantly. I recommend sharing these changes and target group insights regularly as a part of sales and marketing monthly meetings. This way you make sure customer-facing stakeholders know what’s happening within the target group and how to take changes into consideration. 

• Traditionally marketing has identified new decision-makers or intent from conversions such as form submissions or most relevant website visits. 
• Email bounces are my favorite source of identifying decision-makers who have changed their jobs.
• AI speeds up previously manual data searches. Gathering data from the target group’s website, job postings, news or LinkedIn feed is now much faster.

02. Customer insight

For marketing to be insightful and to engage and have an impact on the target audience, it needs to have an understanding of customers' situations, motivators and pain points.

Only a small part of customer insight can be harvested from marketing data, so in a complex sales environment, you also need other perspectives.

Use these principles to gain the ownership of customer insight and prove meaningful information to other stakeholders in your organization:

• Marketing should be responsible for customer interviews and win/loss analysis. There I recommend to focus particularly on customers’ buying process and understanding their evaluation criteria.
• Taking part in customer meetings is a great way to hear from customers' mouths, how they speak about their situation and objectives.
• Collect together a dedicated customer board for key business areas, and bring strategic customers together regularly to discuss key industry topics. Spar with customers on new content ideas or themes.
• Collect a similar group from sales stakeholders to gain regular updates on their situation, bottlenecks or opportunities you could influence on in marketing.
• Marketing should also have an ability to produce, either independently or with a partner, high-quality research on trends and hot topics in the sector or on the target group. When was the last time you conducted research on how your customers buy?

03. Goals and metrics

I recommend marketing organizations to build a playbook for goal setting and metrics. Playbook helps you tackle the extremes of goal setting. Both when there are no goals at all and when every tactical metric is a goal. 

Goals and metrics are vital elements in marketing value communication. They are directly connected to how different stakeholders see marketing impact. When the goals are right and they’ve been set the right way it also boosts the motivation and marketers’ and perception of the meaningfulness and value of their work.

There’s not a one right model to rule them all when building playbook but I’d focus especially on answering these questions: 

• Who sets the strategic goals in marketing? Who sets the campaign goals?
• How to ensure successful goal setting? Do you use for example, the SMART model in setting goals?
• Who has the permission to change marketing or campaign goals?
• How do you communicate goals and progress towards them? Who, to whom and how?

04. Planning process

Systematic planning process adapts to both strategic and program or campaign level. A coherent approach to planning marketing programs creates efficiency, especially in large organizations. Combined with models such as target group and goal setting, it ensures marketing systematically delivers business impact. 

See, for example, Forrester’s Six Elements Of An Aligned, Actionable Annual Plan. It works best when implemented in a waterfall model. If new information later emerges about, for example, business objectives or the role of marketing in achieving them, other elements such as priorities and goals must also be reviewed, not just the action level.

05. Collaboration models with stakeholders

It’s never too late to build and develop team practices. Whether it’s improving collaboration between different areas of expertise within a marketing organization or between sales and marketing more broadly, these tips will help:

• Meet regularly but with purpose. Clarify agendas, goals and participants for weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings.
• Define and document your joint core processes. For example, lead-to-revenue process between sales and marketing or aforementioned processes for target group management or sharing customer insight.
• Identify the common objectives and the roles of the different functions in achieving them. For example, customer acquisition or customer experience objectives.
• Track and measure objectives and invest in quality analysis to monitor progress.

06. Knowledge and capabilities

In a marketing organization, it’s important to consider what kind of competencies and capabilities team or teams should have and how to make sure they are on a required level. Also, how do you make sure you maintain your teams’ capabilities? You can try a mentoring model, structured sparring or coaching. Or generally roll out new things through a small group to the whole organization.

Additionally, this includes methods and forums to share tips of best practices or documenting. For example, what are your team’s best practices to manage advertising campaigns or distributing different content formats.

Do you want more information?

I hope the blog provided inspired you about target group management, customer understanding, importance of goals and metrics, efficient planning process, improving collaboration models with stakeholders and growing knowledge and capabilities in your team. 

Want to hear more? Want to talk about your organization’s situation? Contact us, and let's talk.