Your ability to “defend the spend” is the key to job advancement in a B2B marketing organization. But do you ever get tired of playing defense? Isn’t it better to be on offense — to not only justify the budget dollars you receive by highlighting the ROI you deliver — but also to inspire confidence in your company’s finance team and enthusiasm in its sales group? To be recognized as a driver of the business? During a recent webinar, we sat down with Danny McKeever, Sr. Director, Marketing Operations and Technology at Integrate, to explore answers to the urgent questions marketing operations (MOPS) leaders are asking today. We also talked about the secret to MOPS success, and Danny shared three great tips that can help you stop playing defense and go on offense instead.
3 Secrets To Marketing Operations Success
1. Create alignment with marketing, finance, and sales leaders.
Danny is a MOPS veteran with a track record of success. He told us the first thing he does when taking on a MOPS leadership role is to make friends with the CFO or someone on their team and build productive relationships with the company’s marketing and sales leadership. Knocking down silos with finance and sales is key since the CFO oversees revenue, and sales and marketing are jointly accountable for generating revenue. In today’s digital environment, the Integrate marketing and MOPS teams use the buyer journey as the framework for their collaboration, ensuring that buyers receive consistent messages that reflect their persona and location on the buyer journey, no matter what channel they’re on.
2. Clarify revenue expectations within a single source of data truth.
Once the cross-functional relationships are established, Danny says it’s critical to create consensus across the business on what marketing is responsible for generating in terms of revenue. When those expectations are agreed to, Danny backs the numbers from funnel metrics to set campaign targets and track results within a single source of data truth; Integrate uses Salesforce as the system of record. Also, a data team that includes representatives from marketing, MOPS, sales, and finance meets weekly to analyze data and make sure everyone stays aligned. Danny reports that this frequent meeting cadence allows the team to stay on top of trends and prevent situations where one department makes a change to Salesforce that interferes with integrated technologies used by others — including Full Circle Insights, which allows Integrate to track funnel metrics.
3. Partner with sales reps to build a groundswell of support for MOPS programs.
According to Danny, the third secret of MOPS success is to find allies within the company’s sales rep team. Generally speaking, B2B marketers industrywide have faced headwinds in campaign execution because some sales reps don’t value marketing’s contributions. Danny believes finding allies on the sales rep team can flip that script. Danny says that building alliances with receptive sales reps can spread enthusiasm like wildfire throughout the sales organization. When sales reps see that their MOPS-allied colleagues are succeeding, they’re eager to get in on a good thing, so support for MOPS programs grows organically from there, and success bolsters success for everyone.
The single through-line for all three of these tips is alignment. The MOPS leader, Danny, aligns with Integrate’s marketing, finance, and sales leaders. The teams are aligned around data in the context of a single source of truth. And MOPS aligns with the company’s sales reps, creating programs that drive success for the reps, which in turn drives success for the company as a whole. One thing to note about this strategy: it’s not all about defending the spend. By aligning with cross-functional leadership teams, collaborating within a shared source of data truth, and partnering with sales reps to execute campaigns, MOPS becomes a key driver of the business. Backed by credible data, MOPS can move on from the conversation about justifying the budget and propose marketing campaigns based on proven impact. They’re playing offense!
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