Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Fundamentally, the work that we're doing in marketing is all about selling. Sales and marketing alignment is a must-do and must-have, because all successful businesses must have good sales.
Strategic approaches to creating a Marketing Operations rhythm
Business Strategy
Business Strategy means learning to say “No”. Often, people think business strategy - or strategy in general, is all the cool things that we're going to do. But more often than not, it's being clear about what we're not going to do, so that we can just do one or two things really clearly.
Digital Strategy
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time. From a marketing point of view, what's digital strategy? Why is that important for marketing operations?
Go-to-market Strategy
Simply, it is our ability to be clear about what we want to get done at a campaign level so that customers understand about our capabilities. Go-to-market is also about defining the success of a marketing strategy especially in relation to things like revenue targets.
The Importance of Sales & Marketing Alignment for Marketing Operations
Growth Marketing
The idea of growth marketing is about driving a culture of experimentation. From a marketing point of view, this means ensuring that we're experimenting on key parts of customer acquisition, customer awareness, customer activation, revenue retention, and referral.
Read more about how to use experiments to drive better metrics... right away.
Building a cross-functional team
When driving marketing operations in organisations, you need access to a variety of different skillsets:
- developers
- analytics
- content writers
- strategic thinkers
- analytical thinkers
- marketing technologists
In other words, you need a quite broad team to make a marketing operations cadence work.
Gather first-party data with Customer Insights interviews
Getting first-party data and feedback from your customers is one of the cornerstones of marketing. You can’t really claim to understand your customer unless you have this information – and yet we find that many marketing and sales teams haven’t done this.
Done correctly, your customer insights will inform your understanding of:
- Your customer journey
- Your metrics for success
- What activated your customers
- What held them back from converting
- These are all extremely enlightening things to know.
Segmentation & Positioning
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning can be characterised by the way we profile customers.
This helps us be clear about the goals, needs, predispositions, preferences, and behaviours of our customers. It's the base unit for marketing automation and digital marketing in general, and is a fundamental component in the context of marketing technology and customer acquisition/retention processes.
Creating a Marketing ROI
Also known as benefits realisation, Marketing ROI is the amount of revenue that a business earns which is attributable to marketing efforts. In other words, you need to be able to quantify the financial impact of both the money you spend – and the impact on the business as well.
