What type of team am I?
We've led and advised marketing teams for years. Change starts with understanding your current situation.
Explore our team types below to find your match!
The Short-order cooks
Short-order cooks receive their priorities as overly-specified tasks instead of value-oriented goals or objectives.
Often the work of the Short-order cook has low value: sales leaders and product managers (two typical order-giving functions) do not always have the sharpest understanding of the value that marketers can deliver.
Many times, the individuals giving the orders believe they know marketing better than their colleagues who sit in the marketing department. Often the marketers are overwhelmed and burned out by the volume of orders directed their way. Sometimes the resulting work suffers from poor quality. Sometimes the internal relationships have become abusive. Often the marketers are poorly engaged: no-one aspires in their work to become world class at taking orders.
Remedies
Consider redesigning how your teams engage with stakeholders.
Begin a conversation with your stakeholders about what work is truly important or valuable.
Establish marketing success metrics that are aligned to P&L, operations and customer lifetime value.
Introduce annual and quarterly collaborative planning with your stakeholders.
Invest in “lighthouse” projects that demonstrate to stakeholders the value that marketing can create.
The Cost Centers
Cost center marketing organizations are measured on expenses incurred instead of value created.
When a marketing organization is seen primarily as a cost center, its leadership is put in an endlessly defensive posture. P&L owners view the marketing function as a cost of doing business that is forever eating into margins. Long-term planning and strategic investments become hard to justify. In many organizations, this view of marketing likely formed during a time when its primary role was to provide collateral and presentations to support sales teams—a far cry from the data driven, omni-channel growth engine B2B marketers aspire to build and operate today.
Remedies
Prioritize building deeper relationships with business leaders whose value is measured in sales (and not email open rates).
Put the business model at the bullseye of the conversation with partners.
Build and quantify a shared definition of the business problem and the return on opportunity while avoiding marketing jargon.
Aim strategies at specific outcomes, and describe them in the operating metrics of the business.
The Luddites
Luddite marketing organizations have a view of technology that dates back to the 1980s, when IT was a back-office function. They seem not to have noticed that software has since eaten the world, including them.
Strong product management is a foundational capability in modern marketing, whether or not the organization has adopted agile practices. Product management requires:
An even-handed understanding of business and marketing strategy.
Deep technical competencies (or at least the ability to learn them).
The ability to collaborate with stakeholders from a position of strength, working through trade offs to find the best technical and operational solutions to drive value.
A marketing team that lacks these skills will struggle to build, integrate and adopt technology, and will fail to extract and demonstrate value from its technology investments. Without course correction, it may find that key parts of its digital mission are given to rival organizations instead.
Remedies
Establish a product owner mentality and discipline within your organization
Hire folks with backgrounds in service design and systems thinking
Train the entire function in the rhythms and competencies of product management.
Empower your product managers to make long-term platform decisions on behalf of the function.
The Relay Teams
Relay team marketing organizations take forever to complete anything: work must pass through the silos of different shared services teams, each with their own bureaucratic processes and success measures.
There was a time (about 20 to 30 years ago) when shared services might have made sense for a marketing organization: when executed well, they reduced cost and improved skills acquisition and talent development. Today, the complexity of modern, multi-channel marketing requires the rapid orchestration of tasks spanning multiple disciplines, including creative, brand, user experience, data management, application development, and more. With their intake processes and internal Service Level Agreements, shared services consistently fail to deliver the types of cycle times that are essential for launching, testing and optimizing modern engagement strategies.
Remedies
Evolve and transform your operating model towards small, cross-functional teams, aligned to mission-specific outcomes—the heart of every agile organization.
Build a culture that provides these teams with the autonony and self-direction they need to navigate the modern environment of technical complexities and shifting consumer expectations.
Focus your teams on improving time to market, as well as knowledge acquisition and skills development through cross-functional participation, learning and experimentation.
The Zombies
Zombie marketing organizations have had their brains eaten by their agency partners. Having delegated their understanding to their agencies, they have become overly dependent on them.
Historically, marketing organizations have collaborated with agencies, using their external expertise and scalability to augment internal talent and operations. Often, the relationship is fruitful. But sometimes a marketing organization’s reliance on its external agencies reaches such an extreme that internal knowledge and skills have eroded. On the client side, marketers become glorified project managers, drafting briefs, managing procurement processes, and administering creative reviews. We contend that this pattern is neither sustainable nor effective in the dynamic landscape of modern marketing.
Remedies
Develop in-house expertise across key domains, including content creation, UX design, data science, customer insights, and journey design.
Foster self-reliance and eliminate unnecessary hand-offs to external parties, which inevitably lengthen time to market.
Engage your agency partners to help you scale your operations—but be careful not to lose your brains.
Some marketing organizations have been taken hostage by their legal and compliance departments—and fallen in love with their abductors.
Legal and compliance reviews are key to executing campaigns in almost every industry. But some marketing organizations become all too comfortable accepting endless compliance reviews, using them to justify why it takes so long to get any work done. Like a kidnap victim suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the Compliance Hostage organization has fallen in love with its abductor.
Healthy relationships between marketing and compliance begin by recognizing that regulatory and legal processes must be in service to marketing success, not the other way around. The best of these relationships are collaborative and aligned to common strategic goals.
The Compliance Hostages
Remedies
Work with your legal and compliance colleagues to find ways to innovate together.
Establish standardized and pre-approved content.
Clarify and agree to what is an “acceptable business risk”.
Automate legal review.
Engage in senior-level planning to alleviate resource bottlenecks.
The Artisans
Artisanal marketing organizations create nothing but one-offs. They are like handmade shoemakers, each campaign lovingly stitched together as a treasured work of art, defying attempts to scale it.
Artisans craft every aspect of a campaign from scratch—from audience segmentation to creative conceptualization, execution and success metrics. The result? Fragmented approaches to creative output, content, brand experiences, analytics and even the technology foundation. The impact is often massive: misaligned customer experiences, poor scalability, increased unit costs, prolonged cycle times, and a restricted spectrum of rotational job opportunities for team members.
Some Artisans are responding to persistent stakeholder demands for tailored, bespoke work. Others (see “The Zombies”) are in thrall to the frustrated artists in their agencies’ creative departments. Often, there is a deep lack of understanding of the impact of bespoke work on marketing ROI. Whatever the reason, this disease seems to be one of the most ubiquitous.
Remedies
Align your strategies to a set of standardized go-to-market patterns and customer engagement blueprints.
Using these blueprints, unearth repeatable and scalable marketing patterns. (We have found that these patterns recur universally, regardless of the sales model—be it B2B, B2C, or B2B2C—the industry or the geography.)
Transform your handcrafted approaches into standardized, scalable, and automated marketing strategies—and turn yourself into a data-driven powerhouse.
The Pilotless Plane
Pilotless plane marketing organizations have lost control over the technology they need to get to their destination.
Over the years, many of our clients have struggled for control—or even influence—over MarTech priorities and roadmaps. Often, marketing technology is not only governed, but managed, budgeted, developed and operated by IT (or Software Engineering) departments. The result? A Pilotless Plane organization in which technology gets prioritized and developed according to the needs and logic of the technology itself instead of the marketers who must use it. This misalignment can cripple marketing execution, which is highly dependent on access to real-time data, automation, and analytics.
Remedies
Reimagine the collaboration between Marketing, IT and Engineering.
Establish autonomous marketing control over “systems of engagement”, allowing you to rapidly develop and deploy customer-facing initiatives and keep pace with ever-evolving business and customer needs.
Refocus IT on “systems of record”—areas like billing/ERP, HR, customer identity, and security protocols.
Fortify governance of the technology ecosystem and direct diverse talent and resources where they can be best applied.
The HiPPOcrites
HiPPOcrite marketing organizations make arbitrary and whimsical decisions based on the opinions of top executives. They lack data-driven approaches to driving growth.
HiPPOcrite marketing organizations pivot their marketing strategies to the changing whims of the HiPPO, or “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”. Pivots can take the form of direct creative override, reallocation of marketing budgets from one tactic to another, or drive-by commentary that disempowered employees treat as edict. This can create unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic outcomes. We have personally witnessed the overnight collapse of a Fortune 100 tech company’s organic search rankings because a single, powerful executive demanded a rebrand, which was duly executed as an opinion-rich, chaotic and data-free process.
Remedies
Transform your culture into one that values and responds to data.
Start at the top. Create a leadership team that models mindsets and behaviors that demonstrate to the organization that it values evidence-based marketing and proper testing methods, backed by standardized measures and quantified insights.
The Trend Chasers
Trend chasing marketing organizations are constantly committing to new technologies without an appreciation for the work required to fully adopt and realize the return on investment.
There is no shortage of studies that demonstrate there are more technology adoption failures than successes. Often, an organization falls for the “slick software demo”, positioned as the panacea to all of an organization’s woes. Because these pilots are harder to kill than start, over time the organization becomes littered with half-baked platforms, with no ROI in sight.
Remedies
Align all technology initiatives to strategic and scalable business opportunities.
As part of each initiative, redesign business processes, ways of working, talent and departmental incentives.
Introduce robust governance around all technology spend and/or the introduction of new tools and platforms.
Develop a technology roadmap in service of business priorities and objectives.
Anchor the roadmap to your organization’s objectives and KPIs, aligning customer-facing use cases with required processes, business rules, technology and data platforms.
Schedule a consultation
Do any of these scenarios resonate? If so, we would like to offer you a complimentary whiteboard session. Let’s see how we might turn your marketing challenges into a roadmap of opportunities for growth, innovation and an empowered future.