The emergence of the marketing operations manager is a direct result of the ever growing and evolving marketing platforms and technologies available to put you, your product, and your company in front of potential clients and customers.  As with any type of endeavor and in marketing especially, the only way to show for effective budget use is to have a system in place to measure performance and results.

However, in the midst of planning, budget allocation, execution, data management, reporting, systems and process development – what is lost in translation is that without a thorough and effective strategy in place, what’s most impacted is not the ROI of your marketing spend, but the perception that your company is not equipped to respond to changing customer behavior, or worse yet, unable to quickly and empathetically, respond to customers that should mean the most to your business.

Here are two quick steps to put your business on the right track:

Start with identifying and defining the target customer and ideal leads 

Accustomed to running multiple campaigns, marketing teams are always on the go!   At the end of the day, a lead list is generated, but those who work in the sales department deem them as “unqualified."  What if we defined the parameters from the start – what are the job titles of ideal leads? What is their role and what industry are they in?   What is the business revenue that we are targeting?  In addition to how we want to be perceived by our customers, marketing would then be able to produce tangible results and contribute to the bottom line if there were agreed upon criteria on the leads they bring in, then it would be up to the sales team to contact and close them.  

Sales and marketing benefiting from each other’s knowledge and know-how

Your marketing team might seem like all they do is spend money and come up with creative campaigns and ads that catch eye balls – but did you know that they usually have specific customers in mind when they are crafting their message?  What if they can help you target and guide your ideal client through your products and services in a logical, educational way?  What if they have just the right (and well designed) material for you to put in front of your clients that solves their current problem.  Would that increase engagement with your business and potentially increase client satisfaction and retention rates?

Instead of viewing the sales team as insatiable or ungrateful, use them as eyes and ears for what the competitors are doing!   If competitors are not yet running sophisticated online campaigns, you have early-mover advantage.  And if they are, you need to catch up. The sales team talks to potential clients and customers every day.   They can bring useful feedback and insight to marketing campaigns.

Typically, the marketing operation manager’s career paths originate in Finance, IT, or operations.  Nevertheless, let’s not forget that role of the marketing operations manager is to facilitate such dialogues so that there is mutual respect and a natural flow of interaction between the two departments that’s ultimately going to drive the growth of any business.

A best-in-class marketing operations manager can transform your organization.  Through aligning sales & marketing objectives to a common goal, this is a golden opportunity for organizations to coordinate the efforts of their IT department, sales team, and marketing resources.  Instead of putting blinders on and avoiding new technology, using technical applications to optimize every touch point you have with potential clients, ensures that you have a clear succinct message throughout the purchasers buying cycle, and managing your customer’s perceptions and expectations becomes the center of all that you do.  This can truly transform an organization that is cost and process focused to become customer and performance centric.