Prior to team existing who owned vendor selection? Also, how did you get the organization to align behind the martech team owning it?

Purchasing new tools was in the hands of individual teams and regions. If you had the budget, you could buy a tool. We lacked a cohesive vision and selection criteria. This siloed approach resulted in a lot of pain when certain requirements would come as a surprise late in the game. Moreover, our Procurement and IT teams were overwhelmed by the barrage of requests coming at them without global prioritization. That widely recognized pain was a big contributor to getting the business on board with the martech team owning new tool evaluations. Marketing leadership was 100% behind the idea, which gave us strong footing to begin with. 

We expected to be met with resistance. After all, each individual team was used to being able to do this on their own. But we were surprised when the primary reaction was relief. Our marketing groups realized they could not manage every part of the process effectively and were willing to turn the evaluations, and the navigation of our internal processes, over to our team. Additionally, for the teams who historically lacked a budget to purchase their own tools, the process gave them a path to seek out collaboration with other teams. Having the leadership buy-in, and the understanding of the benefit among the marketers, made rolling out the new evaluation process much easier. 

Marketing operations technologies provide the following benefits when closing the marketing operations gap:

1) Single source of truth. A single source of truth allows you to have the information you need at the click of a button. Whether you’re a CMO needing to report ROI, a designer looking for an approved image, or a project manager keeping things moving, you know where to go for accurate and current information. 
2) Streamlined global processes. One central hub for content, data, people, and budgets allows marketers to share information seamlessly and eliminates time wasted when collaborating across multiple systems and creates a more streamlined global process.
3) Marketing agility. Automating agile marketing will alleviate confusion on task ownership, prioritization, and give you clear visibility into tasks, projects, and schedules. Workflows today should be efficient, optimized, flexible, and intelligent. 
4) Visibility and alignment. Marketing leaders need to close the gap to have better visibility into marketing groups’ activities and to make connections between channels, regions, and business goals.
5) Empowered marketing culture. Once you shift the control back to marketing through the use of technology you are poised to reach peak productivity. You know what to work on, you have the time in your day to give it your best, and you know how the project fits into the overall strategy.

Forrester predicts that marketing technology budgets will “grow by double digits” in 2018 as brands deploy consumer experience technology designed to cozy up to current and prospective users.

If brands don’t take this step, digitally adept firms like Amazon and Apple will continue to serve as gatekeepers between brands and audiences, providing the connectivity, stimulation and emotional experience that customers crave.

Forward-thinking CMOs who “blend tech savviness, an insights-driven mindset and deep emotional empathy with their consumers” will turn their brands into platforms, according to a report released today. They will become obsessed with understanding consumer emotion, measuring it and tapping into it with precision.

In a related trend, more brands will fold the responsibilities of CMOs into the newly created role of chief growth officer: an executive who can blend marketing and tech to drive growth.

“Doing marketing” refers to the execution of marketing. This includes all those tactics related to attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers, areas like email, social, content, events, advertising, and much more.

But the other job marketers have is strategy, otherwise known as “running marketing,” which covers everything going on behind the scenes to make marketing tick. It’s managing budgets and having visibility into where the team is investing, understanding what results those investments have delivered, and most importantly, earning confidence to know what to do next.

To Run Marketing means to optimize its impact on the business, a core tenet of Marketing Performance Management.

It's not only that the Marketing Ops of Best in Class (BIC) organization have more responsibilities, there is a wide performance gap, greater than 40%, in five areas. The Marketing Ops of the BIC are considerably better at (in order of greatest gap):

Strategic Planning
Campaign Analysis and Reporting
Analytics and Predictive Modeling
Benchmarking
MPM Measurement and Reporting

"No matter what size company you are, no matter what industry you are in, the role of marketing is forever changed because of new level of marketing accountability, the age of the digital customer and the pervasive set of new marketing technologies.  Let me leave you with 5 key take-aways.

• MOGs will continue to grow as a distinctive and strategic organizational capability. Get on board or get out of the way . MOGS is here to stay.
• MOGs will serve as a key integrator for sales and marketing. The collaborative role of integrating process and technology will enable an improved working relationship.
• MOGs will be a catalyst for change. Nothing changes an organization like technology. And, when that change happens along with a business orientation, it’s all positive change.
• MOGs will enable marketing to act more like data scientists. Marketing will begin to incorporate more left-brained thinking using data and in the process, run marketing like a revenue center , not a cost center.
• MOGs will allow marketing to become THE expert on the customer through the collection and analysis of online digital behavior. MOGs has access to invaluable data about client behavior, 24 x 7. Analyzing this data creates an up-to-the minute understanding of customer needs and responses."

As mentioned previously, we are severely lacking in professional education, accreditation and skills development. Thus, the sources for professional development are very limited. What do we have? MarTech, Sirius Decisions Summit, a few analyst and vendor events. None truly focused on the holistic practice of MO.

So how are pros getting trained on MO? Well, just like a dozen years ago, MarTech companies are providing most of it. They need to be masters of MO to drink their “own champagne” so this makes sense. However, those technologists who have been around awhile are the first to admit that their ability to train customers beyond the capabilities and requirements of their tech is limited — and compounded by both escalating technology feature complexity and growing marketing function scope. Not surprisingly, this ever-growing gap is jeopardizing their customer success delivery.

Many organizations are struggling to optimize their staffing and skills to compete in a rapidly changing marketing world. What worked yesterday in marketing and technology may not work today – or tomorrow. With the rapid infusion of technology into the marketing organization, tensions between marketing and IT are inevitable.  

How do you structure marketing to manage martech? What skills do you look for….or even need? How do you foster collaboration across groups in this new environment? Who’s in charge? Who should be?

Join our panel of martech experts as they explore the challenges facing CMOs looking to transform their marketing organization. They’ll discuss emerging best practices and the pros and cons of different management structures. You’ll also gain insights into how they manage and run their own companies.

Attend this webinar and learn:

Best practices for organizing around function, channel, customer segment or lifecycle stage.
How to break down traditional marketing silos through re-organization.
How CMOs can successfully adapt the organization to changes from martech.

• Get involved with planning – Strategy is not an afterthought or something you can jump into midway. Ops needs to be involved with every aspect of growth strategy – from defining goals and developing execution plans to analyzing results and making recommendations to improve outcomes. 
• Build alliances across the organization – Marketing ops leaders need to work closely with Sales Ops, Customer Success, Finance, IT, etc. 
• Play a role in budget development – Be sure to get involved with budget planning. Start research now for the tools you’d like to implement next year. If adding a new person to the team would take a lot of “Make It Happen” work off your plate so you can focus more on “Make It Matter” strategy, build the business case and include the new addition in your budget recommendations.

"There are 6 key roles for Marketing Ops function among the value creators (in priority order):

• Customer, market, competitive intelligence, research, and insights
• Analytics and predictive modeling
• Data management
• Campaign analysis and reporting
• Budgeting and planning; financial governance and reporting
• Organization benchmarking and assessments

Five Guidelines for Improving Your Marketing Operations

• Use SMART. Work from specific, realistic, measurable objectives that are written down. It it’s not written down, it’s not there. Have a plan, work your plan.
• Target. Precisely identify your highest potential market segments. Establish key opportunity and accessibility criteria so you can compare market segments on an apples-to-apples basis.
• Customer-Centric: Map your potential customers buying and journey process.You should be able to identify the sequence of decisions a typical prospect goes through to decide whether to buy your product or service. 
• Focus on Value. Best-in-Class marketers are value creators. Move away from being a service provider and momentum for serving as a value creator.  Track and report on how long it takes and how much it costs to create a customer.
• Manage Performance. Develop an actionable dashboard of marketing measures that are tied to your managements’ expectations about marketing.  Ensure marketing is aligned with the company’s business outcomes and strategies. "

78% of US marketers and 63% of European marketers accept that marketing tech is a critical skill in the success of senior marketers and it is a powerful tool in managing and delivering marketing operations processes. Marketing operations is the connective tissue that allows your strategy and technology to come together and stay together. The fragmentation that can come from using separate technologies is brought together in an organisation’s streamlined marketing stack, allowing for data to be pooled and used intelligently going forward.

Marketing operations is about uniting the systems and processes within a business, removing silos and replacing them with a single cohesive unit. Operations manage the processes and run the automated systems which ensure the leads you need are generated and the level of analytic research beforehand ensures a higher volume of qualified leads too. Data is handled and stored effectively so it can be used in a smart and proactive way.

The incorporation of cloud technology into both your marketing stack and as a general standard for your company will have a significant impact on the real-time availability of data, and the level of flexibility you can offer your marketing team as they work to deliver results with the support of your chosen tech.

Here’s a list of source information you may already have that can help you get started collecting what you need to create your plan:
Technical Architecture

• Information Security and Privacy
• User Security and Access Management
• Web Service, ETL, and other Integration Technologies
• Network Topology
• Data Integrity and Latency
• Error Monitoring and Recovery
• System Availability and Response Times

Business Information and Analytics

• Data Strategy—generation and use of data across and between systems
• Master Data Definitions—Customer, Product, Location, Revenue, etc.
• Core APIs and Services
• Analytic Data Stores

Customer Experience

• Definition of a customer and the customer lifecycle
• UI Standards and Brand Personality
• Preference Management and Application
• Relationship Messaging
• Analytics—Imputed Preferences and Predictive Models
• Personalization Guidelines

Which of the following is most essential for Marketing Ops pros to master: business strategy, data and analytics or technology?

Data and analytics. There are plenty of people who know about business strategy, although it’s certainly important that marketing ops people understand marketing strategy so they can be sure to execute programs that are consistent with it.  Technology itself should be handled by IT, martech staff, or vendors; in most cases, the details of technology aren’t something that marketing ops needs to understand to do their jobs. But there’s no one else who will pay close attention to data, and often data knowledge is a key to successful analytics as well. Much of the time in analytical work is spent on data prep and knowing how to do that requires intimate familiarity with the source materials.