With host Darrell Alfonso
Amy Beaudoin (0:07): Hello and welcome to this session on what’s ahead for marketing ops this year.
Amy Beaudoin (0:10): I’m Amy Beaudoin, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Uptempo.
Amy Beaudoin (0:14): And I’m delighted to have Katie Linford, a Forrester Analyst as a guest speaker to share with us her five trends impacting the future of marketing operations before she begins, Katie is absolutely the right person to provide these insights.
Amy Beaudoin (0:27): As she has over 18 years of marketing technology experience in solutions implementation and operations across multiple industries.
Amy Beaudoin (0:35): She joined Forrester through the acquisition of SiriusDecisions
Amy Beaudoin (0:40): prior to SiriusDecisions, she was a Senior Marketing Technology Leader at Whole Foods Market where she focused on platform management and gained deep experience in technology selection evolution and efficiency and business and technology process in an agile environment.
Amy Beaudoin (0:53): Now over to you, Katie, thanks Amy.
Katie Linford (0:57): We’ve seen the role of marketing operations continually evolved since it started.
Katie Linford (1:02): what was once this somewhat undefined special projects, team of mostly analysts and project managers has really grown into an invaluable strategic resource.
Katie Linford (1:14): And of course, our environments are constantly changing.
Katie Linford (1:18): Our the markets continue to advance and our marketing operations teams need to also change to keep up now.
Katie Linford (1:26): The marketing operations organization is essential for driving and enabling efficiencies and growth potential within the greater marketing function as well as across the revenue engine.
Katie Linford (1:40): And so this leads us to our first trend for 2023 which is that these valuable teams will continue to increase the their size.
Katie Linford (1:50): You know, the function contributes to the organization’s ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience, which is of course, how we attain revenue growth.
Katie Linford (2:01): And you know, marketing operations, as part of this is responsible for marketing planning and process orchestration, feeding insights into the business.
Katie Linford (2:12): aligning the data strategy across the marketing organization and optimizing the March stack in ensuring streamline processes.
Katie Linford (2:22): So many important things and the value that this provides to the overall marketing function has led to an increased investment in these resources.
Katie Linford (2:35): So, in our most recent marketing survey or or 2023 marketing survey, we found that marketing decision makers at high growth enterprise organizations which are companies that have more than 1000 employees and high growth is is 20% or greater annual revenue growth.
Katie Linford (2:56): They were twice as likely to plan on increasing their marketing operations personnel budget in 2023 than those at enterprise organizations with flat to declining growth.
Katie Linford (3:08): So our most successful companies are putting their money into marketing operations.
Katie Linford (3:17): So now let’s get into some of the reasons why, why are they doing it, what is marketing operations doing that’s providing, you know, all this great value first or I should say second here on this list.
Katie Linford (3:28): But one of the first things they do is drive be a driver for the investments that deliver insights.
Katie Linford (3:38): So it’s, it’s it’s not enough to for to be data driven anymore.
Katie Linford (3:44): Marketing operations professionals have to be able to take the data, interpret it and turn it into actions that they can communicate.
Katie Linford (3:54): And according to what the data shows now, these insights driven, marketing operations professionals really are change agents.
Katie Linford (4:04): They’re being bold, they’re, they’re taking risks and they’re recommending that things be measured differently, done, done differently than we’ve done them before even suggesting like reconsidering some of our marketing goals now to do this.
Katie Linford (4:19): Well, these marketing ops professionals need to have competencies like knowledge of the data sources, effectively communicating.
Katie Linford (4:31): and you know, data and the necessary actions based on that data.
Katie Linford (4:36): and things like modeling predictions for what might happen next.
Katie Linford (4:41): And this year, we’re seeing more and more of our B2B marketing leaders really dive into this in terms of customer health.
Katie Linford (4:50): So they’re looking to formalize relationships that will implement joint planning processes and, and shared objectives with post sale customer success teams.
Katie Linford (5:02): And we’ve, we’ve seen this be successful.
Katie Linford (5:04): We’ve seen this work in an integrated health management solutions company.
Katie Linford (5:10): They were looking for a repeatable, reliable digital mechanism to deliver what we all want.
Katie Linford (5:18): A seamless shared real time view of information and the insights for each customer account.
Katie Linford (5:25): And their goal was to drive growth and retention.
Katie Linford (5:28): So they created an internal account health score card and this gave them visibility into the customer’s business footprint, their account plan, overall health score operational insights, things like that.
Katie Linford (5:44): And this cost cross functional team, you know, used this this methodology to build and iterate on the scorecard and to drive adoption with the sales organization.
Katie Linford (5:59): And what they saw was they were able to address 80% of the account data gaps within 90 days.
Katie Linford (6:09): And they were able to find an additional cross sell and Upsell opportunities of up to 15 to 10% of their customer database.
Katie Linford (6:18): They great numbers and again, more numbers showing that we know that this works.
Katie Linford (6:25): advanced insights driven organizations which are organizations that specifically go out and, and strive to create tangible revenue results based on a data insights based on that strong data foundation.
Katie Linford (6:44): They are more than 2.2 times likely to drive double digit revenue growth.
Katie Linford (6:53): Next marketing operations is going to renew their emphasis on planning.
Katie Linford (6:59): So we, we still see some marketing operations functions that play a more administrative back of office role, primarily supporting demand ops.
Katie Linford (7:12): But we’re also seeing a lot more of these marketing operations team play a greater role in, in strategy and in orchestrating planning processes.
Katie Linford (7:24): And in a recent revenue operations and buying group survey marketing and campaign planning process facilitation where the top two areas where marketing operations were spending most of their time to the most critical areas.
Katie Linford (7:43): So our B2B practitioners, they work in a complex somewhat sometimes messy world of tactics and vehicles and channels and, and programs.
Katie Linford (7:58): In this survey are the practitioners reported varying levels of success in the effective use of 20 different demand marketing channels across, you know, four stages of the customer life cycle.
Katie Linford (8:12): And this is an area where planning can have an impact.
Katie Linford (8:18): In an interview with an enterprise CMO they said just about every marketing tactic is a good idea, but that doesn’t mean every marketing tactic is the best idea.
Katie Linford (8:29): They went on to say a solid marketing plan cuts down on random acts of good marketing by directing spend and energy to the activities that promise the highest ROI.
Katie Linford (8:41): Now, as an example of this, a global software company needed to enhance its end to end strategic planning process and consider, you know, it’s really its own level of readiness to grow against what it had determined as its primary growth strategy.
Katie Linford (8:59): And so they went in deep assessed, you know what this growth strategy would mean, how it would it convert into marketing plans and made sure that the planning processes and plans were revamped accordingly.
Katie Linford (9:14): And by going through this process of assessing their readiness and then really focusing next on type planning, they were able to make it, they, they got immediate value, they were able to make decisions faster and align to common goals.
Katie Linford (9:31): They, they could much more quickly validate assumptions, which allowed them to act more quickly, which allowed them to, you know, address their revenue in a more timely manner.
Katie Linford (9:45): All right, our fourth trend for 2023 marketing ops will leverage greater control of the March stack.
Katie Linford (9:53): So that I mean, we’ve got rapidly changing business needs, aggressive growth targets.
Katie Linford (9:59): You know, the increasing digitalization of the customer life cycle, increasing demands for customer experience.
Katie Linford (10:06): There are so many things that are impacting this drive for the marketing leaders to seek a greater control of and greater investment in and related to their tech stack.
Katie Linford (10:22): However, we do still see a lot of marketing functions that lack strategic management of their tech stack and their tech environment and a lot of them are left with these overly complex, unstructured, underutilized and thusly overinvested tech stack, which of course negatively impacts their ability to produce consistent value for their customers, for their organization, for the employees, has a great impact on morale and the way that work gets done.
Katie Linford (10:58): So our marketing operations can really have a great impact here is that they are in a unique position to have a strong but also unbiased understanding of both what the stakeholder needs are as well as what the technical capabilities are.
Katie Linford (11:20): And, and the ways of working within the organization.
Katie Linford (11:23): So they are in a position and you know, have the skill sets to look across the stakeholder requests of the goals, look across the environment, the capabilities and to uncover ways of optimizing and streamlining the tech to drive you know, to drive a greater experience to meet more of these goals and objectives.
Katie Linford (11:53): And to, you know, be more efficient in how they’re using the tech and, and where it’s being applied.
Katie Linford (12:00): So, an example here is there was a global Business Intelligence company that set out to simplify their tech infrastructure.
Katie Linford (12:09): It was, it was large.
Katie Linford (12:13): And they wanted to remove redundant and duplicate systems and really streamline how they were going to go to market and the tech that they would use to do that.
Katie Linford (12:23): So they, you know, they followed our best practices.
Katie Linford (12:28): They, they diagrammed their typical customer journey, looked at what their audience behaviors were, determined what it is that they needed, where they had tech investments that were, that were helping in meeting those goals and then where they had gaps and of course, where they had duplication.
Katie Linford (12:48): Then after going through this exercise, they saw their, the digital programs impacted about half of this overall contribution and the cost there.
Katie Linford (13:01): excuse me, the cost per lead, there was reduced by 80%.
Katie Linford (13:08): And they also saw a tenfold increase in sourced pipeline from consolidating chat technologies and process re reengineering on the company website.
Katie Linford (13:18): So some big things and then you know, smaller things like too many chat, too many chat text that made such a a big difference for them.
Katie Linford (13:29): Now, You may be thinking that sounds great, but environments are tense right now, you know, we’re not sure what’s going on.
Katie Linford (13:40): You know, how is this gonna impact our tech spend?
Katie Linford (13:42): We, we’ve been tracking Martech spend for several years now.
Katie Linford (13:47): And of course, with, you know, the big push into digital transformation in the past the past few years, you know, we, we saw tech spending, you know, go up even more steadily and increase a little bit more.
Katie Linford (14:01): And in 2021 you know, in our marketing survey, we, we heard that two thirds of B2B marketing decision makers were planning on increasing their, their spend in tech.
Katie Linford (14:14): And despite current conditions and despite everything that’s going on in 2023 we have 66% or two thirds of our marketing decision makers that are planning to increase their investment in tech and only 10% that are planning on decrease.
Katie Linford (14:31): So this really is a critical area for us to focus on and invest in to enable the experience that we need to drive revenue growth.
Katie Linford (14:42): And finally, marketing operations is going to play a central role in driving internal alignment.
Katie Linford (14:49): And we know that alignment makes everything better.
Katie Linford (14:54): us enterprise decision makers with high levels of alignment across customer facing functions like marketing and customer experience.
Katie Linford (15:05): reported 2.4 times higher revenue growth and two times higher profitability, profitability growth than companies with no alignment.
Katie Linford (15:16): And the re the role that marketing operations plays here goes back to what we were talking about with the tech stack, about the unique position that marketing is in to see across stakeholder groups across capabilities across the marketing organization syncing with operations, teams from other groups, sales ops, customer ops marketing operations is really prime positioned to be the driver for this alignment.
Katie Linford (15:49): And again, we have, we have seen this be successful, we’ve seen marketing come in and drive drive resolution conflicting needs of finding where there are gaps and, and getting everybody focused on the same thing.
Katie Linford (16:06): Now in a global security solutions company, they wanted to accelerate their revenue growth as they transitioned from SAS or excuse me from on cloud toss.
Katie Linford (16:17): Not a small thing.
Katie Linford (16:18): They needed to make sure that everybody was focused on what the change was and what it meant to them.
Katie Linford (16:25): And so they went through an exercise to get everybody pointed in the same direction focused on where they had inconsistencies and inefficiencies and optimized really across the revenue engine.
Katie Linford (16:41): And this alignment led to a 30% increase in opportunity generation and they were able to achieve forecast accuracy of plus or minus 5% the more great numbers.
Katie Linford (16:59): We know that this is important, right?
Katie Linford (17:02): Again, from our most recent marketing survey, when we asked what the greatest challenge was, lack of alignment and clarity and our marketing operations teams are here to help with it.
Katie Linford (17:15): When we asked them what their biggest focus was over the next 12 months, it was driving alignment across the revenue engine and are the personnel here the skills here, you know, these operations, strategic minds, they are the perfect resources, the perfect teams to really bring together the alignment for our company.
Katie Linford (17:40): So marketing operations is gonna have a great year in 2023 we’re looking forward to hearing more about all the great ways that marketing operations is gonna impact revenue growth for your company.
Amy Beaudoin (17:56): Thank you for watching and thank you Katie for sharing your interesting insights on what the future holds for marketing operations.
Amy Beaudoin (18:02): We really appreciate your time as you know, the market is in a state of disruption right now.
Amy Beaudoin (18:07): So how can marketing teams keep up with these changes?
Amy Beaudoin (18:10): I’m happy to say that we have a solution, discover how uptempo can transform your marketing operation and accelerate impact by requesting a demo at uptempo.io/demo.
Amy Beaudoin (18:20): Thank you again for watching.