What Is Marketing Operations and What Advantages Does It Offer?
Last month, ON24 ran its Insight50 session on B2B Marketing Operations – Using People, Process, Tech and Data to Maximize Revenue. Each month we offer 50 minutes of expert advice to answer your questions.
Below is just a brief wrap up of insights from Rebecca Le Grange at Sojourn Solutions and Bekkah Lyman at Oracle NetSuite – and of course, you the viewers! If you didn’t manage to see it, view it on-demand here.
About half of the attendees to this Insight50 webinar said that marketing operations is delivering almost all of their marketing team’s value right now. But, at the same time, another portion of attendees report being at the other end of the spectrum, not even knowing what marketing operations is.
So, how does marketing ops benefit marketing and the business at large? Here are just a few insights our panelists shared for the benefit of those in the dark.
What Is Marketing Operations?
There are individuals who may come from a traditional B2B marketing background where the use of tech and data isn’t as prevalent. As such, they may be uncertain about what role marketing ops plays. Rebecca helps to define what marketing operations does and its importance to the company as a whole:
“Ultimately, marketing operations has the responsibility of taking a look at the overall marketing strategy and then looking at what does the organization have in place around the way it uses its team, the way those teams are structured, the way the processes are defined. Not only within marketing, but between marketing and sales and potentially other departments within the business and then how the martech is utilized to support all of that…The other consideration is this is the team that has access to data and understands the holistic strategy. They have this unique position within marketing to be able to ask some really tough questions. Are we being truly accountable for the budgets that we’ve been given and are we using them in the smartest way?”
Additionally, Bekkah equates marketing ops to Batman’s computer in order to help understand what marketing operations do and their importance to the overall team:
“We are the computer that has all the information, all the details. We have insights into the data, we have insights into the technology, we have insights into the process and the strategic alignment from the business. And, if you think about it, Batman’s computer is always on, it always has the answer and it’s able to give it back to them in relatively quick order, providing an answer that is digestible to whoever’s reading it.”
What are the Advantages?
Having a team that asks difficult questions and is also able to provide answers has definite benefits. Rebecca believes that marketing ops helps marketing be more efficient and effective:
“It’s about how is marketing using all of those resources that it has at hand as wisely as possible, in alignment with the overall marketing strategy and to drive ROI… [It helps to answer] how we can use all of those resources and in the best way.”
Part of driving ROI is making sure sales has the leads they need to do their part in the overall process. Bekkah emphasizes the role marketing ops plays in this process:
“A marketing operations organization is supposed to make sure that leads are constantly flowing and are going to the sales reps, and ensuring that they have activities to act upon in a concise and clear manner. We can do that by leveraging multiple technologies. We can also ensure that our sales team provides us with feedback as to how those leads are performing. Then we can identify ways to improve our data collection or the facilitation of that data over to them.”
Hear more on our Insight50 session
The quotes above are just a small sample of what was discussed and answered on this Insight50 session. Make sure to register to watch on-demand and find out more about what was shared.