Marketing Operations in the Silicon Valley: Addressing CMO Challenges

By Adrian Carol Ott

CMOs of large Silicon Valley companies are confronted with significant challenges including:

• Globalization: Synchonizing messaging and market activity across continents.

• ROI: Faced with a maturing technology industry, CEO's are demanding greater ROI on their marketing invesments.

• New Marketing Technology: The advent of new technologies has enabled unprecedented interactive dialogs with customers. New technologies must be implemented.

• Stakeholder Agreement: Coordination with regional marketing groups, and stakeholders in product business units and sales constitutes a major task.

Marketing Operations Emerges

As a result of these demands and others, many Silicon Valley CMOs have commissioned a marketing operations organization to tackle these challenges. Originally designated to create metrics and dashboards for accountability, leading companies are increasingly treating marketing operations as a key foundation to the marketing function.

"Marketing operations ensures marketing is run as a business," states a VP of Marketing Operations at a major Silicon Valley firm, "We strive to enable the marketing organization to be streamlined in day-to-day processes so they have time to think, focus on the customer and to innovate."(1)

In many business-to-business focused firms in the Silicon Valley, marketing operations is combined with the sales operation function to promote integration of the two groups. Although organizationally integrated, the purpose of marketing operations as we will describe in this article remains the same.

Introducing the 5Ts of Marketing Operations™

Based on our work with clients, and in our research, we have found that marketing operations is an emerging dimension to the marketing mix. Enabled by new processes and technology, it goes beyond the 4Ps (i.e. Product, Price, Place, Promotion), and 3Cs (i.e. Customers, Competitors, Corporation (2)), to fully round out the marketing mix. The 5Ts of Marketing Operations™ are:

• Total Strategy
• Techniques & Processes
• Tracking & Predictive Modeling
• Technology
• Talent

By approaching marketing operations across these dimensions, CMOs have an integrated approach to enable marketing worldwide. Let’s describe the 5Ts in more detail:

Total Strategy: This area involves strategy development in the product portfolio. It is not uncommon for large high-tech companies to have seventy-five or more products in their portfolios, some have hundreds. Managing investments and priorities across the portfolio is paramount.

Techniques & Processes: How should information flow most effectively across the marketing organization worldwide? How do we make decisions? What are our governance processes? What is our roadmap for marketing processes next year? in 3 years?

Tracking and Predictive Modeling: How do we make marketing more accountable? How do we measure campaigns and ensure better predictability of outcomes?

Technology: How do we implement technology across the globe to enable effective customer dialog, demand generation and measurement? What are the business requirements for IT? How does technology support the marketing and sales process roadmap for the next 3 years?

Talent: How do we ensure our marketing personnel are trained and enabled to work with new marketing technologies and processes? How can we enable them to make the right decisions based on analytics and campaign scorecards?

The Future of Marketing and the 5Ts

The 5Ts have a deep and significant impact on customer relationships. For example, by implementing integrated technology for demand generation and customer database access, regional marketing personnel can now build innovative campaigns on top of a marketing operations infrastructure. By tracking the success of a campaign, companies will realize better customer targeting and ROI; they learn from prior successes and failures.

The 5Ts add a critical foundation to the marketing function enabling marketing operations to support Silicon Valley CMOs to tackling contemporary challenges and to integrate with sales operations. It is dramatically transforming the marketing function and is changing how marketing will be conducted in the future.

© 2007 Exponential Edge Inc., All Rights Reserved


The Author: Adrian Carol Ott is CEO of Exponential Edge Inc, http://www.exponentialedge.com/ a strategy consultancy that assists global corporations to grow and innovate through market assessment, go-to-market planning, and strategic partnering. She also serves as Chair of the Harvard Business School N. California Alumni Marketing and Sales Roundtable. The Roundtable is a forum that explores issues and trends faced by senior executives in the Silicon Valley and Bay Area Business Community.

(1) HBS N. CA Marketing & Sales Roundtable, "Marketing Operations: How It Will Transform Marketing Forever", Panel Discussion with VP's of Marketing Operations from Symantec, Cisco, BEA, and a consumer packaged goods expert, June 20, 2006
(2) It is recognized that the 3Cs have been used in other forms and described in different ways. For example, we have heard "Communication" used as a "C". Our description is what appears to be most consistent in literature based on the author's research. Other forms could be substituted for the 3C's and have the same effect. The goal is to avoid debate on this element in this article as it would take it away from the central topic.

Integration? Strategy? Let's Face It: Marketing Needs a New MO

We salivate over the promise and vision of Integrated Marketing yet few of us truly understand it and even establishing a common definition is a struggle.

We long for a seat at the decision-making table yet, in many organizations, Marketing has evolved into a low-stature mouthpiece and "cost center" that contributes little to the enterprise strategy and is treated as a necessary evil.

Our power is further usurped as increasingly more organizations turn over responsibility for vital functions that were once the domain of Marketing to other departments: product management, the sales pipeline, customer experience management.

Many of us are working in Marketing departments that spend most of the time fighting fires and kissing up to CEOs, for fear that our corporate survival depends on such compliant behavior.

We've often settled for reactive, chaotic, dysfunctional work environments where we operate more like order takers at McDonalds and company mouthpieces (spin doctors) than real change facilitators and difference-makers in our organizations.

How many of us are really happy in our positions today, spending precious little time on strategy and customer-facing activates, operating with few resources and facing expectations that are growing geometrically?

Let's face it: If we want to realize the vision of Integrated Marketing and Strategic Marketing, of a more collaborative and enjoyable work environment, of more stature and influence in our organizations, we need to let go of the old. Marketing needs a new MO.

And we have that new MO right in front of us, if we're not afraid to embrace it. It's called Marketing Operations.

Admired technology companies (like Adobe, Symantec and Seagate) are leveraging Marketing Operations to improve performance and demonstrate Return on Marketing as they refine their Marketing organizations using an operational focus.

Marketing Operations is an emerging discipline that increases efficiency and drives consistent results in complex Marketing organizations. It builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing Marketing strategy with processes, technology, guidance and metrics. It creates both the infrastructure and ecosystem for individuals and teams to make informed decisions about Marketing mix investment, gain committed buy-in from stakeholders both inside and outside Marketing, collaborate synergistically across functions, optimize resources, and operate with discipline and accountability.

Organizations that embrace Marketing Operations are being viewed throughout the enterprise as profit (not cost) centers and fully accountable businesses. Marketing executives with the foresight to build a Marketing Operations function in their organizations are blessed with an operational partner, similar to the COO/CEO relationship. Directors and managers gain an invaluable resource to help them get the most out of their Marketing programs, make course corrections and learn from their experience. Even the most inexperienced professionals gain by being part of a learning-oriented environment where they develop fundamental skills to operate effectively, stay accountable, and benefit from Marketing Operations-driven improvement programs, such as new competency development.

Marketing Operations is all about a new MO for Marketing. In fact, it’s fair to say that the abbreviation for Marketing Operations (MO) is an apt descriptor of its potential impact in organizations. Marketing Operations is poised to literally change the modus operandi (MO) of Marketing.

And a new MO for Marketing in organizations is great news for all of us. We won’t be such an easy target come budget cut time. The average CMO tenure won’t continue to drop to embarrassing levels (less than 23 months at last count). Employees won’t be so motivated to jump ship, taking their valuable, but siloed, institutional knowledge with them.

So whether you’re a Marketing executive, middle manager or early-career specialist, it’s definitely in your best interest to become a passionate advocate of Marketing Operations.

Embracing Marketing Operations is a win-win for everyone, but bringing its benefits into your Marketing function is an evolutionary process. MO is both a serious commitment and a great opportunity. Like all change initiatives, it requires careful and comprehensive thought and exacting implementation. Key players in Marketing and other cross-functional organizations, such as sales and product development, need to be invited into the process early on and need to stay involved to achieve stakeholder ownership and buy-in.

The effort, however, yields impressive rewards. Marketing Operations has the power to re-position and re-energize a company’s Marketing function, moving it past stubborn barriers to unprecedented levels of performance and success. MO creates the type of Marketing organization where individuals and teams are empowered to do their best work and a culture of accountability leads to better results. This in turn raises the stature of Marketing in enterprise.

Leveraging the discipline and rewards of an MO approach places Marketing in the perfect position to influence strategic decisions and help increase corporate revenue, decrease costs, and sustain high levels of customer and employee satisfaction. Bottom line, embracing MO should be a no-brainer for every Marketing professional, from the most senior Marketing executive to the new junior staffer. If your organization has not yet embraced MO, you have the opportunity to seize leadership, increasing your value to your organization. If your organization is already leveraging MO, you can work to ensure its continued success. Either way, Marketing Operations enables you to help yourself.