Month: January 2024

TL;DR: Sales Ops (SOPs) and Marketing Ops (MOPs) teams often work in silos with overlapping skill sets but lack clarity and cohesion in their processes and tools. To bridge gaps and align their efforts, businesses need to focus on initiatives like tech stack mapping, establishing common definitions, and promoting continuous communication between these teams.

The disconnect between SOPs and MOPs: Sales Ops and Marketing Ops teams share comparable skill sets, but they often lack clarity into each others’ tools, processes, and perspectives. Businesses tend to separate Sales and Marketing expertise into distinct role profiles—even when they’re both mutually accountable to a VP of Revenue or CRO under RevOps, formal team structure doesn’t always accurately reflect the level of insight that Sales Ops and Marketing Ops people share into one another’s work.

The problem with most handovers: Wherever there’s a handover between Sales and Marketing, SOPs and MOPs will impact each other through how they approach technology at a strategic level and how they use systems on a procedural basis. So when interaction and understanding between these teams are limited, leaders run a high risk of infrastructure that breaks, numbers that don’t add up, and decisions that can’t reliably create revenue.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to leadership how disconnection between SOPs and MOPs manifests in each others’ tech stacks, the impact that arises, and how to improve cohesiveness between the two teams. You’ll learn:

➡️ Common causes for SOPs and MOPs disconnect

➡️ Consequences of poor handover practices

➡️ Strategies for bridging gaps between SOPs and MOPs

 

Stacks in siloes

Sales and Marketing complement each other in their shared aim of generating revenue. Naturally, the choices that SOPs and MOPs make with their tech stacks and process structures have downstream impacts on the other team.

For example: SOPs uses a data enrichment tool to add external information to lead records. Based on this data, Marketing creates nurture campaigns to target particular segments of your audience.

What if MOPs also uses a data enrichment tool for the same purpose?

At best, it’s redundant—bloated costs of tool ownership and increased overhead. The tools that SOPs and MOPs have chosen could require a configuration or have some interaction with other solutions that disrupt how their counterparts work.

 

Sales and Marketing bring different findings to the table.

 

Data integrity’s also a significant issue. Each tool might populate data categories uniquely (e.g. country codes vs. names) or produce inconsistent information (e.g. different job titles for the same person). And if SOPs and MOPs each refer to a separate database, they lack a source of truth to confirm the veracity of the data.

With inconsistent data structures and terminology definitions, SOPs and MOPs run into trouble. Data doesn’t flow between the teams as it should, nor is it conducive to the kind of analysis and reporting that guides better decisions.

The likely outcome: Sales and Marketing bring different findings to the table. People become defensive about their data and processes, yet no one can make a confident call about which customer segments to prioritize or what your revenue projections are for the next quarter—because you can’t trust the numbers.

 

Bridging the gaps

To get tools, data, and processes in sync, SOPs and MOPs need to work from the same knowledge base, with open communication about how things work and what they mean. Here are some initiatives your leaders should encourage to achieve this:

• Tech stack mapping: Create a visual representation of how all the tools your business uses fit together. You want to convey how all the pieces in your stack interact with others, what functions they perform, and who uses them to do what. This likely means speaking to people in different teams around the company to get their perspectives. You’ll gain a resource that exposes any redundant or problematic pieces and spells out what tools are available to fulfill different needs. This lets your SOPs and MOPs teams cut costs and consolidate their stacks.

• Common definitions: Bring SOPs and MOPs together to define and document how they’ll categorize fields, what different data points and common acronyms mean, and what constitutes a lead qualification. These definitions can evolve over time and the lines blur further when doing business with external partners who have their own interpretations, so collaborating on a definition list keeps both teams clear. Similarly, a central repository of data which SOPs and MOPs use for reporting will provide a consistent basis for data analysis.

• Continuous communication: Encourage people in Sales and Marketing to build relationships with their counterparts. Culturally, people should feel comfortable proactively reaching out to others at the onset of projects to clarify accountabilities, share knowledge, and offer strategic input.

Sales and Marketing can be great individually, but when misaligned, the cracks will show to customers. Bringing SOPs and MOPs together encourages clean data, purposeful use of technology, clear communication, and consistent processes—essential to spend wisely, collaborate well, and take strategic decisions with the confidence and insight to drive your business forward.
Get in touch for more guidance on aligning Sales and Marketing.

TLDR: An agency-side project manager (PM) bridges the gaps between your organization and agency partners throughout a project. A PM ensures you’re on track to deliver the project on time, within budget and scope. During a project, an agency PM will help your organization plan deliverables and timelines, follow coherent processes, communicate effectively between teams, troubleshoot issues, and monitor and mitigate risks to the things you want to achieve.

Which projects benefit from project management? Projects like marketing automation platform (MAP) implementations and migrations are often heavy to plan and coordinate. Migrations and implementations involve bringing many different stakeholders together throughout the project to share updates, deliverables, and decisions against agreed timelines and scope—a particularly complex task in larger organizations.

How PMs help: It’s easy to underestimate the demands of aligning communications and actions between various accountable stakeholders in an agency-client relationship. As a result, organizations may decide not to involve an agency’s PM to steer the progress of a project. This decision adds a high level of risk for big projects like migration or implementation.

 

“Having an agency-side PM is essential to keep your internal teams and agency partners on the same page.”

 

Do you need an agency PM? Even if your organization has an internal PM assigned to the project, having an agency-side PM is essential to keep your internal teams and agency partners on the same page.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you navigate the intricate space of project management, particularly in the context of complicated projects. You’ll learn how:

➡️ To effectively communicate the value of agency-side project management to key stakeholders and decision-makers across departments.

➡️ PMs drive collaboration, alignment and risk mitigation.

➡️ PMs bridge the gap between your organization and the agency, ensuring timely input, decisions, and updates to prevent project delays.

 

The PM’s value 

At a high level, PMs ensure that your team and the agency are working towards the same goals to deliver a project on time and within the budget and scope.

PMs accomplish this by:

👉 Planning and setting up meetings between teams.

👉 Coordinating the delivery of action items.

👉 Raising awareness of risks and causes for delay.

👉 Pushing stakeholders to make timely decisions to keep the project moving as planned.

 

“Stakeholder alignment is the key area where PMs make a constructive impact.”

 

Stakeholder alignment is the key area where PMs make a constructive impact.

Migrations and implementations involve many different tasks and decisions. These projects also involve various teams in your organization — such as Marketing, Sales, IT, and Digital — each has responsibilities and decision-making power.

PMs track when input and decisions need to be received and connect these teams to provide timely and relevant updates. Without an agency-side PM to play this role, deliverables, and decisions can slip under the radar and delay project completion.

 

How PMs work

Involving a PM right from the beginning of a project maximizes your ability to succeed.

During the initial kickoff session, PMs create the spine of a project by constructing a plan for deliverables, responsibilities, and timelines. A clear understanding of these pieces is essential for stakeholders to deliver and communicate as needed to progress the project.

 

“PMs bridge the gaps between your organization and the agency throughout the project.”

 

PMs bridge the gaps between your organization and the agency throughout the project:

Agency-side PM responsibilities include:

• Ensuring that the agency has captured all the relevant discoveries.
• Establishing who from your organization is required to participate.
• Following up with stakeholders to ensure that input and decisions follow the agreed timelines.
• Helping to identify, mitigate, and monitor delivery risks.

Through mediation, agency PMs help you achieve success.

Stakeholders from your workplace can go to the agency PM to discuss and address feedback on the project’s progression.

Should a colleague raise concerns about the project or develop new requirements, PMs work with agency teams to find solutions.

An agency-side PM will ask questions like:

• Is your organization’s request in scope?
• How can we make this work?
• What impact will any changes have?
• How can we address any risks?

Having a PM to ask these questions lets teams get organized, make improvements on the move, and solve potential issues as they arise.

 

Alleviating project management challenges

PMs experience some persistent challenges when project managing MAP migrations and implementations.

Timelines are often compromised when organizations lack the resources to participate and provide input as planned or juggle competing projects (e.g. a web launch) that are likely to interfere with the process.

 

“PMs proactively work to anticipate and minimize risks to project delivery.”

 

Unclear ownership of tasks and scope creep born from underestimating complexity can also cause disruption and delay. In these scenarios, PMs proactively work to anticipate and minimize risks to project delivery.

For example, an agency PM can help your organization involve the most relevant stakeholders and sensibly delegate tasks and responsibilities. PMs can also factor competing projects into the initial plan and continuously monitor the risk of interference.

Tips for working with an agency PM:

👉 Scope creep: Avoid strain from scope creep by taking time before the project begins to review the steps involved and decide where your organization needs the most support from the agency.

👉 Project delivery: Define clear goals and priorities to help the PM organize stakeholders and deliver the most pressing items and achievements.

👉 Identify stakeholders early: Identify the people within your organization who need to be involved and establish ownership and accountabilities for the project.

 

Steering projects to success

MAP migrations and implementations are complex undertakings, and the agency PM plays an indispensable role in guiding them to success.

From the start to the end of a project, agency PMs contribute effective planning, process management, risk mitigation, troubleshooting, and alignment between your teams and the agency to deliver results on time, within scope, and within budget.

For any further guidance with MAP migrations and implementations, Revenue Pulse is here to help.