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TLDR: Aligning sales and marketing teams is critical to achieving a better balance of lead quality and quantity. By fostering collaboration, creating shared definitions and workflows, and analyzing first-party data, sales and marketing can work together towards common goals and make data-driven decisions. By taking these steps, organizations can improve collaboration, work with a clearer sense of purpose, and ultimately win and keep more business.

Sales and marketing want the same thing: Great leads that quickly turn into revenue.

Achieving the right balance of quality and quantity is a continual challenge. Even with a perfect ICP and stellar demand funnel, prospects ditch demos, opportunities fail to close, and customers churn.

What often happens when KPIs are missed? We typically see finger-pointing, defensive postures, blame games, knee-jerk reactions, and other behaviors that simply don’t benefit the organization.

Instead of declaring your teammate is underperforming, look at the data and the levers available to pull. Conjecture is not a reliable strategy for creating revenue. Double down on data and alignment to avoid the perils of blame and divisiveness.

 

“Conjecture is not a reliable strategy for creating revenue.”

 

If friction and missed KPIs are common in your company, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. You’ll learn how to get your demand gen back on track by fostering better sales and marketing alignment and implementing a strategy driven by meaningful data analysis.

 

Coming together

When sales and marketing work in siloes, internal dysfunction creates disjointed customer experiences. Sales can’t close the most suitable business for the company if marketing’s campaigns don’t resonate with the needs of these audiences. Likewise, marketing’s efforts to attract the best leads won’t fuel growth if sales’ outreach lacks personalization.

The North Stars of value and revenue should bring sales and marketing together to collaborate on strategy and goals.

Create shared definitions and workflows

First, both teams need shared definitions of common terms. For instance: what specifically qualifies a lead as an MQL, SAL, or SQL? Sales and marketing should also create an agreed-upon methodology for lead scoring, which involves investigating a few data points.

Based on the kinds of customers you successfully do business with, what budget, authority, and demographic traits suggest that a prospect is highly matched to your company? From past closed business, what behaviors at different stages in the buying cycle suggest they’re ready for sales to pursue?

Both sales and marketing have valuable perspectives and reports to share with each other.

Sales, for example, can tell marketing more about why opportunities have been won or lost, what prospects have felt or wanted, and why past MQLs haven’t matched their needs. And marketing can advise sales on the content types that are likely to appeal to the priority leads they’re targeting.

Share workflows and communication structures

Sales and marketing leaders can incentivize a cultural shift towards alignment by creating shared workflows and communication structures. Establishing SLAs together, for instance, makes sure that both teams understand each others’ accountabilities and the exact work that makes a lead progress through the revenue cycle.

 

“Lead with data-driven decision-making.”

 

Leaders of both teams should create shared KPIs and encourage a clear understanding of how sales and marketing’s individual KPIs contribute towards achieving overarching goals.

Taking these steps contributes to a higher quality of collaboration and understanding between sales and marketing.

At the heart of every good strategy, however, is knowledge of why your campaigns or outreach efforts are valuable to the people you’re targeting—because if that value is limited or unclear, the people you’re targeting may not match well with your business, and are unlikely to be sources of revenue.

To help with this, sales and marketing leaders must lead the way with better data-driven decision-making.

 

Finding trend lines

When sales and marketing leaders meet quarterly, they often bring data points to the table like:

📊business closed in the quarter
📊pipeline for the months ahead, and
📊lead volume.

Dig into first-party data

Less frequently do they dig into their first-party data from a forensic perspective, allowing anecdotal observations about customer trends to guide strategy. This is a significant reason why lead-gen efforts fall flat.

To determine who your ideal customers are, leadership should instead look at the data on your total addressable market for months and years past. Are prospects of particular company sizes, verticals, regions, or job titles more prone to churn or dropping off the funnel than others? Where in the funnel do they go?

From this analysis, you can answer questions such as:

✋Is your lead qualification criteria sufficient?
✋Are your target customer types and markets optimal for your business goals?
✋Do your sales and marketing teams need more training to reach higher-value customers?

Identify demographic and firmographic trends

Identify the demographic and firmographic trends within metrics like closed/lost rates, closed/won, open opportunities, and sales-accepted leads. By doing so, you can make a confident hypothesis about the customer types that are most valuable, sustainable, and receptive to your business.

 

“Steer decision-making away from hunches and towards clear evidence.”

 

This outcome justifies contracting the support of a data scientist to parse through your systems and establish the trend lines, but if your budget’s tight, marketing can lead the way. Even just pulling closed/won rates from your CRM, you can begin to steer decision-making away from hunches and towards clear evidence.

Once you’ve identified the prospect types to pursue as priorities, both sales and marketing should research and share insights on these prospects.

🔍What are the emerging and relevant trends in their industries?
🔍What concerns are likely to motivate them at their level of seniority, region, or company?

From this, you’ll get a greater sense of how to approach your target audience and what you can offer that truly speaks to their needs. This understanding should steer the direction of both marketing’s campaigns and sales’ outreach.

 

The result

When sales and marketing leaders invest in aligning their teams, everyone wins.

Creating communication structures for sales and marketing to share goals, set strategies, and refine approaches together based on first-party data analysis substantially improves how you work.

It leads people to work with a clearer sense of purpose, more effective collaboration, and more confident decision-making—all of which are conducive to winning and keeping business.

Do you need help to better align sales and marketing? Get in touch today!

 

TLDR: Scope creep and burnout are exceptionally common in MOPs. Explain your role’s real value and demands so you get the credit you deserve.

The boom in marketing technology has seen marketing shift from a heavily creative discipline into a revenue engine. It’s increasingly capable of optimizing commercial performance and depicting high-level organizational impact. Marketing ops has assumed the responsibility to steer the ship, but recognition has yet to match the reality.

Does any of this sound familiar? Scope creep, burnout, loneliness. Then this guide is for you.

We’ll characterize the challenges of working in marketing ops so you can confidently speak to leadership about your role’s demands and the value you bring. Whether you want a new role or a helping hand, rewards or respect, it all starts with this conversation.

 

The many shades of MOPs

Few functions are as multidisciplinary (or as misunderstood) as Marketing Operations.

• You’re the custodian of an ever-complex technology infrastructure that must surface clean, accurate data and sync correctly between solutions to support campaigns successfully.
• You’re the analyst that reports on budgets and maintains the performance of systems and campaigns.
• You’re the advocate for processes and products that increase revenue, reportability, and productivity.
• And when things go awry, you’re the engineer that fixes integrations by hand to redeem sunk cost investments.

This list is getting long, and you get the picture. In a nutshell, marketing ops makes marketing work.

 

The big MOPs misconception

The big misconception is that you do this critical work by pushing buttons on platforms and taking orders.

Marketing operations is a highly strategic role at the crossroads of many different corners of the business. It takes an exceptionally well-rounded skill palette and a lot of effort to perform well in Marketing Operations. This fact goes underappreciated by the many departments with whom you interact.

The point to qualify for leadership: In MOPs, the magnitude of this invisible labor is extraordinarily high.

There is no other function in the business facing the pressure to:

• resolve the age old question of marketing and sales alignment
• learn the ins and outs of products and play the role of procurement
• inherit impact reportage from senior leadership, and
• build systems and dataflows in step with IT, data science, and legal.

 

Finding focus

Marketing operations is a constantly evolving space, with thousands of new tools entering the market every year. This growth causes expectations and responsibilities to pile up without a greater appreciation of the value MOPs provides.

You may have spent your first few months owning one particular platform or optimizing unused or ill-fitting tools, creating the impression that executional work is the sum of your job. Friction between sales and marketing might be particularly high in your workplace, where your rationale for qualifying leads and passing them to sales is often disregarded. 

Leadership might note that MOPs isn’t the only function challenged by the complexities of workplace tech (just ask IT). But while IT is typically a broader team with an established status, MOPs is often an island on its own, where a handful or even a single member of staff performs multiple jobs at once.

Your CMO or CFO might ask for numbers, but invisible labor in MOPs is difficult to quantify.

 

The source of out-of-scope work

Every organization has its unique mix of strengths and stressors. A slick data science operation can coexist with a chaotic procurement department.

Because of this, the main sources of out-of-scope work will differ between organizations. But here’s the common thread: as MOPs interfaces with many departments, they’re vulnerable to misunderstandings and dysfunction from all around the organization, inviting excess demands by design.

This is a consequence of a hiring drive in MOPs that has sought generalists for roles designed to do many different things. That many people in MOPs are spread thin, their skills poorly utilized and understood, confirms that this has been an unviable approach to hiring.

 

The silver lining

If you relate, there’s a silver lining: Slowly, the industry is catching up.

As MOPs shifts to a more specialist field, where expertise in particular areas like attribution is becoming more prominent, the case for a role with more focused responsibilities has rarely been so convincing.

If leadership wants to take advantage of your skills and retain your loyalty as an employee, it’s time to give your role the focus and recognition it deserves.

 

Work in progress

Most labor in marketing ops is invisible to others.

• You build complex campaign infrastructure and surface Marketing’s contribution to revenue.
• You fix the flaws in your tech stack and cut through the noise of new solutions to find opportunities.
• You coordinate buy-in between teams for processes with leads, data, and product purchases.

This work takes more time and expertise than outsiders assume. As a result, MOPs are spread thin, applying a mix of skills to fulfill unviable expectations.

Despite the progressive energy of the MOPs space, there’s a poor understanding of what it takes to successfully hire and design these roles.

If you’re struggling with excessive invisible labor, it doesn’t necessarily reflect your professional abilities. This causes frustration for many people in MOPs and a look at the active MOPs communities will show that you’re not alone.

Explaining to leadership the true demands and value of your role is the start of you taking charge of your career direction and gaining visibility and respect around your organization.

For advice with defining your role or managing excess work demands, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: If you’re considering a new marketing automation platform, learn the processes, goals, and challenges to plan around before you make a firm decision.

No matter your organization’s maturity, implementing a new marketing automation platform is a significant undertaking.

There’s a tendency for C-Suite to believe that getting off the ground with a new platform is as straightforward as flicking a switch. In reality, there are processes, goals, and concerns your marketing team should establish before deciding on a platform and continue to account for during the implementation process.

In this guide, we’ll break down the considerations and challenges that arise at different stages of the process. We’ll will help you talk with your CMO and encourage them to:

• arrive at clear motivations for implementing a new platform
• get a sound grasp of what the implementation process demands, and
• establish realistic performance expectations.

 

Weighing your decision

As a growing business, making the leap to a marketing automation platform can provide powerful features and data management capabilities for scaling upwards.

For established organizations, the decision to implement a new platform can correct the course of a tech stack mismatched with your strategy.

A new marketing platform is a reasonable step forward if you’ve:

• reached a point of momentum where you need to attribute the value and ROI from marketing activities, or
• found it difficult to consolidate data from disparate sources and act on insights with your current platform.

Still, it’s crucial that leadership thoroughly understands the current state of your marketing machine and what you’re looking to gain by onboarding a new platform.

Beyond the financial cost of running a platform, the real investment here is time.

Once marketing activities, data, and integrations start flowing through the platform, it becomes increasingly difficult to untangle yourself over the years.

With that in mind, your CMO needs to have full confidence in your chosen platform’s trajectory.

While it’s challenging to predict how you’ll use the platform in five years, leadership should at least be able to identify how it supports your marketing team’s current and near-future ambitions.

Encourage them to set out how platforms with good momentum or established status in the market can help the marketing team to address its performance needs.

 

Getting off the ground

All tools come with a learning curve and marketing automation platforms like Marketo have particularly steep gradients to conquer. We wrote a whole post to help you explain Marketo to your CEO.

Besides pushing for additional help and support from the vendor, your marketing team should meticulously plan all that you’ll use the platform for.

Processes ultimately underlie every decision you make to get off the ground.

Make leadership aware that, before you really get up and running with the platform, your marketing team needs to clearly establish how to improve existing processes.

As an example: if your team has been sending lead lists manually to sales, marketing and sales need to agree on a point in the lifecycle where sales can take over before automating the handover.

 

Define processes centrally

Organizationally, your CMO should be prepared to define processes centrally.

Each member of your marketing team doing their own thing without a consistent methodology or shared set of definitions can scramble your reporting. When processes are disparate or data potentially missing, it’s difficult to verify the efficacy of your data or insights.

It can be as simple as standardizing fields and fonts in list uploads, but having your CMO advocate for clear and established ways of using the platform can help to preserve the integrity of your data and encourage clarity in the team.

Breaking down the sweeping task of implementation into smaller, achievable goals is crucial to see success from the platform.

You can make this argument to your CMO to incentivize them to work with the marketing team and define action items at various intervals of time, for example:

• day 1
• day 30
• day 90, and
• year 1.

These action items should be need-based yet realistic, so while leadership might have their eye on a new lead scoring model, you’d be wise to prioritize the likes of creating templates for emails and webinars and lead lifecycles for SQLs.

After you work towards your chosen milestones on Day 1, take stock of whether you met them. If not, it’s likely because the experience of using the platform is more complicated than you thought.

If your CEO’s expectations are still riding high, remind them that the demo viewed during the selection process presents a simplified version of using the platform, where the technicalities are already fine-tuned.

For your marketing team to develop a comparable level of efficiency, it’s going to take time using the platform to really optimize your processes and understand how to optimize different features.

 

Continual improvements

For the ways that a marketing automation platform can make your life easier and improve your performance, “automation” is somewhat of a misnomer.

There is always more work to do.

You’re never going to flip a switch and have everything run like clockwork, and years into using a platform, your marketing team will still be learning on the go.

Through consistent processes and realistic goal-setting, each milestone will see your Marketing team achieve more with your platform.

For any additional guidance with implementing a new platform, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

 

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TLDR: Marketing aims to invest in the campaigns and channels that offer the most significant returns. This doesn’t mean assigning credit so much as investment optimization. Discover why multi-touch attribution is vital for making those decisions.

Here’s a puzzle for you: Someone visits your website. Weeks later, a blog post shared on LinkedIn brings them back to your site, and they register for a webinar. Several emails down the line, this person becomes a customer. (Congrats 🎉)

Now, the BIG question is: What data can you take from that journey to optimize and accelerate future marketing engagements?

The prevailing view in B2B on attribution is to credit one single touchpoint for driving revenue. But we’re big advocates of multi-touch attribution because most customer journeys comprise multiple interactions with your brand. We’d love to be able to make it a ‘credit’ and ‘magic bullet’ conversation, but that’s not the reality of how customer journeys work.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you explain to your team why multi-touch attribution is essential for accurately measuring campaign impact. You’ll learn the:

➡️ Types of multi-touch attribution models that allow marketers to tailor their strategies based on specific goals.

➡️ Importance of choosing relevant metrics besides cost-per-lead to help optimize campaign effectiveness.

➡️ Difference between single source and multi-touch attribution models.

 

Choose your attribution model

It’s important to note that single-source and multi-touch attribution methods have unique advantages and limitations.

The choice between them often depends on the specific goals and business circumstances. We outline the strengths of each below.

 

Single-touch attribution

 
What is single-touch attribution? Single-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to one touchpoint (e.g., an ad click or webinar registration) that a customer had with a brand before converting.

It helps you answer particular questions about campaign performance, for instance:

👉 First-touch attribution: Details which campaign sparked initial interest.

👉 Lead-creation attribution: Identifies which campaigns get people into your database.

👉 Last-touch attribution: Pinpoint which campaigns convert the most leads to opportunities.

Each method is effective at evaluating performance against KPIs, but no one interaction accounts for the sum of marketing activities that influence revenue.

A lead could have anywhere from 5 to 50 interactions with your company on their journey. Limiting your analysis to a single or handful of interactions means the vast majority of your activities have impacts that you’re not even measuring—and if you don’t measure it, you won’t optimize it.

 

Multi-touch attribution

 
What is multi-touch attribution? Multi-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of how different touchpoints contribute to a conversion.

 

“It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.”

 

It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.

These models assign dollars across different touchpoints, and by doing so, the analysis leads to insights that a single factor can’t explain.

Revenue from pipeline or bookings or realized revenue are allocated based on percentages assigned with each model.

Define your motivation: Are you using these models to try to describe credit between marketing and sales, or are you trying to maximize your campaign operations? How you set up the model ultimately determines the data that comes out of it.

This means you need to set up the model to support the conversation you want to have after the fact. Whether it’s a conversation about optimizing campaigns, measuring ROI, or ascribing credit to specific teams in your organization.

Here’s a rundown of what insights some common multi-touch attribution models can tell you:

✅ U-Shaped: Allocates a larger portion of pipeline and/or revenue to the first touch and the lead creation touch and an equal allocation to all other touches.

✅ W-Shaped: Similar to U-Shaped but includes the touchpoint just before opportunity creation. All other touchpoints share the remaining allocation based on all other interactions a customer had with your brand.

✅ Full-Path: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey. Full-path can be equally weighted or custom-weighted depending on the type and maturity of the full-path model.

✅ Sourced (or Even Weighted Up To Opportunity): Focuses on pre-opportunity creation touchpoints and equally associates pipeline and/or revenue to each touchpoint.

✅ Accelerated: Looks at post-opportunity creation at any marketing touchpoints that may have helped to close deals.

✅ Influenced: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue based on the entirety of the customer journey, including pre- and post-opportunity creation touchpoints.

✅ Time-Decay Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey, but the allocation percentage is weighted more for touchpoints closer to time of conversion and less to touchpoints that occur further away in time.

The takeaway for your marketing team: Both single- and multi-touch attribution have their place in your game plan, but multi-touch leads to various discoveries that help you double down on campaign success.

 

“As a marketer, you’re a revenue driver.”

 

As a marketer, you’re a driver of revenue. One of the most important decisions marketing makes for the business is to allocate campaign dollars to the places that give you the highest return on investment.

Your company’s invested in martech to make sense of the data, but if you’re making that call without multi-touch attribution, you’re spending in the dark.

Your marketing manager is probably focusing on cost per lead when making spending decisions.

If you pump more money into the sub-channels where you get cheaper leads and get more leads for your money. By that logic, organic SEO wins every time, then platforms with the next-lowest spend, and that’s where you’ll invest.

When you take a more gradual approach to the analysis and let lead data play out until you can calculate cost per deal.

Estimate revenue based on deal size, and you might see the picture shift.

Platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn may be more expensive per lead but more efficient per deal, bringing in sales at much higher values than sub-channels with cheaper leads.

 

“Not all leads are created equal.”

 

This is where ROI really comes from—revenue vs spend—and it produces a different decision than if you’d focused on cost per lead. The lesson for marketing here is that not all leads are created equal. If you reduce spend based on leads, you could lose out on deals in the long run.

Multi-touch attribution takes figures from across your brand activity and tells you what’s creating deals and ROI. That lets you double down on your strategy and determine how to max out spending at multiple levels:

• channels (e.g., social, display)
• sub-channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook), and
• tactics (e.g., whitepapers, webinars).

This is the essence of how attribution helps your marketing team succeed — from your CMO setting growth targets and strategic aims to your marketing manager running campaigns.

 

Drive better decisions

Multi-touch attribution connects the dots between marketing interactions and revenue, letting you accurately measure and spend on impact.

That understanding puts everyone on the same page about what campaigns really boost your bottom line, and it gives Marketing a more effective way to think about and surface value.

If you’re facing pressure to optimize right this second, just remember: this is an engine for long-term success. Take time to handle your modeling with care and collect the data you need as campaigns progress; you have more of both on your side than you think.

For any advice on succeeding with attribution, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

Contact us to start a conversation.

TLDR: Asking for help shows you’re prepared to solve problems and get results, but it’s not always easy. Explore some of the arguments that can strengthen your case.

Let’s see if you can relate to the following scenario:

Your leadership has made an investment. That is the investment in you, your team, your colleagues and your tech stack. The challenge is that your team is SO successful that you make it look easy.

You’re like the surfer/musician/ballerina who moves so effortlessly that it’s hard to appreciate all the hard work that makes it possible. The outcome for many is that you’re drowning in work, requests, deadlines, and deliverables.

The solution? You need some help.

This blog looks at some of the arguments that can support your request for help.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Our team has worked client side and agency side. Not only does this give us empathy for your current challenges, but we understand how to position the rationale and benefits of some outside help.

Let’s get started.

 

1) Speed

The first and easiest argument is one of speed. You need someone fast.

Agencies can deploy resources faster than hiring. Depending on which market you’re in, and/or flexibility in remote work, it can take a long time to hire someone.

If you’re in the crunch with timelines coming fast and furious, this is one easy argument to get some help.

 

2) Experience and perspective

There are knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns when it comes to MOPs.

Bringing in an outside perspective can give you experience in areas that you’re not familiar with or feel like you’re not optimizing.

For example, take attribution. We’ve seen all kinds of implementations that are not working, or worse, collecting dust. Attribution reporting to leadership can be extremely powerful. Getting expertise can improve your marketing automation’s performance by complementing your skills with others.

An outside perspective in the form of an audit is a place that we’ve seen pay instant dividends. Another benefit of an agency providing help is that you have the benefit of their consultants’ collective experience.

 

3) Time and volume

You don’t have the time to do everything.

This is a harder argument to make when your leadership doesn’t fully appreciate marketing operations.

However if your team can do 50 programs a week and there is a need for 100, the time argument can work. The smaller your team, the easier the argument that you can’t do everything.

Increasing volume is a better argument than time. Keep time in your back pocket. It is better as a supporting argument than a leading one.

Leadership sometimes can hear that everyone is busy and be perfectly fine with that.

 

4) Skill gaps

We’d like to be good at everything, but there can be times when you just don’t have the skills to execute.

We see this with analytics and dashboards all the time.

You can be a Marketo genius but are you also super savvy with Snowflake and Tableau? (If you are, contact me, we love unicorns like you!).

Your team might have some gaps that outside help can fulfill. The best part is that maybe you only need 15 hours a week in that role. A consultant can save the hiring of a full-time resource for part-time needs.

 

5) Test your needs

This one is straightforward. You may not be able to accurately estimate the skills and time you need with support.

If you start with a base number of hours, you can decide whether you need more time or build the case to hire your own resources.

 

6) Off books

This one is interesting but it’s more common than you would think.

Clients often look to consultancies to assist them for the simple reason of not increasing payroll/headcount.

This is a financial hygiene decision. An expense to a consultancy looks better than a salary in valuations.

You could do some probing to see if this argument would fly, but it’s generally one that your boss’ boss might be more concerned with.

 

7) Neutral/unbiased

A consultant can really help when there are tricky dynamics at play like introducing change within an organization.

The perception of a neutral/unbiased perspective can go a long way in bridging divides and finding common ground.

It could also just help you make your case.

If an outside audit gives weight to the point you’ve been making for months, this can really help move things forward.

 

8) Accountability

Possibly the best part of having outside help is their accountability.  They have timelines, deliverables and outcomes to get done for you.

They are responsible for creating a plan and executing it.

Need something done for the end of quarter? Done.

That type of accountability can go a long way in delivering what you need against your leadership’s asks.

 

9) Costs

This is always part of the equation. You will have to present the numbers.

Many of the points made above validate the costs you have to present. The magic is if you can equate the cost of help and the return on investment. ROI doesn’t always have to be dollars in business closed. It can be a better alignment between sales and marketing. It could be reducing the costs of dirty data. It can also be the costs of moving with speed and predictability.

These are just some of the arguments that you can make in building your case for help. It isn’t always easy to ask for help.

Some people see asking for help as a sign of weakness or failure.

We couldn’t disagree more.

Asking for help is a sign of wanting to get things done. Period.

As always, we’re here to help when you need it.

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Scaling up your martech stack at a rate that aligns with your company’s growing needs can be quite difficult.

With so many tech options out there, how can you be sure you’re making the right choices with your investments?

You’ll want to avoid as much tech bloat as possible, while also ensuring your team has the proper tools they need to grow operations efficiently.

It can be a tricky balance, but I have some tips that will set you on the right path.

1) Size is your primary benchmark, not time

When looking to invest in new software tools, the most important consideration is the size – and future growth- of your company.

You might be thinking: when will we get use from this tool? One year from now? Three years from now?

This is okay, as long as size is the primary benchmark for these time-based predictions. For example, let’s say you have 25 clients now. How long will it take you to get to 50 clients, 100 clients, and so on?

Think of buying clothes for a child. You could buy the next 10 shirt sizes for them, but those shirts could be sitting in a closet for the next five years before they fit. Or, they might fit much sooner than expected and you need to go shopping again.

Similarly, it’s your responsibility to track the progression and maturity of your martech stack so you can keep developing it to meet your continuously growing needs. Doing so will require continual communication with leadership.

For example, they might have information about revenue projections for the next two to five years, certain KPI targets that have been set, and so on. All of these factors go into understanding your current and future needs, which will direct how you invest in your tools.
 

2) Tech for now or for later?

Now that you’ve established a reference point for what you’ll need and when you’ll need it, I recommend you future-proof your tech the best you can.

In my experience, it’s better to invest in tools that will last as long as possible to avoid the costly process of ripping out the entire system later.

For example, one option might be to spend $100,000 on a tool that you won’t fully use for another few years. But the alternative could be spending $50,000 on something you need right now, only to spend another $300,000 in a few years ripping out the entire system because it needs replacing.

This “rip and replace” process, however, will be a bigger deal for some tools compared to others.

To simplify things, think of your tech in two categories:

1. Backbone tools, and
2. Peripheral tools.

 
Backbone tools are the core of your martech stack, including your essential marketing automation tool such as Marketo, Hubspot, etc. These tools will be much more painful and costly to “rip and replace,” so you’ll want to grow with them over the long term.

In some cases, depending on your current budget and needs, you can invest in the baseline offering of a certain tool now.

Then, later on, you can upgrade and layer in added services and functions as necessary. These add-ons, which can be applied dynamically, are your peripheral tools – in addition to other things like data enrichment software.

As you can probably tell, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the right tech.

Your needs will depend on many factors including your company’s structure, size, and projected growth. But as long as you’re constantly synchronized with leadership, and you plan ahead to future-proof your backbone tools with room for peripheral upgrades, I’m confident you’ll have an efficiently designed martech stack that can grow alongside you and your team.
 

3) Next steps

Once you’ve worked out which tools to invest in, make sure you’re absolutely clear with your boss about what a tech overhaul will involve. It’s going to take an ongoing time investment, thorough evaluation of your tools, and behavioral change from team members as they adapt to the new tech.

Effectively communicating all of this to your VP and CMO will increase the likelihood that they support your proposed changes. You can read more about how to explain your tech stack overhaul to your boss here.

You’ve got this — and if you need any help bringing in new technology, drop us a line.

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TLDR: Strategy defines your outcomes, tools help you achieve them. Connect the dots between strategy and tech to influence decisions with tools that contribute positively to your goals.

Each year brings a flood of new tools onto the market. So how do you know which is right for your business?

Strategy and technology ideally work in lockstep. One defines your outcomes, the other helps you achieve them. But this relationship gets tangled when your goals aren’t strongly defined.

In this guide, we’ll cover how to connect the dots between strategy and technology. You’ll learn tips for:

a) having a productive discussion with your superiors that links goals and tools together, and

b) framing the conversation to relate your needs in MOPs back to the strategy.

 

Strategy is your foundation

Martech is going through a vendor boom that shows no signs of slowing down. As tech evolves to address more capability gaps, it’s tempting to see the purchase of a shiny new solution as a way to gain a competitive edge.

But tech doesn’t solve problems or set purpose by itself.

Without addressing a clear need for your business, any new tool is like a Ferrari without a racetrack. Powerful, expensive, and wasted.

Strategy is the foundation for all the actions you take, goals you work towards, and places you invest as a business. The outcomes that leadership targets should cascade downwards into a series of smaller goals and define the kinds of tech you consider bringing on board.

Your CMO’s top priority is continuous revenue growth. Your Marketing Manager might want to achieve that by increasing qualified leads. In that case, a solution might be a lead management tool that improves your grasp of lead behavior. The insights from which lets you tweak the customer journey in the right places to bring in more leads and create growth opportunities.

Bottom line: Whatever piece of tech you choose must complete a clear throughline between top-level strategic priorities, relevant performance targets further down, and tools with the capabilities to achieve those aims.

That alignment is how you frame the relationship between strategy and technology for your boss. Leadership wants the tools you use in MOPs to support their aims—this isn’t possible without a thorough sense of purpose.

Ask your boss to share:

• definitive priorities per quarter and year (and their boss’ too)
• how particular performance targets contribute to them, and
• the need a new piece of marketing technology should fulfill. I.e., are we trying to reduce costs? Increase growth? Work more efficiently?

With that understanding, you can advise on the right piece of tech for your circumstances.

And, if you need help defining your strategy and best practices for a technology platform, we can help.

 

Take a need-driven approach

Any decision your business makes on tech acquisition needs thorough involvement from MOPs. As the person likely to manage a new tool, you’ve got a window into the current strengths and challenges of using your marketing technology stack.

Make your case to leadership: You have the knowledge to assess whether a solution is truly the right fit for your needs. Here’s where you explain the evaluation process.

Your boss might be insistent or excited about getting a tool on board, but you need to know how the capabilities and quirks of a particular technology suit your business before you buy it. That’s going to take time.

How to buy time: Gather feedback from users and internal teams, explore trials and demos, and assess how well a tool integrates with your stack and fits your business model—these steps are all crucial for your business to make the right decision. In other words: they’re time well-spent.

Sometimes, the answer isn’t a new tool at all. If leadership wants to achieve a particular outcome, encourage them to think about how you can accomplish the same ends with your current stack.

Are you utilizing all the features of your toolset? If there’s potential to meet performance goals by using the same tech in different ways, that’s a cost-effective way to bring tech in line with the strategy.

Bring the message home: Allowing MOPs time and space to make a thorough evaluation of what technology offers your business, and really taking that assessment on board, increases your chance of spending only on the tools that advance the achievement of your strategy.

 

Speak strategic language

If you want to ensure your leadership team is on the same page as you about how strategy and tech support each other, you’ll likely have to play ‘translator.’

People at various levels of a business speak in different languages, so when approaching your boss (and their boss) about tech, frame the gritty tech details in the context of big-picture strategic objectives.

Is your reporting taking too much time? Are your processes and systems not syncing as well as they should? Could your data insights be faster or more sophisticated?

When you speak with your boss, clarify how those issues impact the top-level outcomes—revenue, growth, productivity.

Position your day-to-day tasks as part of the broader strategy, and it’ll send an important message to leadership: making tech decisions that benefit your work directly feed the overall goals of your business.

Choosing the right technology for your circumstances, and aligning your strategy and tech together, takes some important conversations.

Whatever guidance you need, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

 

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