Does your marketing team have the ‘M-Factor’? Jessica McGreal reveals the make-up of the perfect marketing department today
The world is packed with successful teams, from football to fiction there’s strength in numbers. But whether you’re in a novel fighting crime, debating in parliament, sailing across the Atlantic or embarking on your next marketing campaign, your team needs the right structure, skills and support to succeed.
This has become a tricky task for the marketing department as it undergoes the fastest and largest transformation in its history. The discipline has changed more in the last five years than the last 20 – so achieving the ‘M-Factor’ is harder than ever. In offices up and down the UK (and the world), everyone from marketing assistants to CMOs is trying to overcome the challenges digital, social and mobile present.
Time to re-structure
Consequently, the modern marketing team has had to adjust to this new omni-channel world. Gone are the days when teams are structured round the famous ‘Four Ps’ (place, price, product and promotion). To stay ahead of new self-directed buying practices – which according to a recent study by The Harvard Business Review means on average 5.4 people have to sign off a B2B purchase – it’s vital that these old-school silos are dismantled for good.
“Not only are B2B buyers digital natives who are largely self-directed and over 50 per cent of their way to a buying decision before they ever speak to a salesperson, but B2B buying has also evolved into a team sport,” says Andrew Davies, co-founder of marketing technology company Idio. “The modern marketing team needs to be fundamentally organised to address a market that is dominated by new buyer DNA.”
In practice for many established B2B brands this means re-structuring the marketing department to make it more collaborative and nimble. Previously teams have been built around the channels they own, such as email or social, which can now slow down processes and hinder success. It’s also vital that marketing collaborates and increases transparency between itself and other departments, including sales, HR and finance.
Kevin Tan, CEO of Eyeota, explains: “The perfect marketing team today shares many characteristics and values from what it traditionally has been, but if we’re aiming for perfection there will be much more integration and visibility between the different functions. All too often data – and activity – sits in silos and this means companies are unable to join the dots and understand the different touch points an individual has with an organisation.”
Richard Fitzmaurice, CMO at TMF Group, outlines another issue: “It is very common to see all the elements of a marketing function replicated across regions where reporting lines direct to that region’s head of marketing cause inconsistencies across specialisms i.e. a digital campaign in APAC conflicting in messages with the Americas because no one person is responsible for heading up digital strategies globally.”
Start to review your current structure from the foundations up. If your organisation fails to modernise it will lack the capabilities to really understand the buyer journey – and influence it. As a result, future departments will be broken up in customer-centric teams, argues Edelman’s digital vice president group director, Marko Muellner. In addition to management and leadership he believes the teams will be:
• Strategy: planning and creative leadership.
• Optimisation: performance analysis and testing.
• Reach: paid, earned, community management and email.
• Content: including copywriting, video and design.
• Customer insights: dealing with monitoring and segmentation.
Successful skill sets
So, you’ve smashed the silos and restructured your team so it’s customer-centric, now it’s time to think about the characteristics your ideal marketing team should possess. While a selection of traditional skills remains necessary, B2B leaders need to hire and nurture individuals who possess ‘new’ attributes suited to an era disrupted by digital.
Alison Orsi, VP marketing, communications and citizenship at IBM UK and Ireland, reveals the make-up of her perfect team: “New skills are required – and we are placing new requirements on our professionals: collaboration, empathy, intellectual curiosity, adaptability and 360-degree thinking. As we try to apply data as a game-changer, critical thinking becomes increasingly important.”
Meanwhile, Robert Tas, CMO at Pegasystems adds: “Analytics is very much a new aspect of marketing, and one that I can see taking an increasingly important role in the industry. Today’s marketers have an abundance of data at their fingertips and are able to make decisions based on facts rather than their gut – a luxury that wasn’t necessarily available to those yester-year. Understanding data and analytics has become fundamental to success in order to support the demanding sales function this role now encompasses.”
Consequently, marketers wishing to climb the career ladder need to focus on obtaining a mix of traditional skills as well as more specialist digital knowledge in areas like social media, data and SEO. Stephen Yeo, European marketing director at Panasonic, advises: “As well as the communications and technical folk you increasingly need more hybrid types. To get to the top marketers need to communicate and do traditional demand generation. You need to be able to relate to the product and engineering. You also need to know IT and technologies like marketing automation. You need to understand finance and work with sales.”
Investment engine
To create the perfect team, brands need to invest in people and resources. Whether that’s hiring digital natives or rolling out departmental training, employees need to refresh their skill set on at least a bi-yearly basis.
Fitzmaurice of TMF Group argues that businesses will need to focus on hiring millennials for key roles in the marketing department. At TMF Group 50 per cent of marketing leadership is under 35-years-old and 90 per cent of the wider team is under 35. He explains: “We will see the digital natives come through the ranks to hold the most important leadership roles in the most important marketing functions. They are the digital natives. They are the first generation to have played with digital devices since birth and their mindsets, language, buying habits and attention span – just like their prospects – have been shaped by it. They increasingly go through the same purchasing motions in the B2B world as purchasing their groceries.”
Additionally, brands also have to consider keeping everything inhouse or looking for external support. Victor Milligan, CMO at Forrester Research, believes outsourcing is a bad idea: “Marketing – when done right – understands, empathises and creates value for prospects and customers across different journeys. It is integral to the actual and emotional dialogue that forms awareness, affinity and mutual value. Outsourcing this means, in essence, outsourcing your ability to understand, analyse, and consistently improve your customers’ experience and value. That is far too risky in a customer-empowered market.”
Whereas Andy Markowitz, general manager Performance Marketing Labs at GE, disagrees: “You can’t handle everything on your own internally, you’re going to have to borrow resources from different places where there are smart people. You’re going to have to invest in training and development.”
Markowitz is right, client-side marketers shouldn’t feel pressured to keep everything inhouse. Search for experts and specialists to partner with that complement your team’s
skill set to secure success. Taking on too much work, or attempting to carry out tasks without the right experience will mean you fail miserably.
Is perfection possible?
So, in 2015 the perfect marketing team has to consist of data-driven, customer-centric empathetic storytellers with analytical brains. Finding the correct balance of these right and left-brain thinkers is a daunting task for CMOs, VPs and marketing directors. It’s clear that building a model team doesn’t happen overnight; rather it’s a continual process of adjustments. There’s no ‘how to guide’ or secret formula and each organisation will have different needs.
So does the ‘perfect’ marketing team really exist? Matt Preschern, CMO at HCL Technologies, reminds professionals: “The notion of being ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’ in the state of transformation isn’t anything but an aspiration. There are a good number of companies who are demonstrating how sophisticated they are. If there is an ideal state it will be continuous reinvention. I don’t know that the ideal marketing or communications organisation exists. The questions are how close can you get and can you continuously transform and can you do it quickly?”
The perfect marketing team may currently be a pipe dream for the majority of B2B brands, but that doesn’t mean it’s unachievable in the long run. To ensure your department retains the ‘M-Factor’ focus on the ‘Three S’s’ we’ve discussed: structure, skills and support. This is by no means easy but well worth it.
