Marketing is a team sport. I’ve come to admire and relish being part of marketing teams that operate as a team – where team members excel in their roles and support each other, and the team evolves and improves and ultimately creates market impact “greater than the sum of the parts”.
One such team is a group of modern Boston-area marketers who are now on their third venture together – first an initial group at HubSpot, then a larger group at SmartBear Software and now at Continuum Managed Services.
You have to figure that if the team has stayed together over the years through multiple company moves (from Cambridge to Beverly to Boston), the recipe must be working and they must have figured out plenty of best practices along the way.
So when I learned that Adam Barker, the Director of Demand Generation at Continuum, was going to be sharing his best practices around reporting and marketing process at the MassTLC Demand Gen Peer Group, that meant “Must Attend” for me.
And Adam delivered the goods.
These were 12 best practices that Adam shared, that he and his colleagues apply to building and operating their data-driven, high velocity marketing process
1. Hire “T-shaped” individuals
They look for marketers who can go deep in a specific area of specialty, but also have a breadth of experiences and interests and the flexibility to operate in multiple areas.
2. Everyone on the team owns a metric
The team is structured such that everyone owns a metric that represents the impact of that particular marketing area, usually a specific medium. When I asked Adam for examples he said that the team is broken down into owners of:
- Blog / Organic Web Traffic
- Paid Search
- Social Media
- Events
- Programs
- Prospect Emails
- Customer Emails
These metrics represent approximately 50% of quarterly MBOs tied to individual bonuses.
3. Cross-train the team
There are regularly scheduled “lunch and learn” sessions where each team members presents a “how to” in their area, e.g. “writing a great blog post” or “running a PPC campaign”. This serves to both further develop skills as well as build team camaraderie, and is also a component of the MBOs for each team member.
4. Report on how marketing is doing, not what marketing is doing
This is also a principle I’ve employed, which is reporting on activity alone sends the wrong message – because it’s not about activity, it’s about the results. Adam made the point that reporting on activity can actually serve to cloud or create confusion around performance and take away focus.
5. Share updates weekly
As part of the process, each metric owner updates the metrics in their area weekly. These metrics are posted to a shared repository, in their case the company Wiki.
6. Develop automatic repeatable reports & dashboards
Automated reporting is essentially to feed the process. Having now lived through seeing a product line move from manual to automated reporting, I can tell you that many businesses are still relying on manual reporting, and the shift from manual to automated is a true difference maker – in the visibility its bring and the marketing ownership that it enables.
7. Meet with Sales weekly
Meet with sales weekly and as part of this review the performance results (see #4). Adam’s group refers to these as “Smarketing” meetings – I first heard Mike Volpe CMO at HubSpot use that term to refer to joint Sales & Marketing sessions when meeting with him in 2009 – and I’ve also referred to this as the revenue team.
8. Share anecdotal updates
Adam showed an example of an “anecdotal update” e.g. an email to the sales team with info on the success of a recent program. Everyone is likely doing this in some way, but referring back to #4 and what’s noteworthy about this update is it includes brief highlights of the programs e.g. # of leads or how it compares to results of other programs, to reinforce to the sales team that marketing has its eye on the ball.
9. Operate in monthly marketing sprints
The marketing team defines deliverables as part of monthly sprints, which both ensures alignment and focus on specific deliverables and minimizes distractions getting in the way.
10. Weekly marketing leadership meeting
The marketing leadership team stays aligned with a weekly leadership meeting.
11. End of Quarter retrospective board meeting
This quarterly business review asks questions such as “What did we learn?” and “How will it drive our strategy for the next quarter?”
12. Rinse & repeat
Each of these steps become more effective as team members get comfortable in the roles and their process. So like many things in marketing, it’s important to remain committed and the results will come through consistent application of the process.
Great list from Adam.
For those looking to understand how to setup and operate a data driven demand generation machine, these are two additional resources I've written that go deeper into these topics:
- Six essentials to setting up a closed loop marketing system, via CMO Essentials
- Seven-step plan to a demand generation turnaround