If your company is new to marketing automation or having a marketing operations team, you may be wondering what the best way is to organize. Should you centralize or de-centralize your marketing functions? Should you outsource some pieces or keep everything in-house?
As the marketing operations role grows in importance, many CMOs are likely pondering these questions. Eloqua’s Director of Customer Success, Jocelyn Brown, has assisted numerous organizations in seeking solutions. In recent years, she has identified several key factors that influence the ideal structure for each company:
- Existing infrastructure and skills
- Budgeting process
- Company culture
Taking into account those factors, she’s created the following matrix to guide her discussions:
But like any good marketer, Jocelyn knew that getting a wider circle of ideas and comments could help strengthen her marketing operations structure conversations in the future, so she created a discussion on the Topliners community to propose her ideas and ask for feedback.
Comments began emerging about “the chicken and the egg”: do people create the role of marketing operations because they understand that it’s needed in order to effectively begin their journey to Revenue Performance Management? Or, do they begin the journey with their existing marketing team and later realize that they need an additional role to keep their initiatives on track and help them report consistently on the right metrics?
Soon others began adding their own charts to the discussion and sharing their own experiences (good and bad). It’s the perfect example of crowdsourcing an answer and creating a multi-faceted response that can apply to a variety of organizations. I guarantee that if you’re interested in this concept, you’ll find a solution that will work for you among those proposed in this discussion.