How to Structure Your Marketing Organization For Success
A question I am often asked is how do you think about structuring your B2B marketing team?
While there is no one size fits all, it is fair to say many marketing leaders struggle with the optimal way to structure their teams. Cleary, team structure depends a lot on your current business strategy and the sizes of your organization – that goes without saying, but should you reassess?
Companies that are customer obsessed perform better (Laura Ramos, Forrester). Makes sense but how can we all make this a reality? In most cases, we do not have our teams structured to be customer focused and optimized for the best business outcomes.
Structuring your revenue team
Here are a few observations:
- TEAMS – Marketing, sales, and customer success teams are often operating in silos with disparate goals.
- TECHNOLOGY – Systems that house customer data are often dispersed and owned by different teams (for example Salesforce is owned by sales and marketing automation is owned by marketing).
- GOALS – Lately, there is more emphasis in B2B marketing on the entire customer journey, yet in many organizations, marketing’s primary job is focused on acquisition (that is where you see the investment and dollars).
How can you set up your team to be focused on the customer? I like the idea of a Revenue Team that combines marketing, sales, and customer success. While the org chart and structure will vary based on many factors, here are few factors that can make a revenue team a reality:
Making it work
Here are by top tips for creating a revenue team:
- Have Clear and Documented Goals Does everyone know what they are responsible for? Have a documented plan of record to ensure it is clear how much sales contributes to pipeline, marketing, and partner (if applicable). If there is a cross-sell initiative for Sales, have this as part of the POR.
- Focused Strategy Once goals are clear, it is important to have clarity around HOW teams contribute (i.e. when/where do orchestrated interactions occur). A nice benefit of ABM is it does drive focus and alignment around key accounts and it supports orchestration of activities across the customer lifecycle. Even if your team has a mix of ABM and demand generation, agreeing on a shared revenue model with defined stages and SLAs is critical.
- Technology alignment to support orchestration across teams, it is essential to align the revenue model process with supporting technology. Consider a Revenue Operations team that owns and manages strategy, data analysis/reporting, data management, tech stack management, and in some cases resource/budget management and shared POR (plan of record). The depth of this function will depend on company size! Some technology platforms also support communication touchpoints between teams so the coordination aspect is less arduous.For example, Engagio sends weekly Sales updates so the team can see which accounts are most engaged and the top activities that drove the engagement.
- Incentive alignment It is a stretch to expect team alignment when incentives are different. It just isn’t going to happen. Having a shared goals and compensation defines how people behave. There are clever ways to do this and it’s worth trying.
This won’t come overnight, but you must begin now. Sit down with key stakeholders and start the conversation.
How do you align your team? Let us know your thoughts!
