Process is one of the four pillars of high performing organizations.  Highly functional organizations leverage distinctive capabilities and processes to improve efficiencies and effectiveness. Firms with highly functional organizations experience more innovation, market share growth and profit. To ensure your business takes off like a rocket, you need the operational excellence of a Houston control center. At the heart of the control center is the firing room. Marketing is your organization’s growth engine, or the firing room of your business. Therefore it especially important that Marketing strive to achieve operational excellence. And that means you need to focus on creating and documenting Marketing’s processes.

Marketing’s value is derived from its ability to develop knowledge and skills that define market opportunities and design and implement the strategy that connects customers with products. Planning, reporting, customer journey mapping, content creation, opportunity management processes – are all examples of essential Marketing processes! If your current Marketing processes are not effective or efficient, then automating them won’t improve anything. You’ll only be faster at following a bad process. In fact, adding new Marketing technology if you have broken or inefficient existing processes is a recipe for a mislaunch.

Processes capture the sequence of interdependent and linked procedures used to convert some type of input (typically business inputs take the form of data) into an output.  Therefore, ALL work is process. You may not need technology to complete the process.  But you will ALWAYS need a process before you employ technology. There’s no value in automating all your business processes all at once may not be feasible, so focus on the processes that most directly affect customer behavior.  This is why process is a key part of our work and key to your ability to successfully launch customer-centric growth.

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Organize Your Marketing Processes into Two Categories

Given Marketing’s growth responsibilities, we recommend starting with Marketing processes. In our approach, we categorize Marketing processes into two groups: processes designed to drive revenue by acquiring, keeping and growing the value of customers (externally oriented) and processes designed to improve profit and margin by reducing costs and increasing efficiencies (internally oriented). Typically this work is performed within the Marketing Operations (MarketingOps) function.

Here are three capabiliteis you’ll need to ensure your processes drive operational excellence:

1. Deep expertise developing and mapping processes
2. Pre-developed tools/templates/frameworks
3. Knowledge transfer methodologies so that your team can implement best-practices for process development, change management, and communication going forward

Auditing existing process is a great way to start.  We’d be happy to help.