Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Why You Are Not Organized For Effective Marketing Automation (Part 2)


How to fit the right model to your organizational objectives

Overview: Converting from traditional Marketing to automated Marketing has a major impact on your organization’s Marketing team. This requires establishing the correct type of organization to achieve your goals.

Tags: Marketing Automation, Marketing Automation Organization, Demand Center, Demand Center Organization

We learned last week that converting from traditional Marketing to automated Marketing has a major impact on your organization’s Marketing team. Beyond new skills, your team has to adapt the new technology to your processes, and this requires establishing the correct type of organization to accomplish your objectives. The three very different organizational models are:

1.     Integrated Automation
2.     Distributed Demand Center
3.     Centralized Demand Center

We also learned that each model represents a compromise and none is universally the “best” solution for any type of organization. Each has unique benefits and will require a specific type of change within your organization to drive adoption and promote success.

In general, think of Marketing Automation in the same way Henry Ford visualized building automobiles using assembly lines. Moving from skilled craftsmen creating and assembling piece-by-piece to specific, repeatable tasks is where economies can be gained with Marketing Automation. Where individual marketing components can be repeated, automation excels. Where every task is custom-built, requiring a highly skilled craftsman, automation is just another task that gets in the way of completion.

To evaluate which model best suits your organization, consider the answers to each of the questions below. Rate of these 15 questions on a scale of 1 to 3 as:

1: NO
2: NEUTRAL
3: YES

Overall Organizational Goals
Is there a wide array of inconsistency in expectations for Marketing across the organization?
Are there one or more business units with radically different goals from the rest of the organization?

Overall Marketing Goals
Do different product lines or business units have radically different sales cycles, revenue expectations or methodologies?
Do Marketing and Sales disagree on goals across the organization?
Is Marketing perceived as merely a sales support department throughout the organization?

Organizational Culture
Do business units have vastly different personalities across the organization?
Are business units or other subdivisions radically different in culture or personality?
Is there lack of consistency between Marketing and Sales cultures throughout the organization?

Organizational Dynamics
Is your business cyclical?
Does your organization restructure every two years or less?
Do you grow through M&A?

Current Team Resources
Can your current staff easily accommodate new skill sets?

Current Management Resources
Are your managers intolerant to process changes and new vendors?
Do you manage to available named resources instead of SLAs?
Does your leadership look out for its own needs over cooperative collaboration that benefits the entire organization?

Your score will reflect your propensity towards being able to accommodate one of the three organizational types:

15 – 24:                                    Centralized Demand Center
25 – 34:                                    Distributed Demand Center
35 and above:                         Integrated Automation

Notes:

Consistency helps drive economies of scale. Vastly different expectations do not centralize well.
 
That one-off business unit will weigh disproportionally in the marketing processes being automated. It is best to either not centralize that single unit or not centralize at all, since every process that fits the majority will be loaded with exceptions to accommodate the minority.
 
A staff that cannot accommodate change or adapt to new skill or processes will often resist centralization. You will generally find low adoption based on a perceived lack of understanding of the “uniqueness” of that business unit’s needs.

In next week’s edition, we will look at the roles and responsibilities in the three organizational types. Roles with identical titles can have vastly different responsibilities in these different organizational structures.

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