2008 January | Marketing Operations at Work

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January 2008

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Marketing leaders today are in an unprecedented position to help organizations achieve their objectives in increasingly competitive and dynamic markets. Marketing Operations Partners is one the first services companies focused on changing the MO of marketing by leveraging the emerging discipline of Marketing Operations. To address this significant challenge—and opportunity - Marketing Operations Partners provides a ready-to-go COO and change management team consisting of leading thought leaders in the marketing community. Our team includes subject matter experts in the areas of lead generation and nurturing, customer experience management, process design, strategic planning process facilitation, technology assessment, organizational diagnosis, change management, ROI analysis, business intelligence, and marketing, sales and product alignment. For more information, visit www.mopartners.com.

January 26, 2008

The MO Profession: Collaborate or Alienate?

Filed under: Marketing Operations Community, NoRepost — Gary_Katz @ 2:08 pm

Alan Bunce recently raised the issue in the Unica blog about the lack of places for Marketing Operations professionals to congregate. It’s true. If you filter out the hot buzzward topics of Marketing ROI and the many ways of describing Marketing Automation, Marketing Operations is a very rare topic in speaking engagements, conference agendas (Henry Stewart excepted) and even in marketing publications. Finding a common forum for MO pros to meet (other than Henry Stewart or certain IDC-sponsored events) is even more difficult.

There’s a relationship between the pervasiveness (or lack thereof) of Marketing Operations and how well we in Marketing Operations are (or aren’t) collaborating as a profession (I was going to say “professional community” but I’m not so sure we really have much of one yet).

The only group that I’m aware of that has influence and is totally focused on Marketing Operations is MOCCA (Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance). I have heard MOCCA is an excellent and valued group, but, alas, as an external consultant, I have no first hand experience with the organization. To date, the MOCCA board has chosen to take a very “insular” approach, inviting as members only those MO pros who are working within corporations. The MO profession is too nascent to take such a closed-system approach (which, in the MO world that advocates change management as a key tool in its value kit, ought to be an oxymoron). Our focus needs to be on building the credibility and stature of the marketing operations profession, and cultivating real collaboration, not trying to keep away the very few external consultants who understand the depth and breadth of the MO vision and could be valuable partners in moving the profession forward to the benefit of all.

Ironically, when I questioned some of the leadership and members about this decision, I got the impression MOCCA is really trying to keep all the marketing technology solution providers out of the circle. What does that tell us about the reputation of solution providers in the eyes of their key target audience?

Any MOCCA members out there agree or disagree with my point-of-view?

Gary

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January 25, 2008

Worth the Wait: Sprint’s Marketing Operations Journey

Filed under: Catalyzing Change, Marketing Operations Big Picture, Marketing Operations Community, Marketing Operations Strategy, NoRepost, Return on Marketing — Gary_Katz @ 9:34 pm

Good things are worth waiting for. And one of the best presentations at the Henry Stewart Marketing Operations Symposium in Los Angeles in November was Jon Umsted’s humorous and insightful tale, which he titled “Advancing Marketing Operations at Sprint.” Jon, who has served as both pipeline and process manager for Sprint/Nextel, captivated us as he described the significant hurdles the Sprint MO team had to overcome and the invaluable lessons they learned during their 1–1/2 year experience focusing their MO efforts to implement a Marketing Resource Management technology solution.

The journey included building a case for change, fostering partnerships early on with key stakeholders, building the business case, gaining support, vendor selection, change management and measuring success. Like Nortel, whose experience I shared in a previous post, Sprint adopted the Change Acceptance Process (CAP), GE’s change management methodology. Jon’s presentation provides extensive detail on elements of each of the above stages and examples of useful tools, including CAP and Project Quality Metrics (PQM) diagrams, and two slides that describe Sprint’s lessons learned.

Download the complete presentation at:

http://www.mopartners.com/documents/SprintLAMOM2007-Ext-Final.pdf

Gary

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