Moving to an integrated Sales and Marketing Operations Team

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

This question is not specific to 'Marketo', but a challenge a lot of us marketers face. Just as important as aligning the field sales and marketing teams, is the alignment of sales operations and marketing operations functions. We are looking to move from a disjointed view of these roles and responsilities by integrating the two functions into a centralised department,  with its manager reporting to the C-level head of sales and marketing.

Questions:
Has anyone else been through this process?
What were your learnings or things you wish you had considered in advance?
What roles and responsibilities did this team have?
What was the structure? A sample org structure diagram would be awesome here.
Who were the key stakeholders they interacted with outside the team?

We've got some ideas on this already, and i appreciate that every organisation is different, but i'm looking for examples of how it's worked elsewhere and to capture any best practice tips and advice. There's a lot of great companies in the area using Marketo, so I figured best to tap into what some of you guys are up to!

Any help appreciated. No need to have to answer all my questions. If you've just got feedback on 1, I'd still love to hear it! If you want to send me anything directly (e.g. sample org chart), you can email me here.

Cheers,

Tara

 

[Anonymous]

Tara, as a startup I was handling both sales and marketing operations, but we recently brought on a sales operations manager and we're using the SiriusDecisions models and frameworks to allocate roles and responsibilities between us. 

In fact, I just got back from the SiriusDecisions Summit and one of their sessions was "Marketing and Sales Operations: Cementing the Relationship".  In this session they indicated that their survey revealed that there are significant gaps in the ways these functions plan, report, build processes and manage data.  So consolidating these under single executive may be a good move. They also had a session on their Unified Integration Model and below are operation areas they identified with specific responsibilities (most are shared).

Marketing Operations

• Campaign Planning
• Communications Measurement

Sales Operations

• Sales Enablement

Shared

• Technology
• Measurement
• Rules for Sales and Marketing Alignment
• Pipeline Measurement

SiriusDecisions also has a lot of other great reports about Sales and Marketing Operation roles, models and frameworks as well as consulting time with their analysts.  If you're not already a subscriber, you might want to consider it.

[Anonymous]

I was at that same session.  Although, I'm not sure you absolutely have to have Sales and Marketing Ops rolling up under one executive.  I do completely agree though that Sales and Marketing need to stop operating within their own silos.  Getting both of the functions together to illustrate their operational structure to each other would be a great first step.  Then, after each department understands how the other works, you can leverage the strengths of each for an integrated approach. 

[Anonymous]

If you have an inside sales or telemarketing group, one idea to consider is to align  them under the marketing operations group. We found that when Inside Sales was part of the sales organization, they were generally making cold calls based on the prioritization of the field sales teams.

When we separated inside sales  from the rest of sales, we could prioritize their efforts on leads prioritized by our marketing automation efforts--either through lead scoring or other behavioral activity.  

Marketing automation driven lead scoring still  provided the pool of potential leads for sales, but Inside Sales was repsonsibile for sorting out the false positives with a higher degree of qualification--passing through those leads who not only fit the standard behavior and demographic filters, but wanted to take a call or meeting with a sales rep.  

Sirius rolled out something similar in their recent update to the demand waterfall, introducing the concepts of Automation Qualfied Leads and Teleprospecting Qualified Leads.  

http://www.demandgenreport.com/images/stories/SDS_Waterfall.png

This approach provides a little more flexibilty in handoffs--and probably better reflects the increasing engagement better than a hard  Qualified/Not Qualified handoff.