Where does Marketing Automation/CRM "live" in your organization?

[Anonymous]

Hey all, I would love to get feedback on how marketing automation and CRM systems are administered and run in your organization. Which department "owns" them? Who are the users? If more than one person is involved, what are the roles and responsibilites on the team? 

First, bit of background context to my question...

When I started at ClearFit I was employee #5 and the first marketing hire. Bringing on marketing automation and CRM systems was my first project, and I continued to run them off the side of my desk afterwards. 

Fast forward to today when we are approaching 40 employees with a 7 person marketing team, and Marketing Automation/CRM is my full-time responsibility. I am doing everything from administering the platform, quashing bugs, building programs and functionality, developing integrations, and establishing the architecture. I take a product management approach and serve a variety of internal "customers" including the rest of the Marketing team, Sales, Customer Success, etc. 

I have some part-time help, but it's reaching the point where I need a full-time team of my own to help with this as we scale, since it's already way too much for one person.

So...my real question is, what is the best way to do this? What hires would we need? Does "ownership" of these systems stay in Marketing or move somewhere else? 

Please chime in and share how things are structured in your organization (and for perspective, would be great to know how big your company is too). 

[Anonymous]

I like the hub and spoke model, in which you have a central marketing ops team that handles the creation and execution of programs and program owners around them that bring forward campaign ideas and own promotion, distribution strategy, etc.

Marketo themselves have a similar model that Jon Miller has shared in past presentations. There's a brief bit from him about it in this interview: http://chiefmartec.com/2012/09/cmo-should-focus-on-process-content-and-skills-interview/
 

[Anonymous]

Hey Drew, makes a lot of sense. That's a great interview BTW. 

I notice he refers only to marketing ops. I'm wondering if anyone deploys this with an integrated marketing and sales ops team or if the two are typically separate camps? 

[Anonymous]

I like the idea of an integrated team, but it'd be tough since the work rarely overlaps. That said, with multiple teams touching the same CRM and MA platforms, it's super important that they communicate regularly. That's how we operate.

[Anonymous]

It's interesting, we find in our company the work is highly connected, but I believe it's because our sales team is a bit unusual and we've automated a lot of our sales/customer success process using Marketo, so the work overlaps a lot. 

Would love to understand how the teams are structured (for both teams) at Spiceworks if you're able to share. 

[Anonymous]

Hey Justin, if you want to hit me up at drews<at>spiceworks.com I'd be happy to share.