Time to scale your marketing operations? Don’t worry, that’s a good place to be — it likely means your business or industry is growing. Still, scaling marketing operations can be challenging.
On this episode of B2B Revenue Acceleration, we asked Brendan Kavaney to join us for this discussion. We plugged him with questions about martech, data, internal expertise, and service marketing, and he did not disappoint.
Brendan is the Global Head of Field Marketing and Demand Generation at Mindtree, an IT services company with 20k employees and $1B run rate.
Here are the 4 questions to ask yourself as you begin to scale your marketing operations:
To Scale Our Processes, What Additional Martech Do I Need?
When you are looking to scale your marketing operations, how can you identify what additional martech to invest in?
Likely, any martech you are considering will fit into one of these buckets:
- Marketing automation
- Emailing
- Advertising
- Events
- Other purely experimental areas
This helps arrange your thoughts, so you can understand what area a given martech will influence. Now, ask yourself this defining question
Is this process running at scale, to the point that we need to optimize it?
Yes? Then dive in. (But keep reading, so you don’t overbuy.)
No? Then skip the martech.
Pro tip here: Marketing automation software is obviously likely one of your first thoughts. Some companies do need marketing automation on day one. Others simply don’t. Don’t buy it just because you can, and don’t overbuy:
Often, a super simple and inexpensive solution like MailChimp or Constant Contact has all the necessary components.
Do We Have the In-House Expertise to Use This Tech?
If you aren’t careful, you’ll overbuy: If you don’t have the in-house skillset to run the tools, you may end up spending more money on consulting than the tool itself.
Moral of the story?
Ensure you have the skillset in-house to use any new tech.
Are We Cleansing Our Data?
It’s continually cheaper and cheaper to purchase data, but keeping it clean, is another issue entirely.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when managing data:
- Ensure you have a governance structure.
- Make sure you have stakeholders at all levels of the company. Keeping data cleansed can’t simply be the job of one enthusiastic data analyst.
Is Our Data Consumable in the Language of Who’s Reading It?
You need to ensure all data is consumable in the language of those consuming it.
The same tech may provide data to both marketing and sales, but they’ll likely need entirely different reports.
This post is based on an interview with Brendan Kavaney from Mindtree.
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