Why your marketing won’t scale and what to do about it

Few teams can extend their reach like marketing.

But becoming a scalable marketing operation isn’t something that “kicks in” once the team grows to a certain size.?

To become scalable—and remain effective—marketing teams need, at the very least, a system of project management tools and workflows that allows them to minimize manual work.

These are operational table stakes. Without these foundational pieces in place, none of your efforts will scale in the long term no matter how many talented people join the team.

On the flip side, once you’ve built that foundation, marketing can drive exponential demand and business growth.

Here’s how.

Operations management gaps

Process gaps eat up significant resources.

Take sending an email, for example. For many marketing teams, one person will write the copy. Then another may build and schedule the email in Marketo. If a group needs to review it, they may individually ping the marketing operations team who then bounces it back to the demand generation team.

Does the process work? Yes—but can it scale?

Now imagine using your preferred project management tools to collaborate across the entire marketing organization. With rules, parameters, and project templates, you can configure these tools to trigger automatic requests to every stakeholder.

Instead of going back and forth with each other, each person can simultaneously make their contribution to the email, whether it’s writing the copy, building automation in Marketo, or identifying the audience.

If your foundation allows for automated task delegation and collaboration, it’ll save time and enable you to replicate the workflow for other tasks and initiatives.

Filling the gaps in your foundation?

Think through every action involved in each marketing process. What needs to happen? What can you automate? How can you streamline?

If you have 5 different people who need to review every email before someone schedules it, can you set your project management tools up to require each person to review and approve it??

If you don’t have a system like that, try using a Google doc with checkboxes and create calendar reminders for each stakeholder. Whatever you choose, don’t rely on anyone to remember—create a system that forces people to acknowledge tasks and take action.

Change management challenges

In an ideal world, getting people to adopt new practices is straightforward and seamless. In reality, change management is an ongoing and challenging process that requires some flexibility to succeed.

As marketers, we can’t force people to adopt every new process or project management tool we’re implementing. We also can’t rely on people reaching out to us whenever they need help with a new process or system. In all likelihood, something’s always going to come up, and some people will forget. Repeatedly.

To ignite change with some staying power, we first need to accept that the work of reinforcing new behaviors can get downright uncomfortable.

We also need to regularly remind our colleagues why we’re implementing certain process changes in the first place. We’re not trying to slow anyone down or take time away from their core responsibilities, we’re trying to improve the business.

Approaching change management with flexibility

Instead of expecting our colleagues to become model stewards of our current mission, we need to understand them and what their day-to-day work looks like, so we can then understand how our requests fit into their priorities. We need to build systems and processes that support the way things should work—and then we have to commit to communicating and enabling our colleagues regularly and often.

"I think fundamentally one of the biggest challenges that blocks effective communication when you're in an organization cross-functionally working is not understanding the person sitting across from you, their role, their stakeholders, their pain points, their KPIs." - Annette Reed

Reducing friction however you can is also a good idea. Rather than rip and replace tools, try to find things that are currently working and add or adjust from there.?

For example, if the team has a tool they’re already using, don’t change everything within the tool. Start by layering in some new things to create a softer landing place for that adjustment.?

When building any new process or system, introducing incremental changes will help to maintain the flexibility needed to scale your operations in the long term.

Similarly, remain proactive and inquisitive about what the experience is like for your coworkers, allowing their feedback to guide process refinements.

Don’t let the desire to extinguish bad behaviors completely govern your approach to change management.?

Focus first on building the process the way it needs to work, then add in checkpoints that refine and weed out bad behavior over time. It may slow things down a little bit, but that’s a small price to pay for quality and scalability in the long run.

Lack of innovation around resources

It’s been a difficult few years for marketing teams. Our budgets are flat but our targets are higher, and more often than not, we’re not getting the new headcount we want.

This raises the stakes on finding ways to do more with less. To reduce costs, you can go the traditional route of renegotiating contracts with certain vendors and using data to see which demand generation programs yield the best returns.

But another potentially more impactful approach is to reexamine your team’s structure and the individual role of each marketer. Are these people in the right positions?

Thinking critically and creatively about resources

With marketing teams experiencing major challenges around hiring new people, it’s worth looking at the resources you already have. Is the team you’ve built or inherited set up in the way you need to do business today??

Are their roles still a good fit for their skills? Are their roles still a good fit for the current needs of the business? Is there an area where you need new headcount that someone on the team could potentially grow into? Or does anyone on the team already have the skills to move into that area?

Take a good look at the current state of things, because we tend to shape our teams around previous ways of working. As a business grows and changes, its needs also transform. It’s critical to periodically ask whether you’re treating your resources effectively.

If you’re not, it may be harder to scale in the future.

The complex role of marketing in scaling growth

Marketing teams play a huge but sometimes misunderstood role in scaling business growth.?

Given the ability to reach more people than their resources and headcount would suggest possible, it’s not uncommon for marketers to achieve their goals in ways that won’t scale—at least for a while.

When it’s time to drive significant business growth, the best poised marketing teams are those that regularly evaluate and optimize their operations.

For more actionable solutions to everyday marketing challenges, check out this episode of the Real Talk Real Results podcast. https://bit.ly/3y4p42s