B2B technology companies of all sizes have witnessed a stunning shift in their operating environment over the past few years. The promise of AI and related technologies has risen at the same time as higher interest rates and discerning market conditions have forced restraint, as well as a renewed focus on fundamentals, automation, productivity, and, of course, profitability.
This duality of 2023 continues to shape how B2B revenue (Sales, Marketing, Product, and Success) teams think about their go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Balancing the promise of advanced technology, with productive restraint, and longer-term thinking, is central to the minds of GTM executives and their teams.
The challenge lies in how to implement foundational frameworks that can produce buy-in across the organization, with a clear pathway toward producing results that can keep any business afloat in uncertain times.
Focus and fundamentals have already shifted how many organizations and revenue teams look at the traditional marketing funnel, with an evolved understanding that buyer behavior, customer data limitations, and algorithmic changes have reduced the efficiency of broad, lead-based playbooks.
This has left revenue teams with two choices. They can continue to execute in a conventional B2B GTM framework, attempting to reach a broad audience through marketing content downloads, outbound prospecting, and an increasingly noisy digital advertising environment. Or, they can align the entire revenue organization–including product, finance, and beyond–around a transformational effort to define, unify, and personalize customer and prospect experiences to deliver focused, shared, and predictive results.
If you are like most GTM professionals, the second path is the obvious choice. And for Marketing Ops leaders, this opportunity to transform digital operations and strategy is a rare moment to lead from the front. It offers the chance to deliver a high-performing tech stack, trusted and actionable enterprise data, and a cross-functional team aligned on goals, processes, and metrics/KPIs.
If the idea of implementing this transformation sounds hypothetical and worse, daunting, we understand. That’s why this article champions a new model for Marketing Ops, and the Demand Gen and Digital teams they partner with, to simplify the process.
This new framework is Operations-Enabled Growth, which places a paramount focus on investing in and executing fundamental marketing operations best practices. By breaking down silos, eliminating technical debt, and orchestrating prioritized sales motions and marketing campaigns, this framework promises not just growth, but sustainable, predictable revenue from all of your digital channels.
Challenges in the Marketing Landscape
The dynamic nature of the B2B marketing landscape has presented formidable challenges for revenue teams. Silos within marketing teams–not to mention across the Revenue team and beyond–hinder productivity and decision-making, creating an environment that is often at odds with each other. Additionally, Marketing Ops leaders and technologists often grapple with the burden of years of vendor-saddled shelf wear and technical debt, impeding progress toward clear-sighted and actionable customer data.
Executives, while well-intentioned, often force priorities that lead to rushed, sporadic marketing efforts, commonly referred to as “random acts of marketing,” which contribute to wasteful practices and divergence from operational excellence. For Marketing Ops, this means more time is spent away from growth, and instead is focused on quick fixes, workarounds, and hacks.
The cumulative effect of these challenges manifests across the various facets and teams of marketing, creating what we like to call: SOS, or Symptoms of Silos.
Figure 1: Typical example of siloed teams or resources supporting digital demand generation. Teams or resources may be operating towards a common goal, but have their own projects, priorities and/or development timelines. This independent, siloed approach leads to negative effects of the symptoms for various teams as described below:
Digital Marketing
- Slow Development Cycles: When hindered by cumbersome processes, digital marketing activities and campaigns rarely get off the ground running smoothly.
- Manual Handoffs: Inefficient transitions between design and engineering teams can impact efficiency and brand cohesion across digital properties.
- Brand and UX Discrepancies: Lack of unified brand standards across digital touchpoints damages the customer experience.
- Poor Web Performance and Non-personalized Experiences: Site speed performance issues resulting in suboptimal organic rankings, and non-optimal experiences can diminish conversion rates and inbound pipeline inefficiencies.
- Backend CMS Challenges and Web Analytics Gaps: The choice in CMS is not aligned with business goals, implementation shortcomings, or other technical debt, leading to user-unfriendly experiences and long lead times to new content or experience launches. Similarly, choices and/or configuration of analytics platforms can negatively impact downstream insights and data activation deeper within the stack.
- Undefined Security and Maintenance Protocols: Lack of streamlined processes for technology maintenance can increase security risks.
Demand Generation
- Low Conversion Rates: Inability to move the needle on high-intent engagement points. Non-existent or limited conversion rate optimization process.
- Limited Optimization: Ineffective paid advertising programs with siloed (in-platform only) optimization tactics. Low confidence of where to invest the next dollar.
- Underutilized Data: 1st and 3rd party intent data are not optimized or activated effectively by marketing or sales.
- Alignment Challenges: Lack of process coordination between digital, ops, and of course sales, along with limited SLAs and visibility into handoffs between teams.
Marketing Ops and Analytics
- Data Quality Issues: Duplication and validation problems for both customer and lead records.
- Manual Reporting: Lack of automation forces inefficiencies across the Revenue organization, but also at the executive level when inconsistent numbers and metrics come into play.
- Process Documentation Gaps: Blindspots cause inefficient operations across the board, particularly when trying to ramp new resources across the Revenue team.
- Limited Resources: Despite significant martech investments, resourcing (internal or external) remains restricted.
- Unclear Data Requirements: Lack of definitions impacts insights generation and performance reporting.
Product Marketing
- Broad ICP: When your ICP is loose and not clearly defined, the downstream impact on sales and marketing is exacerbated. Part of this is due to attributes that are mostly reliant on broad firmographic data rather than granular signals such as technographics, initiatives, maturity, team size, etc.
- Limited User Insight: Organizational silos hamper cohesive customer feedback collection ultimately creating friction between product marketing and product. This misalignment obscures the best path for a user to move across marketing content and documentation through product/in-app usage.
- Ineffective Data Utilization: Without the right customer usage and preference data, content and messaging strategy fails to make an impact at the ICP level.
Sales Ops
- Unbalanced Territory Assignments: Due to loose ICP definitions and an inability to source and prioritize look-alikes at scale, we see an uptick in low morale, rep attrition, and under/over-investment in field activities.
- Limited Visibility: Inconsistent workflows from marketing-sourced handoffs, limited campaign context, and visibility into velocity.
Execs
- Internal Finger Pointing: In-the-weeds bickering around team accountability regarding data capture or loosely defined KPIs.
- Untrusted Source of Truth: Static performance reporting, coupled with “this is how it’s always been reported” type conversations. Who owns the reporting, and accountability (e.g. Sales vs. Marketing).
- Lethargic GTM motions: Belief that end-to-end systems and processes related to GTM motions (e.g. campaign launch, new experience launch, new messaging, reporting, etc.) take too long and are not adaptable to the dynamic environment required when scaling operations.
Operations-Enabled Growth Framework
So, what is Operations-enabled Growth (OEG)? And how do you execute on this model?
Fundamentally, OEG is focused on Marketing/Digital Ops and other partners taking a scalpel to underlying marketing infrastructure and technology to uncover a true understanding of marketing, sales, product, and customer data. This, in turn, produces the ability to orchestrate a predictable, process-oriented, and efficient GTM strategy that connects marketing efforts to sales results.
Clean data, with a high-performing and efficient tech stack (e.g. Web CMS, Analytics, CRM, Marketing Automation, ABM, CDP, and more), alongside descriptive and aligned sales and customer engagement metrics and definitions will create true marketing and sales alignment. As a result, your revenue team will begin to see predictable and efficient revenue growth.
So how do we get there? And what does a mature organization look like? There are eight primary facets to OEG that need to be capitalized on to truly orchestrate the framework:
I. A Unified, Personalized Brand Experience
- The foundation of Operations-Enabled Growth lies in delivering a seamless journey for customers across marketing, product, sales, and success touch points. This entails creating vital handoffs between these teams, ensuring a clean, unified user experience, and setting up efficient processes for lead conversion. Marketing Ops is destined to play a foundational role here, but ultimately, a deep partnership across sales, product, and success is required.
II. Secure, Scalable Web Infrastructure
- Recognizing the website and the rest of your marketing technology as a critical product, this component emphasizes the importance of a performant web infrastructure. This not only produces high productivity with campaign and product marketing programs but also ensures the clean flow of data for informed decision-making. Marketing–again, usually Marketing Ops as owner– should have full autonomy over the web experience, with largely self-service content editing across other teams as needed.
III. ICP Alignment, Definition, & Scoring
- Fostering alignment across the Revenue team involves defining and scoring the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Ensuring consistency in definitions and targeting the right accounts and personas with clear messaging is essential to avoid marketing, and selling, to the wrong audience.
IV. Process Standards and Definitions
- This component is about creating alignment in processes, eliminating finger-pointing, and ensuring that campaigns are executed with clear goals. Streamlining and creating SLAs around the inbound lead qualification process and making necessary technology configuration changes are integral to this step. Most sales organizations will have a firmly established sales methodology (e.g. MEDDPPICC), and building lead engagement, handoff processing in alignment with these methodologies are critical to success.
V. Data Creation, Cleanliness, and Activation
- Operations-Enabled Growth is a framework that supports the natural inclination of Marketing Ops to lead data-driven transformation. Marketing Ops leaders must dedicate the time and resources to define data taxonomies, creation processes, flows, and activation for not just marketing, but in partnership with downstream systems and teams. This ensures consistent and accurate data, improving visibility at the top of the funnel and informed decision-making. This is not menial work; it’s essential to create a sound foundation to accelerate transformation and increase the likelihood of success.
VI. Lean, Purposeful Tech Stack
- Avoid shelfware, and instead, build a purposeful tech stack designed to support data creation and analytics across marketing channels, sales interactions, and product usage. A purposeful tech stack also aligns with GTM actions, providing an automated and streamlined approach to executing campaigns, reporting and routing lead activity, and optimizing for desired insights across the customer lifecycle. Purposeful tech stacks could include CMS, Web/User analytics, CRM, BI, ABM, marketing automation, and other tools. It’s up to each OEG champion to determine overlaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities to consolidate, where applicable.
VII. Orchestrated Demand Activation
- High-performing demand generation, coupled with optimal customer acquisition economics requires cross-functional orchestration. For demand generation campaigns to run as efficiently as possible, marketing operations must coordinate multi-faceted support, enabling optimization across audiences, experiences, copy/creative, tracking/attribution, next best action, and more.
VIII. Trusted, Defined, and Timely Insights
- Continuous improvement is a key principle in OEG. After-action reporting allows for reassessing and realigning definitions, standards, SLAs, etc. This iterative approach ensures that insights remain trusted, defined, and timely. Alignment across teams on data creation sets the conditions for predictive/ AI-assisted insights.
Driving Revenue Transformation: Measuring The Success of OEG
Figure 2: This example demonstrates an Ops-Enabled Growth approach across teams and resources supporting digital demand generation. Shared priorities for strategic projects, common metrics, and well-defined handoff processes lead to the following outcomes: Increased Productivity, Efficient Growth, Trusted Insights, and Improved CX.
The success of OEG is gauged across four core value pillars by not just your Revenue team, but your entire organization:
Productivity
Seamless handoffs between teams will foster increased collaboration and alignment, including between teams within marketing (e.g. Design and Engineering, Ops and Demand), as well as across the organization (e.g. Sales and Success). Increased productivity can shorten sales cycles and lower customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Growth
Efficient and predictable revenue growth is achieved through streamlined lead engagement processes, precise targeting, and data and infrastructure optimization. Results will include improved conversion rates throughout the funnel, higher ACV, and increased pipeline from target accounts.
Insights
Automated, trusted insights enable data-driven decision-making across all GTM campaigns and revenue-generating activities. Look for reduced time-to-insight for leads and opportunities, and improved ROI on marketing campaigns, for example.
CX
With a streamlined Design and DevOps process, including automated design-to-developer handoff, your team can deliver a unified brand experience across all channels (e.g. website, product/in-app, mobile, developer, or investor portals). The result is a clean, high-quality, cross-device customer experience that conforms to brand standards and ensures proper activation for all users seeking a one-to-one engagement with your brand.
For different teams within your GTM org, these translate into specific outcomes:
Digital Marketing
- Faster Development Cycles: Streamlined processes for agility, onboarding new resources, and autonomy for content creators/editors.
- Automated Handoffs: This ensures efficient transitions between design and engineering.
- Unified Brand Experiences: Across all customer touchpoints (along with continuity of the brand in-product).
Demand Generation
- Improved Conversion Rates: Enhanced program performance across digital channels.
- Personalized Experiences: Tailored and timely interactions aligned with the right buyer journey.
- Lower CAC: Optimized customer acquisition costs.
Marketing Ops and Analytics
- Improved Data Quality: Reduced errors, duplicates, and purposeful data creation.
- Defined Processes: Streamlined operations for better outcomes and less firefighting.
- Higher ROI: Achieved through a refined, high-performing tech stack.
Product Marketing
- ICP Based on Data: Identify ICP confidently and at scale, ensuring focused and tested target attributes.
- Trusted Data Regarding Content Journeys: Enhanced content strategy with accurate and actionable customer data and intelligence.
Sales Ops
- Better Alignment: Enhanced collaboration around campaigns including improved visibility on the handoff from marketing, which results in greater velocity from marketing-sourced leads.
- ICP Alignment: Better, more confident messaging and account/persona targeting cohesion.
Execs
- Growth Efficiency: Improved customer acquisition, retention, and expansion through productivity gains, data-driven decision-making, and alignment across marketing, sales, product, and success.
- Time/scale/speed/security: Scale to meet the needs of your customers with the agility required in high-growth markets, without sacrificing security or compliance protocols.
- Trusted Insights: Gain confidence in strategic investment decisions when armed with trusted insights and the assurance that initiatives will be executed efficiently.
Case Study: DataBank’s OEG Approach
DataBank, a leading U.S. data center, co-location, and managed service provider exemplifies the transformative power of Operations-Enabled Growth. The company recognized the need to significantly revamp its growth operations and infrastructure, given the substantial growth that the company experienced in a short period of time. Partnering with Convertiv for an initial assessment on a transformable, but phased roadmap, led to expected outcomes of Efficient Growth, Trusted Insights, Improved CX, and Increased Productivity.
As part of this transformation, Databank:
- Developed a design system derived from the new brand guidelines, enabled accelerated development timelines, and automated handoff from design to engineering teams (A Unified Brand Experience).
- Relaunched and optimized the web experience, infrastructure, and DevOps process to align with GTM requirements, reducing time-to-market for new experiences (Secure, Scalable Web Infrastructure).
- Utilized 1st and 3rd party data, to prioritize, score, and activate against target account selection, narrowing resources and budgets against a focused set of accounts (ICP Alignment, Definition, and Scoring).
- Revised GTM processes, standards, and definitions creating alignment between Sales and Marketing teams (Process Standards and Definitions).
- Streamlined data collection across the tech stack based on requirements from approved processes and definitions (Data Creation, Cleanliness, and Activation).
- Assessed, selected, and onboarded appropriate technology to address gaps in data and capabilities to support GTM motions (Lean, Purposeful Tech Stack).
- Instituted structural optimizations for inbound campaigns and lead qualification processes, reducing CAC and improving conversion rates through the funnel for marketing sourced pipeline (Orchestrated, Demand Activation).
- Created trusted, on-demand performance reporting, reducing time-to-insight by 90% (Trusted, Defined, and Timely Insights).
During DataBank’s framework-based transformation, the marketing organization underwent a period of stabilization, optimization, and realignment that led to substantial improvements in growth efficiency, team productivity, and data-driven decision-making. Metrics achieved during this time include a 302% increase in Marketing Sourced Opportunities (MSOs) from 2020 to 2023, as well as a 391% increase in marketing source revenue (MSR).
And, for the overall business, DataBank enjoyed a 135%+ goal attainment in 2023, highlighting the opportunity available for organizations exploring an Ops-Enabled Growth Transformation.
“The Convertiv OEG framework has been transformative for our marketing efforts at DataBank. It has modernized our martech stack, matured our GTM strategy, enabled us to be more data-driven in our investments, and more than tripled our marketing sourced pipeline yield while maintaining a steady headcount and investment the past 3 years.”
– JP Laqueur
Moving Forward
Operations-Enabled Growth is not just a framework; it’s a strategic shift toward building a sustainable, productive, and efficient go-to-market strategy. By addressing challenges, aligning teams, and focusing on key operational pillars, businesses can ensure growth, predictability, and insights for repeatability in 2024 and beyond.