Being able to achieve growth for your business without a subsequent growth in spending—or scalability—is on the mind of most marketing operations leaders today. And if your business is like many, what once started as a lean organization where every staffer needed to wear multiple hats has transformed into a larger entity that would benefit from a few key hires to be at its most effective and efficient.
Deciding whether to outsource or hire in-house staff is your first choice— but if you decide to bring people onboard as employees, what specific roles should you seek to fill? Let’s take a closer look at three specific kinds of MOPS candidates that may appear on your radar, and talk about the benefits of each.
Data Diva
Today’s marketing automation technology provides your marketing operations team with a plethora of data, much of it pre-packaged into attractive, customizable reports. But if you don’t really understand what the data means after looking at it, don’t know what to do based on that data, or have concerns about the quality or compliance of that data, it will be difficult to move forward with confidence.
Accurate, meaningful, actionable data is at the core of your business’ success. Just like your marketing automation evangelist strives for excellence in marketing automation, your data diva does the same thing for your numbers. She standardizes form fields, KPIs and dashboards, streamlining the data collection and reporting processes. She sees the patterns and connects the dots on a higher level, providing scientifically-sound advice for future campaigns, targets and spending. And she leads the charge on data-focused initiatives like CASL, GDPR and other compliance requirements to ensure your standards align.
Technology Guru
At the core of your marketing operations is your martech stack—the integrated technology that allows you to gather, analyze and report on customer data, document customer relationships, develop, launch, execute and optimize campaigns and handle all the other automated aspects of your marketing organization. And if you want these functions to be able to run smoothly, it’s imperative that you have a superstar (or superstars!) who has a keen understanding of not only how this technology works, but how to get the most from its advanced features. As the old cliche goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest link—and if your weak link is in your team’s ability to use your martech stack to its full potential, you could be throwing away valuable marketing dollars.
Marketing Automation Evangelist
Much more than a cheerleader for marketing automation, the kind of superstar in this role understands marketing operation’s seat at the head of the business table and realizes its ability to drive innovation, streamline processes, improve workflows and drive results. Sharing this knowledge with relevant teams across the organization, the automation evangelist spearheads continual creation and adoption of marketing automation elements (e.g. templates, documentation, reusable campaign elements, etc.) The evangelist constantly looks for opportunities—including potential new technology—for marketing automation to make a positive impact on the business, its people, processes and customers, and leads their implementation.
Fearless Marketing Operations Leader
It goes without saying that every amazing MOPS team needs an amazing MOPS leader (like you!) to bring together the right combination of people, processes and technology to make everything run smoothly. Sandwiched between the MOPS team and the CMO, you oversee the marketing operations engine of the organization, fluently speaking both “technology” and “business” so that you can effectively translate business goals and vision into action items for your team. And the team simply wouldn’t function without you.
One Candidate, Multiple Roles
Just like I can be a mom, a marketer and a Denver Broncos fan, your marketing operations candidates can also be many things. So as you’re considering adding to your team, realize that while you’re hiring for a specific role, you may be getting someone who is capable of offering you much more.
For example, the data diva you bring on board may also be Marketo certified, or your tech guru may have the charisma and communication skills that make him a natural evangelist. If/when you find these superstar prospects, you’ll likely want to scoop them up quickly. After all, anytime the value of your resource far exceeds what you’re paying for it, that’s a scalability win!
Your marketing operations team is just one factor in your business’ ability to scale. What are the others, and how does your business rate? Find out with our scalability quiz.
