As a MOPs professional, perhaps leading a MOPs team, are you in an administrative or more strategic role? That’s a deceptively important question for you to answer.
As MOPs has grown as a function within a marketing organization, two operational models have taken shape—and remain the prevalent forms today: Task Master and Strategic Deployer. The former tends to be about back-office-type activities. The latter is more aligned with the vision of the Chief Marketing Officer and plays an essential part in framing their strategy and executing it.
Although there’s value in being a Task Master, there’s more as a Strategic Deployer. To become one—or become a more effective one—follow these three steps to climb up the MOPs strategic value ladder.
Step 1. Be an insights-driven MOPs professional
To be insights-driven means being a MOPs professional who consistently interprets data and applies that to decision-making. It means taking action on what the data is telling you to do.
That ability matters because Forrester found that insights-driven organizations are 2.2x more likely to drive double-digit growth than non-insight-driven ones.
As a Task Master, you’re developing reports and not much beyond that. You measure just about anything that can be measured. There is a likelihood you’re providing some degree of value, but there’s a greater chance they’ll ask you for more than what you’re providing. And that’s a problem because the marketer may not know how to interpret the data you’ve measured and reported. Over time, they’ll get frustrated and stop using the reports. Those reports will have wasted time and effort for all involved.
If you’re a Strategic Deployer, however, you’re doing something very different from a measurement perspective. You’re not just producing reports on vanity metric-type scenarios. Instead, you’re starting with the marketing plan. You use that to determine the needed measurement framework and put it in place, so it helps your organization to understand how an effort is performing against target goals.
Step 2. Be a MOPs professional who’s a design thinker
The next step in being a Strategic Deployer is to be a design thinker. You seek transformative marketing processes. That’s an intriguing orientation because a Forrester survey found that only 20% of B2B marketing
decision-makers identified redesigning processes as a top three priority for their organization. That finding is astounding because you can have a competitive advantage by focusing on process design.
Optimizing your processes gives you and your MOPs team multiple chances to shine because you’ve eliminated tedious tactical activities. You’ve reduced the number of touchpoints, streamlined the approval process, and other such matters to have time to spend on higher-value, more strategic work. It is where you can free yourself from being a Task Master to become a Strategic Deployer.
Step 3. Be a tech-savvy MOPs professional
The third step is to be tech-savvy, which means more than knowing how to use the technology. It’s understanding what technological capabilities exist in marketing and, perhaps, you can borrow for marketing’s needs outside the department.
To that end, develop solid relationships with your technology providers. Work with them to understand and influence their product roadmaps in ways that will help you, marketing, other units, and, not-so-incidentally, the vendors themselves.
Even though we’re witnessing an explosion in marketing technology, most marketers don’t understand it. They rely on people like you, MOPs professionals, to help them understand and leverage the technology to best advantage.
For further insight into being a Strategic Deployer making a major contribution to your organization’s marketing effectiveness and business performance, download the Stensul eBook, How to make your MOPs team more strategically valuable.
