As we step into a new year and quarter, marketing operations teams<\/a> face the perennial challenge of setting new annual goals that are both ambitious and achievable. Goal setting for marketing operations teams isn\u2019t just about hitting numbers but crafting a roadmap for growth and innovation. When setting goals, Marketing Operations teams should consider crafting different sets of goals for two audiences: your public goals, which will be shared with your marketing and sales partners, and your team\u2019s internal goals, which will only be shared within your MOPs team.<\/p>\n When creating your goals, it\u2019s important first to understand if your Marketing Operations (MOPs) teams have adopted a \u201cProduct Management\u201d mindset. This product-first approach involves thinking of your marketing operations team and platforms as a product, continuously evolving to meet the needs of your organization and customers. By doing so, you can create a more agile, responsive, and effective MOPs function. One way to adopt this type of mindset is by building a roadmap of planned work for your MOPs team, broken down into monthly sprints. Jessica Kao recently highlighted the success she\u2019s had<\/a> with this approach on the RevOps podcast.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Once your team has adopted the approach of building a roadmap around monthly sprints, you can start to align both of your sets of goals around that roadmap.<\/p>\n There are many different types of goal-setting frameworks and methodologies, but at a fundamental level, goal-setting usually falls into two approaches: top-down or bottom-up. The top-down approach is often led by upper management and passed down through the hierarchy of the organization, with each subsequent level of management aiming to align their goals with the organization\u2019s overarching objectives and vision. Think of your public goals as your \u201ctop-down\u201d goals. <\/p>\n On the other end of the spectrum, \u201cbottom-up\u201d goal setting is led by employees at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. These goals are often more practical and immediately relevant to the \u201con-the-ground\u201d challenges of daily operations. Think of your internal team goals as your \u201cbottom-up\u201d goals.<\/p>\n When planning your public goals, talk to your internal stakeholders about what their objectives are for the year, map those objectives to what capabilities your MOps team requires to deliver against those objectives, and then break each capability down into what \u201cquick wins\u201d you can deliver for that stakeholder. For example:<\/p>\n In the example above, the long-term vision might be to launch a holistic multi-channel campaign targeting the automotive industry. But that might mean developing new lead management and personalization capabilities within your MAP platform that you know could take six months or more to build out. But if you go back to your stakeholders and tell them that you need six months to build those capabilities out, they are going to be frustrated and view the MOPs team as a roadblock to achieving their goals rather than an asset that can help them win.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, how can you break those capabilities down into smaller \u201cquick wins\u201d to satisfy your internal partners that you\u2019re supporting their objectives? Identifying quick wins is critical, and you can often measure their success in a binary way -did they launch or did they not? That\u2019s the type of product-focused, \u201crapid prototyping\u201d mindset that can help your team plan each monthly sprint. Deliver a quick win each month while continuing to work on the long-term capabilities in the background.\u00a0<\/p>\n Month 1. <\/strong>Create an email template that the sales team can send on their own to their automotive prospects.<\/p>\n Month 2. <\/strong>Build upon that single email template to launch a three-email \u201cnurture sequence\u201d that sales can enroll their automotive prospects into.<\/p>\n Month 3. <\/strong>Launch a webinar targeting the automotive industry.<\/p>\n Month 4. <\/strong>Launch paid search and landing page.<\/p>\n Month 5. <\/strong>Etc., etc.<\/p>\n Communicating these monthly accomplishments to your internal stakeholders is vitally important to keep them engaged and supportive of your team. How you choose to communicate it might vary \u2014 it could be in a monthly email or one-pager, but the most important aspect is to show that your team is delivering value quickly and consistently. <\/p>\n That consistency is going to build confidence in your team from your stakeholders and ultimately buy you more time to not only improve upon the substance of these \u201cquick wins\u201d to deliver more full-fledged capabilities within your platforms but, perhaps even more importantly, it will provide the goodwill necessary to give your team the space to continue to advance your own internal goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dig deeper: Megan Michuda: Spotlight on the expert<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n When thinking about the goals that you set for your internal marketing operations team, you want to think about what success really means for your team. Success in these terms might not be the traditional metrics that initially come to mind for a marketing operations team, like \u201cincrease marketing qualified leads.\u201d Instead, true success may be things that are harder to quantify but are more impactful to your team\u2019s day-to-day work. <\/p>\n Success in these terms might be things like:<\/p>\n These types of goals take time to show progress against, and therefore, reviewing progress against them every quarter will make more sense than a monthly cadence. At the beginning of the year, schedule these quarterly reviews with your marketing operations team and hold the team accountable for reviewing the goals that you set and the progress that you\u2019ve made against them. <\/p>\n Each quarter, you can assess if these are still the right goals and the right priority for your team and also develop tactics and plans for how you can make more progress against them.\u00a0<\/p>\n As we embrace a new year, the importance of taking a strategic, structured approach to goal setting is critical to enhancing the reputation of MOPs across your organization as well as fostering a sense of accomplishment and motivation within your team. This type of goal-setting strategy ensures that MOPs teams are not just operational backbones but also key contributors to strategic initiatives and growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n From AI to layoffs, it\u2019s been quite a year. How has it been for you? Please take our short survey so we can tell you the state of martech salaries and careers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nApproach your MOps with a \u201cproduct management\u201d mindset<\/h2>\n
Designing Monthly Sprints for Continuous Improvement:<\/h3>\n
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Why two sets of goals?<\/h2>\n
Public \u201ctop-down\u201d goal setting<\/h2>\n
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Internal \u201cbottom-up\u201d goal setting<\/h2>\n
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\n What success looks like<\/strong><\/td>\n How do we know we\u2019ve achieved this?<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Marketing Operations is viewed as a strategic partner<\/td>\n MOPs are included in upfront planning meetings consistentlyThe CMO regularly includes bullet points about the MOPs teams\u2019 progress in their own goals and status updates<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Decreasing the number of urgent requests that come to the team<\/td>\n Track your team\u2019s work by tickets, hours, story points (etc.)\u2026 what percent of work is urgent? What percent are \u201cad hoc\u201d requests vs planned work on your roadmap?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n MOPs team members have time for professional development<\/td>\n Create a list of skills or topics the team wants to develop, and keep track of what activities have been done to improve knowledge in those areas (webinars or conferences attended, free product trials to test, etc.)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n We build the necessary documentation around systems and processes that always get put to the backburner<\/td>\n List out the documentation that needs to be created, and regularly schedule updates\/reviews to keep it up to date<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n
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