Background:
A large internal marketing department within a major business-to-business (B2B) manufacturing company lacks a standard process for measuring and setting targets for key marketing KPIs. Each team either has its own way of measuring KPIs or lacks a process entirely. This left marketing leadership with mixed messages on how campaigns were performing against strategy. Furthermore, business leadership lacked major visibility into marketing efforts.
What was Implemented:
After receiving buy-in from key leaders in the marketing department, a process was rolled out using elements of lean thinking and problem-solving across each team. The process was developed by a team of individuals, including myself. Primarily, we focused on creating a standard and shared Excel dashboard, organized by team, with multiple metrics across the marketing funnel. Ultimately, we followed the marketing funnel down to MQLs or material impact on the business.
While I primarily took the lead on development and operations of this dashboard across the department, other team members developed the lean thinking piece of this new process. Teams in the marketing department were trained to “run to the red” once goals were set for their metrics each month. Using visual indicators on the dashboard, these teams could see trends in metrics below goal for the month. Once this behavior was in place, these marketing teams learned complex problem-solving to diagnose and address the issues.
Once the dashboard was functioning, goals were added, and training was conducted, the team on this project worked to facilitate a cadence of leader standard work for the marketing leaders to ultimately take over. This revolved around a monthly process as metrics got populated and reviewed. The leader standard work started with a review in week one to identify areas in the red. In week two, leaders met with metric owners to address these areas. Week three was dedicated to a team effort to solve these areas in the red, and week four was time to begin execution of the plan to solve. While this wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it addressed most issues that arose with metrics.
The Outcome:
This project began at the start of 2024, with the leader standard work kicking off at the beginning of Q2. Over the next nine months, teams slowly began to implement this as part of their weekly cadence throughout the department. Additionally, marketing leaders had one place to gain crystal-clear visibility into how their teams and the department overall were performing. Because of the implementation of the process and the dashboard, marketing began to make data-driven decisions with their work. Previously, many decisions were made based on expertise and instinct without visibility into current data. Overall, this led to alignment across the department, efficiency in campaign planning, and visibility up to business-level leadership.