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Worth Talking About: Assessing Operational Focus & Alignment
5 Tips for guiding an effective marketing review
by Mike Gospe

It’s January and marketers are back from winter break with renewed energy to tackle the new year. As such, it’s common to find marketing teams reviewing and assessing their campaign and program objectives and goals as they plan for Q1 and beyond. The biggest challenges these teams face may not actually be related to the business, per se. Instead, it’s in their ability to get aligned – not just with sales, but with each other - getting press relations, advertising, marcom, social media, web, events, everyone all on the same page and functioning as an integrated team. Despite the distaste some people have for meetings, the best way to drive and ensure alignment and operational efficiency is to carve out quality time to gather the cross-functional team and conduct a thorough assessment. This is the only way to come away with shared, relevant, and agreed upon priorities.

Marketing leaders, managers, and staff report that they spend a significant amount of time in meetings which are poorly run and do not produce meaningful results. It doesn’t take many of these ineffective meetings to derail internal processes, stagnate decision-making, and frustrate everyone. We need a fresh approach to meetings to ensure success. The best way to avoid this pitfall is to structure an operational review using some proven facilitation techniques that will keep the team focused, constructive, and on track.

Driving focus with an assessment technique

Whether you are a CMO with a team of veterans, a new director of marketing needing to quickly familiarize yourself with the global marketing organization, or a product marketing team leader who has newly expanded responsibilities, the assessment technique will help you guide the discussion, capture and align the issues.

The following 2x2 matrix technique allows for flexible discussion and discovery within a proven structure. This structure allows the team to categorize their input into four areas:

1. Sustain: What business practices or tasks are working well today and should be maintained?
2. Turn-around: What operational tasks are broken and require some major re-work?
3. Re-alignment: What tasks are we doing that need some minor tuning?
4. Start-up: What aren’t we doing that we should be doing?

The output of an example assessment is shown in the illustration. During a recent offsite a marketing leadership team led a frank assessment and prioritized the insights that are captured in this template. Action items were then identified and assigned to owners. The team worked the issues then reconvened a month later to update everyone on the progress and confirm the operational plan and metrics for a successful year.

5 steps to using this assessment approach

Step 1: Set ground rules
Begin by setting clear ground rules that will help focus the discussion to be constructive, action-oriented, and centered on elements the team members control. Some examples of helpful ground rules:

• Tell everyone to turn off cell phone ringers to avoid distractions. Laptops, cell phones, texting, etc. are not allowed.
• Allow for plenty of breaks so people can stay in touch while not disrupting or missing part of the discussions.
• Focus the discussion on items the team can control. When the conversation focuses on blaming outside forces, capture the issue on a “parking lot” flip chart, and then move back to what the team can directly control. Avoid the “blame game.”
• Balance the discussion. Ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard. If a team member is controlling too much of the conversation, thank him for his contribution and invite others to share their thoughts. Call on folks who may be sitting quietly.

Step 2: Clarify the context
While there can be an unlimited number of items the team may want to discuss, it’s important to clarify what context the team should be focusing on. As such, it is helpful to ask the team to consider three pillars that affect operational success:

1. Processes: formal or informal processes used to get quality work done
2. Plans: physical documentation, presentations, or other deliverables used to communicate with and align teams in order to achieve marketing goals and objectives
3. People: skill sets of existing staffs, open headcount, and outsourcing considerations

Step 3: Begin in a positive direction
Instead of starting the conversation on the negative, focus on what is working well. Identify strengths of the organization and acknowledge the best practices already in place. Capture this input in the Sustain category.

Step 4: Invite critical (but constructive) thinking
With a foundation set for what is working, next dive into the processes, plans, people issues that need some attention. As the group raises an issue, first focus discussion to clearly define it and where the issue fits: Turn-around, Re-align, or Start-up. Do NOT focus on problem-solving during this discussion. Problem-solving will happen later, after the offsite/workshop. The focus here is to clearly define and describe the issue and its implications for the rest of the business. (Note: Step 4 will require the most time on the agenda.)

Step 5: Prioritization and Action Plans
It’s not enough to identify issues and call it a day. As a final step, ask the team to review all of the issues captured and then prioritize which ones require immediate attention. You can use a common voting technique to help (e.g. if 20 issues are captured on flip charts around the room, give each team member votes to indicate their top 3 priorities. Tally the results and summarize the meeting with a “first-things-first priority list.” For those few items identified as priorities, spend a few minutes to drill down on each, asking for specific next steps and owners. Document these action plans as part of an executive summary that will be distributed to the group in the few days after the exercise.

Getting started

Depending on your need, you may want to hire an outside expert to work with you to design and facilitate an effective, energizing offsite or working session. Or, you might be interested in holding your own team offsite, or a series of shorter working sessions. Either way, this structured operational assessment approach should serve you and your team well. For questions or tips on how to structure the most effective “working session” offsite for executive staffs, sales teams, or marketing teams, contact Mike Gospe or visit Mike’s Marketing Campaign Development blog for more information.

About the Author:
Mike Gospe leads KickStart Alliance's marketing operations practice where he conducts team-based "practical application working sessions" to improve the effectiveness of lead generation campaigns and product launches. His fun, practical approach and roll-up-his-sleeves attitude energizes teams, helping them to get "real work done" while guiding them to the next level of excellence. Mike is the author of the books, Marketing Campaign Development, and The Marketing HIGH GROUND. He is also a faculty member of San Francisco State University’s College of Extended Learning where he teaches "Essentials of Integrated Marketing."

January 2012