Welcome to Part 2 of: “A Nine-Part Practical Guide to Martech Enablement.” This guide is focused on outlining a process to building a data- and technology-driven marketing organization within your company.
In Part 1 of this guide, I outlined the process of taking full advantage of marketing technology. This is called “martech enablement.”
To reiterate, I define “martech enablement” as:
The process of bringing marketing and technology together to create the team, define the strategy, identify, implement and integrate the tools and execute the strategy that enables an organization to engage most effectively with their customer. Ultimately, it’s getting the right information at the right time into the hands of marketers so they can effectively engage their customers to build brand, market products and services and assist the sales organization.
Additionally, in Part 1, I shared how executing martech is analogous to driving a car — but as I noted, just driving isn’t satisfactory for your marketing organization. You must be prepared to race — and race continually — to provide your company with the competitive advantage necessary to win.
In this post, we’ll lay out a road map of what you can expect in this guide by introducing you to the “Race Team Analogy” and showing you its parallels within your marketing organization.
Bringing martech enablement to your organization
To successfully compete and win in the marketplace, your marketing organization must be prepared to race. Your organization must operate like a “Race Team,” possessing all the components and operations of a successful race team. “Race Team” is not just a synonym for the people in an organization, but it encompasses all the components of the race organization. The Race Team has four main areas for us to observe:
The team members
The race strategy
The car and technology
Race day and series execution
Similarly, in your marketing organization, you have your team, your marketing strategy, your martech stack and the execution of your marketing initiatives. This analogy will serve as the basis for the rest of this guide and assist in creating a successful martech-enabled organization.
The team members: Creating the team
As we go through the Race Team analogy, one part of the team is the actual people within the Race Team organization. The team is broken down into three primary areas of responsibility:
The Executive Team — Responsible for the sponsorship, high-level team strategy development and overall management of the team.
The Drive Team — Provides on-the-ground strategic input and executes on the specific race day strategies. This team isn’t just made up of the driver, but also consists of many other supporting staff.
The Crew — Constructs the car and supporting technology according to the team’s strategic objectives. They also provide race-day support and data to assist the drive team in executing the race strategy.
I’m sure you’re already seeing the parallels with your marketing organization. In Part 3 of this guide, we’ll be digging deep into the team structure and the individual members. We’ll examine the roles and responsibilities of the Race Team and how this corresponds to your marketing organization.
In Part 4 of this guide, we’ll examine approaches to building this team through the use of internal staffing and external partners to provide all the critical roles necessary to succeed.
The team’s strategy: Define the strategy
All three groups above must work in harmony to develop a strategy, as they each own components that are critical to the team’s success. A race team must win races to win the race series. In each race, what place a team finishes in will contribute points to the race series objectives, which are tallied to produce a total score for the race series.
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