As the marketing operations function evolves, its leaders must continuously assess stakeholders’ needs. A complete assessment should be performed at least annually. By asking questions, marketing operations can learn about stakeholder expectations and satisfaction levels and prioritize deliverables that add value. In this report, we present a guide to facilitate marketing operations’ discussions with its stakeholders, including how to receive feedback, what questions to ask, and how to act on the findings.

Cristina De Martini

Building a successful marketing operations function requires leaders to design an organizational model with careful consideration of the value that the function must deliver to the marketing organization. Key factors to take into account include goals, competencies, processes, and costs. In this report, we introduce the Marketing Operations Functional Design Process, which provides a structured approach for designing a marketing operations team.

Cristina De Martini

Marketing operations has a valuable role to play in the marketing ecosystem, enabling the organization to deliver a superior customer experience and grow revenue. Without an effective marketing operations function, CMOs will struggle to succeed. To assist organizations in designing a best-practice marketing operations team, Forrester has developed the Marketing Operations Range of Responsibilities Model. This model depicts the prioritized scope of a fully functioning marketing operations team and tiers responsibilities for each scoped discipline from strategic to tactical. In this report, we explain how organizations can use the Forrester Marketing Operations Range of Responsibilities Model to define the function’s contribution to the business, develop more advanced capabilities to make a greater impact, and distinguish its role clearly from other interlocking teams.

Cristina De Martini

B2B pipelines are not built with either leads or accounts; pipeline and revenue are generated by identifying and converting opportunities. Organizations encounter a variety of opportunity types, including opportunities to win first-time customers, retentions, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities (see Figure 1). Virtually all B2B revenue plans contain a mix of these distinct opportunity types — each with its own characteristic conversion and velocity rate as the opportunity moves from being targeted to closed/won. As a result, the mix of opportunity types in an organization’s revenue plan strongly influences revenue engine performance. In this report, we examine B2B opportunity types, their main variants, and the characteristics of each that impact how revenue engines perform.

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Kerry Cunningham

,

Amy Bills

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Vicki Brown

,

Cristina De Martini

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Terry Flaherty

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Lisa Nakano

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Mike Pregler

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Steve Silver

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Anne Slough

A new marketing operations leader must assess the key challenges facing the marketing organization, based on the agenda of the CMO and the results of an initial discovery process. He or she must then prioritize areas of initial focus, gain agreement on short- and long-term initiatives, and then take action to address critical issues and opportunities. In this report, we outline a marketing operations leader’s key activities for the first 90 days in the role and reference relevant Forrester research to ease the transition.

Cristina De Martini

This Forrester B2B Role Profile provides a job description and competencies for the vice president/director of marketing operations role, which leads the marketing operations function in a B2B organization and is responsible for enabling the execution of the CMO’s vision. This function evolves into the chief of staff to the CMO in many organizations as the organization continues to grow and mature.

Cristina De Martini