How to Scale Your Marketing Operations

Growth without the proper framework will lead to disaster. You need robust strategy and operational alignment to take growth and turn it into compounding growth. 

So how do you do it? 

Let’s look at how so many companies flounder under the weight of growth – and the simple ways to implement operational excellence and keep growth accelerating.

Operations are the foundation of sustainable growth

Operations will control how fast you move. Companies need to invest in operations immediately once they’ve found initial traction. Often, when companies get investments or raise a round of funding, the first thought is to just staff up as quickly as possible.

But if you don’t first establish a robust operational strategy and process, the new hires will be set up to fail. Invest in operations first to enable the new employees to continue to help you deliver. 

Why scaling your operations is so important

I learned the importance of operations early in my career at a PLG organization.

I joined, and they were pre-$1M in ARR. I was the second marketing hire, and the company was scaling up quickly. 

We turned on a paid acquisition channel, which sparked an increase in growth within a month. We went from no sustainable channels to one that could scale up quickly. 

Within six months of my joining, they decided to scale out the sales team to talk to all of these leads. Because of the characteristics of this paid channel, we drove users who were high quality and very likely to recommend this product to co-workers. 

Great, right?

Well, not exactly. Immediately as the company started to hire salespeople, we began to run into problems. They didn’t invest in operational support or take the time to establish clear processes and criteria. This poor infrastructure led to challenges adapting, scaling, and innovating. Reporting, passing leads, etc., all became a massive headache and overdrawn process. 

The fallout:

  • Poor metrics on qualified leads

  • Days-long process of getting sales leads

  • The slowdown of the entire marketing department

Why were we failing?

Looking back on this experience now, it's kind of unbelievable, and it's actually hard for me to write about.

Think about it:

  • If you don't have the right qualification standards, the metrics don't matter.

  • If you pass the wrong leads to sales, you're not going to build a good relationship.

  • If you don't trust the data, your marketing team will slow down.

  • If you don't have the right data augmented in your database, you can't run campaigns quickly or be agile.

Thankfully, these days Marketing Automation has become common in every organization. But if we simply rely on technology without establishing a strategic process, automation won’t help. 

You need to start with objective and motivation and build the process around that. A well-though process is what drives sustainable growth. Technology simply makes replicating the process easier.

So how do you scale your marketing operations for growth?

We’ll talk about this a lot more in other articles, but let’s cover a few easy wins here. 

These are critical practices that can get you started – and give you the foundation you need to build on for compounding growth.

As your company grows, as a marketing leader, make sure that you:

  • First, know where you are aiming and why

  • Agree on qualification criteria with the sales team

  • Come to that meeting with a data-driven hypothesis on what qualifies a lead

  • Build qualification standards off of INTENT* and DATA**

  • Make sure the MQL is a predictor of revenue

  • Build robust data infrastructure using ZoomInfo so you can easily segment your database

  • Make sure you have go-to segmentations

*Intent is how a user signed up. If they asked for a demo, they had higher intent than if they downloaded an ebook.

**Data is the persona-graphic, technographic, and firmographic information you have on a lead that signs up.

If you have these processes established, you’re already on a path toward success.

Final Thoughts

Good operations allow you to move fast, and bad operations slow you down. It seems obvious, but many companies miss the foundation before they start a hiring frenzy. 

Without established, robust operations, you’ll lose time, distract your team, and lose momentum. But by spending some time investing in even the most fundamental processes and cross-team alignment, you’ll begin to see true success in your trajectory.

Follow me on LinkedIn or visit our resource page to learn more about compounding growth. 

You also can check our Podcast page, we tackle all of the challenges of B2B marketers looking to build systems that scale.

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