Marketing Orchestration: Easing Tool Alignment Through Shared Engagement

Summary

Finding difficulty implementing new tools and processes in your business or marketing department? This blog outlines the steps to select a new tool, gain buy in from stakeholders, and align your teams on adoption.

By Sarah Threet, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing 

Do you have a difficult time choosing the right tools for your team? Feel like maybe you have too many tools in your stack collecting dust? Perhaps different members on your team, or different cross-functional teams, are not aligned on tools, leaving communications and data in silos? Worst of all, do these silos create roadblocks in getting your campaigns to market? How do you orchestrate this mess? 

 

Here’s a real life example from our client work: 

A client with large marketing team (200 members across functional marketing teams) had difficulty adopting and implementing a new tool, and in the process of implementation, they got resistance from some who would continue to use their own tools. They had trouble hitting deadlines as there was no well-established alignment across the different functional areas in marketing. Operations explained that historically these members would adopt their own tool or push for a new one that they would then abandon a year or so later. This led to a growing tech stack that was not consistently used nor aligned, and it ultimately never addressed their go-to-market problem.  

 

What steps should Operations take to gain buy in from the entire marketing team, enabling ease of orchestration?  

  

 Step 1. Survey team for needs gaps. 

1. Conduct a survey in the marketing department on tool preferences and process issues.  
2. Compile a list of the process issues to share with leadership. 
3. Tally the most prominent issues and the most recommended tools, focusing more on the issues and how they can be resolved holistically (ultimately operations and leadership should have the final say on what tools they think are going to be most appropriate in process efficiency).   
4. Email individual members to ask to expand on why they feel the need for a particular tool; what is the goal it would be solving? If there are patterns in particular functional areas, bring that attention to their leader. 

 

Step 2. Research tools that fit within the current stack (or could replace other tools) and be approved by IT.

1. Avoid overengineering your process and cluttering your stack 
   • Aside from obviously wasting money on tools that aren’t used/rarely used/only used by a couple of people, the biggest issue with too much tech, especially from an orchestration perspective, is creating unnecessary silos: 
     • Often this means different communications in different areas, leading to lack of transparency and missed details. 
     • It also means data collected through different means, with different inputs and standardization would then need to be consolidated and cleaned, wasting time. 
     • Lastly, it’s a headache for operations and leadership, and it delays getting to market on time. 
2. How to evaluate if you need a tool 
   • Does this tool allow access to information that couldn’t be accessed otherwise? 
     • Is something being done with the information being collected? 
     • What could it look like to gather this information in a different way? 
   • Will other team members be working with this tool and need access to the stored information? 
     • How collaborative is this tool? 
     • Could this tool be used as a storage of information and hub for communication? 
   • Ease of use? 
     • Is this tool relatively intuitive for all stakeholders who will need to use it?  
     • Is there another tool as all-encompassing that is easier to use?
     • Is there a set of tools that are easier to use and provide the same functions? 

TIP: Categories of tools to consider

• Identification tools: Identifies prospect accounts/targets within your target audience or ICP.   
• Attention-grabbing tools: Captures the attention of prospects.   
• Engagement tools: Allows prospects to engage with your business through content, ads, sales rep, etc..   
• Optimization tools: Allows you to analyze data and provide insights that can be used to optimize performance of marketing and sales efforts.   
• Expansion tools: Allows you to ensure customers are happy, by providing great service and anticipating churn. 
• Foundational tools: The base of your business. These tools interconnect various tools and are the core tools to help your business operate from a marketing and sales perspective. This includes behind the scenes, day-to-day tools/tech that help marketing and sales efforts run smoothly (including tracking projects and facilitating communication). 

 

Step 3. With IT and leadership approval, test drive a tool with a pilot group on a standalone project or campaign. 

1. The pilot group should be composed of members from different functional groups, backgrounds, tenures, etc.. If testing a campaign, there should be one person per functional group to test the end-to-end process. 
2. If you have some particularly vocal members who are very opinionated about tool selection, and have been known “disrupters” in the process because of their resistance to adopting certain tools, strongly consider including them in the test pilots to better gain their buy in. Without their involvement in testing, they may continue to cause hold ups in flow post-implementation. 
3. Pick KPIs based on the “why” of the tool to gauge whether it is working as intended. Make sure those metrics are important to leadership for their final buy in. 

 

Step 4. Celebrate the choice of the new tool, focusing on the “why” and continuously reiterate benefits. 

1. Provide the results of the test run to the leadership team and your final decision to adopt the tool. Position the tool’s benefits to align with KPIs and goals that leadership prioritizes. 
2. With leadership approval, announce and celebrate the tool adoption to the rest of the team, along with test results, educating on the benefits the tool will provide to each functional team, including performance benefits.  
3. As it is necessary for effective change management, reiterate why this tool is necessary from the start of implementation through its final stages. 

 

Step 5. Establish training and process workflow changes. 

1. Schedule training with teams. 
2. Provide documentation on process workflow changes and open to questions. 
3. Update onboarding documents. 

 

Step 6. Set boundaries. 

1. Ultimately operations should be accountable and responsible for finalizing tool adoption as it is part of their role to maintain the tech stack and hold teams accountable to the process. 
   • Be sure that buy in from management has been a priority from the beginning because operations may need their help in enforcing process changes among the different teams.  
2. Plan a continuous communication campaign.
   • Establish a strong change management team that encompasses members from every team as a representative. 
   • Have regular check ins on tool adoption, questions, areas of improvement and resistance (identify the root cause of resistance). 
   • Build in more training/mentorship when needed. 
   • Celebrate and award “champions” of the tool to motivate adoption. 

 

Conclusion

Remember that no process is ultimately fool-proof and everything needs regular iteration; that is the goal in implementing a continuous communications campaign. Most roadblocks should be more easily managed through team surveys, meaningful inclusivity of disrupters, gaining early buy in from leadership, and providing an easy means of communication. In the end, hold your boundaries to ensure that new processes get a fair shot before beginning iteration.