Marketing teams create outputs. The Marketing team, delivers impact. The marketing experience that a customer receives is the product of a marketing function. A company brand. A social media presence. Digital advertising. Promotions. Events. Digital advertising from promotions. Social media for events. In the company brand. They are all the outputs of marketing teams. All elements are interconnected and all connections invoke dependencies.

Prioritisation is one of the key outputs you should aim for from any strategic planning exercise. Too easily strategic planning can devolve to list building of all the things that need be done rather than removing items from the list and ordering those that remain. Tactically planning a detailed activity and touchpoint plan for the next 12 months is not the same as strategy, and to confuse the two can be a huge drain on productivity.

For many marketing teams, the pressures of supporting the every whim of product owner, sales person or General Manager can result in a cacophony of competing demands. Without a way of keeping them in check these demands sap the energy of the marketing function, reduce the value the team delivers and create noise in the system.

Industry and horizontal marketing models need careful consideration to avoid duplication. Prioritisation is not about getting to perfect, it’s about getting to the best imperfect solution: optimise business impact and value from resources available.

Informed decision making on how global scale, including localisation, supports different Geographies is required to ensure that limited resources are applied to maximum effect. Efficiency requires leveraging the benefits of scale engines across different markets to maximise coverage from the constraints available.

Constraints are all the limitations that prevent you from saying ‘yes’ to everything. The best performing organisations take time to understand the business value that marketing can create and align their resources from the top of that list until constraints prevent them from doing more.

The purpose of planning is to get alignment on how to execute your strategy. To align on how you will deliver work to meet your goals and objectives. Integrated planning is the process of driving that alignment as one marketing organisation. The purpose of integrated planning is to make sure relevant information rolls upwards, downwards and sideways in an organisation so that teams work together, rather than in parallel with each other.

Robert Greenleaf, often called the father of the servant leadership movement, said of decision making “on an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.” Now ask yourself, how does a team make decisions?

How you speak informs how you are understood, be that to internal teams or external audiences. Leads, goals, objectives, campaigns, programs activities, awareness, discovery, consideration – a common language makes communication, analysis and collaboration easier, faster and more effective. And with customers, the more consistently you articulate the value of your solutions, the more those messages will resonate and the greater the impact they’ll deliver.

A common language removes ambiguity on objectives and supports prioritisation of work into the right teams and keeps everyone on the same path to success. Without some kind of performance framework that connects activity measurement, owners and actions, random act of marketing easily come to sap your effectiveness.

Your thought leadership should uniquely articulate your understanding of the market and customers, aligned to your purpose. Your programs, campaigns and offer content articulate your brand, your thought leadership, and your value through connected stories. And you integrate these messages together across the customer’s journey and for the buying group.

How a team operates is more than the sum of its processes and hierarchies. Principles and culture, what you centralise for scale vs devolve to regions or teams, how you use internal communications and enablement and culture and leadership are all essential to driving operational excellence.

How a team operates is more than the sum of its processes and hierarchies. In an environment of volatility, uncertainty, confusion and ambiguity, which could be driven by external factors like market pressures or internal factors like high degrees of change, principles and values can persist as the guardrails to continue effective operations, even when the unexpected occurs.

Scale marketing is the exercise of doing work to deliver maximum breadth of impact. This typically means leveraging digital platforms, automation, standardisation and a focus on driving efficiency through the process. Precision is the exercise of targeting a very specific objective, customer, scenario or region, and building a marketing approach with no attempt to drive breadth. Precision is highly targeted and may have minimal reuse.

When teams don’t understand how their work fits into the wider strategy, they make poor decisions. When they don’t partner cross-functionally they create organisational dysfunction. When they are disconnected from their peers their personal development slows, career progression reinforces the silo and attrition can increase.

When teams struggle to work cross-functionally it can be because they have little reason to, or little that they can agree on. When two teams meet to achieve a shared goal they must be able to see how both their individual and their collective activity contributes to success, and they must commit to each other to accurately represent that partnership when they report back to the business.

All commercially-driven enterprises including for-profit organisations, non-profits, membership clubs and sole traders have an operating model for connecting customer value to a financial arrangement that will sustain future operations. Marketing is no different in this aspect, it just may not look at itself so often in this light.

“The enemy of accountability is ambiguity” said Patrick Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Ambiguity on what is being done, who is doing it and how it is being done can almost always be traced back to the organisational structure of team.

Building a marketing function that maximises value and activates exceptional customer experiences aligned to your unique and likely complex product capabilities requires operational excellence. Knowing the operating model that is most appropriate for your current and future needs and evolving over time is the foundation of what makes marketing organisations that work, work.

Innovation is directly correlated to risk. You try something with the intent to see what happens. If it doesn’t work as you planned, you try something else. If it does work you can decide whether to keep doing it, to build on it with other things that work or to ignore it and move on. And finally you get something special.