Tara Petre

Make sure your systems are designed and integrated to support your marketing goals, company objectives and cross-departmental alliances within your organization. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) that align to those objectives and take into consideration your company’s historical performance. Industry benchmarks will do if you haven’t yet collected the data to create your own, but personalized benchmarks and KPIs will ensure the stretch goals you set are realistic enough to keep your team motivated.

Make sure your team understands and agrees to those KPIs, or better yet, had a hand in developing them. Implement a monthly, quarterly and annual reporting schedule so there are no surprises when it comes down to crunch time. You should be able to demonstrate the connection between all campaigns, activities and departmental spend and those goals. This will keep you in check and will ensure you’re not going rogue on your team — if your efforts aren’t in line with theirs, the success of the entire team is diluted, so focus is critical.

It’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole, especially with all the new and exciting technologies emerging in the marketing automation space, but slow down. Always start with strategy, start small and scale once you’ve demonstrated value. As you scale, be sure to aggregate as many channels as possible into your marketing automation platform to make sure you’re not short changed when it’s time to tally up marketing channel attribution. A touchpoint doesn’t matter if it’s not in the report, no matter how cool that campaign was and no matter what performance report you’re getting from the siloed system you ran it from.

This one should go without saying, but always think through dependencies and trickle-down effects. It’s tempting to make a splash with a sophisticated nurture architecture, a revamped marketing-to-sales lifecycle approach or an omnichannel account-based marketing campaign. Starting with a high visibility project of that magnitude when you’re not confident in the foundation of your systems is unnecessarily stressful. You don’t control your own destiny and you’re doomed from the start if your data and system integrations are in a state of disrepair.

Once you’ve proven value to internal stakeholders, look for ways to incorporate other teams and their initiatives within your systems. By supporting these teams and helping them to reach their goals using the tech stack and expertise you’ve built, you’ll be able to achieve greater success than you ever would have doing it alone. This may mean reaching out to field marketing, customer marketing, inside sales, outside sales, business analysts and anyone else in your organization who you’d like to better align or increase collaboration with. Doing so will allow your reports to tell a more compelling story. It’s like Seth Godin says, “you have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.”