How MOPS proves/improves Marketing performance: 4 essential webinar takeaways

In our recent global webinar, Empowering Marketing Operations Improves Marketing Performance, the underlying message throughout the conversations was clear - more than ever, MOPS is a game-changer for enterprise B2B organizations.

Speakers Dan Vawter, Managing Partner at Sojourn Solutions, Madeleine Bergquist Marketing Manager at Adobe EMEA North, and Stefan Tornquist, SVP, Research & Learning for Econsultancy, discussed the findings of our 2021 MOPS Report. Below are four essential takeaways from the webinar:

On the “proper” role of MOPS (Vawter and Bergquist)

Sojourn’s Vawter explained that “the job of MOPS is to make marketing more efficient and effective, to improve and prove marketing performance.” He detailed the following 5 key functions of MOPS: 

1. “Lead management, meaning how leads are defined and nurtured across the customer journey,”

2. “Martech optimization, meaning how technologies are sourced, integrated, and staffed,”

3. “Customer data management, meaning how data is defined, reported, analyzed, cleaned, and shared, 

4. “Performance management or measurement, meaning how performance is defined and reported,” and 

5. “Marketing governance, meaning how data is organized for compliance and privacy.”

Bergquist succinctly explained the role of MOPS: “MOPS are the people who can actually prove and improve the value of your marketing spend. When you can’t do that, you waste lots of money. That’s the most basic business case for MOPS. “

On how MOPS enables companies to adapt better to change (Bergquist)

Bergquist explained how MOPS helped Adobe respond rapidly and flexibly to the COVID-19 pandemic: “When the pandemic arrived, we quickly changed some of the industry vertical nurtures we had in place, particularly for impacted industries like travel and hospitality. Some of these industry verticals were just turned off completely because we felt they needed to be left alone to work their way through things. We also changed the way we communicated, trying to be as supportive as we could with advice on how our customers could transition from face-to-face customer engagement to a much more digital-first marketing approach.”

Adobe also changed on the internal side, as Bergquist explains: “we changed how we scored leads. The biggest scoring activities pre-pandemic were face-to-face activities such as trade shows -- anything where you met with people in person pretty much meant an instant AQL in our systems. But because nobody was meeting in person anymore, we had to quickly adapt. So telemarketing, for example, became a new channel for scoring, which we’d never had before. We also diversified our virtual events, and planned a whole host of them.”

On how MOPS proves and improves marketing impact (Bergquist and Vawter)

Bergquist offered an example: “We have 3 main areas within MOPS: campaign operations, data analytics, and martech. Because each area and each individual within has a global view, they're able to catch stuff that might otherwise be missed. For example, we recently had a scenario where there was a high bounce rate from content syndication leads, and it was something like 12% when it should be less than 5%. So because it was the same person responsible for all the 3 global regions, she was able to quickly do a comparative analysis with the other two regions.

Her analysis showed that the other two regions had a bounce rate of less than 5%, so there was obviously something wrong with the one region. She then flagged the issue to the team and they were able to take that data back to the supplier and renegotiate, basically saying ‘you've given us some leads that aren't of the right quality for us.’ That fast and data-driven approach impacted revenues, proved value, and improved performance.” 

Vawter offered an example: “We worked with a company that hired a new CMO who set new expectations. Marketing would now need to measure and understand exactly what was working and what was not. And they had to do this in order to justify marketing spend. They’d been measuring last-touch for attribution, which was absolutely not going to cut it with the new CMO. So they needed the ability to measure every touch of the customer journey, and figure out which marketing channels and content were working in order to prove value and justify budget moving forward. 

They worked with a vendor to integrate the technology into their existing platforms and modified all of their different processes. They also had to change mindsets because everybody was used to thinking about campaigns as opposed to touchpoints. 

The result of all this effort was that they were able to measure every touch point of the customer journey. They had a fairly large budget and discovered that some of the spend was not performing well, while some was. Based on these insights, they shifted their budget and that improved performance immediately, by 30% in one paid channel. They were also able to see the impact of content at different stages of the funnel, which helped them improve content relevance and distribution.

What MOPS success looks like (Vawter)

“We started working with a client back in 2018,” said Vawter. “They had many challenges: (1) they had very limited capabilities, (2) they were in a large organization with lots of divisions, different products, and technology silos, (3) their marketing and sales teams worked completely separately,  and (4) all the silos were causing confusion, duplication of effort, and lack of efficiency.

Over the course of two years, they were able to create a centralized center of enablement that all of their different marketers and sales people could go to for support. They built out a process for cross-team collaboration across data, leads, best practices, and thus dramatically reduced their time and cost for launching campaigns. They cleared up their lead management flows, and marketing and sales alignment happened.

As a result, they were able to increase their maturity to support more campaigns with more complexity, and became more aligned with their customer journeys. They made significant gains across multiple revenue measures, and were using their technologies to create better, more seamless customer experiences. A strong MOPS function was instrumental here to improve impact and revenue, as well as enhance the customer experience.”

Watch our full, on-demand webinar. Download our 2021 MOPS Report.