How to generate business excellence

Want to be at par with corporations you once aspired to be? Here's how!

I’d like to shed some light on a topic much debated in companies that have survived more than five years and would like to get out of the break-even trap. They wish to bring their capabilities at par with the corporations they once aspired to be, and the key is operational excellence.

This is achieved by building operational capabilities, which in turn come about by undertaking structured programs for epic-systematic high performance.

To develop a rewarding development program, four factors are crucial to a corporation’s goals:

1. Aim to create value by developing a marketing road map that grants a systematic process for identifying, prioritising and building the right marketing operations capabilities. Make sure that organisational outcomes and not just creation of capabilities are part of the equation in your roadmap effort. This means that your company needs to develop a rigorous business case, without which you risk solving only short term tactical problems and underestimating the tasks at hand.


2. Model a variety of cost/benefit scenarios to better understand the impact of options within the development plan. By doing so, your company can guide its marketing operations initial development and become a high performer that understands the outcome based perspective that is rare in both B2C and B2B boardrooms. For example, deciding on whether to outsource media planning or build capabilities within via participation in open enrolment courses or hiring a consultant. Another common example today is choosing between on or off premise technology hosting solutions. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) can be identified to track to measure value generation and help ensure maximisation of business value through an epic marketing ops solution.


3. Start identifying as many execution scenarios as possible, along with different development circumstances, which will allow your company to implement its marketing operational initiatives whilst understanding the expected outcomes, scope and scale of the effort itself. To determine the best fit strategy for your company, you need to model the cost/benefit outcomes, find means of risk tolerance, change management, user issues and consider forward thinking business goals.


4. Your team needs to be brought on board with this new change/initiative and they must dedicatedly follow through with the newly outlined objectives for long term tenure. Without this commitment, no real value can be achieved.

Perceptions aside about how marketing operations and talent are two very different functions, it has been a best practice at high performing companies to bring these two fields together to work as one epic team, one that intrinsically articulates the leadership strategy going forward to reach the targeted objectives.

By merging these two specialty groups, they can churn out a plan for communications and post deployment support programs. This is how your company will address the critical elements and generate epic business excellence.