Situation

A major SaaS player has experienced hyper growth, but the marketing department was struggling. Sales criticized the quality of leads received, scaling the marketing team was difficult because marketing teams needed to be formed as new offerings were released, and global growth was proving difficult as country and regional marketers “went rogue.”

In addition, the company was concerned about its hodge-podge of technology platforms and tools. Nothing seemed to work as promised by the martech vendors.

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Task

I led an interdisciplinary team to provide an “outside-in” exploration of what could reasonably be done to “build a new (marketing) engine while keeping the plane flying.” 

The SaaS company wanted to learn what best-in-class companies were doing to strengthen their marketing to enable more rapid growth on a global basis, and gain agreement on a roadmap for what should be done when.

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What I did

In addition to overseeing a quick assessment of the “current state” ways of working, org structure, data flow architecture and martech stack usage, I created a “future-state” inspiration presentation that was used to show the contrast between the status quo and where the company could be.

 

With that baseline gap analysis, I led a series of workshops to unpack what would be needed to fill each of the identified gaps, as well as the interdependencies that would need to be addressed during implementation phases. From those workshops emerged a prioritized roadmap defining what changes would be undertaken.

Because the team involved in the workshops represented key groups across the company (marketing campaign teams, product teams, data analytics, IT, ecommerce, HR, sales), the roadmap reflected iterated-upon priorities and gained immediate approval.