critical leadership skills that every marketing operations professional needs

Marketing Operations are chaotic and can make it difficult to master leadership skills. The web is awash with leadership lists, but these must be taken to the next level in order to identify what skills are required and why.

It’s time for us to go beyond simple advice such as “become better communicators” and start using language that everyone can understand. Here are five skills that will help you to tackle the challenges in a rapidly changing industry.

1. Be a strategist and not a firefighter

To develop effective marketing leadership, you must learn to plan and think strategically. This requires that you move beyond the reactive day-today and take proactive actions for the sake your business.

In many situations, this is a problem if the marketing team has not been adequately staffed or resourced. This leaves the team with no choice but to react to items. This shifts at a certain point. Before a fire can start, it’s important to recognize the danger.

Leaders in marketing must be able to solve complex problems and take informed decisions. This means looking at factors other than just financial consequences, such as:

• Implementing new technologies
• Risk mitigation of business processes throughout the organization.
• Just communicating the MQL-to-SQL process between teams is enough.

To be a good strategist, you need to have the ability to:

Business fundamentals: An analysis

You can call it “first principles”, but you should examine your core drivers and be prepared to change the status quo in response to what you discover. Consider the effects of new technologies on your business before you jump onto each martech tool.

Keep up with the latest market trends

Keep an eye out for emerging trends, and try to anticipate how they will affect your team over the next 12-24 months. Communicate this impact in advance to your team. You can spend less time on firefighting when your team is empowered and prepared.

Focus on long-term planning

You need to develop the ability to move out of the weeds into a more planner/advisor-like role. You might ask yourself, “How can our organization benefit from AI?” What are the consequences? Drawbacks? “Ethical concerns”

Dig deep: Rethinking marketing planning for an agile world

2. How to interpret and display data correctly

Leaders can have a profound impact on employee behavior, for better or worse. They do this by carefully selecting what they measure and the metrics that are expected to be used. To excel at marketing operations, you need to have a solid understanding of Marketing Analytics. You must also be able to discern valuable insights, and then communicate these findings in a concise and impactful manner.

Data-driven is defined differently by different organizations, but Forrester summarizes it nicely. “A data driven organization identifies insights that data can inform.” It manages data effectively and empowers the team to use it.”

You must balance speed with data. We often say in our company, “Companies are measured by the speed of their decision-making.” This can be achieved by empowering your team and optimizing your data’s insights.

It’s difficult to grow if you do not know what metrics are important

Leaders are able to see through vanity metrics. However, that does not mean they can be ignored. Understand the relationship between lead and lagged measures, and ensure your team is aware.

Different people in your organization may have different opinions about which metrics are important and how they should be interpreted

Empathy and understanding is key. Balance is important because stakeholders care about KPIs that are different. Some people may pay extra attention to leading measures, but they can still show progress even if the bottom line results aren’t yet visible. In situations like this, it’s important to learn how to use data to tell an engaging story.

Dig deep: Why data-driven marketing is important

3. Empathetic change management is a good practice

When implementing new tools, processes or technologies, which can happen frequently in marketing, change management is important.

You want to minimize disruption for your team, whether you’re using HubSpot sequences or ChatGPT to optimize your SEO. Consider these tips to help you achieve this:

Education and buy-in

Empathy is key when asking others to take on shifts. Make sure that they feel heard and understood. You can reduce burnout and foot-dragging by securing the support of those who are asked to make shifts.

Tailor your message

As you would when marketing a service or product, customize your message for each group in your organization based on what is important to them. People learn in different ways.

Create visual roadmaps that illustrate anticipated improvements in workflow and time savings, for example, when introducing a project management tool.

Small wins

Focus on small wins that are in line with the vision. They can be a positive step or a boost of motivation.

When transitioning to a marketing automation tool, you can celebrate the success of the first email campaign that was sent, showing off its features and improving team morale.

4. Communication and collaboration as a team

Meetings are often held just to meet. Just like in high school group projects, you do not want to be found doing all the work and carrying the burden alone.

Cross-functional collaboration can be key to aligning your marketing efforts with the other functions of your business. But better collaboration does not mean more meetings. (They could have just been emails). Asking the right questions is key to fostering a free-flowing exchange of ideas.

Standardize processes for teams

Ask yourself, “Do we know what criteria we use to make these decisions?” Begin by identifying any inconsistencies between functions. Be aware of differences in responses to the same questions.

Receiving the same request in different formats from different departments may indicate that communication needs to be streamlined and guidelines need to be clarified.

You may find that different teams use different webinar processes. It could be that different teams are ignoring the standard approach for various reasons, or have their own processes.

Identification and resolution of these discrepancies can lead to a more effective, cross-functional company collaboration.

Communication is not something you should jump into without any preparation.

Establishing clear communication channels between/within teams is a great way to ensure everyone stays on the same page. It can also be very helpful to share insights and best practices across departments.

Avoid overdoing communication. It can be overwhelming to go from zero to one hundred to make up for communication lapses. Your team will tune out the noise and become overwhelmed. Leaders must gauge their effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.

5. Flexible but structured when it counts

As a goldfish expands to fit its bowl, so do our tasks to fill the available time. Agile project management allows you to efficiently allocate resources, adapt to changing priorities and deliver results on time.

Communication is key

You must also establish a framework for making decisions to effectively prioritize tasks. This is similar to improving cross-functional cooperation. Communicate goals clearly.

Dig deep: How decision intelligence can be used to solve complex business problems

Efficient resource allocation

When dealing with technology transitions, adopt an agile mentality. Prepare yourself to backup your existing tools, switch to new ones and inform your company of any changes to tool usage. To manage the transitions smoothly, you need to balance time and resources.

Adapt to changing priorities

Ask better questions in order to determine priority and impact. Create a flexible plan to prevent it from falling apart the moment a change occurs.

Don’t hide results, but deliver them on time

When you are late, people will remember. Do not forget to celebrate and remind your team of their successes.

Keep your agility up!

Implementing agile project management will help you to better handle the dynamic nature in marketing operations. This will allow you to adapt quickly and achieve results.

To excel as a leader in marketing operations, you need a unique combination of skills. You’ll be in a better position to face the challenges of an industry that is rapidly changing if you develop these skills. Although it may sound like old advice, adaptability and continuous learning are essential to stay ahead in marketing.

Dig deep: Agile Marketing: What is it and why marketers should be concerned

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