Having a robust marketing performance management (MPM) campaign is no longer a luxury; when it comes to improving the efficiency of your team, MPM is a go-to strategy. The savviest companies are making MPM a completely separate entity within their offices and encouraging collaboration between this specialist and the more traditional members of the marketing team.
Companies that sell in the B2B realm should take special note of the MPM trend. As a business that looks to scale and high performance standards, MPM is especially important. Here’s why.
Your Budget Is Always Under Attack
There is a reason that marketing is always the first budget to get cut in a crisis: This is the department that usually has the most trouble justifying its expenditures. MPM turns this stereotype on its head, combining the rigor of a performance driven organization with the precision of a business development budget expertise.
With an MPM specialist, you now have accountability for your expenditures versus the results they brought in. Because MPM is responsible for a long-term strategy, you will be able to see when to divert funds and when to let a campaign ride if its returns are not immediate.
Aggregating the Most Important Aspects of Marketing and Operations
Your marketing and operations do not have to clash constantly. In a traditional company, the operations side is always trying to reduce the budget for noncritical expenditures or cash outlays without a direct revenue return. Marketing is always trying to expand this budget, because all revenues that could be attributed to marketing are not necessarily direct, and it is quite easy to frame any expense from marketing as noncritical.
By combining financial expertise, experience with analytics and IT under one discipline, MPM finally brings together the creative aspects of marketing with the justification for the existence of any creative outlay. By placing IT, finance and analytics under the same department umbrella, you also reduce bloat in your company that would come from trying to coordinate these three disciplines.
Building Internal Relationships Crystallizes Business Vision
To move product in the B2B space, your clients need to know exactly who you are. In order to put forth a clear vision in the market, you must synchronize your vision within your company first. MPM is the perfect discipline to accomplish this.
Because all of the most important aspects of marketing and operations are now represented in a single department, that department can now serve as a hub for outreach. Finance and IT department heads now have more confidence that marketing understands their language. Plans can be presented to the C-Suite with a new confidence, giving executives a clear picture to communicate with large clients and profit shaping deals.
Although there is no consistent MPM job description just yet, you should take this as an advantage. Hiring an MPM specialist or simply introducing the concept into your company without Borders means that you can customize the role to your needs. The bottom line is increased long-term-efficiency for your marketing department, drawing streamlined and precise conclusions for immediately actionable solutions from aggregated data.
Your creative vision no longer has to be at odds with your number crunchers and in the B2B space, it can’t be. Take the time to ensure that MPM becomes a vital part of your marketing department with direct access to your CMO.
