People, Process, Tools

Objective: Rebuild the team’s operating and collaboration model.

My Role: I conducted and owned the research, strategy, planning, change management, and operationalization of the plan.

Background: I started in my role at Hitachi Solutions by conducting a global brand and marketing assessment this included a skills assessment of the 14 individuals that would be on my team, a tooling assessment of existing marketing infrastructure, and a process assessment of how work and projects were being managed and prioritized.

People Approach: I first joined the organization I had a whole new team I was managing, some junior and some more senior who had been working as individual contributors in various areas of the business. Bringing that many people into a freshly formed team took a lot of communication, learning, and refining on my part. I started with the agile methodology, we started having a daily standup so I could learn what everyone was doing — where they were stuck and how others on the team could help — meeting daily helped the team bond and learn to lean on each other. Once communication was open and the team was working together I went back to the basics of defining responsibilities and accountabilities, to create role clarity.

By defining a RACI for each person there was less confusion and higher productivity. Each person had a clear understanding of how they fit into the larger puzzle and, more importantly, the value that their role brought to the organization.

In phase two of this strategy, I went began to pair up the team based on strengths/weaknesses and skillset into smaller “crews.” Each crew has primary goals and objectives as well as KPIs that they own as a team. These crews include:

• Digital Development Crew
  Goal: Develop, document, and maintain an integrated marketing stack that accelerates and optimizes the customer journey

• Demand Generation Crew
  Goal: Promote and nurture demand for our services while focusing on Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

• Editorial (Content + Creative) Crew
  Goal: Create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content

• Sales Enablement Crew
  Goal: Support and assist the sales team to improve sales productivity and accelerate closed bookings

• GTM Crew
  Goal: Define our unique value proposition and translate our differentiation into a compelling market plan and framework

Process Approach: With the RACI in place and clear goals for individuals and teams we began to refine our creative and content review process to encourage people to think outside of their silos and embrace constructive feedback. This included a 2x2 best practice (two sets of eyes on every piece of content), a new creative brief and project intake process, and defining the production and promotion stages of every type of content. Within six months, we had automated our creative workflow in Asana, we have an open chat where people provide feedback during the creative production process, and we are down to a once-a-week stand-up because we have built trust across the team.

Tooling Approach: After the brand and new creative intake and review process rolled out we took a deeper look at our tooling to support our long-term strategy around 1:1 ABM (Account-Based Marketing). We partnered with sales to launch a crawl, walk, run ABM approach for our brand; this included rebuilding our entire MarTech Stack to gain visibility into the digital customer experience and incorporate a consistent brand journey.

This led to the off-boarding of technology with low user adoption and opened up additional budget for the onboarding of Marketo to manage marketing automation. Over the course of three years, we have orchestrated a scalable, maintainable content engine built to deliver and measure true account-based marketing. Our marketing stack is built around our key accounts, industries, and the goal priorities of the marketing team.

Results:

• Team education and growth: 6 new technical certifications and team members learned several new technologies

• 100% team retention with a 20% HC growth YoY

• Implemented a digital and collateral design system and creative intake process that has cut design time in half

• Increased team communications and job satisfaction by taking notes from the agile methodology

• Evaluated, negotiated, implemented, and rolled out 9 new tools: Adobe Marketo (marketing automation at Hitachi Solution), Sitecore (global CMS), Oktopost (social management), Seismic (sales enablement), Vidyard (video management), Sendoso (direct mail management), Terminus (ABM platform), InsideView (data enrich and data integrity), and Asana (project management)

• Recognized by Fifty Five and Five in 2020, as one of the top 25 Microsoft Partners (out of more than 64,000 cloud partners) for Digital Marketing Excellence, based on content marketing across web, blog, and social channels. Their evaluation stated, “A terrific combination of clarity on their website and understanding what value leads are seeking in their content.”

• Finalist for the 2020 Modern Marketing IMPACT Award from Microsoft

• Created and managed a Go-to-Market plan that raised over $1.25M in partnership MDF

What My Team Says

Brand Leadership