Manufacturing Case Study

Transforming Marketing to Improve Revenue Growth

Introduction

Legacy Marketing Teams Not Oriented Towards Driving the Commercial Strategy

A manufacturing client was looking to enhance the strategic focus within its Marketing organization in order to enable the function to be a sustainable growth driver.

The client operated a centralized/de-centralized hybrid marketing model, where resourcing and functional capabilities were primarily embedded into each of the 3 independent Business Units, with some overarching support from a segment-level marketing team. Given the complexity and wide range of products/markets served within each of the three BUs, this structure was part of a recent evolution of the team to ensure that deep knowledge sat close to the businesses. As a result, marketing teams within each of the BUs varied in size, maturity and capability.

The client sought to transform their marketing activities and operations for long-term revenue growth. Having previously engaged Alexander Group and experienced our level of work quality and expertise first-hand, the company was familiar with Alexander Group’s ability to articulate complex problem-solving into actionable implementation steps.

Approach

Assessment and Recommendation Design

The client sought an external perspective to analyze its existing Marketing structure and efforts and to provide fresh insights that would lead to innovative solutions and performance improvement. The company wanted to compare their current performance to industry benchmarks and looked to Alexander Group for functional capability, role and process design, headcount sizing and KPI measurement recommendations.

For the initial part of the project, we assessed the current Marketing organization to identify areas that diverged from industry standards. We also sought to identify activities that did not support the efficient execution of the commercial organization’s stated go-to-market priorities.

The assessment was driven by four key inputs:

Interviews: Conducted 36 sales, marketing and product management employee interviews and 6 customer interviews

Surveys: Collected “Demand Gen Productivity and Time Spend” survey responses from individual contributors within sales, marketing and product management, and compared the results to industry benchmarks

Metric Analysis: Performed lead gen efficacy analysis related to funnel and opportunity progression metrics

Industry Expertise: Leveraged extensive GTM expertise and industry experience to pinpoint current-state gaps and develop preliminary future-state recommendations

Assessment findings highlighted a need for Marketing to amplify its strategic voice and attributed impact, ultimately serving as the foundation for future-state design recommendations.

Key Findings

Misalignment and Lack of Focus on Priority Capabilities

The findings revealed three primary issues:

‘Downstream’ Activity Time Spend

Alexander Group discovered that 33% of total marketing FTE time was spent on content creation efforts, with only 8% spent on upstream activities. Marketing was viewed as a more reactive, content generating engine rather than delivering business insights.

Imbalanced Structures and Resource Allocations by BU

Alexander Group observed significant headcount disparity across the BUs despite similar revenue profiles and inconsistent deployment of key marketing roles across the various teams.

Inconsistent Lead Funnel Progression and Tracking

Alexander Group identified varying levels of lead gen tracking and attribution maturity, with one BU unable to quantify any marketing attributed revenue. MQL -> SQL conversion rates ranged from 8% -20% by BU.

Recommendations & Outcomes

The Growth Opportunity

To address the core problem areas, Alexander Group directed the client’s focus towards reallocating marketing investment towards strategic resources, enhancing the demand gen strategy, and formalizing the lead management process. Seven recommendations were crafted by Alexander Group to help our client meet its stated goals.

Right size BU marketing teams based on respective needs and priorities

Rename and recategorize select roles to a) better align titles and functional pillars to activities performed, b) develop uniform titles across businesses and in line with market practice, and c) develop systematic career pathing

Introduce three strategic marketing roles to focus on upstream marketing activities

Designate the segment marketing team as a center of excellence for digital, operational and event activities

Update rules of engagement between strategic marketing and product management for high-impact product commercialization use cases/processes

Re-shape Marketing’s demand gen strategy and process management to better quantify the ability of marketing efforts to drive new business

Establish governance boards and KPIs to monitor implementation progress and make adjustments as needed

The collection of recommendations is expected to result in enhanced efficacy of analytics, insights, operations and demand gen activities. Improved coordination between Marketing and other business functions will help align the go-to-market around the highest value opportunities, leading to increased win rates, reduced funnel loss and better customer experience. The anticipated revenue impact was conservatively modeled to create a 200-400 bps CAGR uplift over the next three years.

Expertise in Sales Compensation

Growth requires alignment between strategic objectives and sales compensation plans. With the right incentives, it will be easier for sellers to achieve prescribed goals. For expertise in designing media and entertainment plans that drive growth, Alexander Group has the industry experience and knowledge leaders turn to for assistance.

About Alexander Group

Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.