Marketing teams are different from most other business teams. Why? Because — unlike accounting teams, or sales teams, or operations teams — marketing teams are made up of people with a wide variety of skill sets and personality types.

You have “Quants” — those are the folks who are using data, analytics and performance marketing platforms to find and convert customers.

On the other hand, you have the “Creatives” — those are the folks who create the brand and tell the story in a way that resonates with customers.

As it turns out, getting the maximum ROI out of marketing requires that you build an organization with both Quant and Creative skill sets (and personality types).

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Most marketing work gets expressed in the form of customer acquisition, retention or evangelism campaigns that require equal parts creative and analytics. Entrepreneurs looking to build a first class marketing team need to cultivate a culture that can leverage the best of what both of these groups have to offer. 

To execute at the highest level, best-in-class marketing teams need to fully embrace both Quants and Creatives, leveraging what each discipline has to offer.

The Creatives need data and analytics to know how their creative is performing and how it could get better. Meanwhile, the Quants can’t launch effective campaigns without the inspiration and content of the Creatives.

Either group working in a silo is a recipe for mediocre marketing that misses the opportunity to connect with customers with the right message at the right time. Yet marketing silos are more common than many CMOs care to admit.

Combine that with the vast number of digital and traditional marketing channels and assets that exist today, and you can see why truly aligned teams are rare. 

The alignment between Spotify’s technologists and creatives, for example, enabled the company to produce a customized, hyper-local marketing campaign that scaled across the US and Europe.

Spotify’s in-house creative team took user data and leveraged it to message to consumers in a personalized, relevant way. As Spotify CMO Seth Farbman told AdAge, “data inspires and gives an insight into the emotion that people are expressing.”

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A disparity in functional roles and personality types often leads to silos within marketing organizations.

Two simple steps can help break down silos and start the process towards better collaboration. First, spend time mapping out your processes to be clear on how teams should be engaging with each other. This may be as simple as starting a feedback loop from Quants back to Creative team to let them know how their campaigns performed, forcing a process of reflection and improvement.  

The second step is to get out of email and spreadsheets and to adopt a work management solution.

A single source of truth for teams that can encourage collaboration will foster more integration and openness between groups. Teams need a single source of truth for shared information so they spend less time searching in their inboxes for information that might be outdated by the time they even find it.

Improved visibility between functions and information can lead to better performance marketing and more creativity. When workers on both sides of the team understand each other’s thinking and processes, they find ways to add value to each other’s work. So why are silos still shockingly common for marketers?

Operational excellence in the digital age requires a combination of cultural, habitual, and technological changes that bring everybody consistently into the fold. Imagining a culture of transparency and sharing is a good start, but it takes an investment in tools, and a daily commitment to following through to make it happen.

Better transparency means faster and more engaged teams, who are empowered to make meaningful decisions with less meetings and fewer unforeseen delays. Those incentives should be enough to drive leaders into action – and here’s a few actions to take.

Share an internal case study

The best way to instill your vision for a team without silos is to point to specific examples of times when silos were directly responsible for failure or duplicated effort on a project.

About a year ago this occurred even in our own team, when we realized our sales and marketing teams were automating very similar emails, without realizing customers were receiving duplicate messages. By bringing these emails to leaders of both teams, (as well as customer feedback on the experience) we were able to find common ground for fixing the problem.

Present these stories to your team as case studies in how the problem is affecting everyone (just remember to do so in a way that diffuses blame).

Once they accept that you all collectively have a systematic problem (and that no single person is to blame), you can inspire them with a vision of a happier future in which information is shared, and projects are not held up by a team member’s holiday, and where everyone shows up to work with the clarity and context they need to get their job done. 

Establish a single source of truth for marketing initiatives

The power of technology in this case is its ability to reduce the effort that workers must put into communicating with each other and searching for the information they need. Since “missing information” is one of the most common stressors in the workplace, creating a single source of truth leads to big morale improvements.

Email doesn’t solve all communication and information issues. The problem with email is that information in your inbox stagnates there until you respond to it. If you have information in your email that is valuable to me, I have no idea you have it, and you likely have no idea that I need it.

That’s why it’s critical for marketers to adopt cloud technology.

Sharing files is an obvious step in the right direction, but a truly silo-free team goes a step further to adding real-time information about the status of projects, decisions, and conversations in a shared workspace that everyone can access. Our marketing team runs on Wrike, Slack, and Google Drive to make sure everyone can communicate quickly and access work from anywhere.

Map Workflows for Repeatable Success

Getting a team to adopt practices and technology that improve visibility and eliminate silos is not as simple as buying software and insisting that they change their habits. Change management is essential for getting teams to achieve operational excellence that is sustained by changes in habit.

A few years ago, Marriott wanted to expand its brand to include “Marriott Traveler,” and transform its perception from hotel company into “the world’s favorite travel company,” Marketing Land reported.

They began by choosing a project owner and determined relevant KPIs and a timeline. They adopted goals and a corresponding workflow that would lead to a complete brand perception shift, opposed to a one-and-done marketing campaign. Marriott received over 61,000 site visits within 30 days, and leveraged multiple touchpoints and team members to execute on its campaign plan.

The Wrike professional services team works with customers by mapping the workflow of each team they bring in. We study where assignments originate for each group of users, and where they are passed downstream. It’s often in these passes that work gets delayed or dropped completely, and understanding those touch points are crucial in working towards improvement.

Once you understand the touch points, you need to understand what information each team member requires to do their job effectively.

A designer, for instance, needs a detailed brief that outlines the exact specifications for the requested job.

If they need to write an email to ask you what the dimensions or resolution must be, then they can’t start working until you write back.

If you are tied up in meetings that day, then their work has been delayed by a whole day. In the case of the Marriott campaign, the entire team remained aligned on the objectives of the campaign – introducing a new brand perception and building a new reputation – which kept the team focused and able to execute consistently across all channels.

That’s why transparency starts with an understanding and respect for the value of clarity, and why each team needs to understand each other’s contextual needs for work.

You can implement technology that institutionalizes clarity, but you also need to teach people to deliver as much context as possible when sharing work between departments. The more context everybody has, the less they need to meet, email, and follow up. The information they need is available without thought.

Mapping your workflow also involves removing unnecessary steps, costly approval processes, or extraneous communications regarding decision making. The goal is not just to replicate your workflow with more transparency, but to improve it. Besides, when you build a more transparent organization, many steps will become obsolete as workers are empowered to be more autonomous.

Incentivize Ongoing Cultural Changes

Something important to keep in mind about creating transparency is that information becomes obsolete within a few days of being outdated. If the purpose of sharing data is to provide real-time insights to everyone about current projects, that purpose becomes compoundingly harder to achieve as the data gets older and more stale. Shockingly, 80% of marketing teams blame data quality for ineffective demand generation processes.

Maintaining visibility in your organization is a critical part of the process. For technology, it means reinforcing its usage and adoption on an ongoing basis. First and foremost, that means training workers on how to use technology at the start of the deployment, and also making sure you onboard new hires with procedures and best practices.

For culture, it means sharing success stories and even at times rewarding teams with special incentives for maintaining transparency. Such incentives – a team dinner or wine tasting event for example – are low cost compared to the value an executive gets from being able to get a snapshot of project progress and status on demand.

It’s Time to Start Now

According to a survey we conducted at Wrike for our Agile Marketing Report, 20% of Marketing leaders said, “effectively scaling our marketing efforts as we grow,” was the top challenge they face. To facilitate scalability, building a culture of operational excellence is key in solving this solution and helping marketers do their jobs most effectively.

If your marketing team is growing, it’s time to start. Just as success will lead to compounding value down the road, failure to change will lead to repeating and compounding failures.

About the Author: Frazier Miller is CMO at Wrike.