Sometimes I refer to a company’s operations as their Speical Forces because in many ways they have to be. I know I had a number of occasions during my career as an operation manage to team up with the rest of my organization to run covert operations against a formidable foe in our corporation…the Marketing/Sales organizations.
Many firms with large marketing and sales organizations tend to start being run by the marketing and sales management team. Oh yes, marketing is where all the fun is and a high percentage of today’s business people have marketing degrees or were on the marketing staff for a product launch that brought in millions to their company. They develop an attitude towards them being the organization that keeps the business going so they should wheel the power.
Rogue Marketing
There is nothing worse than a cocky marketing and sales organization going rouge. This usually happens after they bring in a Whale of an account and features many of the marketing team using their commission checks as certificates of superiority over the rest of the company workforce.
Then the C Suite or executives put more fire on the situation by asking the marketing and sales directors to formulate a plan to ensure their level of success can be repeated. Once this takes place the SOP becomes the obstacle in the way of repeating success and they set out to dismantle it or throw it out.
Save the Company
This is when the operations staff breaks out the camo face paint and night vision visors in preparation for their mission of going behind lines of the marketing department to find out what absurd plans and strategies they are putting together to circumvent operational protocols and procedures set in place that ensured their success in the first place.
The battle between marketing and operations goes on in almost every company. Historically, during the development of a company’s marketing campaign, the marketing director will unknowingly overreach the capability of what their current operations performance by launching a new product or service that operations is not able to do. This is because marketing strategies are usually developed without anyone from operations being in the room.
Smaller businesses can the same issues. Especially if the business leaders all have only marketing interests. The thrill of the marketing sometimes brings on thoughtlessness towards how they will deliver what is being marketing. Most of these business leaders will wave off the deliverability issues by saying..’We’ll worry about getting the job done when we get the job’.
Sometimes we will have a prospective client contact us about video-centric digital marketing and we will find out during the initial meeting that they do not have any kind of operations or anyone in the organization interested in overseeing the operations if they had one. They are just in business to have fun selling a product or service that really does not exist.
Operations Runs the Business
The stronger, more successful, businesses of the world place their operations first and then the marketing second. there needs to be a constant balance between what operations can produce and what marketing can sell. This balance sometimes becomes a burden when things get out of balance. It takes a strong COO or director of operations to keep thing balanced.
Think about this before your business operations start putting on their face paint.
Let me know how I can help.
