marketing resource managementDaily demands on marketers can feel like a constant treadmill. It’s a fact today, with no end in sight. With no time for taking on more, it’s time to do things differently.

The best marketing operations teams are going beyond technology deployments and dashboard design to relieve the pressure on everyone in marketing. They’re finding ways to minimize duplication and redundancy, to free-up resources.

As explained in the first installment of this series, #1 Ill-timed Metrics, marketing organizations of all sizes and all degrees of fame face the same chronic problems: ill-defined metrics, slammed resources, sketchy institutional memory, constipated creativity, poor fiscal and tactical decision-making, inadequate marketing portfolio, and the like. Let’s take a close look at:

Sin #2: Slammed Resources

The prevailing attitude of “doing more with less” can leave key people discouraged, overwhelmed, near burnout — eventually, leading them to circulate their resumes.

For organizations, the consequences are costly mistakes, high turnover, collapsed programs when key people leave, and missed opportunities to leverage important but otherwise ownerless programs.

Low morale turns into low productivity, which takes a further toll on constrained resources. It’s a never-ending hamster-wheel that’s plaguing marketing organizations everywhere.

Resource constraints will always be perceived, regardless of manpower expansion and the promises of automation technologies. In fact, those fixes sometimes make matters worse.

What’s needed is greater clarity. And keeping the horse before the cart.

The pain of resource limitations can be minimized by ensuring roles are clearly defined, interdependencies are understood, process workflows minimize dependency on specific individuals, bottlenecks are removed, transparency across work groups is increased, accountability is emphasized, and compelling business cases can be made to executive management.

The good news is that this clarity can be achieved without commandeering your human resources organization to upset the fruit basket, so to speak. That would exacerbate the sensation of slammed resources and derail marketing momentum. The ClearAction Value Exchange shows marketers in every function how to understand and manage interdependencies, inject sanity into workflows, and so forth. And it does so in bite-size time segments, say 20-40 minutes, manageable during coffee or lunch, during a workout or commute, while waiting for a flight or ride or the kids’ event.

The key is to empower marketers organization-wide to chip away at these challenges in small doses, creating personalized mini plans they can try out on the spot, with easy ways to encourage peers to follow suit. The ClearAction Value Exchange does this. It was designed with these challenges in mind, based on inputs from marketers like you.

This post is derived from the article “7 Deadly Sins of Marketing” by Gary Katz, founder of Marketing Operations Partners and co-founder of ClearAction Continuum.

Images purchased under license from Shutterstock.