Organizational Structures – Create the Right Marketing & Sales units | PLOT

Marketing and sales organizations face the challenge of integrating new trends and technologies into their structures, processes, and daily collaboration as part of digitization. Of course, companies have already started to create new job profiles, to establish departments and teams that deal with new channels, systems, product and service offerings, or digitalization. Innovation hubs, digital teams, or online marketing departments are emerging. Their structural anchors vary considerably and offer a wide range of advantages and disadvantages. Rarely, however, are these changes so well thought out conceptually that they can be seamlessly integrated into the existing organization, which is why many companies completely restructure themselves right away. Systems such as holocracy, tribe structures, or closed-flat are considered exemplary. Why?

TYPICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE IN MARKETING

Accordingly, companies are confronted with numerous issues when it comes to establishing or questioning their organizational structure, including:

• What is the right basic structure for my marketing team?
• Where do I impose new tasks (e.g., “Beyond Own Market”)?
• How do I break down existing silo structures?
• How do I mirror a continuous customer experience internally?
• How do I organize internal sales and external sales?
• What are important tasks for me, what is the value chain of marketing?
• How do you organize in a customer-centric way?
• How do I design interfaces between marketing, product, communication, sales, IT, …?
• Is holacracy or hierarchy the right structure for my organization?

MARKETING ORGANIZATION STRUCTURES

Marketing and sales teams today are organized in more different and diverse ways than ever before. At Batten & Company, we are familiar all these varieties. We have many years of experience with CEOs, CMOs, CSOs, marketing managers, and marketing experts from all levels of corporations, international players, large medium-sized companies, and small market-oriented companies. Everybody organizes differently, everybody does something right. Structures can be optimized everywhere, new important units can be formed, and missing roles can be filled with skill sets that do not yet exist.

A successful marketing and sales organization shines through excellence in all tasks of the marketing value chain. It does not matter whether the responsibility lies solely with marketing or is shared with other departments. Marketers should always focus on the customer, which is why breaking down personal and functional silos is so important. From Batten & Company’s perspective, value chain tasks include:

1. The generation of actionable customer-, competition- and market-related insights
2. Generation and design of customer-relevant offers in the form of products, services, and applications
3. Marketing of offerings across all customer-relevant channels and the creation of a consistent customer experience
4. Marketing controlling and performance measurement in terms of sustainable optimization of own activities

If your company is also facing a change, contact us! You can benefit from our wealth of experience if you are thinking about a more agile structure and more value creation in marketing and sales.

Also, read here how the MOM framework, and the PLOT building block, in particular, help translate marketing and sales strategies into organizational reality.