How do you organise your marketing team for effectiveness?

As long as the cat (marketing) catches mice (build sales-pipe) for sales – in an era of shrinking budgets and agile organisations – nothing else matters. Having said that, results follow structure – and here are 3 principles to make your marketing team even more effective:

1. For a large organisation – say 10+ marketeers – some structure and functionally organised reporting into marketing is necessary – if not for anything else but HR, learning, bonding & career growth.

2. Some dotted line reporting (not full line) of some marketeers to sales head is absolutely necessary – irrespective of the company’s size.

3. If you have just 1 functional marketing guy – let’s say 1 content writer needing to write for different sales teams – and you get this person to report to a (or ‘the’) Sales head without any VP Marketing protection , that too is the kiss of death for effectiveness.

All in all – you need to give the marketing organisation some breathing room – they have to be a bit more long-term than sales – yet make them feel the pain of sales so that they are super-effective!