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Case Study: Developing an Effective Marketing Organization

A Marketing Organization focused on Product Management needed to be transformed to a function that could provide direction to the manufacturer's efforts to meet rapidly evolving market needs

"We made several unsuccessful attempts to realign and restructure marketing, but we needed a fresh perspective on how to evolve a successful marketing function to support our growth."
VP of Sales and Marketing, Industrial Manufacturing Company

Business Issue
An industrial manufacturer serving municipal utilities and industrial users had struggled to build an effective marketing function for several years. Marketing, in the absence of a strong organization, had become a fragmented function with many traditional marketing activities conducted by other departments such as Engineering and Business Development. The utility market had been evolving rapidly towards hi-tech solutions and considerable uncertainty existed as to the future direction of the market. Accordingly, the manufacturer needed to develop a strong marketing function to guide future product development and roadmapping to meet the evolving needs of the market.

The current marketing organization performed well in managing the existing product lines, but struggled with capturing the "voice of the customer" and providing directional insight to ensure that products evolved to meet the fast-changing needs of the market. Additionally, senior leadership had little visibility into the performance of marketing which diminished the credibility of Marketing.

Adroit's Role
Adroit was hired to assess the marketing capability and develop a practical roadmap for improvement.
Activities included:

• An assessment of current skillsets within the Marketing organization
• Workload breakdown within Marketing to understand capacity of the organization and current time utilization
• Identification of inter-departmental workflow issues within the Product Development Process
• Design of a new independent organizational structure, to include a single Director of Marketing and creation of a Marketing and Competitive Analytics function
• Recommendations to redeploy sales support activities from Marketing to appropriate support functions
• Design of a marketing and inter-departmental dashboard to improve visibility and accountability of marketing activity and facilitate collaboration between engineering and business development

Outcome
The results of Adroit's recommendations led to:

• A roadmap for the Marketing organization that guided near and long-term initiatives with a focus on improving "Voice of the Customer" and product lifecycle planning
• Realignment of workflow resulting in a productivity improvement equal to 2 FTEs without having to add headcount in the marketing organization
• Improved Marketing ROI by creating a Marketing Analytics organization staffed with lower cost resources with specialized analytical skills
• Improved coordination across functions through increased visibility of departmental activities and overlapping projects