Martech's Capability Gap Analysis solves resourcing challenges

Many of our clients ask for support making their marketing efforts as effective as possible. Recently, during a time of transition in marketing and sales leadership, the foundation arm of a $2+ billion not-for-profit technology company sought greater understanding of how their organizational model could rapidly evolve to meet the changing needs of their business. They were curious about how they could help their internal marketing team optimize revenue and impact.

Adapting our gap analysis to the client

In order to meet the goals of their organization, we first needed to determine if the existing team's capabilities were in alignment with the strategy of each program they support. We dug into building out the elements needed to power our unique framework that surveys both declared or hidden marketing domain expertise and whether the skill of existing employees is able to meet that need.

After the kickoff of our proprietary Capability Gap Analysis, we partnered with the team to build out a comprehensive view of marketing capabilities by category. Using a mature web development function as an example, it teases out the varied experience needed for a proper web presence from front-end to back-end development, technical SEO, and more. Cataloguing the acumen comes first.

One of the many tactics we employed for the taxonomy was to conduct interviews with the internal customers of the marketing team to both identify the work they had requested in the current calendar year and also what they thought their goals were for the coming year. We asked them to think critically about how the right marketing support will make their products, services or communities successful.

The result: New skills hired and developed, with increased clarity

Our analysis determined that there wasn't complete alignment between expertise and expectation, so we provided key recommendations on how to fill the gap in the immediate and shorter-term. We encouraged leaders to provide learning and development opportunities for existing staff. At the same time, we immediately began collaborating with hiring managers and the internal recruiting team to redefine roles, becoming an active part of the hiring workflow. Required-competencies identified in the gap analysis were immediately built into job descriptions. The Martech consultant was included in phone screens for candidates and - where needed - coached Subject Matter Experts on best practices for attracting, hiring and interviewing marketing employees.

We found that having us lead this exercise with the team was incredibly beneficial to the marketing employees and their stakeholders. It provided an opportunity for transparent and productive dialogue on what activities might be paused in favor of others, while also encouraging marketing staff to be realistic about expectations for growth.

As part of the analysis, we took a close look at the flex / surge support complementing in-house ability and provided areas where the budget or goals with the outside agencies could be adjusted.

At the end of the engagement, new employees were already being onboarded, agency spend was being adjusted and the employees felt more purposeful and empowered to push harder toward success.

Please reach out to business@martechconsultinggroup.com to learn more.

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