As "doing the same (or more) marketing with less" embeds itself as the unofficial mantra of the asset management industry, many team leaders are looking to their operating model for answers.
Some conversations we've had from clients in recent weeks:
- How can I best structure my team and allocate resources to not solely get the job done but to do it effectively and efficiently and have some time left for evolution and innovation?
- Are centres of excellence the solution, or do they create greater silos within my team?
- Could I use growth and retention as a device to structure my team and allocate resources to ensure client experience sits at the heart of everything we do?
There comes a time in every marketing leader's career that they may want to revisit the structure of their team - whether new to the role or recently appointed. Maybe they feel their current set up is failing to deliver what is expected by the business, or they are concerned by the harried looks on the faces of even their top talent. Whatever the motivation, once the seed is sown that a restructure could help, the next question is usually: "Where do I start?"
Assess your existing org structure/operating model
How long has the existing team structure been in place? Has the business evolved markedly since then? What technological adaptations or integrations have been implemented? Where has marketing grown in influence and what additional areas of responsibility has your team taken on?
Map the existing roles and responsibilities at both a team and individual level. Does it look like you expected? Think about terminology - do team names and job titles truly reflect the work these team members do? Are there clusters of tasks that don't make sense - things that have been added to your people's remit but are not aligned to their skillsets, for example.
Ask others in the business what's working (and what is not)
Given its multi-dimensional role, the marketing team touches and interacts with a lot of other departments in the company. Ask key stakeholders (and not solely senior ones) what they think is going well and where improvement is needed. It's easy to get defensive about another person's view of your team but an excelling marketing department is one that collaborates cross functionally, acting simultaneously as the guide and the glue of the business' go-to-market strategy.
External points of view will help you validate or reframe your assessment and may also identify areas for improvement that you've overlooked.
Link to business strategy
Hopefully your business has one of these - some don't, others just don't do a great job of sharing it. Ask: Where is the business trying to get to in the next three to five years, who are the core target audiences, which products and services are a priority, is growth within new markets, capabilities or client groups more of a focus, or is retention a bigger play?
If the answer to these questions is "not sure", then find out. Your marketing strategy and the team needed to deliver it can only ever be as good as your business strategy. And if it is not aligned to business strategy and regularly reporting against it, then your marketing team will never command the respect it deserves.
Think about skills gaps
Once the business and marketing strategy are sufficiently cross referenced, you can start to think about the skills and knowledge needed to deliver against them. For example, alternatives may be a strategic growth priority but an area of comparative weakness for your team. Maybe a joined-up client experience is one of the business' core objectives, yet you have a distinct lack of operationally minded individuals thinking about how client journeys connect across multiple platforms. Or perhaps your team is flooded with data streams and has no way of interpreting and acting on them. Restructuring or redeploying headcount is not always the answer to these skills gaps - marketing leads are also assessing where AI, outsourcing or nearshoring could provide scalable solutions. But sometimes there is no replacement for having expertise in house and in the absence of additional headcount a restructure is one way to achieve this uplift.
Future proof your restructure
No one wants to put in place a new team structure only to have to revisit and rejig in another year or two. But it can be hard to make all the changes you might want to in one swoop - if there are co-dependencies with other departments, for example, or tech integration and upskilling required. So plan for this evolution. Think about out what you can/must do in the first 12 months, then the following 24 months and finally, over the next three to five years.
And if you'd like a sounding board as you work through some of these questions - a trusted partner of dozens of asset managers could be the best place to start. Contact us here.
Alternatively, join our CMOx exchange to network with and learn from over 30 other asset management marketing leaders with the same challenges and opportunities as you!