3 Essential Steps for Building a Fast and High-Performing Marketing Team

"We're going to launch an event in 2-3 weeks."

This statement caught me off guard, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

"Well," I murmured, gathering my thoughts as I slowly processed the idea.

"What's the event going to be about?" I asked.

My boss replied, "We're going to promote our new product and latest releases."

After letting his comment sink in, I remarked, "We'll need to pause everything we're working on to make this happen. Is that cool?"

To which he said, "That's fine by me."

And just like that, our entire organization shifted gears to launch a B2B product launch event.

In just three weeks, from concept to launch, we managed to create an online event and secure 8,000 registrations, showcasing the incredible work of our product team.

This whirlwind experience opened my eyes to the power of speed in marketing.

Not in terms of completing tasks quickly.

But rather, being able to produce results rapidly.

You see, speed in marketing isn't about seeing how fast you can finish a task. 

Instead, it's about moving as swiftly as possible to generate results with whatever you're working on.

Thankfully, as a marketing team, we were well-positioned to pull off this event alongside the rest of the company. The team was skilled, proficient, and agile, able to quickly make the pivot.

Since then, I've striven to move as fast as possible.

This doesn't mean I've been perfect, and, to be honest, there have been times when I moved significantly slower than I'd have liked or allowed a level of malaise to set in.

But, like a guiding principle, when you're not moving as fast as you want, you can always recalibrate and get to where you need to go.

With that in mind, in this post, I'm going to share what I've learned about:

• What exactly is slow or fast in marketing?
• 12 causes of marketing friction
• 3 steps to accelerating your marketing team's speed
  

Let's do this.

What exactly is slow in marketing? 

I could be wrong, but I'm not convinced there's a scientific definition of what it means to be slow in marketing.

From what I know and have gathered, it simply means your marketing team is slow—relatively speaking—in terms of how quickly you're able to launch new marketing tactics, campaigns, or tests.

In general, as I'm about to explain, it's beneficial to move as fast as you can.

Speed in marketing is one of the biggest competitive advantages your team can harness. 

It's not just about moving fast, but also about being able to launch new or optimized initiatives swiftly to figure out how to meet your goals.

Imagine launching an entirely new marketing channel. 

Suppose your team can quickly strategize, design, and launch a new campaign to gather early indications of success. The quicker you can move in this scenario, the sooner you'll be able to optimize your efforts to gain traction, scale, and ultimately, grow.

Let's also consider social media marketing. 

If your team can rapidly develop and launch a new campaign in response to a trending topic or event, you're able to not only capitalize on the trend while it's still hot, but also collect real-time feedback. This feedback can be instrumental in refining your campaign for even better results.

These are just two examples to consider. 

Now, if you're unsure whether your team is moving slowly or quickly, consider these questions:

• Can you confidently launch something new and produce results in 1-4 weeks? 
• Are you satisfied with the speed at which your team moves?
• Do your projects stay on track, or does your team tend to miss deadlines?
• Can you increase the speed at which your team ideates, learns, and launches something new? Why or why not?
• Are your projects and tactics organized with clear due dates and assigned team members?

While these questions merely scratch the surface, and there are more questions you can ask, your answers show if you're moving fast or too slow within your organization.

12 Causes of Marketing Friction

The study of friction isn't confined to the classroom.

In marketing, it's a fundamental force to be aware of as well.

Let's take a moment to refresh. 

Think of friction as a force that exists to slow things down. A prime example is when we apply our car’s brakes to slow down. Friction is what slows the car and brings it to a halt. 

In the marketing world, friction can pop up in all sorts of ways. And, similar to our cars, it can put the brakes on our work and bring progress to a grinding halt.

When we identify the areas of friction in marketing, we can work to avoid them and keep things running smoothly. 

Here are 12 must-know causes of marketing friction:

1. Limited bandwidth
2. Excessive red tape
3. Poor communication
4. Works in Progress (WIP)
5. Slow-moving company culture
6. Inefficient processes
7. Inadequate collaboration
8. Shortage of skilled personnel
9. Lack of strategy and clear goals
10. Insufficient technical resources
11. Overemphasis on future-focused plans
12. Regular changes in strategy and tactics

As a marketing leader, it's crucial to not only recognize these issues but also implement solutions to reduce the friction your team faces. 

But, instead of tackling these issues one-by-one, below are three widely applicable, significant steps you can take to not only reduce marketing friction but, more importantly, accelerate your team's work.

3 steps on how to build a marketing team

It’s time to get into the nitty-gritty. 

Implementing these three processes as a core part of your marketing team can help address, avoid, and remedy the 12 causes of marketing friction.

Here are three ways to accelerate your marketing team’s speed:

1. Create an autonomous marketing team
2. Build a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team
3. Create a sense of urgency

Let’s get started. 

1. Create an autonomous marketing team

To move fast in marketing, your team needs to be autonomous. 

Here’s why:

Speed in marketing hinges on efficient decision-making.

In practical terms, your marketing team should be operationally autonomous, which will streamline your decision-making process and empower everyone to move as quickly as possible. In other words, you want to reduce the number of dependencies your team has on people and factors outside of your control. 

Here's how you can set up marketing team for autonomy:

• Obtain approval for high-level plans
• Set budget boundaries
• Establish clear approval processes
• Create a brand guide

Obtain approval for high-level plans

This is one of the most effective ways to set up your team for speed and success. 

After creating your marketing strategy, get approval for your plans from the upper brass at your organization: C-Suite, VPs, or the executive team. 

When you obtain a sign off on the big strategic bets you want to make, then your team will be freed up to work on all of the tactical aspects necessary to execute your strategy. 

Here’s why:

Your boss or c-suite doesn’t want to know all of the details of your plan. 

All they care about are the big strategic moves you want to make to accomplish your goals. So, don’t bog them down in all of the tactical nitty-gritty. They don’t care. 

Instead, get approval for the 2-3 strategies you’d like to implement. 

Afterward, you and your team are ready to roll on everything required to accomplish your goals.

If you need help implementing your marketing strategy, check out Marketing Implementation: 9 Steps to Turn Your Marketing Plans into Success Stories.

Set budget boundaries

Do you regularly go back-and-forth on approvals for budget? 

If at all possible, don’t. 

Instead, work toward creating budget boundaries. 

Here’s the deal:

Budgetary concerns are another significant factor that slows down marketing teams. 

When you don’t have a budget or clear boundaries set with your marketing team, then you’ll always have a back-and-forth with whoever controls the money at your company to secure approval. 

Instead, get with your boss, CFO, or whoever controls the money at your company to either set an overall budget for marketing, per channel, or for a new test or campaign you’d like to run. This way, you don’t have to worry about seeking approval for every little expense. 

Here’s a pro tip, something I’ve used in my own career:

Provide either a weekly or monthly report on your marketing spend. 

This is one easy way for you to lead up by letting the relevant parties know how much you’re spending, what it’s producing, and how you’re optimizing it. This also keeps leadership in the know and from waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering how much marketing is spending.

Establish clear approval processes

You can quickly reduce red tape and improve communication with efficient processes. 

How?

By creating clear approval processes and identifying stakeholders (people who can say “no” to whatever you’re working on) for your marketing efforts. 

Here’s one small example I faced in a previous position.

At one company, after stepping into my role, I noticed there were four people involved with reviewing a blog post before publishing. And, two of the people involved were from different departments. 

The number of stakeholders involved slowed this process down way too much. So, I decided to remove people from other departments in the process because their involvement was complicating what should have been a relatively simple task. 

This process will vary from one organization to another. For instance, some leaders may want to approve copy, while others might prefer to sign off on design or something else entirely. Regardless, figure this out for your company and thank me later. 

Create a brand guide

Finally, by creating a brand guide, you can get your executive team to sign off on your overall approach to branding. This way, you can move fast on most of the blocking and tackling you’ll need to handle, like social media, blog posts, and general paid media campaigns to name a few. 

2. Build a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) Team

This idea is stealing a play from the agile methodology playbook. 

In what I’m going to share below, I’m going to speak into what I know best and that’s building remote marketing teams in the startup and SMB space.

Here’s the big idea for creating a fast team:

Develop a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team.

If you’ve been around Product Oriented Delivery (POD) models before, you’ll notice I’ve “adapted” this term to concentrate on marketing. 

Again, in marketing, to achieve your strategic goals, you must launch, learn, and optimize your tactics as quickly as possible. To do this, you have to build a small, cross-functional team with the technical skills necessary to do the work.

In building your Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team, here’s how:

• Establish your business and marketing strategy
• Determine your short- and long-term objectives
• Balance in-house versus outsourcing

Let me explain. 

Establish your business and marketing strategy

Before building a team, understand your company's business and marketing strategy.

Why?

You must identify the type of work you'll be doing before hiring (or outsourcing) team members.

Will your company focus on:

• Inbound Marketing
• Outbound Sales
• Product-Led Growth (PLG)
• Organic Growth
• Viral Marketing
• Something else?

Your company's business strategy informs your marketing strategy, which in turn dictates the tactics and tasks needed. From this foundation, you can then develop a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team.

Determine your short- and long-term objectives

Next, outline your short- and long-term marketing objectives.

Consider these timeframes:

• 1 week
• 1 month
• 3 months
• 6 months
• 12 months

I'm not advocating for strict adherence to these timeframes. 

Rather, I challenge you to think about what to launch now, soon, and later. 

This way, you can practically plan when to hire someone and balance in-house or outsourced work, leading to the next point.

Balance in-house versus outsource

Should you hire someone full-time or outsource work?

It depends on various factors, including:

• Business strategy
• Marketing strategy
• Timeline
• Budget
• Bandwidth
• Type of work
• Competencies of your current team

No single approach fits all situations when building your team. 

If you're unsure about hiring someone full-time, consider outsourcing to a freelancer or agency initially. If you find you need more dedicated time and effort, you can then hire a full-time team member. 

In tying this all together, ask these questions when building your team:

• What is your company’s business strategy?
• What is your marketing strategy?
• What needs to be done now, soon, or later? 
• Should we hire someone full-time or outsource the work?

While there are more questions to ask and factors to consider, these will set you on the right path.

Regardless of your approach, keep your marketing team as lean as possible for as long as possible. 

Pro Tip: 

Use an org chart builder, like the one from Time Is Limited, to quickly map out different options. Speaking from experience, their tool makes it easy to create an org chart.

3. Create a sense of urgency

Finally, creating a sense of urgency is the last step toward accelerating your marketing efforts.

Finding the right balance here will motivate your team to work efficiently and effectively. 

This doesn’t mean that everyone is running around with their hair on fire. 

Instead, this is about cultivate a specific mindset, being strategic, and eliminating unnecessary red tape, making quick yet informed decisions, and maintaining a steady pace of work

Here’s how:

• Start with your marketing strategy
• Break it down into a smaller time frame
• Measure today and tomorrow

Start with your marketing strategy

This is one nail I’ll continue to hammer: start with your marketing strategy.

It’s fundamental to moving fast. 

In borrowing a line from the U.S. Navy Seals, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” 

How does this practically apply to marketing?

Simple:

If you don’t start with your marketing strategy, then your team–even if they’re fast–will only be reactive, not proactive. Their focus will only be on the here and now, and not making progress toward bigger strategic bets.

Yes, you want to focus on what needs to be shipped this week, soon, and later. But what needs to be shipped should be anchored into your marketing strategy. 

Will there be times when you need to pivot?

Absolutely. 

Break it down into a smaller time frame

Do you have new objectives you are pursuing next quarter?

Then take those big projects, and break them down into smaller time frames, and then focus on what needs to be shipped in the upcoming week. 

Now, during your weekly marketing team meetings (or whatever rhythm you pursue), you can review these tasks and discuss them as a team. 

We’ve discussed this a lot already, but I have one more point to add: 

In launching anything, you need to have the systems in place to do so. 

For example, if you’re launching a completely new initiative from scratch, it’s going to take you more time to do so at first because you have to get the people and tools in place to do so. 
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During my time at PhoneBurner, we made a strategic bet to focus on account-based marketing (ABM). Before we could launch this initiative, I had to do two things:

• Hire someone
• Get the right tools
• Create the initial plan

After these items were in place, then we were able to be in a position to quickly launch new ABM tactics.

In a sense, it’s like laying down a track for a train to run on. After the track is laid, then you can run trains on it as much as you like at a much faster pace. 

Measure today and tomorrow

In marketing, our work should cross multiple timelines. 

As I mentioned earlier, we should operate in three general areas:

• Now 
• Soon
• Later

This isn’t meant to be set in stone, and, if you need dates, I’d break it down like this:

• 1-4 weeks
• 2-3 months
• 4-12 months

Thinking in these timelines will force us to balance short-term goals (lead and demand generation) with long-term goals (brand building). 

Like many things in marketing, this doesn’t happen by accident. 

You can lead your team to focus in this way by measuring two things:

• Lead and lag metrics
• Short- and long-term goals

Let me explain.

Lead and lag metrics

Here’s the easiest way I know how to explain this:

• Lag metrics = achieved goals
• Lead metrics = activity metrics to achieve goals

For example, one normal lag metric (goal) is marketing qualified leads (MQLs). In my time in marketing, I’ll have a commitment (e.g., generate 50 MQLS), and I’ll report on my primary lag metric on a weekly and monthly basis to the executive team. 

Now, with my marketing team, we’ll not only talk about our lag metric. 

But we’ll also dig into the lead metrics (activities) we’re measuring to let us know if we’re going to be on track or not to achieve our goal. 

Here’s an example from paid media:

These measurements will help you to focus on activity that will lead you to achieve your goals.

So, this is a great blend between what you’re doing now to achieve a goal later. 

Short- and long-term goals

Not only do you want to track your activity, but you also want to measure your short- and long-term goals. 

Here are the two big takeaways:

1. Create short-term goals (1-4 weeks)
2. Create long-term goals (5-52 weeks)

If you only have short-term goals or initiatives your team is pursuing, then you’ll end up being short sighted and reactionary. 

If you only have long-term goals, then your team will move slowly.

Now, if you add these two goals together, then you’ll be able to create a balance with your team in terms of the tactics you’re pursuing. 

I don’t think there’s a formulaic approach to this, like 50% of your goals need to be short- and long-term. Expect it to change based on the business strategy of the company, and be OK with that. If you create an agile team in the form of a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team, then you’ll be able to adjust as needed.

Making this work for you

Don’t let the challenges discussed earlier slow you and your marketing team down. 

Remember, take these three steps to build a fast and high-performing marketing team:

1. Create an autonomous marketing team
2. Build a Marketing-Oriented Delivery (MOD) team
3. Create a sense of urgency

Take time (perhaps today?) to review how you implement your marketing ideas and tactics, what is causing any delays, and how you can increase the speed your team moves. 

Monitor your progress.

Make any necessary adjustments. 

And celebrate milestones as you work toward a faster marketing pace.

In time, your team can become faster, more agile, and better equipped to compete in today's fast-paced marketing landscape. 

By following the steps outlined above, you’ll be well on your way to building a faster, more competitive marketing team that can effectively achieve your business goals.