How well is your operations, sales, marketing triangle working?

At The Property Marketing Strategists, as part of our mission to elevate the role of marketing in property, we believe that marketeers have a strategic position across the business. Fundamentally, that most crucially involves working alongside operations and sales - they are intrinsically linked and there's no start or end to how these functions work together. 

We invited Guests Lee Rennie (Melu), Tom White (Wau), Lee Rawlinson (Homes for Students) and Russell Markou (Quintain Living) to the Property Marketing Lounge on the 19th October 2021 to discuss their experience of how the relationships between those functions work, and sometimes don't work and how to resolve this.

You can catch the full recording of this session and all our sessions on our website

We started the webinar with Lee Rawlinson mentioning that within his organisation Homes for Students, the marketing team are the ‘who’, the sales team are the ‘how’, then both of those teams feed up into the ops team who are the ‘why’. The ops team then feeds this learning and information back into the business and the process begins again.

Tom then mentioned that it is rare to find such a dynamic relationship between the Sales, Marketing and Operations departments, but that this is becoming increasingly important that operations are considered a key component of any marketing efforts. If there is a massively disjointed relationship between marketing or sales activity and the operational delivery of it, effectively, you may instantly have a dissatisfied customer and a Frankenstein monster of an organisation.

Is Sales a separate function or is it everyone’s responsibility? Russell Markou stated that within Quintain Living it is their leasing team who are first and foremost responsible for converting sales, but they can't do it alone. They are supported by all other operational departments within the business - It’s about the customer experience and how the customer feels engaging with your brand, every detail matters, so in that way, everyone is a sales person. Tom added that there is now a complexity with that consumer journey which is so multi-layered in terms of touchpoints.

Internal teams need to be supported with the right systems and processes, caring people should be recruited to well-represent the brand and emotional intelligence is so important and powerful. Those relationships between the internal teams and the customer are so valuable.

On the topic of tensions between operations and marketing, and customer retention, Lee Rennie gave an example of a customer who reached out to say that they spoke to someone last week and were expecting something and hadn’t heard back yet - this displays how a website can be geared up perfectly for obtaining a lead, but it's then a case of who follows up? What is the process behind that? How quickly do you respond? This could lead to lost opportunities if organisations are not set up in the right way to handle that, and the whole process from start to finish. Russell then added that healthy tension can be brilliant; testing and pushing boundaries and challenging each other, as long as there is genuine alignment in objectives and egos are set aside. Lee Rawlinson added that there can definitely be a danger when the marketing team are kept separate.

Tom White discussed how the bigger value that you get from those three dots being joined up is a constant feedback loop of data, whether that is quantitative or qualitative. “Marketeers and sales people need to be constantly armed with the tactics that they know are going to engage the audience and actually the people who probably know that the best in most organisations are the ops people.” – Tom White.

Hindsight is a wonderful strategy according to Russell Markou. Meaning that instead of trying to do things all in one go at the same time, teams should work towards one objective and take what they learned from this to apply to achieving future objectives.

Regarding data, all panellists agree it is not only about who ‘owns’ it but who is analysing it and acting upon the results. Lee Rawlinson questioned whether companies are able to have open, protected, safe, non-combative, non-blame conversations about what the data is saying? Tom agrees with this sentiment and adds that between finance, sales, marketing, ops and I.T. there is a huge amount of data that, if used properly, should actually take all of the emotion around decision-making away so that it’s not combative.

Tom says that information has a high value and he believes that data is the biggest mission, but in most businesses, a centralised function like a Chief Data Officer doesn't exist, but it should. Russell states that in this sector, we will all achieve more by sharing data and being more comfortable to help set greater benchmarks and creating a deeper understanding of the customer and where opportunities lie. 

There were key themes to takeaway:

- Customer Service

- Data

- Customer feedback

- Internal communications

If you want to discuss how to build a better relationship between your operations, marketing and sales departments, The Property Marketing Strategists can help. Get in touch…