Why marketing needs a center of excellence

Every large company I have worked in or with has the same three people. They know how the marketing automation platform actually works. They sit in marketing operations or campaign operations or under whatever name the org chart came up with that year and everyone else in the building knows their first names because everyone else needs them. When the field team wants a webinar invitation out it goes to them. When HR needs the benefits reminder sent it goes to them. When a sales director wants forty accounts told about a price change it goes to them too and it is always a Thursday afternoon.

That is a center of excellence. Nobody calls it one. It formed because the platform is complicated and the company could not train three hundred people on it so it trained three. It works until it doesn’t and when it fails it fails in a particular way.

The accidental center

The queue grows with the number of people who want to send and not with the size of the team that sends for them. For a while that is fine. Then marketing hires a product marketing team and sales ops decides the field should get email too and customer success wants a monthly update and all of them are right to want it. The three people are now the reason marketing is slow in the eyes of the people they serve, which is unfair, since they are also the reason nothing has gone badly wrong.

What they spend their days on is the problem. Changing a date in a reminder. Loading a list from an event. Building the same newsletter for the fourth region with the copy swapped. The work that only they can do waits behind it: the data model, the integration that has been flaky since spring, the fact that one contact at a key account heard from the company nine times last month because four teams each thought he was theirs.

The teams that can’t wait find a way around. A rep sends from Outlook. Somebody buys a tool with a credit card. A login gets handed out in a hurry before a launch and never taken back. Every one of those is a hole in the fence the three people were supposed to be.

And when one of the three leaves, the company finds out how much of the setup lived in her head.

What changes when you name it

Three things, and none of them is a new tool.

The first is a charter. Somebody writes down what the center owns and what the other teams own. Templates, audiences, consent, frequency, approvals, naming and reporting on one side. The words, the pictures, the timing and the audience chosen from an approved list on the other. The arguments this starts are the point. They are cheaper now than after a bad send.

The second is that the team gets measured differently. A help desk is measured on tickets closed and its best month is one where it did a great deal of work. A center of excellence is measured on how much marketing left the building and how little of it came back. Its best month is one where most campaigns went out without anyone on the team touching them.

A center of excellence is measured on how much marketing leaves the building and how little of it comes back.

The third follows from the second. The job changes from building campaigns to making campaigns buildable by someone who isn’t on the team. That means templates where the parts that must not change can’t change. Audiences defined once and offered as a short list. Upload rules that check a file before a record is written. An approval that happens because the path requires it and not because someone remembered to ask. Every hour spent on one of those saves an hour a week for as long as the company exists.

What the center should keep

A short test decides which side of the line something sits on. If getting it wrong hurts every team or can’t be undone, it belongs to the center. The platform and its integrations. The data and how consent is recorded. The templates. The suppressions and the audience definitions. How often one person may hear from the company in total. Who approves what. How things are named so the reporting works next year.

Everything else should be handed back. Marketers are perfectly capable of writing their own subject line and picking their own send date and reading their own results the morning after. What they need is for the choices in front of them to be the safe ones. I wrote about that split in more detail in the guide on self-service and the short version is that marketers want far less than ops fears and far more than a ticket gives them.

Isn’t this just bureaucracy?

It can be. A center that adds a review meeting to every send is a gate with a nicer name. A good one removes steps by deciding things in advance. The footer stays on brand because it is locked and not because a designer looked at it. The all-contacts segment doesn’t get emailed because it isn’t in the list of choices. The regional manager approves because the path routes to her and not because a marketer remembered to copy her.

The test is whether a marketer’s Thursday afternoon got shorter. If the center has done its job the price list email goes to forty accounts by five o’clock and nobody in ops heard about it until the report.

Why this matters more than it did

More teams send than ever. Sales, customer success, support, HR and product all have a reason to be in the inbox and the inbox is one place. The contact doesn’t see your org chart. He sees nine emails. Somebody has to own the total and the center is the only team positioned to see it. I’ve written before about who owns the inbox and the answer hasn’t changed. It just got more urgent.

AI took the cost out of writing. A team that used to send one email a month because writing it was work can now draft five before lunch. The brake on volume used to be effort. Now it has to be policy and policy has to live somewhere. The rules for what the AI may write are a center of excellence job whether you call it that or not.

Consent and privacy rules turned a sloppy list upload from an embarrassment into a legal matter. And the platform itself costs real money. An Eloqua or Marketo contract that only three people can use is an expensive way to send a newsletter. The center is how the rest of the company gets a return on it.

What it looks like when it works

3M is the example I keep coming back to because the numbers are public. They had 250 people who needed to send email and one small team building it for all of them. A campaign took eight hours. With a center that gave those people paths to run themselves it takes about 45 minutes and the regional teams send 120 to 200 campaigns a month. The team didn’t grow.

ConnectWise put it in a way I like. Their marketing automation team was being asked to send one-off emails for the company and the product team and HR. Once they gave those people a simple way to send inside the team’s settings and best practices they had, in their words, removed themselves as the roadblock. Their time went back to the sophisticated program work that was the reason they were hired.

Omron’s version is thirty country organizations sending their own email on the central database and subscriptions with nobody at headquarters building it for them.

In each case the center kept everything on the first list. What changed was how much went through it.

Where to start

Write the two lists and get the sending teams to sign them. Then look at a quarter of requests and find the campaign type that is most of the queue. It is almost always a single email to an existing audience. Build that one path properly: the template with the right parts locked, the audiences, the upload rules, the approver. Switch it on for one team. Measure three numbers for a quarter: how long a campaign takes from request to send, what share went out without ops touching it and how often something had to be redone. Then add the next campaign type.

The mechanics are different on each platform and we wrote them up: how to build the center in Eloqua and how to build it in Marketo. Campaign Launchpad is what we built for the part the platforms don’t do: the paths other teams run themselves while the center keeps the templates, the rules and the record.

The three people are still there in every company that does this. They are just no longer the reason anything waits.