Log #022 | How Marketing & Analytics should structure meetings

Every Marketer says they want an analytical counter part. Yet, so many that have one are unhappy.

It’s not just the marketer though. Data analysts and scientists are also unhappy. From their perspective, they’re doing everything that feels right but then get passed over during promotion. And the business cost of this misalignment is crazy high: missed opportunities and incorrect decision making is just leaving money on the table for the business.

So, how do you fix it? Like any relationship, the foundation of a good one is communication. In a future article, I’ll talk about how to improve communication between Marketing and Analytics but today I’m going to outline a framework on how to structure the right meeting cadence between Marketing and Analytics.

Every framework is meant to solve a business problem even a communication one. In most B2C companies, the pace of innovation and strategic change is fast meaning that context gets lost quickly, so this framework helps reduce the cost of lost context. .

Here’s when businesses usually make decisions:

They set quarterly plans, review them monthly, and make decisions weekly. Seems straightforward enough, but how often is that context being passed to the lowest employees of the company? Is there a forum in which senior leadership shares “This is the strategy for the quarter” and then “Hey, here’s how the business changed this month so we’re doing XYZ”? The answer is anecdotally No.

Unfortunately, when there’s a breakdown in communication it’s the lowest of the totem that suffer and get blamed. A proper meeting architecture forces repeated interaction but also outlines what needs to be discussed at each meeting.

Like many framework this one is primarily rooted in experience. There’s no scientific proof that this will absolutely work, but I have a pretty good hunch that it will because I’ve been in situations where there’s been the right framework and ones where there wasn’t.

More importantly, you can no longer use communication as an excuse for poor performance so it removes a variable when trying to solve organizational dysfunction.