How to Ensure You Have a Robust Team

As leaders strive to enable business transformation to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving  marketing and regulatory landscape, it’s clear that success will come from developing teams with skills that provide a competitive advantage, and set individuals, teams and the business up for the future.

The challenges of a rapidly changing industry have meant that identifying the current skills of a marketing team, and identifying gaps to fill and upskill, is becoming more and more important to senior marketers. In response to industry need ADMA has developed a Marketing Skills Assessment tool that allows marketers to strategically measure current capabilities and plan for the future.  The basis of this is an industry led Capability Framework, which encompasses four key marketing operational quadrants (Discovery, Strategy, Planning and Execution) to ensure a 360-degree assessment of team members. The assessment tool drills down into 12 capabilities and 35+ skills and also includes the soft skills (eg Curiosity, Collaboration) required for success.

Andrea Martens, CEO ADMA states that, “across the board marketers have indicated to us that there is often excellence in specialty subject matter, including digital, data analytics and marketing execution. However, it’s the more holistic capability building that has become more necessary to upskill.” Hiring experts in their field provide rich vertical capability; the broader marketing view, business acumen and commercial understanding are sometimes not as prevalent. Ensuring that teams are looking outside of their specialty is imperative to develop well-rounded marketers of the future.

Mim Haysom, Executive General Manager, Brand and Marketing, Suncorp and ADMA Advisory Committee Member used the Mark Ritson Working from Home course in 2020 as one tool to broaden the skills of her team. “Many marketing teams are focused on upskilling in the digital space, and as a result sometimes it’s the marketing fundamentals that get overlooked. Our capability program is focused on ensuring we have the right balance so we are not only upskilling in new capability requirements, but ensuring the team has strength in marketing and business foundations.” Haysom states.

Stuart Tucker, Chief Customer Officer, HiPages, also an ADMA Advisory Committee Member, agrees, “Sometimes it’s the basics that we’re missing. For example, the ability to manage third parties or strategic problem-solving capability is what we need to build.”

To ascertain these gaps, it’s important for senior marketers to feel that they have the tools to effectively discern the needs of their teams. Both Haysom and Tucker attest that they use robust, measurable performance processes which have been developed in line with their business objectives to generate meaningful insights that then lead to assessing roles. “We have a rigorous forma performance review followed by individual plans. Data analytics generates meaningful insights which feed into these plans and can then translate into open roles.”

Beyond the assessment of roles, data has become an increasing focus for marketers, particularly in the current regulatory environment. However, both Haysom and Tucker agree that it’s the use of that data that is vital. Tucker states that, “now more than ever we need to ensure that we have the skills within our teams which previously may have been within other departments. It’s all very well to access data from multiple sources, but sometimes having too many data points can do more harm than good. The real skill for a marketer is being able to translate data into meaningful customer insights to inform decisions”.

In all industries senior marketers are looking for additional tools to assist them in the development of their teams. ADMA is committed to providing meaningful robust resources to meet these needs. The development of the ADMA Marketing Skills Assessment which is founded on the Capability Framework is one tool that can assist marketers of all levels understand their skills capability and where they can focus on further education and training.