Change Management for Marketers: Perfecting People and Process

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a complete solution to help you personalise every moment of engagement across the customer lifecycle so you can build lasting relationships and drive business growth. However, the reality is that most marketing teams are not set up to fully harness the opportunities it provides. Their resources are absorbed by manual tasks. They’re stuck integrating data vs innovating with data. Our customers tell us these are not technology issues but stem from challenges related to people and process. 

To unpack these challenges and how marketers can align their teams to get the full value of their technology investments, I invited some experts to join me on stage at Agentforce World Tour Sydney.

We covered everything from where marketers get stuck on the marketing operations maturity curve to how Salesforce customer Funlab pushed past this point to reduce manual processes and increase lifetime value by 28%. Effective change management practices were instrumental in their success.

What is Change Management?

Change management is a strategic process that helps organisations and individuals adapt to change. The process involves planning to guide people through the change and ensure effective implementation. Six main benefits of change management include:

• Clearly identify stakeholders and hold them accountable
• Assess the need for change and predict the impact of the new initiative
• Empower employees throughout the change process
• Reduce the amount of time required to implement a change
• Mitigate risk associated with new processes
• Ensure the success of new initiatives

So, when implementing marketing technology or data and AI initiatives, organisations should prioritise change management to achieve the expected results.  

Our session at Agentforce World Tour Sydney offered a masterclass in change management, including practical tips for implementation. Let’s dive into the key insights and practical advice shared during our conversation.

Moving up the Marketing Operations Maturity Curve

As technology advances, customers expect better, more personalised experiences. However, our Ninth Edition State of Marketing Report found that fewer than six in 10 marketers are able to fully personalise familiar channels such as email and mobile messaging.

Luke Tucker, Business Consultant and Change Expert, Salesforce, shared that what holds many marketing teams back is the ability to evolve their operating models to fully adopt new technology. Most get stuck halfway along the marketing operations maturity curve where they are performing repeatable processes, using basic personalisation, and consistently A/B testing and measuring ROI.

Teams struggle to move past this point and optimise their capabilities and results. Barriers include team structure and an inability to operationalise new technologies. This is where a transformation pod can help and ultimately enable an elevated marketing strategy.

A transformation pod ring-fences 20-30% of the marketing team to:

• Rapidly innovate and build the future-state
• Drive broader adoption of capabilities
• Deliver on your strategy faster
• Drive best practices across the business

Building a Transformation Pod to Fast-Track Value-Realisation

By building a transformation pod, marketing teams can adopt a new two-speed operating model. With this model, the transformation pod builds the future state, and the remaining team runs business-as-usual activities in parallel. 

What this looks like may differ from one business to the next. For example, for a small start-up, the transformation pod may be one marketer who has carved out one day per week to focus on the future state. For a large corporation, the pod may be a team of 15. The most important thing is that the transformation pod has people who are passionate and empowered to drive innovation and change. 

Once the transformation pod is in place, marketing teams should set the foundations for their new operating model by:  

• Establishing clear roles & responsibilities & success metrics
• Auditing the customer journey & employee experience to identify use cases
• Streamline BAU campaigns to regulatory & revenue driving
• Dedicate budgets to use cases

Change Management Success: A Deep Dive into Funlab’s Transformation Journey

Funlab is a leader in competitive socialising experiences. It aims to get people out of their homes and into the real world to experience human connections at its venues, including Holey Moley and Strike. For a closer look at what effective change management involves, we asked Tracy Tanti, Head of Customer Relationships & Retention, at Funlab, to share her team’s transformation journey.

Funlab’s Transformation Goals

Starting out on their transformation journey, Tracy and her team’s goals were to: 

• Support the business’ global expansion and entry into the US 
• Accelerate growth, scale, & value for the business and customers
• Create a connected customer experience 
• Create and activate a 360° view of guests with visibility into their journey and interactions

A Framework for Change Management and Transformation

Funlab’s focus on change management helped it to achieve its goals and quickly move up the marketing operations maturity curve—shifting from a level one to a level five in eighteen months. This move up the maturity curve has solidified marketing’s role as a growth and revenue centre, rather than being viewed as a cost centre. 

Funlab’s journey involved eight key stages: 

• Stage 1: Discovery – Focused on upfront planning and research, developing a growth plan aligned to the strategic vision and business objectives, and ring-fencing budgets.
• Stage 2: Planning & Design – Built a team structure which optimised the budget through strategies like seconding staff to the project and short or long-term contracting. 
• Stage 3: Implementation – Implementation supported by strong governance and stakeholder engagement. This stage also focused on data management and ensuring access to clean and complete data for activities like lifecycle management and segmentation. 
• Stage 4: Testing – Final check to ensure all use cases were delivered, followed by user testing to ensure the solution worked as designed. 
• Stage 5: Deployment – Successful deployment supported by training, implementing change management, and thorough planning, including a contingency and rollback plan.  
• Stage 6: Hypercare – Continued focus on change management to support users while being vigilant and ready to quickly address any technical issues and challenges.  
• Stage 7: Enablement – Evaluated the success of change management strategies and assessed what tools and training were needed to continue supporting users. 
• Stage 8: Measure, report, analyse & optimise – Continued focus on delivering and demonstrating value to the business. 

The Results: Funlab’s Transformation Enables Personalised Experiences and Increased Customer Lifetime Value

Funlab’s meticulous approach to comprehensive change management has paid off significantly. By prioritising planning, stakeholder alignment, and continuous optimisation, they quickly moved up the marketing operations maturity curve and met their transformation goals. 

Funlab quickly scaled its operations and expanded into the US market, with six venues now live across three states. The team has also streamlined online and offline processes, creating a smoother and optimised experience for customers and employees. Previously siloed data is now clean and actionable and sales, service, marketing, and venue teams are now united by Salesforce’s deeply integrated platform, which allows them to share a 360-degree view of each guest. The real benefit for Funlab’s marketers is maximising this 360-degree view of guests through Marketing Cloud to create value and personalise every customer touchpoint.

Results include: 

• 100% improved access to clean and actionable data
• 50% reduction in manual processes, saving countless hours
• 30% increase in active guests
• 28% increase in guest lifetime value 
• 13% growth in physical venues from entering a new market
• 69% online category growth
• 34% increase in database