FOCUS 4: Agility No more mission 'impossible'

How to empower agile teams with creative control, flexibility, and speed

Team agility and empowerment will make or break your strategy

All too often, marketing teams are slowed down, creativity is stifled, impact is unclear, and teams lose motivation because of fundamental challenges with silos, stakeholders, processes, and bottlenecks.

Over the last few years, many businesses are benefiting from a movement toward democratization. Disciplines that were once kept under lock and key by specialists are open to other teams around the business. Meanwhile, specialists maintain control over the really important stuff.

For example, the rise of low-code and no-code platforms hasn’t just helped accelerate software creation for seasoned developers. It also empowers “citizen developers”. People with little or no coding experience can now create apps aligned with central IT policies and governance and compliance requirements.

This shift toward democratization has brought major gains in business agility.

Kate Terry, Head of Demand at Turtl

Similarly, the democratization of data has revolutionized the way many businesses operate. The growth of data lakes and BI solutions has made data, and the hidden insights it contains, easier to access for people outside of analytics teams. All the while, the data remains properly managed, processed and secure.

With democratization,the people closest to the problem can now fix it themselves. They no longer need to wait for specialist intervention. In addition, specialist teams are saving time and money. As a result, they are free to focus on important strategic projects rather than micromanaging every tiny change.

What does this mean for marketing teams?While some roadblocks require a bigger organizational overhaul, marketing teams can more quickly find areas of autonomy and flexibility - and gain motivation.

By democratizing content, marketers can realize these same benefits. However, similar to software development and data analytics, doing this successfully requires the right technology to support it.

It gives my team a creative outlet. Everyone is just proud of their content at the end of it. They're desperate to share it and see how it performs - they love the analytics.

Alexa Bradbury, Global Marketing Director at Guidant Global

Democratizing content creation means retaining control over the things you can and should control. For example, this may include aspects such as branding, key messages, and an engaging format. Simultaneously, non-specialists should be empowered to produce content themselves.

With a content automation platform like Turtl, you can control which elements of content creation can’t be changed by “citizen content marketers”. This can be done while bringing in insights and specialized knowledge from across your organization to create content that achieves the right outcomes.

At EI Advisory, for example, a team of analysts with no marketing experience uses the drag-and-drop interface in Turtl's SaaS Content Platform to create engaging, high-quality reports for the B2B market intelligence firm’s clients.

And content democratization helped Cisco's marketing leadership to empower their marketing team while saving 90% on costs and reducing content creation time by months.

Click below and listen to what the Guidant Global team think of implementing Turtl

Clarity grows success

The roles and goals of a manager

Managers need to assess team ROI and direction. This means not only focusing on results, but also defining what success looks like despite disconnected roles or organizational bottlenecks.

Successful management requires a combination of team accountability (everyone knows their responsibilities), task tracking (quantitative and qualitative data), and valuable feedback (covering expertise areas and opportunities for growth).

The roles and goals of a leader

Leaders determine the sustainability of projects and innovative operations improvements. Don't only keep an eye out for trending topics or industry buzzwords, but for replicable and long-term viable business strategies.

Effective leadership requires a combination of interrelation (covering interdepartmental team communication), evaluation (asking for performance reports while offering constructive guidance), and motivation (growing and exciting your clientele and team, as well as yourself).

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.

Tom Peters, business management author

Informa Markets + Turtl:
Empowering teams to deliver personalized, high-quality content 90% faster

When it comes to professional, high-quality sales and marketing content, PowerPoint-produced documents and PDFs are beginning to show their age. With Turtl's help, Informa Markets is able to create customizable proposal templates that are visually appealing (and trackable).

Turtl Docs are designed to always be on-brand, interactive, and brain-friendly. The previous process of piecing together each proposal wasn't just time-consuming and disjointed, it allowed mistakes to be sent to customers. Turtl's automated solution enables salespeople to follow a streamlined workflow using pre-designed, on-brand templates which can be edited and updated as needed.

But that's not all - the Informa Markets team also found Turtl's software was easy to learn and quick to implement, saving invaluable onboarding and production time. Both new and experienced sales teams are now able to hit the ground running and start creating high-quality proposals right away.

Turtl helped Informa Markets achieve:

90% reduction in production time
1,540 hours saved per person, per year
$138,000+ annual savings