The challenge is this: you can have very good strategies, ideas and tools and not have the right team to implement them. There is one thing we must always keep in mind: ''we are only as good as the team we can put together''.

As we all know, when it comes to building a good company, it's all about people. Anyone who has grown a good company knows that it is all about people. But what does this mean? It sounds like a very typical thing to say. Do you think that teams just happen to come together and everything works out great? No, of course, we don't.

One of the first questions CEOs ask themselves when organizing their marketing team/department is: what kind of marketing leader should they hire and what are the skills and abilities that team members should have. In the end, these are questions about who we put behind these great ideas. If marketing is leading the issues in this company, how do we make sure we have the most interesting people on board?

There are many truths about great marketing organizations. That is, some patterns make them work perfectly. A perfect marketing team must have the following:

- The right structure

- The right talent

- The right processes

- The right ecosystem

- The right management

- The right leadership

- The right culture

7 divisions of challenge and chaos that all of us, in the case of leading a team, have to master. You can have the best idea in the world, a category in which there are hardly any competitors, and still, fail. If you are not able to create something fast enough, the reason it happens is usually the team.

So that's why we're going to tell you about the attributes and patterns that great/perfect marketing organizations follow.

In this post, we will focus on two of the 7 points: Structure and Talent. Because without a well-defined structure and a proper search, our teams would be incomplete.

Structure

The first thing is the structure. It is the most complicated and the one we spend the least time on.

Businesses or marketing organizations set up and structure themselves for the present and not for the endless future. However, there is a problem with this statement, that many of us do not think that we have to constantly restructure or re-organize. This is no longer the case - ''do not be constantly reorganizing because it creates chaos'' - we were told. But we should and have to do it anyway.

Most common marketing organizational structures:

The problem with these 4 ways of structuring marketing organizations is that they are fundamentally broken if we use them forever. We have never considered reorganizing, changing the structure. We have decided to keep growing, hiring more people, new squads. When maybe we should be thinking about it all from 0. We can review them all one after the other:

- Functional: if we think about functional, we know that marketing and sales have to be together.

- Domain-based: it has more to do with acquisition and lifecycle (they are closer together) and how we manage it. Nobody owns it, nobody is the owner and that creates problems.

- Geographic: global, what do we do locally, what do we do centrally, who has the budget, what affects the profit and loss account? Nobody feels empowered.

- Product-based: each product has to be dealt with separately. What is not separate is the customer, so how do you manage research, and how do you manage user experience?

Nothing, neither works.

And now you ask yourself, how should I do it? What is the right structure?

You have to think about what is the most important thing for the coming year. We are in a very competitive environment with very high growth categories. We are all trying to think about how we can survive 5 or 10 years and how we create companies that don't disappear, that is, that endure over time.

It is, indeed, much more difficult, but we have to think about it from year to year. It is called the elastic organization. The main thing is that it is functional and based on experience and depth, it is cross-departmental, cross-cutting support.

Another thing to consider is how to make teams work better? We organize teams around people: a team member does not like a certain task, or doesn't like to work in this way, or doesn't want to work with that person, and so on. So we structure the whole organization around that person because that person is a crack.

We have to tell that person what their job is, what they are good at and who they should work with. We have to make him see that we will be there to support him and, if he doesn't accept it, we will let him go. But don't organize the whole structure around one person or a group with enormous potential. Because, in the long run, it will do you a lot of harm and you will lose a lot of time.

Tactics

• Be clear on the 3-5 most important metrics for the coming year.
• Define what impact we need for the next 6-12 months.
• Be willing to reorganize constantly, at least twice a year.
• Talk to the teams about this when they come in, have conversations with them. They should know they will be in an elastic organization, so they'll be excited about new challenges every year.
• And, finally, make sure that if you have that structure around one person, you have to end it.

Talent

The second most important thing is talent: who do I hire, what is the profile of that person? This is a difficult question, a very difficult one.

The best marketing teams/organizations in the world are T-shaped and domain agnostic. Most of their channel managers and leaders fit this definition. Let's explain what this is all about.

This concept refers to the fact that the best marketing teams in the world have deep knowledge across the entire funnel. And they are also versed in content and landing page design. In addition, these teams are broad and know how to make a profit and loss statement. On the other hand, they can work with design teams and do research and analysis. They also know code and can talk to technical people about engineering. This is important because it gives us redundancy. Redundancy helps you run faster than your competitors.

It's great if you have a team like that, in a T-shape, you are already ahead of the others.

The idea is that you can bring your marketing experts together, swap them in any room and they can represent the whole team interchangeably. This gives relevant information to help the whole organization function better. This is difficult, but it is ideal.

Tactics

And, of course, tactically, how does this work? What are the skills we need to detect in people?

• You have to design your recruitment process to attract, screen and close T-shaped hires.
• You can detect these profiles by asking questions, for example, like this:

What areas do you master and in which ones do you feel most comfortable?
Can you explain your last annual planning forecasting process?
In which language did you develop your last product, and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
If you didn't like a design from your creative team, how would you approach it?
If you could learn about other areas of the business, what would they be and why?

• Benchmarking and referencing in terms of salaries. Most people know what it's worth and, that's a conversation you need to have with the CEO and/or CFO.
• Interaction with management. 

It's exhausting to do a lot of address. You potentially would face difficult conversations, but you have to do it. This is the job of leading a good team. You have to connect with people, explain what you need and get them to buy your proposal. It is vital. 

In the next post, we will look at the different processes and the importance of creating an ecosystem that works for a team.