A Simple Guide to Lean Process Improvement There are many businesses out there that operate with a mindset of “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it.” Unfortunately, this type of close-minded thinking can lead to a great deal of waste. Tasks may be unnecessary to achieve the final goal, processes may be repeated multiple times when one would be sufficient, employees may be wasting time on superfluous responsibilities, and materials may be wasted during manufacturing. When this occurs within an organization, employee satisfaction decreases so turnover increases, quality suffers so customer satisfaction and retention is decreased, and one look at the books will likely indicate the company is hemorrhaging money. You might think that this type of operational inefficiency only occurs in large corporations and organizations, however, it’s just as prevalent in small-to-medium-sized businesses and can be seen throughout every department. Efficiency is the name of the game for successful businesses, and you’re about to learn one of the best ways to turn your business into a lean, mean, money-making machine. Lean Process Improvement What is lean process improvement? Lean process improvement is a concept originally developed by Toyota to decrease the amount of time it took from receiving an order to delivering it. While lean process improvement is often discussed in a production environment, the concept can be applied to service, healthcare, technology, and even government. Consider a marketing department that has multiple people working on the same project but not communicating. Rather than each handling a specific...

The Marketer's Guide to Process Mapping Imagine you’re tasked with baking a cake for a friend’s birthday. You’re not exactly an expert baker, so you hop online and look for an easy-to-follow recipe that will help your dessert be the star of the party. Your mouth is watering as you scroll through photo after photo of delicious-looking cakes. Finally, you settle on a gorgeous strawberry shortcake photo and dive into the recipe. It has a list of ingredients and then one line of instruction that says: “Bake cake.” Confused, you frantically scroll down looking for more guidance. With none available, you end up wasting ingredients when you have to remix your batter and it takes forever to bake because you have to stop and repeat earlier steps or start from scratch because you’ve done something wrong. Your cake is an utter failure and you end up swinging by a bakery on your way to the party. Perhaps you’ve never had to bake a cake, but no doubt, you’ve been given assignments at work that leave you wishing you could rely on a bakery. The only information provided to you is an end goal and you struggle to meet your boss’s expectations because you have no idea how to complete the task they’ve given you. It happens more than you think, and if you’re a manager, you may even be guilty of doing this to your employees. When this happens, projects don’t get done on time or don’t get...

What is a Data Warehouse? Everything You Need to Know As a marketer or business analyst, you know that data is an important part of your success. And the way you store and organize your data will either make your job easier or harder. There are many ways that you can store data, one of them being data warehousing. This is an excellent option for businesses that need to look at a large amount of data from multiple sources. Today, let's learn what a data warehouse is and how it can help you analyze your data. With a data warehouse, you can perform queries and look at historical data over time to improve decision-making. The main people in a company who will use data warehouses are data scientists and business analysts. A data warehouse will get data from multiple sources, including relational databases or transactional systems. To access the data, analysts will use business intelligence tools to analyze, data mine, make visualizations, and conduct reporting. As data continues to evolve, it's imperative for businesses to use data to stay competitive. What is the ultimate outcome of a data warehouse? The ultimate outcome of a data warehouse is to extract insights, monitor performance, and improve decision-making. By using reports, dashboards, and visualizations, analysts have all the tools they need to make the right decisions. Benefits of Using a Data Warehouse 1. Historical data. One of the main benefits of data warehouses is the ability to look at a large...

What is Data as a Service (DaaS)? "The Cloud." It's a concept that has grown wildly within the past 20-40 years as technology evolves. But if you're like me, you might not know what it really means. The cloud refers to how and where data is stored and where it isn't. It allows software and services to run on the internet, instead of only locally on one device, because the data is stored remotely across a variety of different servers. With this technology, companies have begun storing data online and modernizing their infrastructure, data management, storage, and analytics. While data management, analytics, and integration can sound like intimidating topics (especially to those of us that aren't mathematically inclined), it's so important for analyzing, strategizing, and increasing reliability in data for your marketing efforts. In this post, let's review what data as a service (DaaS) means and look at some DaaS companies to understand it better. DaaS companies focus on helping customers use their data in the most strategic, efficient way. Additionally, they help customers store their data and have impeccable search functions to make creating data reports easier. As we continue to get more data and insights into what works and doesn't, data-driven decision-making is becoming more and more popular among businesses. DaaS is similar to software as a service (SaaS), which are companies that offer software online and via the cloud, instead of needing to download or install a program. There's also IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)...

Data Ingestion: What It Is Plus How And Why Your Business Should Leverage It A scaling business is bound to have data stored across multiple sources (e.g. databases, files, live data feeds). Even individual teams within a department — such as Content  Marketing, Brand Strategy, and SEO — likely use multiple data sources simultaneously.  It's important to ensure you have a way of viewing, visualizing, and analyzing all of that data at once. This gives you a complete picture of the health of everything related to your business, from small projects to team projections to overall business success. Data ingestion is the process that can efficiently get all of your data in one place.  Data Ingestion At a high level, data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of data ingestion in greater detail, describe its importance, review the data ingestion framework, and highlight a few tools that will make the process simple for your team. Let’s dive in. What is data ingestion? Data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. It’s the process of transporting data from a variety of sources into a single location — often to a destination like a database, data processing system, or data warehouse — where it can be stored, accessed, organized, and analyzed. This process allows businesses to get a holistic view of their data in order to leverage and apply resulting insights and findings in their strategies.  Why is data ingestion important? You may...

Marketing vs. Operations: The Battle for a Small Business' Attention "Your company is one viral moment away from a potential shutdown." Yes, you read that correctly. Imagine your company is fortunate enough to appear for a few minutes on a national TV show with millions of viewers. You can hardly contain your excitement. All eyes are on you. There's no turning back.  Your excitement soon turns to horror, however, when you realize your company isn't ready for this type of attention. Suddenly, a surge in traffic to your company's website causes it to crash. Team members quit from the stress of performing under pressure. Vendors threaten to sue you for late payments. Customers are angry because their orders are either incorrect or weren't provided on-time. What took you years to build has effectively been destroyed overnight.  How can a successful organization good enough to land a coveted spot on a TV show succumb so quickly? The answer lies in Marketing vs. Operations. The Paradigm Shift from Not Enough Customers to Too Many  When an organization officially opens its doors for business, marketing-related activities tend to be the primary focus. And it makes sense. After all, if no one knows about your product or service, you won't be in business long. Those activities can include sales strategies, P.R. and social media campaigns, and digital ads that catalyze advancement from the startup to the growth stage of business.  Eventually, if you have a great product or service that customers want, you'll...

What Is an Enterprise Data Model? Enterprise data modeling is nothing new. This tactic has been around for years, but it is still relevant to modern businesses today. It can feel like an abstract, complex concept at times, but it is an important part of data governance, which helps manage and secure a company's data assets. In today's world, data security is important, as is boosting productivity and efficiency with up-to-date applications and digital processes. Enterprise data modeling can help ensure company apps and data are standardized, secure and in-line with the business mission. What is an Enterprise Data Model? Simply put, an enterprise data model is a visual representation, or graph, of an enterprise business' data. It focuses on high-level, more abstract components as it tries to define and standardize an entire enterprise business' data. That means enterprise data modeling can be a massive task, but it will be important to help reduce duplicates, inaccuracies, and errors in a business' data. Why Do You Need an Enterprise Data Model? There are numerous reasons why you might need an enterprise data model. Let's dive into four, now.  1. Improve Data Quality Even small companies handle a lot of data on a daily basis. Over time, this data can quickly become irrelevant. Errors can slip in unnoticed, as can redundancies. The more issues in the data, the less accurate it becomes. When companies revisit data to inform decisions, data riddled with errors and redundancies can impact company sales and...

How RevOps and the ‘Rhythm of the Business’ Drive Alignment at HubSpot Educator and computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." If you work for a growing company, be it a startup or scale-up, you'll know that attempting to "invent" the future isn't a matter of waiting around for flashes of inspiration and eureka moments — rather, it requires proactive planning, excellent execution, and awesome alignment. You'll also know that these ingredients aren't easy to come by. Not by a long shot. That's why I swear by a simple, unique framework to help me and my team at HubSpot prepare for the future. It's called 'rhythm of the business,' and it involves visually mapping out the key events, milestones, and activities scheduled across the business year and ensuring that every team is intimately familiar with the plan — or rhythm — for the months ahead. As a member of HubSpot's revenue operations team, understanding the 'rhythm of the business' is critical for our success. Our team's north-star goal is to remove friction for our customer-facing teams and help them to pass that friction-free experience on to customers. The RevOps model sets us up for success because it breaks down silos between operations professionals, unifies them as a central team, and allows them to work collaboratively on the systems and processes that power a business. As a result, duplicative work gets weeded out, repeatable tasks get automated, and time is...