As an operational framework, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is adopted by many organizations around the world to improve their business’s operations in a way that garners results faster and gains traction. By perfecting this methodology, your team can become an EOS Marketing powerhouse!
What is EOS?
The Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS is an operational framework to help businesses improve their systems and processes. EOS is based upon six key components: vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction.
The idea being, if an organization can master the six components of EOS. They will have a grip on their business, achieve predictability, and will therefore have traction to help with continued growth.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System was developed by Gino Wickman, a renowned author on business operations. Gino has personally delivered over 1,900 EOS full-day sessions with the entrepreneurial leaders inside the EOS community.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System is designed with startups and businesses run by entrepreneurs in mind. It is not for large businesses with thousands of employees and offices spanning the globe. Up to 250 employees is a number that has been quoted in terms of how big a business should be using EOS. But really, it is not a one size fits all framework.
EOS Marketing: How it can help
The pillars of EOS can each be applied to your marketing agency or marketing department. Each has its own value specific to marketing which has been outlined below.
Marketing vision
When adopting EOS, business leaders must first establish their vision. This is not simply just the vision for them as an entrepreneur, but the vision for the business.
This vision should be shared among all employees as them buying into the vision will help sustain the business’s growth in the long run.
The vision component helps your marketing department by clarifying your ten-year target, your three-year plan, and your one-year plan.
By breaking down a ten-year target to a one-year plan. You can then break your one-year vision into 90-day rocks. These 90-day rocks can then be made up of sprint goals.
Having clear business objectives, broken down from a major 10-year plan into 90-day rock and sprints can show if and how the business is on the right track.
This clear vision allows for the members of your marketing department to focus their efforts on what drives real value for the business. They know the year’s marketing objective. They know what 90-day rocks have to be hit to achieve that yearly objective. And, then know what the tasks are inside the sprints that make up the 90-day rocks. Therefore, by staying on track with this plan they can gather momentum and traction to realize the bigger business goals.
Marketing teams can use the Vision/Traction Organizer, or V/TO as a practical tool to help codify these marketing objectives into existence. The V/TO clarifies how the team can build traction.
No more short-sighted marketing
Marketing plans can often be short-sighted due to leadership putting the excess onus on marketing KPIs and certain metrics. Why this may show as a weekly or monthly objective as completed, and therefore looks great for staff, it does not really move the business forward.
By having a clear marketing vision, it is easily shown what has to be produced to be on track. This is likely to be shown in having a much longer lifetime customer journey.
This longer customer journey refers to the nurture that happens from target market to leads, leads to customers, and from customers to become high-value long-term customers.
Marketing agencies and departments can now create long-term campaigns and strategies to satisfy the outcome laid out in the Vision/Traction Organizer.
Right people, right seats
All organizations are made up of people. That’s why we call the companies.
Many of the most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that it is the people inside the organization that are its cause for success.
EOS stresses the importance of this. Get the right people. And get those people in the right seats.
The right person can be defined as someone who buys into the vision. They should be a good culture fit and have the capabilities to work well inside the organization.
The right person then has to be in the right seat. This means ensuring that the person has the support they need, and if they are a leader, they are trained and supported in being a leader.
An org chart for the organization and the marketing department clarifies the roles and responsibilities of each seat in relation to one another.
The EOS Marketing Scorecard
In the year 2021 and beyond, it is imperative to have a marketing scorecard to be able to track the department as a whole and each campaign’s successes or failures.
The marketing scorecard must be able to show to the leadership team, in a snapshot, the spending, and results of all current marketing campaigns.
This information can then be tracked on a weekly basis and trends and anomalies can be identified early.
Any campaigns that might be thought of as “set it and forget it” campaigns might actually be broken.
The executive team members can now manage the marketing department through data rather than initiatives and ideas.
KPI examples for an EOS Marketing approach
Your marketing team’s KPIs must be tracked in the scorecard so that knowing the results bring value to you and your team.
Below are some common KPIs that marketing department’s track:
- Website views
- Leads
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate of lead to sale %
- Cost per sale
- Average order value
The process and issue resolution
Weekly “Level-10 Meetings” and Daily Scrums are an important part of the proven process of the EOS model.
Daily Scrums are stand-up meetings designed for the team to discuss what they are working on, keep them accountable for recent work, and resolve any work they are blocked on.
This allows for issues to be resolved quickly and increases the throughput of the entire team.
The Level-10 Meeting should use the marketing scorecard. Learn how to host a Weekly Marketing Meeting using some of the principles of EOS.
Core processes
Too often, marketers and their work exists inside of silos and they are unaware of how their work impacts the other areas of a business.
By having marketers understand the core processes of a business, such as customer service, sales, product development, etc. The marketers’ abilities are improved as they understand the business and more importantly, the customers, far better.
This means marketers can go beyond blanket messaging based on demographics, psychographics or past behavior and can now understand the customer experience and relationship that the customer has had with the business.
Your marketing functions as a result of knowing your customer from all angles. Your customer is not a match for your marketing campaigns.
Designing a systems map can better help marketers understand the customer journey and how the customer interacts with the business, i.e. how customer service and business development can go hand-in-hand with remarketing or upselling.
Rocks & Sprints
Rocks and Sprints are at the core of the strategic planning process that EOS prescribes for your marketing team.
One thing we have seen time after time is that marketers have too much on their plate. Their time and efforts are diluted, as are the results.
They are trying to keep several plates spinning, rather than driving campaigns to completion and/or great results.
Taking a step in every direction gets you nowhere.
By establishing a 90-day outcome in the form of a Rock, the team can then break that rock down into the tasks and initiatives required for its success. These are done in two-week sprints.
Your EOS Marketing future
You can become a member of EOS by heading over to EOS Worldwide and joining the community of entrepreneurs who have adopted the Entrepreneurial Operating System.
There are also many marketing agencies and consultancies that advertise that they too are adopters of EOS.
If you are interested in how EOS can be applied to your marketing team, get in touch with us today.
We are always happy to discuss how we can help.
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