The Challenge
A global finance organization’s marketing costs were rising year over year. A nascent follow-the-sun (FTS) model, inadequate reporting, outdated technology, inconsistent roles, and fragmented talent across global locations were hindering the effectiveness of marketing investments across LA, London, and India operations.
Due to a lack of modern marketing capabilities, leaders struggled to fully leverage FTS operations, leading to challenges scaling and measuring the effectiveness of marketing spend.
Partnering with Point B resulted in powerful, ongoing cost savings and significant operational improvements.
The Opportunity
Conscious of rising costs, the organization sought a strategic partner to support development of core marketing capabilities with a focus on tech-enabled content creation and consistent management across the US, Europe, and India. Our experts identified that a robust marketing operations maturity assessment would enhance automation, streamline global operations, refine performance measurement, and facilitate contract negotiations with the firm’s primary agency.
Leaders partnered with Point B based on our marketing-specific business process and information technology outsourcing expertise, as well as our ability to provide best-in-class offshore rate benchmarking through our partnership with Oxford Global Projects.
The Approach
Using proprietary benchmarking data and market insights, we compared our customer’s marketing maturity with similarly sized organizations across industries to identify gaps in talent, processes, and technology. We established a target state for operational maturity across the US, Europe, and Asia as well as future state goals for internal and external marketing capabilities and offshore labor rates. After gaining alignment on core growth areas, we developed a modernization roadmap focused on technology, offshore leverage, and contract renegotiations. This work led to:
- New contract terms aligned to industry standards
- A negotiations strategy to lower agency costs
- An automation strategy to streamline workflow and build standardized content templates
- Creation of a Vendor Management Office for governance, capacity management, cost control, and quarterly reviews
- Intake and dashboard tooling to forecast workforce needs and estimate costs
- A dual vendor strategy to ensure in-house and offshore talent focus on the right types of work
- A clear framework for vendor role definition to right-size talent investments
- Updated contract language to incent automation and cost reduction
In addition, our team worked toward clarity by defining a global FTS operations model to support existing workflows across marketing operations, content production, and digital marketing teams.
Project Results
Partnering with Point B resulted in powerful, ongoing cost savings and significant operational improvements. They achieved:
$10.4M+ in contractual savings over the next five years through a renegotiated marketing operations managed services contract
An estimated 25% in savings through role, geography, and skillset standardization across offshore locations, based on best-in-class capabilities
A 30% increase in capacity with AI and automation-fueled workflows and standard enterprise applications (like Adobe)
Seeing the impact of this work on adjacent teams, leaders from the organization’s IT and data and analytics functions plan to partner with Point B to capture similar value and savings and pilot nearshore vendor partnerships.
RELATED INDUSTRIES
RELATED SOLUTIONS
