An interesting article by Andrew Gaffney of the DemandGen Report “New ROI Study Shows Firms with Ops Teams, Metrics Outgrowing Competitors” highlighted a new study by the Lenskold Group / MarketSphere that showed that firms with Marketing Ops are outpacing their competitors 52% to 46%.

“We consistently see that the high performing marketing organizations tend to have advantages in marketing operations, strengths in generating insights, and ROI discipline,” says report author Jim Lenskold, president of Manasquan, NJ-based consultancy the Lenskold Group. “The economic pressures are increasing the demand for measurements and ROI, and should motivate marketers to improve their capabilities. It is a critical time to understand and manage marketing effectiveness. And as marketers experience the opportunity to improve marketing effectiveness with better insight, we would expect those practices to hold steady and continue on beyond the economic recovery.”

This is a trend we have seen for some time. Firms are measuring both their marketing programs and marketing organizations more than ever before. The ROI of marketing spend and the volume of sales-qualified-leads delivered to sales are now common measures for compensating marketing executives.

Measurement is just one aspect of the general shift marketing organizations are making as they begin to own the upper portion of the sales funnel. “A more operational approach to the marketing function makes organizations more accountable and more efficient.” According to Mark Lewis, Director of Marketing at Fujitsu Computer Products. “Just as Sales organizations have added Ops support to better understand and manage the sales cycle, marketing organizations need to measure their performance as well.”

And while Marketing departments are becoming more analytical, don’t expect the science of marketing to render the art of marketing obsolete. As Dan Pink describes in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the right side of the brain skills such as creativity, empathy, contextual, and big picture thinking are going to become increasingly important as we outsource and automate marketing.

Is your marketing organization measuring its way to success?