NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

The free course · Volume III

Marketing Operations

Five Seconds, and the Numbers That Rise as You Miss

The numbers went up. That is not the same as being heard.

Start with The Report Reading Or read from the beginning

16 lessons. Each one teaches a single instrument: not an idea, a thing you can do this week and afterwards be able to tell whether it worked.

  • 16lessons
  • 15named instruments
  • 14minutes of video
  • Freeno account, no email

Before you start

What this is, and the sentence the rest of it hangs from.

  1. Start here What this course is, what it is not, and why it is written for the operator rather than the copywriter. 50s video
  2. The numbers that rise as you miss A marketing dashboard can improve for a year while the business gets worse, and nothing in it is lying. The rising-as-you-miss pattern52s video

Part one. The Message

What a buyer is actually deciding, and how long they take to decide it.

  1. Delivery system versus message Sort every number you report into two piles. Most operations find one pile nearly empty. The two-pile sort57s video
  2. Five seconds, and fifteen Awareness and consideration are different jobs with different budgets of attention. The five and fifteen test53s video
  3. The Listen Ten recorded conversations with recent buyers, transcribed, read in their words rather than yours. 53s video

Part two. The Numbers

Which measurements describe the message and which describe the machinery.

  1. Attributed is not incremental Attribution tells you which touchpoint was nearby. It cannot tell you what would have happened anyway. The holdout49s video
  2. The nine numbers If you cannot produce these from memory, marketing is not being run as an operation. 51s video
  3. The doubling question If I doubled this budget tomorrow, what specifically would happen, and how would you know? 50s video
  4. The ostrich effect People check numbers more often when the numbers are good. Reporting frequency is itself a signal. The reporting frequency check51s video

Part three. The Buyer

Finding out what they know, which is rarely what you were told they know.

  1. The negative question Ask who it is not for. An operation that cannot answer is selling to nobody in particular. 51s video
  2. Two gaps The gap between what you said and what they heard, and between what they heard and what they intend. The two gaps55s video
  3. Where you are on the pyramid Most buy on price, fewer on value, fewest on time. Marketing to one tier and delivering to another fails predictably. The Market Pyramid, for marketing1:00 video

Part four. The Operation

Running marketing as an operation rather than as a series of campaigns.

  1. Three at the top, one at the edge Concentrate effort where volume is, and experiment where you are least certain. The capacity rule57s video
  2. Define, agree, automate In that order. Automating a process nobody agreed produces disagreement at speed. 51s video
  3. The three-part answer When someone asks how marketing is doing, give the number, its variables, and what you are doing about it. Give them the number and its variables50s video
  4. On method: the eight second attention span The most repeated claim in marketing, and why this volume does not use it. The method note50s video

Common questions

Does this course cost anything?

No. All 16 lessons, the videos, the transcripts and the diagnostic are free. There is no account, and no email address is asked for until after the diagnostic has already shown you your reading.

Do I have to take it to sit the NBOP assessment?

No. It is not required, and it confers no advantage. The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this course, and the people who write the questions are not the people who wrote these lessons.

How long does it take?

About two hours to read all 16 lessons, and about ten minutes for the diagnostic. Most operators do not need all of them: the diagnostic points at the three or four that address what it found.

Who is it for?

People who already hold accountability for how work gets done. It assumes you run something. It is not an introduction to operations and it will not qualify anyone to enter the field.

What is the Operator’s Diagnostic?

A nine question instrument from Volume I. You rank the eight domains by how accountable you are for them, say what share of last month each one actually took, and name the external standard you would be judged against for each. The disagreements between those three columns are the findings. It is the front door to every course here, because it spans all eight domains rather than one endorsement worth of them.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practicing operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.