Marketing SOPs Written From Observation, Not Interviews

Every document I write carries two lines at the top: the person who owns it, and the date it expires, usually six months out. Documentation without an owner and an expiry describes the company as it used to be, and within a year everybody knows to ignore it while nobody is willing to say so out loud. The week of watching: I do not start with interviews. Interviews produce the process people believe they follow. I ask for screen recordings and sit in on the real work: the campaign actually being built, the quotation request actually arriving from a website form into the ERP, the monthly report actually being assembled from four sources at nine at night. The distance between the described process and the observed one is the entire reason to hire somebody for this. What level the writing sits at: Not clicks. A page that says open Campaigns, then New, dies with the next interface release and takes the reader's trust with it. I write at the level of the judgement: which campaigns are allowed a manual bid and on what evidence, what makes a search term worth a negative rather than a note, when an enquiry from a territory with a distributor goes to that distributor and when it is kept, what the first-response clock actually starts on. A manufacturing set, as an example of shape: Quotation intake with the first-response commitment written in hours and measured from form submission, not from the moment somebody opened the shared inbox. Territory and distributor conflict rules by postcode. Fair follow-up: who owns the badge-scan list after WIN Eurasia or Hannover, what sequence it gets, and the date the list stops being worked instead of being emailed forever. Naming and tracking taxonomy. Report assembly with the exact source named for every number, so the report can be rebuilt by somebody who did not write it. The refusal that matters: I will not document a process I believe is broken. If the observation week shows a third of enquiries dying in an inbox nobody owns, you get a two-page memo saying that, and we agree the change before anything is written down. Documenting a broken process makes it permanent and hands it the authority of a written page. It is the most common damage done by this kind of work, and it is done by people being helpful. Where it lives: Your tool. Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, whatever wiki you already pay for. No new system. No diagram drawn for the sake of having a diagram. Screenshots only where the interface genuinely carries meaning, and stamped with the date they were taken so the reader knows when to distrust them. Handover: The last day is a working session where each named owner reads their own document aloud and edits it in front of the room. Documents that have never been read out loud have not been read. An owner who will not attend that session is not an owner, and we choose a different one before I leave. Not included: No video library, no learning platform. No ISO 9001 quality manual register — manufacturers ask, and a marketing procedure written in QMS language is read by the auditor and by nobody else. No CRM or automation configuration: I write what the process is, your team or your vendor builds it. No job descriptions, no org chart. Who this is not for: Teams in the middle of a reorganisation, where the week would document something about to disappear. Agencies wanting a white-labelled playbook to sell on as their own method. And anyone who wants the documents without the week of watching. That version exists, it is called a template, and it is free from a dozen places.