Pop quiz: What assignment should your marketing team tackle first? Should you complete the one marked “Due ASAP,” or the one labeled with the red siren emoji in the email subject line? Or should you drop everything and work on the project the CEO personally asked you to take care of when you passed each other in the hallway?

You know that when everything is a priority, nothing gets prioritized—this leads to scattershot, inefficient processes that do little more than keep your head above water.

On any given day, marketing operations teams may be iteratively planning in response to business or market changes, analyzing data, executing campaigns, and tracking budgets and key metrics—anything that contributes to the overall efficiency of marketing efforts in the marketplace. But making the day-to-day operation of your marketing department more efficient can reap benefits as well. According to a Total Economic Impact study by Forrester, increasing the productivity of marketing operations within a large enterprise can claw back lost productivity— amounting to over $1.7 million in just two years.