Key Takeaways
- A 5-step business framework (Explore, Plan, Configure, Deploy & Train, Enhance) guiding digital marketing retainers and website projects from insight to impact.
- Aligns Marketing, Sales, IT, and Customer Success through cross-functional collaboration and a RevOps framework.
- Drives adoption, consistency, and growth with HubSpot implementation, CRM processes, and continuous improvements
Why the Spitfire Navigator Approach Matters
In today's digital landscape, a structured yet flexible and iterative approach is required to deliver consistent results and build sustainable client growth. At its heart, the Spitfire Navigator approach is more than just a methodology: it’s a Revenue Operations (RevOps) framework. This comprehensive 5-step project framework provides just that: a blueprint for success. It's designed to guide every client engagement, ensuring a holistic, data-driven, and collaborative journey from initial concept to continuous optimisation.
This approach focuses on guiding your business from insight to impact and supporting Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, IT, and Executive teams across industries. It aligns internal goals and external execution through practical, cross-functional collaboration.
Communities of Practice: Cross-Functional Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Spitfire has implemented a Communities of Practice methodology as part of our internal knowledge development and continuous improvement strategy. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of individuals who share a common interest or discipline and regularly engage in collective learning, knowledge sharing, and capability-building. These communities allow us to deepen expertise in key areas such as CRM architecture, content strategy, SEO, and reporting, while maintaining an integrated, cross-functional approach to implementation and learning.
The Spitfire Navigator Approach is applied consistently across all Communities of Practice, enabling our teams to surface multi-point data insights, identify cross-functional collaboration opportunities, align around client goals, and define meaningful milestones that drive customer success.
According to Deloitte, organisations with strong knowledge-sharing practices like CoPs are 92% more likely to innovate, 57% more likely to be agile and 52% more productive, as they reduce knowledge silos and foster strategic alignment across departments.
By embedding this collaborative framework into our culture, Spitfire ensures that both our team and our clients benefit from a continuously evolving, insight-driven, and integrated delivery model.
Let’s dig into each of the steps.
1. Explore: Laying the Foundation
The Explore phase establishes foundations by auditing business models, goals, audiences, and digital footprints. Success here depends on cross-functional collaboration between Marketing, Sales, IT, and Customer Success.
This is the foundational step, dedicated to gathering strategic insights through comprehensive discovery and research with the client. This is where we truly understand the client's business model, goals, target audiences, governance requirements and competitive landscape, while thoroughly auditing their current business ecosystem and digital footprint. The goal is to proactively collect data and insights that will inform all future work.
Who gets involved:
- Marketing: Define KPIs and pain points
- Sales: Share insight on pipeline gaps, lead quality, and closing challenges
- IT Managers: Outline technical constraints, system dependencies, and data infrastructure
- Customer Success Managers: Share onboarding challenges, churn triggers, and client retention pain points
Here are some examples of how the various communities of practice at Spitfire apply this step in practice:
- For Creative projects, this phase involves empathy-driven research through client interviews and stakeholder sessions to unpack business goals, audience mindsets, and core problem spaces, sometimes including design audits.
- In SEO, this includes running a full SEO & GEO audit, covering technical aspects, content, and performance, and performing an "AI visibility check" to assess brand share-of-voice on AI platforms like ChatGPT.
- For CRM Solutions Architecture, the focus is on identifying the integration landscape (e.g., pre-existing systems, centrality of integration) and assessing the state of current customer data and user roles, guiding the technical advisory from the outset.
- The Reporting teams use this phase, with the support of AI, to proactively capture and collect data and insights throughout the month. They begin populating monthly reporting decks early with observations, but most importantly, communicate them in real time to allow for optimisations.
2. Plan: Crafting the Strategic Roadmap
Building on the insights from Explore, the Plan phase is where we create a tailored strategy aligned with specific business objectives. This involves outlining ICPs, buyer personas, campaign roadmaps, technical specifications, content strategies, automation and CRM strategies and defining clear success metrics. Crucially, this phase emphasises cross-functional collaboration to ensure an integrated plan across business functions.
Who gets involved:
- Strategy & Marketing Leads
- Sales Leadership for persona alignment, pipeline clarity
- IT for data flows, API documentation, field mapping, and technical feasibility
Here are some examples of how the various communities of practice at Spitfire apply this step in practice:
- The Interceptor Strategy activity in this step involves facilitating a strategic workshop with stakeholders to further develop the insights from “explore” and validate these discovery findings, deep dive into objectives, and introduce persona thinking, alongside a competitor benchmarking exercise.
- In CRM Solutions Architecture COPs, this phase involves in-depth scoping to define the solution architecture, business rules, data flows, and field mapping, as well as documenting detailed integration requirements, all with IT collaboration.
- The Content COP focuses on developing a strategic content roadmap tailored to the buyer journey and creating a unified content calendar that defines topics, deadlines, owners, channels, and formats. It also explicitly establishes cross-functional collaboration with SEO, design, and social media touchpoints.
- The sales blueprint is where we formalise sales enablement strategies, such as lead scoring rules, lifecycle stages, CRM views, and automation for faster response. Sales input ensures the plan isn’t theoretical, it’s practical and revenue-linked.
- The Reporting Blueprint prepares the structure and tools needed for accurate and strategic reporting. This includes analysis using the SQS framework to evaluate KPIs and client-defined success metrics, and identifying performance journeys for storytelling.
3. Configure: Bringing the Vision to Life
The Configure phase is the execution stage where tools, campaigns, integrations and assets are built according to the strategic blueprint developed in the "Plan" phase. Whether it’s setting up HubSpot, developing a website, integrating technology, or building out campaign assets, everything is customised to fit the approved client's needs and infrastructure to meet the defined milestones.
Here are some examples of how the various communities of practice at Spitfire apply this step in practice:
- The Creative Blueprint excels here by building initial design prototypes (wireframes, UI mockups), presenting them for feedback, and conducting informal user testing to iterate and refine designs based on learnings.
- For Development projects, this phase details structured development practices like version control, branching, merge reviews, and rigorous internal developer QC, logging all work against checklists.
- The SEO Blueprint places strong emphasis on technical implementation (e.g., speed optimisation, schema markup, mobile responsiveness) and on-page optimisation (metadata, headings, internal linking), as well as deploying off-page actions.
- The Social Media Blueprint focuses on platform optimisation, producing multimedia content, scheduling posts with UTM tracking, defining community-management protocols, and preparing interactive elements. It also ensures all posts include alt text and captions for accessibility.
4. Deploy & Train: Go-Live and Empowerment
The Deploy & Train phase is the crucial go-live stage where CRMs, campaigns, workflows, or websites are launched and internal client teams are enabled to use them effectively. This phase is meticulously managed to ensure smooth execution, thorough technical quality assurance (QA), and immediate performance tracking from day one, often including user acceptance testing (UAT) and client training.
Here are some examples of how the various communities of practice at Spitfire apply this step in practice:
- The Development Blueprint features a highly specific "go-live Checklist" that includes analytics setup, final redirects, domain configuration, and content migration. It also offers post-launch training and technical walkthroughs.
- In CRM Implementation, it involves training relevant teams for user adoption, completing UAT and QA, and deploying the configured CRM system. It is then followed by finalising updates to portal documentation to reflect the deployed version.
- The Reporting Blueprint's "Deploy" phase is distinct, focusing on sharing and discussing the compiled report with stakeholders, encouraging pre-reading, presenting summary insights, and securing client alignment on proposed initiatives.
- The SEO Blueprint uniquely emphasises requesting indexing via GSC and submitting refreshed XML sitemaps to accelerate indexing of new or updated URLs after pushing technical and content changes to production.
5. Enhance: Continuous Improvement and Sustainable Growth
With everything live, the Enhance phase focuses on continuous improvement through reporting, analysis, and optimisation. The goal here is to ensure sustainable growth, better user experiences, and evolving results through campaign refinement, UX iteration, technical audits or CRM scaling. This phase is deeply data-driven, aiming for iterative improvements based on performance.
Here are some examples of how the various communities of practice at Spitfire apply this step in practice:
- All blueprints consistently engage in regular reporting and analysis (e.g., monthly reporting) and iteration and refinement based on insights.
- The Development Blueprint highlights gathering client feedback and applying the "Build → Retain → Compound methodology" for continued iteration.
- The Reporting Blueprint's "Enhance" goal is uniquely focused on evolving the reporting process and its strategic value, documenting learnings to refine how reporting is structured and delivered, and enhancing data storytelling capability.
- The SEO Blueprint conducts quarterly mini-audits and strategy reviews to reassess the competitive landscape and algorithm updates.
- The Content Blueprint explicitly includes repurposing strong content into new formats or channels as an optimisation activity. It stresses training the content team in best practices for AI, SEO, and storytelling.
Why the Spitfire Navigator Approach works across departments and functions
Executive team: Predictable growth, ROI and business clarity
Marketing: Scalable campaigns, measurable results, team empowerment
Sales: Higher quality leads, CRM that works, better visibility and training
Customer Success: Better onboarding, proactive support journeys, churn prevention tools
IT: Secure, scalable, integrated systems with full documentation
Your Unified RevOps Framework
The Spitfire Navigator Approach is more than just a project framework; it’s the foundation of our Revenue Operations (RevOps) philosophy. By uniting Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and IT under a single strategic system, we remove silos, streamline handoffs, and align every team around shared metrics and outcomes.
This enables teams to navigate complex projects with clarity, ensuring that every effort contributes to a consistent, client-centric, and data-driven methodology. This ultimately leads to successful delivery and long-term client satisfaction. The detailed blueprints across various specialist areas demonstrate how this versatile RevOps framework adapts, ensuring thoroughness, integrated planning, and continuous improvement in every project.
Whether you’re implementing HubSpot, redefining your content strategy, or integrating CRMs, this approach ensures every move contributes to one goal: growing revenue, together.
FAQs: Understanding the Spitfire Navigator Approach
What is the Spitfire Navigator Approach?
A structured 5-step business framework (Explore, Plan, Configure, Deploy & Train, Enhance) aligning teams for measurable results.
How does HubSpot implementation fit into the Navigator?
It provides a tailored CRM implementation process that ensures adoption, integrations, and long-term success as part of a RevOps strategy.
What role do Communities of Practice play?
They enable cross-functional collaboration, reduce silos, and improve innovation across CRM, SEO, content, and reporting.
What is an AI visibility audit?
An audit that assesses your brand’s share of voice in generative search engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity), which is key for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
How does the Navigator ensure continuous improvement?
Applying a continuous improvement framework with audits, reporting, and refinements for sustainable growth.
Ready to See How This Works for You?
Book a Free Discovery Call to explore how The Spitfire Navigator Approach can align your Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and IT teams toward measurable results.