Three Big Ideas from Dreamforce 2014

Dreamforce, Salesforce's user conference, is always a phenomenon – boatloads of sales and marketing tips and tricks alongside the philanthropic videos and big name entertainment. However, it was these three ideas that impressed me most.

Marketing automation enters the age of the platform: The integration theme threaded through Dreamforce as the company unveiled Salesforce 1, a platform for the Internet of Customers.  Providing a quality digital customer experience requires the integration of applications, data, messaging channels, and delivery mechanisms (including mobile and machines). Like an orchestra playing a piece of music, a brand is more richly experienced by multiple instruments simultaneously. Orchestration is the key. If the oboe plays independently in this corner and the violin over there, you can imagine the discord – even if they all work from the same sheet music. Integration, platforms, and clouds are themes I've also heard from Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Adobe, IBM, Hubspot, and Microsoft. Most of these companies will fill in important platform gaps over the next few years to become winners (I think Salesforce will clearly be in this camp).

Why this matters:  Marketing technology platforms will prod two big changes. Marketing will need to reorganize and become multi-channel and customer experience oriented.  And although vendors playing nice together will be easier to do in the cloud than it was for on-premise software, CMOs will someday find it valuable to standardize on a platform (or "cloud"). Hopefully, they will have differentiated choices that optimize for different business models.

Growing importance of design: I was super impressed with the fireside chat between Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and Marc Benioff, Salesforce's CEO. I found Marissa's ideas on design most intriguing. It’s a topic you don't hear much about in business circles, yet it was clear that her views on design informed her strategy for Yahoo and her leadership style.  One of Marissa's points - don't design for the expert.  Create a "big green button" for the thing people most want to do. Expert users can afford to work a little harder to get their bells and whistles.  Simple things, if they are the right things, make a huge difference. Think about the impact of Amazon's iconic Add-to Cart one-click shopping.
Why this matters: Change-agents (managers, marketing ops pro's, communicators, etc.) would benefit from getting grounding in design. You might start with a little podcast I recently found called 99% Invisible.

Marketing in the moment:  Marketing is speeding up. Few marketers remain unconvinced about the value of personalization. Messages are more effective when they leverage the viewer's attributes. Now it seems that time is also becoming an impact point. Your message is more relevant if it pops up within the context of a real-time conversation. Some moments are daily habits – such as exercising, or conducting a task at work. Other moments are occasional, shared, and public – such as a sports event or an event like Dreamforce. Some moments can be planned for but others will pop up opportunistically and you need to be ready.

Why this matters: Marketers pay lip service to the concept of "agile" but marketing in the moment requires a truly different approach than planning a launch. Agility is what enabled the Oreo marketing team to steal the moment at the Superbowl. Read this Wired story to learn how they did it.

These are three ideas that I'm going to pay more attention to.

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Will a Robot Make Your Marketing Job Obsolete?

Cars with no drivers.  Airport ticket counters with only touch-screens. Surgery with no doctors. Automation has taken over human jobs since the industrial revolution. But this trend may be accelerating with the "Great Restructuring". Which marketing jobs will automation make obsolete?

Time magazine recently published an article titled The Robot Economy which highlights the types of jobs that will flourish (and which won't) as automation expands. Time says,

"If your job involves learning a set of logical rules or a statistical model that you apply task after task – whether you are grilling a hamburger or issuing a boarding pass or completing a tax return – you are ripe for replacement by a robot."

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing sectors of the technology industry, growing at 11.8% in 2012 according to the IDC 2012 Worldwide Marketing Automation Vendor Share Report. Most marketers would agree that marketing automation drives gains for their companies - improved customer engagement, greater marketing accountability, better pipeline management, etc. But is it good for marketing people? The jury is out on whether automation is reducing marketing headcount.  On the precipice of the 2008 downturn, the IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark showed a decline in marketing headcount as a percentage of total employees to approximately 1.5% and the number has sat roughly at that level for the last few years.

Winners and Losers in Marketing Jobs? Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, is about making better decisions using analytics. In a chapter about chess, Silver summarizes a 1950 paper by MIT's Claude Shannon on the benefits of a computer in making decisions versus the benefits of a human.  Claude Shannon said that computers are better at decision-making because:

• They are very fast at making calculations
• They won't make errors, unless the errors are encoded in the program
• They won't get lazy and fail to fully analyze a position or all possible moves
• They won't play emotionally and become overconfident in an apparent winning position that might be squandered or grow despondent in a difficult one that might be salvage

 Claude Shannon said that humans are better at decision-making because:

• Our minds are flexible, able to shift gears to solve a problem rather than follow a set of code
• We have the capacity for imagination
• We have the ability to reason
• We have the ability to learn

 Silver concludes that the reason why a computer like IBM's Deep Blue could beat a chessmaster is that chess is a deterministic game, that is, there is no luck involved. In deterministic situations, where there is perfect information and perfect knowledge of the rules, computers do a better job.  However, wherever there is uncertainty, a better decision will be made if humans help out.

Future proof your career. To ensure you head your career in a confident direction, gain competency in the following types of marketing skills:

• Solve problems that have never been solved before:  Work that is genuinely non-routine, creative, or paradoxical – such as people or customer management, strategy development, and design.  However, be warned that being creative does not let you off the hook for learning to use data to inform the creative process.
• Analyze for insight:  While analytic tools will do most of the heavy lifting for us, humans will give meaning to the data patterns as well as to create models, frameworks, and stories for using the analysis.
• Make unstructured decisions: Unstructured decisions are those where no explicit process for deciding can be put in place – such as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). Almost every category of marketing has jobs like this. Put yourself in the line of fire, where there are tough trade-offs, and information is ambiguous. 
• Persuade: Automation can take over lead nurturing by listening to online data, analyzing it for behavior patterns, and responding with the most relevant selection from a content catalog.  However, blending a human with automation may get you better results.  A leading tech company found that although they can go straight through to purchase using automation, that adding an inside sales person to the conversation increased deal size by 3x.

What ideas have you seen marketers implement to help future proof their departments?

 

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Sales process - the missing ingredient for marketing ROI

Most marketers in B2B enterprises have never been trained on sales process. If I were running your marketing or sales organization this would be the first thing on my agenda. Why? Because without understanding sales process, marketing is essentially set up to fail. How can anyone improve or contribute effectively to something if they don't know how it works. It's like setting up your manufacturing to produce blue widgets but not telling your suppliers what parts you need for your particular widgets. So they ship you tons of blue stuff and hope that somehow it all works out. That's the position, to one degree or another that most enterprise marketing organizations are in even at some of the most advanced process-centric companies in the world. Largely because they have chopped up the customer creation process into a collection of departmentally independent activities. 

In a large enterprise with many products lines, business units and segments, there are likely to be a number of different sales processes. Marketing and sales resources should be aligned against these processes horizontally. This is the key to making the shift from a siloed command and control organization to a responsive, integrated customer focused one. Not only is it important to design around sales process, which should be designed around the buyer's journey, but it is important to design for change. Markets are dynamic and sales processes change.

Marketing automation systems, especially those that are integrated with the sales force automation or customer relationship management system, have begun to provide marketing with some clues to sales process. At least they can see what happens or does not happen when they deliver something to sales. But the data does not always explain why, and that's the critical part. Marketing needs to understand very specifically how Sales operates in order to optimize around customer outcomes. The alternative is for marketing to optimize around departmentally focused KPIs like the number of MQLs (ugh), or SALs, or worse vanity metrics like hits, sentiment, likes, etc. These metrics are useful indicators for some marketing activities, but not as business drivers for marketing investment.

Aligning marketing and sales around sales process is the first step to formulating an enterprise customer creation process that extends across all customer touch points, including: billing, fulfillment, service and support. At each stage of maturity, marketing, as well as all the other customer facing departments, gain much greater visibility and accountability to the whole process and its connection to corporate objectives for growth, market share, and margin. This is all necessary for a true picture of marketing ROI.

Your action items:

• Marketers: lobby your top executives to make regular sales process training for marketing a priority. 
• Sales executives: demand that marketing know how the different parts of your sales force work so they can more effectively develop prospects and serve customers. 
• CEOs: get smart about your customer supply chain by applying the same level of due diligence and process discipline to it that you have to your product and services units. As a result, you will make much more effective use of marketing investment and be able to hold your whole customer facing team accountable for its contribution to your strategic objectives.

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Next Gen Marketing Teams: From Silos to Systems

Automation has revolutionized marketing. It has brought new insights, capabilities, and methods of engagement. It has demanded new skills, thrust us into the omni-channel universe, and opened new levels of visibility and accountability. But these are all ripples in the pond, so to speak, only the most immediate after effects of a rather large splash down. The most profound change is just beginning to be felt. Automation has introduced the notion of an enterprise customer creation process, a horizontal function that cuts across all marketing activities. Effectively implementing and managing this process requires next generation marketing teams to be much more integrated and coordinated. 

Despite its mystique as a freewheeling, creative and dynamic function, corporate marketing is in reality a deeply fragmented hierarchical organization. Specialists typically function in separate domains moving from project to project with great urgency, rarely having time to consider the big picture. The need to be highly responsive to changes in direction has created a culture adverse to structured workflows. However, as marketing automation solutions consolidate into an enterprise system, a diverse set of marketing roles, process definitions, and data structures are brought together. In response, marketers are beginning to redesign their organizations around workflows instead of activities. Rather than having social, web, advertising, content, partner, analytics, systems admin, etc. in separate organizational buckets, these roles are being reformed into cross functional teams responsible for executing entire campaigns. 

Marketing solutions are starting to be designed around a multi-disciplinary community model. Adobe's marketing cloud offers a collective view of the campaign workflow for each member of the team and unique workspaces for the various roles in content production, campaign management, analytics, etc. Each member can see what contributions have been made and why. They can communicate in real time on key issues and how they affect the overall process. IDC expects this trend to become pervasive. Providers such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others are driving their solutions around a vision of the "customer facing ERP" which integrates all customer facing functions in what will most likely be a hybrid cloud for managing customer experience. The implications for organizational design will be significant and CMOs should start instilling the culture of workflow based communities as soon as possible. 

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If Content is Still King, Data is Heir to the Throne

Content marketing is becoming a primary strategy to solve the challenges of massively scaling and diversifying marketing channels. But content does not naturally support both scale and diversity at the same time. The only thing that scales as endlessly and cost effectively as the digital world is data. As a result, data marketing is on the rise and will ultimately inherent the throne as the core strategy for modern marketing. What is data marketing? It's using interactive data to directly influence or add value to your prospects, customers, and partners. Think of it as content marketing without the editorial. Data marketing is already fueling the rapid growth of content marketing. The best pieces of content marketing are typically wrapped around a compelling piece of (static) data. The key is that stripped of editorial, data must become interactive and not only deliver personalized insights but capture and bring user input back. 

Modern business solutions are increasingly deployed in the cloud on SaaS platforms that capture every transaction of every user. SaaS vendors are finding huge value in these datasets. They provide empirical evidence of best practice, efficacy, and cost effectiveness. Marketing and sales automation vendors can show their customers and prospects what types of campaigns result in the greatest lead generation, the highest value and velocity through the pipeline and the greatest return. They can tell them what type of social media content and cadence is most effective on which social media channels. This insight represents enormous value-add over and above the operational efficiency the systems provide.

Consider the power of this model applied to channel marketing. A SaaS platform for channel enablement can offer partners a single point of access to content repositories, transaction systems, execution environments, (inbound and outbound marketing, sales process tools) and social networks. If it's constructed properly it provides a place for partners to get work done, not just a library to read about how to get stuff done. For smaller partners that lack infrastructure and staffing resources this is an invaluable resource. As they use the platform it captures:

• Engagement – who's downloading what how often from the platform
• Transactions – deal registration, order submission, billing update, MDF reconciliation.
• Execution– the number of leads their marketing has produced, how leads are progressing through their pipeline
• Social interactions - groups they join, how they participate, what SMEs they interact with.
• Performance data – closed deals, order value

Access to this data can be offered from the platform through the development of a few simple forms and reports. The more data partners provide, the greater the level of analysis and insight they get in return. This information can be used to identify best practices of the top performers and shared (in aggregate) with other partners to help them run their businesses, resulting in better overall performance of all partners.

By utilizing pure data as collateral, companies can deliver highly targeted proprietary insights at scale much more efficiently than they can with content. While the role of content will in no way diminish, companies that master the art of data marketing will have greater levels of engagement, retention, and revenue with all their key constituents than those that rely exclusively on content marketing. 

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The State of Marketing Operations 2013

Companies simply cannot excel at modern marketing without strong Marketing Operations.  These professionals reinforce high performance by strengthening processes, technology, metrics, and best practices.  A recent study by IDC CMO Advisory Service, in conjunction with MOCCA, found that the Marketing Operations function is flourishing and expanding beyond its original charter.

 

Marketing Operations has been a rising star from its inception. I like to compare Marketing Operations to the structural frame of building. Try to scale without steel girders and you get a weak and wobbly high-rise.  Your marketing will also be weak and wobbly without Marketing Operations.  IDC first recognized Marketing Operations in 2005 in its annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks study.  Then, Marketing Operations represented 2.5% of the total marketing staff. The team became a fast-rising star – driven by the need for marketing accountability and the addition of marketing automation.  In 2012, tech companies averaged 4.4% of their staff in Marketing Operations.  IDC believes that the optimal percentage is between 4% and 6% of total marketing staff. Below 4%, a company will lack the necessary operational capabilities for solid management and transformation. Above 6%, a company should examine whether it's time to infuse operational capabilities into other functions rather than holding them in a single role.

IDC's Definition of Marketing Operations:  Internal staff responsible for developing and orchestrating the processes and systems required to enable efficient and effective marketing.  More specifically, marketing operations staff members are responsible for developing and managing the processes to ensure smooth operation of strategic planning, financial management, marketing performance measurement (including dashboard development), marketing infrastructure, marketing and sales alignment, and overall marketing excellence.

In this new study, called Marketing Operations Expands, IDC finds the Marketing Operations function expanding. It has progressed beyond its early charter of planning and resource management to become an important part of lead management and marketing technology among other areas.  More than 70% of survey participants say their role has broadened in the last year and more than 80% say it has become more important. The top six responsibilities for Marketing Automation are: automation, analytics, process improvement, campaign execution, and planning/budgeting. Survey participants, many who are members of MOCCA, the marketing operations professional organization, told IDC that Marketing Operations is also spreading out from its original corporate center to regional teams and beyond its origin in technology companies into new industries.

How should marketing leaders view the expansion of the Marketing Operations role? On the positive side, Marketing Operations can serve as an important and exciting pilot lab for new marketing science initiatives. However, in many organizations, IDC observes that Marketing Operations risks becoming the dumping grounds for not just critical operational tasks, but also for most of the “odd jobs” in the department. Too much expansion, or the wrong kind, results in performance degradation.

For more information on the IDC CMO Advisory Service Marketing Operations Expands research report (which contains important information on organizational structure, skills, job scope, success factors, and much more) check the MOCCA website or contact me at kschaub@idc.com.

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#CMOFact: IDC 2013 Marketing Investment Planner

With 2012 coming to an end, for many businesses planning for 2013 will bleed into the New Year. Marketers are no exception; in anticipation of the planning cycle each year, the CMO Advisory Service publishes our annual Marketing Planner in August/September, developing the B2B tech industry's leading marketing (and sales) benchmarking study. To anyone familiar with the industry, you are probably used to hearing that Marketing is transforming. What is so exciting about our Marketing Planner is we are able to provide specific guidance on changes, challenges, and successes within the industry through incredibly accurate industry data and qualitative information provided by you, the senior marketers. Marketers in turn are able to use this information to successfully plan for the upcoming year.

I’ve taken the liberty of pulling out some key facts below from our report that are particularly interesting or useful. Feel free to share them and remember to follow me on twitteror check out the CMOFact hashtag - we will continue to share some marketing goodness there.

#CMOFact Number 1:  In 2012 the average large B2B Marketing organization is in receipt of a 1.7% budget increase. This is 50% LESS than the 2011 rate.

#CMOFact Number 2:  The Marketing Budget Ratio for B2B tech companies has declined each year from 2009 through 2012. Marketing Investment is not keeping up with revenue growth.

#CMOFact Number 3: B2B Tech CMOs are spending approximately 30% of their budget on digital marketing programs. This is up from 12% in 2009. 

#CMOFact Number 4: For Large Tech Companies, only those in Software (vs Services & Hardware) are receiving increased budgets!

#CMOFact Number 5: The marketing automation train is picking up speed, and fast. Jump on now or prepare to be left behind. This is a new category in our survey and is already at 3.1% of programs budget and 1.6% of staff allocations.

These are just 5 nuggets from the 2013 Marketing Planner. The full version includes a complete overview of the current state of the B2B Tech Marketing it includes; program spend, staffing breakdowns, up and coming technology, and forward looking advice. For your own copy, reach out to Wendy Pemberton at wpemberton@idc.comor find it here. 

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How bright is the silver lining of Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud?

At their annual Dreamforce shindig last week Salesforce.com announced the formalization of their marketing capabilities as the Marketing Cloud. Essentially it is a coupling of four key pillars of Salesforce.com's front end:

1. Customer intelligence: Data.com enriches contact and account information with fresh feeds from sources such as LinkedIn and many others. Enables both sales and marketing to create detailed contact profiles for segmentation, targeting and campaign management.
2. Social advertising and content management: The recent Buddy Media acquisition provides support for a wide range of social channels (social, web, mobile) and formats including contests, videos, and photos. Users can coordinate their publishing and advertising activity and measure impact throughout the social sphere.
3. Social listening and analytical tools: Radian 6 monitors popular social services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as blogs, forums, communities and more. Supports 17 languages and mobile access.
4. Core CRM functionality: Salesforce.com consolidates resources to provide sales reps with a single source that can connect them with other applications, contacts, colleagues and workflows. Pulls data together into account/opportunity context. Delivers reporting data to sales and sales managers and can provide opportunity and pipeline performance data into other systems such as marketing and order management.

Salesforce.com is taking its "Social Business" mantra to heart by building its marketing functionality with a "social first" philosophy. The question is: will this be enough to satisfy Salesforce.com customers (and the company itself)? The answer is probably not. The functionality you won't find in Marketing Cloud is significant - the core campaign management tools, workflows, analytics and more offered by marketing automation vendors (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo, Neolane, Pardot, etc.) Even though there are fewer seats to be sold to marketers as opposed to sales, these two worlds are rapidly converging. The systems needed to automate them will need to do likewise, as evidenced by the tight integration of most marketing automation systems with Salesforce.com and the recent announcement of Chatter for Eloqua.

But Marketing Cloud is undoubtedly only the first step, in fact it's well beyond the first step for Salesforce.com and the only issue going forward is how do they continue to expand functionality in this area?  The build or buy equation for Salesforce.com currently favors the build approach as valuations for marketing automation vendors are sky high, at least in terms of an acquisition. Salesforce.com has plenty of time to creep into the marketing automation arena, establish itself as a more serious threat and then re-evaluate its strategic decision around marketing functionality.

In the meantime, marketing automation vendors have their work cut out for them. They must stay well ahead of where Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud may go. They must continue to grow rapidly, prove their staying power and market value. Customers, however, should have no illusions that Marketing Cloud is an enterprise marketing automation platform in its current state. There is much more to marketing than social engagement especially for B2B models. Waiting for Marketing Cloud to evolve or for social to mature is simply not a choice, there is way too high a price to be paid in terms of market share, growth, and profitability. So if you're considering marketing automation don't delay or change course because of Marketing Cloud. Charge ahead full steam and should the social engagement of Marketing Cloud pop your ROI, by all means add it to your arsenal. 

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Data-Driven Marketing: A Survey of Marketing Automation Maturity in Global High-Tech Companies

Marketing has become technology, process, and data driven. On average, marketing operations teams at the large high-tech companies in this survey manage over a dozen major systems in an ecosystem that is rapidly evolving. The purpose of this survey was to assess the technology load on marketing organizations in terms of number, scope, and scale of systems as well as adoption, effectiveness, resources, and overall satisfaction levels. There are many interesting results from the data:

• Companies that take an enterprise approach to managing the customer creation process make the most effective use of their marketing infrastructures.
• Data-driven marketing requires many types of systems working together. They must be managed, matured, and optimized together to be most effective.
• Business intelligence (BI) competency is critical — it's one thing to have the data, it's another to use it.
• Penetration into the intended user base for each marketing system is the key:
• Leaders have achieved 90% or higher user adoption for the four pillars of any digital marketing infrastructure: campaign management, Web content management, CRM/SFA, and customer database. By comparison, laggards average only one over 90%.
• Leaders have achieved 75% or higher user adoption for 9 out of the 13 key digital marketing technologies categories we included in our survey. Laggards average only five systems at or above 75% adoption.
• Most respondents (even leaders) believe they have not realized much of the potential they see in their marketing systems.
• Organizational, process, content, and data readiness are seen as the major impediments to reaching the full potential of digital marketing infrastructures.

Clients of IDC's CMO Advisory can access the full document here. 

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Big Data Comes to Marketing?

What's the most commonly heard word in marketing organizations today? It is “Transformation.”

Dramatic transformational change is sweeping through marketing functions in most industries. And the main "change agent" is the customer. Or what we at the IDC Executive Advisory like to call the "New Buyer" . Our customers and prospects today are crafting their own routes to learning about products and services. They are motivated and skilled at educating themselves and learning from peers. They travel through numerous digital pathways in their exploration process. And by the time they come to a meeting with the vendor sales person, they are smart and savvy. They are empowered.

Marketers need to ask and answer these questions: Where did our Buyers come from? What do they know already? And above all: How do we  add new value to where they are in the process of discovery about our product or service? The New Buyer dynamic creates volumes of new data and customer intelligence analysis opportunities for vendors.

In turn, Those in the marketing job function must be able to bring better data into any planning meeting, including discussions on budgets and investments; programs and campaigns; or performance measurement. Hard data needs to complement the “softer side,” or the “art,” of marketing.

The tools for accessing and mining data, and turning data into insights, are now plentiful for today’s marketers. And, The marketing job function might be the last of all an organization’s major functions to become automated.

The marketing winners of tomorrow will be masters of rapid data management — able to turn data into intelligence, intelligence into analysis, and analysis into decision support and execution. Achieving this will be the first step in the rudiments of sales-to-marketing cost control.

For the CMO, there are three critical, inter-departmental, data-driven intersections that need to be created and nurtured. Marketing is now too important to run in isolation, so here are the three key intersections:

1. The Marketing and CIO intersection. New IDC research shows that the investment in marketing automation technologies in 2012 will be at three to four times the rate of 2011 levels. Automation technology development is going to sweep through sales and marketing over the next 10 years.

2. The Marketing and Sales (CSO, or Chief Sales Officer)  intersection. Today, the CMO needs to be able to connect sales technologies, such as CRM, with new marketing automation technologies.

3. The Marketing and CFO intersection. The CMO needs to deliver a return on investment in measurable terms in order to have meaningful budgeting and planning discussions with the CFO. Measuring impact of push programs in terms of conversion to leads, opportunities, and revenue is the game today.

I like to say that there will be more change in Marketing in the next five years, than we have seen in the past 25 years combined. These Marketing data and IT automation issues will be at the forefront for the next generation of successful CMOs.

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CMO's report universal lack of preparedness for key challenges

IBM released the findings of their Global CMO study yesterday and one of the primary conclusions is that CMOs feel unprepared to address key challenges. The most surprising thing is how consistent the feeling is across regions and vertical industries. CMOs generally face the same issues and report very similar levels of "unpreparedness" in the face of them. Top challenges include: data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics, among others.

The findings are based on 1,734 structured in-person interviews with CMOs in large organizations conducted between February and June of 2011.Regional and vertical representation was reasonably well balanced. The sheer scale of the effort and the willingness of so many CMOs to participate indicate a role under siege.

In our research, IDC has learned that marketing is undergoing fundamental and painful transformations on several levels: new and expanding datasets, new channels and forms of communication, new tools and infrastructure requirements, new dynamic in customer acquisition, new pressure to prove business impact, new skills required for success. It is a multi-dimensional change that has many marketing leaders struggling to keep up.

The IBM study provides a strong basis for CMOs to educate their C-level peers on the challenges they face. However, by design, it does not offer practical models for addressing the issues. IDC has strong evidence that the customer data record is the fundamental design principle around which all customer facing activities and systems should be (re-)built. The customer record is increasingly the source for strategic insight, tactical planning, and performance metrics. Any marketer working in an organization without an enterprise customer creation process (with the requisite standards for customer records, data governance, and the infrastructure to support it) is set up for failure.

Unfortunately hardly any companies today manage customer creation as an enterprise process. We believe that this is the root of the universal "unpreparedness" revealed in the IBM Global CMO study. Having a practical model for implementing an enterprise customer creation process is the first step toward mastering all the key challenges CMOs and their marketing organizations are facing today.

ENTERPRISE customer creation is not something that only happens in marketing and/or sales. It encompasses every customer touch point over the lifetime of the relationship. It goes beyond the jurisdiction of any departmental leader and therefore must have C-level (CEO) endorsement and active support. It is the demand side equivalent of supply chain automation and we all know how WalMart conquered the world by mastering that side of the economic coin. On the demand side, the challenge is finding and forming relationships with prospective customers much earlier using channels and resources not traditionally thought of as marketing (or sales.) In addition the relationship needs to be tracked consistently from marketing to sales to finance, provisioning/fulfillment, support, etc - i.e. the customer data record must be uniformly defined and managed across departments. All the information associated with a customer record must be available to everyone involved in the process. It is a massive undertaking on par with the supply chain automation effort, but the reward is being months ahead of your competitors in terms of customer contact and relationship building – a key competitive advantage that will be very hard to displace.

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Spark by Marketo

Marketo announced a new sub-brand called Spark targeted at the SMB market. It's a testament to how successfully Marketo has transitioned from SMB to the enterprise space that it has to go back and offer a new brand for what used to be its primary market. The demand for marketing automation at large enterprises is driving rapid growth for all marketing automation companies, and Marketo is no exception. So much so that smaller prospects are starting to perceive the company and its target market as having outgrown them. Not so.

SMB is intrinsic to Marketo's heritage and the company has no intention of walking away. The Spark offering is more than just a "lite" version of its flagship product. The idea behind Spark is that it is a bundle of software and services to help small companies quickly adopt and become expert in the use of modern marketing automation technology. Marketo is dedicating expert staff to offer training, support, and mentoring for its Spark customers. The importance of this cannot be overstated as marketing automation requires a higher level of sophistication, analytical ability, and business process expertise than most small companies have in their marketing departments.

The challenge for Marketo will be managing Spark as a sustainable business model. Typically the enterprise segment is much more profitable for software companies (SaaS or not). Large companies have more money, bigger projects, and greater potential for expansion into other business units. However, Marketo knows the SMB business well and has a subscription model revenue stream that's ramping up to the point where it can afford to support the launch of a down market offering until it starts to pay for itself. It is the rare company that can serve both segments well, but Marketo has clearly separated the two teams internally which IDC believes is absolutely critical for success.

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The Four Stages of Data Driven Marketing

Who is your customer? It is a deceptively complex question that a surprising number of B2B companies cannot answer. The difficulty stems from several causes:

• Inconsistent definitions for customer attributes (account name, industry, segment, organizational hierarchy, contact name/email, etc.)
• Fragmentation of the data across multiple databases and applications
• Departmental perspectives on customer relationships
• Lack of an enterprise customer data management approach

The impact of all this is a severe slow down in decision making and an inability to optimize critical processes in customer facing functions, most poignantly in marketing and sales. The solution is to define customer creation as an enterprise process – not something that happens only in marketing and/or sales – and the implementation of data standards and governance to support it. This enables marketing to be data driven, but there are four distinct stages of data driven marketing and not all of them lead to success:

1. Stage One – Fast Failure. This stage is characterized by response-based decision making. Marketing decisions are based on response data from marketing systems – web hits, landing page registrations, and myriads of other campaign performance data. All of this is important, but leaves marketing unable to tie any of its activities to key business metrics such as revenue performance.

2. Stage Two – Slow Failure. This stage is introduces conversion-based decision making. Marketing and sales systems are integrated along with customer data definitions and structures. This provides a quantum leap forward for both sales and marketing. However, marketing is still one degree of separation from linking its activities to business performance. Sales pipeline is a good proxy but it is no substitute for the critical business data that comes from the next two stages.

3. Stage Three – Measurable Success. At this stage marketing finally is able to measure contribution to revenue. However, it is not enough to rely on initial contract data alone. Account A that closed for $1 million and account B that also closed for $1 million may be very different in terms of margin and lifetime value. Account A may have cost $250,000 to sell, install, and support where account B cost $500,000. If that's the end of the data set, then of course marketing should bring on more account A profiles.

4. Stage Four – Market Mastery. At this stage marketing understands the long term profitability of customer relationships. If over time account A buys nothing more and account B upgrades and expands its investment by millions of dollars at improving margins, marketing can refine its activities accordingly and begin to drive overall business performance.

The key lesson is that marketing is greatly influenced by the depth of data available to it. At each stage in IDC's data driven marketing model, new data can completely change all facets of marketing activity from strategic targeting and messaging to tactical campaign investment and roll out plans. As a result, it is crucial for companies to get to Stage Three as quickly as possible and remain ahead of competitors on the journey to Stage Four.

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The Marketing Operations Role: Where To, From Here?

Looking Back, Briefly:

Marketing Operations has been the fastest growing job role in tech marketing over the past few years. When IDC first started its surveys of marketing spend and staffing back in 2003, Marketing Operations wasn't even on the job roster at most organizations. Today, the "MO" role represents about 6.5% of the total staff and it is the fourth largest job "category" for a large marketing department. So, what happened? The rise of this role was the response of the CMO to the general condemnation that marketing was not acting like a business. The Marketing area was perceived as offering up no accounting, and no accountability... but also offering no end to the pleas for more budget. And so Marketing Operations as the "staff accountant" role started to turn up at the larger and more complex marketing organizations. As the MO role really took off, the general job description would include four areas: budgeting and planning; measurement and reporting; technology deployment (marketing automation technology); and process improvement.

Looking at Today:

Of the four job areas described above, the most problematic, right now, is technology. There is a vast new set of IT tools available for marketing organizations: Marketing Resource Management; Content Management; Performance measurement; Analytics; Social Media Platforms and Monitoring; and the list goes on. The problem is that in general, marketing organizations do not have the staff skill sets to effectively evaluate, deploy and use these tools. In our 2011 Role Survey of Marketing Operations professionals, respondents said that their number one problem today is the sorry state of the "Automation Infrastructure" and that their number one goal is "Finding the People that know how to fix this". There is an equally large and underlying issue "below" the technology level, and this is the database and data management issue. With so much marketing automation now in place, the first output that this new technology is producing is crystal-clear visibility to the fact that: "Wow, we have REALLY POOR customer records". And so a very major issue for the Marketing Operations role is finding the database-savvy personnel who can help with this challenge.

Looking Forward:

Given how fast the MO role has grown and given the significant challenges of today, I want to offer three areas of "Essential Guidance" for CMO's and their MO "lieutenants". The first step is to re-visit the job description. In a series of executive interviews that I recently completed, many MO professionals complained that "Our Marketing Operations area has become the dumping-ground for all the unwanted marketing tasks that no one else wants to do!". Now, whose fault is that?

Job number one, therefore, is for the CMO with the MO team to define and then re-articulate its role to other parts of marketing; so that it does NOT become the dumping-ground! Job number two is to then conduct an "Activity assessment" of what the MO personnel are actually doing, as held against that job description This may all sound like a junior league management exercise but my strong suspicion is that because the role has grown SO fast over the past four years that it MAY be the case that role clarity and scope are due for a closer look. This assessment should also include the organizational placement of the MO role. Why are so many of our MO staff at corporate headquarters? Why are these staff not within our product lines and in the field? These are questions worth asking. Job number three is then to ask "Where do we go from here?" regarding the role and staffing. I believe that the "future" of MO role effectiveness and impact is not in more staff as measured by headcount. In fact, the MO role as a percentage of staff is likely reaching an upper limit at this point. My hunch is that it may "cap out" at perhaps 8 to 10% of staff. However, the MO roles of tomorrow will be more strategic than they are today. The nature of the role will evolve. While today's MO staff are largely involved with individual execution (within the job description mentioned previously), the MO role of the future will be more about educating and infusing other parts of the marketing organization with a marketing process-excellence mentality, skills, and tools. In this way, the MO staff will become a more "leveraged" function. This leverage will include improving the influence and impact of MO across the entire marketing organization, not just at the corporate marketing location(s). As you further deploy the MO role, think about not hiring more Marketing Operations staff....think about driving the existing "smarts" and influence of MO down and through your entire marketing organization.

-- Rich Vancil

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Marketing Automation: Keys to Success

Of the 235 respondents in a November IDC survey, nearly 40% had not implemented a marketing automation solution (yet). Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today's marketers. Digital marketing has exploded in scope and complexity making it practically impossible to efficiently and effectively reach your target audience without a fully realized marketing automation infrastructure. If you haven't gotten started you are already way behind the ball.

40% have not yet implemented marketing automation

Source: Marketing Automation: the Rise of Revenue, IDC #255860, Dec 2010. n = 234

Marketing automation is a must have for today's marketing and sales organizations. There is a wide array of online sources readily available to buyers that can significantly influence purchasing behavior. As a result, marketers must maintain a pervasive and continuously refreshing digital presence. Frequency is emerging as the most critical capability for sales and marketing organizations – frequency of outreach, analysis, and reporting. The cycle time for everything in marketing is under enormous pressure and companies that deliver more often, respond faster, and sustain their digital presence more successfully will be the winners.

Keys to success:

• Standardize your customer data
• Deploy marketing automation
• Review KPIs for marketing and sales to ensure alignment, visibility, and data integrity
• Integrate data, workflows, and governance across the whole "response to revenue" cycle

Top 3 places small companies (less than $1B) start:

• Lead management
• Campaign management
• Content management

Top 3 places large enterprise ($1B or more) start:

• Campaign management
• Lead management
• Financial reporting

Marketers must solve a stack of process, operational, and technical issues. It is a very complex and large scale problem spanning not only marketing and sales, but every other piece of the "response to revenue cycle, including: configuration, pricing, order processing, accounting, as well as service and support functions as well. The full scope of the customer relationship must be visible and measurable. Point solutions focused on particular marketing processes are great catalysts, but, IDC recommends companies take a holistic approach that ensures consistent data, workflows, and governance throughout the customer lifecycle.

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Channel Marketing Automation – When CRM is not Enough

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel.

With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped?

Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions
These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with significant indirect revenue. A recent IDC study of large IT companies found that on average channel revenue was $2.4B. It was generated by 34 channel marketing staff managing 8,500 active partners. That equates to $45 million of revenue per channel marketing staff member but only $1.2 million per partner. The dirty little secret – there are also on average approximately 19,000 inactive partners!


Source: IDC’s 2010 Best Practices Study in Channel Marketing (n=13)

A Better Way

Your CRM and SFA are not going to answer any of the critical channel management questions – although many companies think their CRM system is where they should be "managing partners". In fact, a partner management system fulfills a role more like an SFA – it tracks all the activity that occurs after the lead is generated. It should also facilitate the process of lead distribution – managing all the partner credentials and accreditations need to qualify for a particular lead. Then there's deal registration where the partners accept the lead so that it is not poached by another partner or … ahem … the direct sales force. And when you consider some of the other requirements of partner management, the CRM fallacy becomes clear:

• Recruitment and on-boarding
• Training and development
• Business Planning and Reporting
• Compensation and Incentive program management
• Marketing and Sales support

Are these capabilities that your CRM can provide? Your SFA? Would you even want them to? The answers should be no, no, and no. Don't be thrown off by that last bullet – the marketing and sales outreach your partners require is very different than the corporate outreach that marketing operations is doing. They rebrand, reschedule, embed, and otherwise repurpose marketing content, making a direct translation from corporate marketing to partner marketing wholly inappropriate.

If you have (or want to have) a significant amount of revenue going through the channel, you need a dedicated partner relationship management (PRM) system to automate more than just marketing and sales activities. Don't look to your CRM, SFA, or even the newer marketing automation vendors to provide you with the full set of capabilities necessary to effectively manage channels. Those solutions are focused on a very different set of requirements. They may have slideware and inch deep functionality, but that's typically it. Do ask about integrating a PRM with these systems as reporting should roll up easily across direct and indirect sales.

A number of key capabilities to consider when implementing a platform channel marketing automation:

• Manage partner profiles and contacts
• Deliver and track training, certifications, etc.
• Set business rules for lead distribution
• Handle deal registration
• Provide a single system of record for partner and channel management
• Provide detailed performance reporting (12-month rolling review)
• Track partner outreach campaigns
• Manage market development funds (MDF) and co-op spend

With these issues on the table, it should be clear that automating channel marketing requires a dedicated, purpose-built solution. It will be costly and painful and meet substantially lower expectations otherwise.

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The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework

Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well.

However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles.

The Need for Alignment
The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule: IDC research shows that up to 80% of the content marketing generates is not used by Sales, even though a lot of it is specifically created for Sales and Channel enablement. Additionally, customers say that Sales reps are insufficiently prepared for their initial meeting 50% of the time. Clearly a massive disconnect is at work.
IDC's Framework for Sales and Marketing automation is, therefore, focused on the tight alignment of key Sales and Marketing processes. This framework represents only those processes that must be coordinated (potentially integrated) between the two organizations. It is not meant to be a comprehensive map of all the processes in which each organization must engage to be successful – there are many activities on each side of the dynamic that do not have a corollary on the other.
Each high level process in Sales that has a counterpart in Marketing must share:

• A common set of definitions for inputs and outputs
• Proportional allocation of budget and resources based on overall business objectives
• Phase-appropriate performance metrics
• An integrated IT ecosystem

Source: IDC, 2010

Implementation
IDC recommends that sales and marketing automation efforts be tightly coordinated across both organizations so that the customer experience and lead management processes are handled seamlessly by all parts of the infrastructure. Even if a marketing implementation will have no sales users and vice versa, the data definitions and flow will be critical for both organizations. IDC recommends that:

• Senior marketing and sales leaders meet regularly to plan, review, and asses automation projects
• Marketing operations and sales enablement teams are especially critical, they should have representatives from both organizations with senior level sponsorship.
• Marketing needs to be very cognizant of how leads and lead details will flow into the SFA/CRM environment.
• Sales needs to be diligent in making sure marketing is capturing the high priority prospects and the high priority details so that lead acceptance criteria is routinely fulfilled.

Next Steps
One of the key issues for automating sales and marketing is establishing a shared automation road map. Upcoming research from IDC will help you: prioritize your plans based on business impact and implement best practices to be most successful.

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Many Ways to be Agile

We all greatly enjoyed our time together at the CMO Advisory meeting in Santa Clara last month. The level of participation and feedback was all very positive and we would like to thank everyone who attended for bringing their "A" game with them.

One of the topics we talked about was Agile marketing. We keep coming back the Agile project management concept as we triangulate the issues of career path development, sales and marketing integration, and automating sales and marketing processes. Agile has something to offer on all three fronts, and may prove to be an essential catalyst for success.

First, a Word About Agile

Very briefly, Agile is a method for managing projects that is based on small teams delivering discretely defined outputs in very short time frames. It is characterized by frequent fifteen-minute status meetings (called "scrums") in which 3 to 7 team members answer three questions: What did I do yesterday? What am I doing today? What is in my way? The project manager (called a "scrum master") is in charge of managing all the obstacles so the rest of the team can proceed on schedule. The schedule is based on 2 to 4 week workloads (called "sprints"). Progress is tracked in a "burn down chart" that shows how many hours the team has put in and how many it has left to do.

Agile is ideal for managing high frequency activities such as digital marketing, as well as portions of larger projects such as a trade show that can be broken into smaller steps. Elements of the Agile method can also be borrowed and combined with more traditional waterfall approaches to manage the fire drills that inevitably happen in just about every other kind of marketing activity.

• We recommend that managers of organizations new to Agile use careful judgment when introducing it. Activities that are good candidates include: email campaigns, collateral development, building microsites, and creating social media assets. You can then move on to more complex issues like product launch planning, events, field marketing, etc. The extent to which Agile is adopted should be determined by marketing staff themselves, if the culture does not embrace it, don't force it.

Career Development
Agile can be an effective way to offer new skills and leadership opportunities to marketing staff. With its quick cycle times, small teams, and discrete deliverables, Agile offers marketing staff the ability to play different roles on different teams, including leadership, at almost no incremental cost.

• We recommend that the career dev aspect of Agile be emphasized only after your organization is successful with Agile, it should not be an explicit objective when getting started.

Sales and Marketing Integration
Agile offers a very interesting way to get marketing and sales personnel together to quickly address issues of common interest such as: defining lead qualification criteria, setting up processes for lead transfers and clawbacks, coordinating last touch in marketing and first touch in sales, facilitating sales enablement, etc.

• We recommend that marketing and sales managers work together to get their teams to cycle in and out of Agile based projects so that each side can better understand the other - particularly In terms of providing a seamless customer experience at the point of lead transfer.

Process Automation
Automating large scale marketing departments Is going to be an enormous undertaking, and for many companies one of the key issues will be cultural. Marketing is notoriously not process oriented, nor are marketing personnel typically comfortable with the billable resource model. But this is the world they are going to be thrust into post-automation. Processes will be formalized, optimized and measured. Individuals will be expected to track their time against specific activities – and/or it will be automatically tracked within the system.

• Managers should not underestimate the magnitude of this transition and the fact that it will impact everyone in marketing personally. Some, hopefully most, high potential employees will embrace the change, others will find it threatening and disruptive.
• Agile marketing is an effective way to get marketing teams comfortable with – and to see the benefit of – working in structured, measured work conditions. Agile requires everyone to not only estimate the time they expect to spend completing specific activities, but to track and measure the actual time in "burn down" charts. This is a safe and democratic way to get your marketing staff prepared for the world of the "marketing ERP" that is just around the corner – and this cultural priming may be the best way to ensure the adoption and sustainable success of future automation efforts.

So we feel that Agile marketing is worthy of careful consideration. We hope you give it a try and let us know what your experience was like.
Cheers,
Gerry Murray

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A Preview of IDC's 2009 Tech Mktg. Benchmarks: A Focus on Marketing Automation

As discussed in my last blog entry, Are you Ready for Marketing's 2010 Annual Planning Process? , the IDC CMO Advisory Practice is “in the thick” of collecting surveys for our 2009 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. We expect to collect detailed marketing investment data from nearly 100 hardware, software, and services vendors. With this is hand, we will be well prepared to provide our insight and guidance to tech marketers for their annual planning process.

I'd like to invite Seth Fishbein, a senior IDC analyst on our team, to provide a preview of some of this research, focusing on CMOs’ marketing automation priorities for the coming year. A more comprehensive analysis of this topic will be included in IDC’s 2010 Marketing Investment Planner, due out in late September/early October.

"Thanks Michael. Based upon interviews with leading tech marketing executives over the past month, the following three areas represent some “low-hanging fruit” in the marketing automation space for 2009/2010:

• Development of a formal marketing automation roadmap: Tech marketers should take a fresh look at their marketing IT tools and applications to look for redundancies and cost savings. Not only has IDC observed that most marketing organizations under-invest in automation tools, but most have not developed a roadmap or formal taxonomy to align their systems to strategic goals and related processes. A couple of verbatim comments from our study:
  
  - “We are reviewing all of our marketing systems, from owners to costs to measurements, to see what is truly being used and what is needed…”
  - “We are hoping that an audit of our marketing automation systems will help us integrate our lead management system with SF.com in order to automate and measure the flow of marketing opportunities to sales…”
  


• Simplification of marketing processes and systems: A common thread among tech marketers is the lack of data quality and consistency in their lead management/CRM systems. In particular, a frequent challenge is field marketing’s adherence to data-entry standards. IDC is observing that more marketing organizations appear to be moving in the direction of simplifying their marketing automation strategies and taxonomies in order to make processes easier for global users.
  
  - “More [investment in] automation is not a priority, [but] process improvement is…and we will then automate more where it makes it easier.”
  - “We are trying to streamline our campaign management systems so all users, from North America to Japan, can select from a list of 10 campaigns as opposed to 30-40.”
  


• Improvement to sales enablement and marketing asset management technologies: IDC research shows that over 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today (IDC’s Best Practices in Sales Enablement – Content and Marketing (to be published end of July)). This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects and current customers. IDC estimates that at least 30% of companies' marketing investment, including program and people spend, is dedicated to creating content and marketing assets. Clearly, marketers can leverage cost reduction opportunities if they take the time to improve their content management process and technologies.
  
  - “Our content is all over the place…a more formalized content portal is being created to get our sales team the most relevant materials when they need them.”
  - “…marketing is funding an improved marketing asset management system and we are hoping to achieve 3% - 5% reduction/reallocation of spend on annual asset development and improved production efficiencies.” (improvements in production efficiency, reduced program time-to-market, and reduced re-work).
  
  In the next several weeks, IDC will be publishing a sales enablement report highlighting best practices in marketing content management from a lifecycle management, technology, and measurement perspective. Detailed company case studies will be also be included.
  

Please keep in mind that we are currently in the process of collecting surveys for our 2009 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. If you are interested in participating in this study and have not received a survey, please let us know as soon as possible. Thanks!"
Seth Fishbein, Senior Analyst, CMO Advisory Service (sfishbein@idc.com)

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Marketing's Role in Sales Enablement

The Sales Enablement (SE) role is fast taking root at many of our client companies. But it is interesting to see that its position on the organization chart is somewhat fluid. Does the role take root in sales? In marketing? Does it have to make an effective straddle across both functions , or is it bound to get hung up on the fence between the two?

Our IDC marketing and sales research teams are surfacing many good techniques for improved sales enablement. Here are some practices specifically for marketing's side of the sales enablement challenge as presented by Rich Vancil, VP IDC Executive Advisory Group.

"Thanks Michael. Depending on your resources and ambitions, these SE practices are noted as: easiest, harder, and hardest.

1. Easiest: IDC defines Sales Enablement as "Delivering to the sales representative (direct or channel) the right material at the right place, at the right time, and in the right format, to move a specific opportunity forward." Yes, there are a lot of moving pieces in that equation. But the place to start is with all the material that is clearly and blatantly in the wrong place/time/format. Sales executives consistently tell us that only a fraction of marketing content and collateral is used by them. Marketing's first move in SE starts with marketing content audits and asset management strategies that clean out all the lowest underbrush of what is not used. The easy pickings might happen quickly. An incoming CMO at one of our client companies ordered an immediate marketing-asset inventory which identified 550 separate items of marketing assets that were in constant need of updates and re-touches and re-prints and all sorts of expensive maintenance procedures for materials that were found to be marginally distributed.
2. Harder: "People, process and technology" is a guideline of places to look for operational change. But managers often jump to the technology first and this is often a mis-step in emerging automation areas (such as marketing and sales) because there are so many alluring new applications one might try and buy. Bear in mind the old adage "all software is merely someone's else's idea of how you should run your business" to be mindful that you need to examine and re-work your own processes first - with your own thinking - and then find or develop the technology to assist and automate. The critical Sales Enablement process between the marketing and sales functions is the lead hand-off and lead-nurturing activities. Executives really need to understand this process before buying and applying technology towards it . A marketing professor of mine wrote a famous case called "Staple yourself to an Order" which suggested a process audit approach that one could use to understand a customer's experience with one's company. Could we suggest that you "Staple yourself to a Lead" and observe the process path that you travel, in and around marketing and sales, at your company?
3. Hardest: Even more challenging is advanced marketing re-engineering enabled by comprehensive sales forensics. More complex "upstream" engineering of marketing cannot de done without a great deal of "downstream" sales intelligence. This was hammered home in an excellent briefing that we took this week from Drew Clarke and Brendan Grady who are senior marketers in IBM's Cognos division . I have known Drew for years and he is one of the industry's most diligent practitioners of the science of marketing. At IBM/Cognos his team is making a deep examination of the sales processes and prospect-communications sequencing that leads to pipeline acceleration and productivity. All sales and marketing "touches" to active leads in the pipeline are monitored by and analyzed in laborious detail. With these data in hand, the team can make important decisions about changes to marketing programs. It turns out that event attendance for certain prospects can be achieved with fewer email touches versus previous practice. This and reduces expenses and annoying re-touches. It also turns out that the direct mailing of the highly produced and expensive glossy corporate brochure has less than desired lead-velocity impact. There will be other cost savings and process changes that the Cognos team will achieve through analysis of the sales data.

The key point is that after the "easy" pickings are taken, the harder and hardest upstream decisions can only be made if you have excellent downstream intelligence. This is the crux of the B2B marketing paradigm: long sales cycles , multiple touch points and significant marketing-to-sales interplay makes the ultimate attainment of marketing ROI accessible only to those who can master the sales forensics. Please feel free to comment below or contact me at rvancil@idc.com."

(Interested in a taking a 3 minute survey on sales enablement? Click here: tinyurl.com/ctc6gs)

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