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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IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark: Behind the Scenes

This week the IDC CMO Advisory Service will start revealing results from the 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmark. In this 10th annual study we found some surprises – as you might expect in this era of marketing transformation. In anticipation of the results, I thought I would share a bit of what goes on behind the scenes in the benchmark.

First – what is a benchmark? The term was first used by early land surveyors to describe the fixed point against which all others were compared. Today, benchmarking means the systematic practice of comparing your business processes to what others are doing in order to achieve superior performance. Companies benchmark against peers to learn how they compare with similar companies and best-in-class to compare with those that achieve optimal results.

Why do companies benchmark? A benchmark provides context for decision-making. You spend a million dollars a year on social marketing. So what? If your CEO asks you this question, what will you say? Tech marketers tell us that they like to benchmark for the following reasons:

• Improve the quality of annual planning: Last year’s program budget and gut feelings are no longer sufficient input
• Gain insight into critical trends: Learn what industry leaders and competitors are doing – and how you stack up
• Reallocate costs: Identify areas of overspending and opportunities for better value
• Transform with confidence: Answer questions such as how much to invest in new areas like social marketing or how should I re-organize my department?
• Drive with data: C-level executives increasingly expect marketing leaders to manage their business with the same level of operational excellence as other corporate functions.
• Get an independent view: Benchmark data provides IDC analysts with a wealth of information that make guidance to clients personalized and accurate guidance

How does benchmarking work? At IDC, we use a six-step method.

1. Participants are given a standard taxonomy. This is SUPER important.  IDC requires that participants bucket responses in accordance with rigorous activity-based costing methods and a marketing taxonomy based on 10 years of experience so that we're truly comparing apples to apples. We start agonizing over the taxonomy early in the year. It must evolve with changing times but maintain enough consistency for trending.  This year, we carved out marketing automation as a new category and adjusted definitions to accommodate new media and practices.
2. Participants bucket their marketing investments into categories.  We start participant recruitment in the spring. Fortunately, IDC has a large constituency of companies that participate annually, but we always conduct outreach to get new blood. 
3. IDC collects the data. For IDC's benchmark, the tech company participants are primarily mid-sized and large companies and we have a 95% B2B focus.
4. IDC creates a database of normalized data. This is our secret sauce and takes a ton of work.  Every survey gets scrutiny. Anomalies get investigated. We use statistical methods, sophisticated tools, and marketing experience to work the data so that it really means something.
5. IDC analyzes the database for benchmarks and trends. We conduct analysis of various kinds – comparing years, industry sectors, and program and people data. We also conduct interviews with CMO's to lend color to what we are seeing (although we are constantly out talking to practitioners and marketing leaders during the year).
6. IDC reports.  All participants are invited to a webcast and get a free report that includes a large amount of data and IDC insights.  Over 100 tech companies each year contribute to the database and get this free report.  For participants who desire a more personalized view, IDC offers a custom service that compares their data with a "market basket" of appropriate peers. IDC conducts an analysis of this custom benchmark and then works with companies to provide guidance decision-making and for instigating change.

Watch this space as well as the press for this year's findings!

 

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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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Lead Distribution Scoring - a key differentiator for B2B marketers

Lead scoring is a well established technique for marketers to translate digital responses into levels of qualification for next stage outreach. For companies with no direct sales or sales cycles of 30 days or less lead scoring methodologies can be rapidly optimized around purchase behavior. For long cycle B2B sales processes, the optimization process goes only as fast as opportunity development which for many high tech companies can be 18 months or more. This is a crucial time for B2B marketers and they need to be just as exacting in how they manage the post-lead qualification journey as they are in getting prospects to the starting line.

B2B marketers need to segment, message, time, and target their communications with their direct sales reps just like they do with external prospects and customers. In my previous blog post Six Key Table Stakes for B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment marketers were tasked with three things:

1. Treat the sales force like a market segment
2. Market collateral (and leads) like solutions
3. Take an account-centric approach to lead generation 

Lead distribution scoring touches on all three. Lead distribution scoring is a second stage scoring process for marketing qualified leads that enables marketers to "get the right information to the right sales rep in the right format at the right time to move an opportunity forward." This is IDC's definition of Sales Enablement and is a fundamental concept that should govern how marketing markets all of its output to direct sales (leads, campaigns, collateral, etc.) The days of posting to a portal or flowing and forgetting MQLs into the CRM are over. Lead distribution scoring incorporates dimensions such as:

• What type of rep is this contact going to? 
• By segment 
• By tenure
• By region
• By product line, etc.
• Does the rep need many leads or a very limited number of leads? 
• What account is the lead associated with?
• Is the sales rep meeting with this account in the next four weeks, next two weeks?
• How is this contact connected to others in the account? 
• Is this contact interested in the same solution as other contacts in the account?

Using a lead distribution scoring methodology will bring sales and marketing into much more direct alignment on a one to one basis. It can be applied not only to leads but to collateral, campaign training, and more. Marketing output can be "made to order" for sales reps so that it is not only highly qualified, it is also has high immediacy and relevancy to the reps' call sheets. If the relationship between marketing and sales so bad that accessing call sheets is a non-starter, then look for friendly reps who might be willing to give a little more to get a little more from marketing.

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Most Important Lead Management Practice: Align on Standards

Of all the lead management best practices a company can invest in, the one that stands out as most important is defining standards.  Recently, IDC interviewed technology marketing executives to learn what's working and what's not in 21st Century lead management. When asked for a description of their greatest success, many more companies stated consistent global standards (including a common language) than gave any other answer. 

Why is standardization so important?  Variation is a main culprit in erratic and unreliable processes. No two leads are the same. No two geographies are the same. No two campaign tactics perform the same. Nothing in lead management is really the same. Though companies can’t hope to eliminate all variation in their lead management, the best practice companies get rid of much of as much unnecessary complexity and redundancy as possible. By reducing variation, companies gain better control and achieve more predictable performance.

Important areas of lead management standardization include:

• Definitions: “All marketing groups and geographies use the same stages, taxonomies, and definitions of what it means to be sourced, what it means to touch a lead.”
• Data: “We strive for a single version of the truth.” “Instead of a 60-minute meeting on why my data is better than your data, we now talk about results – why is Hong Kong doing better?”
• Procedures: “We consolidated 40 lead queues into six. We standardized BANT criteria, implemented standard SLA’s, standardized everything.” “Even though we are a decentralized company, we run a single process.”
• Systems:  “Everyone uses the same common business intelligence system so we pull data from the same source.” “Using the same marketing automation system enforces our processes. It has accelerated best practice sharing.”

How to Increase Standardization

Marketing leaders acknowledge the difficulty in getting alignment on standards and offer tips from their experiences:

• Cross-functional groups: “Bring together a core cross-functional group (regions, field marketing sales), people who are passionate and have a direct stake in the outcome.”
• High-level sponsorship: “The sponsor was responsible for both sales and marketing. She publically gave me power.”
• Appropriate specificity: “At first we standardized at too high a level – defining one stage as an “opportunity” for example, and things were too confusing. By getting more granular, putting in more stages, making routing rules more specific, we’ve gotten better results.”
• Persistence: “The secret is to keep revisiting the model and the results. We’ve needed to revise it multiple times to accommodate changes in sales and marketing capability.”
• Transparency: “Collect the data and let everyone see how bad it is. Then pick your battle.”
• Training: "We conducted initial roll-out training as well as ongoing training to maintain momentum."

Recognize the Limits of Standards and Allow for Some Flexibility

 Although aligning around standards is the most important best practice, it's important to recognize that exceptions are occasionally needed. Companies should start with a goal of full standardization but then be alert for where variation is reasonably required.  For example, an emerging region with fast growth, such as China, may have genuinely different requirements than a more developed North America for what percentage of leads gets handed to sales.  However, demand a strong business case for any variation, especially in early days when people aren’t used to standards. Then be sure and treat the variation as an exception.

IDC's report, IDC CMO Advisory Service Best Practice Series: Realizing the Vision of 21st Century Lead Management, will be available soon. IDC also offers taxonomy to assist companies to standardization. (See IDC's Worldwide Sales and Marketing Taxonomy 2012 #231252)

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Technology Buyers Tell Us How to Speed Up the Buying Cycle

IT leaders making enterprise-level technology purchases report that their buying cycle has increased by more than 20% in the last three years, according to IDC's 2012 Buyer Experience study. They are not happy about this fact and were not shy about telling IDC about how vendors can speed things up.

IDC's 2012 Buyer Experience Study reveals that CIO's making enterprise-level technology purchases report that their buying cycle is now longer than five months when multiple vendors are competing for their business.

I find several things interesting about this fact.

1. The length of the B2B tech buying cycle continues to increase.  In 2009, the buying cycle was about 4.5 months and is now 5.4 months. It has increased more than 20% in three years.

2. IT executives have consistently told IDC that they would like their buying cycle to be shorter. Three months seems to feel about right to them – which is 40% less than what they currently experience. The CIO's readily admit that their own companies are to blame for most of the delays – 60.8% of the delay they attribute to their own buying process complexity.  More people are now involved in each decision, for example. However, 35.6% of the delay, IT leaders say is caused by poor marketing and sales processes on the part of the vendors.

Clare Gillan, IDC Senior Vice President of Executive and Go-to-Market Programs, told the audience at the recent IDC CMO Advisory client meeting that survey participants were very clear on how vendors could help them speed up the buying cycle. Here is advice from the IT leaders along with just a few quotes:

• Listen: "Listen to what we are asking and what we want before presenting a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all solution."
• Justify: "Help us write the business case."
• Honesty: "Put everything about your product on the table, including the short-comings."
• Pricing: "Provide all available options with associated pricing up-front."

 Respect, service, and transparency – these are the communication attributes I perceive when I read the survey results. Are these attributes in your persona descriptions?

3. One more thing I find interesting about the reported length of the buying cycle:  Does five-plus months seem short to you? In contrast, marketing and sales leaders reported that 19 months is their average sales cycle for enterprise-type deals according to IDC's 2011 Tech Marketing and Sales Productivity Benchmark studies.  I don't think I have ever heard a B2B tech marketer or sales leader report a sales cycle of just a couple months - except for small ticket items, repeat purchases (which would not be included in this survey question's category) or the occasional purveyor of some super-hot-can't-wait solution.

My guess is that buyers have a different definition of when the buying cycle starts than do marketers and sales people.  What does this mean to marketers who are engaged with buyers in very early stage conversations? Something to think about.

 

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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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B2B ROI: Marketing is Not a Candy Machine

"What is your expected return on investment for the next campaign?" This question is common and easy to ask, but it is also one of the most challenging to answer. Determining financial return on investment (ROI) within the context of a long sales cycle has largely been a failure. Becoming financially accountable is possible – but B2B marketing departments will need more advanced quantitative tools.

How should companies measure the financial value of marketing expenditure? For some ordinary company expenses, such as capital equipment, ROI is a common measure of value. Never before have there been more spreadsheets and dashboards available to slice and dice any facet of marketing. With information so available, it has never been more justifiable to treat marketing like an ordinary expense and ask for an ROI similar to the type that applies to the purchase of new equipment.

B2B Marketing is Not a Candy Machine

Yet attempts to measure meaningful financial ROI in a B2B marketing context using methods applied to capital expenditures have largely failed. They have failed because the assumptions underlying ROI calculations do not apply to the majority of B2B marketing situations.ROI calculations assume that a marketing program is a simple, unambiguous transaction. Such a transaction works like this: If I put quarters into a candy machine and push a button, a candy bar pops out. The investment (quarters) and the return (candy) are clearly and immediately connected.

Simple math can measure simple marketing. If I send mail piece X, I get 100 orders. If I send mail piece Y, I get 200 orders. Therefore, I should invest in Y. Because I know the cost of the mail programs (investment) and the resulting value (return), I can calculate ROI.If the only marketing activity conducted was the mail piece, then an ROI calculation would be simple arithmetic.

However, B2B marketing within the context of a long and complex sale is not simple. It is a multifaceted set of influences that is applied against quickly changing human buying behaviors. IDC research shows that it takes an average of 19 months to create a new B2B customer and includes multiple touches.

Compare our single direct-mail example with an actual marketing process that involves as many as 25 different media types over nearly two years. What role did ads play in getting the buyer to respond to either mail campaign? What about the sales call campaign that coincidentally occurred about the same time?

GUIDANCE: Don't attempt to calculate simple B2B ROI. Simple ROI fails to measure B2B marketing value because B2B marketing value results from the accumulation of effects over time. Other types of success measures will be useful at measuring tactical programs, but financial ROI using data collected at this level cannot be accurate.

First Step: Get a handle on your "I" (Investment)

The fact that simple ROI fails to measure marketing value does not mean that businesses are forever doomed to wonder despondently about the value of their marketing investment. However, progress requires more data and more advanced quantitative tools.

One hurdle is the lack of basic financial data within marketing departments. IDC consistently sees that many tech marketing departments have a poor understanding of their "investment," or "I," much less an ability to then determine the "return," or "R."

GUIDANCE: Do start by measuring your "I" (investments). Track marketing investments carefully over time and seek to control these expenses. Each year, IDC produces a Marketing Performance Matrix based on our annual Tech Marketing Benchmark survey identifying best practitioners in marketing operational excellence. In collaboration with these best-in-class companies, we've identified the operational behavior and performance indicators most useful for investment control and other important practices. Tech marketers can participate (for free) in IDC's this survey and receive a complimentary copy of the aggregate results to see how their company compares. Contact Joe Ferrantino (jferrantino@idc.com) if you are interested in participating.

Next Step: Analytics are required to start down the "R" path

The candy machine example described previously is a model for an ultrasimple, "coin operated" buying process. A more complex process, such as B2B buying, has many more steps and requires a more sophisticated model. Although B2B buying is not neat and linear a well-thought-out, multi-stage, pipeline is a reasonable proxy.

By capturing lots of behavioral data at touch points along the way, marketers can describe buyers' progress from step to step toward a purchase. Important metrics include conversion (how many buyers from early stages progress to the later stages?), velocity (how fast do buyers progress through the stages?), and volume (will the amount that buyers intend to buy satisfy the need for revenue?).

Clusters of data-producing programs then become the levers and knobs that a company uses to nudge buyers from stage to stage. B2B companies with data learn quickly about the interdependency of marketing and sales in nudging buyers through the pipeline. IDC research shows that the average large tech company invests $40K - $70K USD in marketing for each sales person. This ratio may change in the future as more companies exploit the leverage between the two functions.

Once an organization has collected enough data to model a reasonably accurate customer creation pipeline, business intelligence and analytics tools can be applied to tease out the contribution of various marketing program components to movement between pipeline stages. Combinations of different programs can be tested for their ability to increase conversion and speed velocity, thus creating a pipeline that delivers the required revenue at a continually lower cost.

GUIDANCE: Do invest in a data-driven, buyer-centric, customer creation process that links programs to a smarter pipeline, which in turn links to revenue. Simple ROI calculations do not work for complex processes. To start down the path towards a reasonable answer to the financial ROI question, invest in a more sophisticated customer creation process model, lots of data, and analytics..

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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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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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Essential Guidance for 2011

Building the Intelligent Sales & Marketing Organization.

IDC's best and brightest analyst teams were assembled in Boston and San Jose during the past two weeks to present their latest insight and guidance for creating the global intelligent economy; focusing specifically on the impact of social, mobile and virtual technologies on this vision. Morning speakers discussed how to position for the third wave of IT industry growth driven by mobility, clouds, big data and intelligent industries. In the afternoon, one of the many tracks included presentations by IDC's Sales and Marketing Advisory team about the vision of the intelligent sales and marketing organization and they key success factors required to achieve this vision. A few key take-aways from each of the presentations in this track are provided below.

Executing for Marketing Excellence in 2011 by Rich Vancil:

Start – or accelerate – your social business transformation
 With communication cycle-times dropping and the purchase decision influence continue to shift to buyers, a shift to "social business" is imperative for your success;
 41% of businesses have already implemented an enterprise social software solution
 Focus on building "peer-to-peer" connections, not "vendor-to-customer"
Make a deeper investment in intelligence and operations
 Drive marketing operations and market intelligence initiatives and investment down through the organization, across the business units and into the regions
 Better establish and govern the processes for sales enablement and data quality to improve sales intelligence and their ability to leverage insight and resources.
Build a better budget (IDC CMO and Sales Advisory clients should refer to IDC's combined marketing and sales investment benchmarks data)
 As marketing budgets recover, allocate new investments with the needs of a new reality – digital marketing is here to stay, and is only increasing in its ability to drive awareness building and demand generation; and greater alignment with sales will require continued investment in campaign management, sales enablement and lead management extending into what has traditionally been considered sales' domain.


Building the Intelligence Sales Organization by Michael Gerard:

Listen to your buyers:
 Technology buyers indicated a desire to reduce their buying cycle time by 40%.
 Two-thirds of the delay between desire vs. actual buying cycle time is the result of buyers' internal funding and decision-making processes; however, vendors' sales teams can impact this part of the delay!

Drive sales to be more strategic by investing in a next generation sales operations team which focuses on – sales strategy, productivity and automation. Team with marketing, your learning and development organization and IT to gaps in sales intelligence – customer intelligence for sales and sales enablement.

Push the limits on sales performance measurement
 Establish a sales analyst function to better measure sales productivity
 Improve data quality with the aid of other parts of the organization
 Analyze the sales pipeline, rep performance and the impact of sales productivity improvement initiatives to help impact strategic and tactical decision-making



The Sales & Marketing Automation Imperative by Gerry Murray:

o Investment in sales and marketing automation continues to increase as companies recognize the value of technology in adapting to new market realities
o However, sales and marketing need to better align across their own teams as well with other parts of the organization to create a more holistic experience for customers (e.g., marketing, sales, finance, services, support)
o Your company should establish a customer data czar, with team members in sales and marketing, to execute and govern data quality processes.
o Evolve to a more comprehensive sales enablement platform (i.e., beyond a content portal) centered on integrated customer experience management

Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/sales.jsp] and CMO Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/cmo.jsp] should contact us for a full overview of any of these areas as well as access to our latest research schedule and listing of published research.

Please do provide any comments on this topic below or reach out to us to participate in upcoming sales and marketing research.

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The Complexity of Multi-Path Marketing

In our most recent survey of CMO's, we asked: "What is your primary Voice by which you go to market? Is your Voice that of: product line; industry; solution; campaign (or theme); customer segment; or job role?" The responses were evenly spread across these six voices. Which basically translates to: "As an industry, we go to market with all those voices at once".

I see so many executives struggling with this complex messaging ambition. Mar-Comm executives like to refer to this ambition as their "messaging architecture" but frankly I don't see many of these architectures that would pass the building inspection: it's just too complex.

Now, add to this a second dimension: the media in which your voice is carried into the market. Today's marketer has dozens of choices of media to choose from: from traditional advertising to social media tools. Obviously.

Finally, add a third dimension of time. New IDC research shows that the average cycle time of creating a new tech B2B customer -- from initial marketing all the way through to a closed deal -- is over 17 months.

And so now you have six voices, perhaps 35 different mediums of choice; and 17 months of engagement time. What do you get? In the first place - you get overwhelmed with choice! In the second place, what you do get is about one closed deal for every 2000 contacts that you started with at the very beginning of your campaign.

I once had a job as an assistant product marketer and my boss gave me a direct task: "Fax those new product fact sheets to our top 100 clients, today". One medium, one voice, and one dimension of time. No decisions on my part. I was a skilled faxer, and quite poorly paid.

But now you are the boss and "they're paying you the big bucks"… So, how are you going to figure this out?

This is the challenge of multi-path marketing and I believe that it is a bellwether issue for senior marketers. Over the past several weeks I have been interviewing some of our industry's top marketers about this issue, seeking their approaches. Here is what I am hearing, and some guidance on process approach:



1) The objective of all of this is greater "Personalization". Get the right message and content to the right person in the right time, place, sequence, format and voice. Now, to accomplish this, you might think to install the marketing content and execution tools in the part of your marketing apparatus that is closest to the customer: the channel partner or field seller. Counter intuitively, the opposite is happening.

2) Personalization begins with centralization. To make personalization happen, the best marketers are moving content production, tools, and process "Upstream" -- that is, away from the field and deeper inside the central machinery of the marketing operations areas. Content and asset management tools and sales enablement portals are helping this process.

3) Yes, there still needs to be local execution decisions: translation and choice of media are the two primary areas. But the field marketers who are most successful in these decisions are supported by those robust content management tools way up-stream at headquarters.

4) An additional element that adds to the complexity of multi-path (and multi-geography) marketing execution is the contribution of agency partners. Agencies will add their own flavor of voice and media choices - which may cause a global campaign to become very "un-unified" quite quickly. Several large tech vendors are moving towards agency consolidation to help alleviate this.


In a recent head-to-head with a CMO I asked: "From a marketing perspective, what is your single biggest challenge for your $20b company?" His reply: "We need to ensure that the marketing messaging that we create here at the top is effectively threaded into our execution all across and down through the organization".

In a nutshell, that is the challenge of multi-path marketing.

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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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My Next Marketing Career

The future belongs to marketing specialists, not generalists.

If I were starting my B2B marketing career today I would think about becoming a specialist in one of two areas. These are areas of marketing execution and measurement that may seem narrow, but will be deep enough to be the foundation for a specialized career. Narrow and deep is the key to success. Be the one person at your company that really knows how to provide:

1) "Forensics". Be the specialist in how to data-mine the activity inside a B2B sales force automation system. Become your company's expert in turning those data into analysis, and then turn the analysis into actions on how to change the marketing activity that impacts all phases of that sales pipleine.

OR (not AND !)

2) "Measurement Agility". The traditional execution of a marketing program or campaign follows a long arc of time from concept to content to production to media execution to response and to results. Digital and social media are dramatically shortening that arc and this brings a world of opportunity for more agile measurement and response. Become your company's specialist on rapid-time, real-time measurement and adaptation.

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Watch that Org Chart in 2010

Twenty percent of tech vendors $1b or greater in revenue are now reporting that they have experienced some form of organizational "mash-up" between marketing and sales over the last 12 months. This is the C-level effort to adddress the long-standing mis-alignments and costly points-of-friction between sales and marketing.

Lots of thoughts on this...but the most important is a "heads-up" to expect more organizational pressure and change in 2010. IDC forecasts marketing expenses (investment) to rise by 3.5% this year. We expect sales expenses (investment) to rise by 4.7%. Finally, we expect average revenue to to rise by 3.2 %. So, the math is not hard: operating margins will be under continued pressure. My sense is that the C-Level will respond with more brute force re-drawing of organization charts.

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Social Media is Not Marketing...Yet

I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix.

The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing.

What is most promising is that "Social” will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice.

But Social Media is not Marketing…Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through.

Social Media will become marketing when two things happen. First it needs to contribute to the "inbound" side of marketing. Web 2.0 conversations about your company’s product and services need to be mined and gleaned so that they become valuable components of your product management decisions. The litmus test here is that your product managers start to depend on those contributions.

The second thing that needs to happen is on the "Outbound" side of marketing. The litmus test here is that Social Media needs to become a primary preference for how buyers inform their decisions. IDC research shows that buyers almost always prefer to receive information from independent third parties and from their peers. So, Social Media should really shine in this application.

There is important work ahead to make it this happen. It’s all about how to operationalize your marketing organization to reap the benefits of Social Media. "Operationalize” doesn’t make it through your spell-checker… but it is on the lips of the best marketers in tech, today. Only with operational depth will Social earn its way into the marketing mix. In our latest survey of CMO’s less than one-half said that they were making "significant" progress on this task - and that’s from an audience who tend to self-rank pretty high.

Here are three operational Best Practices that I see marketing leaders taking, right now. These leaders, by the way, are moving quickly on these. My sense is that they know that these basic operational tasks need to be completed well before the inbound and outbound marketing benefits can be realized.

1. Centralize. If you have followed the IDC CMO area research, you know that we are not great fans of heavy-handed corporate marketing. But in this case we are pressing hard for this. The issue is that (Congratulations, by the way) everyone in your company is now in marketing! Well-meaning engineers are merrily blogging about a new technical advance. Your sales reps are tweeting about a local seminar that they are setting up. The problem is that we are creating the perfect environment for a major breach of data. A privacy issue will be violated; an important confidentiality will be disclosed. When this happens, the blame I think is going to wind its way back to the marketing department, regardless of marketing’s role in the breach. So, corporate marketing needs to have the basics of governance and policy in place.

The second opportunity for centralization is for shared service creation. One of my clients has five major development groups and the lead developer in each group took a separate initiative to construct a community site for the development community and their most engaged customers. Couldn’t the deployment of a master community site with five sub-divisions have saved money? Yes. And wouldn’t it be easier to then deploy a single mining tool across those sub-divisions? Yes.


2. Train. I don’t think that there is a lot of good external "courseware" for how to conduct Social Media Marketing. But wait! Remember that everyone in your company is now in marketing?? I would bet that for every 100 people who are involved in Social conversations, that you have two or three real sharp-shooters. Find those two or three, and have them train the rest.


3. Measure. Poor metrics can give good marketing activities a bad name. One of the basic faults in metrics development is measuring activities and not results. Measuring the number of Tweets or enumerating the cast of your Followers are stark examples of these errors. Measure how many buying decisions you influenced. Measure how many customer service issues you identified and passed on to the right area for resolution. It seems basic but I am surprised at how many marketers still measure just the volume, the activities. Why? Because it’s easy. You have to be willing and able to do the harder work.


"Operationalize" for Social Media. An important initiative for 2010.

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