Rise of the Campaign Manager Role

Even the most successful technology firms continue to struggle with consistent and effective execution of their campaigns and related go-to-market strategies, unable to improve their alignment with marketing or the organization as a whole. The campaign management function provides the opportunity to solve the foremost problem of tech marketing today: that of the declining return on marketing investment that results from executing marketing mix elements in separate and disintegrated streams. Tech marketing departments that have not structured for this role yet should do so.

Here is some key guidance and insight based upon my recent interviews with marketing leaders in the technology industry as well as findings from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Board meeting with 33 marketing professionals:

• Campaign managers provide the missing link between the business units, marketing shared services and regional marketing. At Quest Software, campaign management serves as the liaison between marketing shared services groups and the business units and ensures sales' involvement in the campaign management process.
• The foundation of a successful campaign is a detailed go-to-market strategy that includes, but is not limited to, target segment(s), messaging aligned by audience, marketing mix, channel strategy, objectives, and metrics and targets. IBM uses a master brief at the start of any new marketing program, product announcement, or launch to help lock in these elements.
• A campaign's go-to-market strategy and execution requires tight global alignment across marketing and sales, while ensuring that specific parties remain accountable along the process with established timelines. Symantec has developed tiered campaign processes and ensures that regions are leveraged as part of this process to secure their involvement and improve efficiencies of planning and execution.
• Yes, process comes first, but don't underestimate the power of technology. Differentiate with newer campaign management software to establish and leverage one-to-one relationships with your prospects and customers and continue improving lead management processes, particularly lead nurturing activities.
• Common functional and cross-functional metrics continue to apply for campaign performance measurement, yet room remains for new metrics. Don't be afraid to experiment with new metrics. . . and don't underestimate the value of more qualitative metrics.

Read More

Common Attributes of Today's Leading Tech CMOs

Each year IDC completes a rigorous study of technology marketers' efficiency of their marketing organization. This includes over 100 of the leading tech. firms, representing over $400 B in revenue. To help separate the "leaders" from the "laggards", I've developed a Marketing Performance Matrix (2x2 matrix) to stratify marketing leaders and laggards. Each participating company is located on the Matrix as a function of the efficiency of its organizations' operations and the effectiveness of its execution. However, the numbers are only part of the analysis. We also interview the CMOs at several companies within the leadership quadrant.

Here's a bit of what we've learned from these market leaders:

• Gain the trust of your CEO and CFO. Nothing gains the C-level team’s trust of marketing more than demonstrating fiscal management responsibilities and receiving high praise from the sales organization. Nortel’s executive team was extremely impressed with the operational rigor that Lauren Flaherty, Nortel’s CMO, has brought to Nortel’s marketing organization; including her team’s progress in managing marketing investment and aligning with sales for effective execution in target markets. Her progress gained her a sizable increase in marketing budget for 2008.


• Stop doing more with less. Marketers need to stop the cycle of continuing to expand their number of activities with less money and staff and aim for quality and impact from a fewer number of marketing campaigns. Sun Microsystems demonstrated this discipline in 2007. Sun’s marketing leadership team has been driving the marketing organization to develop fewer but more effective GTM campaigns and has reduced the number of worldwide campaigns from 82 in the past (pre-2007) to no more than 6.10 campaigns currently in the market. HP Technology Solutions Group’s (TSG’s) CMO, Deb Nelson, has rallied her troops around three to five integrated marketing campaigns.


• Leverage a strong, senior marketing team in the regions to stay close to the customer and improve your team's agility and reaction to market and competitive shifts. More advanced marketing organizations have established processes and infrastructure across their marketing organization that enable greater decentralization without losing management insight and influence. One example is Avaya: according to Jocelyne Attal, Avaya’s CMO, "corporate marketing needs to act more as a governance function." Citrix’s CMO, Wes Wasson, hired more business-oriented marketing executives to strengthen its regional presence while also putting a global professional development program in place.

Please feel free to contact me at mgerard@idc.com for additional information on this study or add your comments below.

Read More

Stop Doing "More with Less"!

For several years now I've heard the adage that marketers need to "do more with less". That is, during the "Internet boom" technology marketers enjoyed the "excesses of marketing investment", resulting in the luxury of having a sufficient number of people and significant backing for program investment; while today, as a result of significant budget cuts and reorganizations, we feel the need to maintain the same number (or more) of programs and campaigns with fewer people to support them.

Well, I think that we need to stop doing "more with less". That is, aim for quality and impact from a fewer number of marketing campaigns, programs and activities. Sun demonstrated this discipline in 2007. Sun's marketing leadership team has been driving the marketing organization to develop fewer but more effective go-to-market campaigns; reducing the number of worldwide campaigns from over 75 in the past (pre 2007), to no more than six-to-ten campaigns currently in the market. Another example of this strategy is evident at HP TSG, where CMO Deb Nelson has rallied her troops around 3-5 integrated marketing campaigns.

Challenges of stopping the cycle of doing more with less include: shifting marketing's culture to be more strategic versus tactical (not an easy feat with continued pressure from sales for short-term results); achieving marketing's buy-in and alignment with much fewer campaigns, which may result in a lack of support for some products or geographies in the interest of focus, at least in the early stages of this process; putting in place key staff and processes to improve marketing organization's efficiency and effectiveness with this new strategy (e.g., campaign management, marketing operations, sales enablement, a shared service marketing team); and collaborating with sales leads and other CMO peers for development and buy-in to this strategy.

Read More

Have we made any progress in marketing & sales alignment?

Over the past five years that I've been speaking with CMOs as part of my work here at IDC, sales alignment continues as one of the top priorities on every CMO’s to-do list. The increasing maturity of the technology sector accompanied by significant consolidation will only increase the importance of marketing and sales working in unison as part of the customer creation process. In a recent study, we asked marketing and sales folks to rate marketing’s effectiveness at optimizing sales’ worldwide efficiency and effectiveness (1 = not effective, 100 = very effective). Marketing executives rated marketing’s contribution to sales higher than the ratings provided by sales executives: 62 versus 57, respectively. The key message here is not that marketing gave itself a higher grade but that, more importantly, both scores remain low relative to the importance of this alignment to the success of the organization; and with an average of 15% of revenue, or more, being invested in sales and marketing, this alignment remains a process in disrepair.

What are sales and marketing leaders intending to do about this problem?

1. Better alignment of sales and marketing IT infrastructure.
2. Better alignment and integration of (what should be) joint processes (e.g., planning, budgeting, forecasting, market segmentation, go-to-market strategy, lead management)
3. Better alignment/utilization of performance measurement or metrics

Here are some actions sales and marketing executives should take to accomplish these objectives:

1. Integrate marketing and sales operations. This can be a "soft" merge, which would involve alignment of the goals and responsibilities for the marketing operations personnel and the sales operations personnel who report separately and respectively up through the marketing and sales structures. It can also be a "hard" merge, which would have the sales and marketing operations functions incorporated into a single organizational position.
2. Leverage and dedicate field marketing to develop and deploy marketing strategies/assets in collaboration with sales. Dedicated field readiness managers (sales enablement managers) can ensure that globally based enablement "teams" understand sales’ knowledge gaps, while soliciting their strategic input around the overall sales strategy. Field marketing needs to act as the "center of gravity" for development and execution of the local marketing and sales strategy in collaboration with sales.
3. Align sales and marketing with the needs of the customer in mind. In the words of one of our clients. . . "[We have] marketing and sales define and map customer needs, customer acquisition and retention processes along with definitions of key roles, hand-offs, inputs/outputs, and organizational structure required to support such processes."

Read More

An Industry-Proven Framework for Managing Marketing's Investment

Given the economic backdrop of 2008, there are more good reasons than ever for sales and marketing executives to engage in a deep scrutiny of their costs. Many organizations have made good progress on cost control, but there is much to be done; and our IDC CMO Advisory research continues to identify big pockets of wasteful spending in these functions. To help technology marketers better manage their investments, we have just completed our second edition of the sales, marketing, and market intelligence (MI) taxonomy. (email me at mgerard@idc.com for a free copy of this extensive marketing investment framework) This expanded taxonomy includes several new line items that need greater "illumination" of spending and staffing, so that executives can make decisions about their investments. These areas include:

• Digital Marketing. Growth in this area continues to outpace other marketing areas, and in many cases takes funds from these other areas. (e.g., more traditional advertising) Most importantly here, the digital marketing strategy must be a component of the broader marketing and sales strategy and not a standalone effort.
• Campaign Management. Marketers need to do a better job of integrating the traditional elements of the marketing mix with the newer elements, so as to achieve a unified campaign approach versus "silos" of program execution. (more to come on this topic since we just finished a Marketing Operations Board meeting on campaign management best practices)
• Industry and Solutions Marketing. These staff areas have received further definition and clarification of roles.
• Market Intelligence; Customer Intelligence; and Business Intelligence. These areas are under active re-assessment at many organizations as the importance of the functions continues to rise.
• Sales Enablement. This is a key leverage point for increased sales productivity. Marketing and sales are increasing their sales enablement effectiveness through a combination of people, process, and technology.
• Tele-sales and Inside Sales. These growth areas of the sales department receive further detail in this year’s study.

Read More

Is MPM 3.0 Even on Your Radar? (Marketing Performance Measurement)

Marketers in the technology sector have made significant strides in developing and deploying their marketing performance measurement(MPM) strategies. Most have moved beyond the unrealistic quest to establish the perfect return on investment (ROI) metric, and have developed a solid marketing operations area that focuses on maintaining a set of pragmatic marketing performance objectives and metrics. Even so, many companies remain behind the MPM development curve, with the economic, marketplace, and corporate pressures continuing to grow.

Where are the best practice leaders today (i.e., MPM 2.0), and what does their next generation MPM process look like? Here's a quick look at the state of the industry today for MPM based upon a recent study by IDC's CMO Advisory Service:

• Marketing Operations is "leading the charge" to improve the group's measurement process and drive analytical rigor across the organization in addition to the more familiar art of marketing. (refer to my earlier post regarding MO staffing levels and responsibilities)
• A cascading dashboard strategy has been deployed, including a CMO or executive-level dashboard, and dashboards at the business unit, functional and regional levels. Nortel has done a good job of building this type of hierarchy into their MPM process.
• Regions and business units are beginning to improve their data input and overall participation in the MPM process. Citrix takes this a step further and puts the responsibility of data collection and some analysis into the hands of the regions.
• The importance of measurement at the activity, functional and campaign level have penetrated the organization as an established "culture of measurement", resulting in improved efficiencies and effectiveness across marketing. In Intel. . . "discussions driven by the dashboard have made the staff smarter and more cognizant about how we're contributing to Intel business success and why."

Essential guidance for every marketer to either catch up to your peers, or to stay ahead of the MPM curve includes: 1) If you don’t have a MPM process yet, start now!. . . And don’t aim for perfection; 2) Use relevant metrics that drive action; 3) Include all marketing groups in your MPM process as well as sales; and 4) Include your MPM process as part of your weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reporting and strategic planning process, with a well communicated cadence in alignment with sales and corporate.

Feel free to comment below or email me at mgerard@idc.com to continue the discussion. I'll be glad to share some additional insight regarding where I see companies headed for "MPM 3.0".

Read More

Highlights from IDC's Sales & Mktg. Effectiveness Summit

IDC just completed its 4th annual Sales & Mktg. Effectiveness Summit. This was a full day event in NYC that included a great line-up of executive speakers from Careerbuilder, Akamai, Salesforce.com, ESPN, American Express and others. Although this certainly won't do the event justice, here are a couple of the "gold nuggets" that I took away from the event:

• Sales may be the "top scorer" in your company, but marketing most likely has the most "assists". [Mary Delaney, Chief Sales Officer, Careerbuilder.com] Do your sales & marketing teams appreciate the contribution of each group as well as the need to work as a team?
• "Candor", not "Cancer". [Delaney] That is, honest feedback can either be brought to the right person/team so that something can be done about it - Candor; or it can spread to every other individual in the organization resulting in lack of action and a reduction in efficiency and moral-Cancer. (I believe Mary sourced GE/Jack Welch for this philosophy)
• SF.com's framework for optimizing "Campaign to Cash": 1) Demand generation; 2) Sales effectiveness; 3) Territory and fit; and 4) Retention/upsell. No doubt this framework requires a combined marketing and sales effort, with a strong focus on data quality and segmentation its markets and subsequent strategy. They are certainly "sipping their own champagne" at SF.com. (better than "eating their own dog food")
• American Express has truly leveraged marketing asset management processes and technology(SAVO) to improve their effectiveness. For example: 1) significantly reduced the 10+ hours/week that sales spent on collateral creation and research tasks; and 2) improved usage and engagement measurement by sales of marketing's content and related assets including user and asset-specific metric reporting capabilities(e.g., 3,844 total log-ins and 12,654 document requests in the first month of their MAM roll-out).
• Akamai has taken some very tactical steps to improve marketing and sales alignment, for example: developed call scripts for inside sales and improved marketing's overall lead generation process to improve prospect qualification; created templates for more rapid response to RFPs; and developed competitive and objection guidelines for sales to help them in the sales process.

Read More