mommyjenlin

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 form...

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 ...

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 p...

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 a...

Have you started planning for your 2010 fiscal year yet? Our best practices study in planning – people, process and technology indicates that the average marketing planning cycle begins about 6 months before the fiscal year end. (for CMO Advisory Service clients, refer to "Marketing’s Planning – People, Process and Technology, IDC Doc. #216134 ) If you're one of the more mature organizations, planning will be part of the fabric of your weekly, monthly and quarterly team meetings. Regardless, a significant part of this annual process is assessment of your current "operational" metrics and development of next year's projected investment strategy. I define "operational" metrics as those metrics that track your marketing investment strategy, including: 1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – such as Marketing Budget Ratio (marketing spend as a % of revenue), Program to People KPI, Revenue per Staff, Staff Throughput (program spend per marketing staff), Centr...

Five or six years ago I was frequently asked the question "What is the one key metric to track the impact of our marketing investment?" Without even breaching the open-ended topic of what is ROI, I typically responded with my own question of "Do you even know how much you're spending on marketing, let alone what the return is?" In most cases the response would be a simple "no". After working with 100s of companies on analyzing their investment as well as seeing the progress that marketing operations and marketing finance people have made, I can comfortably say that as an industry we have matured significantly in our ability to track marketing investment . . . at least at a high level. (e.g., Marketing Budget Ratio (mktg. spend/revenue), Program-to-People KPI, etc.) I consider these to be operational metrics as opposed to execution metrics. ( refer to past posts for more details re: execution metrics ) Greater sophistication in investment management, wh...

How many times have we heard in the B-to-B marketing press the past several months about the importance of increasing content relevance to our prospects and customers, better engaging them through digital marketing vehicles and improving our ability to generate and qualify marketing leads? Yes, all extremely important priorities for us as marketers, however, if you're a $100M+ company none of this can be accomplished in an efficient and effective manner without the back-office infrastructure to support it. And we all know how difficult an infrastructure conversation is in this economic downturn. For the purposes of this conversation, let's focus on the area of database marketing. Even the best marketing organizations struggle with consistency in database marketing processes; consolidation of prospect and customer data across the multitude of databases in use across the world; cleansing of data to prevent a "bad data in = bad data out" scenario; and overcoming the comp...

As your marketing organization approaches the end of its annual planning cycle, remember that it shouldn't end on January 1, 2009. As marketers we must get better at managing our annual and intra-year process as a part of our regular business processes vs. a once per year disruptive event. Doing so could be a helpful step forward in improving our ability to manage investment, shift resources in response to market conditions, and improve alignment within marketing and with the rest of the organization. Based upon interviews with marketing leaders in the technology industry and findings from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Board meeting, I'd like to offer the following "food for thought": 1. Staffing : Do you have an individual or team who's accountable for developing, executing and governing your planning process? The marketing operations function can provide the foundation and discipline for a well-orchestrated and managed planning process. Although this ...

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) ...

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 t...