Marketing Operations - My Next Adventure

I stumbled into Marketing at a point in my career where I was ready for a change. I had spent five years building large-scale data warehouses and business intelligence systems. During that time I enjoyed speaking with end users and their executives and understanding how the systems would be used. But for the most part, my work didn’t require me to understand the businesses I was supporting. Technology was safe for me at that point, but the constant feedback from every mentor was that I needed to focus on the business aspects of these projects as I progressed up the ranks. Good advice. After years of pure technology focus, I decided to look for roles that bridged the gap between business and tech.

I found a role that required a deep understanding of data warehouse technology, but applied that thinking to the business aspects of marketing databases. Yes, my teams were still building large scale customer databases – one client had 70 million customer accounts – but my personal work was focused on delivering related business process improvement. To accomplish that, I spent most of my time meeting with client side marketing executives and learning about their needs. As I listened, I realized that I had always paid close attention to how companies marketed to me in both a personal and professional context. I was particularly interested in what happened after I gave my name to a company for the first time. How soon did they follow up? Did it appear that they resold my data? Were they respectful of me and did they honor an opt-out when I registered one? I had always loved database marketing; I just hadn’t realized it until then.

In the years following that realization, I built multiple marketing automation systems, learned how to measure the ROI of marketing programs, developed integrated sales and marketing lead generation programs, and managed global customer data quality at a name brand company. Those roles taught me the ins and outs of CRM Marketing, and from there I felt confident that I could take on any role in the database marketing space.

With that in mind, I was excited when I found my new role. I am building a Marketing Operations team from the ground up at a global software company that focuses on oil, chemicals, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Marketing Operations is defined many ways, but for me it means efficiently managing marketing resources by improving technology, process, and measurement. Woo-hoo! I know how to do that. I’m excited for this new role, and plan to focus upcoming blog posts on establishing robust marketing process, integrating sales and marketing programs, and marketing automation technology. I’m sure I’ll write about other aspects like yearly planning, reporting/analytics, and of course… data quality.

CRM and Marketing Measurement to Drive Sales

How do you drive the Sales team to follow up on all those leads you’ve provided? And how do you get your marketing team to provide qualified leads instead of rows of uninteresting data? The answer is to measure both and use the resulting reporting and analysis to find gaps in your marketing and sales processes.

Your marketing and sales systems do what they are supposed to. They keep track of your interaction with customers (CRM) and help your Sales force plan to sell (SFA). They also keep you in touch with your customers through some combination of inbound, outbound, email, direct mail, and other marketing services your company provides. You may have even integrated your social media, web analytics, and online media, but chances are that you have not.

So what’s next? Convergence time.

Let’s start with a basic CRM program and build on valuable layers of information along the way. My company sends out lots of email marketing, so that’s what I talk about more than anything else. Once I’ve executed an email campaign, the first thing I want to look at is the result of any of my tests. Did recipients open emails more frequently when I did A vs. B. Next I want to know whether people clicked through the action buttons I provided them. These first two points are marketing centric, but next comes the fun part.

Once I know who clicked through the email, I have a new segment of interested parties. This segment can be divided up into customers and prospects (based on data available in your CRM system). As a next step, what did those people do when they clicked through to your landing page or site? Did they look at one page and leave? Or follow a path toward a product that you advertised? Or follow a path to a different product? We have now added another level of advanced segmentation from your Web Analytics platform. From a marketing perspective, you can now define lead nurturing programs.

And from a Sales perspective, we have defined richly qualified CRM and Web segments. So what happens when you add a note to your SFA system letting the rep know that a contact or a prospect account has clicked through an email and pursued a specific product? If your marketing team has built credibility with sales reps and management, you can be sure that the rep will trust this information and follow up to drive a sale. If you haven’t built credibility (or communicated this new approach), then the rep will see another bad lead and do nothing.

Either way, you need to report on these cross functional results. When presented Marketing qualified leads rather than bulk leads, what was the action taken by each sales rep. How much revenue was generated for each lead delivered? What about for each lead worked by a rep? If you are able to, you should test delivering different segments to different sales teams to determine which teams are best able to drive results. Maybe inside sales has a better chance to make a qualified lead sale since they are available to follow up immediately when provided a triggered lead. Alternatively, the product path followed online may define the sales rep that should get the lead. Or it could come down to rules of engagement on who gets what.

Once you are able to present segmented results showing which teams follow up on leads and drive sales and which teams let leads sit, you can have better conversations with Sales and Marketing management. This will expose issues with both your Sales and Marketing departments, but can lead to conversations that help both organizations mature. Are your marketing teams communicating well and enabling the sales with the appropriate collateral to sell to these leads? Are your sales reps following the playbook and working the leads the way management thinks they are? Show the results and let the conversation lead to change at your company.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Series Intro

I will be joining a panel discussion on June 28, 2010 at the Sales 2.0 Boston Conference. The topic for my panel is Sales and Marketing Alignment, so for the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing a series of posts on related theory. To cover the subject, I will be scratching the surface of very complex subject matter. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like me to dive deeper into any topic.

Here’s my initial list of topics, although these could certainly change as I go. 

1. Intro and What is Sales 2.0
2. CRM and Marketing Measurement to Drive Sales
3. What is a Qualified Lead?
4. Systems Integration - Connecting Web, CRM, and SFA tools
5. Global Sales and Marketing

This is a departure from previous posts about Data Governance, Customer Intelligence, etc., but it’s what I’ve been thinking about. I hope you enjoy.

What is Sales 2.0?

Most of the information about Sales 2.0 is from companies affiliated with the conference. That makes sense as this is about the intersection of Sales and Marketing, and these companies are eating their own dog food (my favorite cliche from my consulting days). It may be that there are lots of other people writing about it as well, but it’s no surprise that the content Google is finding first is from these Marketing focused companies.

What the hell is Sales 2.0? I’m not the first person to ask that question. HubSpot, a conference participant, asks that very question on their blog and their guest writer, Nigel Edelshain claims to have coined the phrase. N. B. I have no reason to doubt him, I’m just excited how nicely the Google results are shaping my blog post. If that’s intentional from the marketing spend of these companies, they are doing a great job of guiding my understanding of a new topic. It’s good to think about these things when approaching advanced Sales and Marketing techniques, because your ultimate goal should be to replicate this approach.

Nigel defines Sales 2.0 thusly: “Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively.” Alright. I get that. A good standard definition that everyone can buy into. I think it may overlook some of the CRM plumbing that makes this concept functional, but I like how concise that is.

What about others? How do the vendors promoting the theory define it? Inside View, who is another conference sponsor, has a whole page dedicated to defining Sales 2.0. They have been supporting the conference and concept since 2007 and confim Nigel as the creator of the original concept. Their definitions page links to other definition pages, and I count at least 30 different definitions for Sales 2.0.

I’ll stop there, but continue soon with CRM and Marketing Measurement. I look forward to your comments.

B2B Customer Intelligence Series - Introduction

My job title and primary focus is Data Governance, however the data I spend the most time managing is B2B data. As a former consultant, I constantly find myself suggesting new applications to drive Sales and Marketing programs. Sometimes it’s as basic as dipping into database reserves to find new prospects, but often my extracurricular projects are pure Customer Intelligence, also referred to as CI. Customer Intelligence can cover a lot of ground, so let me define it.

Customer Intelligence is the intersection of Sales, Marketing, and Analytics that helps present the best customers and prospects to inform company strategy and tactical approach.

Customer Intelligence work manifests itself as Analytic projects including predictive modeling, cross-functional leads programs, and Sales and Marketing strategy projects. In most companies I’ve worked with, Customer Intelligence is distributed across several functions and that group collectively defines the companies Customer Relationship approach. In others a central group focuses on Customer Intelligence and coordinates the distribution of related information to drive strategy.

Other companies have no Customer Intelligence. They are Customer Ignorant. In that case, the Sales and Marketing teams approach customers based on generic approaches and anecdotal history of which customers are the “best”. With good products and excellent customer service, this approach can work. However, over time it will open the door for competitors to take over and dominate the market.

Here are a few thoughts for the upcoming series. The plan is for each of these topics to be developed as an entire post over the next few weeks. If you have other suggestions, please comment on the post or tweet a reply to @markgoloboy.

1) Customer Intelligence Flexibility

No matter how successful it is, every sales strategy will be retired someday. It may be next week. It may be next year. But be sure, the target will be set somewhere other than it is today. How do you build a Customer Intelligence strategy that allows your organization to stay agile?

2) Aligning Against the Opportunity

Once properly implemented your Customer Intelligence approach should become an integral part of the sales reps’ day. How do you integrate the information with your existing processes and systems to align against the opportunity?

3) Direct Marketing Impact on Sales

Customer Intelligence can help define a set of high value prospects that deliver return on Marketing investment. Determining which factors influence purchasing requires advanced analytics. What’s the best way to develop analytic models and measure whether they predict a prospect’s likelihood to become a customer?

4) Defining Lifetime Value

Determining Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer and potential LTV of a prospect can align Sales, Marketing and Product goals with corporate strategy. However, LTV analysis requires that your product and sales data has been collected consistently for your company’s history. How do you develop and use LTV to drive product direction and Sales and Marketing focus?

Data Governance for the Executive Level

You’ve done your work. You understand the issues. This is your one chance, so it better be smooth.

My previous blog posts have focused on Lightweight Data Governance for the most part. I’ve sprinkled in some more fomal theory that I’ve learned from the experienced pros, but for the most part I’m writing about my own experience with Data Governance. If I sat here and told you the best way to manage a mature interdepartmental Data Governance practice, you’d call B.S. And you’d be justified in doing so.

With that backdrop, I’m going to begin to describe the transition from Lightweight to Formal practice. I don’t yet know where I’ll end up, but along the way I’ll try to help others with their journey. At some point you will find the limit of project based, department level Data Governance. Whether it’s funding for resources and tools, or interdepartmental coordination, you will need to present Data Governace to a room full of executives.

Do you have a mature presentation ready at a moments notice?

You never know when you’re going to be asked to present. Your boss may say something in a meeting and the next day you get your opportunity. You should create a short 3 or 4 slide presentation that quickly justifies the work your team does. It should be provocative, show the problems and your solutions to them, and clearly demonstrate the value your team represents to the company.

The slides should include:

1. Your Company’s Problem and how Data Governance can solve it
2. Your Current Work Plan, which should be High Level and written in business terms
3. Your roadmap for the next 12 - 24 months
4. Challenges (funding, resources, roadblocks) and your solution to them

Do you have sponsors who can describe your value?

If you are the only one who believes your work is necessary, then it’s not. You must build relationships with the teams you work with, and build credibility with their management over time. If you were called into a meeting right now, which three executives one or two levels above you would you invite? Who would be invited by the organizer. They should understand how your work benefits them, and be willing to stand up for you.

Get right to the point.

Why do the executives need to spend this 30 or 60 minutes listening to your presentation? Think about it from their perspective. They have much better things to work on than this, right? Tell them why it matters up front. Make it about revenue potential, solutions to business (not data or technology) problems, or cost savings. That’s the way an executive thinks. You can also talk about control, compliance, and the corporate maturity that your work representes. But, trust me, focus on the dollars and business problems first.

How can Data Governance increase revenue?

This one is especially important during this terrible economy. What’s your company’s #1 goal this year? Sales. Nothing else matters if there’s no money coming in the door. How can Data Governance help the Sales team?

1. Clean up customer data so the reps know what to focus on. This will require improved systems, better processes for reps, Finance / Order Administration, Customer Service, and anyone else who touches customer data. That interdepartmental coordination requires Data Governance to understand the issues caused by poor data quality.
2. Improving the data will remove inneficient admin tasks from your Sales Rep’s day, allowing them to focus on selling more. If the Rep needs to sift through old prospects that will never purchase to find the hidden gems, they are not working efficiently. Data Governance should develop the processes to maintain the Sales reps portfolio systematically so they have fresh data to work with. Obviously, this is more important as your Sales organization and customer base grows. If you have 100s or even 1000s of customers, you can probably ignore this one.
3. Allow management to focus on the issue, and not the noise. Every time a Sales rep sees a bad row of data, they either move on, cringe and move on, or scream about it. The ones who move on quickly make the most money. The ones who scream are looking for excuses not to sell. They will complain to their management, who will invariably complain to those responsible for the data. Is that you? By removing the excuse that the data is bad, management can focus on the real issues of Sales productivity.

What business problem problem are you solving?

I think the fun part of Data Governance is that it allows you to help resolve longstanding business problems and answer tough questions. If that’s the result of your early data governance work, you’ll get funding to do more. What is the direct business impact caused by inconsistent, incorrect, or misleading data permeating your organization? Who screams about it in meetings? Go ask them how you can help. When you understand their business problem you will know where to start.

Lastly, how can it reduce costs?

The most important part of that question is “Lastly.” Everyone else starts there, but I think it’s the hardest to sell to your management. A revenue or business problem based justication is more strategic than a cost savings plan. Anyone can save costs. Cutting resources or choosing different tools is easy. Look around. Your management has done it repeatedly this year.