The Myth that Marketing Automation Reveals Buyers’ Journeys

Psychologists have compared the human instinctive aversion to change to the way people avoid pain or experience fear. Yet one of the primary responsibilities of CEOs is to facilitate cultural, organizational and strategic change in response to evolving market dynamics – a tall order when your opponent is human nature itself.

However an increasing body of research is creating a chorus with a resounding message: Change or die.

Lori Widzo’s recent blog post at Forrester is the latest voice in that chorus calling for change in the field of marketing. We’re waking up from a daze that started when marketing results became increasingly unreliable and change whacked us in the head and flipped decades of established marketing and sales practices upside-down.

How Customers are Changing
According to Forrester, 75 percent of … Read more →

Employee Engagement in Balanced Scorecards

Key performance indicators are important gauges of progress in any endeavor. Balanced scorecards encourage 360-degree views of progress for a corporation or initiative. The scorecard typically covers several categories, for example: customer, financial, productivity, and competitive metrics. By linking these categories in a single view, managers may see linkages between these areas and make all-encompassing, better informed decisions. Of course, the selection of these metrics … Read more →

Key to Marketing Agility: Customers 1st

The ability of your company to quickly shift according to marketplace changes is largely dependent on where you place customers' well-being in your decision-making hierarchy. Are customers, employees, shareholders, or personal agendas the number one priority of management’s decision-making hierarchy? And if you were to ask your customers to confirm your answer, would they agree?

Ask 10 people and you might get 10 different answers. But that lack of clarity does not bode well for marketing agility! Despite the title of the acclaimed book Employees First, Customers Second, the book actually chronicles the CEO's efforts at HCL Technologies to re-align his company with customers' changing priorities: "The increased complexity of the customer's business, combined with the increasing complexity of solutions (usually sourced from multiple vendors), made it necessary for customers to focus on execution and implementation." From various customer interactions he came to realize that "our biggest problem with the organization structure was that it did not support the people in what we call the value zone: the place where value is truly created for customers. In a services company in a knowledge economy, this zone lays in the interface between the customer and … Read more →

The #1 Cost-Saving Strategy That 99% of Marketers Overlook

Marketing OperationsI've enjoyed working in B2B marketing for the last fifteen years. And I've seen it all, from online behaviour analysis to lead nurturing; from personalized messaging to social media marketing. Some of these trends have provided dramatic traction for B2B marketers and some have been less impressive.

But in recent years, as companies have pressed for a tangible demonstration of ROI for their marketing spend, I have wondered about the metrics of the marketing 'deliverable', and whether or not companies aren't perhaps missing something critical.

What vs. How
As marketers, we spend a lot of time evaluating what we do in the marketplace and hardly focus on the how – in other words, the "creative & strategy" versus "operations & processes". And if we were to take a survey of the most experienced marketers around the world, I'm fairly certain that they would say they've made their career on the what. And here’s where I see a gaping hole. Precisely because we don’t usually focus on the how, marketing … Read more →

Marketing, Sales & Customer Care Alliances to Grow Revenue

SellersCompassTM Copyright 2012 NBS Consulting Group, Inc. All rights reserved.In everyday life a compass (also known as GPS or global positioning system or map) may be integrated in nearly everything you do — whether you're driving, flying or hiking. Imagine such a tool for Marketing, Sales and Customer Care for collectively navigating the journey of prospective buyers and customers across the entire customer life cycle. A step further than the typical customer touch-point map or customer journey map, this type of compass would clarify roles and collaboration to align your company with what's needed for a great customer experience that results in higher revenue and customer retention with lower costs of marketing, sales and customer care. At a recent customer management conference I heard Christine Crandell, CEO of New Business Strategies, explain her Sellers' Compass(TM) methodology, and learned some much-needed new perspectives on ways that Marketing, Sales and Customer Care can improve the customer experience.

Where Does the Customer Experience Begin?
Consider the new reality of the buyer's process (pre-sales and post-sales): with all the online and peer resources available today buyers often have already completed their Define, Search and Evaluate phases prior to your Marketing and Sales radar registering an official touch-point. This fact is a weakness … Read more →

4 Customer Centric Culture Building Blocks

customer centricityIt’s popular to tout customer-centricity, yet it’s very difficult to consistently demonstrate. The word centric means having a specific thing as the focus of attention and efforts. Customer-centric means that concerns other than the customer’s well-being are in the background while the customer stays in the foreground.

That may seem simple enough, yet reality proves the elusiveness of customer-centricity. In Accenture’s Delivering the Promise study, 75% of executives viewed their customer service as above-average, while 59% of their customers reported their experience with these companies’ service as somewhat to extremely dissatisfying. Likewise, in CMO Council’s Customer Affinity study, half the companies said … Read more →

Marketing Operations: What’s That?

marketing operationsMarketing. … Operations.

One’s kinda sexy. The other… um, not so much.

Put them together and what have you got? Well, it’s something, frankly, that very few people think about.

The thing is, when most people think about a marketing department, they think about what it produces, not how it operates.

Marketing Operations does the opposite. It puts a focus on all the processes, efforts and resources that it takes to deliver the end product, and it reengineers … Read more →

Clorox Brand Leader Shares A Key to Marketing Agility: Developing Capability


Over the past few weeks, we've explored many facets of marketing agility, including cross-functional alignment, process strength to prevent organizational knowledge from walking out the door when key employees leave, and the value of a marketing and customer intelligence practice at the core of Marketing Operations. This week, we'll look at another key aspect of agility — the ability to develop capabilities that bridge the gap between the value the marketing organization currently provides and the impact it will need to have in the future.

To tackle this important topic, we've asked Doug Milliken, Vice President, Global Brand Development at Clorox, to share his experience. Doug oversees the companies brand-building capability, including strategic marketing best practices in the areas of brand strategy, brand architecture, communications and insights, and marketing training and people development programs globally. Doug describes the work they do as developing the capability to develop capability. Following is a synopsis of a recent interview we conducted with him on the Marketing Operations Leaders Talkshow.

What is capability and how do you define it?

Capability is knowledge or skills put into practice to get a result. You don't have capability until you can … Read more →

Agility Part 2: Keys to Marketing Alignment with Stakeholders

Last week we discussed the importance of aligning Marketing cross-functionally with stakeholders to enable an enterprise to effectively think, decide and act with agility. Today, in the second of our three-part series on the topic, we’ll dive even deeper into the realities of Marketing-led  cross-organizational alignment. Specifically, we’ll look at the barriers to alignment and strategies for Marketing to overcome these obstacles and drive alignment.

Barriers to Marketing Alignment
Lack of awareness and knowledge of common goals are often key factors preventing Marketing from aligning effectively internally. This highlights the need to frame Marketing goals in terms of business outcomes … Read more →

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