Sales & Marketing Alignment Systematically

marketing sales alignmentMuch has been written about the quest for Sales and Marketing alignment, and Marketing Operations is often at the sharp end in its pursuit. Among those declaring "tight" Sales and Marketing alignment, significantly higher growth rates were reported in Aberdeen Group's benchmark report, Sales and Marketing Alignment: The New Power Couple. Keys to success include shared lead definitions, qualification criteria and best-practice processes. With the usual proviso that technology is never the answer, underlying system considerations should be emphasized.

Systematic Information Sharing
Efficient and effective sharing of contact data and leads between Sales and Marketing is a crucial aspect of alignment and marketing agility. Holding data separately means … Read more →

Mastering Revenue Cycle Management

Revenue ManagementDid you know that up to 90% of the buying process is complete before a prospect engages with a sales rep? Marketing has a golden opportunity to take ownership of this critical part of the buying process.

That's why an understanding of "TOFU, MOFU and BOFU" is becoming increasingly crucial for today's business-to-business marketer, as explained in a recent presentation by Jon Miller, Founder and Vice President of Marketing at Marketo.

TOFU = Top-Of-the-FUnnel
TOFU represents more than 90% of Marketo's marketing database. This early-stage audience is not yet ready to buy and wants to consume relevant, helpful content before engaging with the company. Targets are basically names in the database who are exposed to Marketo via content, brand or word-of-mouth. Content is largely educational or entertainment, such as research, funny videos, curated lists, infographics, thought leadership and definitive guides. This content can be downloaded anonymously.

MOFU = Middle-Of-the-FUnnel
Individuals who have moved from TOFU to MOFU have validated the TOFU act of faith with … Read more →

Optimize Your Marketing Investment

Marketing InvestmentWhat single improvement would help your company optimize its marketing investment? To answer this question, you're probably thinking about your marketing budget allocations for campaigns, events, intelligence, etc. But this question is not about that — it's about getting more bang for the buck by doing things smarter across your marketing organization.

Optimizing means achieving the best possible results by maximizing desired factors and minimizing undesired factors. Desired factors are easy to name: revenue, market share, profit, and opportunities. Undesired factors along your path to these goals include duplicated or scrapped efforts, and low productivity and morale. Your marketing expertise is the key to maximizing desired factors, while how your marketing organization operates is the key to minimizing undesired factors.

Sub-optimization is a "situation where a process, procedure, or system yields less than the best possible outcome or output, caused by a lack of best possible coordination between different components, elements, parts, etc." (BusinessDictionary.com) When any part of your marketing strategy suffers because of isolated pockets of expertise, the squeaky wheel getting the grease, pet projects, firefighting realities, and the like, your marketing investment is sub-optimized.

Insufficient budget is CMOs' biggest aggravation, … Read more →

Is Your Marketing Organization Ready to Change its MO?

Marketing TransformationIt can sometimes be difficult to determine whether your company is ready to implement Marketing Operations. As described in 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing (previous blog post), Marketing Operations (MO) is an emerging discipline with the potential to significantly increase performance and accountability in complex marketing organizations. It leverages a strong front-end infrastructure to reinforce marketing strategy and back-end programs and tactics. This article identifies the characteristics that signal your organization's readiness for MO and answers these questions: What does that organization look like? What are its primary pain points? What is its vision for the future? What pressures are driving it to consider undergoing substantial change?

MO Readiness: A Checklist for Your Company
To see if your company is a good candidate for MO, check any of the following characteristics that apply:

  • My company is midsize or larger
  • My company's marketplace is dynamic and highly competitive
  • My company's marketing has evolved into … Read more →

7 Deadly Sins of Marketing

7DeadlySinsBusy corporate marketing groups can be so focused on tactics and fire-fighting that they jeopardize their marketing investment.

Overreacting to events, tackle symptoms rather than underlying fundamental problems and jumping to please the boss can prove fatal. Crippled marketing efforts can leave promising companies in the dust, or at least handicapped at the starting gate.

Admired companies are leveraging Marketing Operations to improve performance and measure ROI as they refine their marketing organizations using an operational focus. Marketing Operations is an emerging discipline that increases efficiency and drives consistent … Read more →

Don’t Confuse CX Technology with Customer Experience Management

MarketingTechnologyYou're a customer, so you're a perfect judge of logic when it comes to the ways companies are trying to get ahead with customers. First of all, let's face it: when you buy something you want it to be easy to get, function flawlessly, and allow you to move forward in your life or business. That encapsulates what customer experience management is all about: companies that can make it easier and nicer to get what you need in life/business are the companies you'll say good things about and come back to. If you agree that this is your outlook on being a customer, then we've got a good foundation for properly defining the role of technology in customer experience management (CEM).

Customer Relationship Management: As a customer you hope you don't have to repeat your story every time you interact with a company. Just like in personal relationships, you expect to be valuable enough to the other party that they remember what you did together before, so that they might anticipate what would be appropriate going forward.

CEM Lesson: CRM as a technology is a tool to nurture relationships that anticipate what a customer would appreciate, in the right way, at the right time. (Not a self-serving tool to push unwanted stuff with contrived urgency, essentially eroding rather than nurturing the customer relationship.) Use Marketing Automation and Sales Intelligence tools to … Read more →

Avoid Marketing Technology Mistakes: 5 Checkpoints for Proposal Process

wrong-way-sign"People, process, and technology" are the trilogy mantra for successful marketing automation, as all too often the allure of a shiny new technology falsely appears to be a silver bullet for curing all ills. Successful adoption of marketing technology starts with the way you approach your request for proposal. It's all too easy to make mistakes compiling and issuing a request for proposal (RFP) when choosing marketing technology. In the spirit of learning from the mistakes of others, here are five worst practices and corresponding best-practice checkpoints. How many do you recognise from RFPs in which you've been involved?

Worst Practice No. 1: Impose Very Tight Timelines
Once the decision has been made to undertake a request for proposal, everyone is keen to proceed as quickly as possible, resulting in compressed and unrealistic timescales, also known as "hurry up and wait" as reality sets in and the project stalls.

Best practice check points:

  • Allow sufficient time, including internal activities as well as solution provider response preparation.
  • Build-in time for re-scheduling postponed discovery sessions and for handling additional queries that arise.
  • Remember that the quality of the responses and ultimate selection of the best solution are reliant on allowing sufficient time.

Worst Practice No. 2: Create Requirements with No Indication of Priority
The temptation is … Read more →

How Marketing Accountability is Achieved

In the quest for world-class effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing organization, the importance of clear goals cannot be overestimated. Clarity within your own team just makes sense when you think about the need for clarity with marketing's stakeholders, especially with customers. Clear goals lay the foundation for everything else your marketing organization aspires to.

In research conducted by Marketing Operations Partners, marketing executives were asked about their current phase in the journey toward mature marketing operations practices, as well as their near-term plans to "move the needle" in that trek. Clear goals are a prominent aspect of both phases: the journey to-date and what's going to be instrumental … Read more →

Increasing the Value of Marketing Operations

Value is what most things in business are about. And in Marketing Operations, best-practice companies are reaping higher value as they evolve toward a more sophisticated scope for what Marketing Ops (MO) entails. As you can see from the following excerpt from the Journey to Marketing Operations Maturity best practices study, high-value MO goes beyond automation, measurement and administration to include higher value-add tools such as cross-functional collaboration, change management, metrics alignment, competency development, predictive analytics, and the like.

Key Finding #3:
The scope of Marketing Operations progresses over time towards increasing sophistication and value.

Survey Findings:
Companies showed clear tendencies to extend the scope of MO. Thus, the scope of MO typically includes fundamental, expanded, and sophisticated elements:

  • Fundamental MO Scope — Includes budget management, customer … Read more →

Business Customer Experience Management Stories Highlighted in 3rd Annual B2B CEM Study

Customer Experience Best PracticesStories of business customer experience management practices and successes are featured in the 3rd Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study. Examples span across voice-of-the-customer, employee engagement in CEM, customer-focused culture, customer experience profitability, and more.

Business CEM stories are rare relative to consumer-focused examples, despite the fact that business customer experience can be much more challenging, with high involvement of numerous influencers of the purchase decision, high stakes purchases with lengthy sales cycles, reciprocal buyer/supplier relationships, and complex touch‐points across functional areas, managerial levels, and products, among other factors unique to B2B environments.

An enterprise customer experience manager at telecom provider Orange, Emilie Smith, said: “In B2B there’s an even bigger argument for CEM linkage to revenue and profitability because often the products and services for businesses are a lot more sophisticated and … Read more →

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