Disrupting The Game

Category: Data

Get visual in real time with your marketing dashboards

Are you building and supporting concise, real-time, visual dashboards to better enable stakeholders to understand and respond to Marketing’s contribution?

If you don’t have a marketing dashboard environment then perhaps you should.

Indeed, if you are relying on Excel and PowerPoint to report your contribution then this means you are burdened with manual processes and rear-vision data that yields little insight.

According to a Forrester Research report, Marketing Measurement needs an MBA, your dashboards should focus on marketing’s contribution to primary business outcomes such as revenue, margin, market share, customer value,and shareholder value, these tools should also help sales, support functions, and the marketing rank and file understand how marketing programs shape interest and demand as well as lead to healthier pipelines and lower costs per opportunity.

“Digitally adept buyers couldn’t care less about the key capabilities of your products and services; they want to know why your approach will better solve their problems,” Forrester says.

“CMOs that focus dashboards on business outcomes like category ownership, market share, retention rate, and account penetration keep the focus on why customers buy, not just what they buy.”

If you don’t have dashboards tracking the metrics that matter today then you must tomorrow.

September 15, 2013
An inconvenient truth: our marketing data doesn’t count in the C-Suite

Senior executives do not regard marketing results as important when making key decisions, according to a recent Forrester Research report, Marketing Measurement needs an MBA.

According to the marketers surveyed by Forrester, few of their C-suite colleagues refer to marketing data when making strategic calls.

That’s a worrying reality for anyone with the word marketing in their title.

Marketers are failing to inspire executive leadership, according to Forrester.

Only 8% of the surveyed marketers in the report claimed that their CEOs used any marketing numbers when making decisions.

CFOs are taking even less notice, with just 4% using marketing numbers.

Marketers’ peers aren’t much better. Forrester found that only 10% of business unit and divisional leaders rated marketing data as worthy of consideration.

Even Sales isn’t engaged, with only 15% taking note of Marketing’s numbers.

No wonder B2B marketing budgets are typically stuck at around 2% of revenue.

And when you think about it, why should CEOs, CFOs and general managers be interested in disconnected operational data points such as email response rates, brand awareness stats, website traffic and trade show scans?

Unfortunately not enough marketers are both genuinely moving the revenue needle and demonstrating that they are.

Marketing needs to move from vague goals to specific targets driven by hard data:

Source: June 2013 “Measuring and Communicating Marketing Performance” Forrester ITSMA/VEM webinar.

August 31, 2013
“The ROI of Social Media is that your business will still exist in five years”

We know we can reach customers and buyers via social technologies, but the environment is foreign, resource intensive, highly personal and hard to measure.

Most marketers are working with Social tools and processes, but few have a genuine strategic approach for building and maintaining a viable presence.

“Socialnomics” author and blogger Erik Qualman has prepared this excellent snapshot of the state of social in 2103:

Qualman claims that the ROI of Social is that you will still have a business in five years.

“Socialnomics”: a huge oppportunity and a daunting challenge.

August 15, 2013
Do you have a foreman managing your content marketing factory?
Getting a sophisticated content marketing program happening requires a significant degree of cross-functional alignment and co-ordination.

Leading B2B sales and marketing research consultancy Sirius Decisions says “no single function can own the end-to-end content process, but organizations must appoint a foreman who acts as the operational hub for process optimization and measurement”.

The foreman’s mandate must include the following responsibilities:
- Process (audit, internal marketing, cross functional interlocking and optimisation)
- Insight (personas and localization)
- Technology (content managemet system, content workflow management and sales asset management)
- Measurement (utilization, quality and impact)
Do you have room for a “content operations” executive who is focused on content quality and efficiency? If not, you almost certainly should.

Here is Sirius Decisions’ recommended content marketing roadmap:
July 21, 2013
Users rate Salesforce.com as the CRM leader & Oracle’s Larry Ellison agrees

Salesforce.com is the top-ranked CRM solution featured in the CRM Grid of the crowd-sourced software review and evaluation website G2 Crowd.

G2 describes itself as a user-driven software review site. Here’s their mission statement:

The current approach to buying business technology is broken. Buyers spend too much time sifting through spin, reading outdated analyst reports, and sitting through endless meetings. After all this, buyers still lack confidence in their choice of technology and most projects fail to meet their expectations. We will change this. By capturing our collective wisdom, we will make purchasing business technology as easy as buying consumer products.

As the chart above illustrates, Salesforce.com earned the highest overall score, followed by Microsoft Dynamics.

Several vendors earned High Performer status by achieving high customer satisfaction, but they do not yet have the market share and global scale required to get themselves into the Leaders’ quadrant.

The top High Performers include SugarCRM, Workbooks, Salesnet, and Nimble .

The CRM Grid rated Oracle, SAP, Sage, and NetSuite as Contenders, meaning that these vendors have significant scale and market share, but below-average user satisfaction ratings.

The top ranking was validated this week when the founders of Oracle and Salesforce.com, Larry Ellison and Mark Benioff, announced that after years of fierce competition they are getting into bed together.

Salesforce.com will embrace Oracle’s new multi-tennant 12C (c stands for cloud) database technology and introduce the Oracle Exadata hardware into its datacenters, while Oracle will integrate Salesforce.com into its Fusion HCM (Human Capital Management) HR and Financial Cloud (ERP) products.

Critically, from the CRM perspective, Oracle acknowledged that it will start using Salesforce.com itself.

Whilst the developments are interpreted by analysts as good news for Oracle’s infrastructure business, any company with one of Oracle’s CRM products (Siebel, Fusion CRM, CRM on Demand, RightNow CRM, E-Business Suite CRM or PeopleSoft CRM) should be wondering about their place in the landscape given these statements this week from Oracle’s Ellison during the announcement conference call for the media and the analyst community:

“Almost every time we buy a Company, they’re running Salesforce.com CRM. And, in the old days, we would try to move them over to our sales automation application — the Fusion sales automation application right away. We’re going to leave some of those companies on the Salesforce application for this specific purpose of making sure our integrations — that’s why I say we’re going to become a user of Salesforce.com’s CRM applications. We’re going to leave those implementations in place. We’re going to wire them up to our financials, and we’re going to be an early adopter of these out-of-the-box integrations. So, I mean obviously — I am sure Marc can do a better job than me of telling you just how successful Salesforce.com has been in CRM. But, we see them all over the market. They’re the market leader, and our customers expect for us to work gracefully with Salesforce.com. Both at the application level and the Company level.

“You’ve got to be able to turn on the Salesforce CRM applications, the Oracle HCM or ERP applications. And those things just have to start sharing data and working together – the key word being seamlessly . . . and that’s what Marc and I are committed to working on.”

It wasn’t stated explicitly during the announcement, but the Salesforce.com alliance relegates Oracle’s own CRM applications _ which it has recently started promoting as “Customer Experience Solutions” that customers can “Enhance, Augment and Migrate” _ to the rear-vision mirror. They will still compete with Salesforce.com (they will not go away anytime soon) but the case for any of them suddenly became a lot harder to make even allowing for Oracle’s formidable, hard-core “no prisoners” sales culture (which is, in fact, very similar to Salesforce’s).

The company’s new-generation Fusion CRM product has failed to win any reference customers. The two deployments which were announced in 2011, Siemens and Green Mountain Coffee, have apparently hit the proverbial rocks.

Siemens appears to have abandoned its implementation and Green Mountain Coffee is reportedly unhappy.

Critically, Oracle isn’t promoting any positive Fusion CRM customers on its dot com website. Only two old Siebel “customer highlights” are featured in the CRM section. If you have the time, click on the Gartner Research panel on the page. Two of the three Gartner links have expired. The one active link leads to an out-of-date 2011 report. Could this be because Gartner now agrees with the G2 Crowd users?

Today the conventional, on-premise Siebel platform, which Oracle purchased in 2005 for $US 5.8bn, is nearing the end of its 20+ year life cycle.

R8, which was introduced in 2007, is the last major Siebel release and recently there have been a wave of significant defections, which have shrunk Oracle’s flow of license maintenance revenue (on which its margins are reportedly as high as 90%).

Companies as diverse as IBM, Kimberly Clarke, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Bayer, Forrester Research and Corporate Executive Board have all walked away from Siebel in recent years.

Oracle’s user interface product, Open UI, is cited as a solution to Siebel’s usability issues, but as one leading analyst told me recently it is no more than “lipstick”. And despite being released in 2012 there are still no reference customers.

Customers of the marketing automation tool, Eloqua (now called Oracle Marketing), that Oracle bought last year no longer face a fork in the road. The vast majority are Salesforce.com users.

And the newly-christened Customer Experience Suite, which includes Oracle Marketing (Eloqua) and other acquisitions Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire) faces an interesting positioning challenge (whilst integration itself remains a massive work in progress).

Finally, the Benioff-Ellison bromance has reignited speculation that Oracle & Salesforce.com could one day exchange equity, with Benioff becoming Ellison’s successor. Watch this space, as they say.

June 29, 2013
Hijack your customers

It is a gimmick, but a clever one. Guatemalan shoe store Meat Pack has a nifty app that sends an alert to customers whenever they enter a competitor store. The GPS-driven alert kicks off a timed discount, starting at 99%, which encourages the customer to rush to Meat Pack. The quicker the customer gets to there the bigger the discount.

June 2, 2013
Marketo chases the integrated marketing software suite
An integrated marketing software suite is the big picture goal of leading marketing automation vendor Marketo.

Last week, in San Francisco, company founder Phil Fernandez told the 2800 delegates at his customer conference, the Marketo Summit, that an integrated marketing platform was the long-term objective.

Fernandez cited Marketo’s alliance with marketing budgeting company Allocadia as evidence of the company’s commitment.

Together with other possible partners, such as the content management specialist Kapost, there were plenty of evidence that the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could come together for Marketo.

Whilst the sign posts are pointing in the right direction, more detail would have been welcome during the keynote, which was interesting but not compelling.

Together with Datarati’s Will Scully Power, I presented the Ansell case study to a good crowd of 320+ in one of the conference’s supporting sessions.

It’s no surprise, but we’re all facing similar challenges:
- Marketing and Sales alignment is an ongoing challenge for all of us
- Inside Sales is a critical success factor to ensure leads are filtered before any hand off to Sales.
- The accurate attribution of revenue to marketing is a process of continuous optimisation and refinement.
- Don’t use marketing jargon with the C Suite and Sales people. Communicate to them in the vernacular they use when discussing their priorities, e.g. revenue growth, not opens and clicks on links, for example.
It is interesting times in the still relatively new marketing automation space.

Before the conference, Marketo announced their plans to raise $US 75 million in an upcoming IPO. This has brought to the foreground the speculation about who may buy out Marketo. Late last year Oracle acquired Marketo competitor Eloqua.

Salesforce.com. Microsoft and SAP are all seen as potential acquirers of Marketo. If it happens, what would that mean for the integrated marketing suite vision?
April 18, 2013
The machine that changed the world finally changes marketing & sales

In 1991 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published The Machine That Changed the World. It was the result of a multi-million dollar, five-year, 14-country study into Toyota’s primary weapon, lean production.

When the book, now recognised as a management classic, was written, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today it is the world’s largest car company and almost every manufacturing company, regardless of the widget they produce, is committed to some form of lean production.

Machine contrasted two fundamentally different business systems — lean versus mass, two very different ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value. The authors, Womack, Jones, and Roos, documented lean production’s advantages over the mass production model pioneered by GM and predicted that lean production would triumph. They asserted that lean would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating activity from health care to retail to distribution.

Finally, more than 20 years later, lean is coming to marketing & sales, which has been for far too long the domain of broken processes, disparate legacy IT systems and old-school selling attitudes and habits that cannot adapt quickly enough to today’s rapidly-changing competitive environment.

Companies and their brands cannot afford inefficient sales organizations that are not focused on providing their customers with superior business outcomes and results, rather than products and services. Holistic customer-centric companies are enjoying higher margins and superior marketplace differentiation. Those who are slow to respond are commodity suppliers racing house brands to the bottom of their respective markets.

Marketing and sales has no choice but to get into bed together and become an efficient revenue generator, embracing state-of-the art technologies, lean process discipline and engaged people, in an optimized and simplified selling machine.

Here’s Salesforce.com’s latest interpretation of what a synchronized process, technology and people revenue engine looks like.

March 29, 2013
From push, to pull, to participatory
As we journey from push to participatory, with a stop at pull along the way, here are a few guidelines from customer experience guru Bruce Temkin:
You can’t buy loyalty, you’ve got to earn it

Innovation is a team sport

Every interaction creates a personal reaction

People are instinctively self-centred

Customer familiary breeds alignment

Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers

Employees do what is measured, incented and celebrated
Bruce has recently released his 2013 US customer experience ratings.
10,000 U.S. consumers were asked to rate their recent interactions with companies across three dimensions of their experience: functional, accessible, and emotional, using their responses to rate 246 companies across 19 industries. Thirty-seven percent of companies received a “good” rating or better, an increase over 28% of companies in 2011 and 16% in 2010. Grocery chains, fast food chains, parcel delivery services, and retailers earned the highest average scores while TV service providers, health plans, and Internet service providers earned the lowest.

The three dimensions are:

1. Functional: How well do experiences meet customers’ needs?
2. Accessible: How easy is it for customers to do what they want to do?
3. Emotional: How do customers feel about the experiences?

Here are the leaders and laggards:
March 18, 2013
Behind marketing automation’s magic curtain

A catalyst for sales alignment and a key ROI enabler, marketing automation holds great promise, but it is still a relatively new space. To help smooth out the inevitable speed bumps on the road to process maturity, one of the leading players, Marketo, has developed this excellent infographic.

Source: www.marketo.com/marketing-automation/

March 11, 2013