'You can't manage what you don't measure' - but Marketing will try anyway..

I recently came across the findings of a survey conducted by Patricia Seybold Group and the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) into data-driven marketing. It may not come as a surprise to find that many Marketing department's fail to subscribe to the mantra attributed to Deming: if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. Marketing is famously associated with assertions that suggest the opposite of measurement, such as that of Lord Lever that 'half of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don't know which half'. This needs to change.

Marketing Leadership Needed to Drive Change 
But, despite the much greater availability of reliable data, due to marketing activity being increasingly conducted in the digital world, it seems that data-driven decision-making is not widespread. There is maybe a clue as to why this is the case in the findings quoted on the Patricia Seybold Group website:

'The survey further shed light on the factors that enable a company to become data savvy. First among these is leadership, with clear objectives and success measures. Data governance and technology plans and investments closely follow leadership. We also found that clearly documented, formal procedures and a dedicated analytics group are critical to success.'


Process, technology, governance and dedicated analytics are not concepts naturally associated with Marketing. To change expectations about how Marketing contributes to business performance and the revenue cycle,  Marketing requires leadership and vision from the CMO, as mentioned above. Unfortunately, what I see too often is companies embracing technology solutions as 'the answer' without asking any of the right questions.


Data Needed to Support Marketing-driven Pipeline


Marketo say in their Blog interview with Patricia Seybold:


' the combination of changes in buyer behavior and the technology capabilities available today make much more actionable data available to marketers. For instance, customers don’t call in salespeople until much later, so marketers use data to read buying behavior signals on the web in order to present the right offer at the right time as they move prospects through the buying cycle, much like a salesperson used to do in face-to-face engagement. Similarly, now that marketers are responsible for nurturing prospects through a larger slice of the buying cycle, they need to apply the same rigor to their pipeline reporting that sales has historically provided.'


But, in reality, how much of this is really happening outside the largest companies worldwide (led by the US)? I have often struggled to convince senior management to implement the changes required across the sales and marketing process to drive the data that fuels the key metrics needed to link Marketing programs with revenue. This seems to be reinforced by the study findings (see below) from Patricia Seybold Group, with whom I'll leave the last word. There is a long way to go before most marketing departments will have a Marketing Operations team; and measurable outcomes, supported by analytics, will be the norm.


'Most disturbing, only a handful of non-marketing senior executives rely on marketing data to make decisions, as shown in Illustration 2. As you might expect, business-unit and sales executives used marketing data the most to make decisions. Mostly, though, marketing data reports are reviewed with no action taken (my italics).'

7 Steps to Effective Pipeline Management - Part 2

Sales Pipeline

This week I’ll continue my look, started with last week's Blog, on Marketing’s contribution to sales pipeline and how the customer’s buying cycle must drive how Marketing interacts with them and helps Sales to identify and develop sales opportunities.

The simple buying cycle I set out last week is as follows:

1. Understand Buyer behaviour
2. Be found
3. Convert interest to action
4. Create a community of interest
5. Nurture leads to create sales opportunities
6. Support the sales process
7. Retain and develop customers

I talked about the first three stages last week. These are about understanding and segmenting potential buyers; creating communications that enable your company to be found; and capturing interest so that it can be nurtured and developed into a sales opportunity.

Communities of Interest

I think of business communities as a self-selecting community with a set of business challenges and/or responsibility for operational or strategic assets which leads them to seek further information with which to educate and influence their purchasing decisions. They may be involved in a purchasing cycle, but typically community behaviour is more likely prior to formal acquisition processes and particularly post-sale.

Today generalised social communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn exist, within which communities of interest (‘Groups’) can be created. In B2B high-tech circles, media groups, such as TechTarget, continue to promote subject-specific communities. But the challenge facing Marketing is to use this community paradigm to nurture its own database of opted-in contacts. With the right content and a good understanding - based both on behavioural tracking and the information volunteered by respondents - of information needs, we can push out relevant information, or make it available on a personalised landing page URL and track response.

Nurture Leads

What is a lead?

This may seem like a strange question, but I can guarantee that what Marketing calls a lead and what Sales expect from a lead are two different things. This handover point from Marketing to Sales is always a bone of contention, often exacerbated by Marketing having to hit lead targets that bear no relationship to sales outcomes. If Marketing is the owner of prospect ‘touches’ until such time as the prospect (or more accurately to this point, the ‘suspect’) is ready to consider alternatives and shortlist, then how to identify this point is a priority and can only be achieved when Marketing and Sales sit down together.

In a complex sale, the nurturing process can be measured in months, so it requires a comprehensive nurturing strategy from Marketing using multiple communications channels and highly focused content. Twitter, Blogs, news stories, white papers, newsletters, video and interactive media are likely to be key content/ channels along with email, events and seminars. Contact-level database tracking and lead scoring will be essential to manage the nurturing process.

Support the Sales Process

Sales will pick up and continue the dialogue with prospects that Marketing has started. Particularly at the initial sales engagement, whether by telephone and email or in person, the messages must be consistent and deliver on the brand promise carefully developed over weeks and months. All sales support material must facilitate this process and be developed in close cooperation with Sales.

Later in the sales engagement, Marketing should be working closely with Sales to understand how it can support pipeline velocity: opportunities can get qualified out, slowed down or lost. Marketing has an armoury of weapons to help with opportunities that get stuck at various points in the sales process, such as ‘short listed’ or ‘proof of concept’. By automating the end-to-end pipeline process, Marketing should have a real-time dashboard that provides data on what is going on and provide input to Sales and Marketing discussions about what is being done. This is not just a Sales management responsibility. Rejected leads, opportunities qualified out and lost deals should be recycled and inform the marketing strategy.

Retain and Develop Customers

Realising customer value, building customer loyalty, and thereby expanding deployment of products and services in B2B environments is a key strategy for high-tech suppliers. In fact, in such a highly innovative industry, with the resulting short product lifecycles, this ‘land and expand’ strategy is critical to reduce the on-going costs of customer acquisition. Often profits are lower on the initial sale with an expectation of growing this business.

Marketing needs to understand how this strategy will be deployed and how interaction with customers is different from that used with prospects. It requires a more joined-up approach since the customer’s day-to-day experiences will now be handled by Operations (or Support and Services). How do today’s customer interactions help identify opportunities for expansion and how does Marketing leverage these?

Internal seminars, Intranets, executive events, case studies, networking and internal success stories can all be used in post-sales situations, but the focus once more has to be on engaging with Sales and Support to incorporate Marketing communications into the overall customer engagement strategy.

In Conclusion

Marketing can often get hung up on short term tactics and short term targets which are not aligned to actual pipeline performance. By understanding the customer journey throughout his buying cycle, tactics can be better targeted at particular stages in the journey to meet specific quantifiable ends.