It’s the never-ending question from Finance and the C-Suite: prove your ROI! Measurement, and ROI determination specifically, is something inherently hard to do in marketing. But as more organizations come under budgetary pressure and Marketing becomes more important to other corporate functions, expect measurement to only become more important in the coming years.

In our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, we profiled three key things marketing organizations must get right in order to tackle measurement in a rigorous way. Here’s what we think:

Align marketing goals with corporate goals. You’ll learn how to ensure that marketing’s investments support corporate-level (not marketing-level) goals. By linking marketing activities and metrics back to corporate priorities, you increase Marketing’s credibility and give yourself a better platform to showcase your contribution to business performance. Our case studies from some of the world’s most advanced Marketing departments will show you how to collect cross-functional input on marketing metrics, give you tips for securing broad executive buy-in on marketing metrics, and how MLC can help you get input on activities and goals.

Select the right metrics. Once you’ve selected your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to measure them. Easier said than done, right? We’ll show you how to select a small set of meaningful metrics to track marketing performance, ensuring that you don’t invest resources tracking things not aligned to corporate goals. You’ll learn how to narrow down a list of meaningful metrics from the universe of potential ones and get tips for identifying redundant metrics. We’ll also show you how to use MLC tools to build a brand experience storyboard.

Design actionable marketing dashboards. So you’ve selected your goals and your metrics; how do you report progress? We’ll show you how to design user-friendly marketing dashboards that encourage stakeholders to incorporate marketing metrics into the decision-making process. You’ll learn how proper organization and aesthetics drive usage of marketing dashboards, how to design dashboards that are easy to use and act on, and how to design scorecards to communicate metrics effectively.

MLC members, please check out the “Performance Measurement” section of our brand-new Marketer’s Playbook for more.

I looked at my marketing text books one last good time – the pages seemed fairly crisp, but most examples cited in the book seemed obsolete. It seemed like between 2008 and now, marketing had undergone a transformation and the textbook couldn’t keep pace with it. So what happened to the classical marketer – the one whose world circled around the 4Ps? The answer to this question lies in the evolving nature of marketing.

Earlier this year, MLC surveyed a group of 30 leading CMOs on 15 dimensions that they think will influence marketing in the future. The results suggest only one theme – marketing is becoming a smarter function. Some of the top things CMOs identified as value creators for marketing in the future include:

• End-to-end experience management
• Agile planning
• Advanced analytics
• Insight-based marketing
• Enhanced listening capabilities

As marketing’s role is expanding in the face of changing economics and evolving technology, marketer’s roles must evolve too. So what does a next generation marketer look like? Here’s what we heard from our CMOs: Read More »

It’s no secret that, for a lot of large organizations, the very nature of business is changing. B2C brands – once happy to blast one-way messages at static demographic targets and watch the dollars roll in – have been and still are embroiled in a transition to new paradigm, that of one-to-one marketing. B2B marketing organizations are just beginning their forays into social, but they’ve been dealing with an equally-challenging phenomenon – that of growing commoditization of business products and the resulting shift towards solutions.

In fact, I’d argue that the shift away from cyclical commodity sales to non-cyclical solutions sales is the bigger of the two changes – it not only required marketing organizations to acquire new skills and staff up, but it tasked them with essentially creating a new market. For B2B marketing organizations, previously relegated to creating brochures and other content for Sales – that was a big shift, and it’s one that many companies are still navigating.

So how are companies making the shift from sales supporters to a more strategic orientation? The first thing the best B2B organizations are doing is taking a hard look at their talent. Is it ready to support a richer, more strategic commercial presence?

That’s exactly what one company, Dow Chemical, did when the company was faced with a mandate to transition its business from a cyclical, commoditized business to a non-cyclical, solutions-oriented one. Realizing that selling solutions required a bit more than providing salespeople with some interesting collateral, the company put together Dow Marketing University – a training resource designed to get its marketing staff ready to take on a radically-different market and challenge. Using principles and data from CEB’s Marketing Excellence Survey – a survey resource designed to test your marketing organization’s attitudes and skills across a range of key marketing disciplines – the company upskilled its staff across two years, driving strategic marketing ability and ultimately, marketing profitability.

How did they do it? Dow, with help from MES, kept three things in mind: Read More »

It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?”

Most marketers throw up their hands, call the salespeople a few choice names (“cowboy” is one I can repeat for a family-oriented business blog like Wide Angle) and just start plugging away again, thinking that someday those dastardly cowboys will realize what Marketing can offer. Others get frustrated and quit.

So what seems to be the problem? In our research into Sales/Marketing alignment, we’ve noted two things: first, salespeople reject 80% of the tools Marketing creates for them. 80%! And second, that the most important driver of this phenomenon is that Marketing lacks a real view into the customer/rep dynamic, and that the tools created don’t reflect the realities of that dynamic.

Two segments of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook address this divide head-on: Read More »

According to some, the world is in a state of stagnation when it comes to innovation. Last year, in reaction to that, I asked if there weren’t still pieces of low-hanging fruit in management – are there things that innovation processes don’t consider? Places managers don’t look for innovative ideas?

We’ve noted that ideas and products that derive from customer-focused innovation processes are most likely to survive and succeed in the marketplace, so part of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook is a section on innovating with customers in mind. We think if you can convincingly cover all three of these bases, you’ll be well on your way to creating great, consumer-focused innovations: Read More »

Segmentation is one of those things that marketing organizations have to get right. Poorly-designed or outdated segmentation schemes can result in irrelevant marcomms, lost sales, dissatisfied customers and worse. Most marketers consider segmentation a top priority, yet few have reaped the benefits that segmentation can provide. They often struggle to clearly define segmentation objectives, select the right segmentation methods, and execute segmentation across the organization.

When we launched The Marketer’s Playbook, our new resource for marketers looking to get up to speed on modern approaches to the key challenges of the discipline, we knew segmentation had to be a huge part of it. So we put together a resource designed to help marketers do three things, where you’ll hear from companies like LG, Best Buy, Reynolds and Reynolds and FedEx:

Define segmentation objectives. You’ll learn how to gather cross-functional input on segmentation objectives, ensuring that all functions have a say and that segmentation is aligned to functional needs. It’ll also get you buy-in from executives before you begin studying the ways you can segment your customers – something that will avoid a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth down the road.

Selecting segmentation methods. You’ll learn how to select the segmentation method that best fits your organization. Because segmentation models vary in their sophistication, ease of implementation, and resource intensity, there’s no one model that will work for every organization. Our resources will help you pick from a few commonly-used segmentation methods.

Executing segmentation. Once you’ve picked out your method, it’s time to put it in play! You’ll learn how to embed the knowledge you gain from segmentation throughout the organization. Inability to translate segment knowledge into actionable steps for key stakeholders often causes segmentation initiatives to stall, lose momentum, or fail altogether. Our resources will help you prevent segmentation initiatives from breaking down and embed segment voice into the workflows of cross-functional stakeholders.

Please check out our playbook for segmentation, and don’t hesitate to peruse through the whole thing, where you can also learn about topics like thought leadership, performance measurement, and customer understanding.

The marketing planning process is – judging from our conversations with members to the traffic on our website – one of the stickiest parts of managing brands. And, when you think about it, it makes sense; good marketing planning requires organizational knowledge of consumers, channel partners, and internal capabilities – three things we know marketing organizations never have enough knowledge about.

MLC members have shared with us a number of key best practices in this space, and the dominant theme of them all is simplicity – acknowledging that brands can’t plan for every eventuality, and equipping teams to be resonant no matter what happens in the market. It’s the principle behind MasterCard’s Plan on a Page, for instance; keeping the plan simple not only allows the team to spend time actually doing marketing, but it also allows them to stay flexible if market situations change.

Knowing that planning is the biggest pain point for a lot of our members, we’ve created a special section of the Marketer’s Playbook devoted entirely to planning, complete with video guides, links to case studies and toolkits we’ve put together, and other resources that will help you be the best planner you can be. To summarize our advice, becoming a rockstar marketing planner requires two things:

Understanding marketing planning. It sounds simple, but understanding the theoretical and practical underpinnings of planning before you begin to plan is essential. Our resource center talks about what challenges you’ll face internally and externally, how to align your marketing plan with corporate strategy, and how to identify the limits of planning will help you avoid pitfalls as you actually begin to craft your plan.

Building an actionable plan. So, you understand what planning’s all about – now it’s time to put the thing together. Our resource center will help you prioritize which opportunities to include in the plan, secure buy-in from cross-functional peers during and after the planning process, and use internal communications strategies to drive marketing plan acceptance and adoption.

MLC members – be sure to check out the Marketer’s Planning Playbook!

Last month, Shelley wrote an insightful piece on the possibilities and dangers of using Net Promoter Score, and the comments suggested that NPS may be on the way out.  Common arguments against NPS are that it is too difficult to know customers’ true needs through one question, and that companies should not place as much emphasis on one simple question.

For those of you who don’t deal with customer surveys on a daily basis, Net Promoter Score is a one-question survey (that is often supplemented with other questions) that assesses a company by asking customers: “How likely are you to recommend X Company to a friend or colleague?”  Respondents rate their likelihood or recommending X Company on a scale of 0-10, where 0-6 are “Detractors”, 7-8 are “Passives”, and 9-10 are “Promoters”; to determine a company’s NPS, companies subtract their percentage of “Detractors” from their percentage of “Promoters”.  The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Even though some are now questioning the value and validity of NPS, many are still using it.  Some companies have even been very successful in aligning themselves around NPS – it has given them an easy way to measure their customers’ happiness with the brand, and they have aligned their whole customer experience around making their customers more likely to recommend their brand.  Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey’s Ultimate Question 2.0 mentions two interesting ways companies have used NPS to boost their brands. Read More »

If you found an oracle and could ask it anything, what would you want to know?  Most of us would go right to life’s great questions, like “What happens when we die?” and “Is that Donald Trump’s real hair?”  But I’ll bet a lot of marketers would also reserve a little time to unlock a few mysteries that hit a little closer to home, namely, “What do my customers want/need/expect from me as a supplier?” and “How can I convince my customers that I am providing something more than just goods or services – and that they should pay more for it?”

In our recent conversations with B2B marketers, we’ve heard a lot about these very questions.  Many feel that there is a competitive edge to be gained through superior customer understanding, but most haven’t yet seen those efforts translate into bottom line results.  Ultimately, the goal is not learning more about customers just for the sake of knowing it, but figuring out those key insights that can shape and inform Marketing and Sales strategy, approaches, and collateral.

From our early work, there seem to be two key elements: Read More »

Segmentation offers a range of benefits for Marketing and Sales organizations, but there are a lot of ways segmentation can fail. Here are a few, along with MLC’s insights on avoiding these pitfalls:

Failing to get the segments right. The most effective segmentation schemes go beyond topical similarities, like industry, company size/revenue, and geographic footprint. Instead, best-in-class segmentation processes split customers and prospects out according to deeper needs, desired outcomes, and priorities. Getting your segments wrong will lead to ineffective messaging, surface-level insights, and potential irrelevance.

Want to read more about building a world-class segmentation scheme? Check out these resources:

• MLC’s overview of common segmentation methods
• How Dow Chemical segments customers according to needs and priorities
• How Lafarge uses customer behavior to gain insight into segments
• How Square D groups customers into opportunity tiers
• How FedEx dives deep into the needs of industry segments

Focusing on the wrong segments. Once you’ve broken customers up into segments that reflect the way they buy, the challenge is to figure out which segments to prioritize over others. Key to this is understanding which customers are most valuable, then matching those opportunities to the organization’s long-term goals and capabilities.

Want to read more about segment prioritization? Check out these resources:

• Segment prioritization topic center
• How MCFA separates low-value buyers from the rest of the pack
• How Iron Mountain identifies and motivates advocates inside organizations

Not activating segments in the field. It’s one thing for Marketing to identify and prioritize segments correctly and in ways that bring value to customers and the business; if frontline staff are unable to leverage segmentation schemes to drive sales, the segmentation exercise will necessarily be of limited value. Keeping segmentation schemes simple, but pervasive in sales materials and training, is key to driving resonance with the sales force.

Want to read more about activating segments in the field? Check out these resources:

• How Sienna taught frontline staff to recognize target segments
• How FedEx designed sales collateral around segment insights
• How Johnson Controls uses segmentation to help reps diagnose customer needs
• How Lexmark created “segment experts” within the sales staff

Ineffective use of segments in innovation and NPD. Segment knowledge can produce incremental boosts in message resonance and revenue, but the long-term value of a good segmentation scheme can be found in how companies leverage those insights to create new products for high-value audiences.

Want to read more about using segment insights in innovation/NPD? Check out these resources:

• How Phillips invests in future high-return segment needs
• How Cardinal Health focuses innovation at a segment level
• How Reynolds and Reynolds surfaces unmet needs of segments