For the uninitiated, Net Promoter Score (often referred to as NPS) is a way of assessing a company based on just one question: “How likely are you to recommend ABC Company to a friend or colleague?”  on a scale of 0 to 10.  Those who answer 0-6 are “Detractors,” 7’s and 8’s are “Passives,” and 9’s and 10’s are “Promoters.”  Net Promoter Score is determined by subtracting Detractors from Promoters.   The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Honestly, I am not really sure what I think of NPS – can you really figure out what you need to know about how your company is doing with just one question?  As questions go, it seems like a good one, but is it enough?  While it may be “The Ultimate Question” (as so declared by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 book that popularized this method), the answer is certainly not that simple.  To be fair, even within the book, Mr. Reichheld (who is a speaker at the conference) admits you don’t just ask one question.  At very least, you ask two – the second being “Why did you reply the way you did to the previous question?”

The companies who believe in NPS (and there are many) and use it well (perhaps fewer of those), know that it isn’t really about a score.  NPS, when done right, is a quick-pulse way to spot problems and, more importantly, to address and try to solve those problems.  Analysis of the text verbatims from the “Why” questions can provide rich insight as to the root cause behind what is causing customers to be Detractors.  And the best companies have closed-loop systems that follow-up with Detractors to try and fix the problem (or at least understand it better to avoid repetition in the future).  Many organizations have tied compensation of executives to Net Promoter Score, which really means they are tying compensation to having happy customers, not just profits.  The presentations I’ve seen here are not about survey techniques or research methods, but about how companies orient their corporate focus around and then truly deliver an exceptional customer experience.

There are a lot of ways to misuse NPS as well.  The biggest error seems to be managing the score instead of the elements of the customer experience that drive it.  As an example, when you take your car to be serviced at the dealership and as you leave your service tech says something like, “In a few days you’ll get a survey, I hope you’ll respond that you are extremely satisfied with your service and if you feel you can’t do that, please tell me now what I can do to change your mind.”  You don’t say anything, even though your experience was less than marvelous, but when you get that survey you feel compelled to pick the top response.  The dealership has managed its score, but not learned anything about how it could have made your experience better or how it might actually inspire you to recommend it to others.

Rob Markey, partner at Bain and co-author with Reichheld of “The Ultimate Question 2.0” spoke yesterday and offered some good insight.  He said, “The number is meant to reflect an underlying reality…the point of measuring is to lead to action to earn customer loyalty.”

Do you use Net Promoter Score?  What do you think of it?  Is it the “Ultimate Question” or is there a better one?  Is one question enough?  Use the comments below or send me an email.

While it’s looking like 2012 might be a better year for business than 2011, it’s still essential that marketers focus on ways to ferret out waste and inefficiency in operations – both to minimize the impact on corporate bottom lines, but also to remain flexible for the new channels and investments that are sure to pop up in the coming 12 months.

And so, we measure everything – campaign effectiveness, brand investments, even the internal operations of the marketing function. But a marketing organization is a complex organism, and can be measured in an infinite number of ways – ways that might be contradictory or misleading.

Unsurprisingly, MLC members have come up with a number of ways to measure marketing’s effectiveness. Here are a few of our most popular strategies:

Measure adherence to the brand promise. Large organizations face inherent difficulties in consistently delivering on ambitious brand promises, and FedEx was no different; performance to brand promise was wildly inconsistent across channels and geographies.

In response, the company created a scorecard that boiled down the brand promise into discrete employee behaviors, incenting the front line to comply in the process. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm financial performance. This one can be difficult to figure out – it’s hard to determine, with any sort of certainty, which marketing activities have led to which performance benchmarks at the corporate level.

Xerox moved to this model after years of throwing large volumes of performance data at senior decision-makers. They used a lean Six Sigma process to arrive at a manageable number of insightful metrics aligned with broader firm performance, leading to higher levels of senior-staff buy-in. MLC members, read the full case here.

Measure marketing’s contribution to firm goals. We highlighted this case in this week’s post on sustainable brand growth, but it also explains a key insight into what Marketing should prioritize when it comes to effectiveness measurement. Given the somewhat ambiguous nature of marketing, it’s key that senior folks buy in – and most often, getting buy-in is contingent upon answering the question “What have you done for me lately?”.

One MLC member solved this problem by creating a purpose-built dashboard that shows exactly how marketing and branding initiatives align with and contribute to corporate goals. MLC members can see the whole case here. We’ve also blogged about this case.

This evolution is to a great extent accelerated by the proliferation of consumer data and the many good things you can get out of it. While you can certainly observe customers in store (people still do), it is infinitely more scalable to use web mining to “observe” thousands perusing the net, estimate what stage they are at in their purchase process and tailor your messages accordingly. Few would have heard of Signet Banking Corp but many are familiar with its spin-off Capital One, the 8^th largest bank in the country – and one that was built to a great extent on the strength of analytics.

But just like anything with massive impact, analytics can also go massively wrong and the failure very often has less to do with the tool itself than with the one wielding it. The only thing worse than no data is bad data, and the only thing worse than bad data is bad interpretations. Here’s how you go down that slippery slope and how you can climb back up:

• Your purpose should drive the questions you ask. For example, on MLC’s Discussions forums we often get questions about Net Promoter Scores and how to interpret them. While it’s perfectly reasonable to benchmark business unit performance year-on-year based on NPS, without data transformation it tells you little, about things like share of wallet. Your competitor maybe only 0.1 point ahead of you for all 5000 customers, but when it comes down to picking between you two, they win every time. Your NPS difference is only 0.1 yet the difference in share of wallet is a gaping 100. Office Depot learned a similar lesson when they found what’s asked in their mystery shopper questionnaire makes for a nice store but not necessarily for a nice shopping experience, leading to the odd phenomenon in which shopper scores are up but sales are down (customers don’t care about recently cleaned bathrooms). In this case their president actually took the time to go and ask customers incognito. Hey, who said you can’t combine traditional market research methods with up-and-coming analytics?

• Your data should inform, not dictate your interpretation. The claim that churches cause crime is a classic example of not taking into account a key factor – that larger cities have more room for both. The observation that Harvard dropouts earn more on average than Harvard graduates is a typical case of ignoring outliers. Developing metrics from different angles and building models using multiple suitable techniques will increase the robustness of your conclusions. People from different departments will also see the same data point differently, this is valuable troubleshooting. If your stores’ restocking speed lags behind that of competitors, is it simply because you are short on people or is it because store managers assign associates to different sections each time? Is it because your deliveries arrive when the store is busy or because inventory control is slack and wrong items get ordered? Think, and then think again from a different angle.

MLC members, for more of our thoughts on data and analytics, stay tuned to Wide Angle and our Twitter account for the next few months, where we’ll be sharing the best insights from our ongoing research into Big Data.

This quarter’s Executive Guidance - a series of leadership studies put out by the whole of CEB, representing a cross-functional consensus on emerging management topics – is called “Overcoming the Insight Deficit”, and it’s all about putting Big Data to big use. We found that even as companies invest tens of millions of dollars in data and analytics, less than 40% of employees have the ability to take advantage of those investments. The report’s focus is on developing individual and organizational capabilities that make the technical investments worthwhile.

Want to learn more? You can download the report here.

By Ana Lapter

Effective touchpoint planning is based on marketers’ ability to turn insight into consumer-facing initiatives.  This is not easy thing to accomplish.  MLC research reveals that 96% of marketing organizations are largely unsatisfied with their ability to convert consumer understanding into an effective planning exercise.  One major reason is marketer reluctance to get out of the comfort zone of planning campaigns around favorite channels.  For many packaged goods companies, the dominating channel is TV.  In other industries, it might be direct mail or other forms of promotional channels.

Here are three tactics for jarring your team out of its favored touchpoint comfort zone:

Spur discussions to drive comprehensive channel analysis. Kimberly Clark implemented a mandatory use of a simple tool it calls the “Channel Consideration Worksheet” to force the marketing team think more broadly about which touchpoints to use.  A tool like this drives a focused analysis of each communications channel in terms of impact and degree of interaction with other channels.  In addition to forcing the exploration of a wide variety of channels beyond the “tried and true” options, these types of tools can enable creative thinking with respect to the ability of non-traditional channels to achieve higher impact that some conventional ones.  The latter outcome is highly desirable given the current proliferation of social media and on-line peer information forums “competing” with traditional marketing channels for consumers’ attention.

Assign specific roles to individual channels. Many marketing organizations have built conventional wisdom that associates specific touchpoints as best at driving specific outcomes—for example, TV is best as an awareness vehicle.  This sort of conventional wisdom reinforces the channel bias, and can stunt creative thinking about touchpoint planning.  Forcing planning teams to assign specific roles to individual touchpoints can shake them off of these conventional wisdom views.  For example, instead of using TV as the go-to awareness driver in a campaign, consider using direct TV inventory with a call to action, or position TV as the vehicle that will drive consumers to a social community for some kind of further interaction.  Targeting channels with different, yet complementary, roles can be an effective way of moving beyond generic goals, such as brand awareness outreach.  MLC members, see an illustrative example in this case study on touchpoint planning.

Conceptualize waste associated with the “comfort zone” planning approach. Reach and frequency are familiar metrics, but they can create a false sense of confidence in a mass media channel’s ability to meet a communication campaign’s goal.   We’ve seen some CPGs make use of a “waste metric”, in which they dessect reach and frequency to size the amount of waste embedded in a TV media buy.  (Waste is an estimate of the dollars spent on eyeballs that are NOT in the target audience).  Regularly tracking waste and making it a prominent item of discussion can catalyze marketing teams to think of alternate, more efficient ways of achieving campaign objectives.  For related tactics, see the 7th page of this case from Kimberly Clark.

Planning high-impact touch point investments is an evolving topic, given the emergence of new channels in the consumer world.  A disciplined-approach to strategic touchpoint planning can turn any touch point selection debate into a thoughtful discussion incorporating both an experience with “tried and true” channels, and new thinking regarding the ability of a channel to effectively drive specific marketing outcomes.

Stay tuned in June for MLC’s updated Anatomy of a World Class Integrated Marketing Organization.  We’re updating the tool to account for the rise of social and mobile media.  Members will be able to benchmark their IMC planning process from soup to nuts.  For additional resources on marcom planning, see MLC’s topic center here.

Then comes the dreaded question: what’s the projected ROI? And instantly, all the air gets sucked out of the room or e-mail thread – and the great idea is never to be heard from again. Because for any idea that’s even remotely risky or disruptive, guessing the projected ROI is largely a fantasy, right up there with unicorns, leprechauns and a working office printer. (IT folks – I keed, I keed)

So when Phillips’ Oral Healthcare, makers of the Sonicare electric toothbrush line, faced a mandate to double their rate of growth, they knew they had to find a way to neutralize the ROI question from the beginning. The result was the company’s Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap, part of our revamped Product Management topic center.

Instead of focusing innovation on which idea would generate the highest ROI, the Roadmap focuses innovations around segment needs first, then sends ideas through a number of filters to determine which would move ahead in the development process. Marketing creates a rough estimate of the relative size of each segment need and the odds of success Philips has in addressing that need. It is against these segment-specific needs – not relative ROI – that Philips places bets. The process elevates ROI measures from project-specific granular projections to informed valuations of the opportunity size and likelihood of winning specific consumer needs – in other words, from a metric, to a concept.

Marketing then filters ideas through a four-step funnel that tests for the following:

1. Team enthusiasm. Recognizing that internal buy-in is the most crucial element of any innovation effort, Philips throws out potential innovations that are not broadly supported by the team.
2. Intensity of customer dilemma. If the innovation is a “nice to have” for customers, as opposed to a “need to have” or “would really like to have”, ideation stops here.
3. Effect on brand equity. Is the innovation consistent with the brand? Philips places this towards the end of the funnel, recognizing that if the opportunity is big enough, it may warrant reappraisal of the brand.
4. Alignment with business strategy. Is the innovation consistent with short and long-term objectives? Again, this is placed last for a reason – a truly disruptive opportunity may warrant a reappraisal of business strategy.

The hard-nosed realists out there are shaking their heads. “Why make a move in the market, if you can’t even make an educated guess about ROI?” Fair question – but the problem with this reasoning is that good ROI models project returns based on products that are already in the market. If the offering is really is disruptive and innovative, ROI exercises will likely be nothing but conjecture – a waste of time at best, and actively misleading at worst. The ROI filter also has a pernicious side – it ensures that nothing gets through the internal vetting process except safe, incremental innovations – a sure recipe for slow growth.

In this case, we’re talking about product innovation, but ROI is an awfully restrictive metric in any situation that involves extensive speculation. In the social media space, we’ve advised against using ROI as a determining factor in investment decisions and in marcomm planning, we’ve observed that higher-level metrics do a better job of allocating resources than ROI.

MLC members, for more on the Roadmap, including steps for getting executive and cross-functional buy-in, please check out the full case.

• In the book “Winning,” Jack Welch describes a tactic he used at GE to force himself to always enter a business situation with a fresh perspective.  Every time he travelled, he got off the plane imagining that the Jack Welch of yesterday had had no idea what he had been doing.  He felt that this ritual of taking a critical eye to past decisions helped him enter every situation as an opportunity for improvement.

• In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Laura J. Soave, a marketing executive at Fiat discussed details of Fiat’s ‘Return to North America’ marketing launch, adding that “My ultimate goal would be not to spend one dollar in traditional advertising.”  Instead, she says that she will focus on social media and other grassroots approaches to target likely buyers.

Now, consider the following:  If you were starting the marketing function within your business today, how would you choose to allocate your media mix?  In other words, if you had a zero-based planning process (rather than one based on the previous year’s plans), what would you choose to spend your money on?

Year after year the Council’s various investment benchmarking exercises show that, even as marketers identify more efficient and precise channels, few organizations tend to move beyond small-scale experiments to shift budget into these channels.  So what’s stopping us?

One big culprit: legacy thinking, which primarily manifests itself in one of two mindsets:

• How we manage our organization – The Council identified the key factors of ‘agile’ marketing organizations, i.e. having the ability to shift the marketing mix by 30% year over year vs. the average shift of about 5%.  It turns out the ‘legacy’ way of doing things actually puts up barriers to being nimble enough to shift the media mix in any substantial way.  Spoiler alert: contrary to popular belief, inability to measure returns is a factor but not the major factor; most ‘organizational inertia’ resides in motivation and engagement of brand / product owners, the nature and management of agency relationships, and the design and efficiency of an organization’s communications planning and execution process.
• How we think about our role – As Gandhi so eloquently put it, “we must become the change we want to see in the world.”  If marketers are responsible for keeping the customer at the center of our business, it must naturally follow that marketers must change as fast as our customers are changing (and they are changing; insert blatant plug here to participate in our 2011 research).  How fast are you changing?  How much time do you spend executing vs. experimenting?   What mix of your success metrics are backward-looking (to benchmark against historical data) vs. forward-looking (to invest in new and different media vehicles)?

Fortunately, there are ways to leave the legacy that binds us behind.  Let me offer Three Ideas to Break the Shackles of Legacy:

1. Proof of Life – do you have any “Zombies” in your marketing plan?  In other words, can you link each marketing tactic to a marketing metric to a marketing strategy to a corporate objective?  If you can’t see a straight line between these four pillars, then marketing shouldn’t do it (and you can potentially free up budget for more efficient channels).  Here’s how Vista (pseudonymed high-tech company) did this.
2. Permission to Play – it’s time to break out the sandbox.  Encourage experimentation among your team; foster an environment of learning.  As new ideas come up, encourage discussions to determine if the idea: a) could contribute to a desired business outcome, and b) if there is a fast and cheap way to test the idea.  Think about using a 70/20/10 approach to allocate your marketing communication budget.
3. What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? Your customers are talking – are you listening?  What are they saying, and where are they going for information?  Who influences their decisions?  Thought leaders?  Peers?  Here’s an idea from Purina – they use influencer network maps so that they can influence the influencers.



By Erin Lynch-Klarup

(Note: This is Part 2 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

B2B marketing organizations today are emphasizing the transfer of ideas to customers (just consider the rise of terms like “thought leadership”, “consultative selling” or “solutions”).  This makes sense – done right, an insight-based approach is one of the few ways suppliers can avert pure price-based competition. Additionally, our research shows that insight is valued by customers in the long term.  “Teaching” activities such as offering unique perspectives on the market or helping the customer navigate alternatives strongly predict loyalty.

It follows that marketing plans this year should have a strong insight orientation.  Naturally the marketing plan will align to broader organizational strategy, but the marketing objectives that support company strategy should be grounded in delivering insight that changes customers’ valuation of your offering.

Metrics, of course, are a key element of the marketing plan.  They’re the primary tool we use to operationalize marketing’s goals.  The right metrics will measure progress, yes, but also to communicate the marketing plan at a level that individuals can act on.

As we examined insight-led marketing this year, we found ourselves wondering how the metrics we track change for a marketing plan geared towards educating customers (in a way that prompts purchase).  In partnership with MarketingNPV, we’re in the process of developing a metrics framework for the insight-led world.

We’ve divided the relevant metrics into four categories:

Marketing

Broadly, we want to know if marketing is identifying compelling insights for target segments, and getting them out to those segments through content and sales enablement.

Sales

We want to know if marketing’s closest functional partner “buys” the insight-based approach.  Is sales adopting or even helping to co-create an insight-led sales pitch?

Customer Engagement

On the customer side of things, we want to know if customers are consuming our content and sharing it with others.  And if so, is this earning us purchase and loyalty?

Outcomes

Are we transferring insight to customers in a scalable way?  Are we teaching customers things that clarify their decision and prompt purchase?

MLC members, for more on how to build insight selling and commercial teaching into your marketing plan, please make plans to attend our webinar, Building an Insight-Led Sales and Marketing Strategy, on September 14. Two times are available; one from 9-10AM eastern, the other from 2-3PM.

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know?

An emerging technology that we refer to as “view-through technology” can help.  This java script embedded in a company’s web page tracks visitors’ exposure to a set of third party sites that reference the brand.  While it doesn’t capture everything, in conjunction with a listening platform, leading marketers are using this technology to target online campaigns and fine-tune messaging. 

View-through technology is worth considering if:

• Your online campaigns are viral or otherwise often don’t include links to your site
• You engage in social media and viral marketing campaigns
• Your brand is mentioned regularly across the blogosphere
• You use online PR as a marketing channel

For more on the MLC’s approach to social media metrics, take a look at our post on Return on Objectives.  If you’re interested in exploring view-through technology a bit more, you might check out Tealium, one of the few vendors in this space.

MLC Members, Check out an example and vendor profile in our use case Using View-Through Technology to Understand Social Media Effectiveness.  Also, join our May 4^th webinar Cutting Edge Uses of Social Media Data to learn more about this and other potential uses of social data.

1. Savvy social media-ites can cite their business objective clearly and succinctly. All members of the social media team know what their efforts are designed to achieve.

2. You’ve made principled decisions on your target audience. You know which customer segment to pursue and what social media vehicles they’ve adopted.

3. You know your customers’ outcomes and how social media facilitates the achievement of those outcomes better, faster, and cheaper than other methods.

4. You act on the intersection of customer outcomes and your organization’s broader unique strengths, creating strategic social media advantage within your competitive set.

5. Fast-cycle test-and-learn experiments comprise your tactical social media endeavors. Each experiment is hypothesis-led.

6. The team holds hands and pre-commits to next steps based on each social media experiment’s result. This facilitates buy-in upfront and limits time lost to analysis paralysis post-experiment.

7. Teams lay out required resources for each experiment to boost transparency for budget owners and pave the way for measurement clarity.

8. With ROI still a mirage for many, social media winners link transactional metrics to attitudinal and behavioral objectives that the broader organization knows have an impact on financial performance.

9. Social media teams don’t hide the ball. They are upfront with the risks each project faces, and utilize RACI methods to mitigate them.

10. Social media teams tell other marketing teams how much more fun they’re having working on this topic. What, you thought all ten were going to be serious? And I’m only somewhat kidding.

MLC Members can put these 10 habits to work in our upcoming workshop in Dallas, Texas on Thursday, March 4th. You can register here.  In this workshop, you’ll actively develop your company’s social media strategy based on these proven best practices, with facilitation by MLC experts and input from your peers. If you’re responsible for social media initiatives and execution at your organization, this is an event not to be missed. We look forward to seeing you there.

The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap.  You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat. 

There, you’ll find a section called “The Momentum Effect”, which is a research project on the ROI of social marketing conducted by Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution.  The project studied social networking efforts from adidas and Electronic Arts. 

Here are three tidbits from Briggs’ paper that give you some sense of the substance:

• Of 30,000 TV ads the typical consumer sees in a year, she forwards less than 5 to friends
• By contrast, half of the value created by the social marketing efforts studied came from viral connections
• The number of incremental consumers moved to a top box Intent to Buy by viral impact was (approximately) 3:1 against those directly exposed to the marketing message

The piece is chock full of additional tidbits, figures and benchmarks.  Moreover, on page 44, you’ll find a good framework for social marketing executions in which the objective is to drive intent to purchase or recommend.  You may be able to use a model like this directly, or it may simply be fuel for constructing and proving out your own model.

Note: do take the results in this study with a small bit of salt.  It was funded by MySpace, and social dynamics for your brand and category may be different than for adidas or Electronic Arts.  However, the methodology is sound and the thinking therein is instructive. 

If you’re interested in learning more about MLC’s efforts to model different types of value created by social media (or you’d like to participate in the research), please contact me.

If you need help right now in thinking through social media metrics, take a look at our view on Return on Objectives.  Or, MLC Members, check out the metrics portion of our Social Media Strategy Builder.

Click Image to Enlarge

A social media strategy without metrics is like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, truly missing a core ingredient. A social media strategy with the wrong metrics serves the turkey with pasta sauce rather than gravy. Sure, it adds flavor, but it completely distracts from the purpose of the meal. Here’s my point – in marketers’ rush to prove that social media investments produce the required ROI, our social media plans trumpet metrics that may have little relation to what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

In delivering the results of our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic to multiple members over the past month, I sense two problems with social media measurement schemes (and trust me, some are more scheme-like than your local bank heist):

1. Many transactional pieces of social media are incredibly easy to measure – number of followers, Facebook friends, blog posts, and on the list goes. This pulls social media novices into a volume metrics vortex; we become so fixated on sheer numbers that we lose sight of the higher-order objectives that made us think social media was a good idea in the first place.

2. There is incredible senior-level pressure to make every marketing dollar count given today’s economy. Certainly, most social media channels have lower per eyeball costs, but so far, marketers are relatively poor at demonstrably connecting those eyeballs to financial results.

These two elements – transactional metrics and financial outcomes – are actually two ends of a broader measurement spectrum. At this early stage of social media adoption, ROI is a fanciful goal but may only show failure if we cross the chasm too soon. We need a bridge to get us there, and that bridge is a return-on-objectives approach.

Return-on-objectives enables us to work backward from required financial outcomes to select the right set of day-to-day social media metrics. Sitting in the middle are behavioral objectives and attitudinal objectives – mainstays of any marketing communications initiative. The bridge is thus: identify behavioral and attitudinal objectives that key stakeholders have “pre-agreed” correlate to, and ideally cause, positive financial outcomes. Then, work from those selected objectives to transactional social media metrics. Add water and stir, and you have the right gravy for your social media Thanksgiving.  And trust me, it works far better than pasta sauce.

MLC members, learn how to embed social media metrics into your strategy by listening to our teleconference replay here.

Starting in December, we are jumping in to help members learn from each other–we aim to produce a series of case studies on this very topic.  If you believe you might have a good social media metrics case example at hand, please contact lmorris@executiveboard.com

Take the sales cycle – or the time it takes somebody to go from an evaluation to a purchase. Over time, we observe that the sales cycle, especially in B2B contexts, is especially fixed by customer. Different people and different companies simply have different ways of making purchases and it’s very hard to lastingly change this. Of course you can inflect this through discounting or special offers, but these effects are temporary at best. Marketers can learn a lot from watching the sales cycle as carefully as possible because it’s a very powerful indicator of whether or not demand for a given offer is either slowing or expanding:

• If the sales cycle goes down across multiple regions and people for a given product/service, then this almost certainly means that the market is growing. This is the time to suggest aggressive campaigns to capitalize on the momentum. It’s also a good time to consider expanding coverage through the addition of people.
• Conversely, a contraction of the sales cycle should suggest a change in the nature of the demand.  People will tell you that deals are stuck in the pipeline, and this is when marketers face maximum pressure to come up with a quick relaunch or a new campaign. Realistically, they would do better to resist this and instead focus on quality of business, concentrating resources on fewer customers known to have significant needs.

Incidentally, there’s always the person whose sales seem to go much faster than everyone else’s, and most likely this person is doing something differently. It’s worth finding out so that marketing can tell everybody how to similarly get on board. But there’s also a chance that this person is simply a little more restrained about entering unlikely deals into their pipelines – and that too is worth understanding.