But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management.

The only attribute where everyone agrees on ownership? Sales productivity.

As you would expect, if you don’t know who is in charge of an activity, it becomes very hard to succeed at it. When we divided the survey population into two groups – those who knew who owned an attribute and those who didn’t, there was a clear correlation between clarity of ownership and effectiveness at the given activity. Indeed, even if the group agreed that an attribute was very important, the organization found it hard to succeed with that attribute unless they also knew who owned it.

That relationship makes our last finding even scarier: there is a close relationship between how important an attribute is to the success of the organization and whether there is clarity of ownership, and it isn’t what you’d hope. The more important an attribute is, the MORE likely it is that the organization is unsure who is in charge.

Let’s look at the graph above again.  The top five attributes with lack of clarity around ownership are voice of the customer, commercial strategy, customer portfolio management and customer segmentation (we exclude channel management because many participants did not deal with channel partners). The bottom five are sales productivity, customer-focused sales process, role design, brand development, and coaching. Excluding brand development, the top five were universally agreed to be more important than the bottom five. Would you rather have clarity of ownership around commercial strategy or role design?

The problem here isn’t necessarily that companies haven’t assigned ownership, it’s that they’re not communicating that ownership effectively to the organization as a whole. Many of the CMOs we spoke to could immediately identify who they had put in charge of each attribute, but they hadn’t communicated those ownership decisions to their teams.

Of course, in the hurly burly whirl of implementing a plan, things can change, and ownership of attributes may transition over time as the needs of various projects change. But making sure that you are clearly communicating ownership decisions, and making one person accountable for each attribute (so the organization at least knows who is generally in charge) can go a long way towards resolving ownership uncertainty in your organization.

MLC members, contact your account manager to take the Commercial Integration Diagnostic and find out what ownership looks like in your company.

The reason?

Social media enable brands to build strong customer relationships that deliver value to multiple functions e.g., new product ideas (NPD), answers to customer questions (Customer Service), or advocacy (Marketing).  Managing these shared relationships requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which only a leader with significant clout and authority can achieve.  As the customer champion, the CMO is uniquely positioned to play this role.

To drive firmwide collaboration on social media, CMOs tend to share the following core behaviors:

• Invest significant time in learning about social media and its business impact (e.g., ask youngest staff members for regular updates on emerging trends; set up extra monitors to show live feeds of social media chatter)
• Widely communicate a belief in (and rationale for) the importance of social media
• Set bold goals to encourage firmwide social media experimentation
• Align multiple functions around social media strategy

Beyond those core behaviors, however, there are many different approaches to getting executive buy-in on social media and silo-busting.  Some CMOs are personally active in social media, while others lead from behind the scenes.

Below are 4 profiles of CMO pioneers of social media.

MLC members, learn more about the CMO’s role in social media at our 2010 meeting series, “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.” Register here.  Or, attend the webinar on July 14 with your team, where we’ll share some of the highlights from the research.  Webinar registration here.

1. Centralized structures optimize to efficiencies of scale.  Marketing activities are handled by a central team and scaled across many divisions.  Unlike other structures, decision-making power is concentrated with this central team, which reports up to a CMO.
2. Decentralized Center of Excellence structures optimize customization to a division (product, business unit or geography).  Unique marketing teams report up to heads of divisional marketing; a central team of experts act as internal consultants.  Reporting lines are clear and simple, and there is no company-wide CMO.
3. Decentralized Shared Service structures similarly optimize to divisional customization.  The balance of marketing power lies in divisions, but a central team handles easily-scalable activities.
4. Hybrid structures ideally balance central scale with divisional customization.  Divisional marketing teams report jointly to a central marketing function and to divisions.  This complex structure is increasingly common in large organizations, as it reflects the highly–matrixed constituencies Marketing works with.
5. Segment-Aligned structures optimize customer understanding.  The majority of marketers sit within segment teams while a central team coordinates and handles scalable activities.
6. Project-Based structures optimize flexibility.  In this rare configuration, marketers are deployed to flexible, cross-functional project teams as needed.  Teams are typically temporary, designed to form, deploy and dissolve with the projects they address.

MLC members: Are you contemplating reorganization?  If so, check out our in-depth analysis of each structure including benefits, drawbacks, questions to ask and tests to run.

Marketing and Sales have traditionally seemed resigned to this, content to work around each other if they couldn’t work together.  That’s changing.  We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the attention marketers are paying to alignment with their sales counterparts.  Three factors are driving this interest in improved coordination across the commercial organization:

#1: The Downturn

The economic downturn exposed existing problems within the commercial organization.  Poor lead handoff or inconsistent messaging become more apparent in a recalcitrant buying environment.  Additionally, spending and personnel cutbacks at many organizations make duplicated efforts across Sales and Marketing unsustainable.

#2: A Complex Purchase Funnel

Thanks to digital media, the purchase funnel is increasingly chaotic.  Customers in many industries are likely to learn about suppliers from an online forum of peers rather than a sales rep.  As suppliers cede control over their positioning, clear and consistent messaging—along with general coordination between Sales and Marketing—is critical.

#3: The Rise of Collaboration Technologies

Nearly all of the Fortune 1000 has some sort of CRM system in place, and we’re seeing increasing rates of adoption when it comes to collaboration, automation, and analytical technologies.  The potential benefit is huge… but this makes the potential downfall of lagging behind competitors huge, too.   In the midst of this technological arms race, marketers need to discern which alignment problems can be solved with technology—and which need to be solved first before technological innovations will pay off.

We’ll be spending the next few months going into greater depth about Sales and Marketing and we’d love to get your feedback and comments.  Has Sales and Marketing alignment become more important at your organization?  What is driving your interest on the topic?

MLC members, Register for our April 20^th webinar to learn about early findings from our research on detecting Sales and Marketing breakdowns.

Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.

Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?

There are two near-constant mistakes that prevent most organizations from building successful marketing plans:

1. They replicate the previous year’s marketing plan, subtly tweaking resource allocation and marketing activities from the previous year, which was only slightly different from the year before that, and so forth.

2. Interim changes to plans are either made with little regard to the original strategy, or not made at all. In layman’s terms, some call this tactic the ‘stick-it-in-a-drawer’ method of planning.

Taken together, these mistakes yield plans that are unresponsive to changing market conditions, miss shifts in customer needs, and produce tactical plans reliant on ‘traditional’ media.  With continued uncertainty in today’s economy and social media shifting the communications landscape daily, an incremental, unadaptable marketing plan is the surest path to wasted effort and misguided strategy.

So rather than simply expecting different results, how can marketer do planning differently?  For starters, marketing plans must link to corporate strategy – it’s the only way to demonstrate the function’s contribution to the ultimate arbiter: shareholder value.  Marketers should implement metrics immediately after settling on strategy – not after selecting tactics. Cross-functional leaders don’t much care how many Facebook fans you have; they want to know whether your strategy worked … which most CFOs measure in dollars. The closer your metrics are to financial outcomes, the stronger the case for marketing investment becomes.

With linkage to corporate priorities, Marketing’s performance is inextricably linked to the performance of peer functions. Harness that cross-functional input during planning – solicit input from Sales (particularly B2B companies); understand how the R&D pipeline will impact future sales; make sure Market Research provides the best customer insight. Lastly, practice integrated marketing communications, with each medium and touchpoint serving a clear purpose toward the achievement of marketing objectives.

Implementing these principles will at least break the insanity habit, but by no means will they alone yield long-term success. There remains a need to build a repeatable process embedded in daily workflow, where the plan is a living document referenced throughout the year.

MLC Members, if you’re struggling with planning, we’d love to understand your specific challenges so we can build better resources to support you on this perennial pain point.  Please take this two-minute survey about the state of your organization’s marketing planning process or e-mail my colleague Abhaya Menon, and we’ll be sure to follow up!

• Your company hasn’t created a standardized set of marketing competencies and capabilities. You may have a sense of what general areas to focus on, but intuition is a poor man’s reference guide to functional improvement.
• Marketing’s functional scope has significantly increased over the last several years.  A marketing manager may be leading an agency negotiation one day, the next she could be working on a segmentation project, and maybe she’s doing a pricing re-boot a day later.   

Even when we do create development plans, our tendency is to link them to short-term projects (e.g., “did you or didn’t you complete that digital campaign, and was it successful or not?”), which results in general management skills development. Or we align IDPs toward developing very specific skills relevant only to one project, when we need to focus on basic – but incredibly necessary - marketing competencies like marcomm mix management, segmentation, or channel management that enable success across a future projects.

Like I said, it can be tricky…so, one of MLC’s sister programs, the Marketing Excellence Survey (MES) created a job function guide to help you and your management team build more meaningful, marketing knowledge-oriented IDPs by framing development in terms of the marketing knowledge gaps most commonly found in different marketing roles. For example – what are the key marketing competencies needed for (and frequent gaps found in) product managers vs. business development professionals?

By building IDPs around the specific functional knowledge areas staff in different roles need, marketers can set their staffers on a course that will result in transferable skills – rather than general management skills or single-minded capabilities that relate only to a specific project. 

My suggestion: don’t just use this job function guide to create plans for your direct reports, you can also:

• Pass this on to your own managers so they can use it with their teams
• Help yourself out by passing it on to your HR business partner who probably could really use the help understanding and creating a common vocabulary for basic marketing competencies
• Pass it to your staffers who are wondering about the kinds of knowledge they need to acquire to progress the next level or to a different role. 

As Digital Web Lead at Allstate Insurance, Lizzie Schreier has faced her share of legal battles.  After jumping through hoops to persuade Allstate’s legal team to embrace (or at least accept) social media, she’s ready to share her key lessons learned. 

Here’s her advice on how you can make the marketing / legal partnership a little less painful:

Video: Top Tips for Legal

Deck: Getting Legal on Board

1.     Don’t Share Anything Before They Do.  (7:59 – 11:06)

• Don’t proffer your strategy.  Use the first meeting with your legal team to do some reconnaissance to understand what (if anything) you’re up against.
• Ask those leading questions:  Who knows what a message board is?  A blog?  Who knows the difference?  What are your biggest concerns with social media?
• Remember, you’re not there to answer their questions – yet.  Use this session to listen; if you let them, legal will tell you exactly what objections you need to overcome to convince them it’s a good idea to get involved in social.

2.     Don’t Say the Words “Social Media”.  (12:30 – 14:10)

• Avoid the term “Social Media.”  It’s a foreign concept that’s loaded with negative sentiment for your legal team – worry, discomfort, incompetence.  Allstate uses the term “Content Syndication” instead since it’s a concept that legal understands (more people sharing your content = good) and appreciates (more people sharing your content = better SEO).
• To secure buy-in from the leadership team, don’t have them all in the same room when you do your pitch.  Meet with execs 1:1 so you can tailor your language/verbage to match how each stakeholder talks about his team’s goals.

3.    Walk Before You Run.  (14:11 – 16:00)

• Look for little victories as a way to build confidence and garner momentum for social media investment.  If your legal team is incredibly skeptical, start with social media monitoring as a way to show value.  What would you not have known about your customers if you hadn’t been listening?  How have those insights changed the way you message or market your products?
• In the case of Allstate, Lizzie’s legal team initially said she could start a forum – as long as she didn’t talk about insurance.  So Allstate set up a discussion forum where people could talk about things they valued (and insured), like their cars and their houses.  After a month of swapping tips on vinyl siding and tire selection, Allstate’s legal team had gotten comfortable enough with how the forum worked to allow the conversation to turn to insurance.

MLC members, want to learn more tips for working with legal?  Lizzie will be joining panelists from Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart on February 18^th for a teleconference on strengthening the marketing / legal relationship.  Click here to register!

Dysfunctional?  Yes.   Mutually dependent?  Absolutely.

The same can be said of Sales and Marketing.  The two functions often butt heads behind closed doors, but their cooperation and interconnectedness is necessary to achieve key business objectives.  Of course, getting the two groups on the same page is often easier said than done.  We typically see breakdowns in the following areas:

• Commercial strategy: the building blocks of position and go-to-market approach
• Customer centricity: the extent to which processes and structures map to customer needs and workflows
• Customer understanding: an organization’s ability to capture and apply insights and information
• Plan execution: a commercial team’s ability to put strategy into action

How well integrated is your commercial team across these categories?

If you’re an MLC member, it’s easy to find out.  Our 15-minute online diagnostic surfaces areas of misalignment between your organization’s Sales and Marketing teams.  We’ll provide you with detailed analysis that highlights strengths, weaknesses, and activity division of labor, helping you prioritize which areas to fix first.

Ms. Bartz suggests leaders simplify and interpret the flood of information for employees and stakeholders.  Building on this, I’d urge marketers to focus on 3 C’s as they grapple with information richness:

1.  Clarify - Help your teams and internal partners separate important information from distractive. Identify 2-3 attitudinal or behavioral objectives for your brand or product and develop a list of metrics that directly connect to those objectives, as well as a list of metrics that don’t.  Keep the lists front-of-mind and updated throughout the year.  Teach your team to focus on those direct-line metrics, and spend little or no energy on others.

MLC Members: see the Return on Objectives approach for more details.

2.  Connect – No matter how rich information becomes in 2010, it will never rival the tacit knowledge held by employees around your organization.  Enable connection of this information by strongly advocating for social media internally. If you don’t have an internal social network of some kind, push for one.  If you do, lead by example in a way that drives emotional connections between employees across functions, which is much more likely to open the gates of tacit knowledge exchange about your customers and the business.  For more on this idea, I found this HBR blog post by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown provocative.

Use social media to spur live connections that go beyond simply rational, work-related topics.  This kind of connection is the critical precursor for unique insight (see Combine below).  Looking for inspiration? See this WSJ article on Silicon Valley leaders connecting their organizations over board games.

3.  Combine – Much is written about gathering insight from data produced by digital and social media, but not enough about differentiated insight, which propels brands and products to real market advantage.  The best path to differentiated insight combines information and knowledge sets in new ways.  Having connected tacit information in the step above, give it a boost by being your brand’s chief collaboration broker.

As a marketing leader, one of the more leveraged ways of driving collaboration is to align goals and incentives.  Get together with your peers in Customer Service and PR, at a bare minimum.  Jointly audit the 2010 goals, objectives and incentives of key individuals on your teams to find opportunities for alignment. 

MLC Members: see how Microsoft has done this, or view the webinar replay in which Ray Day, VP of Communications with Ford, talks about marketing and PR integration.  

Or discuss these and other issues related to social media live, with your marketing peers, at the Council’s upcoming meetings in London on 9 February, Melbourne on 22 February or Chicago on 23 February.

What do you think?  Any other shifts you’d add to the list? 

If you’re a predictions junky (like me), check out Jay Baer’s “Colossal List of Social Media Predictions” for 285+ more items of fun.   

MLC members, stay ahead of the curve:  Join us for an upcoming “Profiles in Social Media Success” event to learn more about how social’s going to shake things up in 2010.  We’ll be in London on February 9th and in Chicago on February 23rd  to share our latest findings — I’d love to see you there!

Also, I’m heading up to New York next week for BDI’s “Social Integration” conference on January 13th.  They’ve got a great group of marketers lined up from companies like Pepsi, HP, and Intuit to share their social media “lessons learned” — and MLC will be there to facilitate a roundtable discussion on scaling social media across the enterprise.  If you’re in the area, join us!