Author Archives: Craig Moore
About the Author
Craig Moore is Service Director, Marketing Operations Strategies, at SiriusDecisions. His three decades of experience span such areas as marketing operations, partner marketing, strategic alliances, product marketing and management, software development and entrepreneurship. Follow Craig on Twitter @cramoore.
Maybe You Already Have Enough Data for Analytics: Part II: More Insight With Touch Analysis
- 20th May 2013
In my last post, I described marketing touch analysis and how to use this information to “do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.” Today, I add more variety to the approach and explain how to gain better insight into the effectiveness of your marketing tactics. I promise to keep the rocket science out of this discussion to help you better understand what this stuff is and how it can help you with your work. There are pragmatic ways you can take advantage of these techniques without a staff of scientists.
Continue Reading....Maybe You Already Have Enough Data for Analytics: Marketing Touch Analysis
- 15th April 2013
B-to-b marketers are beginning to analyze the performance of their marketing tactics over time, across segments, personas, geographies and product categories in order to determine tactic effectiveness. The most straightforward approach to this is marketing touch analysis, which tracks the interactions of individuals with marketing tactics on a plotted graph.
Continue Reading....Marketing and IT: A Lovefest?
- 19th February 2013
I attended the Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance (MOCCA) Executive Forum last week in San Francisco. For those of you who are not familiar with this group, it is composed of people in marketing operations leadership roles, primarily in b-to-b companies. True to its Silicon Valley roots, members mostly come from technology companies, although MOCCA’s ranks are growing with companies from other industries. There are two chapters, one based on the West Coast and one in Washington, D.C. We held an interesting Oxford-style debate on the topic of whether the “ownership” of marketing technology should be with IT or the marketing organization. One side took the position that marketing should be the absolute ruler of its technology and IT should butt out, and the opposing position was that IT was far better staffed and equipped to plan, procure and manage technology than marketing.
Continue Reading....Campaign Planning: Balancing Long-Term Vision and Short-Term Goals
- 4th December 2012
Marketers who are setting out on a path to develop integrated campaigns are challenged to balance the desire to address customer needs against the pragmatic realities of ensuring they’re promoting the offerings that can be sold and delivered in the near term. It’s a tough balance because we want our marketers to move beyond seeing the world from the view of the current portfolio of offerings and focus on meeting customer needs. However, sales organizations want marketing to also drive interest around offerings they can forecast and sell.
Continue Reading....Microsoft Acquires MarketingPilot
- 19th October 2012
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of MarketingPilot to bolster its Microsoft Dynamics CRM business. This is the second marketing software acquisition in a week (ExactTarget acquired Pardot on October 11 for $95.5 million), putting an exclamation point on the importance of marketing technology solutions. This acquisition also signals Microsoft’s intention to do more in the rapidly growing market for marketing applications.
Continue Reading....Balancing Campaigns and Launches
- 17th October 2012
More and more, we find marketers adopting an integrated campaign strategy to drive increased sales productivity and marketing efficiency. An integrated campaign is built on a business-needs-based theme, and it runs for an extended duration (usually a year). Within the campaign is a series of carefully choreographed reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence activities. When multiple products are folded into a single campaign, marketing messages shift from a focus on products, features and benefits to a focus on the relationship between the prospective buyer’s business needs and the value proposition of the campaign’s offerings. They can be more impactful to the business overall, but they do not make the direct product push that product managers are used to.
Continue Reading....Two Areas for Improving Efficiency in Marketing and Sales Operations
- 21st September 2012
Sales operations and marketing operations tend to work separately, each focusing on their own priorities. It is not unusual to find missed opportunities to share insight, information and experience that could result in improved sales productivity (which is everyone’s objective) Here are two areas where marketing and sales operations professionals can improve performance.
Continue Reading....Determining Whether to Automate Marketing Processes
- 5th September 2012
B-to-b marketers, who've become more comfortable with procurement, implementation and use of automation technology, are increasingly interested in implementing tools that optimize processes and enable new marketing operations efficiencies. Many are identifying processes that are candidates for optimization and deciding whether marketing resource management (MRM) applications would be a good choice to improve operational performance. Here are three perspectives.
Continue Reading....What Makes a Good Marketing Operations Employee?
- 20th August 2012
Marketing’s focus on measurement and ROI is challenging CMOs to hire employees into the emerging discipline of marketing operations who have skills and experience that have not been in the traditional domain of marketers. These attributes include technical savvy and systems-thinking skills, as well as a diverse blend of cross-disciplinary expertise and management skills. A marketing operations leader should have a strong background in the discipline of marketing, but people with strong operations experience and a propensity to develop their skills in marketing can also fulfill many roles within the team. Here are some attributes to look for in marketing operations team members and leaders.
Continue Reading....Is Your PO Process Costing You Precious Marketing Dollars?
- 8th August 2012
Marketing regularly loses a portion of its budget to an insidious financial management process known as “Open PO Reconciliation.” It’s not unusual to see b-to-b organizations lose 5 percent or more of their budgets to the reconciliation monster. However, with just a bit more attention to detail and building a good relationship with the finance team, this money can be recovered and utilized.
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