Tag Archives: Marketing Operations
SLA: Cumulative MQLs Delivered to Sales
- 23rd May 2013
Service-level agreements (SLAs) between marketing and sales are sometimes perceived by sales as one-sided. It may appear as if sales must commit to a timeframe for leads to be accepted and processed and must follow rules for engaging leads (e.g. number of outreach attempts within a particular time period) while marketing doesn’t make any commitments or have any obligations – except making sure sales does what it committed to. Right? Wrong!
Continue Reading....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....Marketing Analytics: Beware the Black Box
- 23rd April 2013
One of the most positive developments in b-to-b marketing is an increased emphasis on data-driven decisionmaking. Growing numbers of marketing organizations are relying more on data and facts to make their decisions. While many organizations are not as far along as they’d like to be, I’m finding that most marketing leaders’ intentions are in the right place. With the desire to get really good at this really fast, marketing organizations are turning to advanced analytical techniques. Marketing leaders are hopeful that easier analytical approaches are right around the corner – if only they could apply the right algorithms to the data they have, they could create more of the insights they need. Advanced analytics offer great potential for b-to-b marketers, but I suggest you watch for three things when considering them.
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 Stakeholder Analysis Fundamentals
- 2nd April 2013
Stakeholder analysis is the identification and examination of marketing stakeholder interests, influences, expectations and attitudes as they relate to a project (e.g. rollout of a marketing automation platform, standardized marketing reporting or data quality initiative). Its purpose is to understand the political and people-oriented aspects of the project environment, and the processes and functions that impact (or are impacted by) the project. The result is a better understanding of the stakeholders (e.g. interests, relationships), better decisionmaking and greater project acceptance by stakeholders. When undertaking stakeholder analysis, use the following guidelines to obtain optimal results.
Continue Reading....Data Measures Activities, Too
- 20th March 2013
Do your marketing reports measure contact activities (e.g. number of contacts generated from a webinar)? Do your marketing tactics use contact activity to generate the target list (e.g. contacts who downloaded certain assets)? Does your scoring model use contact activity to help prioritize leads? If you’re like most marketers, the answer to all these questions is “yes.” Why, then, do most marketing operations teams neglect to include or discuss contact activity data when embarking upon a data quality, data management or data governance project? Why focus only on field-based data?
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....Make 2013 the Year of Realistic Thinking
- 2nd January 2013
The desire to make everything simple is lulling us into believing that great marketing execution is easy. To put it simply, that’s just not reality. Here’s my proposal: Let’s make 2013 The Year of Realistic Thinking. Why? If I’ve learned one thing over the last few years at SiriusDecisions, it’s that there’s a burning desire among marketers to simplify everything. From lead scoring and measurement to the buyer’s journey, customer lifecycle and the messages created to support it all, a common mission is to reduce the complexity. This can often be a good thing; for example, it helps us make decisions faster or prevents us from over-engineering execution. But other times, the insistence on a simple story causes marketers to lose some of the nuances that can make a big difference.
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....Sales and Marketing Measurement: Aligned, Not Identical
- 8th November 2012
Most of the marketers I work with have gotten the message: Sales and marketing alignment matters. They’ve accepted the evidence showing that well-aligned organizations perform better. They understand that sales and marketing alignment means that sales and marketing are moving in the same direction and working toward the same end in a coordinated way. But what’s harder for many is making peace with this reality: Sales and marketing reporting should not be identical – even when each is intended to drive aligned contributions.
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