Better Business Banter

Each can teach: Comparing Not with For Profit Marketing

2021-11-19T14:17:00.010-08:00

It’s becoming less easy to draw a line distinguishing the marketing efforts of For Profit (FP) companies with Not For Profit (NFP) companies. With accelerating consumer expectations and more affordable marketing technology, many NFP’s are adopting more mature FP tactics and talent to enhance their fundraising efforts. And the rise of cause based marketing has FP’s considering grassroots engagement tactics and tools well known in the NFP space. This 5 minute read will describe how NFP’s differ from FP’s in business model, mission, and maturity, and the valuable lessons available to help address existing business challenges.

Don’t think the lack of profit motive means not for profits aren’t big business. According to the Urban Institute, donations approached $430 billion in 2018. That said, its hard to generalize about the sector given the diversity of organizations and models. based on 2018 figures, growth in fundraising and expenses were uneven across not for profit types and sizes, with the less than $50,000 in annual donations growing the fastest. With the readers permission to generalize anyway, I offer five core differences between FP's and NFPs and 5 implications and learnings these provide.

5 ways Not For Profits and For Profit Marketing Efforts are Different

1. Business Model:

Target Audience: NFP’s often include B2B and B2C most for profit companies either focused on end consumers or business customers and have the luxury to focus their efforts on a defined set of products and processes that best serve this audience. Most not for profits, on the other hand, manage two or more tiers of relationships, each with very specific engagement and data management needs. These include the B2C style retail donations (often under $5k-$20k annually), varied B2B style items including high value individual donors, corporations and partnerships, end of life giving, as well as volunteers and partner organizations. Engaging this multifaceted audience often requires separate marketing teams and processes for web, email, events and other activities, increasing organizational complexity and diffusing investment in skills and tools across a diverse set of needs.
Project Funding for non profits is often structured in a manner that discourages coordination and a longterm investment mindset

The Operational Efficiency Ratio (% donations that go directly to programs)vs is extraordinarily important to the credibility and fundraising performance for not for profits. In lean fundraising years, most organizations must pause or scale down projects to maintain the required efficiency ratio. Others starve non-donation generating departments creating organizational imbalances in opportunities and performance..
Grant donations are called “restricted funding” for a reason. Donors often define what, when, who, why and for how long the donation can be spent, creating the tendency to deliver piece-meal and disparate solutions that increase long term tech complexity and costs.

Customer Lifetime Value is different for not for profits. Remember your CLV equation (value of annual payments over the life of the relationship minus cost to acquire and service).

For most B2B and B2C for profit products, there is a linear relationship to the total amount of revenue a specific customer can deliver based on the product cost and consumer need lifecycle. Using softdrinks in a made-up example, an average US consumer will chug 39 gallons Coke every year and sets a reliable ceiling to the potential to annual earn from a given consumer.
In the donation space, while many “retail” donors adopt B2C style behavior such as early attrition and limited growth in donation value, not for profits who engage and sustain their donors over a long period of time have a rare opportunity to:

Generate volunteers and peer to peer fundraisers
Double the donation value in cases of employer matching
Be gifted much larger sums at end of life

2. Mission Based. Cause based employee and consumer sentiment is on the rise and a significant lever in driving company performance.

According to Imperative’s research, mission-driven workers are 54 percent more likely to stay for five years at a company and 30 percent more likely to grow into high performers than those who arrive at work with only their paycheck as the motivator. Not for profit organizations already know and rely on this to counterbalance disparity of pay and advancement vs for profit jobs. From my own humbling experience working in a global NFP, I can’t overstate the power of a mission-motivated team to move mountains.
Caused based consumer sentiment is equally impactful and growing.IED notes $1.85billion spend in 2014 growing 3.7% annually over the prior 5 years. At the other end of the spectrum, companies who’s messaging or practices conflict with a cause can suffer unforeseen and often severe consequences. The marketplace is increasingly volatile and many examples Companies who’s normal practices are called out by cause based

3. Maturity and Investment levels.

Technology: In comparison with FP’s NFP’s have historically under invested in technology and salaries and this has generally meant NFP’s lagged FP’s from a Digital Marketing Maturity perspective. As the following NonProfitPro survey suggests, there’s also a tendency to be overwhelmed with the options and interconnectivity.

Talent: NFP challenges related to competitive compensation and overworking people are not new, but new alternatives in cause based marketing and corporation B options have made not for profits begin to reconcile employee worklife balance.

4. Technical Deficit. NFP’s often struggle to reconcile a diverse set of platforms, users, and data schemas set up without a central governance structure. These local solutions eventually run aground because of platform upgrades, new integrations, or even the sole admin leaving without a replacement, and then become unplanned emergencies to be rationalized into standards. For a similar reason, data silos become a significant hindrance to NFP’s looking to growth and drive personalized automation..

5. Consumer Engagement: On different scales or are they?

Lets face it, for all of the investment and hype in customer engagement, most FPs are still scratching the service of the type of deep emotional bond an NFP can create with mission minded supporters. Anchored by the defined “I will give you this if you pay me” transaction model, the FP relationship remains commercial and potentially out of synch with the needs of the community.
Successful NFP’s clearly articulate and deliver on a mission that resonates with its audience. This resonance is built upon shared beliefs and shifts the engagement model to us for a greater purpose. This can translate to a range of benefits, from more tolerance for overcommunication to the willingness to volunteer your free time or personally fundraise on behalf of a cause.

Learnings and Implications:

Marketing Technology: remains an opportunity for NFP’s who are reconciling the historical disconnect of investment budget, the pace of change, and the complex needs of diverse stakeholders. Database and integrations management is particularly challenging for NFP’s as they must reconcile a hodgepodge of formats and files from local chapters and silo’ed fundraising teams. NFP’s should take a page from FP’s playbook and invest in a marketing operations team that sits inside of marketing (not IT) and can manage the steady flow of campaign build, tagging and execution.

Marketing Talent: The competition for talent continues to intensify. NFP’s must raise their investment if they want to attract the skills needed, but can enjoy an increasingly cause-minded applicant pool if they can provide a comparable professional experience. For Profits that cannot clearly articulate cause based elements embedded into their employee experience are actually at risk if NFP’s can raise salaries even a little.

Funnel Conversion: FP’s are experts at digital marketing, lead and funnel management. As part of the package, FP’s sashay serious internal skills in UX design, tracking, optin mgmnt, test & control, personas and marketing automations, often with digital consuming more than half of total marketing expense. The vast majority of NFP’s generate less than $500,000 in donations per year and often spend more than 50% of their marketing budget on offline channels like direct mail, telemarketing and events Additionally, most of these small and mid-tier not for profits leverage 3rd party agencies and partners for digital lead gen, with many NFP’s struggling to effectively understand and manage partner performance and media spend attribution. NFPS should continue to develop their digital marketing capabilities as a part of the larger channel portfolio.

Mission: NFP’s are experts at articulating and mobilizing mission based subscribers to take action through a variety of channels including social, peer to peer, advocacy, messaging and events. FP’s have much to learn about how to articulate, connect, and engage customers and employees. NFP’s use of storytelling, connection with local organizations, and volunteer management are among the many secret ingredients that help sustain and grow NFP efforts.

Retention and loyalty: This is perhaps the biggest opportunity for best practice sharing between NFP’s and FP’s. FP’s should pay attention to how NFP’s execute mission based messaging and non-commercial community building through various channels and experiences. Not for profits must recognize the potential incremental value of long-term donors (including employer matching and bequeathment) and invest in the centralized supporter data model, reporting, consumer journeys and personalized cross channel marketing automations to which FP’s excel.

There are likely many more examples of differences and similarities to highlight and I welcome your feedback. That said, the examples shared thus far help point us to the potential conclusion of the value of diversity in its many forms and how both for profit and non-profit business models can benefit from each others successes.

So you need to integrate customer data

2020-04-17T09:48:00.002-07:00

Got data? Of course you do. In today’s digital platform enabled world of marketing the challenge is often not what data you have but can and how you use it. With each new tool, custom field, and data warehouse, companies expand functionality but can also reduce their ability to deliver personalized engagement from a single view of the customer.

Why is this important?

According to Gartner, companies spend close to 30% of their total marketing budget on digital tools meant to deliver personalized communication at scale. While these tools generate, analyze and store rich data elements, the task of integrating the data to be stored and retrieved becomes increasingly complex. This creates several challenges including siloes, conflicts, costs, and compliance.

Why is this so hard?

Escalating needs: As companies grow and elevate their level of maturity, they often find the need to centralize data from diverse platforms to realize the personalization functionality promised from their expensive marketing automation and CRM platforms
Overlapping tools: Each new marketing stack tool can increase the complexity of data exponentially, often creating a mess of API’s, webhooks, 3rd party data appends, data warehouses and Customer Data Platforms. This is compounded with redundant platforms.
Speed to launch: in their rush to implement, developers sometimes create work-arounds, static tables that they plan to go back and fix later. Stabilizing these shortcuts is a challenge due limited documentation and shifting IT resources
Governance: Data is frequently “owned” by the channel teams who generate it. While fine in principle, these teams bring a siloed view driven by the tools they use rather than the holistic value of the data they generate
Industry specifics: Many industries have unique data sets or customer requirements that create additional complexity. While at Laureate University, for example, my team struggled to manage 2 email addresses (personal and student issued) in the gold standard contact schema

6 Steps to a successful integration

While each data integration effort has its own set of requirements, I've learned the hard way that successful integrations require 6 basic steps.

1. Organizational alignment & support: Data integration is detailed work requiring long term collaboration and commitment. Recognizing the and involving the key stakeholders in the solution will ensure your efforts have an impact. This includes resources to identify, supply, and discuss each stakeholder’s data and tools and the time to accomplish the work. It also includes some decision making body with stakeholder representation.

2. Embrace a single view of the customer approach: Applying a “gold standard” customer record approach goes beyond marketing buzz by solving a fundamental network complexity issue. This is well articulated by Hull.io who show how the number of 2-way data integrations required between tools increases exponentially with the number of tools added but stays constant when you apply a single customer record approach.

3. Understand the data sets: This step relies heavily on subject matter experts provided in step 1.

Ingest all tools, tracking, and databases
Define and organize by source: sometimes called a data catalog, this effort captures an inventory of each data set, categorizing the data type, source, format, storage, and other features

4. Determine the requirements

Transactional vs analytics processing: Some data sets are needed for real time transactions and personalization and require more robust integration. One example is the personal data used to prefill a form and speed checkout, another is a new lead. Other data sets are more passive and can be updated at times of lower activity. Judiciously managing the difference is critical to data network fidelity and managing data costs.
Define resolution rules: Data stewardship includes the need to define rules for managing conflicts, gaps, and low confidence data. Defining these rules upfront ensures consistency and reliability.
Compliance: GDPR, CCPR, and other regulations are now business as usual for data management

5. Transform and integrate: These steps help to make sure your your data clean and fully usable.

Enrichment: Integrating 3rd party data and appends in required format and permitted use rules
Cleansing: remove old, unreliable unusable or just plain bad data
Segmentation: analyze and apply segments and personas
Transformation: Where necessary, update the data formats to be accessible
Map fields and filter data flows to tools: super important, this is where you ensure you define the sources and uses of data by platform. Best practice is to create a hitlist of core fields at the contact, company, segment, attribute and event levels as a baseline set that hits 80% of platform requirements

6. Governance: Centralizing a team to “own” and manage the data as an asset is a best practice. Here are some recommended elements of this centralized governance team:

Gold standard record: Manage the gold standard record, access to it and any future modifications
Data resolution rules: Articulate and share the data resolution rules. Encourage debate and alignment
Compliance, cleansing and retention: define the core policies and processes and support local teams in the execution of them
API, webhook, and 3rd party append management: Define standards and best practices for integrations and either centrally manage or support teams who execute them
Platform integration & removals: Define and share new platform guidelines with stakeholders and support the assessment of new platforms as needed

While the task of integrating diverse sets of data and tools is daunting, the rewards are immense. Companies are increasingly recognizing data as a core asset and applying resources and focus to manage it as such.

Contact me and let’s discuss data challenges you face.

How to rationalize redundant platforms

2020-04-17T09:38:00.002-07:00

It’s time to do a double take on redundant systems. Think about your own company, how many overlapping database, analytics, marketing automation, or content management tools are in use today? From using Qlik and Tableau for reporting to mailchimp and marketingcloud for email, each redundant service has its outstanding features, invested expertise, and a story why it’s essential. Each redundancy also increases fees, silo’ed teams, tech complexity and overhead.

In this back and forth there is one clear and correct answer on the relevant value of redundant platforms: it depends.

Why does redundancy happen?

Product technical evolution: platforms add new features over time, overlapping with existing tools in adjacent areas

Mergers: integrating a new business and their legacy marketing stack

Separate business units or geographic teams don’t coordinate or prefer to use tools best suited for their region and localized stack

Functions with different scale or maturity: smaller teams may not be at the same stage of maturity, have the expertise, scale, or budget to thrive on more powerful but complex tools used in the larger units

Can’t get rid of the dang thing: some legacy systems are so entrenched its “easier” to leave them in place

Shiny object syndrome

Is Redundancy good or bad?

To answer this question, it’s important to understand each core benefit against the relative trade-offs it creates. The below table illustrates some generic benefit and consequence statements:

Figure 1: Generic Benefit/Consequence Continuum

Looking at the list one notices how the benefits are clear and tangible to the business user while the consequences are often obscured or intangible. If the business owner is making the decision, the redundant platform is a clear winner unless the intangible consequences can be quantified and allocated. How might this work?

4 Steps to understand the true cost of a set of redundant platforms:

Talk about it: Encourage dialogue between the relative parties to clarify the true requirements and how best to solve them
Define the trade-offs: Use the benefits continuum above as a starting point, but spend time distilling the key tradeoffs for your solutions
Prioritize: Take an honest assessment of the priority for each trade-off and whether the consequences are material or can be addressed with a simple work-around
Quantify the Cost of Ownership: Recognize and assign costs incremental platforms create for the impacted business, operations and technology teams. These are numerous, but can include:

Duplicate & Incremental Costs: Licensing fees, transaction fees, marketing ops & technology support, training & certifications, etc.

Resource rigidity: teams and templates limited to their own platform
Interoperatability with core platforms: including CRM, Marketing Automation, databases, ERP, and financial
Reporting consistency: reporting integrity, timing, and consistency
Data flow, storage, availability, and control
Impact on future tech development: duplicate platforms slows development time
Branding consistency: look and feel of messaging across platforms

Ready to try this out? The following example looks at redundancy caused by product technical innovation and geographic diverse business units.

Donation Platform Example:

Donation software-as-a-service platforms for charities and Non-Government Organization’s (NGO’s) are a great example of product technical evolution. Like the lead generation teams in B2C, donation teams generate a significant portion of total working capital (revenue) and often merit best-in-class platforms to maximize success. This has led to a rapid evolution of donation platforms to offer advanced marketing solutions wrapped in a comprehensive suite of communication, engagement, and donation tools. Springboard and iRaiser are two such best-in-class examples.

Let’s consider a multinational NGO that uses both donation platforms in different regions. This worked fine in the past because the localized structure of teams, communication formats, and IT teams insulated the donation tools and minimized the cost of integration. Fast forward to today and the platforms have evolved to intersect or replace existing marketing automation, CRM, social, and webpage elements. See below for an illustration of how iRaiser and Springboard now overlap several portions of the marketing stack.

Figure 2: Donation Platform Capability Evolution

As the donation teams develop more and more sophisticated multi-channel journeys, they increase the investment in the training, templates and customization of their respective tools. This entrenchment conflicts with an organizational effort to simplify platforms and enhance the consistency of experiences and data across the customer lifecycle. Perhaps even more problematic, customer data exists in various formats and locations creating challenges for distinguishing and personalizing journeys for different donor types.

Using vendor comparisons, I’ve updated the consequences section and added a “Findings” column with potential findings for our hypothetical example:

Figure 3: Example Donation Platform Benefit/Consequence Continuum

So is it better to consolidate the donation platforms across geographies? Should we choose the one that better integrates with salesforce? It depends.

If the donation generation teams can continue to thrive on their platforms in relative isolation from the larger set of CRM, systems, and data, the benefits of consolidation may not be worth the lost expertise. The tools aren’t that costly themselves but I’d model out the donation volumes at higher transaction volumes since every 10k donations = $1,000 in fees. Also important is to solve any defined gaps in access to donor populations.

Digging deeper into the cost of ownership, it’s important to assess the potential impact of overlapping tools on data completeness, speed, and costs for managing in the hybrid environment. A good idea in capability evolution cases like this is to plot the usage of various overlapping functions like email, content creation, and reporting back to the core customer record to assess any loss of fidelity, control, or decision making. Finally, recognizing any impacts to areas like customer experience and the longer-term tech platform roadmap should also be included in the final decision.

One thing is for sure, platform redundancy is a part of life for the modern organization. How well teams plan and manage these redundancies will determine their ability to drive maximum performance and ROI. In this spirit, here are 4 additional steps to help you build a culture of collaborative management, planning and results.

4 Steps to make even better decisions about your tech stack

1. Advisory Council: convene a group of key stakeholders for a monthly forum to discuss platform challenges, opportunities, and invite speakers on new innovations like blockchain and AI

2. Develop a Roadmap: track larger and interconnected platforms on a 5-year roadmap. Differentiate platform status by its relative longevity in the market and within the company: Assess, implement, invest, maintain, sustain, discontinue

3. Economic allocation: If the drag of a redundant system creates significant ongoing costs for other teams, it’s worthwhile considering a defined budget transfer between units to cover some portion. This ensures the true cost is felt by the business team and the tech and ops teams are resourced to provide support at a defined SLA

4. Make data a priority: give robust and efficient data flow a permanent seat at the requirements table

Want to discuss these or related topics more? Contact me and let’s talk.

Controlling CRM in a Crises: managing automated marketing mishaps

2020-03-19T11:04:00.003-07:00

This 5 min read highlights situations that require adjusting your automated marketing and provides 9 steps to prepare and execute a response strategy.

I’m a big fan of CRM and its ability to automate personalized engagement tactics at scale. Leveraging advanced marketing tactics and technology, B2C and B2B organizations leverage CRM to deliver massive returns. With careful construction and ongoing test and improvement, automated campaigns deliver thoughtful and personalized engagement across the customer lifecycle at scale.

Until it doesn’t. The current coronavirus pandemic one of three scenarios when the beloved drip campaign turns into water torture, risking experience and loyalty in the process.

1. Operational Issues

The most common yet often poorly coordinated scenario, operational challenges include things like the website is down, support centers are understaffed, payments or other required processes are impacted. For example, while at MetLife, we sent a major email campaign driving inbound calls on the same morning the call center staff was in all-day training. D’oh! Sonds simple but CRM campaigns designed to generate traffic should coordinate with impacted teams to ensure resources are available and have the best chance to engage and convert.

2. Current events

Let’s face it, things move pretty fast. What sounded like a great subject line last month might now belong in cards against humanity. Current events run the gambit of social, celebrity, political, natural and economic disasters. The severity of an incident varies significantly in this scenario, ranging from being considered tone deaf to offensive all the way to criminal negligence. When public meaning shifts because of social movements like me too, new popular phrases and even emojis, your automated campaigns could be impacted.

For example, I recently joined a professional networking group called lunchbreak. Their email #2 was built to encourage me to set a time to meet another professional I don’t know for coffee or lunch. Perfect for a new customer on any normal day. Of course, on this day I was busy losing a % of my stockmarket value and stocking up on canned goods in a facemask.

I like this example because the team recovered quickly, sending out the same email with a revised subject line: “now supporting video”

Here’s an additional link for more on managing coronavirus impacts on your loyalty program.

3. Company Failures

The third scenario is different than a natural disaster because it’s entirely focused on the company, its people and products. Product recalls, management changes, and bankruptcy are all examples and brings a new set of requirements for sensitivity and brand stewardship. When Samsung’s Galaxy Note7 lithium battery started exploding and were banned from commercial flights, its time to rethink the CRM campaign encouraging recent browsers. When Carlos Ghosn filmed his own spy escape movie, its probably good for Nissan to dial down verbiage like escape, steal, or brand values.

So what do I do now? Who can forget the wise words of tactical preparedness from the back of the A Team van, “the best offence is a good defense.” You don’t have to be a fool to recognize the importance of preparation in addition to execution in managing a crisis.

Event Preparation:

1. Build a good connection with your communications & PR teams. Know the key players and ask to understand and be included in their emergency protocol.

2. Inventory your communication themes and assets for easy reference. This can be a big undertaking, so start by inventorying every new campaign, and then capture existing campaigns on a priority based.

3. Stop the line: Like the lean manufacturing concept, it’s important to know who on the team has the ability to stop a campaign if necessary. Make sure you have coverage so you can stop a campaign no matter who is on vacation.

4. Assign “owners”: Whether by campaign or by stage, it’s helpful to have a resident expert who knows enough about the campaigns to quickly find and manage any issues that arise and feels responsible for their resolution.

Event Execution: OK, so something just happened.

5. Set priority: Convene the team and align on the immediate priority to protect the customer experience & brand.

6. Triage: Discuss what’s known, the root cause, and define immediate steps & owners to reduce risk (change subject line, reroute clickflow/CTA, pause specific campaigns, )

7. Notify: other process owners of the impacts to their process flows based on the changes you made as soon as possible (ideally before you make the change).

8. Apologize if needed: It’s painful but sometimes it’s also the right thing to do.

9. Question "business as usual" assumptions: while not an immediate concern, after a crises its a good idea to reconsider core preferences like message density, contact time and frequency. While Tuesday am used to be the best time to reach a B2B prospect, current prospects may be busy home-schooling and respond better in the evening

While we may have recognized the challenges that Lucy and Ethel would face at a high speed chocolate factory, marketing automation challenges aren’t as easy to spot. Of course stuff happens and will continue to happen. How well you can recognize and quickly address your automated communications can make the difference if you can protect the customer experience and brand.

Crack the Stack: Optimizing your Marketing Technology

2020-02-25T13:26:00.000-08:00

Crack the Stack: 4 keys to optimizing your marketing technology

Gartner’s survey estimates the 29% of the overall marketing budget goes fund the marketing stack (up from 22% in 2017) and is now the single biggest component for many companies. More than just cost, a well-executed stack provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace and ensures the company meets its sales and retention goals. It’s such a focus in some companies, there’s even annual awards, the stackies! This article provides a working definition, describes why its so hard to get stacks right, and provides 4 steps you can take to get the most out of your investment.

A marketing technology stack is a grouping of technologies used to conduct and improve marketing activities. “Martech” automates processes and data flows to improve efficiencies and increase the ability to engage customers and win in the marketplace.

The stack typically includes critical components of marketing execution, including:

• Content Management System (CMS): serves web and blog content

• Advertising Technology: includes display, SEM, retargeting, adtracking & attribution)

• Engagement Channels: social, email, webinar, sms, call center, form pages,...

• Reporting & Analytics: provide dashboards and insights

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): tracks and shares customer behavior

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): track and maximize organic search results

• Data Orchestration and Architecture: manage data flows, tagging, and platform integration

Here’s a helpful breakdown on why it’s important to optimize your marketing stack.

Despite all the attention stacks get, they are incredibly hard to get right. Five factors are major contributors to this challenge:

• No “one size fits all” model: Most stacks are unique due to industry specific requirements and the build-up of legacy processes and systems

• Constant change: Rapid evolution of technology, platform ecosystems, regulations, and business models

• Misalignment between skills and capabilities: The optimal marketing stack structure evolves as organizations grow in scale and mature in their integrated marketing capabilities

• Redundancies, interoperability limitations and data gaps: Many organizations have built stacks without a centralized platform selection and integration governance

• Data orchestration and architecture are an afterthought: Most organizations fail to prioritize data management in their stack capability and skill development, increasing workarounds and reducing functionality and ROI

All of these reasons drive the need for ongoing active management, selection, and integration. Further, companies must invest in a defined data enablement strategy to unlock the value of their platforms and customer data.

4 Keys to optimizing your marketing technology stack:

1. Understand your stack

A clear understanding of all the systems and data flows is the first step. This may sound simple, but often the reality is siloed between functions and channel teams and requires effort to ensure the level of detailed needed. I use the following steps to accomplish this:

i. Inventory current systems & recognize duplicates & conflicts

ii. Map data flows and frameworks

iii. Quantify the headcount needed to support core functions

iv. Identify security & compliance challenges

v. Identify pain points and process bottlenecks

2. Match your stack to current and future business needs

OK, so you know what’s in your stack and how the data flows within it. Next, its important to align the current stack with the business strategy, sales and marketing plan, and budget. This step helps to “right-size” the platforms and data use cases over time and combat the inevitable “shiny object syndrome” to which execs can sometimes fall prey.

The below framework applies a generic stack over the capability maturity progression. Note that some functions and tools start to play a role only in the later stages of maturity.

3. Integrate your platforms and data

One of the most common gaps I see with clients is the lack of attention they pay to data orchestration, architecture and reporting. Think of data as the fuel required to drive the value of the marketing stack. While rarely an end-in-itself, the disciplined capture, tagging, storage, and retrieval of data is a core requirement.

Of the many challenges, a big part is the need to integrate disparate or legacy systems. Often different functions insist on best-in-class platforms that perform well in isolation but don’t share data well. Target Marketing’s 2018 survey suggests integrating the existing stack is the #1 focus area to improve customer experience.

Another challenge is the platform vendors themselves, who’s promises of seamless integrations set a false expectation of what’s really required to make this stuff work. Even add-on’s to your central Salesforce, Oracle or Adobe product-set are themselves a patchwork of acquisitions and far from natively integrated.

The below image tries to capture the significant role that data plays in the stack puzzle and why it needs to be a priority, especially when you need to integrate diverse systems.

4. Ongoing management and improvement

In a recent Korn Ferry survey, 27% of CMO’s were concerned with staying ahead and taking advantage of digital tech trends. Another 22% admitted they struggled managing their current technology. More than just staying ahead, many companies struggle to effectively manage the patchwork of legacy systems they have. The best companies apply the following tactics to ensure the get the most out of their technology investment:

i. Oversight: Encourage a technology oversight committee to review the existing stack, address gaps, conflicts and redundancies and review relevant new technology partners.

ii. Make Data a priority: Invest in a data orchestration and architecture to better integrate and access key data elements and support diverse solutions. Then mine the data for insights and strategies.

iii. Align your stack needs with organizational skills and resources: Invest in people and training where necessary and watch out for outsourcing core competencies

iv. Continue to improve and innovate around the business strategy and leverage new tools to unlock customer value and operational efficiencies

Marketing stacks are a critical component of your go-to-market strategy and can make the difference in attracting and keep customers. Complex and evolving, effective stacks require constant assessment and improvement in partnership with a deliberate data enablement strategy .

There’s no one right stack and no one expert. Share your thoughts and comments…

Integrated Marketing Maturity Curves

2019-10-27T18:38:00.001-07:00

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else” – Yogi Berra

The role of marketing continues to evolve, with today’s CMO and her team adding technology, behavioral tracking, new channels, and other disciplines to their already crowded list of responsibilities. Welcome to the rise of integrated digital marketing, a holistic approach combining marketing strategy, process, and technology to improve the cost and effectiveness of customer acquisition and loyalty efforts.

In this evolving landscape it’s hard to recognize, let alone keep up with the rapidly changing and expanding tool sets and practices to compete. In a 2019 study, BCG found much room for growth, with 55% of businesses stuck in the first 2 stages of maturity, and only 2% of responding companies operating in the highest stage 4 maturity. The majority of respondents who improved their maturity ascribed a 30% cost savings and up to 20% revenue increase from their integrated efforts.

How does a CMO determine if she/he should prioritize content, marketing stack, or test and control? Once you’ve prioritized the skills needed, how can you set targets to identify and achieve the required level of mastery? The integrated marketing maturity curve answers these questions. First, let's define the 4 components of integrated marketing.

Components of Integrated Marketing:

Why a maturity curve?

The maturity curve provides two important benefits to the integrated marketer in understanding and prioritizing their efforts.

Synchronize skill sets: Integrated marketing requires a cohesive set of contributing skills. Advanced campaign prioritization, for example, relies on data management, tracking, analytics, and test & control. Weakness in any one skill is likely to limit potential to optimize other skills.
Highlight areas for specialization: While skills are integrated, there’s still room to prioritize specific skills that have the highest opportunity for impact. For example, an acquisition focused company who spends a large amount of their marketing budget on new leads may want to accelerate their lead management and the related data and tracking skills.

Here’s an example of Lead Management skill maturity curve within Marketing Operations. You can see sub-skills evolve from adhoc, through opportunistic, systemic, and predictive stages.

Lead Management Maturity Curve:

The Integrated Marketing Maturity.

Now we take the 14 individual skills that make up the 4 skill categories and plot a maturity curve for each. All 14 curves are included in the full report. Below is a summary of all 14 skills on one curve.

Using the Curves:

Make your own curves: Every industry and business is unique. While this curve is a good starting point, you are encouraged to consider your own set of skills and competitive landscape.
Assess your organization: Take some time to do an honest assessment of your current organization and partner network across each of the relevant skills. Extra points if you can also get an idea of the competition on these same skills.
Align Skills with Strategy: Just because you are good at something, doesn’t mean that drives bottom line results. Work with each of your core skill teams to connect the dots between what they do and the defined business strategy. Capture any blockers that the skill team sees as a limitation to their success.
Set your targets: Assuming there’s clarity on which skills support the strategy, you can now set maturity goals for relevant team members. For example, by the end of next year, we integrate 2 internal and 1 external data sources into our customer profile.

Please contact me to learn more about the integrated marketing maturity curve summary or to discuss one or more of the 14 maturity curves in more detail.

Lessons learned from an RPA implementation

2019-10-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

This post originally appears in the dPrism dBrief. Check it out and sign up for weekly articles on digital transformation from a range of experienced thought leaders.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been getting a lot of buzz lately, for its promise to reduce manual work, accelerate operations and enable new products and services. While RPA offers huge potential, there are plenty of challenges that can impact a company’s ability to realize the promised benefits. To help you realize the full potential of RPA, below are five lessons learned from a recent project establishing an automation center of excellence for a client in the global financial services industry.

RPA is software that emulates human keystrokes and mouse clicks in order to automate rote tasks. RPA designers create automated processes using bots or artificial intelligence (AI) to copy and paste data, run calculations, format files and more. RPA is often used on high volume or strategic processes to improve scale and cycle time while reducing errors and risk. This case study explores key takeaways from a recent experience with RPA:

Select the right pilot opportunity to demonstrate proof of concept (POC). While it might be tempting to tackle more complex business processes, an essential objective of the POC is to prove the viability and value that RPA provides. Keep in mind that RPA requires a substantial shift in the organization to address internal process, IT, and compliance to achieve a sustainable automation program. In our example, the first launch was delayed by a month due to the need to align on a standard file format and secure adequate resources for testing. We recommend:

1. Selection: choose a simple process with clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to measure the impact in real terms (manual hours, cycle time, quality). Back-office processes are preferred to limit exposure to customers.

2. Preparation: Schedule adequate time to define the process from end to end before trying to automate it. This includes the steps, inputs and outputs, service level agreements and organizational elements that need to be considered.

3. Support: Enlist key stakeholder support for the program (from executives to the execution team) to provide adequate resourcing. Include subject-matter experts (SMEs) for solution requirements and testing and leaders to support the organizational change needed to adopt the automated process.

Define your level of investment and resourcing – and begin planning immediately. Almost as bad as a failed POC is a successful POC that fails to build momentum because of delays in required resources. Because skilled RPA developers and analysts are difficult to hire, companies that see RPA as a strategic growth platform are encouraged to define and initiate their resourcing strategy in parallel with the POC. Assuming the POC is successful, companies typically choose between the models illustrated below. In dPrism’s most recent case, the client chose a hybrid approach, leveraging external consultants (option 2) to develop the pilot while simultaneously initiating the search for talent to staff the ongoing program (option 1) by pilot launch.

Engage compliance and information security early and often. RPA should be considered a disruptive technology. As such, it is critical that compliance and information security teams understand RPA not just conceptually, but also how specific automation projects will impact current processes. In the recent project example, we did not spend enough time getting compliance buy-in on the proposed solution before starting development, requiring rework to meet internal standards. To avoid this rework loop, we recommend:

1. Establish the project objectives and educate the team on basic RPA mechanics.

2. Once a project has been identified, engage again to walk through the solution and proactively call out specific areas of change, open concerns and opportunities.

3. Reengage once the solution has been identified to make sure alignment.

4. Find ways to enhance existing control and compliance to increase credibility and buy-in.

Integrate into your larger technology assessment process. Most companies have a standard technology assessment, approval and resourcing structure to ensure consistency and accountability and to optimize scarce development resources. While it’s a good idea to pilot RPA in an appropriate POC staging space, RPA projects – when validated – should quickly move into the mainstream assessment and be subject to the same review, approval and allocation process as other solutions. This ensures RPA is held to the same standards and evolves from special project to core competency. In our recent example, the client moved quickly to include RPA projects in their core project submission review process, ensuring greater visibility, platform stability and organizational acceptance.

Communicate the concept, then get real. While the concept of RPA automation is easy to grasp, the nuts and bolts of what makes a good project and where to find them in your organization requires more than an introductory Powerpoint. Indeed, after introducing RPA to its business leaders, our client found it necessary to follow up with brainstorming sessions and process deep dives to identify relevant opportunities. To ensure the organizational adoption needed, we recommend:

1. Engage stakeholders on the concept as part of a digital or operations strategy

2. Follow up with tangible examples (like your POC), using process maps, step by step videos and output examples.

3. Conduct brainstorming sessions or empower internal SME’s to identify and submit new projects based on a stronger understanding of what makes a successful RPA project

A well-executed RPA strategy can unlock significant value in efficiencies, process control and new product development. Take advantage of these lessons learned to accelerate your own program or contact us and see how we can help.

5 steps to successful process automation

2019-05-22T20:56:00.001-07:00

This post originally appears in the dPrism dBrief. Check it out and sign up for weekly articles on digital transformation from a range of experienced thought leaders.

Since the Industrial Revolution, companies have sought competitive advantage through gains in process efficiency. Non-farm U.S. labor productivity has steadily advanced at an annual average of 2 percent for the past two decades, reflecting the relentless drive by companies in every industry toward improvements that will sustain their operating models. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a recent example of this trend, involving the programming of software “bots” to conduct basic tasks across applications to reduce manual effort.

But whether it’s lean, process outsourcing or RPA, solutions are only tools in a larger strategy to unlock next-level efficiency, scale and product opportunities. Companies must avoid a “hammer looking for a nail” approach by developing deliberate goals, a long-term roadmap and organizational readiness. Here are five steps to ensure you create an automation strategy that captures the benefits of efficiency, scale and speed, while opening up new product and service opportunities.

1. Set your (Automation) goals: The single most important step in the process is to clearly articulate the program objectives. Is the goal to save money, reduce compliance errors, speed cycle times or increase revenue with new products? The more specific you are in the planning, the better you can prioritize opportunities and deliver solutions. In the short term, focusing on one or two measurements (e.g. cost and quality) is ideal, since the project needs to show a return on investment while building proficiency. Over time, however, companies are encouraged to take a portfolio view of the entire suite of benefits including speed, customer satisfaction and new products or services.

2. Go slow (to go fast): After the headlines and sales pitches, many executives have high expectations from automation software and are tempted to apply it to their most challenging problems out of the gate. But these moonshot projects often struggle to build the required competency and momentum to sustain success. With a recent dPrism client, we established a six-month pilot focused on efficiency targets within a single business unit. We scoped more than 25 opportunities to identify a robust pipeline, separating them into immediate, medium, and longer-term horizons based on the complexity and process risk. For our proof of concept, we chose a smaller program with a limited audience. The team was able to deliver a working project in just a few weeks and slowly expanded into more complicated and high-volume opportunities. One key learning from that experience is managing project timelines to enable fine-tuning and time for the human team to adjust to the new process.

Action: Select a single process or function to focus on for a pilot automation solution. Consider a lower risk “proof of concept” approach for the first solution, addressing a smaller or less complex element to compensate for the learning curve. At the same time, build a backlog of prioritized features for the development team to tackle as it gains momentum.

3. Standardize before you automate: Unlike a regimented factory with processes designed to fit standards, many office activities are a swarming mess of variations and exceptions supported by a human who understands the end objective and how to jump through hurdles to achieve it. These variations severely limit the automation opportunity from a volume and percent solution perspective. Companies must therefore be willing to re-engineer and standardize current “ad hoc” human processes as an important and critical part of the effort to maximize the total automation opportunity.

Action: Be prepared to transform your process to maximize automation benefits:

Process: Remove unnecessary manual intervention, variations, and exceptions.

Data format: Ensure the data input formats are supported by your automation solution, including most Office Suite products, CRM, ERP, HTML and others.

Inputs and outputs: Standardized fields and formats.

4. Select the right tools: Just because RPA automation is super cool, doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for every job. Indeed, API’s, databases, macros and good old-fashioned process re-engineering can address some challenges more easily or cheaply than RPA. Integrating a suite of tools into your solution set allows companies to address a variety of situations to increase flexibility and long-term outcomes. These include:

APIs: Where possible, collect data from reliable sources, such as your customer relations management (CRM) system or web analytics, using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Building a bot to scrape data should be a last resort.
Databases and Macros: A recent dPrism client cut their RPA solution development time in half by deploying a simple database within the solution. This database delivered the additional benefit of improving the manual process for exceptions, further enhancing the solution.
RPA: Solutions like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and WorkFusion provide a robust set of RPA tools and access to open-source libraries of existing “bots”. Remember to approach development with the intent to reuse automated bot elements to accelerate impact while minimizing future development time.
Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Chat Bots and Crowd Sourcing: There are some processes that are too complex or ambiguous for RPA. In these scenarios as well as customer facing situations, ML, AI and chat bots increase the automation potential.

Action: Expand your thinking of automation beyond a single software, and provide practical alternatives to realizing automation targets.

5. Prepare for the impacts of speed: Accelerating one part of your process is likely to impact other elements, often creating new bottlenecks or breakpoints. Enabling an internal culture for speed is required to effectively manage these impacts and drive future enhancements to the process.

Action: Map out all the inputs and outputs in your process, including raw materials, decision making and approvals to understand and address items that risk becoming bottlenecks as the process speeds up. Consider adopting agile methodology to accelerate internal collaboration and support flexible prioritization models that adjust to rapidly changing landscapes.

There is no single silver bullet to achieve modern productivity gains. Rather than blindly following the latest automation technology, executives are encouraged to pursue an outcome-driven strategy backed by a strategic roadmap, carefully selecting the initial opportunity and applying a wide range of automation tools and re-engineering to most efficiently solve larger and increasingly complex challenges.

How to get the most out of your email channel

2018-12-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

This post originally appears in Adweek. Check it out here!

It’s easy to overlook traditional email when compared with interactive and higher cost channels like paid display and social. With the right level of attention and integration, however, this reliable and low-cost workhorse can be your secret weapon to improving acquisition and retention performance of all your campaigns. This article will show how email contributes to company performance and suggest 4 ways to improve your own email marketing performance.

Why Email?

Email is core to the customer relationship. Email is the first piece of customer information captured. Often used as the user ID and the customer identifier, the email address is the most reliable two-way connection with a customer.

Email also delivers. According to a June report from OneSpot, conducted by The Relevancy Group, US marketing executives said email attributed 21% of the total revenues in Q2 2017, up 17% year over year. eMarketer’s 2017 email marketing Benchmark set the median email marketing ROI at 122%, four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.

There’s room to improve. As demand Metrics/Return Path recent survey suggests, less than half of the respondents are seeing email performance improvements. eConsultancy’s 2018 email marketing census agrees, with its top finding that email continues to be the most effective marketing channel, though fewer marketers report stellar performance

If organizations recognize the opportunity, why are so few capitalizing on it?

What’s missing is a comprehensive strategy

Many marketing teams allocate talent and focus in line with channel budget rather than channel impact. When this happens, there is a tendency to create brand and media strategies with email as an afterthought rather than a central component. These companies miss the chance for their email to connect the dots between channels and weave together a personal narrative with compelling call to actions to close the deal.

Here are 4 steps with specific actions you can take to improve your email marketing performance:

Master the numbers. Get to know the core KPI’s: sent, bounced, received, opened, converted, unsubscribed, removed. Spend some time understanding where you are on each of these measures and the “leakage” from each stage to the next.

Action: Include an email KPI dashboard in regular marketing meetings.

Action: Determine targets and strategies to improve important areas including simple tweaks like subject lines, timing and frequency.

Earn your access. Don’t mistake access for interest, excessive amounts of emails with low content value is a sure way to an unsubscribe. Beyond the active unsubscribes, email service providers (ESP’s) like gmail passively manage your access to their subscribers using a sender relationship score. A few negative scoring email “bomb’s” in a row can cause gmail to throttle your sends by up to 90%, temporarily sidelining communications with close to 40% of your total subscribers.

Action: Lean in Opt-in. Embrace GDPR, Canned Spam, TCPA, and other regulations as minimum standards to earning and keeping a subscriber’s interest.

Action: Less is More. Try to remove 25% your current email campaigns by eliminating redundancies or reducing send frequency. Alternatively, set a max # emails per day/week/month with an escalation process for exceptions.

Action: Give to Get. Revamp the remaining emails with a give to get strategy in the form of information, entertainment, access, and discounts.

Integrate into the strategy: While most email campaigns focus on short term objectives, there is a huge opportunity for companies to enhance long term relationship through multi-step campaigns. For example, a for-profit university used an email survey to capture personal motivations for pursuing a degree from all their new inquiries. This one-two approach keeps the request for information (RFI) simple while capturing deeply personal insights on the value points in a prospect’s buying decision. These insights can then be used to prioritize the values to highlight in a personalized narrative that improves the messaging performance across all channels.

Action: Reframe Success. Now that you’ve mastered and improved the basics of email KPI’s, its time to reframe what a successful email campaign means. Select a few subscriber behaviors that matter to the business (RFI, download, speak with an agent, start /complete an application, purchase, repurchase,.. ). Now link an entire campaign to the successful completion of that action on any channel.

Action: Develop a long play. Look at your entire acquisition or retention lifecycle. Identify drop-offs in the narrative which would benefit from reinforcement or a deeper insight into the customer’s intent. Start building short sequences of cross channel reinforcement narratives aligned to encouraging a measurable subscriber behavior. Expand once you get the hang of it to extend the reach and performance from paid and organic channels.

4. Capture, review, learn, repeat. Email is an ideal candidate for rigorous A/B and multi-variate testing to accelerate learnings and build a culture of continuous improvement.

Action: Test and learn. Build a campaign test governance process to track KPI’s and defined subscriber behaviors over time. Set small improvement goals and encourage tinkering and discovery.

Action: Test less and none. For non-essential campaigns, consider using short-term control groups who are excluded from email campaigns to better understand email’s true cross-channel contribution.

Despite its low cost, email delivers outsized results for marketers who know how to best integrate it into the overall engagement strategy. By learning how to best harness its power to recognize, reinforce, and remind, brands can realize significant improvements conversion and retention efforts.

Seven Steps to Accelerate your Velocity

2018-12-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough” Mario Andretti, car racing legend

This post originally appears in the dPrism dBrief. Check it out and sign up for weekly articles on digital transformation from a range of experienced thought leaders.

Companies in slower-paced industries used to be able to dismiss Mario’s sense of urgency because they felt safely removed from the digital fast lane. As the pace of change accelerates, however, there is less likelihood that slow or complacent executors will be able to keep up, much less grow. This article explores how executing with velocity is an organizational capability and prescribes seven steps that will help you accelerate velocity to compete and win in your increasingly fast moving marketplace.

Speed is a mindset and a competency

The first thing you need is a real desire to accelerate velocity. Often this comes from a market disruption, such as a new competitor creating a back-to-the-wall fight for survival and relevancy. Alternatively, new leadership or a compelling new market opportunity may define the need for speed and raise its importance within the company priorities. Whatever the reason, there must be a deep, enterprise-wide understanding of the value of accelerated delivery in terms of its impact on competitive position, market share, and/or pricing margin to adopt the required mindset, which can mean reducing priority cycle-times by at least 50 percent or more.

Now that speed is an organizational priority, it is necessary to build a competency to support it. Like a racecar driver and pit crew team, a velocity focused organization requires rigorous planning, coordination, empowerment, and a discipline for continuous improvement to turn strategy into execution.

With these in mind, here are some guidelines for building a velocity mindset and competency in your organization:

1. Know the finish line. Perhaps the most powerful tool for an organization to increase velocity is defining the objective. More than a decade ago, Geico changed the auto insurance industry by offering a quote in 15 minutes or less. This seemingly radical goal cascaded across the organization as clear definition of success that is linked back to each individual’s work and creates a sense of collective purpose.

2. Set the metrics and boundaries. With the finish line in mind, break the problem into its relevant parts, setting smaller targets that add up to a faster whole. John Doer’s book Measure What Matters outlines a great approach to setting organizational “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR’s) honed from his experience with Intel, Google, LinkedIn and other winning companies. Keep in mind that speed requires counter balancing metrics to avoid compromising the brand. Clear requirements around product cost, quality, customer service, employee experience will make sure you stay in the safe zone.

3. Choose your vehicle. While Mario’s Formula One car is faster, it’s not the winning choice at Daytona or the Paris-Dakar Rally. Executional velocity is no different, with several considerations for rightsizing the project vehicle to the task:

Scale: Rightsize the effort to the task. Smaller scale projects can thrive with a skunkworks approach. But a skunkworks would not have been effective for a project on the scale of Intel’s famous coordinated competitive response to beat Advanced Micro Systems that involved the entire Intel organization.
Time to Market: While building up a velocity focused organization over time is ideal, some opportunities can’t wait. Creating a fluid resourcing model that can staff up or down with internal or contract labor keeps things moving forward while the organization catches up.
Methodology: There are lots of ways to manage a project. While methodologies like Agile are extremely effective at high velocity development cycles, the additional change management effort with any new approach needs to be weighed against the benefits and other considerations. You may not be able to wait for the entire team to get up to speed on Agile, so you may want to adopt a learn-as-you-go and learn-what you-need strategy to keep things moving.
Alternate Channels: New channels continue to emerge that can be harnessed to accelerate execution. Hive’s Kevin Guo built a game that pays 600,000 “workers” pennies-per-click to label photos. This paid human assistance helps train Hive’s AI system at an unmatched level and accelerates their AI product’s arrival point. Customer feedback, social channels, machine learning, and yet unknown channels are waiting to increase your velocity.

4. Resource: Resourcing for speed must include short- and long-term goals to ensure both receive adequate investment. It’s easy to burn all your investment fuel on incremental labor for a short-term acceleration but long-term improvements in process, systems, and culture will drive more sustainable velocity.

5. Remove roadblocks and distractions: No matter how strong a start, every project runs into challenges that can reduce velocity. Ensuring there are clear lines of decision making with an emphasis on employee empowerment keeps the team moving without excessive oversight (this is one area Agile excels). Assigning a project champion to provide organizational support and address roadblocks is also essential.

6. Deliver and learn: Nothing ever goes like we think it will, especially at higher speeds. Processes break down and alternative opportunities emerge. Building in debrief sessions where the entire team candidly shares what they learned and how to improve is critical to improving results.

7. Get help when you need it. With so many other business priorities, few companies staff for special projects or high velocity development cycles. Bringing in experienced executivesto augment your staff’s horsepower and subject matter expertise is a great way to increase velocity without impacting other priorities.

While not a strategy in itself, executing with velocity enables companies to compete and win in a rapidly accelerating marketplace. So strap in, rev your engines, and get ready to shift into the fast lane.

How to use less agile to be more agile

2018-09-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

This post originally appears in the dPrism dBrief. Check it out and sign up for weekly articles on digital transformation.

There are many reasons to like the agile development process. Its focus on adding value to a “minimum viable product” in iterative sprints is a great way to avoid waiting until the end of a project to see if you’re on the right track. Also, its practices of working in small, empowered teams, with rapid standup meetings and retrospectives, are becoming hallmarks of modern software development. So why are some agile projects still clunky or over engineered? This article will suggest three ways your agile intensity is misaligned and three ways to lean lighten structure and lean into a flow.

First thing to note is I’m an absolute believer in the agile approach and continue to marvel at its positive impact on team empowerment and tangible productivity. Here’s a good primer on agile for readers unfamiliar with the approach. My observations are focused on my own experiences and the very human tendency to over-engineer things.

Agile is a method, not a blunt instrument.

A few months ago, my team launched a new platform development project, integrating external consultants using an agile framework with client team members with little agile experience. We spent quite a bit of time going through the agile approach, carrying out card-sorting exercises, building a glossary of terms and scheduling weekly standups and monthly sprint retrospectives. The client was interested but a bit overwhelmed. Since our project was the only application of agile in their workday, it became more of a curiosity than a practice.

Opportunity: No matter how much you might believe in agile, keep in mind the goal is project outcomes, not teaching agile practices. As long as you maintain the required discipline inside the project team, it’s not necessary to confuse the larger organization with agile terminology and artifacts. I like to think of concentric circles of agility, with the inner team fully entrenched in how the work is done while the outer groups are only interested in the outcomes. This helpful since its easier and faster for the team to translate agile than to teach it.

When agile gets clunky: standups and retrospectives

As streamlined and efficient as agile meeting structures are, they can still become clumsy when participation doesn’t match activity. This became obvious during the three-month discovery period of a nine-month project. Without a lot of work product elements to keep them engaged, many under-utilized project members were bored in the standups and retrospectives we dutifully scheduled. Standups and retrospectives became more of an update better handled through dashboards and email summaries.

Opportunity: Consider standup and retrospective meetings as guard rails to keep your project aligned. The more challenging the course, the more you need these guardrails. For your own projects, consider how each of the following contributes to the need for alignment and adjust frequency to what works:

The clarity of purpose
The need for team interaction
Sprint length (shorter sprints have fewer chances for blockers and misalignment)
Amount of backlog items

This idea is well-articulated to the extreme by a product manager at Spotify. In his view, a well-organized team gets into a state of flow where standups and retro’s are no longer needed.

When the input isn’t agile

In a prior role, I had the chance to participate in a highly effective agile team developing marketing capabilities across marketing, sales and service. It was one of my most exhilarating professional experiences to contribute on a team that fluidly handled the intense workload in a high-quality manner. The team had built processes to vet new opportunities while also doing required development and break/fix maintenance. If left to thrive in our little bubble, we had created a productive and resilient ecosystem.

No capabilities team lives in a bubble. We would often get mandatory last-minute requests for unscheduled and un-vetted projects. Depending on the size, the “gate crasher” project could wreck the entire cycle, forcing the team to compromise on maintenance and other important components.

Opportunity: Try to think of agile in a suppler way, reframing the things you can control within the confines of the reality of the work. In my prior example, we created a stand-alone team (train) for out-of-process requests to buffer the disruption to existing teams. Over time this “gate-crasher” team morphed into an innovation team, with different internal groups vying for development time on their best new projects. Last-minute projects still had a place, but only if they passed a higher standard based on the other potential projects in queue.

It’s not my intention to encourage anyone to abandon the many exceptional components of the agile development approach. Indeed, only by fully immersing yourself into its full structure can you understand how powerful its components are individually and in concert. What is encouraged is to keep in mind that agile’s very nature is to find the best work product for the minimum effort. At the point you understand the rules, you have the opportunity to relax them for desired effect.

5 Steps to a Successful Customer Portal

2018-07-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Article first appears in the dPrism dBrief:
By now you likely know all about the importance of the user experience (UX) in product design. Another angle on making your organization user-centric that’s getting more attention is CX, for “customer experience.” Simply put, CX seeks to give enterprises maximum visibility into every step a user takes on their journey with a given product or service.

From Amazon to Zendesk, companies are leveraging CX platforms to streamline user engagement, improve loyalty and maximize operational efficiency. In principle, creating an integrated portal that includes account profile, product information, product purchase and service functionality in an easy-to-use design makes tons of sense. In practice, CX platforms can be one of the most ambitious and rewarding programs an enterprise undertakes.

CX platforms are so hard to get right because they combine the complexity of integrating disparate systems and processes with the art of customer interaction. We’ve helped clients in B2B, B2C, and in professional and trade associations design and implement CX platforms that are increasing customer loyalty, maximizing efficiency and driving competitive advantage. In the process, we’ve discovered and honed several best practices that, when applied to CX initiatives with consistency and diligence, deliver optimum results. Here are five of the most important steps you should be sure to take as you start or continue your own CX platform journey:

Do your homework (go slow to go fast): In our experience, a “ready, shoot, aim” approach does not deliver positive outcomes for CX platform projects. As much as you want to get right to work, adequate planning is a success factor critical to understanding the overall objectives, customer segments, use cases and business case. Let’s look at each in turn:

Objectives: While each use case is different, Nikil Sharma’s model highlights five common objectives as a starting point. There is no single right answer, but you should expect to have to prioritize the objectives based on business goals.
User Segments: Spend some time defining the customer personas who will use the CX platform, and identify their common and unique requirements. This will be useful as you define your project roadmaps, and align new functionality within your user segmentation strategy.
Use Cases: This is the “so what” part of the exercise. Articulated from the end-user’s perspective in non-technical language, the use cases become the contract between the business and developer team on what will be delivered. Well-defined use cases keep developers focused and become the basis of epics, features and stories within the agile framework.
Business Case: Leverage your core use cases and customer segments to estimate the overall business case and value of the experience platforms. This sets a baseline and frames the maximum capital investment over several budget cycles to hit the required rate of return.
Governance: Assuming the project gets approved, it is important to establish a long-term governance structure to define policy, prioritize the project roadmap and make provisions for project resources. This guidance will help accelerate the project through its development and release phases and builds organizational consensus and ownership.

Make it useful (utility + UX = adoption): Almost by definition, a CX platform needs to provide enough utility for users to keep coming back. Since what users want and what the company wants don’t always align, primary research through customer interviews and surveys is not optional. One client found great success by setting up a user panel over the life of the platform development, getting valuable feedback that helped cut non-essential tasks from the roadmap. The agile “minimum viable product” approach is also a helpful tool to stay focused across the release roadmap. Any discussion of utility would be incomplete without noting the integral role of good UX/design. Bringing in designers early in the CX platform’s development is critical to ensure adoption and usage of the intended functionality.
Train ALL your users (learn to love): No matter how good the designers are, CX platform users will still need some handholding to understand and use all of the functionality. Whether you build your own or leverage existing training modules from your platform providers, make sure to invest the time to train your user base at launch as well as provide ongoing learn-as-you-go skills trainings. Training is important for end users AND the internal team who must maintain the experience platforms. I worked on one university experience platforms project where the team did an excellent job training students. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the time/resources to train the staff and after a few months the platform looked like a ghost town due to neglect and glitches. As students went back to old channels, university staff were inundated with calls and emails they were no longer staffed to manage.
Energize the Community (realize network effect): Assuming you are keeping your core user segments in mind for the use cases and design, users should be thrilled about your efforts to simplify their experience with you. They won’t be, however, unless you invest time in a communications strategy to include users in the dialogue and actively manage expectations. Communicate early and often is a good code here, since even well-intentioned companies can run-afoul of users who’s cheese got moved. In later phases of the project it is possible to step beyond basic communication and look to ways to engage and energize the community. Gamification is one element of this, where offering a competition, rewards and recognition can lead to desirable user behavior. Also consider user crowdsourcing models that add value to the business. Some examples of this include Amazon’s customer reviews and Motorola’s unpaid super users who generated much of their product FAQ’s and trouble-shooting tips.
Keep improving (done is dead): The CX platform landscapecontinues to evolve as new tools, channels and platforms arrive and disrupt the old paradigm. Because of this, an attitude of continuous improvement is vital to keep pace with marketplace demands for increased efficiency and functionality. Dashboards with Key Performance Metrics are helpful in recognizing and prioritizing future improvement opportunities and establishing performance targets over time. On the user adoption side, look past high-level metrics (# of users) and dig into the detail of daily visits, transaction volume by type and user contributions. On the efficiency side, look for improvement opportunities in transaction cost and cycle time to help to encourage adoption.

At the highest strategic level, the CX platform aligns the entire business to best attract, support and retains every organization’s most critical business asset: the customer. Sound complicated? It is.Transformational? Absolutely. If you are working on a CX platform (portal) project include these five steps or message me.

5 Marketing Persona Pitfalls and how to avoid them

2018-04-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

This post originally appears in the dBrief blog from dPrism Advisors

Most marketers are no strangers to the idea of applying “personas” to their customer segments in order to deliver more relevant, personalized messages that can drive improved engagement and response. While personas can create huge advantages in the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing message, many companies still struggle to unlock the value of their persona-based campaigns. Here are five top reasons why personas fail and steps you can take to avoid them:

Motivation: An effective persona needs to provide a platform for a distinct and personalized narrative. This goes beyond basing a message on a customer’s demographics (“who” they are) to answering “why” they are motivated to purchase. Motivation-based personas for HomeDepot might include “homeowner who wants to do a small home projects,” or “family undertaking a major home project,” or “contractor who needs supplies early in the morning.”

Next Steps: To get to the “why,” use the “jobs to be done” framework of user-centered design: “As a [persona], I want to [perform a task], so I can [fulfill a user need]. Example: “As a homeowner, I want to add a bathroom to my home, so I can increase its resale value.” Define a list of the top reasons why customers buy your product or service and prioritize these based on your offerings and market potential. Integrate these “why” statements with your existing personas.

Matching: The next pitfall is the failure to validate the needs of actual customers and aligning those needs with specific personas. One of my past clients, a for-profit university, asked their sales agents to validate its personas based on verbal customer response on the first call. Since not all prospects speak with agents and not all agents effectively capture the true motivation, this approach was an unreliable way to confirm the university’s assumptions about its users. In this case, the University added the motivation-based question on their introductory prospect email, increasing capture, accuracy, and funnel conversion.

Next Steps: If you don’t match at least 75 percent of prospects with a persona, there’s an opportunity to rethink the capture process. Don’t be afraid to ask the prospect directly. Heavy users of look-alike models should consistently test and refine the model’s accuracy.

Message: Many companies can barely handle the content and copy for one messaging narrative, so creating 4-5 persona-specific narratives is a huge challenge for content and creative teams. Most put forth a mediocre effort, tailoring a few images and copy lines within core templates.

Next Steps: Go back to the customer motivation and the shared value. Position the message to fulfill the motivation: “Why do I need this product?” For the university mentioned earlier, it was to advance a career, remain qualified in a career, change a career, and for self-fulfillment. Now wrap that motivation with shared values and benefits (e.g. price, convenience, quality, social responsibility, etc.) when coming up with messaging.

Medium: One of the most valuable insights into a persona is learning where and when they are open to considering your product. Alas, many persona engagement models focus on display advertising and email, missing phone, social media and other channels to best match the persona’s purchase and repurchase consideration process.

Next Steps: Expand your current message narrative into a “choose your own adventure” journey across several channels, including phone, email, web, social and paid media. Map out each channel along the purchase journey, the required actions, messaging, and frequency. The goal is a more natural and compelling experience, rather than just increasing the volume of channels and messages.

Measure: Dive deep into the rich tapestry of user behaviors to get a clear picture of your customers and personas they are aligned to. Collecting and analyzing data for comprehension involves effort, but it’s time well spent.

Next Steps: Set your expectations on the value and frequency of persona-based reporting. Depending on the required effort and pace of change, select a monthly or quarterly frequency to report and discuss persona-based measures. One caveat: More frequent reporting is required wherever personas are used to allocate paid media and content development resources.

Adopting personas is a terrific way to better connect with your customers on their purchase motivations and sources of shared value. But realizing the value from your investment takes time and careful management of these five pitfalls.

7 Tips to Set and Maintain the Customer Experience Roadmap

2018-03-07T11:54:00.001-08:00

Check out my latest entry in dPrism Advisor's blog. Synopsis:

It’s a journey not a destination

Unlocking the potential return of a 360-degree vision on the CRM platform investment requires long-term view and investment strategy. No matter where you are on the maturity curve, internal strategy shifts and the rapid pace of change within the platform industry means maintaining your long-term CRM roadmap is essential to optimizing your investment and avoid getting trapped on data islands with half-functional processes.

Here are seven things to keep in mind as you map and track your CRM vision:

Map the journey, in three ways: This time-consuming but important exercise is a foundation to enabling a healthy CRM architecture with clear requirements on the capture, store, score and response to customer behavior and information across multiple channels. Go beyond basic process mapping and include efforts to map the customer experience and technology systems, including all the data elements involved.
Prioritize the required work. dPrism recommends using an agile framework with incremental releases using minimum viable product-based requirements.
The data is the product: The data requirements you specify will define the parameters of your personalization efforts. More than just defining the data fields, it’s important to articulate which teams and platforms need to access and update each field at which stages in the journey.
Assign a long-term budget: Nothing kills a three-year transformation more effectively than one year of funding. The expected payback on a mature and well-functioning CRM/marketing automation solution is huge, but requires consistent investment. Unfortunately, many organizations stall along their journey and are forced to islands of data and engagement journeys.
Use metrics to track long-term progress: % adoption (data, activity, customer journey), response rates, revenue generated, op cost of key teams. Here’s a good CRM dashboard primer from Salesforce.
Pay attention to the CRM industry roadmap. The technical landscape continues to rapidly evolve for CRM and the larger digital infrastructure of channels, dominant publishers, attribution, reporting and data integration. What seems impossible now may be just two releases away. Staying current with your technology providers roadmap can help you sequence your own roadmap and avoid costly customization.
Include the entire organization: Companies often choose to launch CRM in sales and marketing to quickly realize an ROI. While this makes sense, it’s important to include other key functions in the ongoing roadmap discussion and continue to strive for a comprehensive rollout that includes marketing, sales and service. For example, universities and associations who first launch CRM in marketing are often surprised by the prospect/customer profile gap caused by issuing a second studentname.edu email address.

Companies rushing to build out their CRM platforms are like get stuck along the way. Take the time to update and maintain a thoughtful roadmap to manage change and deliver on that 360-degree vision.

Acquisition vs Retention: the fool’s paradox

2018-01-15T18:37:00.000-08:00

There’s an ongoing debate on how Marketing should balance its focus on acquiring new customers vs keeping existing ones. This article will detail the economics of the tradeoff and show how most companies under-invest in Retention. After outlining the reasons for Acquisition’s over-indexed attention, the reader is rewarded with four ways to achieve a better balance and increase profitability through customer lifetime value.

Its an AND not an OR. Studies that pit acquisition against retention miss the point. Of course new customer acquisition is an essential objective for growth minded companies striving to satisfy earnings targets. But there's a clear tendency for companies to under-invest in retention efforts as they rush to fill their leaky buckets.

Why Retention Matters

Of the many benefits of retention, lets focus on the comparison with acquisition:

1. A good defense is the best offence: Remember the leaky bucket? According to Bain, a 5% increase in retention equates to a 25%-90% increase in profitability.


	2. The 5 for 1 tradeoff: Even Forbes quotes the common benchmark that the cost to acquire a new customer is five times the cost to retain one. Of course there is a diminishing return to this payout, but it’s amazing so few companies optimize for this return on retention investment.

3. Sell to friends not strangers: Anyone in sales will tell you how much easier it is to sell to existing customers vs new prospects (50% easier according to Marketing Metrics).

4. Don’t help your competitors: Keep in mind most customers who leave you bring their business to a competitor. For this to sink in, make it a point to estimate what portion of your competitor’s gains came from recently departed customers the next time you look at market share trends.

Why Acquisition Overshadows Retention

In Deloitte/Fuqua/AMA’s most recent CMO survey, more than 70% of companies anticipated acquisition growth compared with only 50% that were optimistic about improvements in retention. Here are four reasons why this imbalance occurs:

1. All eyes forward. New customer acquisition is a forward-looking metric of growth and weighs heavily in calculating future valuation. New Acquisition is the success measure used to determine effectiveness of large investments in media. In contrast, retention is rearview in nature, often measured months after an event and with shared accountability between multiple functions.

2. Measure me this: A vibrant sector has emerged to attribute the success or failure of vast sums of marketing budgets from the various media sources. Intense debate surrounds this sector as brands seek to improve attribution model transparency. Attrition is far behind the disputed attribution science, and messy functions like servicing don’t make it easier to attribute causes.

3. Agency Able: Part and parcel with the attribution industry, agencies have rushed to support the acquisition arms race. Because of its position at the top of the funnel, acquisition responds quickly to increased investment and is much easier to outsource.

4. Get along to get on: In contrast to Acquisition, improving customer retention requires tight integration with product, operations, and technology teams. Unless joined at the hip by shared performance targets, Marketing and Operations are more likely to go it alone with less success.

Knowledge is half the battle

With the root causes for retention’s under-investment in mind, here are four steps you can take to find a more profitable balance:

1. Listen: Pay attention to both direct and operational measures to deduce and manage attrition pain points:

a. Direct Feedback: VOC surveys including NPS and customer effort, listening via social, voice call and text recognition, and digital tracking including heat mapping, click through and engagement rates.

b. Operational KPIs: retention rates by cohort, service volumes, delivery SLA’s, issue resolution time. A worthwhile exercise here is to calculate the financial benefit from a 1% improvement in retention at each key journey stage to give context and prioritize focus.

2. KPIs: Define and Assign Accountability for meaningful retention metrics.

a. Define: Assign attrition rates targets at key stages in the product lifecycle (e.g. 10 days, 100 days, 1 yr). Choose up to 3 other meaningful and measurable metrics from the direct and operational measures defined above and add them to your scorecard.

b. Assign: Share accountability for KPI targets across relevant stakeholders. Its ok to start small, assigning targets to an adhoc project first and then adding operational and feedback goals to departments in successive waves. Since all departments impact the customer experience, its important to choose a measure that can instill employees a sense of ownership.

c. Refine: Segment your customers by profitability. Check out Chris Zook’s work to learn more, since it’s very important to include future profitability potential in your segment strategy to avoid alienating future stars.

3. Integration: Establish a cross functional work team to focus on a specific area of opportunity with accountability for a measurable KPI improvement. If you are just getting started, it’s recommended to pilot a smaller and winnable project (low hanging fruit) to gain momentum before tackling bigger opportunities.

4. Budget: There’s a number of ways to systematize the more balanced prioritization of investment in retention efforts within the day to day operational culture.

a. Set aside a defined investment: Perhaps the easiest way to ensure adequate budget is to set a defined investment % amount for retention related projects. This works well in a top down scenario to jumpstart adoption.

b. Project IRR Thresholds: Ensure the window of time used to calculate returns from new project is long enough to include the compounded value of retention improvements. Companies that use < a 2 year minimum ROI expectation risk erroneously prioritizing short term growth over more profitable alternatives.

c. Level the field: Every marketing budget contains big-bet investments that are must do’s. Set this must-do budget aside. Now create a level playing field comparing the remaining little-bet investments and your retention initiatives and let the best projects win.

So the next time you feel forced to decide between Acquisition and Retention, take a deep breath and don’t get forced into making a King Solomon split decision. Instead, expand your profit outcome horizon and take a deeper look at investments that can stop the leaks.

What is CRM, anyway?

2017-11-10T13:20:00.002-08:00

What is CRM, anyway?

Ever have a hard time explaining what you do? Recently when a colleague in the same industry asked me my definition of CRM, my jumbled response made me realize it was time to write it down.

Customer Relationship Management is the disciplined management of the customer as an asset throughout their comprehensive relationship with a company or brand. It is a simple mandate that transcends sequential functions like marketing, sales, and service and has deep implications on business profitability through acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

The 3 Elements of CRM:

1. Customer Data: A fundamental premise of relationship marketing is that you need to capture as much of the interactions with a customer as possible. Think of a sales agent calling you to ask for another order one day after you had a terrible customer service call that is still unresolved. Because of the barriers between function like sales, service, and digital, the need for a system that captures ALL of the customer interactions in one system of record emerged. In this capacity, CRM focuses on ensuring the effective capture, storage, and retrieval of customer interaction and status data to and from a host of interactive channels (web, phone, email, portal, sms,..). CRM platforms like Salesforce & Oracle are major players in this $23Bn + market.

2. Segmentation: Now you have rich customer data from multiple sources, it’s time to understand key data elements that help to define specific customer segments that would benefit from a more targeted approach. For example, an online company selling nuts and snacks may have multiple buyers including family, pet owners, office, bakers, bars, and restaurants. Each of these groups have different purchase needs and behaviors that could be better encouraged as segments. In this capacity, CRM tries to recognize the specific segment behaviors and define the engagement experience best matched to the segment. Most companies can only focus on 4-6 segments at one time, but the goal is to personalize to an individual.

3. Engagement: in CRM’s action phase, the object is to automate the segment-specific messaging experience through a set of available channels and ensure all customer response (or lack of response) is fed back into the customer data record for future personalized engagement. Sophisticated campaign logic allows an endless combination of steps and outcomes, with more possible with every new data field captured. Below is an example of a choose your own adventure customer journey (click source to see 8 more examples):

CRM as the Customer Advocate

Modern CRM brings incredibly powerful tools to enable companies to connect with their customers on a personal level at fantastic scale and economies. Companies like Google and Facebook have deep visibility into their customers through the combination of data sources. They also have automated access to contact the customer across a number of channels. With this great power comes great responsibility to maintain and nurture the relationship on the customer’s terms. Here, the CRM acts as an advocate to avoid aggressive or creepy behavior to preserve the relationship. In this way, CRM practicioners bring deep empathy for the customer and advocates on behalf of the companies most valuable asset.

Five questions to fix your lead management leaks

2017-10-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

New leads are like water for many companies, essential for health and growth. Indeed, many consumer facing companies spend 60-80% of their marketing budget to generate new leads and keep pipelines flowing. As a result sales and marketing teams place significant focus on optimizing their lead gen investment, developing sophisticated attribution models to ascribe conversion success back to the source marketing message. While the debate on accurate attribution rages on, many companies still lack the basic plumbing necessary to accurately capture, assess, and segment their precious lead flow.

Not at all sexy or scandalous, lead management is the plumbing that ensures your precious lead liquid is under control. Effective lead management ensures four important functions occur:

Capture: all leads from all sources are captured and logged for future processing. A reliable log is critical for managing the process quality and cycle time. Also critical here is enforcing standards so all lead sources have common log data and tagging protocol.
DeDupe: Duplicate leads are processed with business logic defining how the core contact is impacted while removing redundant contacts from the list. Don’t let the name fool you, superior smarts are needed to ensure proper classification of re-inquiries of prior leads essential for mixed media attribution models to function.
Append: Matches the raw but deduped input from the source and appends it (often for a fee) with additional fields through matching personal info. This could include DoNotCall registry, known class action legal trolls, cell # look up for SMS, and a rich assortment of demographic data matched to 3^rd party registry’s including family, income, education, past purchase behavior, and hundreds more fields.
Segment: Now with a clean list appended with additional details, it is possible to segment and score the leads to define different priority, messaging, and channel/frequency strategies. In this stage, lead management is responsible for providing the sales and marketing teams the essential data fields to fuel their segmentation strategy.

Got leaks?

The above four steps seem basic enough and most lead generation teams intend to support them. Unfortunately several realities increase the probability for companies to lose control over these basic tenants of a healthy lead management process. These include:

· New Channels: New channels and technologies are a big part of the rapidly evolving marketing landscape. While it would be nice to build these new lead sources correctly, often in the rush to launch date, the channels are connected with complex workarounds and business logic that undermines the universal approach to lead management.

· Multiple CRM systems: Some companies support multiple CRM systems and stumble on the challenge of integrating leads from disparate systems and data architecture into the universal view desired. Defining the “gold standard” record source and universal lead management protocols are essential to managing this schizophrenic CRM setup.

· The pace of change: Most digital marketing teams are a hive of innovation, running pilots, a/b, and multivariate test scenarios to continuously optimize the experience. In this rush it’s easy to layer on temporary and undocumented fixes that support a launch date but not lead governance. Its rare teams will allocate precious development resources to rebuild successful pilot structures the correct way, creating a mess of business rules and exclusions that make lead management and testing extremely difficult.

Five Questions to Improve Your Lead Management

Luckily, its relatively easy to assess your level of control by asking these 5 questions:

1. What’s my capture rate? Due to system and process bugs, capture rate is rarely 100%. But is your match rate sustainable and is it improving over time?

2. What’s my confidence in the dedupe process? Duplicate leads are a bad customer and agent experience. They also inflate lead counts in pipeline performance dashboards.

3. What % of my total leads are assessed & appended? Match rates vary by data provider, but it’s not uncommon for companies to match only 65%-85% of their total leads. Are your match rates sustainable and do you have a viable strategy for the unmatched population?

4. Can I use the assessment & appends to segment the population and deliver personalized contact strategies? This is the hardest part to master and requires clear definition of the priority fields. Many err on the side of capturing too many fields without a clear plan how to employ them. This “more is more” approach ignores the physics of data flows and can significantly slow down the processing time.

5. What is the speed to process a new lead? Speed to outreach is critical in both B2B and B2C arenas. If optimal outreach is within 15 minutes, a 5 minute lead processing time is not acceptable. In these cases, go back to your flow and strive for greater simplicity.

How to keep your leads from leaking in the future: For the reasons mentioned above, effective lead management requires constant vigilance. Here are four areas to help maintain control.

Lead Management Governance: Define a universal process and record protocol, then apply to all existing and new channels.
Add lead gen to your impact testing: few development teams incorporate lead management in their testing routine to ensure new features don't impact with your ability to quickly and accurately process leads. Reconsider this gap using the $'s invested in lead gen to help prioritize.
Performance tracking: While lead management is foundational to media attribution and much easier to achieve. Embrace the quantifiable nature of lead capture, accuracy, append quality, processing speed and cost to continue to track and improve lead flow.
Documentation: document all the new rules, workarounds, and stories employed to manage future builds and troubleshooting efforts. This will help the entire team, including the IT team who tests new releases impact on leads (#2).

Effective lead management aims to provide the most accurate and timely capture, dedupe, appends and segmentation of new leads in order to realize the best ROI. Unlike attribution, it is entirely within your ability to establish and maintain best in class process and keep those leads flowing.

Stories that Sell: crafting a content strategy for multi-stage purchases

2017-08-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happens when a purchase is important enough to require significant agreement from the logical left and roused right brain: the decision gets stuck in committee. Things like a house, car, education, insurance, healthcare and other big rocks in the finite bucket of life require significant clarity and trust to win and keep a customer on the rational and emotional level. This entry will provide you with a 6-step approach to creating content based engagement with circular stories designed to progress both sides of the brain to go from committee to customer.

Every great love starts with a great story – Nicolas Sparks, The Notebook

1. Your Story has Meaning:

Our content strategy begins with three core questions that make up every compelling story: Want, Need, and Can. Almost every piece of content provided is designed to answer these three questions:

§ WANT: Why is this better than other options?

• Favorable to competitive products

• Higher ROI vs opportunity cost for other pursuits

• Brand affinity/ confidence

§ NEED: How does this help me reach my goals?

• Product features

• Product benefits

§ ABILITY: Am I capable of being successful?

• Am I eligible

• Do I have the ability

• Do I have the money

• Do I have the time

2. Your Story has Sequence:

These big rock purchases can take weeks and months to realize, often with the prospect conducting research, filling out an application, speaking with a sales agent and in some cases submitting to eligibility rules. As purchase processes are extended across multiple steps and requirements, our story must also expand to address latent questions and reinforce the emotional connection necessary to take action.

Said another way, once a local mortgage company has satisfied a prospect’s ability, want, and need questions at the research stage, they need to earn them all over again at the engage, apply, accept, and purchase stages. See below figure for an illustration.

3. Your Sequence is Dynamic:

As you get to understand the sequence better and manage to a limited prospect attention span, the next step is to recognize and optimize for subtle dynamics. In other words, the level of intensity necessary to satisfy the Want, Need and Ability questions changes for each question at each stage. It is up to the savvy marketer to adjust how the content intensity to best resolve each question in an efficient and effective manner.

In our mortgage example, a mortgage broker might increase the intensity of the Need messaging (product features and benefits) when the customer is still filling out the application. Once the application is complete, that broker might shift focus to amplify attention on Want, building relationships and showing favorable comparisons. See below for how this might work.

4. Your Story is Circular

It would be fabulous to believe that any customer who is going to buy can be convinced on the first go-round at each stage in the purchase process.

Alas, this linear view of customer behavior is science fiction. Instead, our consumer love story requires a more circular path, allowing prospects who are not progressing to loop back in our story until they are convinced enough to take necessary action forward to the next stage.

The below figure shows how this might work, with some customers progressing at each stage, and the remainder cycling back until they accomplish the required message and intensity for each question enough to convince the customer and motivate them to take action.

5. Your Story is Supple:

Einstein labeled as insane the tendency to try the same thing over again while expecting a different outcome. It is just as crazy to expect a prospect who didn’t progress to be convinced by a second attempt with the same messaging. Because the prospect journey is circular, we must prepare alternative messaging to capture attention and unlock the Want, Need, Ability questions for that stage.

Start by trying to understand the latent obstacles. Use things like customer surveys, agent dialogue, and competitive assessments to hone in on unanswered questions (below figure).

In addition to a more relevant message, there are several great tactics to adjust your communications enough to capture prospect attention and action.

· Message and Sequence: Start by shifting the levels of intensity for each question to see if you can better answer their specific needs. You can also change the order and format of the messaging to attempt to cut through the clutter.

· Channel Mix: Another great tactic is to shift up the channels where you present the messaging. If you relied on email and web page, try paid social retargeting, SMS, or an outbound phone call to connect with the prospect on their terms.

6. Your Story Moves: Call them sales tactics, behavioral economics, or jedi mind tricks, a solid body of research provides a large set of tools to engage and motivate prospects towards action. Included in this long list of Machiavellian motivators:

· Link with Personal Goals & Aspirations: Apply persona based messaging, capture and leverage goal statements, and highlight aspirational values in common

· Encouragement: gamification is an excellent motivator, as are old-fashioned notes of congratulations. New services like Motimatic aim to systemize this concept through paid social media

· Loss Aversion: Removing an option induces a sense of urgency and drives decision making. Many use devices like limited time discounts and highlight the cost of lost opportunity

· Choice: Put simply, too many choices are overwhelming. Simplify the available options to drive decision.

· Commitment: Prospects who make a formal statement of commitment are more likely to complete purchase

· Bargain: Also known as pricing crack, discounts, grants, offers, transfers & trade-ins still play a big role in motivation and can be very effective when used sparingly.

In addition to the core 6 steps to crafting your story, here are some extra tips to crafting a compelling consumer story:

• Test & Control: While it’s important to put your best foot forward in terms of an engagement strategy, you should also expect to continue to update the experience based on customer response. As part of this improvement effort, its critical you establish a robust and ongoing test & control structure for reliable feedback on the best tactics.

• Up-Front assessments & data capture: One way to eliminate the guesswork and reduce the test & control cycle is to ask prospects to share information about themselves for greater personalization. Survey’s, preferences, feedback forms, and tracking behavioral choices are all ways to learn more about the customer and apply this to improve their progression.

• Barrier Mapping: While there are many possible reasons for prospects to stall in the sales process, it’s important to map them across the lifecycle to see how to minimize their impact. Convening a cross functional team to drill into specific barriers by stage can help to determine alternative solutions

While each customer is different, most share a common set of questions around need, want, and ability. Effective marketers need to craft a dynamic and supple story that accounts for the required message content and intensity at each stage. Like a choose your own adventure story, the complex product story must provide a consistent yet flexible message that can support multiple attempts convincing action.

4 Ways to Create Your Own Multi-Step Campaigns

2017-03-06T08:49:00.001-08:00

Unlike the one liners used to sell hamburgers, complex products require a richer story line with multiple steps to close the deal. Indeed, the time and relationship building required to make a sale increases with the price and complexity of the purchase (figure 1). Companies that can figure out how to build trust while educating the customer on their best options will win in this long play marketplace. This article describes why product marketers deploy multi-step messages and 4 simple steps to create your own campaigns.

Figure 1: Product investment curve

Let’s agree that not all leads are ready to speak with a sales agent and sales agents don’t want to speak with all leads. The vast majority of total leads are not ready to engage with a sales person, yet. These potentials need to be nurtured in the most efficient way possible until they are ready for a limited amount of salespeople to help close the sale.

Multi-step campaigns increase sales efficiency in two ways:

Accelerating customer readiness through automated channels
Identifying the qualified opportunities that deserve focused sales team attention

Automating the task of turning marketing ready leads into sales ready leads is scalable and cost effective. This increases the ability to focus sales agent on higher converting leads. Let’s see this in action.

For a one step process, imagine a car owner who needs an oil change. They probably have a service station they frequent, so the full purchase decision is a phone call to schedule the service. Even a new customer would be able to select a station and schedule the oil change in a few simple steps based on location and advertised price.

For a multi-step process, let’s consider a new car dealership. Like the service center, the dealership wants to increases sales. But on high ticket items like a new car, it’s a long way from vaguely interested to car buyer. So the dealership breaks the problem into pieces.

They start by placing local media to generate interest. These ads point to the website and encourage research. For those who show higher interest, for example by spending at least 5 minutes checking out the cars on offer, the dealer can provide a discount offer for scheduling a test drive. Even if this prospect doesn’t purchase after the test drive, they may still purchase a car in the future.

This long play relationship uses automated channels like email, digital retargeting, SMS, Dir Mail, and Phone for long term nurture and new releases and sales notifications. More personal channels like an outbound sales call can then be saved for customers who show relevant interest in terms of digital and in person behavior.

4 ways to create your own Multi-Step programs

Start with the end in mind: Define the success criteria in terms of actions the customer needs to accomplish.
Break the problem into natural stages: define the full customer journey by stage, including the required actions to progress (research, inquire, compare, buy, use, repurchase).
Motivation ≥ Perceived effort: At each stage the required customer effort to proceed must be less than the customer’s motivation. If it doesn’t, consider smaller steps. If a prospect isn’t willing to share all their personal info at an early stage, isn’t it better to simply capture their name and email to continue the dialogue?
Personalize the message and channel mix: Use message personalization to get noticed. Also experiment with different channels frequency, and sequence to increase campaign effectiveness with “surround sound” messaging.

Sounds easy enough, but what about our car dealership friend? Here’s an illustration of how this might this play out for her.

1. Start with the end in mind: The dealer’s end goal is sales. She has identified test drives as a high opportunity flow of high converting leads as the behavior to encourage. But she has a limited number of staff and test cars, so it’s important to encourage test drives for the most qualified prospects.

2. Break the problem into stages: The dealer plots the desired journey. Generate Interest, Customer Research, Select the dealerships, Schedule test drive.

3. Step into the Customer’s Mind: For this dealership, most customers fall into two categories, anonymous shoppers and brand loyalists. Brand loyalists are excellent customers but are a small population and only grow when the dealership acquires new customers. So the dealer focuses on anonymous shoppers and how to encourage them to do research on their brand.
Games and quizzes can work well here to encourage introductory research, as well as SEO marketing articles. But to make the leap from anonymous web search to scheduling a test drive, the dealer realizes she needs to offer an incentive. The trick is to only offer it to customers who have shown sufficient intent to increase the chance of conversion.

4. Personalize the Message & Mix: By placing cookies on their site, the dealer is able to recognize past visitors and serve up content relevant to past visits. This browser history is important to log repeat visitors and see what brands and options interest them. Once on their radar, the dealer can serve up pop ups and Facebook ads presenting test drive offers with the specific car the prospect has viewed to select visitors who fulfilled a minimum set of digital actions and browser behavior.

In situations with longer sales cycles and larger investment products, it’s difficult to go from 0 to 60 in the first interaction with a prospect. Multi-touch marketing helps to nurture marketing ready leads into sales ready leads at a pace that fits the customer’s motivation. As the old adage says, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

TMobile's entry into Advertising Fame

2017-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

In spite of their frequency and production value, every once in a while an advertisement makes an unforgettable impact that propels your own thinking in synch with the brand positioning. True moments of advertising genius, the kumbaya of “Id like to buy the world a coke”, the jolt to attention from Apples hammer throw. And now I submit to the royal roster of the indelibles: Pests by TMobile.

How could I be suggesting to add an Eddie Money song to the greatest desert island song list of advertisements you ask? In their latest campaign, TMobile has completely changed the narrative related to an industry standard: Fees.

Persistent paper cuts in the pursuit of commerce, fees are a known and deeply resented phenomenon. Indeed, along with coverage, fees are one of the most quoted pain point for customers. And yet a significant portion of customers still accept additional fee structures even when there are alternatives.

TMobile has been eliminating fees for years and growing market share in the process. Adding more than 850 thousand universal plan subscribers per month, they are growing twice as fast as larger competitors Verizon and AT&T.

Yet despite the economic logic of moving to a lower fee option, TMobile has only freed 10% of the total telecom market from fees. Since the average us wireless customer pays 18% in fees and taxes, according to a November 2015 report by the Tax Foundation, why don’t more customers more switch?

With the left brain convinced, how can TMobile outrage the right side of the consumer brain and sway them to switch to a universal plan?

TMobile’s quirky Pests starts innocently enough. A family in their living room, dad is opening the bills. When he opens the Verizon bill, words like Fee and Surcharge start crawling around like cockroaches on the family table. Yuk. In the words of the besieged father,

“Decent people shouldn’t have to live like this”.

You cant unsee the fees crawling over the same table you play board games with your kids. You cant unfeel the skin crawlie feel of one of those things marching up your arm. You cant un make the unfortunate connection between the word fee’s and fleas.

Like the unforgettables before it, TMobile’s Pest shatters the consumer’s sense of equilibrium. Annoying but tolerable before, fees are now revolting.

Every. Fee. Every. Time.

So a cheers to TMobile and their entry to the lasting halls of advertising memory. This one goes in the Good the Bad and the Ugly gallery.

Feel free to comment with your own unforgettable experiences.

Why Retargeting matters and 4 considerations for your own campaigns

2016-10-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

CRM systems like Marketo have come a long way from its single channel engagement beginnings. Digital retargeting is one of my favorite features, allowing the sensitive marketer to expand their message across more channels and connect with their customers like never before. Pocket protectors on while I geek out on why retargeting is so important and provide tips on how to structure your own campaigns for success.

For today’s discussion, I’m mostly referring to Marketing Automation functionality, like what you find in Marketo connected to a CRM system like salesforce. These platforms are expanding their impact by extending the number of stages marketers can build in to their multi-channel engagement strategy known as retargeting or realtime personalization. Huh? See Figure 1 for a schematic of how this works.

So what? More stages,

Imagine a one touch marketing campaign. You visit a car dealership web site and they post a $1,000 discount for people who come in for a test drive in the next 4 days at a location close to the zip code you entered. Now extend that to two channels: The same retailer sends an email to you check out their newest inventory. After you open the email, you visit their site. When you visit their site, a widget (pop up ad) appears on the side navigation that features the specific car you clicked on in the email and a great discount offer.

Now imagine the same email triggered an ad in your facebook feed with the car you looked at, and an offer if you provide your contact information and agree to come in for a test drive.

In each case, the dealership made an offer to attract new customers. In the 2 touch model, the message in the initial email channel was reinforced in a 2^nd channel for only those who showed positive intent by clicking on the email. In the third case, the same customer was forced to give their information (and permission to be contacted) to be eligible for the offer.

Means More influence.

Retargeting is effective in driving behavior because it extends your message across more channels and beyond a single interaction. This has multiple benefits including:

the more exposure you have to a message, the more chance it has to influence you
diffusing the message between multiple channels reduces the risk of channel fatigue and channel bias
Basing the 2^nd stage experience on actions taken in the first enables a more personalized and targeted user experience

Retargeting is also efficient in managing your contact strategy.

· it allows the marketer to focus efforts and expensive offers on a smaller population of customers who have taken some action or shown some interest

· It automates the list upload for 2^nd (and 3^rd) tier experiences AND the capture of actions and form fills in the downstream experiences into the CRM system. This automation is important both because it eliminates manual list transfers and because it allows the marketing message to stay with a customer immediately after they take an action, rather than waiting for a batch list upload hours later.

4 things to consider when building your own Retargeting campaigns

OK, so you’ve got a viable CRM and marketing automation platform and you are ready to up your retargeting game.

Set your end game: If you are going to go through the trouble of creating a multi-stage experience, it should coordinate in a way to best achieve a specific outcome. Do you want to drive awareness, capture contact information, or make the sale. Setting target KPI’s on a few measures will help frame the type of experience (and budget) needed. For example, if Im a B2B service provider and wanted a campaign to capture new prospects, I might start with a paid display ad offering a free whitepaper in exchange for name, email and company size and industry info. For those who download the website, I can retarget an offer if they visit my site and instruct my sales team to focus attention on those contacts who also visited the website.
Make it personal: Depending on how you structure the initial experiences, you can capture important details about a prospect that drive personalization of your messaging and improve relevance. Consider your bank knows you clicked on a banner ad for their airline miles card. Instead of teeing up a generic ad in your facebook feed of all their products, they post pictures of beautiful beaches with a 40,000 mile new customer offer. And when you call in to discuss your existing card, the agent shares relevant benefits of the mileage card over your current card.
Know when to Hug and know when to Wrestle: Depending on your end game (see #1), you will need to craft an experience series that best delivers on the objective. In cases where the goal is simply awareness, you can use retargeting like a blanket to wrap around high potential customers with all of the branding and benefit reinforcement possible. If the goal requires greater customer engagement, say scheduling an appointment with a sales agent, you will need to get more involved in eliciting response through the experience.
Use free channels but invest in paid: One of the great things about retargeting is that you can create widgets that pop up for visitors to your own website without having to pay media fees. This is an excellent start and should be leveraged as much as possible. That said, not everyone you want to reach visits your website - that’s why you need to retarget in the first place! In many cases, marketers are looking to expand their reach to the channels where their customers are and are in a mindset to consider their product. For these situations, retargeting gets some help from intermediaries like AdBridge to ensure the lists are shared with the social channel, and any actions or information captured is shared back with the company CRM.

Its hard to stay one step ahead of the game. But retargeting makes it possible to create multi-staged experiences that expand the marketers reach while also improving personalization and efficiency.

5 CRM Lessons from Volleyball

2016-09-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

I got a thrill from watching the Olympic Volleyball teams compete this summer. Seeing the players fluidly switch positions, execute sets spikes and blocks, and dive like maniacs to make a save shows what high performing teams can achieve. It also reminded me of the best behaviors from successful CRM-supported sales organizations.

Here are five lessons CRM marketers can learn from volleyball:

1. Take the serve seriously: In volleyball, only the team serving can score a point making it doubly important to keep scoring. Just like a serve, new lead engagement needs to be practiced and perfected to deliver the best opportunity to cultivate a relationship.

2. Keep the ball up: Active customer engagement is key to building and keeping customer relationships. This means keeping the dialogue going, and realizing that sometimes you need to dive to try and save it.

3. Too many touches and you are out: A one way dialogue without customer response will end up losing the customer. Avoid over contacting by striving to get customers to respond and progress.

4. Know who sets and who spikes: CRM marketing sets the opportunity, sales scores the points. 'nuff said.

5. Teamwork is everything: players constantly shift positions and fill in gaps as the game progresses. In the same way, CRM must integrate cross channel engagements based on how the customer behaves,

The fluid teamwork of a pro volleyball team is an impressive lesson on how a CRM team can unite towards a common goal. Reading the moves of the other team, they rearrange, engage, and score.

Big Data Accelerates the CRM Data Race

2016-07-21T07:28:00.003-07:00

Check out my recent article on how Big Data impacts CRM practice in the CIO Review magazine:

Synopsis:
By layering the where, when, how, and with whom from disparate sources on top of a single brand’s myopic relationship, Big Data is able to unlock the why of an individual’s purchase and use behavior.

The most mature companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook) apply aggressive tactics to capture and apply information from all of the four potential data sources: Internal, 3rd party, Consortium, Aggressive Capture. In doing so, they are creating a superior position to better understand and engage customers compared with competitors.

Big Data combined with CRM and Marketing Automation tools is incredibly powerful. Companies need to ensure the application of the information is applied with sensitivity to avoid the risks of being creepy.

4 Questions to Craft a Contact Management Strategy

2015-11-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Communication used to be limited by the challenges of the message transfer mechanism and cost. Print, telegraph, telephone, all have limitations in terms of delivery regardless of the demand. Today’s Marketing challenge is the reverse; unfettered and almost free delivery of communications to an audience with limited attention. In this supersaturated environment, contact management is key to cutting through the noise to maximize the reach, impact, and cost of your communications. When you finish this blog, you will have a 4 step formula to create a successful contact management strategy for your business.

Often coupled with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, contact management focuses on the capture, storage and retrieval of customer contact details. A more advanced interpretation supported by sophisticated CRM and marketing automation tools like Marketo or Eloqua, contact management is the systematic management of customer communications across all channels to optimize customer engagement efforts for the greatest return.

Sounds simple enough: communicate with my customers in the right mix, sequence and frequency to drive the most profitable behavior. Many companies offer cloud software to integrate and manage all your channels. But how do you determine the right mix?

The answer depends on the specifics of your product, marketplace, and customers. So strap in and prepare to provide thoughtful responses to the following 4 questions. When you are done, you will have the foundations of your channel strategy.

1. What am I solving for? By far the most important thing to get right, clearly defining the objective goes a long way to being successful. Common objectives include increase sales, decrease costs, capture new audiences, customer retention, and cross/up sales.

2. What behavior am I encouraging?

Go deeper than just “buy my product”. Walk a mile in your customer shoes and understand the required investment, product complexity, buying process, payment process, and so on…
Chart the behavior on its behavioral propensity curve. Make sure to address to ensure the behavior is sustainable
Determine the inherent barriers to Motivation and Ease in the behavior you want to promote.
Craft your message to recognize, inform, encourage, entertain,...your customers in a manner that overcomes the barriers and drives sustainable behavior.

3. What’s my channel mix?

Reach: Volume counts in this first criteria. You want to select channels that present your message to the largest potential audience. The greater the reach, the more likely the message will be heard.
Influence: A multiplier to reach, influence is a measure of how effective the channel is in delivering a convincing message that will impact behavior. Buying a coke from a convenience store is a relatively low investment purchase which works well with simple reminders instead of deep behavioral shifts. On the other hand, signing s complex, multi-million dollar service contract which may require multiple approvals within an annual budget cycle can only progress past a certain point with human contact.
Cost: The contrast to reach / influence is cost. While a face to face meeting is preferred, its hundreds of dollars more than a phone call, which is dollars more than a chat, which is pennies more than an email (see page 8 of this presentation for more).
Relevance: TV, Web, print, outdoor, phone, face to face, guerilla, and social models exist to get your message out. Each channel has its own personality and use case. One might argue that twitter, with its short burst text, directional messaging and young audience isn’t the best medium to sell a large investment item like a car. But it could be excellent for ordering a pizza if they can get the logistics right.

4. Engage not Enrage: This is the art of engagement style marketing.

Get permission: A price of entry for many channels, especially regulated channels like phone, email and text, Seth Godin’s advice on permission marketing is still true today.
Earn their interest: On low investment products, it’s enough to simply be cute or funny. For more complex products, earning interest may include good faith efforts to educate the customer, providing value-add alternatives, in an easy to consume format.
Build a Dialogue: I’ve often found marketers are a bit like stalkers, so thoroughly engrossed in the features, habits, and emotions of their customers that they can get ahead of themselves and scare of the customer because a lack of context. Instead Marketers need to build a dialogue with their customers at a velocity consistent with the speed of trust.
Don’t be Desperate: Nothing demeans the underlying perceived product value more than an overly aggressive sales process and intrusive messaging.

Companies orchestrating all of these steps into a deliberate and progressive dialogue with your customers are able to cut through the noise and create the best opportunity for a long term and profitable relationship.

Stay tuned to next entry on ways of building out your contact management strategy across the channels and customer journey stages.

Show me the Money: Using Customer Lifetime Value to guide your CX plans

2015-05-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

I’m just going to come right out and say it: none of the Customer Experience (CX) related metrics out there provide the results-focused discipline needed to drive a business. Most of them focus on measuring customer sentiment that theoretically will drive loyalty and word of mouth (NPS, Satisfaction) or reduce attrition (Customer Effort, First Contact Resolution, complaints). Often the value of these metrics must be taken on faith, with no better benchmark of target performance than industry peers and aspirational comparatives like Apple and Amazon.

Faith, like hope, is not a strategy.

This is a major issue for CX professionals as they struggle to identify and gain support in the C-suite for the right areas to invest. At best, these faith based measures can only identify major issues in brand promise and service delivery. But they fail to provide the detailed roadmap for defining the business return from CX efforts, how good a process needs to be, and how to balance the trade-offs of experience with profitability.

Enter Customer Lifetime Value...

A month ago I had the chance to present on how to tie financial impact to customer experience at a Consero CXevent. Surrounded by some of the brightest practitioners across industries, many lamented at the challenge of getting C level executives to support their initiatives. This isn’t because executives don’t care about CX. Rather CX often fails to gain traction because compared to hardcore metrics like sales, operational cost, and profit, CX requires a leap of faith where you are never quite sure how far you need to jump and for what return on investment.

In order to translate their objectives in financial and marketing terms that are core to business strategy, I recommend the CX industry adopts Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

CLV is: the present value of the future cash flows attributed to the customer during his/her entire relationship with the company. Financial folks should notice the similarity with an annuity value calculation. Stated in simple format (ignoring the NPV element for now):

CLV = Cost to acquire a customer –((Average Value of a Sale) X (Number of Repeat Transactions) X (Average Retention Time))

For example: A cell phone company spends $200 to acquire a customer. This customer spends $40 every month for 3 years and it costs the company $20/month to service. The CLV of that customer is:

($40 -$20) X 12 months X 3 years = $720 minus the acquisition cost of $200, so CLV =$520.

This seems straightforward enough, but the implications to the business are profound.

Acquisition cost (cost of the annuity): If an average customer generates $720 in profit, the cost of acquisition must be less than that to generate positive returns. CX efforts that can prove they reduce cost to acquire positively impact the ROI.
Annual revenue (annuity premium): if through superior service the business can prove an increase in revenue per customer, say by cross or upselling additional services, they can substantially increase the total margin. Any investment in CX to do so must be justified with the cross sell revenue it drives.
Longevity of relationship (annuity term): At least as important as the annual revenue is the longevity of the relationship (retention). The longer they stay a paying customer, the more the customer is worth because the cost of acquisition remains the same. Efforts to drive loyalty need to sustain retention impacts that exceed the investment cost.

In this one simple formula, CX teams should find and pursue business relevance. Here are some examples to illustrate its application.

“Should we improve our return process?” Zappos has one of the most lenient return processes in any industry, offering no questions asked within 365 days (and sometimes honoring returns from another retailer). Judged purely on operating cost it makes little sense. But bring to the CFO the concept that the return policy is an investment to drive repeat business and you have an ROI that will stand on its own.
“What Average Speed to Answer (ASA) do I need to staff to?” Many organizations use an 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds as a benchmark. To determine if this is the right target for your business, review customers answered at different time period and determine their propensity to purchase more products and their retention rate. You may find that 70% ASA has little to no deterioration in CLV while providing substantial FTE savings.
“What’s the value of my new customer onboarding efforts?” Take a look at the revenue and retention per customer of those who received the onboarding treatments vs the control population who gets no onboarding. Dig deeper to ensure the design of the program promotes these two CLV elements in a measurable way.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m passionate about good customer experience and the positive contribution it can make to the business. But belief is not enough to convince CFO’s and other key leaders on the value. Worse, belief can be misguided by an overzealous desire to deliver superior service at a cost that does not justify the investment.