If you’re wondering which you should measure and improve first effectiveness or efficiency – it’s not a chicken or egg question -choose effectiveness.  This may seem counterintuitive since financial pressures often take you down the efficiency path, but improving how your marketing effectiveness is about generating incremental sales and customer value as opposed to efficiency which focuses on reducing waste.  It’s hard to make decisions about where to cut when you don’t know what is and isn’t working.  This choice is about doing the right things and then focusing on how to do these things right. Only by starting with effectiveness can you demonstrate marketing’s impact  on the achieve key business outcomes and make a strong case for playing claim a strategic role.

Of course to measure effectiveness takes data.  One of the primary reasons we fall short of being a strategic partner is that we lack the data, analytical models and right metrics needed to demonstrate our contribution and connect marketing back to the business.    To drive effectiveness you will need analytics and data that can be used to tease out the causal relationship between particular marketing efforts and such business outcomes as customer acquisition, customer loyalty, and customer profitability.  The more you can show the impact of marketing efforts and investments on the bottom-line the more influence marketing will have on company business decisions and future business strategies.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

Everyone we speak with is concerned about the economy, battening down the hatches, hunkering down.  Many of us in marketing are seeing our budgets sliced, diced, and chopped faster than an infomercial gadget.  But if your strategy is sound consider being a contrarian and refuse to participate in the downturn.  We’re not suggesting you be rash with your money; but when everyone else has decided to go into idle mode, there can be a unique window of opportunity.  The PIMS research has shown those companies who continue to market during the downturn come out on the other side in a better position than their competition.  If you’ve done your homework and your products and service meet the needs and preferences of the market and you can demonstrate you deliver tangible value to your customers, then it is just as important to promote your company during business downturns. And if you’re been doing marketing performance management and measurement you can have the data to make a strong case for how your investments are going to add value to the company. Continuing your marketing efforts will help you build brand preference and support an image of strength in the market when times are tough.  Here are some that are good to do regardless of the economy:

1. Stay top of mind with customers.  Existing customers may consider changing suppliers when there is volatility and uncertainty in the market.  This is not the time to go silent with existing customers.  Develop and execute on customer marketing programs that will keep existing customers engaged.  It may also be the right time to conduct some customer research.  According to a recent survey of European businesses conducted by SPSS, about a third of companies consider customer retention their number one priority in the current economic climate, compared to only 8 percent of companies whose main concern is customer acquisition—a sharp drop from previous years, when about 40 percent of organizations cited customer acquisition as their primary concern. Not surprisingly, nearly 70 percent of the survey’s respondents said that gathering and analyzing customer feedback will be vital to their success over the next few years, as they work to boost retention by better understanding their customers.

2. Redouble your new business efforts.  Your sales people and channel partners are swimming against the current and are probably finding it challenging to make their numbers. With fewer opportunities, salespeople will have more time to invest in every qualified lead.  . This isn’t the time to try and do more with less, rather this is the time to do better with less.  Rerun demand generation programs that have proven to have high returns in terms of both effectiveness and payback.  Revisit your definition of the ideal customer in terms of personas and scenario marketing, rather than just demographics and other traditional profiling.   This may provide new ideas for how to connect with these opportunities.  If you didn’t do post-mortems are programs in the past due to lack of time, do them now.  This way you can examine what worked and what can be improved.  If the program looks like it is still relevant make the improvements and leverage your learning curve and the investments you’ve already made.

3. Benchmark your marketing performance.  If you don’t’ know how you stack up and you’ve never had the time before to find out, this may be a good time.  While measuring and managing marketing is always a good discipline; it is even more critical in tough times. Executives are more receptive to making an investment if you can quantify the results.  Benchmarking will help you understand whether your performance targets are in line, better, or behind your industry set.  Use this information as part of your marketing planning, performance target setting, strategy development, and budgeting.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

The marketing operations function enables the marketing organization to operate more like a business, with formalized processes, infrastructure, and reporting. Best-in-class marketing operations organizations develop a performance measurement process that cascades from corporate objectives to marketing objectives to marketing programs.  A best-in-class marketing operation organization should tackle three areas:  the measurement of marketing ROI and demonstration of value, balancing marketing strategy with tactics, and tying marketing success to the goals of other groups. As you evaluate your marketing operations function, you want to make sure that at a minimum it:

1. Drives the processes for budgeting and investment decisions and more effective strategic planning

2. Leads the charge for marketing performance measurement processes.

3. Identifies and implements the required infrastructure to maintain the consistent implementation of processes.

If you’re ready to take your Marketing Operations to the next level, here are five things you should tackle:

1. Collaborative and transparent planning processes to ensure alignment between marketing plans and business outcomes.

2. Increased visibility and accountability in the budgeting process and expenditure tracking that ensure alignment between investments and impact.

3. Detailed project plans that link tasks to deliverables to outcomes and define the workflow for the approval process for the deliverables to improve predictability, on-time deliverability, and cost management.

4. Systems for storing and easily searching marketing assets along with guidelines outlining usage parameters and templates that enable field marketing, sales and distribution partners to localize and customize any content for specific geographies, customer segments and customers that promote sharing and reuse and ensure that sales and field organizations can find and use these assets, resulting in better return on investment.

5. Development and deployment of dashboards that enable marketing organization to gain instant visibility into key outcome-based, operational and activity metrics.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

But it is working. Entrepreneur after entrepreneur have told me of their success stories in generating revenue and even reaching profitability. Now with such achievements, it is that much easier to get calls returned from Angels and Venture Capitalists (with a better negotiating stance).

This begs the question. If they had been focused on revenue and profitability from the beginning what might have been different? Would they have reached both milestones that much earlier? There is no way to answer that definitively. However, I do believe it to be true (though I am biased).

The focus on revenue and profitability is a positive outcome of the last 12 months. Lets hope that it continues.

CEOs face challenges every day. If you’re the CEO of a small or medium size business (SMB) your challenges not only include prioritizing the numerous demands on your time, balancing short-term opportunities with long term goals, managing cash flow and long sales cycles, solving resource shortages ranging from funds to people, but also the variety of hats you wear as the CEO. The SMB CEO is often responsible for closing key deals and serving as the company’s primary marketer. Sound familiar? Then build this simple CEO marketing toolkit, designed to save you valuable time and money.

Every toolkit should have six basic items:

- A hammer, to use as a lever

- A wrench, to turn things

- A screwdriver, to attach or close things

- Pliers, to bend things or hold on to small stuff

- Screws, bolts, duct tape or super glue, to connect things

- A measuring tape, to – you guessed it! – take measurements

Let’s translate these everyday tools into marketing tools.

In the world of marketing, the hammer is your company’s value proposition. What’s a value proposition? Simple – it’s the basic reasoning for why people should consider your product or service. Your value proposition shows you understand who the customer is, and what they want and need, and that you understand their purchasing criteria and supplier evaluation attributes. It answers the question, “Why should someone buy from you?” It addresses pain points and buying motives while serving as the basis for your positioning.

Here’s an example of a weak value proposition: ‘Company A is a leading provider of real-time mobile network intelligence solutions that are creating the foundation for a successful mobile data experience.’

This is a stronger value proposition: ‘Company B tailors and integrates web-based solutions that automate business processes so broker-dealers can increase rep and employee loyalty.’  Which example best reflects your value proposition?

Your second important tool is your wrench. Generating more sales leads is one of the top three business goals. How do you turn on lead generation? By developing market-centric actions tied to incremental behavioral commitments – we call this the Buying Pipeline.  How do you control the pipeline flow? By optimizing the marketing mix (offer, price, placement and promotion) to address your prospects needs, wants and buying process.

You need an all-purpose screwdriver for closing and tightening. In the business world, the screwdriver represents your proposal and contract templates, customer references, and how accessible you can make your products and services to prospective customers. Having the opportunity to try your products or services before buying is key to accelerating the adoption process.

Use these six questions to gauge the speed of adoption of your product or service:

1. Does the target perceive that the product/service adds value?

2. Is the product compatible with current practices and processes?

3. Is the product/service easy to understand and use?

4. Can the product/service be sampled and/or trialed?

5. What is the risk factor in buying/using the product? (Tip: lower is better)

6. Is it easy to communicate the advantages of the product/service?

No toolkit is complete without a set of pliers, which allow you to hold onto small delicate objects. In the business world, these delicate objects can be your prospects. Pliers also offer flexibility – as do your product/service roadmap, product line, product configuration, purchasing and financing options.

Screws, bolts and glue allow you to connect or hold things together. To connect your business operations together, make a contact management and/or relational database system that supports sales, customer support and marketing, which should be one of your first considerations (not something you install once the task has become formidable and expensive).

Although listed last, the business equivalent of the ruler or measuring tape is one of your most important tools. Use metrics in your company’s business, marketing and sales plans to clearly identify how success will be measured, and to track your business’ progress towards that success. Metrics can include securing a specific set of customers, a certain number of deals each quarter, a certain amount of repeat business from existing customers etc. These business outcomes serve as the basis for your strategies and tactics.

These six simple tools will:

- help you clarify why people should buy from you

- make it easy for people to adopt your product or service

- give you and your prospects room to maneuver on product and pricing

- enable you to establish sales and marketing processes and systems

- help you establish clear metrics that indicate how well you are achieving your business objectives

With your CEO marketing toolkit in place, here are three tips on using it for maximum impact:

1. Remember to repair things that are broken quickly – the longer you wait, the worse and more expensive it can get.

2. Use the best materials you can afford.

3. And wise words from my father apply, “Do the job right the first time.”  Rework is expensive in both time and money.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

Panopto
MyBuzz.us
TweepML
Bluyah
ValueAppeal

So, what’s a CEO to do?

First, ask your Sales Manager if he/she knows how many deals need to be closed in order to reach the revenue objectives for the next two quarters. Odds are pretty high that the Sales department isn’t thinking of number of deals, so they don’t have a solid handle on the amount of effort necessary to generate the required level of deals. Many companies, sadly, don’t even know the average selling price of their products.

Next, stop by the Marketing Manager’s office and ask him/her how many contacts their programs need to generate to deliver a closed order. Chances are good that your Marketing ace may have data related the conversion of impressions to leads, but struggle when it comes to knowing how many qualified leads convert to prospects. So, the Marketing department won’t be able to say how much effort (lead generation) is required to get a deal either.

It’s time for the CEO to insist that Sales and Marketing integrate the lead pipeline with the sales pipeline into a “buying pipeline”, a customer-centric planning and management tool that keeps the company steadfastly focused on the customer at every stage of the cycle.  The buying pipeline tracks the entire course from target to contact, to suspect, to lead, to qualified lead, to prospect and, finally, to customer.  Using a buying pipeline approach encourages Marketing and Sales to work together to understand where each opportunity is in the pipeline and who has the primary responsibility to move it forward.  A useful guideline is for Marketing to own the processes from target to qualified lead; and Sales to own the processes from qualified lead to customer.  Ownership does not mean that the two functions work in isolation.  Unfettered communication between the functions is essential for both developing and honing the pipeline.

A solid pipeline tool also details the many steps and the consequent time involved in each phase.  It’s an easy leap to see how the pipeline can be used to create a dashboard for measuring marketing and sales progress toward revenue goals.

If you embrace this approach, start the buying pipeline as far back as the target, rather than later with a qualified lead, the company can gauge which programs are most effective in reaching viable targets.  Beginning the analysis at the qualified lead stage reveals only half of the story.

Each stage of the pipeline has different demands for the company and product.  For example, at the target and contact stage marketing must create awareness for the company and product.  After all, people buy from people they know.  At the suspect and lead stage, marketing is focuses on getting the audience more familiar with the company and product.  People buy from people they like.  At the lead stage, Marketing and Sales collaborate to determine which leads are qualified so the best opportunities can be pursued.  It is at this transition stage that sales takes the helm in pursuing qualified leads while marketing needs to nurture those opportunities that are not ready to be harvested.

At each stage along the way monitor your progress.  You’ll want to keep tabs on how many people/companies populated each stage and how many advanced to the next stage.  With a little history, a company can assess its conversion ratio and begin to fine-tune its efforts, propelling more opportunities to conversion faster. Over time, employing a buying pipeline provides a consistent way for both small and large companies to track conversion ratios, identify bottlenecks, and monitor the sales cycle. Most important of all, a buying pipeline enhances a company’s ability to win new customers–and thrive.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

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In the first group, while the tactics were well defined, they were not anchored to any specific strategies or objectives.  Someone reading the plan for the first time would have trouble understanding why the organization is embarking on these efforts and what outcomes are intended.  The second group contains an enormous amount of information about the market, company, customers, competitors and a set of strategies and tactics.  However, in this group, it is difficult to connect all the dots between the information, the plan and the outcomes.  While it may seem that the two categories have little in common, the one common link is their inability to tell their company story.  A good marketing plan is in essence the “Cliff Notes” version of the company story explaining current status, how it got there, and what if anything needs to be addressed and if so, by whom, how, with what and when.  A good marketing plan has all the elements of a well-told story.

A good story grabs our attention, captures our imagination and draws us to the characters–both the heroes and villains–and to the situation at hand.  A marketing plan should do the same. While a marketing plan doesn’t need to be a novel, it does need to provide a context, define the situation, clarify the objectives and measures of success, and establish the strategies and tactics for achieving outcomes.  A marketing plan must provide a setting and context, just as a story does.

Once we have established the context, we can very quickly provide the information about the organization’s successes and challenges, its market, position, competition and customer information.  As with all stories it needs to be clear how the situation came to be and what challenges and obstacles must be overcome. Opportunities also need to be presented. Once the situation and the objectives are clear it’s time to explain what must be done for the story to end “happily ever after.” It seems that most good stories contain at least one and sometimes both elements - something that must be overcome and/or something that must be acquired – the elusive quest and the slaying of the dragon. A well-crafted marketing plan lays out the same information whether there are any dragons to defeat or quests to complete.

Once we understand the primary plot, the remainder of the story, that is your plan, must outline the challenges and the quest; define what it will take to succeed and win; identify which competitors to overcome and which dragons must be slain; and identify the strategies and tactics to deploy by whom, when, and at what cost.  As with every story, there needs to be some detail about the players, their skills and flaws, and an outline of the tactics to be deployed – perhaps its developing a new product or service to pursue a new market and fill a portfolio gap, perhaps its establishing a new channel relationship.  Keep the tables and charts of your market, along with customer and competitive information, as they are illustrations for your story. Just understand they are not the story.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.