The Marketing IT Process Strategist Blog

Why Marketing Is The Least Efficient Process In Business Today

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:19:56 GMT

I'm not the only one saying it. So, Marketing, listen up! It's not about comparing your brand against your competitors any more. It's about comparing the way that you go about doing Marketing against a more optimized way. If you're inefficient in how you do marketing, then you're not fast and lean. This waste removes your competitiveness. It ends your career.

Is Building A Marketing Database Worth Losing Your Job?

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:40:33 GMT

A little known secret is that those who control the marketing database control the future of the marketing operations. They win.

Is Your Marketing Automation Being Done By Machine Men With Machine Minds And Machine Hearts?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:31:03 GMT

At the conclusion of Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", he delivers a memorable speech that describes how technology has brought us closer yet there are those who use it as "brutes" to tell others "what to do, what to think and what to feel". He calls them "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts." When you think of automation, think of this. By definition, automation requires the use of control systems to orchestrate a variety of steps to eliminate human involvement. In the context of marketing, the term 'marketing automation' in popular parlance seems to conjure up dreams of personalized customer treatment, where the right information reaches the one in need of it at the right time with the least human intervention. But where do you put the human touch to keep from coming across as a "machine man" with a "machine mind" and a "machine heart"? You start by respecting the fact that you're dealing with people not objects. Allow them, therefore, to explore the information that you have, rather than direct them on what to do, unless guidance is what they give you indication they wish from you. Take a stepwise approach to profiling your contacts, as they consume the assortment of information that you have for them. This information is the context in which they operate and, if you're sensitive to how they interact with specific elements of this information within this context, you may be able to suggest a more continuous and fitting presentation of new information, as you adapt to their preferences. Call your behavior a "context-sensitive interaction" with your clients. What do you control in this environment? You control 2 things: 1) the initial information that makes up the contact's context and 2) the degree of guidance that you can offer the contact when coursing through this context. What do you not control? You don't control the contact preferences or response to the information context. Since you don't control this, neither can a marketing automation machine. But you must be ready to adapt yourself progressively to both of the contact preferences and responses to avoid acting like a machine and not a human in your marketing efforts.

Building A Marketing Operation Flexible Enough For A Recession

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:07:48 GMT

Your marketing operation cannot afford a recession and a panic response from you to freeze it in place. How can you remain nimble and thrive?

What Marketing Automation Project Sponsors Are Not Saying About Their Chosen Solutions

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:24:00 GMT

A Demand Gen Report sponsored by Manticore Technology reveals that early adopters of marketing automation technology are giving high marks to their chosen technologies and emphasize ease of use and rollout. The survey results, however, are more eloquent for what they do not say. They indicated that 79.2 of participants said that on another go-around they would better prepare their organization for a project of this nature by "building proper processes and content offers to feed the automation system. Now, if only 1 out of 5 people was satisfied with the proper degree of preparation in process definition and with the available amount of content that was needed to run these automated marketing procedures, then what does that say about the volume of content available and the procedures that were automated (if at all) through the launch of the new systems for the remaining 4 people out of 5 in the survey audience? What do survey results say about these CMOs' degree of preparation for such projects? Could it be said that 80 of participants were unprepared for the amount of process definition discipline, complexity and content volume demands that automation would make of them? My experience tells me so. But who is talking about this out there in the industry? Always look at who sponsors these surveys and reports. Follow the money.

Here Within Reach Are The Fundamentals Of Applied Lead Nurturing

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:59:30 GMT

Below is an excellent presentation from Marketo regarding the latest insights and techniques in Lead Nurturing, backed by findings from MarketingSherpa and Sirius Decisions. The presentation walks you through a definition of the Lead Nurturing Process, a method for how to conduct Lead Nurturing, and some ideas on calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing. Lead Nurturing is a crucial function in the B2B marketing business process. This introductory presentation offers some basic insights that can move you farther down the road toward becoming a more disciplined database marketing practitioner, since you do need a solid marketing database to accomplish effective lead nurturing. Enjoy!

What's The Trade-Off In Standardizing Marketing Using SaaS?

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:22:54 GMT

When standardizing marketing operations by getting a SaaS solution there is more to it than just selecting the pretty front-end. Find out what else.

Why Marketing In A Recession Requires A Marketing IT Process Strategy

Wed, 27 May 2009 08:07:21 GMT

Marketing in a recession will force radical change upon your operation. What single point of focus could make or break you?

How Social Technology Could Lead To Better Customer Relationships

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 03:44:07 GMT

What's technology for if not to build closer relationships between people?

Listen to Charlene Li, author of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies" speak about this vision.

Her emphasis: Marketers should concentrate on developing a conversation rather than just delivering a one-way message.

This goes against Marketing's DNA. Nevertheless, using social technology, listen and learn from your customers before engaging them in a dialogue.

Of great importance is to note how different social technology user segments become involved at different levels with that technology while networking in their communities. This will make demands on the business intelligence technologies and strategies from companies facilitating these communities.

What's The Story Behind Marketing In A Recession?

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:28:08 GMT

Seth Godin's says of marketing in a recession that "the challenge for marketers is to figure out how to change the story they are living so that their customers can change the story they tell themselves. What you make, where you make it, who makes it, how it's priced and sold and ... it all adds up to a perception. If you change these elements the story will change too."

When times were rolling the challenge was all about persuading the customer to believe a storyline of Consume! Consume! So marketers indulged themselves. They bought lots of ads space, agency services, cool new demand gen technology. Now that times have changed, the challenge per Seth Godin should be to change the story, right? The new line could be Preserve! Preserve! That's what you're living. But do that and who will buy from you? So how consistent is this reasoning?

It may seem counterproductive, but persuading people to save up during the good times and consume from their reserves during the bad times is actually a pretty reasonable story to tell, particularly if you understand the business cycle. But what marketing organization is actually going to set out a strategy to ride the economic boom-bust cycle in this fashion? It's just not done!

Godin is right. The story has changed. What (little) you make, wherever you can affordably make it now, whoever is still employed to make it for you, and how you've had to slash prices or stock it up in inventory does indeed add up to a perception -- the perception of recession.

Marketing in a recession takes more than changing a story to change perception. It deals squarely with reality -- the reality of a market crash, unemployment, liquidation, thrift, fear. Take Robin Robins comment about poor marketing results often stemming from marketing messages that are boring, off target, and lacking compelling offers, testimonials, headlines, and other critical elements required to get results. As president of Techonology Marketing Toolkit, her focus is VARs, computer consultants, resellers, integrators and solution providers who must be highly flexible in this tough economy. Small businesses need laser focus on a niche. They need to be agile and nimble to survive. So do big ones. That's more important than a change in story.

How practical is this advise about becoming truly agile and nimble as a marketig operation?

Consider what Business Solutions Info illustrates in its "Is Your Marketing Plan In A Recession?" article:

"Advanced Microcomputing Concepts (AMC) was experiencing double-digit growth selling communications solutions to the real estate vertical market until the market dried up. Through the VARs quick thinking and marketing initiatives, it was able to branch out into other vertical markets. Even though the real estate market is now in a slump, AMCs business isnt."

Yours doesnt have to be, either.

Why Join A Marketing Operations Group Online?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:21:57 GMT

Yesterday I joined the Marketing Operations Future Forum that Gary Katz at Marketing Operations Partners founded 5 days ago through LinkedIn. Already 100 members have signed up. The representative sample is rather revealing.

Although half of the membership consists primarily of consultants and integrators, one-fourth of the members are pure marketers handling operations or doing marketing for an enterprise that is not selling solutions specifically to marketers.

Gary explains that the purpose of this group is to serve as a "steering committee on moving forward with agreed-upon industry initiatives." Sounds like the mission statement still needs a bit of refining. But that's fine. This is a hatching professional field.

So for the time being I'm just excited to find so many people come together so quickly since the group's inception less than a week ago. Ideally like me they're interested in a similar vision to that which Gary shared during a luncheon this month in San Francisco that kicked off the creation of the group.

In that conference he covered the following points:

The field of Marketing Operations still needs to define itself as a profession
Its major stakeholder -- the CMO -- is also struggling with definition
There is opportunity to develop the profession

Standards, certification, a training & development model
It may be possible to "grow the pie"
The profession can have a greater impact on the enterprise

There is opportunity for marketing operators to practice what they preach

There is need for better alignment & collaboration
For better integration of talent and technology supply chain
For a clearer path for customers to find and get help

Key question: As a profession, are marketing operations managers either breaking or perpetuating silos with their current operations?

All these are fine points. But one caught my attention most. It was made by Dave Hutchinson from the Project Management Institute for Marketing & Sales, who spoke of the relationship between project management and marketing operations.

It struck a chord with me as a key area of discussion about the future of Marketing Operations, and the main reasons why I've been working on my SCPM or Stanford Advanced Project Management certificate, since the management of a critical corporate operation does require a solid discipline in project management and organization.

Verified expertise in advance project management, therefore, should be a minimum requirement for any marketing operations manager to meet in large enterprises.

Who Is The Right Crowd In The Cloud?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:09:17 GMT

So you're curious about what people are saying about you? Were you raised to pay attention to gossip? It seems today a whole new business model is taking shape built upon the premise that listening to what the masses have to say about you as a company will somehow reveal the truth about both the masses and you.

I'm going to make a bold and unpopular statement here, which is that Salesforce.com's newly launched customer services SaaS called Service Cloud is not much more than a futile effort at listening to the masses gossip about your company to glean from forums, social networks and the blogosphere some actionable "knowledge" to help you achieve your company's vision. Sounds exciting?

It may seem condescending to say that there is a group of people better than the masses. But it isn't necessarily disdain and superiority against the masses that leads one to state the obvious, which is that a crowd by mere fact of being the biggest crowd of all does not have some kind of inexorable ability to produce high grade, collective knowledge that may be funneled down into your company's customer service organization to help it do its job better. This notion, in a word, is mush.

Think of who is the crowd in the cloud?

I like what Albert J. Nock in his brief though tremendously incisive essay titled "Isaiah's Job" has to say about the masses vs. their nemesis, what he calls the Remnant:

"What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?

"As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians. But it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either."

What's the point of building a "knowledge" base founded on the tweets, sputters and grumbles from mass-man? The video below from Salesforce.com idealizes what can be found in this multitude of data that, like a restless sea, tosses back and forth ever changing in the masses.

Measure the cost of entering those rough waters. Target the Remnant instead. They're hard to spot. But they're the right crowd in the cloud.

The Bottom Line On Cloud Computing

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:53:05 GMT

How To Guarantee Economic Value From Your SaaS Marketing Automation Investment

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:20:53 GMT

Marketing in a recession is hard enough to do if demand for your products is on a decline. But when your budget gets the squeeze, it's time to start doing some things differently if you're to survive. How about some pennies from heaven?

Some marketers are choosing to optimize their operations through marketing automation using cloud computing or software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to reduce marketing operation expense while securing productivity gains fast. According to The New York Times:

"These days, no computer user is an island. A recent study determined that 80 per cent of the data used by business comes from outside the company. Cloud computing 'is the technical response to this reality', said Anthony Arott of anti-virus software company Trend Micro, based in California.

A somewhat broader definition of cloud computing comes from Barry X. Lynn, CEO of 'cloud platform' provider 3tera of Aliso Viejo, California. 'A lot of people define the cloud as having the computers be someplace else. And that's not true,' he said. People have run IT in data centres they didn't own for years. In the 1970s, we called that 'remote job entry'. In the 1990s, it was 'outsourced data centres'. It's not a new concept.'"

SaaS and cloud computing may sound new, but theyve been with us for a long time in various forms. The key value of SaaS and whatever is handled by computers in the cloud is in enabling you to optimize your operation fast and cheaply -- without building the core infrastructure. This way you can exploit the (little) market opportunity there is in the economy today.

This means that SaaS products have better take less than 3 months to implement so that by month 6 from project initiation you're able to benefit from efficiencies and greater productivity from optimized operations. How do you accomplish this?

You've better think about your SaaS provider of choice being able to talk to other platforms whether on or off-premises. These bridges to be built by your SaaS provider to other SaaS or internal systems have better be straight-forward to set up and test, while remaining flexible enough to grow with your operation and the infrastructure they're connecting to.

Your SaaS should also be able to convert data into whatever format is necessary to enable other systems dependent on it to operate, including keeping data clean or cleaning it on its way to another system.

Your SaaS should be able to depend upon a top team of consultants with expert knowledge of the product and a tried methodology to get you up and running in no time. You're taking all kinds of risk if you don't work out your SaaS arrangement this way. And with all that risk unmitigated, chances are you might not secure economic value quickly from your SaaS investment. It's fire and brimstone that will rain on you then!

How Is Your SaaS Managing Its Risk Of Depending On Another SaaS To Continue Scaling Operations?

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:30:20 GMT

SaaS Operations and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) expert Dani Shomron speaks about the transition that on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers will have to confront very soon as their areas of specialization conflict with the way that they've set up their own business models:

"...[I]f you look around, you will notice that most SaaS providers are also SaaS consumers. From CRM to Marketing generation, to financials, to you-name-it, SaaS companies are adopters of SaaS technology. (Of course most SaaS companies are even greater adopters of open source; hey, its free!).

"Still, most on-demand providers are running their own data centers, the network, the servers, the storage, and I would dare to say, not excelling in that department. SaaS technologists are product people. Innovative, creative, not harnessed by process or procedure. The typical data center is a product of evolution gone haywire. You start up with a couple of servers, and slowly build up, slapping a switch here, a database there, buying a cheap router, until it becomes quite unmanageable. And they probably do not have the right staff to design and maintain the infrastructure.

"SaaS companies are finding it hard to let go of their infrastructure assets, but more and more are realizing that they simply suck at the job. Especially if they are big enough for it to matter, but too small to do a good job.

"Networking, hosting, storage and server management have become a commodity. And as such, shouldnt you let someone else do the job?

"Enter the managed service providers. They will take care of every tier that you will allow them access to. From hosting, to networking, servers, storage, database monitoring and management, and many are interested in taking over the application management, if you just let them. It is the next tier and probably most lucrative."

SaaS is very alluring, particularly if you wish to execute on rapid marketing in a recession. You can overhaul key areas of your marketing operation very quickly by adopting a SaaS model. But as someone who has had to put these models into operation several times, I will say that it's not often that I find a marketing organization who has done its due diligence in understanding how the SaaS model truly operates from the SaaS provider's point of view. Data integration. Data Hygiene. Infrastructure Scalability. Data Security. None of these matters disappear under a SaaS model of operation. The risks are only hidden outside the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the client and the SaaS provider. Make sure you understand the direction your SaaS provider is taking with its infrastucture. It's not only your data they're hosting. They're hosting your operation, and that can be your future, you know!

Where Will SaaS Data Quality Control Come From?

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:01:44 GMT

SaaS based operations without data quality control are not long sustained. Where can you expect help to arrive from?

Why Integrate Your SaaS Also In The Cloud

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:27:00 GMT

The following is a bit technical. But if you're thinking of automating your marketing process through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider like Eloqua to plug it right into your CRM system, which might also be hosted by a SaaS provider like Saleforce.com, then you need to study the following a bit. The bottom line is that as businesses choose the SaaS model to run more of their operations in the cloud, these SaaS point solutions proliferate across the enterprise. In a large company one division might be running its marketing operation on Eloqua, another on Engage B2B and another on Market2Lead. They might be plugging right into various instances of Salesforce.com. Suddenly, if the corporation's CEO wanted to see a view of the whole enchilada integrated, the corporate marketing and sales ops team might find itself knocking on IT's door. But avoiding IT was one of the main reasons why these marketers and reps decided to go with a SaaS model. What then? Here is where the following explanation proves useful. First remember the importance of service oriented architecture (SOA) and the role business services play in it. (See video) Then consider what Phil Wainewright has to say below about how SaaS providers need to exchange these services between each other. Phil Wainewright, a consultant who works with SaaS system integrators, explains in this interview how integration can be done independently in the cloud much better by a single service provider focused on making SaaS work between each other than by SaaS providers creating point-to-point connections between the systems you've subscribed into. This is crucial information because the multi-tenancy nature of autonomous SaaS solutions limits how flexible a point-to-point connection can be between SaaS systems that get configured differently by each tenant, yet is shared as the SaaS connector-in-common with other tenants but with different configuration needs than yours. In other words, there is only so much you can expect from a point-to-point connection between 2 different SaaS providers. Tweak it too far and it will stop working for you. Phil is interviewing Richard Nucci, CTO at Boomi, a SaaS systems integration firm. He puts the matter well. "The [integration] solution provider brings with him an arsenal of pre-thought-out, best-of-breed SaaS apps that are pre-integrated yet customizable to meet that customer's unique workflow. And I think that's a huge opportunity for sure and something that's really just in its early days." Not early enough! Just perfect timing, Richard.

What To Fear When Deploying A Demand Generation System

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:35:10 GMT

There is a healthy exchange recorded at David Raab's blog between marketing automation vendors like Eloqua and Marketo and corresponding system integrators regarding what it takes to successfully deploy a demand generation system. David is a well known consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis and publisher of the "Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems."

The Scourge Of SaaS: Data Integration

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:00:53 GMT

It's not plug and play. I wished it were. But what then would be left for Service 2.0 system integrators like Appirio to do? The point is that Software-as-a-Service providers have systems that have to talk to other systems inside your company, and connecting them is not a slam dunk, especially if you're a large enterprise. Don't believe me? Well, listen to what Informatica , the leading independent provider of data integration solutions, has to say about it. In its "Solving Cloud Data Integration: A Key Challenge for SaaS Providers" white paper, Informatica explains the 3 challenges that SaaS providers must overcome to become truly successful:

Legacy Data Migration: Referred to as the "Onboarding Challenge", SaaS clients often need to transfer their operations data from existing systems to their SaaS provider to ensure operational continuity. Extracting, transforming and bringing this client data onboard the SaaS system is a delicate job which many SaaS providers do not have expertise in doing. But can you afford to start your operation from scratch, without historical data, as if you were a start-up operation?

Ongoing On-premises Data Feeds: You might upload one big batch of legacy data into a SaaS solution to get your operation started. But what if you need to continue feeding that SaaS system with more data from that internal source? Can your SaaS provider handle ongoing feeds? "Many SaaS providers lack an adequate infrastructure to handle synchronization, in which reliability, failure detection, and guaranteed [data] delivery are critical," says Informatica. Can you afford to live with a SaaS data island, isolated from your on-premises, mission-critical systems?

Hand-coded Data Integration: The SaaS provider wants your business. To get it, it will code by hand the integration routine necessary to get your data into its system. But the more clients this SaaS gains, the more daunting is the maintenance of these hand-coded and inflexible integration points. Where do you think it will apply its engineering resources? Will it dedicate them to developing more functionality into the SaaS application or to keeping your system integrated and from falling apart? Either way you will pay for it through higher subscription fees or the SaaS provider's growth will be stunted. Where should your investment go then?

Fortunately Informatica offers data integration delivered within a SaaS providers environment as well as hosted data integration services (data integration "in the cloud") as explained in their white paper. It's a worthwhile read. Consider it carefully.

Cloud Computing Made Easy

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 06:48:24 GMT

With over 50,000 clients, Salesforce.com is the poster child for Software-as-a-Service. Without a doubt it has more flexibility than many other SaaS providers targeting marketing and sales departments out there, which is all the more reason to remember that it has taken this company a decade to get to where it is today. It makes a difference, believe me, because in attempting to integrate a less mature SaaS solutions to Salesforce.com recently, I've had to admit that, despite SaaS solutions not being as customizable as packaged enterprise applications, yet Salesforce.com does offer greater room to play when you try to set it up to match your idealized business process. It doesn't fit like a glove. But it's better than a catcher's mitt. That's why this video from Salesforce.com explaining cloud computing carries weight. But don't kid yourself. We're still a long way from these SaaS solutions being truly customizable to meet your complex global enterprise situations. If you're a small business, however, it's time to get serious about cloud computing.

A Simple Way To Understand The Credit Crisis

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:35:23 GMT

What brought us this Great Recession that is pressuring you to improve your marketing or face demise? Here is a terrific and highly visual explanation. It's also a great example of how powerful online animation can be at explaining difficult material in an easy way. It's what online marketing is all about!
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

How Deploying A SaaS During A Recession Might Send You To The Morgue

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:42:04 GMT

SaaS is cheap to deploy. We're in a recession. What could be simpler? Find out the simple truth.

Gambling Your Choice of SaaS In A Tough Economy

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:33:45 GMT

Established enterprise software makers like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are moving into the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) space, giving it more legitimacy than companies like Salesforce.com and Google have produced for CIO's and others deciding whether to adopt this method of software delivery.

Google and Salesforce.com have demonstrated that SaaS offerings can take solid root at the department or divisional level within a large enterprise. But can SaaS take on the large enterprise as a whole? That's to be seen, as these SaaS projects become more complex. In the words of Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc.:

"...even as some SaaS projects may start to resemble the complicated on-premise software projects they replace, the benefits of SaaS have not diminished, Kaplan said. These include little to no up-front costs for hardware, faster upgrade cycles, the chance to get applications into the hands of users faster and the ability to scale the service up or down easily.

"And though more complex installations of any kind carry an inherent risk, SaaS deployments still pose far less risk than on-premise ones."

This is the result of maturation. The SaaS industry is growing. It has triumph at securing a beachhead and now finds itself increasing its rate of system deployments, "given such factors as the ability to scale down the number of users as economic conditions change or to cater to a dispersed workforce," said Kaplan.

But can that foothold turn into advancement into the hinterlands of enterprisewide deployments? Is your SaaS a sustainable proposition? The current economic downturn will sift this market. Be sure to place your chips in the right place.

Dealing With SaaS Integration In Marketing and Sales Automation

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:11:08 GMT

Running a SaaS integration project is not what most marketing and sales SaaS clients subscribe for. But the need for integration is big. SaaS only raises the urgency. How do you deal with that?

How This Recession Mandates A Radical Change In The Rules Of Marketing

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:46:13 GMT

Here are some salient points from the January 18, 2009 edition of Business 24/7.

The emphasis falls on Marketing innovating its operations process to exploit new opportunities in a dramatically shifting world.

The rules of marketing are changing.

1. Prepare to make structural changes to your marketing operation.

"Media companies have not, as yet, dealt with the structural pressures confronting them. Despite digital media being the dominant growth opportunity as marketers seek advertising that is more targeted, accountable, and interactive, many media firms have yet to profit from it. It will become more popular during the downturn. . . .

2. The days of a captive TV audience are behind us. A fragmented audience online is the target.

"Consumers now spend more time online, devoting time and attention to online news and video entertainment, blogs, search engines, online games, social networking, and e-commerce. Demographically, reports suggest that members of Generation Y spend 30 per cent more time online than watching TV. . . .

3. Go digital or go bust!

"Leading companies that did not limit their efforts to quick fixes and instead undertook efforts to reshape their cost structures fundamentally, found themselves stronger following previous downturns. Media companies should do the same by directing money and attention to digital assets and related capabilities that are key to growth following the downturn, and by shedding struggling analog. . . .

4. Cash is King

"Cash and liquidity provide significant advantages in the media and entertainment world today, with more opportunities for players with strong balance sheets to pursue acquisitions. . . .

5. Innovate to survive

"The best companies recognise that a harsh economic climate does not mean the end of innovation. . . .

6. Focus on giving customers the experience they want. The money will come.

"Today, marketers will pay for media environments that deliver an engaging experience to a targeted audience and move consumers closer to a purchase, and they will pay for the opportunity to create a consumer relationship. Online newsletters, video games, online video, and mobile phone content represent target-rich areas that are ripe for advertising-oriented innovation. . .

7. Build the digital customer relationship and your business might survive to see a new era.

"Media and entertainment companies that target such spending need to adapt faster and stay ahead of demand. This current economic downturn will accelerate a shift in consumer behaviour and advertising toward more digital media, with intensity and permanency. . . ."

No matter how you phrase it, marketing won't be the same after this recession. The Digital Age will require more systematic, disciplined and targeted processes that blend marketing strategy with deep technological know-how.

Avoiding The SaaS Integration Straight Jacket

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:25:28 GMT

SaaS integration is a topic neither SaaS subscribers nor SaaS service providers spend much time discussing before signing the dotted line. But whose job is to talk about it and why?

The Key To Recession Marketing Success Beyond The Moment

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:52:58 GMT

Recession marketing is top of mind today. But is today all there is? What saves you now while it profits you tomorrow?

How Marketers Can Beat Recession? Inspire and Innovate, Say Heavy-Hitting CMO's

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:43:38 GMT

"Inspiration and innovation were constant themes at the [Association of National Advertisers Conference], which focused on how Masters of Marketing are dealing with the dramatic changes driven both by the economy and technological advances. 'Balancing inspirational and operational marketing, and moving from spray and pray to precision marketing' are two key fundamental guidelines for the future..."

It's not all bad news for marketers in this economic downturn. Some serious marketing leaders are hitting the nail on the head and providing real hope through clear direction.

They're not fussing about how companies should avoid making deep cuts in their marketing budgets as the recession worsens. They're keeping their message simple though positively constructive. In a word, they're calling for innovation. Will you answer the call? Are you ready to innovate the way you do marketing? How about starting with your business process? After all, that's what doing marketing really means. It means operating or processing work in a particular way.

What of your marketing process are you willing to innovate this year to become more systematic and deliberate and end the spray and pray approach to marketing? This is a time when you can no longer afford to be wasteful to keep the lights on in your operation.

What are you willing to modify to make your operation not only more efficient but more effective?

Will it be the way you process information to find your most responsive target audience?
Will it be the rate at which you convert responses into sales-ready leads?
Will it be the precision with which you deliver suitable content to contacts who need to progress sooner through the sales cycle?
Will it be the way you determine the right marketing mix of messages, communication vehicles and timing of delivery to generate the highest quality response at the least cost possible?

Pick a process. Formulate it. Test and refine it. Then relaunch it to innovate your operation. Try to survive this recession by improving the way you do business. Innovate your marketing process.

How The Optimized And Agile Marketing Organization Survives This Recession

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:06:05 GMT

Many marketing organizations will be under the gun in 2009 to improve performance or die. What can they do to survive that wont be make-shift, reactive work?

One thing will help marketing organizations start performing and it is workflow process optimization.

I know. It's that dreaded word: process. It's the kind of stuff that gets abstract very quickly, and Im writing primarily to a marketing audience, after all. So lets keep this visual and simple. Check out the rather straight-forward video below. It reduces to bare bones the basic idea behind process improvement.

The video speaks clearly of the purpose for improving process, which is to optimize the business operation. This optimization reduces cost, even substantially, thereby improving bottom line profit while also advancing marketing performance. Theres your argument, marketing, for staying alive in this recession!

Pay no mind to the fact that the illustration that the video uses is about order processing. Replace that example with campaign management and lead flow, and you got a relevant case about a process that marketing swears by, which has better progress favorably next year to improve dollar yield on demand generation expense.

Note now the benefits derived from process optimization according to the video above and what each could mean to marketing if achieved:

Standardization = An integrated marketing organization
Compliance = A credible marketing organization
Strategy-to-Operation Alignment = An effective marketing organization
Process Efficiency = An efficient marketing organization
System Assets Control = A safe and accountable marketing organization

Marketers, it's time to get busy with workflow process improvement for the marketing operation. Next to process improvement there is change management as another subject of importance that marketers should embrace in 2009. The market never rests so neither can your business. Facing these constant pressures to innovate, how will your operation cope with the invariable demand to adapt and remain agile? Thats what Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) helps with.

Youre a marketer and not IT, I know, and youve never heard of SOA. No worries. The following video is made just for you. Its an entertaining introduction to a methodology that, combined with business process management (BPM), will give you the fundamentals for truly transforming your operation for the better in the midst of a recession, and survive.

Why Knowing Your Marketing Process Helps You Decide Wisely Who To Layoff

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:13:23 GMT

Dr. John Sullivan, professor of management at San Francisco State University and the "Michael Jordan of Hiring" according to Fast Company, published earlier this year a fine article about the flexibility that a business gains when using a contingency workforce strategy to avoid layoffs.

In other words, he says to use contractors, part-timers and temps to achieve a nimble and cost-contained operation and avoid layoffs.

"A contingent workforce strategy is sometimes called a 'shamrock' strategy because it splits a firms labor force into three distinct leafs. Each leaf of the shamrock represents a different form of labor including permanent employees, contingent labor, or outsourced labor, each of which gets a predetermined percentage of work allocated to it.

"To support a shamrock strategy, HR departments must provide managers with a series of related tools that determine the appropriate balance of labor types given projected market conditions. This strategy gives managers an increased capability to cut labor costs whenever product sales decrease or conversely, to rapidly add talent when the business is growing."

There is a lot of juicy information from Sullivan about all the benefits that a contingency workforce affords an agile organization. He is light, however, on how to decide which resources provide the appropriate balance between labor types, i.e. between permanent, contingent and outsourced workers.

He comes close when stressing the importance of determining the ideal target percentage of contingent workers your operation should hold.

"Examine historical patterns to see what the highest growth rate could be, then do both a best- and worst-case scenario to estimate the maximum and minimum levels of contingent workers you will need for both scenarios. The normal range of contingent workers can be as low as 5 (in medium growth times) to a high of 25 of the total workforce. The high is set based on the maximum conceivable percentage of the workforce that could be laid off in a worst-case situation."

But what does it mean to examine historical patterns, especially in view of a worst-case scenario?

The way to look at the operation is through a study of the historical pattern of work flowing from worker to worker that defines the marketing process at your company.

Mapping that marketing process is the best way for you to discern where you need to apply a permanent head count to maintain the critical junctures secure, while applying contingent services in areas that need more temporal focus and support.

This is not something for HR to do but for the marketing operations team in conjunction with the marketing leadership. Only by formalizing your marketing process strategy is Management in a position to decide wisely, fairly and not reactively who and who not to lay off.

7 Principles On How To Use Web 2.0 For Innovative Marketing Process Strategy Execution

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:50:16 GMT

What is Web 2.0? According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) it's a "set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online. That includes blogs, wikis, social-networking sites and other online communities..." The WSJ says that marketers are using Web 2.0 technology to "collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion." Are you doing that? If not, the article speaks of 7 principles you could adopt to get results.

Build a community of customers and let them be part of the marketing process -- You know about this. You've done focus groups and surveys, right? Now take it to the next level and let your customers in on the process of product development, positioning and messaging through Web 2.0 technology. Make that wiki work for you!

Encourage your customers to participate in the community -- Offer notoriety, rewards, special privileges to participants and use a moderator to stimulate and prompt for customer involvement when interaction dwindles.

Join the discussion going on about you outside your company -- Have your ears been itching lately? Your customers talk to each other about you at forums and blogs. Are you part of those exchanges? Whether they're complementary or not is not the point. They're happening. What are you doing about it?

Stop it with the sell, sell, sell mantra! -- Bottom line: If your customers are lively participants in the plan to have you do for them what they want from you, then you won't have to sell them anything they don't already want and told you about.

It's not about controlling the conversation, but participating in it -- Let members in the community drive because, if they feel controlled, they will shut it down.

Find a 'marketing technopologist.' -- A technopologist? Well, that's WSJ's term for "a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction." You need one to play the circus master and keep the show from stalling.

Go all out and experiment! -- Web 2.0 is about trial and error. Have you tried to sell your products through avatars in a virtual world? Not yet? Try it out. Innovate.

Without a doubt there are cool new tools available for marketers to use in their craft. But always remember that piecing together a seamless experience for the customer is the key to an efficient marketing process strategy. Listening and delivering to customer expectations is the key to an effective marketing process strategy. Together experience and expectations fulfillment make your marketing process strategy successful. New Web 2.0 bells and whistles alone won't do it.

What Should Marketing Automation Focus On In 2009?

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 08:04:54 GMT

It seems like beyond fear of a layoff due to economic pressures, marketers fear one thing more: a decline in leads volume. Years of experience dealing with direct marketers and telemarketers have shown me that these folks like teens hooked to an iPod have a hard time letting go of volume. For all you hear about how there is a trade-off between lead quality and lead volume, and that quality should advance first because a qualified lead is all that a sales rep cares to work through, the marketers responsible for producing each lead tremble at the thought of having to let go of quantity to produce quality. The pipeline is drying up! Were scraping the bottom of the barrel! Send us more leads! is all too often the first response you hear from a telemarketer. Our quality scoring logic is too stringent! Open the floodgates! We need leads! follows soon after. As we wrap up this year and look into 2009, I couldnt agree more with what Elana Anderson, VP of product marketing at Unica, had to say about the recession and its impact on marketers. The downturn will certainly place more emphasis on marketing performance and accountability. Marketers will need to do more with less, and the answer to drive short-term results will no longer be the easy answer i.e. increase marketing volume. There you have it, that dreaded focus on volume. Its the easy answer. But there is a reason why this is so. When was the last time your marketing organization was evaluated by the impact that quality of interaction with customers had on the bottom line? Focus on volume is the easy answer because volume is easy to track, while the influence of quality on sales is hard as nails to identify. Elana hits it on the head, however, when she explains the function that marketing automation can play in making tracking of influence more feasible. As she put it, companies should leverage marketing automation technology across channels and lines of business to drive customer centricity and marketing automation technology must focus beyond outbound communication processes, like the automating of email broadcasting, and instead enable targeted and customized messaging at inbound customer interaction points. Beyond that, marketing automation needs to support integration across inbound touchpoints and outbound messages. Integration. Thats the name of the game! Silo busting. And isnt it thrift or consolidation of efforts to reduce waste basically what pulls an economy out of recession any way? So make sure that whenever you start discussing marketing automation around the conference table next year to improve operational efficiency and marketing dollar yield, you keep in mind that the main objective will need to be the elimination of silos of operation in lieu of integrated marketing performance.

Marketing Process ROI: Show Me The Money

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 10:57:26 GMT

Rushing into marketing process automation for a low SaaS rental fee seems prudent to a CMO under the gun. What crucial insight must you remember while estimating your SaaS ROI?

What Will You Do If Your SaaS Provider Goes Out Of Business Next Year?

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:28:23 GMT

This year Business-Software.com revealed its top 10 hosted CRM vendors. The list contains all the usual suspects commanding a presence in the SaaS space today. The top 10 hosted CRM vendors for 2008 were

Aplicor
Netsuite
Siebel CRM onDemand
RightNow Technologies
Sage Software
Salesforce.com
Commence Corporation
Soffront Software
eSalestrack
SugarCRM

These providers cover the gamut servicing from SMB to Enterprise clients. Theyre well known, which is the more reason to wonder what will become of them in the next 2 years as the economy enters a global recession? Going by what technology evangelist for cloud computing infrastructure Michael Sheehan has to say, the future of SaaS couldnt be brighter. In fact, in his recent article How To Survive the Global Recession Through Cloud Computing," Michael asserts that cloud computing will be one of the main catalysts for technology-savvy companies to stay in business, basing his considerations on Gartners "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009". He emphasizes the need for improved integration. Key to Integration is making the connections easier through the use of public APIs. As more companies expose their APIs to developers, the wheels for integration become even more greased. This is all fine and good provided that these API are carefully documented, but more critical is that APIs must adhere to some sort of standard, said Sheehan. He is right about integration. But Im with Lawson Software's CEO, Harry Debes, when he quips that SaaS is history repeating itself and questionable as an operations model long term. In fact, he gives it 2 more years before it faces its first major tumble. The way the economy is going, I give it 1 year. He agrees that the business case for SaaS seems straightforward: you see the software, you like it, you want it. So you subscribe to it. But, if you're the SaaS provider, "because all your costs are up front, and your revenue is over a five year period, the more you sell, the more you lose. You don't break-even till the four-and-a-half year mark, but here's a bigger problem--there's no guarantee that that customer is still going to be yours in four years' time. Getting signed up as a SaaS customer is fast, but getting out is just as fast, Debes said. This will make survival difficult for many SaaS companies when customer operation budgets severely shrink and SaaS subscription revenues dwindle next year. Easy come, easy go. Make your SaaS selection with care, and always have a Plan B in case you need to cut down your subscription costs and still run your operation. Basically, make sure you're in control of your database assets.

FREE Guide: 10 Slip-ups To Avoid When Creating A B2B Marketing Database

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:06:49 GMT

Ready to build your B2B Marketing Database?

Learn what to avoid to ensure success doesn't avoid you!

Get this FREE guide now from the Marketing IT Process Strategist!

One-to-One Marketing Using SaaS. How To Make The Most Of It.

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:46:41 GMT

One-to-one marketing presents some particular challenges that a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution may be able to resolve. Or may be not. Find out.

CMO Gets Head Chopped Off Over Poor Lead Management

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:46:10 GMT

Why is a marketing database able to save a CMO from decapitation?

B2B Marketing Promotion Breakeven Calculator

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:43:30 GMT

This calculator will estimate how your promotion will breakeven. Try it free.

SaaS Adoption Means Fumigating The Marketing Organization

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:40:00 GMT

In practice, the automation of marketing using hosted SaaS applications involves combating resistance to change. Know how to do it?

Keep SaaS Data Quality From Sinking Your Marketing Automation Solution

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:11:58 GMT

Is SaaS data quality control part of the risk transferred out of the enterprise and onto the service provider? Software belongs to the host, but data to the client. How to keep it clean?

What Is The Starting Point For Measuring Marketing Performance?

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:48:23 GMT

Marketing is fundamentally about 2 things: innovation and taking a unique public stance on it. Simply put, if your company comes up with a new way of doing something better than your competition and you successfully ensure the right public knows about it, then you've done all that marketing is meant to do for a business.

The proverbial Achilles heel to any Marketing operation seeking for continuous funding is to prove reliably how all that publicity work affected the companys bottom line. This is not easy to do since Marketing is not Sales, after all, and can lay no direct claim to revenue generation. For marketers the smart thing to do is to avoid those poisoned arrows. Stick to basics. Measure what you do control. Estimate primarily the gains from that.

You may think that this won't do the job, not with so many marketing gurus talking about Marketing becoming accountable only through complex formulas that require configuring performance dashboard software using sophisticated statistical models or specialized staff to set up, use and maintain. Forget them for now. Keep it simple. Measure what you control.

And what do you control? You control how the company articulates innovation and also the stance that it takes in the market about this innovation. That's Marketing. Can you put a dollar figure to that? Call this articulation your company's "presence level" in the market. It is your baseline. It is against this scale that you should track your performance.

How then do you define your "market presence"? Is it by how often you discover your company named in various industry publications? Is it by the number of clients who are willing to reference you to other accounts? Is it by the frequency with which some particular professionals respond to your promotions? Is it by the percentage of overlap between what you offer to your public versus what your competitors offer? Is it by the rate of acceptance that you received from sales reps when you hand them opportunities that they admittedly knew nothing about before then?

However you define your market presence does matter much, because this definition leads you in the direction of monitoring what is both controllable and significant to Marketing, as the questions above show.

When you determine how to define your market presence as an innovative company, you will identify by extension a fundamental set of criteria (in the answers to the questions above, for instance) with which to take a stance as such in the market. These criteria constitute the basis of your core performance measurements, rates and benchmarks.

Use them to create metrics. Only then will you be ready to discuss what type of database might be able to help you track them to report on Marketing performance and ROI.

Is It Time To Get On The Social-Media-For-Marketing Bandwagon ?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:49:09 GMT

What is social media? According to the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG)'s survey results out this November, 75 of respondents define "social media as media that is based on conversations among users." It's peer-to-peer social networking, i.e. your customers and prospects talking to, well, your customers and prospects, preferably about you and in the most complimentary of terms. Is social media going places? MENG reports that 67 of business participants said that they will increase budgets in 2009 to advertise through these media. But is social media an integrated element of the marketing mix? No. Only 20 of respondents indicated social media is an integrated element of their marketing programs. So what's to be surmised from all this?

Surmise that the basics still apply. Regardless of the technology, who are you targeting? What for? And how? What does it matter that there is technology that makes interaction possible between members of your target universe, if you're not clear on what you're going to say or do through it other than place banner ads?

Think of blogging. How have you been using this technology in your marketing (you have been using it, haven't you)? Who did you blog for? What did you blog about and toward what end? Well, if you've been apprehensive about blogging, just keep in mind that social networking is only the next evolution of this technology. It is as cool, intriguing and misunderstood as blogging was 10 years ago. So no need to feel left out. Just adopt what you can understand. Various media become mainstream soon enough. Just consider what The Economist had to say about blogging last week:

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which as with every new medium in history looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. Today lots of internet users do this, only they may not think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.

If you're not sure yet how new social media may improve your marketing ROI, don't fret. Judging by the experience from blogging, the service supplier market will change to show you how to exploit their service offerings and integrate your marketing operation to social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), social news portals (e.g. Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine), multimedia broadcasters (e.g. Google Video, YouTube), etc. and remain capable of targeting who you need to go after moving forward.

7 Prioritized Strategies for B2B Marketing In This Recession

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:17:51 GMT

Jon Miller was a key contact I had at Epiphany at the time I was deploying that marketing system for one of my employers some years back. I always respected his insights about marketing operations.

Now that he has helped found Marketo, Im pleased to pass along a summary of his recommended strategy for conducting B2B marketing for recessionary times. His insights are worth a more thorough reading here.

Use lead management to maximize the value of each lead: Score your leads and target those risk-averse contacts who, with incremental nurturing, may mature into a more valuable lead to Sales.

Focus on your house list: Marketing to people you know is cheaper than procuring new names. Nurture your customer database.

Build and optimize landing pages: Direct your campaign respondents toward topic-relevant content pages and Web forms instead of toward your companys home page. You could more than double the number of leads you capture for every marketing dollar spent.

Make sure youre found by the content that you produce: Produce content that appeals to those ready to act on it now, not to prospects who may one day do something about it.

Appeal to the nervous buyer: Dont play it safe with risk-averse buyers. Be bold in giving them reasons to trust you! Appeal to their pragmatism. Mitigate their risk.

Align sales and marketing: Eliminate silos. Collaborate with your Sales reps. Integrate efforts and unify the revenue pipeline.

Don't be a cost center: Dont frame marketing in terms of cost. Frame it in terms of investment, backed by a business case that amortizes gains and makes marketing accountable over time.

As much as I agree with Jon, I think one missing ingredient in his list is a prioritization scheme. There are dependencies between these 7 strategies. So some items precede others. For example, you cant build and optimize landing pages unless you identify first the kind of target audience who should receive a particular message.

Depending on your companys marketing process and infrastructure, the priorities may change. But my suggestions in general would be to do first things first and second things never in the following way:

If you havent done so yet, build or refine your customer database. (#2)

Meanwhile, align objectives with Sales. (#6)

Secure with Sales a justification for investing in a recession-proofing strategy for marketing operations. (#7)

Produce content that both draws pragmatist customers attention and mitigates risk of engagement with your company. (#5 and #4)

As part of content optimization, improve your response capture mechanism, such as landing pages. (#3)

Execute your campaigns with response maturation as the process you will monitor to achieve your recession-proofing strategy. (#1)

Having prioritized your strategy, boldly go through this economic slowdown confidently knowing youre doing all you can do to achieve success for your business.

What's Sacrificed For The Success Of A CRM System?

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:17:17 GMT

To secure the protection of a city, it was commonplace in antiquity to set the cornerstone of a new town upon the body of a human offered as sacrifice to the spirit power of that future city.

There isn't much difference between this and what some companies do when they begin building CRM systems.

What is a CRM system if not a means to link a variety of human interactions under a decided order, much like the road pattern of a new city? And judging by the complexity of the undertaking, the caliber of the required resources, the amount of time that it takes to complete these projects and the many livelihoods that depend upon the success of such an enterprise, calling for a sacrifice often seems to be the needed action to guarantee security and success for all involved.

I suggest that the project manager's peace of mind is the sacrifice upon which the CRM city is built.

I've deployed several CRM systems. Some have been packaged solutions. Some custom-built. One thing they share is the measure of sacrifice both required prior to breaking ground and kicking off the project. All of these projects have placed a particular demand on the project leader to guarantee the success of that future CRM metropolis.

They have required a sacrifice of preparation and commitment from the project manager that neither the sponsors, the staff nor the clients will imitate. Everyone expects guarantees of prosperity in the re-formulation, using new technology, of the way that a whole corporate community has become accustomed to doing business.

So whatever guarantees may be secured for this future community of CRM city residents, they are all founded on the remains of the CRM project manager's peace of mind in thinking, come what may, that this new way of doing business will actually mean that the community will embrace radical change and a new way of doing business with each other. That's what CRM systems do for companies, after all.

But it's only too common, to put it in a picturesque way, to learn after the city is built that the city fathers and all construction workers had anticipated that the new, shiny CRM metropolis would attract into its new air-conditioned mall that large crowd of sales rep villagers scattered all over the valley. Yet the reps remain able to make their quarterly sales quota by sweating in the field without joining the city. Meantime the mall is serving as a top-rated mausoleum for the CRM project manager.

6 Tips for Consolidating An Infrastructure

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:50:49 GMT

Last year Forrester surveyed 246 IT executives to discover that 60 had completed or were executing systems consolidation projects.

76 meant to start a project within 6 months from the survey. Cost reduction through gains in efficiency was the primary driver, which means that reductions in complexity, workloads and energy costs can improve productivity yield for the same buck.

CIO Insight picked up on this and suggested 6 tips for successful infrastructure consolidation. For anyone taking on marketing automation/CRM head-on, the following can serve as a basic cheat sheet of what to keep in mind to secure a basis for project success:

Know your business' strategic direction and which applications align with it. This will help you discern which apps to retire and which ones to bother integrating with each other.
Know what the final integration environment will look like before you start creating it. This has to do with knowing what capabilities the business will require in the short, mid and long terms to ensure the impact of change can be absorbed by the organization.
Orchestrate the operation by creating virtual environments that simulate the actual resources on which the applications run. This virtualization reduces costs of operation.
Store only the data you need and put it all in one place before implementing virtualization. This improves system performance and makes management easier.
Conduct asset inventory and performance analyses to evaluate which technology might work best in which department. One size fits all does not work when trying to convince the business to change.
Level set expectations on deliverables. Be realistic. It takes time to reach the goal. It's not easy to get buy-in. Costs saving come in the form of not needing to spend more on technology in the future.

An important caveat I can vouch for in having worked at system integration to deliver on marketing databases, automation and CRM systems is the following remark from James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester:

In planning how long an infrastructure consolidation project will take, Staten cautions that IT must be careful not to set timelines that are too aggressive. "When you roadmap your consolidation timeframe, be conservative with business constituents so you set expectations that you can beat, he says. This gets them behind you for later phases of consolidation, which you will need, because IT consolidation is often a very political change.

How true it is!

Advance The Project With Excessive Humble Pie

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:12:44 GMT

C.S. Lewis said of pride, "The more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others." How proud we project managers can be of working in excess.

I can't forget a 31-day stretch when I labored non-stop to reach a project milestone. We were midway through the assignment, averaging 14-hour days and juggling conference calls, workshops, training sessions, status report meetings and a myriad of technical and clerical activities required to complete our mid-term objective.

I was hard on myself and my team wasn't any easier on itself. We achieved the goal, then reverted to our typical 10-hour shift, 5-day week until the next crunch, but not without having suffered significant wear and tear. Soon after, some of my colleagues took brief vacations and I followed with a 1 week leave to sunny Florida.

While trying to detox from my most recent overdose of adrenaline and endorphins (I had reached my goal, after all), I couldn't shake a gnawing unrest within me. Back at the office I reported the status of our project to one of my stakeholders and, concerned for my team's health though likewise impressed by my own achievement, I added "...But, you know, to make it happen we worked for a month literally every single day. No weekends. No breaks."

"So now you're working like we do in Sales," he retorted.

How right is Lewis! Here the magnitude of my own arrogance confronted me in my dislike of what I'd heard my client express about himself. What went wrong in this picture? Was I incorrect in revealing how hard I'd worked with my team to succeed? Was my colleague incorrect in telling me how hard he works with his?

If those were the questions to ask, then the answers would be no. But the real question involves motive and is different than those I posed. It is "Was I wrong to have implied to him that without my unassailable dedication there was no way he could have reached this supreme achievement that I got for him with my team?" The answer to this one is a resounding yes. But it took his telling me how insignificant he really thought I was relative to his own accomplishments to unveil for me my own shortcoming.

As Douglas Wilson might say, I fell to the the temptation of thinking that my position of recognition was something I had achieved autonomously. This is obnoxious professional arrogance, a folly that the best only too readily indulge in to our shame. In the end my team, who deserved to have been defended from excess work and nonetheless praised for their tenacity, received neither due to my stumbling.

Truly humbleness can advance a project farther than any excess of professional pretentiousness.

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Your CRM...

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:12:44 GMT

My most recent and successful CRM project generated 1000 ROI. The project took 6 months to complete, and 6 months later it had recovered its cost and added to the bottom line. Where did the return come from? It was the result of business process streamlining and improved productivity. Alright. That's fancy terminology for what?

Basically the new system let us snoop daily into the working lives of corporate marketers, sales reps and channel partners, and put them on the spot if they didnt show us the numbers we wanted to see. We called that channel visibility. But it was snooping. You can imagine how very popular it made my team.

An IDC study showed that most CRM ROI comes from cost reductions due to increased productivity (41) and business process enhancements (51). Technology-related savings (whatever that stands for) accounted for only 7 of the return, according to the report. So, checking up on your colleagues and holding them accountable for specific results significantly reduces corporate costs, huh? Well now, theres a new thought!

If you ever want to be part of an action thriller using a CRM system, then I can attest to the effectiveness of snooping on your fellow man. It will get him on his toes. Raise the hairs on his back. Pump adrenaline into his system. But so would a rottweiler loose in the office. Believe me, the day this marketer, rep or partner gets bit is the day all remaining trust in the CRM system no matter how miniscule goes out the window.

This is how IT is guaranteed victory in battle while defeat in war, because that precious data that should populate those precious user screens not only become harder to come by but also tend to enter the system distorted. And guess who is blamed for the resulting absurdities? No one at first, of course, because what is blamed initially is the system. But we all know who owns the system, dont we?

Help Me Sell Or Get Off My Back!

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:12:44 GMT

Gimme more! More accurate sales forecasts! More detailed customer profiles! More deal closure status! More updated contact lists! Alight, all this is information that matters to a sales rep whenever it is fastened to the compensation that he receives from his employer. And all of it is captured in one single document: the purchase order.

With a purchase order in hand, a rep has documented all the past, present and future of significance for his employer, until the employer, for whatever reason, begins to hunger for more. Then the existing documentation stops sufficing, and the rep begins to hear the rumblings of displeasure.

But Im making my quota! What else do you want?

What else indeed! Who knows better about making deals than a successful sales rep? Such a person knows not only that you cant get something for nothing, but that you shouldnt be expected to give something for nothing either.

Whats an employer willing to give a rep in exchange for more information than it takes the rep to make a sale with?

The most resounding complaint Ive heard from CRM users has been that the system doesnt show the rep how to sell more, which is not only what the rep is accountable for doing but also what the rep is more apt at doing.

In my experience reps are awful at data entry. They tend to prefer speaking to reading, and listening to writing. Generally theyre not cut out for routine clerical work. Theyre independent, dynamic, confident and remote from the mothership. When they synchronize with her, they do it out of necessity. They need to get paid, after all.

So, unless management assigns them to the singular task of taking down customer orders, the way a waiter does at a cafe or an inside sales rep does at a call center, it blocks them from exercising their primary strength closing deals! Yet a typical CRM environment aimed at managing the process of field sales does precisely that.

Instead of helping reps sell more, it attempts to convert them into clerks, and clerks are not known for living in the fast-track and making six-figure incomes. Ask successful reps inadvertently to become clerks, and youre asking them to render something for nothing one good reason for an ambitious rep to tell you Get off my back!