Marketing Operations at Work

I Swear I Haven't Been on Vacation This Month!

Judging from the drop in my posts since the end of June, I wouldn't hold it against you if you assumed I was vacationing all month. Truth is, I do need a vacation, but I swear I haven't had one yet!

If you don't believe me, check out my Twitter activity. I've been very active there.

Lots of exciting things are going on behind the scenes, which I look forward to sharing with you in greater detail soon.

But, in the meantime, here's a high-level overview, so you don't think I've been a slacker all month (<:}.

First, we're migrating this blog from Typepad to Wordpress so Marketing Operations at Work can be more integrated with our website and we can better practice what we preach.

Second, my Marketing Operations class for UCSC Extension is going to be offered online this Winter! That means those of you interested in your Marketing Operations professional development will be able to get easy, self-paced access to my course whether you are in Silicon Valley, UK, China or India! The university has assigned a team of instructional designers to work with me to build the course for online.  Too cool!

Third, as you may have noticed, we've been collecting data for our Marketing Operations Best Practices Benchmarking Study. We've had a great response; about 150 companies completed the online survey. Though we've recently closed the online survey, you still have the opportunity to participate in our in-depth interviews by phone or in person. We expect to be conducting these interviews through August, so let me know if you are interested in being a part of the process. There's a free final benchmarking study report in it for qualified participants.

Fourth, the Marketing Operations Future Forum on LinkedIn, which is vested with co-creating the future of the Marketing Operations field, now has more than 300 members and reads like a who's who in Marketing Operations in enterprises, solution providers and consulting companies. The major work of this forum is to develop a common body of knowledge for our evolving field, which we can develop into an educational curriculum and, ultimately, a certification program. We are actively collecting content (written, audio, video, slides) you'd like to contribute to the effort in exchange for attribution.

So now that I've finally posted something for July, I feel a little better. Stay tuned for more details on these announcements and even more exciting news ahead.

Gary

Invitation to Participate in Marketing Operations Best Practices Survey

Marketing Operations Partners is updating its Best Practices Benchmarking Study. The goal of the study, Marketing Operations 2.0: Taking MO to the Next Level of Effectiveness, is to identify: 

• Key drivers in the journey from MO inception to maturity in best practices 
• Scope of MO practice across different organizations based on company characteristics, Marketing function characteristics and MO function characteristics
• Success factors and obstacles to progress for the MO function 
• How organizations assess their effectiveness based on Marketing Operations strategy, process, technology, guidance and metrics.
• How Marketing Operations is evolving within organizations and as a professional discipline

An online survey is available now through July 17, 2009. This survey will take only 15 – 20 minutes to complete and your responses will be kept 100% confidential. In appreciation for your time, we will e-mail you a PDF of the executive summary of the benchmarking study, if you provide your email address at the end of the survey.

Go to the online survey now.

Qualified organizations that participate in face-to-face or telephone interviews to complement the survey will be eligible to receive a PDF of the entire study once published. Please let me know if you are interested in participating.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Gary

Give Marketing Operations a Little Love, BusinessWeek Gurus!

BusinessWeek columnist, Marshall Goldsmith, is author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "Succession: Are You Ready?" and the New York Times and WSJ bestseller, "What You Got Here Won't Get You There." He also pens a column for BusinessWeek called Marshall & Friends. This week, Goldsmith wrote about "Marketing in the Age of Turbulence," in which he interviewed well-known marketing guru and author Philip Kotler. Goldsmith did a great job setting up the interview and Kotler delivered great wisdom, but a real opportunity was missed. Neither gave credit to the emerging discipline of Marketing Operations as a way to navigate through the waves of change. That inspired me to post of comment on the BW site. I hope MO wins a few more evangelists as a result. But it woudl have been so much more powerful if the likes of Goldsmith and Kotler would have used their pulpit to give MO some love.

Here's the comment I posted:

Adding some left-brain people to the marketing department addresses just part of the problem. What about short CMO tenure? And what about a lack of operational focus? Interesting that early on in his article Marshall casually uses the term "marketing operations" to describe marketing departments, yet fails to mention the emerging discipline of Marketing Operations (MO), a key enabler to delivering the strategic and accountable marketing he envisions. We need CMOs and CEOs with the vision to invest in dedicated MO functions that effectively operate as the CMO's Chief of Staff. Especially in complex organizations, MO is integral to bridging strategy to execution, and aligning marketing with the C-suite and other stakeholders throughout the enterprise (such as sales, finance, IT, customer experience). Most organizations are missing the opportunity to change the MO of marketing by fully embracing MO. This is a shame because MO done right can hugely impact an enterprise's business intelligence, sales enablement, pipeline velocity, scalability, brand governance, customer experience, ability to demonstrate marketing ROI, and agility to navigate the winds of change.

Come on Marshall and Philip, start treating Marketing Operations as a beloved brother or sister of marketing, not an ugly stepsister or neglected orphan, locked in the parlor doing the chores no one else wants to touch. If you play your cards right, your Cinderella-in-waiting could evolve into your CMO's indispensable Chief of Staff.

Gary

Marketing Operations? In IT??

Today the newest member of the Marketing Operations Partners team is penning a post for us. Many of you may know Michael Dortch from his work as an industry analyst for Aberdeen Group and Robert Frances Group. The old-timers amongst us may even recall his journalism days with CMP publications NetGuide and Communications Week. Michael is uniquely qualified to write about the opportunity for Marketing Operations and IT to align for the greater good, so enjoy the first of what I'm sure will be many great posts – Gary

by Michael Dortch

Should IT be embracing Marketing Operations? Should MO be embracing IT?

Sure!

At its heart, Marketing Operations is about bringing some adult supervision to some of the most highly personal, visceral, and therefore non-standardized activities conducted by any business -- not to mention some of the most business-critical. To succeed, therefore, Marketing Operations professionals must do a lot of successful marketing, selling, and evangelizing to multiple constituencies within their own organizations, if their efforts are to show any benefits to the enterprise's external relationships with customers, partners, and prospects.

Oddly enough, highly parallel challenges face every IT department that's striving to be truly business-driven and to supply truly effective business tools and solutions. What's more, almost every business action, decision, and transaction is enabled or supported by some kind of IT. And at many enterprises I've known, the IT departments actually have the most experience in formalizing, documenting, maintaining, and refining key processes and practices.

All of this means that Marketing Operations professional and evangelists should forge good working relationships with IT decision-makers at their enterprises at the earliest possible opportunity. The combination of the two can and should lead to many new opportunities to "IT-enable" efforts at increasing profitability, customer and partner satisfaction, "return on marketing" and IT ROI.

At the very least, it will make for conversation over meals or drinks refreshingly different...

7 Myths CMOs (and Their Bosses) Just Gotta Stop Buying

Sometimes it seems like Chief Marketing Officers are living in the Wild Wild West, riding their horses from town to town, frequenting one saloon after another, stirring up a ruckus, and often leaving their town-folk (employers) wondering why that cowboy (or cowgirl) didn't quite live up to their fantasies. 

The cowboy appeal. It's probably what makes certain CMOs attractive to CEOs and their companies in the first place. Have gun, will travel. Always up for a good scrap (even if it's the wrong fight). Good at hitting a target (even if the target turns out to be an innocent bystander). 

No wonder the average CMO doesn't hang around town long (or is run out of town).

In order to keep the legend of the cowboy CMO intact, CMOs and the CEOs who hire them have perpetuated a few myths. It's high time (or is it High Noon?) that someone shoots holes in these myths. Because we aren't in the Wild Wild West anymore. 

Here's seven myths that CMOs and their bosses truly need to stop believing if they want to get the most out of Marketing in today's world:

Myth #1 - "I'll just hire me one of them superstars." Everyone loves superstar performers, and if your organization is fortunate, you may even have a few of them. But let's get real: superstars are not going to solve all of your problems. They might even create a few. Superstars are hard to locate, hard to recruit, hard to afford and hard to keep. A superstar in one company could easily be a goat in another. And the best superstars aren't going to hang around a losing organization (or one that is so dependent on them that they are always expected to save the day). The smart superstar will walk out the door with all the experience and insight they collected on your dime, and you'll be left looking for a new sheriff. 

Myth #2 - "If everyone just picks themselves up by the bootstraps and tries harder (or works smarter) . . .." We've all heard the rallying cry. "People, we need to be better, smarter, faster, more efficient, etc. So we're all going to need to work longer hours. Everyone will be held accountable to deliver more results. And we'll win together." Upon hearing this call to action, we start out wanting to jump in and do our share to bale water from the sinking ship – until we realize our superiors are commandeering the lifeboats for themselves. Expecting more out of your people when you're giving them less support, less resources, etc. just isn't reasonable. Yet we do it with regularity. And we convince ourselves that it works. And maybe it does, for a short period of time. But if you expect your people to show up to work environment every day that resembles the fight-or-flight stress of a battlefield (or gun fight), you are going to experience a lot of casualties.

Myth #3 - "If we can just get some of that Marketing automation, that'll solve our problems." Companies seem to operate in one of two extremes. The younger, scrappier company (or the older company that has never taken Marketing very seriously) may invest very little in technology to support Marketing staff. The cost is poor resource utilization and lost opportunity. On the other side of the fence is the tech-savvy company that treats automation as the panacea to all of its Marketing department ills. It's hard to say which extreme is worse. But from a risk and hard cost standpoint, companies that make poor investments in automation are more exposed. Marketing automation is just a tool. If you have to change your entire company to run the tool, you've made the wrong investment. Your people will revolt. And your technology investment will be largely wasted. Marketing automation should help you to run your company, not the other way around.

Myth #4 - "If we can't quantify it, we shouldn't do it." As a Marketing Operations advocate, I love measurement. I'm titillated by analytics, especially predictive. I dream about a culture of accountability in every organization. Still I know from experience that a fixation on numbers alone, while appealing to the scientists among us, doesn't begin to capture the breadth of insight we need to make a real informed decision. Much of what we achieve in Marketing is extremely difficult (and costly) to quantify. What is the value of a key customer or strategic relationship? To what degree does our brand recognition get us on the short list for our sales opportunities? We may be able to create formulas or models to quantify these assets, but at what cost? If the cost of measuring your Marketing begins to approach the cost of your Marketing, something is definitely wrong.

Myth #5 - "I don't care what it takes, just get it done!" We all love the Nike "Just Do It!" campaign. It plays to our desire to turn our dreams into action. It makes us feel proactive, alive and like we're taking charge of our lives. But "Just do it" also has its dark side. How many times has an executive commanded that we stop making excuses and get something done – damn the consequences? In the process, we alienate our press contacts, our partners, even our customers. We see this often in the sales cycle when we push so hard to make a quarterly quota that we put our customers in awkward (even risky) positions, with nary a care about their exposure. We may get a short-term fix, but in the long-run we damage important relationships because we are overly-focused on taking care of our company's "needs" at the expense of whatever and whoever is in the way. 

Myth #6 - "We can't spare a dime to invest in research." Our bias for action can lead us to believe that research is a waste of time. We convince ourselves that things are moving so fast that any data we collect will have a short shelf-life anyway. Or if we realize we don't have a plan to convert data to actionable insight, we justify away the need for research. Or the research we do is conducted by people who don't have the training (or time) to do the job right. So instead, we shoot from the hip. We keeping marching out the same Marketing programs that we believe have always worked for us (long after they stopped being effective). Our Marketing plans are grounded in assumptions and beliefs that would likely not survive serious scrutiny. Our entire Marketing effort sits atop a very shaky foundation.

Myth #7 - "We don't have time to examine our own navels." Whoever came up with this comment must have had an issue with process and the value of learning from experience. George Santayana reminds us that "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Marketing teams need to take the time to collectively review the effectiveness of their Marketing strategies and how well (or poorly) they worked together to realize (or fail to realize) them. Successful execution of Marketing strategy is reinforced by a healthy system. When is the last time your organization underwent a system health check? Did your bring aboard an objective professional to assist in the diagnostic process, or did you do a self-examination? How did that work out? Did you make substantive changes or did you file the learning away to be acted upon some day?

So, here's a message for all you cow-folk out there: stop shooting yourself (and everyone around you) in the foot! You've got an unprecedented opportunity to do things differently. We're in the 21st century now! Let's leave the Old West behind and step into the new world of Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Marketing Operations 2.0. You may not get to flash your shotgun as often, but you'll sure play a bigger role in building a flourishing town (your company) into something of which you can truly be proud.

Gary