Marketing Operations at Work

Google Starting to Slip as a Marketing Operations Model?

While Google is often described as an advertising company, I tend to view the company as a Marketing Operations machine. At least where operational efficiency is concerned.

• They are masters of Marketing Automation.
• And they truly "eat their own dog food."
• Their search technology address Knowledge Management challenges by organizing huge volumes of information into some semblance of relevance and priority. The taxonomy framework behind their infrastructure is impressive.
• Their solutions actively address the common enterprise challenge of feeding the sales funnel with new, hopefully qualified, leads
• Their customers will quickly know it if there are holes in Google's operational machine, and we really haven't seen many instances where they've dropped the ball.
• Most of the products they provide - such as Adwords, Google Analytics - have a metrics component.

So when we see the news that Google is laying off 200 people in their Sales and Marketing department, we are reminded that Google has its warts too. The company looks like a model of Marketing Operations excellence from the outside because it executes with great precision. It also seems to be superb at the front-end strategy because most every thing it has touched in the past several years seems to turn to gold (with the exception of those AdWords customers who haven't optimized their campaigns and are paying for bad leads).

We saw indicators of this potential rat-trap when Google was aggressively poaching talent from Microsoft a couple of years ago, even when they had no actual positions to offer that talent initially (how nice it must have been to collect paychecks from Google without having any responsibility, accountability or even anything to do). It seems it's deja vu all over again, only this time the waste has been identified in Sales and Marketing (and we all know how easy it is for most companies to chop anything that remotely resembles waste in Marketing).

So I guess the lesson here is that companies that look great on the outside - even those like Google that grow a business fundamentally based on operational excellence - can be kind of an unhealthy mess when you look under the hood.

But what the heck, as the Billy Chrystal character Fernando reminds us, "It's better to look good than to feel good." (<:}

Gary

Forrester Ranks Enterprise Marketing Platforms

Forrester Research recently released its first report in two years on Enterprise Marketing Platforms and found that Marketing technology vendors are now placing greater focus on usability. According to Forrester, marketing platforms consist of six core applications: campaign management, customer analytics, interaction management, marketing resource management (MRM), marketing asset management, and lead management. No single vendor received top marks across all of these categories. Forrester cited Unica as the leader in market leadership and relationship marketing; Aprimo as the leader in Marketing Operations, and Oracle Siebel as delivering the broadest overall application. Forrester revealed that campaign management functionality is no longer highly differentiated. "There's a recognition in the marketing universe -- and by vendors as well -- that campaign management is a mature discipline now," said Suresh Vittal, senior analyst with Forrester and author of the report. "The tools come off as very similar. Where they differentiate themselves is in the user friendliness, depth and access to analytical data." In interactive marketing, newer vendors that traditionally were not considered part of the marketing platform market are emerging, such as Omniture and Responsys. Vital expects these companies to continue to offer better functionality than the enterprise vendors because of their deeper domain expertise in interactive marketing and better understanding the space. Gary