The Marketing Consortium

Next, please...

My month of blogging about marketing operations ends today (even though it's not technically the end of the month).  Hope you've enjoyed it.  I have.

The summer is heating up and with that, our next moderator Akin Arikan, senior manager of Unica's internet marketing solutions group, will be blogging throughout July about using the Internet to measure marketing results.  I hope you check back often to see the new posts from Akin and the many marketers who read this blog. If you'd like to continue the dialog about marketing operations I've started here, please feel free to email me at abunce@unica.com or follow some of the links to resources I've posted throughout this month's blog.

Excelsior!

Why is marketing operations so important?

I'm almost at the end of my month of blogging on marketing operations, and I haven't even talked about the most interesting part of the topic yet.  Time flies when you're having fun -- or rambling aimlessly about things most vendors won't tell you...

Why is marketing operations so important these days?  Why all the fuss?

When talking about streamlining marketing operations, at lot of people mention the phrase "do more with less" as the motivation.  But I have yet to find a marketer who wants to be able to say to their management team "Good news! Next year you can lower my budget."  Instead, most of the marketers we work with are facing a rapidly growing workload, and they'd just like to be able to keep up -- or even just not have to hire as many people next year as their workload suggests they will need.  In other words, "do more with more."

What are the reasons for the growing workload? The most common cause we witness is related to the proliferation of addressable media, and increasingly granular segmentation being used to target audiences with these media.  This addressability and segmentation is good news and bad news for most marketing organizations.  The good news is that they can target smaller group of customers with unique, highly relevant messages.  The bad news is they have to produce lots of unique, highly relevant messages! 

In other words, marketing operations is becoming critical because only with efficient and precise operations can these targeted strategies be supported.  There's a parallel to Dell, or any "mass customization" manufacturer.  There's no way Dell could let people customize their own computers unless their operations were lean and mean.  (Speaking of Dell, if you ever get some time with our CEO, Yuchun Lee, get him to tell you the story of starting his own computer assembly business in his dorm room the same year Dell started his.  But get him to tell you about blackjack, first.)

The subject of addressable media and targeted marketing strategies is a good segueway to tomorrow, when I'll hand-off the blog baton to Akin Arikan, who will be writing about the Internet's role in marketing measurement.

Book your flight for London

Speaking of the Henry Stewart conference on marketing operations, there's another edition coming up this week in London.  It's usually a bit smaller than the US versions, but Europe has its own take on marketing operations which can be worth exploring.  And while you're at it you can see the sights (I recommend the "Original" bus tour) -- or visit Unica's London office!

The last two things!

Finally, here's the end of my pre-empted presentation at the Henry Stewart conference titled "Ten Things Most Vendors Won't Tell You."  These are the last two things!

#9) You need I.T.

You need your IT department's help.  I know that to a marketer, that's a little like saying you need politicians, personal injury lawyers or the IRS.  But it's true.  Marketers must avoid their typical antagonistic relationship with IT.

There's a trend in software today towards "on demand" or "hosted" applications, the rhetoric surrounding which makes it sound like you will never need to call your IT department again.  We're all for on-demand and hosting, and in fact provide this model of deployment to lots of our customers.  But even in these cases we recommend that our customer at least get some advice from their IT group.  The last thing you want, years into your usage of a system, is IT wagging a finger and saying "uh-uh" when you ask about bringing the application in-house or integrating it with another enterprise system, because they don't approve of the architecture, or security infrastructure or whatever.

#10) You're going to screw up (and so are we).

Every implementation is an iterative process, with lots of learning along the way.  And the learning continues even after you're live with the software.  Sometimes that learning is smooth, and sometimes it's rough -- and usually it's both at varying times.  No matter how many times we warn you, you're going to do things you shouldn't.  And vice versa.  And so success requires a committment from both sides -- vendor and customer -- to work through the inevitable bumps in the road.  You need to pick a vendor the same way you would pick a partner, and think of them that way, as a partner.

And, if you'll forgive the shameless plug, we think Unica is a great partner, and so do hundred of our customers. 

Another Marketing Operations blog

If you're starting to think past the end of this month and are interested in staying connected to the subject of marketing operations after the topic of the Unica blog changes, I'll point you to another blog worth bookmarking.  It's Gary Katz's, who is the CEO of Marketing Operations Partners.  His blog is titled "Marketing Operations at Work."  I quoted MO Partners in my opening post this month, and Gary commented recently on my recap of the Henry Stewart conference.  Check it out!

Almost done with my presentation

We're closing in on the finish of the presentation I didn't get to give at the Henry Stewart conference titled "Ten Things Most Vendors Won't Tell You."

#6) Implementation hurts

Any vendor who tells you that implementing software to manage your marketing operations is easy is like a dentist saying "this won't hurt a bit..."  But the pain has nothing to do with the software itself.  We're talking about changing the way people work, and people -- especially busy ones like marketers -- don't like to change!  So you've got to expect resistance, complaints and loss of faith partway through the implementation, no matter how bad the old way was.  Thus the important of so-called "change management" strategies.  Or put more simply, don't forget the people factor!

#7) You're the least important person to this project.

If you're at this conference [OK, so you're reading a blog and not at a conference, but remember this was supposed to be a presentation!], you're probably a project manager running the software selection or an IT business analyst.  That means you're already invested in making this successful.  The key to success is to get the people who aren't invested -- most importantly the rank-and-file users -- to actually use the product.  User adoption will make or break your project, because only they can ensure the data in the system is accurate and valuable to your management and decision-making processes.  Here's a tip: get executive sponsorship and buy-in, so you can use both the carrot and the stick.

#8) Big Brother is watching.

A common concern for the average marketing software user is that "Big Brother will be watching me! I don't want to have the status of everything I do tracked in the software."  Many vendors and project leaders rush to reassure them that it's not true.  But it is true!  That's half the point of using these types of systems, and it's what makes the information in them so valuable.  However, the good news for users is that Big Brother won't call them as often on the phone, or make them scramble to put together status reports, or assign work to them when they're already busy.  So, learn to love Big Brother!

Next time, the last two things.

Special gift from IDC: a Marketing Operations report

Michael Gerard from IDC's CMO Advisory Practice, who posted a comment on this blog earlier in the month, has provided a special gift for our readers.  He recently co-authored a study titled "The Marketing Operations Function: Is It Evolving Fast Enough?" and said I could make it available here.  Please download it, read it and let us know what you think.

More from the presentation that never was

I'll continue sharing the points from the presentation I didn't get to give at the Henry Stewart conference, titled "Ten Things Most Vendors Won't Tell You."

#3) We don't price based on value.

Shockingly few marketers we talk to are required to build a formal business case -- that is, a cost justification analysis -- before buying software.  How can you know the value of the software you're buying without this type of analysis?  How can we know, and price it accordingly?  Without it we're both left to guesswork, and we price and you buy based on what feels right.  Wouldn't it better if we could nail it down more precisely?  When it happens, it's win/win, because the benefits generally far outweigh the costs.

#4) We're not marketing experts.

Anyone recognize this guy?  It's David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather and called by some the "father of American advertising." [We've got a new director from Ogilvy, by the way.]  I think we'd all love to put our marketing in the hands of a modern-day Ogilvy.  But would you want him writing your software code?  How about answering your technical support call?  Our recommendation is to let each expert do what they're best at.  Get your marketing strategy from marketing experts (you've heard from some of them in the comments posted to this blog), and buy your marketing software from software experts.  Of course, despite being software guys, we do know an awful lot about marketing...

#5) We can't solve all your problems.

Most marketers start off thinking that all their problems are completely unique, and will a custom solution.  And if we thought that was truly the case with any of our customers, we'd tell them we couldn't help and would send them right home.  But the reality is that 90% of your problems are actually very similar to other marketers, in some cases marketers from very different industries, and our software is designed to solve that 90%.  There's always going to be the 10% that is truly unique, but don't get too hung up on that.  Fixing the 90% goes a long way towards achieving real benefits.  Most importantly, don't let any software vendor build you a custom solution to get you all the way to 100%!  That's the kiss of death for software, because custom solutions are extremely difficult to maintain and scale.

Halfway there.  More next time.

The presentation I didn't get to give

I mentioned in a previous post that a scheduling mishap prevented me from giving my presentation at the Henry Stewart conference last week.  As many of you know, the conference is largely focused on using software to improve marketing processes and operations, and lots of software vendors were in attendance.  So I deliberately titled my presentation provocatively: "Ten Things Most Vendors Won't Tell You."  Many attendees were intrigued (or politely pretended to be) and asked me to share the "ten things" in this blog.

So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I'll spend the new few posts sharing with you ten things you probably will never hear a marketing operations software vendor say to you.

#1) Software is not sexy!

Some marketing software vendors might pretend like software can be the most important, most exciting and most impactful part of the marketing process.  But, unfortunately for we software vendors, it's not true!  Other things are far more important, and many of them are things that software can't really help with at all -- such as creativity, strategy, and employing the right process.  Process in particular is important when it comes to marketing operations.  There's a great quote I heard once: "the only thing worse than a bad process is a bad process that's been automated by software."  It's particularly true in marketing!  Don't listen to any vendor who tells you that software will solve all your marketing problems.

  #2) You're too easy to impress!

Beware software vendors who try to impress you with lots of bells-and-whistles in their software.  There's nothing a vendor likes better than to make your eyes light up in wonder when they show you a flashy feature in their product.  But the reality is that these things are usually unimportant to the successful transformation of your marketing operations.  The really important aspects of software, the things that can make or break the success of your implementation -- such as design for usability, for example -- can't be shown in a short product demo.  And sometimes the most mundane features of the software can have the biggest impact on your operations, if they address your particular challenges.  So, marketers, please be sure to take the time to truly understand your problems, and what you need to fix them.  And don't let yourselves get distracted!

That's all for now.  More next time.

Plugs in return for comments

Thanks to Michael Gerard and Mayer Becker for weighing in on the Henry Stewart conference.  Good points, both.  I want take a minute to reward them for commenting on my blog by shamelessly plugging their employers.  Just kidding, that's not really my motivation -- but I do want this blog to be a way for anyone interested in the topic of marketing operations to find resources, and so I'll point out that:

• Michael is part of IDC's CMO Advisory Practice, which is a great place for marketers in high tech to find information about marketing best practices, including marketing operations.

• Mayer is part of MarketSphere's Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) practice and has really been around the block when it comes to using technology to improve marketing practices.

In my next post I'll start sharing my "Ten Things Most Vendors Won't Tell You," the presentation I didn't get to give at the Henry Stewart show.