Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the ZoomInfo blog: http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/tag/ben-bradley/

Over the coming months, my hope is to interview a number of organizations about their best practices in marketing execution.

What is a Marketing Maturity Model?

Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a way to explain the evolutionary processes software development organizations adopt relative to benchmarks and best practices. A CMM process is a defined path of improvement that helps organizations increase their software process capability. A CMM provides:

• a roadmap for optimizing processes
• a collection of best practices
• a shared language
• a way to prioritize

Similar to CMM, I’m thinking that a Marketing Execution Maturity Model would be useful to help marketing organizations adapt as they seek to improve the accuracy and value of their marketing investments. MEMM is a defined path of improvement that helps organizations increase their marketing capability.

MEMM has a primary objective–improve the organization’s capability to effectively execute marketing activities. It represents a path from inconsistently performed practices to mature and repeatable processes that elevate marketing effectiveness. The proposed model would provide the basis for continuous improvement in the practices already established, as well as the basis for the next layer of practices. By stealing liberally from software CMM efforts and writings, we can begin by saying that MEMM is simply a framework that will guide organizations in selecting high priority process improvement actions based on the current maturity of their marketing processes and practices.

What are the benefits of MEMM?

Clearly defined best practices for improving marketing effectiveness are difficult to find for many organizations. A best practice framework for improving the marketing process is needed.

It is the goal of this project to collaborate with some of the world’s leading marketers. The purpose of this collaboration is to jointly develop a collection of best practices, benchmarks, peer network and sense of community that enable mature and repeatable processes for improving marketing performance.

Together, this collaboration will increase involvement through shared purpose, move people forward in the selling process by connecting them to the purpose (and to each other) and create communities for action.

It is believed that this kind of collaboration will provide participants with the following benefits:

• Access to peers and the benefit of a community’s prior experiences
• A common language and a shared vision for improving marketing performance
• A framework for prioritizing actions and improving departmental performance
• A proven mechanism for defining what improvement means for each organization

How is the MEMM Defined?

Like CMM, MEMM would characterize maturity in terms of five levels. Each level is the foundation necessary to progress to the next level of maturity. The five levels are as follows:

• Initial: The marketing process is ad hoc and chaotic. Little is defined. Success depends on individuals and their initiative.
• Repeatable: Basic project management process track costs schedules and results. Process discipline is in place to repeat earlier successes on projects with similar objectives.
• Defined: the process is documented and integrated throughout the organization. All projects follow a defined full lifecycle process.
• Managed: Detailed measures of the marketing process are collected.
• Optimizing: Continuous process improvement is enabled by quantitative feedback from the process and from piloting innovative ideas and technologies.

Next steps?

Next steps? There are a couple of next steps. The first step falls squarely on my shoulders. I will conduct interviews with leaders from various marketing organizations to discuss these ideas. When possible, I will publish these articles. Over time, I’m hoping these articles help solidify some of these ideas.

What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization to quickly and easily create and manage their own collaboration websites. Once SharePoint is part of your organization, there is no need to ever call IT for support or to set up permissions. Individuals are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. SharePoint is pretty slick and it is often overlooked as a project management tool.

I read the book because I believe most marketing failures can be traced back to failures of project management. I wanted to see how SharePoint could be used to quickly manage marketing projects and help my clients avoid marketing project failure.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of great project management tools. ProjectCompanion. Microsoft Project Server. Primavera. Basecamp. ProjectTurf.  But many people don’t know that they probably already have SharePoint running somewhere within their organization. When budgets are tight, leveraging technology that you already have can help stretch a strained budget.

I emailed Dux to get a better understanding of some of the essential capabilities marketing managers should look for when evaluating project management tools. His response was succinct:

·         Supports the generation of a project charter, schedule and budget

·         Facilitates communication and feedback

·         Monitors project activities

·         Controls project changes

·         Analyzes and forecasts project performance

·         Disseminates project status to relevant stakeholders

·         Provides real time information essential for initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing a project

In response to my question: “When should a marketing manager start thinking about using a project management tool,” he responded:

1)      No standardized systems for integrating project goals: project schedule, cost and quality objectives are individual silos. For example, financial information in Excel is not automatically recalculated anytime the project schedule is adjusted. Making manual updates takes time away from other project activities.

2)      Inefficient document management: project documents are not stored in a central location. Tracking, undoing changes, and the ability to roll-back to prior versions are limited. Additionally, varying levels of access permissions are unavailable. IT/IS can only do so much in supporting information access requirements.

3)      Lack of appropriate tools to facilitate team collaboration: Project information is not accessible anytime, anywhere. In addition, the team is incapable of developing or working with information at the same time.

4)      Inability to report accurate and timely status of the project: project status information is only available whenever the project manager makes it available. How do you deal with project sponsors who want to view real time project status information?

5)      Not achieving organizational strategic goals: lacking a standardized tool to facilitate consistent project management processes throughout an organization can limit the ability to effectively support strategic goals.

Any marketing manager should quickly realize that these five issues alone more than justify the need for investment in reliable project management tools.  Dux’s book gives a deep dive for any marketing manager investigating how to use SharePoint to better manage his or her department. Pick it up at Amazon.

After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing.

The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and this is because there has been a disconnect between sales and marketing in most organizations. Ironically, now it is more important than ever to make sure these two are aligned.

Here’s why.

Sources of competitive advantage have shrunk. What it really boils down to is customer satisfaction and customers are harder than ever to satisfy. The Internet has contributed greatly to this trend by arming consumers with a plethora of information before marketing departments have the opportunity to bombard them with ineffective, corporate messaging efforts. “Citizen marketers,” as the book refers to them, have made it impossible for marketing and sales to exist solely within the four walls of corporate America, and away from scrutiny. Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, social networking and so on – allow buyers to self-service, bypassing corporate marketing’s efforts. Therefore, the sales team plays a vital role as the buffer between customer experience and marketing. The sales force must execute the positive customer experience that marketing departments are communicating.

Thus, sales campaigns become like a chess match, where you need a solid strategy and where the ability to think trumps the ability to work hard. And data driven decision-making arms salespeople with the tools they need to be successful.  

Sales benchmarking requires companies to review the sometimes unseen links between process and result. This review encourages an objective look at practices, systems and metrics and challenges business methods that should be scrutinized; and provides a means for driving change in the sales process.

In the sales process, there are a number of intangibles – things we would rather measure by how they “appear” or “seem.”  The same is often true with marketing. The soft metrics of appearance make it difficult to measure.

The authors of Making the Number point out that successful benchmarking is only possible through data. By assigning key performance indicators (KPIs) to reflect key parts of the sales process, a sales manager can assess whether or not a campaign is successful and what needs to be continued or abandoned.

The authors are quick to point out that benchmarking is not merely a comparison of your current performance with that of past performances or a collection of meaningless data that cannot be applied to positive change. The benchmarking process must be repeatable, consistent, reliable, trustable, measureable and comprehensible. In other words, it must first lend itself to multiple iterations. There must be no logical contradictions. The same results should be produced when the process is followed correctly. All process activity must be described and defined. There must be metrics that enable the measurement of work within the process and it must contain instructions that are understood within all roles of the process.

Benchmarking is not an instant fix for companies who have broken sales and marketing processes, and it is not a way to force the organization to make the necessary changes. It is a merely a dashboard of what is going on inside and outside of the organization – a way to evaluate what processes are working and which are not. Only leadership and management can enforce and implement positive change.

The key is to making this change happen is implement best practices with benchmarking. First, identify the companies that excel in their business. Get their buy in to study their policies, technique and operating environment. Discover ways to transfer their best practices to your organization in a way that makes sense. Finally, implement these new best practices within your own organization, evaluate the process and continuously improve upon this method.

Part of this process is determining your sales management’s maturity level. Level one is the chaos level where activity is mostly ad hoc. The second level is the defined level where processes are documented but not necessarily consistent. Level three is the reportable level where the process has actually been adopted. Level four is the managed level which consists of quantitative sales management and level five is the predictable level where sales management is predictive and casual. Once you determine what sales maturity level your organization is at, you can work on advancing to higher levels through the employment of a consistent winning strategy.

The next step is the actual data collection, which is the most labor-intensive part of the benchmarking process and also where the organization begins to get a detailed view of internal and external operations.

A company will experience a sustained competitive advantage when sales benchmarking moves from being a one-time event to being embedded in the operating procedures of the company. You must understand that your peers will not stand still. Sales benchmarking needs to become a standard operating procedure and part of your company’s long-term strategy for success.

One of the biggest excuses companies see against adopting benchmarking as a regular business process is “Things are going well – we don’t need it.” The problem with this attitude is that you are looking behind instead of ahead. It may be very likely that if you are successful today, you will be successful tomorrow. But it is not a given and it would probably do you well to be sure that your company is doing what it needs to in order to stay on top.

Regardless of the obstacles presented by companies or employees that are hesitant to adopt benchmarking, each can be overcome. It is important to keep future successes in mind and to know that the sooner you implement continuous benchmarking, the sooner you will find the facts you need to make sure your sales organization is consistently a success.

• Business Week article – “Beyond Blogs” – http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/08_22/b4086044617865.htm

• Virtual Karma blog – list of Web 2.0 applications – dated 2006, but comprehensive, check out comments too – http://www.virtualkarma.blogspot.com/2006/01/complete-list-of-web-20-applications.html

• CNN Money article – Executive’s Guide to Web 2.0 – http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/19/technology/web2.0_goofing.fortune/index.htm

• Branding Tactics by Chris Brogan (note: “Passports”) – http://www.chrisbrogan.com/100-personal-branding-tactics-using-social-media/

• Subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog on community and social media – www.chrisbrogan.com

• What is Scrum? – check out http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=18

The only measurement that matters is measurement that truly shows how effective you are at reaching your customers.

Traditional B2B marketing measurement is especially tough because anything you do impacts everything else you do. How does your PR impact your PPC? How does your PPC impact your SEO? How does your SEO impact your website? How does your website impact your direct mail? And vice versa, and so on.

In looking at various measurement methodologies, it seems few actually demonstrate a measureable connection between the multiple activities that define true multi-channel B2B marketing and the sales pipeline.

Finally, as a last insult to simplicity, the measurement methods you use for your company will have little bearing on the measurement someone else uses for their company. In B2B marketing and sales, benchmarks and best practices are hard to find. Everyone measures and values certain tactics differently. My media mix and your media mix are not the same. Your sales approach and my sales approach are not the same.

So what to do?

First, don’t sweat it.

No matter how trivial or important the tactic, assign it a key performance indicator (a KPI).

A KPI is a quantifiable measurement, agreed to beforehand, that reflects the critical success factors of a certain tactic. The KPI for your website’s performance may be the unique visitors or the number of inquiries or any other metric that is important to you. The KPI for your media relations activities might be press mentions or advertising equivalency. Whatever the KPI, it should be binary. This means, at the end of each month, you should know if you achieved or did not achieve your KPI. If your KPI for your website is 1000 unique visitors per month, then you know with certainty at the end of the month whether or not you achieved your web KPI. Likewise, if your monthly public relations KPI is 4 or more mentions about your company every 30 day period, you know with certainty whether or not you achieved your KPI.

Next, if you have 10 tactics and 10 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 10 score with 10 being most important and 1 being least important. If you have 104 tactics and 104 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 104 score with 104 being most important. This ranking forces you to think about the importance of each of your tactics as part of your total media mix. If your SEO is a the most important tactic in your arsenal of 10 tactics, SEO gets a weight of 10. If PR is the next most important tactic, PR gets a weight of 9. And so on.

For every 30 day period, honestly evaluate whether or not you achieved the goal for each KPI. If you achieved the goal, give yourself a score of 1. If you did not achieve your goal, give yourself a score of 0. There is no negotiation. You either achieved the KPI or you didn’t.

Multiply each of your KPI scores by your force ranked weight. In the SEO example above, if you achieved your SEO KPI, multiply the tactic’s weighted score of 10 by 1. If you did not achieve your PR score, multiply the weighted score of 9 by 0. Work your way through all your tactics and determine whether or not you achieved your KPI. Add all these sums together. See the table below for an example:

If you have 10 tactics, you have a total possible score of 55 (10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=55)

When you add all the scores in the table above and divide them by the potential score, you have a grade of 60%. Next month, try to improve your grade.

Is this an exact science? No. Far from it.

But the exercise of measuring forces you to define the things that you value. It also forces your team to reach an understanding of the metrics that are expected from each piece of creative or from each tactic you produce.

If the measurement is not working or if you are measuring things you don’t value, you quickly recognize it. You adapt. Wash. Rinse. Refine. Repeat. And so on until you settle on a definition of the things that matter most.

Finally, your measurement lets you compare your marketing performance to your sales pipeline. This is where your measurement really matters. What happens to the sales pipeline if you adjust certain tactics? What happens when you start measuring things differently? The sales pipeline is the true indicator of marketing success. If you measure a marketing tactic and it provides no insight into the overall health of the sales pipeline, does it matter? Absolutely not.

Is all this extra effort worth it? Absolutely.

NOTE: If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet referenced above, email me at bbradley @ bradleywiltjer . com

Some thoughts…

Financial management: Fiscal management allows CMOs to track and manage investment by region, segment, business unit, product line, and campaign. Professional Services Automation software allows consulting organizations to measure effort against dollars. What functions are marketing departments using to measure the effectiveness of personnel as well as budget spend?

Customer Asset Management: sales force automation or contact management, activity management, opportunity management, call reporting, lead tracking, order entry and support, customer contact and telemarketing. What about sales force productivity tools such as dashboards that allow sales to check orders, enter expenses, check inventory, manage distributors, track leads and accounts. In addition, mobile sales people can reduce sales lead times by requesting product specifications, sending product samples and updating forecasts directly from their laptop computers. Online customer service and support. with account management, maintenance/help desk services and field service applications. Market intelligence. This includes competitor intelligence, trend analysis and supplier management. Performance analysis, marketing planning, sales forecasting and human resource management.

Response processing, literature fulfillment and tracking sales campaigns’ effectiveness.

Marketing Management. Traditional metrics don’t work for measuring marketing across multiple channels. Diverse distribution channels and constantly changing pricing schemes create extra complexity. Automation of these functions improves the ability of marketing to contribute to the value of the organziation.

Web analytics: or should it just be analytics?

Business intelligence:

Content management and digital asset managment:

Database management, email and campaign management

Search

Process Improvement: Complex marketing processes that lend themselves to automation include: lead management, sales material enablement (savogroup.com), channel marketing, co-op funds management, co-op materials and ad management (brandflex.com), dealer management, project management (basecamphq.com), process design, email management (swiftpage.com), campaign management, measurement, analytics, product management, measurement, etc.

All the stuff behind the scenes – dashboards, metrics, BI and the glue that binds and connects all these silos into useful information — this is the “not sexy” IT stuff — this is the foundation of the stack. Everything in the stack is critical for making better decisions and create a learning marketing department.

Here’s a good IDC report on the marketing operations function:

http://unicashare.typepad.com/share/files/the_marketing_operations_function_idc_dec_06.pdf

Help me out here…what else belongs to the marketing stack? How should the stack be organized? Is it a stack?

Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a way to explain the evolutionary processes software development organizations adopt in the process of becoming world-class. CMM describes an organization’s software development processes relative to benchmarks and best practices. A maturity model provides a roadmap to best practices, a shared language and a way to prioritize process improvement projects.

CMM defines “levels” or steps of maturity through which an organization must pass in order to achieve the next level of process improvement. A CMM process is a defined path of improvement that helps organizations that want to increase their software process capability. It is a path of improvement going through several levels of maturity.

This Technology Marketing CMM (TM-CMM) has a primary objective—improve the marketing department’s capability to perform marketing activities through automation and other process improvements especially in the marketing operations arena. It represents a path from disorganized, chaotic, and inconsistently performed practices to mature processes that elevate marketing effectiveness.

Improving marketing operations effectiveness requires more planning and forecasting, better performance management and consistent execution of best-practices. These are skills that are different from softskills of creative and strategy. These skills are becoming more important as marketing evolves into operational and metrics-based processes. These marketing functions easily map to CMM efforts.

By stealing liberally from software CMM efforts and writings, we can begin by saying that TM-CMM is simply a framework that will guide organizations in selecting high priority process improvement actions based on the current maturity of their marketing processes and practices.

I’ll be posting to this topic in the coming days and may need your feedback and/or your willingness to help me design a self-assessment survey that we can use to benchmark.