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.

So why do marketing projects fail?

• Poor definition of project goals, role of marketing
• Overly complicated marketing objectives
• Marketing objectives not clearly defined and difficult or impossible to measure results
• Little-to-no accountability for results
• Not enough momentum

What this means, is that marketing projects fail when they are poorly defined, overly complex, lack measurement/accountability and take too long to execute.

When you improve these five factors (definition, simplicity, accountability, friction and speed) and you can’t help but improve results.

ONE – Define the Objectives. Many problems start with a poorly-defined plan. The plan should include program requirements (i.e., sales objectives) and potential limitations. These requirements are often referred to by project management experts as the project charter. After the plan is drafted, it should be reviewed and discussed by representatives from all departments that will be impacted by its execution in order to gain agreement and support. Only after you gather feedback should the plan be finalized.

TWO – Keep it Really Really Simple. Simplicity is related to “definition.” Simple means ease of measurement and clearly crafted objectives. Only when there is agreement on the program direction from the outset, can sales and marketing achieve a happy medium between innovative marketing and realistic sales goals.

THREE – Measurement/Accountability. Most marketers can’t tell which portion of their marketing budget contributes to sales. Ask these two questions to bring clarity to the way your organization measures results and holds the marketing program accountable: – How will the program be measured? (Will you measure hard results like the number of leads generated? Or soft results like the ability of a program to build market presence or penetrate a specific market? If you are measuring soft results, ask if these things can be accurately measured). Some frame success by winning accounts from the competition, increasing purchase volume within existing accounts and by preventing competitors from poaching your accounts. A simple objective that frames the entire marketing project portfolio (for example, all projects should improve lead flow and/or improve conversion of leads to sales) makes it easier to measure success. – If program tactics are not working (almost certainly will happen), how will the program be adapted? Is a strategy shift needed, or are different tactics needed? Link project success directly to the project owner’s compensation.

FOUR – Streamline and Remove the Friction Integrate your marketing into the sales process. Marketing and sales should be part of a seamless and integrated process. Marketing should be designed to generate prospects ready to take the next action in the sales process. The sales process should be designed to accept those same prospects. Walk through each step in both of these processees and identify all elements that may cause a customer to slow down, stop, become distracted, or heaven forbid… that most dangerous of customer activities… think. At each decision point remove percieved risks, insert rewards, make it an unnatural act not to move forward along the path you define. Re-engineer your internal sales engineering, administrative and contracting procedures to minimize delay and customer thinking. This is especially important if your sales are complex (if they involve “complex” products and services affecting multiple departments, longer sales cycles, multiple decision makers and/or senior management approval).

FIVE – Speed and Agility. Make decisions quickly. A decision not to proceed is better than no decision. A decision to kill the project frees you up to focus on other, more promising projects. Be ruthless. Kill non-starting projects quickly. Those you keep should start with tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals. Within a week after a product launch, for instance, there should already be results to evaluate and midcourse corrections arising from that evaluation.

If you aren’t making midcourse corrections, you are probably off course.

I believe SCRUM ideas should be embraced by marketers for project management.

In ControlChaos, they talk about a concept called ExtremeValue – “a business driven methodology for wringing every possible cent of value from your investments in product and systems projects. ExtremeValue differs from usual practices in that it causes functionality and value to be produced incrementally so value can be realized early and built upon, and business strategy prioritizes the sequence of functionality delivery so that the return on investment is maximized.”

What is most appealing about this concept from a marketing point of view is that it reduces risk. If the project is managed with incremental phases, it means that the investment is never greater than the cost of the increment. In otherwords, if you produce and measure the result of 30 day increments, your investment is never more than 30 days of effort.

As you learn and measure, you change direction and focus based on market feedback.

In the changing market, priorities and customers change. 30 day marketing priorities allow progress to measured rapidly — rather than waiting until requirements are finalized or plans are final.

This also means more clarity — as a marketing manager you now have direct visibility into the ongoing evolution of your marketing and you can now steer the process and make the right tradeoff’s between cost, time, quality, and functionality to deliver the most important impact as quickly as possible.

In each phase, we identify the biggest priorities that create the most value. Together, the sales and marketing team review how these priorities can be turned into progress that delivers value. The sales and marketing team then execute and review progress.

Decent article here about content and the “emerging role” of marketers as publishers. Like a magazine, marketers should start thinking about their editorial calendar and pushing a new edition out every month to their customers and salesforce.

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

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.

So we started working with a Six Sigma black belt consultant a few weeks ago.

Our question…how can we apply Six Sigma-like processes to the process of marketing to and engaging with clients? How can we apply lessons from Six Sigma as a formalized process for engaging with customers on multiple levels. Can we look at the client engagement process under the lense of Six Sigma?

The first question…when and why do client engagements go wrong? We grouped our own experiences and also some of the experiences of a few of our clients into a collective bucket.

Overwhelmingly, client engagements go south when expectations are not properly documented. This is true in marketing professional services, this is true in marketing widgets.

Managing expectations is most difficult because often the buyer of professionl services does not have a clear idea of what they want and need.

Expectations are also way too optimistic, too complicated, poorly defined, and are impossible to measure.

So the sales process then becomes a process of definition. Sales engagements need to move clients forward in their own decision-making process.

Some of the take-aways from the Six Sigma consultant were quite simple — the biggest one boils down to people. Better project definition is attained by attention to very simplistic and what may seem like naïve rules:

Definition: as a starting point, what problem are we solving? Have we designed a project to solve the problem? How quickly can we solve the problem? Take one problem at a time. Start with discrete “blocks” of tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals.

Ownership: Who owns the project? Is the success of the project tied to their compensation? What is the intended result? Starting with the sales force, where is the most friction? Involve the customer in a recurring evaluation of the accuracy and relevance of the current message, pitch and offer.

Measurement: How will this program make money? How will we measure it? Success equals sales.

Action: Are we making decisions quickly? A decision not to proceed is better than no decision.

Quick turn around: All projects are executed and completed in discrete timeframes not to exceed 4 weeks. Each time intervals represents a small iterative milestones. Large problems are broken into smaller pieces.

Demonstrate and communicate progress: After every project, there is something to see, touch, and evaluate. There is “stuff” that is useful and measureable and working (or not working). This happens during the project, not after the project. This helps keep the project on track, on target, and on budget.

Everything is a test: Test early and test often.

Everything changes. Get used to it.