It’s easy to pull the big headlines out of the CMO Council’s annual Marketing Outlook study. In fact, the big news this year is that budgets are slowly on the rise with renewed investments into the digital marketing space. Transformation was certainly the big theme marketers agreed upon in the study. If you haven’t had a chance to review, download --> 2010 Marketing Outlook Report

But I tend to gravitate to the smaller insights. Take for example the personal objectives of marketers in 2010. Aside from the “my boss might read this so I better tow the party line” answer of “reach out to customers to advance market insights,” marketers are looking to strike a better balance. 32% aim to better manage pace and schedule, 19% would like to spend more time with family and friends. Interestingly 22% are looking to get in front of the boss more to become a more trusted influencer of the CEO and another 19% are looking for the next big step.   

And while marketers are not worried about loosing their jobs (so all of you folks waiting to shout from the treetops that CMO-mortality is yet again on the rise, sorry…) most are frustrated by insufficient budgets, organizational cultures and senior management mindsets that are likely making transformation difficult, if not impossible.  But here it is: marketing isn’t easy.  We knew that going in. We don’t manage the party list, we don’t make pretty pictures or make the logo spin and sparkle.  We own the customer…and that is a huge job.

But it’s a great job, isn’t it.  So no matter how far we fall in our attempt to balance time with our CEO and time with our family, we still have the best job around. 

Speaking of one of the reasons I love this gig…the Summit returns! This year, rather than heading to the coast of California or even escaping into wine country, we are heading to the big apple to host the 2010 CMO Summit (www.cmosummit.org). This year we will focus on Synchronizing the C-Suite. We will be inviting top voices across IT, finance, operations, legal, customer service, and even the CEO to talk about the opportunities to engage, partner and align to best optimize customer experience, improve operational efficiencies and how to best drive the bottom line. The Summit, with headline sponsors Accenture and Jigsaw, will be held on September 15 – 16, 2010 so be sure to mark your calendars.  More details will be released over the next weeks.

Until next time,

Liz Miller
CMO Council
@lizkmiller on Twitter

Marketing Audits Lead to Improved Marketing Performance

By Laura Patterson for VisionEdge Marketing

The CEO of your organization probably conducts a number of organizational audits each year.  But when was the last time you conducted an audit of your marketing organization?  A Marketing audit is to the marketing function what a financial audit is to the accounting department.  While a financial audit typically examines accounting procedures and an organization’s financial records to make sure they are accurate, a marketing audit is more about analyzing and evaluating the effectiveness of the marketing department in terms of alignment, skills, processes, systems, and return on investment.

The purpose of the Marketing audit is to determine where the marketing function is excelling and where there might be opportunities for improvement.  After conducting an audit, you will have a better understanding of your marketing organization’s capabilities, contributions and overall health and strength.  To achieve higher performance levels, increase effectiveness and improve return on investment, your organization may need to add new require training programs and new systems, re-define or reengineer processes, or change the talent mix.  As opportunities for improvement are identified and a course of action is decided, the resources needed to affect the improvement can be appropriately resourced.  Therefore the annual budgeting and planning cycle offers an appropriate time to conduct a marketing audit

What the Audit Process Should Entail

Should you decide to conduct a Marketing audit, you want the assessment process to consist of interviews with key executive staff, marketing personnel and other members of the organization that interface with the marketing personnel and who rely on the marketing team for support.  The audit process should also review various business and marketing documents, such as the business plan, marketing plan, job descriptions, and the systems, data, and processes used by marketing personnel.  All of this information should be used to develop a picture of how well the marketing department is performing in a number of key areas such as strategic and tactical planning, program development and implementation, budgeting and resource allocation, market, customer and competitive analysis, measurement and reporting.

Six Functional Areas to Examine When Conducting the Marketing Audit
A comprehensive audit and assessment process should at least examine the following six areas to determine how well a marketing organization is performing:

• Organizational Alignment- which explores how well the marketing organization is aligned with the institution’s initiatives.
• Marketing Skills and Proficiency - related to the following: market, customer and competitive analysis, planning, program development, execution and reporting.
• Performance Management- which include: data, analytics, creating measurable marketing objectives, establishing program performance targets, and reporting on performance and results.
• Infrastructure – which include: data, systems, and tools.
• Resources - which include: people/access to talent, budget.
• Processes – which include: operational Processes, Skills Assessment and development Processes, Data Management Processes, Measurement and Reporting Processes, etc.

Five Dimensions to Explore When Designing the Marketing Audit
As you prepare to conduct an audit, frame your process so that you can learn at least these five things:

• The marketing skills, competencies, knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction of and with the marketing personnel
• The extent to which the marketing organization is aligned with the rest of the business
• The extent to which the marketing plan and planning process supports the organization’s initiatives and which aspects of the plan were achieved and which aspects failed to meet the performance objectives;
• The extent to which the marketing programs were successfully executed and communicated internally
• The performance of the marketing programs and the personnel.

Three Steps for Conducting an Audit
The audit and assessment process generally includes at least these three steps:

1. A review of key business documents such as:
   
   
• Business plan
• Marketing plan
• Marketing budget
• Organizational chart
• Functional job descriptions
• Training plans
• Marketing status reports, a dashboard if one exists, etc.
  
2. Interviews with executives, marketing and sales personnel, and other members within the organization that interface with marketing and or depend on marketing for support. Therefore participants in the interviews may include the members of the leadership team, product management, customer service, operations, sales personnel, and finance.
   
   A key part of the interview process should include learning what has and hasn’t worked in terms of planning and program execution, what is and isn’t going well in terms of marketing performance and collaboration and what would indicate improvements in performance, alignment, collaboration, and capabilities.
   
   
3. An onsite-review of marketing processes, data sources and data, systems and tools.
   
   You should expect a written report that details the findings of the audit for all the areas being examined to help you understand how well your marketing personnel and initiatives are working and to identify your most urgent marketing challenges. The report should include what the organization is doing well, where the organization needs to improve as well as a list of recommendations on how to increase Marketing’s overall performance. The more quantitative and evidentiary the report the better.

Who Should Conduct the Audit
Conducting a Marketing audit takes a certain degree of expertise.  Just as financial audits are typically conducted by an objective third party or committee who at least knows what they are looking at and for, the same holds true for a marketing audit.

Conclusion
Organization’s already make major investments in their marketing department in terms of program budgets, talent, and resources to deliver value to organization.  The Marketing audit is an extension of that investment to ensure the marketing function has all the systems, processes, tools, skills and support required to effectively deliver that value.  In that regard, the Marketing audit is perhaps the most important investment a company will make in their Marketing organization.

Laura Patterson is the President of Vision Edge Marketing, a data-driven and metrics-focused marketing firm that specializes in marketing performance management and measurement, marketing and sales alignment, product and strategic marketing, and professional development.

Marketing Dashboards – Great Investment or Huge Expense?

By Mitchell Gooze for Customer Manufacturing Group

Marketing dashboards are all the rage this season. Perhaps because every other management function has a dashboard, VPs of Marketing feel they need to have one too? Or maybe because dashboards can be a great tool to help you manage your business processes. The answer is yes…to both. However, if you can accomplish the latter then you won't be left out either, and the dashboard will be an investment in business success not a vanity expense.

Pat LaPointe, author of Marketing by the Dashboard Light, suggests there are five things a marketing dashboard does:

• Aligns marketing objectives to the company's financial objectives
• Creates organizational alignment within Marketing and it clarifies the relationship between Marketing and other corporate functions
• Establishes a direct link between spending and profits
• Creates an organization that makes decisions based on hard facts supplemented by intuition
• Creates transparency

With respect to Pat, who is a smart guy and did write a book on Marketing Dashboards, those five things are akin to believing that the right automobile dashboard will allow you to win the Indy 500. A properly constructed dashboard can help you measure, monitor, manage, and improve your Marketing/Sales processes, and with it the conflicts between people and functions can be reduced. However, to believe that the dashboard will do it all by itself is like believing all you need is a teleprompter to make a good speech.

While dashboards can be a very useful tool, Marketing dashboards have become a panacea for many who hope that creating a dashboard will allow them to manage their Marketing activities more effectively. However, just like other technology-based tools that came before, the dashboard can be a seductive solution that does not work out.

And again, like many technology tools before it, if you want a dashboard to help you improve Marketing performance you have to know what to monitor that is driving business performance.
Too often the frustration is that there is no correlation between the investment in a Marketing dashboard and improved Marketing results. Far too often the dashboard becomes an expensive "hood ornament" for a computer desktop. We know of at least one company that invested well over $250,000 in a Marketing dashboard that provided no useful information upon which the VP of Marketing could make decisions.

And it does not have to be this way. Marketing dashboards, like their counter-parts in other business functions, can be a great and useful tool that helps the Marketing department perform better.  Laura Patterson, CEO of VisionEdge Marketing, describes a marketing dashboard as a "multi-layered graphical tool that brings critical information about the performance of the organization…to facilitate faster and more accurate decision making, alert users to issues or problems, increase visibility into marketing efforts and improve effectiveness and efficiency."

While the process of implementing and using a dashboard can result in the five benefits mentioned previously, it is naïve to assume this will automatically come to pass. One only needs to look at every other deployment of technology tools designed to facilitate management processes. It is entirely possible to deploy useless software-based tools despite the apparent need to follow an approach designed to avoid that fate. Often this is because the tool's deployment is the desired outcome, rather than the results using the tool could provide…if you took the other steps required to make the tool useful.

What Makes a Good Marketing Dashboard?

A group of folks from the Tuck School of Business defined a Marketing dashboard as "… a relatively small collection of integrated key performance metrics and underlying performance drivers that reflects both short and long-term interests to be viewed in common throughout the organization."  For what purpose? And we disagree with the definition anyway. Quite simply, as we stated earlier, an effective Marketing dashboard should help you measure, monitor, manage, and improve your Marketing/Sales processes. In doing that the conflicts between people and functions can be reduced. Effective Marketing will accomplish the rest of Pat's list cited earlier. In other words, the dashboard is a tool to help you manage your marketing process. It is just a tool, and like any tool it can be misused or misdesigned.

And even the right tool in the wrong hands can be dangerous. Another critical aspect of a dashboard tool is found in the idea of facilitating faster and better decisions. The tool should not only contain pretty lights and a way to understand the data behind the lights, but it should be built on a foundation that makes communication about that data easy and timely. In the end it’s about people using information to make appropriate, correct, and timely decisions.

Who is the Marketing Dashboard For?

Quite simply, who ever needs it. The purpose of the dashboard is to improve Marketing process performance. It should be considered a decision support system. People who manage that process need the dashboard to help them know what actions to take and when. People who are concerned about the performance of marketing may want their own version of the dashboard to look at results. This 'results only dashboard' will be different than the 'in-process dashboard,' which will also show results. If your dashboard can only show you results, how can you make timely in-process changes to facilitate better results?

Alternatively, it is argued by some that a dashboard is really about communications. Indeed that is true. However, the communications should be occurring as the dashboard is used to improve process performance, not as a scorecard. If you want a scorecard, create one. Again, using the Indy race car analogy, the dashboard is used to determine how to improve the car's performance so as to win the race, not to have a discussion of what went wrong after you've lost.

How Do You Get a Good Marketing Dashboard?

A good Marketing dashboard can only be created if you first understand the corporate objectives that Marketing is tasked to support, and what outcomes Marketing is expected to produce to support those objectives. And that is likely to be more than just leads, or impressions, or new communications materials. Further, you must understand the processes you are using to achieve those outcomes so you can set the appropriate measurement points to monitor. If you only get information on the outputs, you can do little to correct quickly enough when activities go awry.

People who believe they know how to create a useful dashboard list some steps to getting one. These steps include:

• Connecting marketing programs to business outcomes
• Decide what to monitor on the dashboard
• Make sure you can connect the data chain between Marketing activities and business outcomes
• Identify the data sources needed to get the data you are using for your monitoring
• Develop an initial dashboard to test

Sounds great, and fraught with landmines. Building a dashboard can be the impetus for doing steps 1-4. However it is still easy to skip over steps 1-4 in any meaningful way if the objective is a dashboard. If you don't believe that's true, look at all the CRM and related tools that have been implemented over the years and gone unused because the tool was allegedly the impetus for understanding and improving the process. In truth getting the tool deployed was the goal.  Bottom line, if you want a useful dashboard, doing the hard work of steps 1-4 is critical, and until you get those right, the dashboard won't help you.

How Do You Pick a Dashboard Tool?

There are lots of dashboard platforms on the market starting with Excel and going to VERY expensive. Deploying a dashboard requires the work described above and a tool that appropriately supports the resulting requirements.  Unfortunately, most of the consultants (including us) that provide dashboard deployment support also offer a software tool to deploy the dashboard that results. If the tool they offer is Excel based, then the dashboard they recommend will be of limited capability by definition. On the other hand, if the tool is multi-layered, multianalytical and fully functional, then the dashboard recommended is likely to use most of those features, even if you don't need them.

Unless you pick a consultant that is not 'tool driven,' we recommend that you understand the capabilities (and usage cost) of the dashboard tool the consultant is going to recommend. In many cases, the tool is driving the recommendations, not the other way around. A key capability to make sure you understand: How will the dashboard platform support team communication to facilitate business process improvement. After all, that is the real purpose of a dashboard.

Final Thoughts

Dashboards can be great tools to help people manage and improve their business process. However, like any tool, you must learn to use it well. With technology based tools a secret is to make sure it is monitoring and reporting on useful, actionable information…accurately.