I agree with McConnell’s view that what we need may not be more dashboards, but more marketers that can bridge the gaps between the analytics, systems, and business capabilities, marrying them to customer demand and experience.  This week I resolve to let the end vision fuel the machine.  Let’s see what I can build!

In honor of today’s post, enjoy a few minutes of Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine.  For the record, according to Wikipedia this song is about the band’s disillusionment with the music industry- NOT big data!

Marketers are always asking us, “What are the five most important metrics that should be on our marketing dashboard?” These marketers want a template; a quick and easy answer so they can move on to their next challenge. Well, we’re not giving them the easy way out.

That’s because if you start building a dashboard for your leadership team with the individual metrics, you’re starting at the wrong place and you’ll end up with something that is useless.

Instead, you need to start to build your dashboard by answering these three simple (ok not that simple) questions:

• What are the outcomes that the business needs to achieve in order to meet their goals?

• What does senior management expect marketing to contribute towards these outcomes?

• How will senior management know that marketing has made a contribution?

Only when you have the answers to these questions can you begin to build a dashboard that shows how marketing generates value for the organization, the impact marketing has on the business, and what actions or course adjustments are required.

So the starting point for your dashboard is not metrics. Rather, you begin by having a conversation with senior management. You have to start from the top and work down. You also have to understand, your business and the role marketing plays. You can’t even begin to think about metrics until you’ve done this work.

More than One View of the Dashboard

Once you figure out what senior management wants to see, don’t slap yourself on the back and walk away. There’s more work to be done.  The dashboard needs to be more than a reporting tool; it has to a multi-tiered, decision making tool that contains not just metrics for senior management, but also the data that the marketing managers need to run the marketing function and the marketers need to manage their programs.

Often this means that there needs to be at least three levels to dashboard:

• One that is used with the executive leadership team that communicates marketing’s value, impact and contribution,

• One that can be used by the marketing leadership to run the marketing organization, and

• One that can be used by functional members of the marketing team.

Each of these views needs to facilitate action and help marketing keep themselves on track (or in line with the business).  Each level contains a set of metrics that is derived from aligning the marketing activities with business goals.

As a result of the business goal alignment, the metrics on each of the three levels don’t stand alone; they are linked to create data chains that show explicitly how the marketing program metrics contribute to the marketing function targets, which in turn drive the business outcomes. And the relationship among the metrics is not accidental—it’s all carefully planned.

Dashboards that contain data chains show the relationship between what the business is trying to accomplish and what marketing is doing.

The Test of a Good Dashboard

How do you know if you have a good dashboard? A good dashboard will answer the question, “Is what we are doing in marketing working? Are we moving the needles?” If the needles aren’t moving, a good dashboard will help you figure out why. Remember, a well-designed dashboard is a decision making tool, not a report.

For example, if the needles at the top—the business outcomes—are moving, and marketing is hitting its targets, then we can conclude that marketing is making a contribution. If the needles on the top aren’t moving, by looking down the data chains, we should be able to see why. Which marketing programs are not producing the marketing outcomes that contribute to those business outcomes? If those programs aren’t working, perhaps we need to stop what we are doing and reallocate the budget to something else?

In another scenario, we may see that marketing is exceeding its objectives in one area, but falling short in another. Again, we can use this information to reallocate the budget to ensure that marketing is contributing to each of the business outcomes identified by the senior leadership team.

Now you know why we can’t tell you which five metrics should be on your dashboard. Marketing dashboards are not one-size-fits-all. There is no one recipe for success.  Only your senior management can tell you which metrics to include. It all starts with a conversation and hard work to understand your business and the role marketing is expected to play.  This will reveal how to measure marketing’s value.

So start the conversation—and tell us how it goes!

Your outsourced Legal and Security department

Evolutivo Gendoc is a solution that consists in integrating in a unique concept the functionality and database of a CRM, the management of the human resources, an e-learning platform for the online training and other basic functionality such as the calendar, reports, massive campaigns etc.

In what does it consist?

         E-Lerning Platform                                                                                                                 Toolbox

Organised in courses,tuition, tests                                                                                             Reporting

Reports over the progress of a user                                                                                          Integrated with other software(Google Apss)

Access to the portal                                                                                                                        Offline-Mobile Client

White Labeling                                                                                                                                  Checklist

•  Client Management: personal data, visits, calendar, courses
• Legal Documents Generation by using the questioner and checklist
• Time scheduling management (related to employees, clients)
• Online training
• Compatible with mobile devices iPad-iPhone-Android using devices
• Costumer portal for the Medical examinations
• Management of the security devices
• Privacy Law Integration into the CRM
• Wiki integrated

Gmail Bookmarklet

Is an extension that syncs the tasks from the calendar of the CRM with those created from your Gmail account. It allows you to have your emails classified according to the correspondent project, generate a new task from a mail, and track the time spent on each task/project comparing it to the deadlines set before.

Marketing Dashboard

Is a new interface developed by the Evolutivo Team that allows you to crate massive campaigns, massive tasks from the contacts/clients/employees by choosing the parameters.

Time Control 

A new interface that enables the user to create massive campaigns, massive tasks, send massive emails by choosing the preferred parameters.

Send an email to info@evolutivo.it if you are interested in trying a demo.

Evo Marketing Management is a software that manages the marketing campaigns and provides a measured efficency.It ensures success by using an intelligent automated process that focuses on improving sales. Using the knowledge management software, cloud computing applications, social CRM tools, and much more, it simplifies the process of brand communication, providing consistent messages across all departments. In addition, this suite allows you to monitor the progress and performance of the various campaigns and establish marketing strategies that work, to ensure success.

Features

Promotional Campaigns
Mailing List
Email and SMS Marketing
Keep track of responses
Budget and expenses
Report and analysis
Asset Management
Automated workflows
Standart models
Massive Marketing Campaigns dashboard

A marketing dashboard can get your team to discuss and agree on shared goals, then bring them together to go after them. It can be a teaching tool about how your organization works. And, it can become a source of inspiration for new ideas when you try to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways.

Most of all, beware that a marketing dashboard is not about making it, but using it.

Tilly Pick

CONTACT

© 2012 Development Practice 360, LLC

An approach worth reading and implementing into your own CRM.

Above you’ll be linked to a conference paper from two of the Evolutivoteam members.

Implementing open source technologies in sales process engineering: a practical approach for predictive costumer behaviour tools using vtiger CRM .

Where to start? Begin by establishing and gaining agreement on performance targets and metrics, and putting in place the mechanisms to track and report on progress against goals.

Marketing performance measurement and management (MPM) is the process of analysis and improvement of the efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of marketing investments and activities. This is accomplished through alignment of marketing activities, strategies, and metrics with business objectives.

A marketing performance measurement framework can be a useful tool for developing those measures and metrics most relevant to an organization’s strategic growth goals.  Three categories of measures are often considered:

• Enterprise growth: measurement of overall performance against business outcomes, growth goals and competitive sustainability; e.g., revenue growth, profitability, market position, brand leverage, etc.
• Marketing strategy: measurement of return on marketing investment (ROMI) from core marketing strategies and processes; e.g., high-impact segmentation strategies, service line development, market expansion, portfolio diversification, retail innovations, clinical partnerships, etc.
• Marketing activities: comparative measurement of effectiveness, efficiency and outcomes of specific marketing and sales tactics or programs; e.g., direct mail campaigns, web traffic, risk screening events, physician sales,

Some marketers use a marketing performance dashboard to monitor, manage and report results.  Marketing measurement systems can also be designed to report at health system, regional, facility and service line levels.

So what are the critical success factors for marketing performance management?

• Making marketing performance measures, monitoring and reporting systems a priority
• Targets and metrics aligned to strategic planning, business development and operations priorities
• Decision support systems with timely access to performance data
• Cross functional collaboration to set and agree on targets and metrics
• Cross functional accountability for outcomes
• Regular reporting intervals to review progress against goals
• Timely adjustments to strategy and/or course corrections

A high-performance marketing operation requires outcomes accountability for marketing activities and expenditures.  A marketing management measurement and reporting system can be a powerful tool for building support and helping health leaders better understand the inter-dependency of strategy, operations and marketing in achieving growth and marketing goals.

What have been your successes and challenges in marketing performance measurement?

So what does that average B2B marketing organization look like today?  And what are the challenges that organizations must overcome to get to best-in-class?

Challenge #2:  We still struggle when it comes to linking our B2B marketing tactics to revenue outcomes; thus, we have a hard time proving (and better targeting) the specific impact of investments in content offers and demand generation programs.

The Web 2.0 world has substantially changed the dynamics between sellers and buyers – changing the information consumption patterns of B2B buyers and resulting in a new era of buyer power.  One dynamic is the emerging importance of content and the impetus to adopt new content marketing processes. 

But we need to be able see the linkages between content consumption and revenue outcomes – both elasticity and ‘critical path’ – within a given persona’s buying process if we are going to be able to develop sophisticated content-based nurturing.  Yet seeing this type of linkage is in fact the Achilles heel for many B2B marketing organizations.

The Lenskold Group highlighted this challenge in their recent “2010 B2B LeadGeneration Marketing ROI Study.”  It pointed to the fact that most B2B marketing organizations are able to link only basic offers to revenue outcomes:

When asked to describe their organization’s highest level of measurement capability to assess lead generation marketing, close to half [of] marketers (44%) reported that they credit the last marketing touchpoint as the lead source. Twenty-one percent (21%) reported that they split credit across multiple touchpoints, an approach that acknowledges how marketing impact is dependent on more than just the last touchpoint generating the lead. Only 14% use the more reliable techniques of market testing or modeling to isolate the impact of specific tactics (11% and 3%, respectively), while the balance (20%) do not track leads to specific marketing touchpoints.

One obvious call-out is the fact that marketing automation synchronized with a CRM platform can help track contact offers and establish these linkages in a closed loop; however, as we saw from SiriusDecisions earlier in this series, only a quarter of B2B marketing organizations use marketing automation in a sophisticated fashion, and only about 10% use marketing automation to manage the entire demand generation process. 

Analyst Megan Heuer with SiriusDecisions commented on this in a recent blog post, “So You’ve Got a Marketing Dashboard … So What?”  Heuer asserted, “It’s a fact that despite good intentions of marketing teams to improve reporting and dashboards, the gap remains wide between desire for better reports and the execution that delivers them — not to mention the skills to take that data and turn it into actionable advice.”

B2B marketers also seem challenged when it comes to analyzing their activities in the context of the buying cycle.  “We know from our research that we in marketing don’t do much with analytics—i.e., using data to determine and predict customer buying patterns,” commented Chris Koch with ITSMA in a blog post.  “Only 50% of marketers in our survey said they had analytics programs, and of these, few were focused on predicting behavior; most were simply reporting past behavior. Even rarer is the ability to carry those analytics all the way through to a sale.”

This challenge has broader implications, as well.  Not only as B2B marketers do we have a hard time connecting the dots for ourselves, but we also have a hard time connecting the dots for our colleagues in the rest of the enterprise, according to a recent post by David Wieneke on the UsefulArts.us blog:

[T]he Association of National Advertisers’ Marketing Accountability Conference found that most financial executives don’t accept Marketing’s forecasts or ROI calculations. 

• Nine out of 10 said they don’t use ROI metrics to set marketing budgets in the annual budgeting cycle.
• Seven out of 10 said their companies don’t use marketing inputs and forecasts in financial guidance to Wall Street or public disclosures.
• Four out of 10 said marketing forecasts made inside their company can’t pass the muster of a standard corporate audit.

So what is holding back out ability to link programs to revenue outcomes – and to deliver analytics that show the total impact of B2B demand generation programs and that enable them to be tuned?  Honestly, the technology’s not the problem, folks.

The Annuitas Group touched on this in a blog post:  “[S]o many marketing organizations are struggling with determining what to track and how to track it.  As a result, many end up measuring with no clear purpose in mind.”

Analyst and author David Raab has his own take.  He commented in a recent blog post, “Why Marketers Don’t Measure”:  “[M]arketers have for years listed better measurement as a top priority but made little actual progress,” commented Raab.  “When asked about obstacles, they generally come up with reasons like lack of data or measurement technology … .  Since these are problems that can be solved with funding, they suggest that the root cause is that marketers doubt measurement is worth the investment or don’t know how to do it.”

So we come back to a call-out from our first challenge.  A true skills gap seems to explain why people and process are such important areas where we should be investing our time and energy to improve the state of B2B demand generation.

[update]  Part four of this series continues to examine the three major challenges facing B2B demand generation today and looks at the third challenge – our overall lack of buyer orientation.  Stay tuned …

Marketing Key Performance Indicator Dashboard

This simple-looking, text-based dashboard tracks Marketing Management KPIs in a very straight-forward fashion.

The Marketing Management dashboard enables the marketing professionals to quickly determine the health of the marketing department. This dashboard contains the KPI region and reports on campaign to cash, campaign ROI, and budgets. The Marketing
Management dashboard facilitates comparing data of the current period with prior periods and helps analyze trends in lead generation, lead conversion, cost per lead, and revenue per lead, thereby providing historic trend data to plan future objectives.

The KPI region includes a snapshot of key performance data and enables marketing professionals to quickly assess the health of the marketing department. The KPIs present information on key marketing areas, such as lead generation, lead conversion, won opportunities amount, booked orders and so on. You can quantify, compare, measure, and track KPIs against prior periods to view historic trenddata. Some KPIs provide additional drill-down details, others display one level of summary data. By selecting a specific link within the region, you can drill down for more details.

Leads from Customers New Leads created during the selected period from existing customers. Customer is a person or an organization with which the company has a selling relationship, regardless of whether anything has actually been purchased or serviced. A customer is a party with a customer account.
Leads from Prospects New Leads created during the selected period from prospects. A prospect is a person or
organization, which the company, does not yet have a selling relationship.
‘A’ Leads Leads created during the specified period and
with a lead rank of ‘A’ as of the sys date.
‘A’ Leads % Leads created during the specified period and
with a lead rank of ‘A’ as of the sys date and as
a % of new leads.
New Opportunities Amount The sum of the sales credit amount of all opportunities with a marketing source created
within the specified period.
Won Opportunities Amount The sum of the sales credit amount of all opportunities with a marketing source that
have the:
• Close date within the selected current
period
• Closed flag set
• Won flag set

Cost Per Lead The marketing budgetary cost of generating all leads.
The Cost Per Lead displays expenses associated to each lead during the selected period. Based on the profile settings, either PTD Cost or Total Cost is displayed. Program cost calculations are defined from either the approved budget amount or the actual cost value.
Revenue Per Lead The booked revenue ratio resulting from all generated leads.
Lead to Opportunity Conversion Percentage of leads converted to opportunities during the specified period irrespective of when the leads were created.
Campaign Started Number of campaigns started during the selected period.
Events Started Number of events started during the selected period.

Social media technologies, themselves, certainly have their own learning curve, but the greater learning curve for marketers is contending with the fundamental power shift in the customer-brand relationship that social media technologies are enabling.  Thus, recognizing and responding to the new reality that individual customers and brand communities increasingly define (and have part ownership over) brands requires a fundamental shift in our approach to bringing products and services to market.

Source: IBM Press

IBM executive Sandy Carter is a forward thinker on this issue whose experiences and industry dialogue eventually led her to realize that marketers need a new set of tools if they are going to better contend with this power shift.  Her new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.O:  How to Use ANGELS to  Energize Your Market, delivers just such a ‘tool box’ for marketers — presenting a normative framework, together with numerous case examples from companies in a variety of B2B and B2C industries, to help marketers think through these challenges inside their own businesses.

Few are as well-equipped to tackle such a subject as Carter, who has had an impressive career in the enterprise software arena and who currently is IBM’s Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels.  In this role, she is responsible for IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA initiatives and is in charge of one of IBM’s premier brands, IBM WebSphere, which under her leadership has shown strong growth.  She also led her global marketing organization to garner 14 industry marketing awards in 2007.

What is Marketing 2.0, and what are Carter’s thoughts on how marketers can gain leverage in the dizzying world of social-media technologies to energize their marketing programs?

We’ve touched on this topic in the past, including a post on “Changing How You Think About Marketing to Your ‘Mobile’ Brand Community” and another on “Deploying Social Media for New Product/Service Development,” but I think Carter does a particularly good job of tying it all together in an integrated context; thus, we wanted to present her perspectives here.

So here is our Q&A with Carter on Marketing 2.0, ANGELS and her new book.

PB:  How would you describe Marketing 2.0 (and its underlying drivers) to someone in 200 words or less?

Carter:  Marketing 2.0 is adding social media tactics into your marketing plan for greater market understanding and demand generation. Marketing 1.0 was about using e-mail, and static Web pages to generate new demand and progression; for instance, leveraging your Web site to drive participants to an event. Marketing 2.0 takes the linkage to the next level. It is about using blogging to add another listening channel to your focus group strategy. It is about innovating new product ideas with Twitter or Wikis. It is about using innovative personalization through online chat or Jellyvision to form tighter relationships with your customers. Marketing 2.0 is using the new technology of search optimization, virtual environments, social networks and microblogs. To be most effective, Marketing 2.0 optimizes the mix of social media with traditional marketing methods.

You talk about your ANGELS marketing approach in the book. What does this acronym mean, and how can it help marketers better contend with the realities of Marketing 2.0?

Social media is still relatively new and we are experimenting with all the different outlets and mixes available. This is the fun part – we can actually be instrumental in shaping how best to use social media in any business. In the book, I try to help companies by introducing readers to an ANGELS approach that is really a framework for leveraging techniques and determining the right marketing mix.

• A nalyze and ensure strong market understanding 
• N ail the relevant strategy and story 
• G o to Market Plan 
• E nergize the channel and community
• L eads and revenue
• S cream through technology

The book details the strategies at each step of this framework with a summary section on Putting It All Together.

Do you believe that knowing, understanding and connecting with your target customer is becoming more simple or more complex for marketers over time? And what role is technology playing in this evolution?

Marketing 2.0 is about engaging communities through conversations. In social media, these communities take the form of social networks and the communal groups that develop within them. But joining the conversation isn’t as simple as just jumping in. People are not going to engage with you if you are a passive ‘taker’ of the community. We have to listen, talk, listen again, assess and contribute value – becoming citizens of each respective community we wish to join. As such, the complexity of the market is at a unique place. We have a set of clients that are digital citizens. These digital citizens expect the use of technology to connect with them. But we still have a set of clients that are not comfortable with the digital world. As such, marketers have to segment how they communicate with that audience. For instance, I recently talked to a customer who no longer does e-mail. He will only read Twitter or texts! At the other end, I work with a CEO who also doesn’t like e-mail, but rather prefers in-person seminars. A great marketer needs to understand the clients’ digital preferences!

You discuss the strategy of ‘lightly branding’ in your book. Can you explain what this is and its importance in the current marketing environment?

Lightly branding is about using influence to drive your brand, not a heavy product push! Look what Unilever did with Dove in this space. They created a blog on “What is Real beauty?” Unilever realized that there was juxtaposition in the market. While other companies said they were supporting beauty, they only showed airbrushed, slim models. Dove wanted to truly connect with real women. They wanted to give women confidence in their own beauty and started doing so through a very successful set of forums and blogs, not on their products, but their stance for young girls and women on beauty. While the blogs have increased their sales, their focus is on their corporate values, not their products.

Lightly branding means that marketers know they no longer own their own brand. It implies that marketers must understand the new circle of influence in the Marketing 2.0 world and learn about the power of technology to reach some of those influencers.

Two core points you make in the book are the importance of breaking through the noise and of ‘screaming.’ What do you mean by the latter, and how can marketing organizations be more effective at screaming to break through the noise? What are the tools and technologies they should leverage in doing so?

Today we are overwhelmed with information. There are more text messages sent everyday than there are people in the world. If MySpace was a country, it would have the 11th largest population in the world. As such, in order to scream you must be a great marketer in the basics and more. You can’t forget the basics of having solid value propositions to target your client and show relevant value. That fundamental does not change. And won’t! But, you do have to have add into the marketing mix the right set of social media tactics. To be most effective, you must learn about technologies like Twitter, LinkedIn groups, Jellyvision, podcasting and more. For instance, Twitter has been used by Dell to sell their excess inventory, IBM is using blogs to strengthen our connection to the market, and Meijer, the supercenter pioneer with 185 stores in the Midwest, is using widgets to build customer loyalty and repeat purchases and it’s been a tremendous hit with moms who shop and prepare meals. I would highly recommend that all marketers update their use of technology.

You believe in the importance of leveraging influencer and word-of-mouth channels. As the size and scope of the social-media universe explodes, how can marketers remain focused in their leverage of influencer networks to efficiently meet their goals and objectives (without getting caught in the weeds)?

In the book, I recommend creating a wheel of influence. This wheel of influence is where you look at the world of who has the most powerful voice. For instance, now with all the new technology and social media, all marketers must look at the bloggers that influence their sphere. By way of example, Twitter, a micro blog site, recently influenced Johnson & Johnson to change their advertising based on what Tweets said about their latest Motrin ads.

My advice to marketers to not get caught in the weeds is to do the following:

> First, listen to the marketplace to gather valuable market intelligence about their brand and their competitors. This will allow companies to better understand the awareness of their current market position and to identify key thought leaders and ‘tippers’ in the critical communities.

> Second, leverage that information to shape the Marketing 2.0 strategy in order to: 

• Engage with existing (or identify new) subject matter or topical experts to contribute to the online dialogue about your company/industry
• Create and maintain an ongoing presence and active voice in key market conversations
• Create and maintain ongoing relationships with key external bloggers that show a passion and depth of knowledge

You talk in your book about ‘serious gaming’ as an emerging marketing communication channel. What are the opportunities and challenges you believe marketers face when employing this channel?

Serious gaming is a phenomenal opportunity to assist companies in a number of areas like education, on-boarding, collaboration and marketing. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) 63% of the US population now plays video games and this number is significantly higher in Asia. Today’s game players are acquiring the skills that companies increasingly value as the gaming generation enters the workforce. Using games to market has a very compelling value proposition. When well-implemented, a game can virally target a sweet spot demographic, where they live, in a medium they love and understand. The games can then be used to gather all kinds of information about the player, and even generate leads. For instance, IBM is using gaming for education and has its game Innov8 in thousands of universities. The biggest challenges are in understanding your goals and selecting the right gaming approach. In the book, I outline the top 5 lessons that I have learned in my gaming experiences to date.

You have some interesting observations about best practices for building marketing dashboards. What are your top few rules for building an effective marketing dashboard? How does this relate to your philosophy of managing marketing in a 2.0 world?

In the end, Marketing 2.0 comes down to effectiveness. Without the right results, none of it matters. In designing a marketing dashboard in the new world, there are a few key areas for focus.

• First, always link to your business strategy. It is really more than just a marketing dashboard. It is what binds marketing to the business and truly reflects the value of the function.
• Second, the dashboard needs to be updated for the new world. In the book, I recommend adding in some new metrics around innovation from listening, engagement from social networks, blogging and Wikis.
• Next, consumability is a key element. To be effective, a marketing system or dashboard must allow management to drill into supporting details in related reports, or conduct multidimensional analysis to determine why a metric is performing a certain way.
• Finally, it is a journey. It requires specific focus on data quality, systems to support campaign management and the movement of data from the Web to sales automation systems, establishing consistent processes for lead management and integrating business intelligence tools to monitor results and plan appropriate actions.

You introduce the concept of the ‘in-process’ metric as a way to better manage the hand-off and carry-through between marketing and sales in customer acquisition and management. Can you explain why this is so important?

A high performance marketing organization is one that ensures that marketing and sales are tightly connected. The premise is that it is not enough for the seller to say, I am responsible for an account. Marketing is not my job. And it is equally unproductive for marketing to say that they have completed their job because they helped create an ad or helped create a lead. So that means that sales and marketing linkage is equally important in your Marketing 2.0 plans.  

As such, at IBM, we created something called in-process metrics. They show what happens ‘in-between’ a marketing action and the closing sales. It involves ownership of both marketing and sales to progress the leads between creating the lead and closing it.  Whether it is a virtual summit or an in-person event, this ownership and joint teaming is crucial for success. Connecting marketing with sales is about accelerating business transformation and growth overall. In-process metrics are a best practice in the industry to show indicators that Marketing 2.0 is connected in the overall business. Again, back to the dashboard, marketing must be connected to the business!  This principle applies regardless of how we identify the opportunity – through social media or traditional methods.