September 21st, 2010

10 Ways to Make Your Marketing Organization More Strategic and Effective

One of the biggest challenges for marketing professionals is to determine how to balance their time to work on both tactical and strategic marketing activities and actions. Left to natural tendencies, most marketing people and teams will work on short-term activities that help drive the business for the next month or quarter. An old HP colleague of mine calls this the “tyranny of the current.” Most organizations naturally assume that the primary role of marketing is to help sales close short-term and mid-term business. And that certainly is an important part of the marketing function. After all, we are trying to create new products, brand awareness, and demand for something! If it is not for sales – or to generate incremental revenues or market share – then what is it for?

Yet at the same time, when marketing teams focus only on the short term, they miss some of the strategic roles that marketing can and should play within the organization. From experience, I know that tactical, short-term focused marketing teams are not very well-respected. In order to be considered a strategic function (like finance, operations, R&D, etc.), there are other critical roles the marketing function must play. I listed those key areas in the blog entry 6 Key Roles of Highly Successful Marketing Organizations. I won’t repeat them here.

What I would like to do is highlight 10 distinct ways marketing can become more strategic in any organization. They include:

1. Bring more customer insights and the voice of the customer into the organization.
2. Write a strategic marketing plan, budget funds towards it, and execute against it.
3. Focus a few key positions on strategy (long term) and keep those people focused on longer term activities and goals (such as planning, strategic initiatives, etc.) vs. execution (tactical).
4. Separate sales or business development functions from marketing, if they are organizationally together. When marketing is imbedded within the sales department, it makes it particularly difficult to be strategic.
5. Separate marketing operations (the business of marketing and reporting, forecasting, pricing, sales response, etc.) from marketing management. Give it focus within an organization.
6. Set objectives, accountability, and metrics for short and long-term team objectives and hold your people accountable for delivering results for both. After all, what gets measured gets done.
7. Hire the right people for your organization. You need people who have the skills to operate at both a strategic and tactical level.
8. Learn to prioritize and say no. Of course, this is very hard to do. But stick with activities that are aligned with the organization’s objectives, not the “issue du jour” advanced by an aggressive sales manager or the sales response team.
9. Read Marketing Managementby Kotler and Keller. This is a great book to learn about strategic marketing management.
10. Set expectations around long term focus with senior management. With constrained resources, a common feature to most marketing organizations, certain tactical activities will need to be de-prioritized in order to spend time on the longer term, strategic elements of the business plan. These strategic elements should contribute to the company’s longer term revenue and profitable growth.

Effective marketing requires a balance of strategic and tactical work. Too little tactical work and marketing will be seen as working “in the clouds.” Too much tactical work and marketing will not be valued as a strategic function but as a “sales assist” team.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how you have balanced these orientations within your own marketing teams.

September 6th, 2010

The Zen of Marketing Management

I was thinking about how, as marketers, we are so completely focused on end results, whatever they may be. We are obsessed about new product intro dates, pricing, social media impact, web site hits, sales, profit, market share, and the list goes on. We are whipped into a frenzy around measurement and ROI of our marketing investments.

This in turn reminded me of a Zen story that will shed some light on another important aspect of marketing. It goes something like this:

A student asked a Zen Master,
‘If I work very hard,
how long will it take for me to realize Zen?’
The Master replied,
‘Ten years.’

The student replied,
‘If I work very very hard,
how long will it take for me to realize Zen?’
The Master replied,
‘Twenty years.’

The student replied,
‘If I work very very very hard,
how long will it take for me to realize Zen?’
The Master replied,
‘Thirty years.’

The student replied,
‘But, I don’t understand…
why does it take longer when I work harder?
The Master replied,
‘When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.’

Too often in marketing we are obsessed with the goal, to the point that we fail to understand that the path, or the process, we used to reach the goal is equally, if not sometimes more, important. Oftentimes, marketing professionals fail to invest adequately in infrastructure and business processes that will ultimately help us achieve the expected business results. In marketing, it is often hard to rise above the challenges of the quarter to quarter “what have you done for me lately mentality.” Truth be told, businesses need to ensure that the right processes and tools are in place to reach those treasured results. Having a processes-oriented mentality (following the path if you will) will achieve many important things. First and foremost, it will help you build a better framework for problem solving.

For example, do you want to build a more effective new product launch capability?  In order to do that, you need to map out all of elements of a successful product launch – the timing, actions, owners, and interdependencies. A second important outcome is that a well-defined process should improve overall operating efficiency. Build the process out and you will find what you really need (and don’t need) to run the business efficiently. A well-defined process also optimizes workflow, making the overall decision process more efficient. That could mean reductions in people, time and money. Great BPO projects don’t add resources—they take resources away, because they are more automated, require fewer steps, and so forth. Finally, there is the matter of effectiveness. The path will lead to more effective decisions. The results include (among many other things) better product designs, enhanced time to market for new products, more accurate forecasts and improved pricing. One shortfall of the marketing function is that it is not always favorably viewed as being a tightly-run ship, due to all of the processes, metrics, and control systems such as the supply chain or the financial aspect. Because of this, we get a bad rap; but I think we are getting better and improving over time. Having said this, we still have a long way to go, and a long path to follow!

Therefore, the path to great decisions is as important as the goal. Being more process-oriented will help you keep your eyes on the path. Marketing professionals who focus only the goal will miss the enlightenment that can be found by following the path.

What is your marketing Zen?

Resources:

http://www.amazon.com/Z-B-Business-Administration-Practice-Transform/dp/1577314697

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/zenstory.html

  

---

 [RG1]Singular because this refers to “path.”