Pressure to fill the prospect pipeline for Sales can drive Marketing to produce an overwhelming volume of collateral, campaigns, events, studies, and so forth. It’s impressive, yet attribution can still be elusive.
Silos within Marketing are a big cause of unbalanced Marketing portfolio, with each sub-department pursuing their own targets. Integrated marketing communications helps drive synergies, but have you identified the success recipe for precisely what creates the most lift?
The first step is to un-silo-ize Marketing groups’ targets relative to enterprise targets. Whatever you’re doing, show how it directly supports your CMO’s targets, which should directly support the CEO’s targets.
The second step is to un-silo-ize Marketing groups’ deliverables. Look at the whole enchilada. Throw everything in the pot, regardless of originator or target, and see what rises to the top. Which ingredients pop, and how do the ingredients support one another?
The third step is to look for patterns. Among the top ingredients, what are the common factors? It may be a certain type of headline or call to action or media or art. It could be any combination of factors. Identify the patterns, and you will find your success recipe.
The fourth step — and most impactful — is to evaluate your success recipe across the customer life cycle. This tends to be the weakest link in pipeline management. How will you balance your success recipe across the end-to-end customer experience journey?
As Gary Katz stated in his flagship article, 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing, that inspired this one:
“Poor intelligence about program ROI creates a challenge in sustaining the right marketing mix.”
Marketing intelligence across the customer life cycle is critical to getting more value from your existing resources. Your program ROI intelligence is not great until it covers the full spectrum of customer interactions with your company. It’s better to proactively nurture repeat sales, upsell, cross-sell, share of wallet increases, and customers’ evangelism of your brand. Yet it’s more common to drive these behaviors rather than nurture them. Remember the exponential profitability of existing customers relative to new customers.
A revolutionary way to develop new thinking and habits in un-silo-izing, connecting targets, finding patterns, and supporting the entire customer life cycle is the ClearAction Value Exchange. Through half-hour Workspaces you can create mini plans that are easy to experiment with right away, and easy to share with peers. Your colleagues can gain a personal conviction of new thinking and habits within a half hour, too. This accelerates shared vision and collective capability.
This post was inspired by the classic article, 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing, by Gary Katz.
The ClearAction Value Exchange is full of breakthrough methods to un-silo-ize your Marketing portfolio.
Other posts in this series:
- Ill-Defined Metrics: 1st Deadly Sin of Marketing
- Slammed Resources: 2nd Deadly Sin of Marketing
- Sketchy Institutional Memory: 3rd Deadly Sin of Marketing
- Constipated Creativity: 4th Deadly Sin of MarketingÂ
- Dysfunctional Relationships: 5th Deadly Sin of Marketing
- Faulty Decision-Making: 6th of 7 Deadly Sins of Marketing
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