Measure Up Blog has Relocated to https://www.visionedgemarketing.com/blog/
To all our readers and followers. Hope you are having a wonderful summer. We have moved the Measure Up Marketing blog directly to the VisionEdge Marketing site; enabling our content to all be located in one place. The blog can now be found at https://www.visionedgemarketing.com/blog/. We appreciate your support and shares, thank you!
Stay tuned, new content will be posted shortly.
All the very best,
Laura
Three Elements of Successful Change Management
We are sitting in a meeting with the CMO and a new marketing operations director from a large, well-established company. They had called and asked for a meeting to help kick their marketing metrics and dashboard up a notch.
In the last year, this marketing organization has added various capabilities, including customer relationship management, marketing automation, and marketing resource management systems. The marketing operations director has a staff, which includes the marketing automation and marketing resource management teams.
Recently, they’ve had some measurement adoption issues, so they decided to appoint a dozen of the marketers from their
200-person global marketing organization with marketing performance and operations responsibilities, with dotted line reporting to the marketing operations director. Some adoption issues are related to experience and training, but some are more subtle and the result of people who aren’t receptive to change. As we listen, I realize that this team didn’t take change management into account at the beginning of their journey.
No Magic Pill for an Instant Change
The size or industry of a company doesn’t matter.Every aspect of marketing performance management often requires cultural, process, and skill changes.
Many times these organizations underestimate the effort required—they want something fast and easy. It reminds me a little of people who want to lose weight, but they don’t want to make any activity changes or diet. They want to take a pill to lose weight, preferably while they sleep, and watch the pounds quickly melt off.
Unfortunately, such a magic pill doesn’t exist. Even the diet pill companies clearly state, “X pill was designed to be used in conjunction with a healthy diet and exercise. Some users may lose weight without changing their diets or exercising, but exercise and healthy eating are recommended for optimal results.” And there you have it, most of us who want to lose weight are going to have change—change our diet and/or change our exercise routine.
Change Is Part of a Company’s Improvement
Change is pervasive in our society and a fact of life in organizations. Change involves making alterations to the organization’s purpose, culture, structure, and processes in response to seen or anticipated changes in the environment. It can also facilitate prosperity and growth, even in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments.
Effective strategic marketing leaders realize that change is part of the continuous improvement process, and CMOs bent on survival embrace change.
Three Elements of Change
Author Dallas Willard tells us that successful change takes three elements: vision, method, and will.
Vision
Successful change hinges on a picture of a desirable future.
Vision can provide both a corporate sense of being and a sense of enduring purpose. In 1995, John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School and world-renowned change expert, introduced his eight-step change process in his book
Leading Change. Kotter posits that without a sensible vision, change efforts can dissolve into a list of confusing projects that take the organization in the wrong direction. Kotter strongly emphasizes that the vision must be easy to communicate. That is true for marketing teams adopting performance management. The CMO must create the sense of urgency, craft and communicate the vision, remove obstacles, produce short-term wins, anchor the change in the culture, and build on the change.
One of the easiest, least expensive ways to create a quick win is to change the approach to the marketing plan, which is an existing process and output for many organizations.
Method
Once you have a vision, the next thing you need is a method.
Using the losing weight example, let’s imagine that there is an upcoming event in a few months where being slimmer is important, a class reunion for example. You can envision all the benefits dropping 20 pounds offers both in the short term, for this event and, in the long term, for your overall health. The next step is to decide how to lose the weight… Will you hire a trainer and nutritionist? Join a gym? Join a weight loss group?
When you work with a firm that specializes in marketing operations, marketing performance measurement, marketing accountability, and so on, they should have a well-defined method you will use and can then adopt.
Will
The last item is intention or will. This is probably the most critical for any successful change. If you don’t really want change and/or you can’t get your team onboard, the probability of success is slim. An initiative is only successful when individuals change their daily behaviors and workflows. Being able to mobilize the individual change necessary for an initiative to be successful and deliver value to the organization is the essence of change management.
Here are five important steps to support will:
- Be aware of the need for change. If you don’t think you need to lose weight, you won’t.
- Desire the change. Even if you may know that your life or quality of life depends on making a change (stop smoking for example), you have to want to change. Performance management takes hard work, so the payoff and value needs to be very clear.
- Know how to make the change. The team members need to know how the change is going to take place and their roles in the change. They need to understand the timing and rhythm.
- Develop the skills needed to implement the change. Most likely, team members will need skill development, and hands on training is key to adult learning. Include this investment in your performance management budget.
- Reinforce the change. For the change to be sustained, constant vigilance and reinforcement is vital.
* * *
In a world where the rate of change is speeding up, the best defense is a good offense. So, master change management by planning for these three key elements: vision, method, and will.
Best-in-Class Marketers Prove They Create Value
In 2000, the Advertising Research Foundation probably didn’t realize that their report about marketing’s ability, or lack thereof, to measure its value and contribution would initiate numerous studies, conferences, and products on the topic. This year’s joint VEM/ITSMA Marketing Performance Management Survey* , which looks at how marketers and C level executives would rate marketing’s value, revealed that 85 percent of the nearly 400 study participants are seeing increased pressure for marketers to measure marketing’s value and contribution.
A key component of the annual study looks at the comparison of the number of marketers earning an ‘A’ grade from the C-Suite for their ability to impact the business and measure their value with their counterparts who are falling short. The grades remained relatively consistent with prior years, with only a quarter of the marketers earning an ‘A’ for their ability to measure and report the contribution of marketing’s programs to the business.
By now one would think this journey would be nearing completion, but there appears to still be plenty to learn. Over the years, the study has revealed that ‘A’ marketers exhibit a number of differences from their colleagues–they are better at alignment, accountability, analytics, automation, assessment, and alliances. The investments in these capabilities and how they approach the work of marketing has enabled them to serve as value creators for their organizations. On the other hand, the marketers in the “middle of the pack” focus more on enabling sales, and the laggards operate primarily as campaign or program producers. In this day and age, with all the technology that marketers have at their fingertips, it begs the question “Why can’t ‘B’ and ‘C’ marketers get close to C-level executives and show their value?”
Become a Value Generator
Marketing organizations that create value are proactive. The ‘A’ marketers hold themselves accountable for contributing to business outcomes even if senior leadership doesn’t. They believe it is their responsibility to identify, investigate, evaluate, recommend, and prioritize market and customer opportunities. These marketers implement continuous change to maximize the organization’s success, and enable it to stay abreast or ahead of market, customer, and competitor moves. ‘B’ and ‘C’ marketers don’t seem to do that, don’t ask the right questions, or don’t know how to show their value.
Make Marketing Performance Management a Priority
According to the data, organizations that are performing well when it comes to customer value and business growth, are those where the marketers excel at performance management. ‘A’ marketers prioritize performance management, establish a clear roadmap for performance improvement, and focus on aligning marketing to the business not just sales. They have regular two-way dialogue with senior leadership and are motivated to select and report on the metrics that matter most.
Here are three qualities of this elite group that any marketing organization can emulate:
- Be a business person first, a marketer second
- Provide customer and market insight to inform business strategy, in addition to enabling sales
- Tap experts to hone skills and improve capabilities
Join the conversation with VisionEdge Marketing and ITSMA in our webinar, The Link Between Performance Management and Value Creation, Tuesday, June 17th, from 10:00-11:00am CST.
*VEM has been conducting the survey for 13 years. ITSMA has co-sponsored the survey for the past three years.
Five Proven Practices for Customer Experience Mapping
Customers are the most important part of any business, and keeping them happy should be at the top of your list of priorities. If your organization is among those that have created customer experience maps, kudos to you and your team! If not, and this is an itch you want to scratch, read on for five (5) tips to help you undertake this important initiative.
Before we offer advice for mapping the customer experience, it might be useful to make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we mean by customer experience. At VisionEdge Marketing, when we refer to customer experience we mean the points of interaction between the customer and an organization. These touch points include, but are not limited to, interactions associated with pricing, purchasing, servicing, payment/billing, support, and delivery of your organizations offerings (goods and/or services).
How customers evaluate their experience is based on their perception of the actual performance of the organization at that point of interaction compared to the customer’s expectation. In 2005, James Allen from the Harvard Business School revealed that while 80% of businesses state that they offer a great customer experience, only about 8% of customers feel similarly about their experience. Understanding this perception versus the expectation, and the gaps across all experiences, enables you to create customer experience performance targets and key performance indicators.
Customer experience mapping is a vehicle for capturing the perceptions versus the expectations across all points of interaction, ideally for each customer segment and/or persona. The mapping process should enable you to develop processes and skills designed to deliver an experience that sets your organization apart in the eyes of your customers, hopefully resulting in customer loyalty and becoming advocates for your goods/services.
Many organizations often mistake creating a process map with creating a customer experience map. While similar, their focus is quite different. A process map describes your company’s internal processes, functions, and activities and generally uses the company’s internal language and jargon. A customer experience map describes the customer experience in, and only in, the customer’s language. What makes customer experience mapping challenging is the fact that the customer experience is typically quite complex, because it cuts across divisions, departments, and functions.
Here are five key steps to help you create your customer experience map:
1. Start with the universal touch points that can be applied across all your customers (you can create more specific experience maps as time goes on)
2. Make a list of all the touch points. For each touch point write a description, method of interaction, and customer expectation. We have found that this step is best accomplished by:
- Involving as many people as necessary, including members of your customer advisory boards, to identify all touch points
- Holding working sessions and conducting interviews to capture and incorporate the expected and actual emotional, experiential, and functional experiences for each touch point
3. Document your learnings and produce a visual illustration (map)
4. Use the map to identify areas working well and those that need improvement. Focus on those areas that are known as “moments of truth,” those crucial interactions that determine whether the customer becomes or remains loyal
5. Build a plan to address James Allen’s “Three D’s,” which he believes enables organizations to offer an exceptional customer experience:
- Design the correct incentive for the correctly identified consumer, offered in an enticing environment.
- Deliver the proposed experience by focusing the entire team across various functions.
- Develop consistency in execution.
Sometimes organizations need help with this, which is why there are experts out there! Don’t be afraid to ask for help–this is an area you do not want to ignore.
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