78. Evaluate: What Is Measured Improves

You will be pleasantly surprised to learn that you have been automatically building a measurement and evaluation process into your marketing plan. Each step of the P•R•A•I•S•E Marketing Process has components that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your plan as it is executed.

Purpose

Goals and objectives were defined in the first section of your marketing plan. Now that you have completed the marketing planning process, you need to revisit the goals to see if they are still relevant or if they need to be adjusted:

• Are the goals still relevant and realistic given what you have learned through your research and analysis?

• Have you established both short-term and long-term goals?

• Do you have buy-in and commitment from leaders across the business?

• Are the goals linked to the larger goals of the organization?

Goals should be specific and measurable so that you can evaluate your progress toward achieving the stated goals and update them as your business situation changes.

Mission, vision, and values are timeless but there are times when they need to be updated to reflect leadership, market, or customer changes:

• Are the vision, mission, and values of the company defined?

• How will the vision be communicated so everyone in the company is clear about where the company is headed?

• How will values become such an integral part of the business that it drives, supports, and nurtures the behavior in all employees?

• Is there congruency between the internal brand and external brand?

• Do employee performance reviews include measures of accountability and demonstration of core values?

The SWOT analysis that you created as part of your situation analysis is a tool that can be used in the yearly planning cycle. Use this at the start of strategic planning meetings to get a quick consensus of the company’s strengths and weaknesses relative to external threats and new opportunities.

Research

Customer research is an ongoing activity. Customer surveys and interviews may only be done once or twice a year, but there are several mechanisms you can build into your plan to continually measure customer satisfaction and loyalty with respect to your product and service offerings. Interactive voice response (IVR) will help you evaluate the effectiveness of customer service agents, as well as listen and understand the issues that concern your customers. Consider how you can integrate Web-based feedback (quick surveys, blogs, forums, etc.) to stay current and connected to customers. Continuously refine your understanding of why your customers buy and what motivates them. Consider hosting a customer advisory board to get in-depth information about how to improve your business on an ongoing basis. Most important, get out of the office and in front of customers to observe them interacting with your products and services. You may learn more this way than with a dozen surveys!

As you learn through ongoing customer interactions, apply this information to improve customer experience and to increase the success of marketing communications and programs.

Customer segments should be analyzed in operations reviews so everyone can contribute their knowledge and experience from working with customers. It will also create a collective understanding of who the most important customers are to your business. Evaluate how well the CRM plan is being executed. Is the sales team doing an effective job of targeting and selling to “A” customers? Is the number of customers in this category increasing? If you had a goal to migrate “B” customers to “A” customers, was the strategy effective? What new strategies should be developed to impact customers in the “C” and “D” categories? Based upon a refined understanding of customers, will this change the target market profile?

Competitive updates are easy if you divide the responsibility for collecting this information across several people. In operations reviews, people can report changes and strategic adjustments can be made. As new competitors are identified, your team can respond quickly.

Macro-environmental trends are easier to monitor when several people are tracking various topics and issues. If this information is collected on an ongoing basis as described in Section II, “Research,” your strategies and plan can be updated real-time in quarterly operations meetings.

Analyze

Break-even and target profit are dynamic and change as the factors that impact these measures change. Evaluate pricing for your solutions compared to industry benchmarks and competitors’ pricing. These metrics can be evaluated as financials are updated, or during the quarterly marketing and operations review.

Continuously look for new ways to add customer experience, thereby adding value and the potential to raise prices. You may wish to do the “Finding New Value” worksheets once a year to evaluate strategic changes in response to changing conditions.

Distribution channels require analysis in several areas. Were the goals for each channel met for revenue, profit, and margin? If not, what will you do to improve results? Do channels need additional training? Are there any issues related to channel conflict or compensation? Do marketing programs create too many or too few leads? For some businesses, channel partners represent the most important aspect of their marketing mix. Build relationships and create ongoing value with your trusted partners. Include them in company meetings and events and share information with them to build a mutual understanding of customers and your business.

Implement

The Implementation Calendar and Marketing Budget are updated as programs are executed. In quarterly reviews the program results should be reported and analyzed. The results may require changes in messaging, targeting, price, media, creative, and other areas. Marketing is a process of continuous learning by tracking results, understanding the underlying factors that created the results (whether they are positive or negative), and making adjustments.

Remember, most businesses are looking for a marketing program that will be a “magic bullet” to produce new customers. The real secret is rigorously measuring and analyzing results and making improvements based upon a closed-loop continuous learning process.

The Marketing Program ROI worksheet is a “what if” tool that can be used to test new marketing programs. This worksheet should be used in conjunction with the sales funnel analysis worksheet and the ROI Optimizer.

Sales funnel analysis will help you analyze how the steps in the sales cycle correlate to marketing strategy and execution. Do programs target qualified buyers? Do they generate enough leads? Do they create too many leads resulting in lost opportunity because the sales force is not staffed to follow up? Analyze the number of proposals that were created and how many were converted to closed sales. Each stage in the sales funnel should be analyzed for its effectiveness.

Strategize

Strategies should be assessed and updated in every quarterly review meeting. The performance measures and market reports on the topics previously mentioned will dictate if strategies need to be adjusted. New competitive information may require attention to competitive and pricing strategies. Trends and customer analysis may signal that strategic changes must be made. Customer feedback may reveal the need for a new service. A new product innovation may create growth opportunities in new markets. As products evolve through the lifecycle, they require new distribution channels, pricing, and marketing.

Evaluate and Execute

The ROI Optimizer is a process you will learn in the next chapter that will link and measure all the elements in the demand chain. It is an invaluable tool that will help you not only assess the effectiveness of marketing programs, but will also identify specific areas and dependencies in the demand chain where improvements can be made. By improving the success of marketing and sales strategies and tactics, you will be able to make better decisions and grow your business at a faster pace.

The Balanced Scorecard is another tool you will use to measure the effectiveness of targeted objectives. It will help you align people and processes to meet customer needs, thereby achieving financial goals. An overview of this process is described later in this section.

Culture assessments will create specific measures you can use to improve year-over-year results in several areas of your business. Several companies can help you create and administer assessments. Look for those that will link employee and customer satisfaction with business performance metrics. You can also follow the ten “Culture Rules” at the end of this section to design and monitor your own programs.