3

Realigning Your Structure

From Silos to Convergence

Once your people have started to change their mind-set, the next thing to change is how your organization is structured, both within the marketing group and in interactions with other departments. The traditional view of a linear relationship with the customer no longer works. Marketing, sales, and customer service departments each had their own relationship with that customer. But because of the explosion in the number of channels that we use to communicate with our customers, and our customers’ shifting expectations of how we interact with them, the old way of doing things isn't good enough anymore. Rather, we need to think about how we can conduct a far more cohesive conversation with our customers. They don't want to experience our silos.

One significant change in structure relates to marketing's adoption of all the new communication channels available in the digital space. Figure 3-1 depicts exactly how customers might view a channel focus compared to a customer focus.

 

We have been adopting, testing, and investing in all these channels, and over time, we even organized our teams around the channels. Each time a new channel emerges, like e-mail or social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on), we create a team—digital marketing team, search marketing team, social media team, e-mail marketing, for example—or assign responsibility to someone to manage it and connect to customers through it. We have gotten very good at reporting and measuring these channels. Defined testing strategies help us determine how a channel is performing and what levers we can adjust.

At some point, we started to see another shift. It became very obvious that while our channel performance effort was necessary and informative, all of these channels were starting to converge and were going to significantly change the way we evaluated and managed our investments. While it may seem obvious, we were effectively ignoring the idea of channel convergence (see figure 3-1), as all of marketing was busy testing new channels and forming new teams to manage the channels, especially across digital marketing, which encompassed areas such as:

• Website strategy
• E-commerce marketing
• Search engine marketing and optimization
• Social media marketing
• Social media monitoring and response
• Digital and social advertising
• Owned, earned, and paid digital communications (blogs, online publishing, and media)
• Online communities
• E-mail marketing and nurturing
• Online chat engines
• Content marketing elements such as syndication and deployment strategies

 

Effectively converging channels means engaging with the customer in one consistent voice. While all these channels are distinct, direct connection occurs between all the activities within each of them. The activities within a channel can affect another channel's results (both positively and negatively). We also realized that customers don't necessarily want to hear from us on every channel. What they want instead is that we communicate with them by their channel of choice. If we connected with a customer by, say, e-mail, he doesn't want us to force him into a different channel like social media or a direct phone call. This applies to both outbound conversations, which we initiate, and to inbound connections, which the customer initiates. The channel messaging also needs alignment. Content across channels is another element of coordination for achieving maximum amplification.

The trouble arose, then, when we failed to coordinate our communications across all the different channels we had open. We risked alienating our customers because we lost track of how we were connecting with them. No matter how creative or appealing the message, we realized we couldn't afford to broadcast it to indifferent or unlikely recipients. Get it wrong and we could be seen as noise, diminishing the return on our marketing investment while throwing money at people who simply tuned us out. We might send different campaigns to the same prospect or, worse, bombard them with messages they had no interest in whatsoever.

We once sent three hundred e-mails to a customer during an eighteen-day period. How did that happen? When I knew we needed to learn more about how to converge channels, I turned to key leadership to find the answers. Channels do not operate independently and neither should we, because they actually complement and improve each other's performance. Jennifer Chase, SAS senior marketing director, put it nicely when she said, “There are even times when you can draw the wrong conclusions when you look at the performance of a channel independently.” For example, if someone says something negative about your company on Twitter, you might jump to conclusions about her level of engagement with the business. But Chase also said that focusing on a single channel might mean you miss out on the larger context for why a customer sent that tweet. “But it can also be very difficult to conduct an in-depth discussion with someone using 140 characters at a time,” she said. The strategy therefore should be to encourage the customer to move the conversation elsewhere—maybe to e-mail, chat, or the phone—as a way to figure out the best way to resolve her problem. “Customer expectations have shifted,” Chase told me. “They expect that you as a company know them and what actions they have already taken with you. They expect you to connect the dots.”

The key point is that once you've made the switch to embrace an analytical mind-set, you'll need to make a series of internal structural changes to your organization to take advantage of those new capabilities. That all begins with altering how you look at and react to your customers. In short, you need to look at the forest as a whole instead of focusing on the trees alone. Our solution was to take a step back and evaluate where we had applied bandages and patches that were failing us. I took my leadership team offsite and asked them point blank: If we had the chance to start from scratch and rebuild our organization, what would it look like? How could we change our thinking to become more analytical and modern in interacting with our customers? How do we put customers at the center?

The answer was that we had to do a renovation and bring our channels together and create a new customer-centric view of the market. We needed a way to monitor all of the different campaigns we might be running for a customer from a centralized place. We knew we had to create unified messaging across all of our channels and give our customers the kind of personalized attention they are asking for. And we did that by creating the framework depicted in figure 3-2.

In order to effectively manage a multichannel approach in digital, we realized that we needed to:

• Align investment strategies.
• Create more consistent messaging, content, and creative.
• Define rules of execution for those publishing content.
• Develop and monitor consistent performance metrics.
• Enforce continual internal communication.
• Align performance objectives across teams, creating interdependencies.

Figure 3-2

 

These kinds of changes were painful. People tended to focus on their area of expertise or influence at the exclusion of everything else. We were asking them to look at the bigger picture instead and understand the consequences when they undertook an action. In short, we needed to adopt a much more unified approach to how we thought about everything, from our campaigns to how we handled inbound contact from prospects.

After many iterations of organizational design, we landed on the framework shown in the figure. The framework served two purposes. It became the global structure for organizing marketing consistently in order to have maximum impact, improve communications, and optimize resources. The other purpose was to demonstrate a design that supports both a shared services approach and a go–to–market approach. We defined marketing shared services as those functions that could operate most effectively as a more centralized approach, leveraging channel expertise and establishing a service-level model. We also converged similar channels into these teams. In the go-to-market approach, everything comes together, resulting in a marketing plan aligned to our messages and driven by our customer knowledge. Marketing shared services and go-to-market teams have common objectives. The framework comes to life in slightly different ways, depending on the size or scope of a region, but our intent with the framework was to create a foundation from which to align, collaborate, and integrate our efforts as much as possible.

Going to Market—In a New Way

When we leverage the power of customer experience analytics, we can then understand all of the intersection and entry points we have with our customers—what I defined in a previous chapter as their “digital footprint.” This digital footprint connects all sources of customer data interactions that tell a story of that individual or the company overall. For marketing, this type of information allows for increased targeting and segmentation, analyzing trends, and evaluating the performance of a particular site or asset. Marketing can apply scores and trigger actions as a way to design a better go-to-market plan, which is how we present ourselves to the external world in a cohesive and aligned way.

To get a more holistic view of the market beyond the limitations of any one channel, your marketing analytics strategy should allow you to fully capture all the data, apply visualization techniques, and create an outcome that marketers will be able to consume as they make decisions about campaigns, activities, and plans. The analytics and reporting empower better decision making to increase the rate of success in channel convergence. The impact of convergence flows into reorganizing modern marketing teams.

A key example of one such change we made as a marketing organization was to rethink how we implemented our go-to-market efforts, including all our campaigns and channels. In the past, for instance, we expected marketers to be experts in every aspect they needed to support a new campaign, from social media and content to lead generation and event preparation. They also had to know everything about the product or service around which they were building a campaign. They needed to be a jack-of-all-trades.

But that's now changed. Given the complexities and intricacies involved with all the different channels, let alone the rising importance of content as part of an effective campaign, it doesn't make sense for marketers to be good at everything. Rather, go-to-market leaders act more like the conductor of an orchestra: someone who both understands the expertise of the team members around her and knows how to pull them in at the moment they're needed to make the campaign a success. “The concept of the orchestrator evolved from the idea that it would be great to have someone who had a view of the entire organization and who could help connect the dots,” said Scott Batchelor, a marketing manager whose team is charged with mounting the go-to-market campaigns for SAS analytics products. And as Felicia Ramsey, the marketing manager in charge of customer intelligence and risk solutions at SAS, noted, “In a digital marketing department, you need specialists and someone to bring them all together. The marketer will know their topic well, but they are also at the center of bringing in the right people to build the best go-to-market program.”

Establishing a Go-to-Market Office

A go-to-market (GTM) office owns the definition, building, and orchestration of GTM programs and campaigns aligned to corporate initiatives.

Revenue and Growth Marketing

• Demand generation and pipeline marketing
• Client management, reference management, and development

Retention and Loyalty Marketing

• Current customer and adoption marketing
• User group support
• Education practice marketing and academic outreach programs

Country or Business Unit Go-to-Market Dimension

• Adopts, executes, and provides inputs for regionwide or global programs
• Owns the localization and customization of regionwide or global programs, and campaigns to the local markets
• Develops marketing strategy, programs, and campaigns unique to the country
• Is the primary interface to country sales and field organization
• Gives input to overall business and marketing process, including feedback

 

An Orchestrator in Action

We use the term “orchestrator” to describe the job of marketers who make connections between different areas within our organization in order to bring a campaign to market. Their key functions are:

• Marketing around the customer decision journey for a key initiative.
• Synchronizing digital and traditional marketing channels so that SAS is found more often, more effectively, and by more customers.
• Ensuring the customer journey approach is progressing with key stakeholders.
• Engaging with client managers to identify needs for business units.
• Acting as point of contact for leadership and senior leadership across SAS.
• Ensuring alignment with sales targets and marketing strategy.
• Actively participating in product launches.

 

A marketing specialist who reports to Batchelor or Ramsey, for example, taps channel and product-specific experts from within the organization for help in building a campaign, but also accesses resources like our external communications team and PR teams as well as our corporate creative team, which serves as our in-house creative resource. Figure 3-3 shows how all the components of a go-to-market plan combine. The marketer orchestrator sits at the middle, bringing together all those different levels of expertise. According to Chase, “The goal is to create a plan that is aligned internally and externally, and that takes a multichannel approach and is anchored by the customer journey.”

 

 

When you're managing many campaigns, knowing who you're sending information to or who you're expecting results from is critical to your success. When you optimize those efforts, score the data, and put models in place that give you more information about behaviors and interactions, you will see immediate impact in the form of cost savings and campaign effectiveness. For instance, we experienced a reduction in e-mail opt-outs by about 20 percent and increased click-through rates by about 30 percent. Because the campaign is highly optimized, we're getting the right information to the right people. So the results are higher-quality leads, reduced costs, and a better experience for our customers.

Some examples of channel convergence in action include:

• Back links in blog posts to increase search volume.
• Integration of social media strategies into traditional campaigns or events.
• Social media sharing within advertising.
• Optimization of search word strategies across all channels consistently.
• Incorporation of chat technology within e-mail marketing.
• Consistency in all digital advertising—search, social, display, network, and more.

Creating Marketing Shared Services

Another area where we needed convergence was in content marketing. Content has become a critical part of marketing and must be both relevant and accessible in many different forms and for many different platforms, such as mobile-friendly, videos, ebooks, slideshows, and so on. It's not enough to post white papers on your site for customers to download.

The trouble arises, though, in generating content. Or, more specifically, making sure there is coordination across the organization for acquiring it. We found that we had different channels investing time and money in acquiring content, such as by hiring someone to write a research paper, when another department channel already had a similar paper sitting in its archives. We were continually reinventing the wheel and wasting plenty of money, because we weren't coordinating our efforts. “We were the worst offenders of creating random acts of content,” said Barbara Anthony, who has worked for SAS for twenty-eight years and is now the director of the digital and content marketing team.

Our solution was to create a shared service called content marketing that would be a central resource every campaign or go-to-market team could coordinate with when acquiring or sharing content, as well as a content framework to show the connection of content creation and marketing (see figure 3-4).

Anthony leads the team that created a catalog and inventory of our existing content. They then scored each piece of content based on its effectiveness. John Balla, a content marketer, was a member of the sixperson team that reviewed every single piece of content we had in-house. Balla had been working at SAS for eight years as a campaign team lead and content creator, blogging, contracting research, and recording event content to promote in digital formats. In his new role, his focus is to evaluate existing content inventory and guide content development to improve campaign performance and other forms of audience engagement, such as search and social media. As an example, Balla and his team reviewed every white paper the company had collectively written about the subject of data management. They also watched every video and webinar we had filmed and then judged each piece with a figurative thumbs-up or thumbs-down. “We were looking for the pieces that were the most consistent with the story we're trying to tell as a company,” Balla told me. For instance, he said he had read some 127 white papers on the topic of data management alone, 62 of which passed muster.

Implementing Marketing Shared Services

We have rethought our structure by redefining those components in our organization that would be optimized by establishing a shared service—globally or regionally.

Content and Communication Services

• Content planning, procurement, and placement (deploy and amplify)
• Content curating and management
• Reference management
• External communications and analyst relations
• Multilanguage delivery

Digital and Creative Marketing Services

• Digital advertising (display, search, etc.)
• Creative design for all channels
• Social media marketing
• Website and e-commerce marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Emerging channels

Marketing Sciences, Analytics, and Reporting Services

• Systems, process, and governance
• Metrics, reporting, and analytics
• Marketing automation (including e-mail marketing)
• Data strategy (including nurturing and segmentation)
• Lead management
• Marketing operations, forecasting, budgeting

Event Planning and Logistics Services

• Plan for event project management systems and processes
• Create and execute pan-regional events

Customer Contact Center

• Inbound focus customer experience and service
• Demand generation
• Social media monitoring and response
• Multichannel (chat, phone, e-mail, web, social)

 

One approach Balla uses to screen the content is quantitative; he assigns each asset a score based on its search term keyword density. In that way, he evaluates whether the author uses the same words and phrases that customers use in Internet browsers during the different stages of their decision journey. While objective, that approach doesn't provide a complete evaluation of the content. Balla also told me that some subjective scoring is needed because search performance is only part of the picture. White papers are evaluated for the quality of writing as well. “We have to remember that we are dealing with human beings who are reading something,” he said. “So we scored content based on whether it was well written or just stale and mismatched with expectations set by the asset title.”

Another result of our content review process was that we uncovered gaps, target areas where we didn't have enough or any content. “We may have had tons of white papers on the subject of the customer journey,” Anthony explained, “but maybe we needed an ROI calculator as well.”

At the same time, we posed a challenge to marketers—they needed to evolve from thinking only of managing their specific channels into becoming orchestrators, someone who uses the data and analytics to test and understand different strategies that are most effective with our customers and prospects. “To successfully manage our relationships with the customer,” Anthony told me, “we learned that we had to centralize our operations.”

Developing New Department Relationships

The seeds for the structural changes to implement our analytical approach to marketing began in 2007, when terms like social media and Web 2.0 were becoming mainstream. An enormous shift was occurring in the digital world, and the leaders of the various marketing departments created an internal group called the Marketing 2.0 Council to talk through and digest the major implications these changes might have on our organizations.

Those council meetings were very successful and helped us promote our brand through the new emerging channels and to better coordinate how we could leverage outlets like blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and the rest for both outbound and inbound communications with our customers.

As the complexity of the digital communications world continued to proliferate, we as an organization realized that it wasn't just marketing that was affected by the changes in technology and how people used it. Our entire organization had to adjust. That sparked the creation of a new council we dubbed “Digitize the Business.” We included representatives from almost every department in the company. Our goal was to collaborate on modernizing and enhancing our customers' experiences with us. As Aaron Hill, one of the key drivers and coordinators of the Digitize the Business efforts, told me, “We needed to start sharing these digital things we were doing with marketing across the company because it was now impacting all of us. We needed to start collaborating and working together.” That meant that as a marketing organization, we had to rethink our relationships with other departments in the company and understand how analytics could help us work more closely together. The foundation for those changes began with developing a strong partnership with our IT department.

Partnering with IT

Marketing technology continues to grow and change, which is both overwhelming and exciting. Regardless of how amazing the technology or tool may be, I like to say that “the devil is in the data.” That's why a marketing analytics strategy requires constant care and feeding of the data, and that the integration, management, and governance of the data must remain a constant priority.

Given the complexity of the technology landscape, the ability to focus on which areas demand attention and prioritize investments and implementations is essential. Modern marketing organizations, therefore, need to implement a technology road map that delivers automation, empowers the marketers directly, and incorporates a data-driven priority. But embracing the technology for handling that data presents a challenge for marketing. While marketing requires new technical skills (more on that in the next chapter), we're not the experts when it comes to the technology. Now that we are relying so heavily on data and analytical tools to do our work, we need more help from experts in how we can both create and collect enterpriselevel customer data, while also ensuring its integrity. Without good, clean data, we can't market very well, no matter how sophisticated our tools are.

In the past, marketing might have developed its own tools and databases to house the information collected. We would go out and buy our own hardware and software to get up and running quickly. We recognized that not only was this going to duplicate resources within our organization, but we simply didn't have the in-house expertise to maintain the systems. We had to have the IT team as our partner instead. We recognized that we needed IT for its expertise in storing, integrating, modeling, and providing a consistent structure for our data.

At the same time, IT had to have our understanding of the business needs to know what questions to ask when capturing the most important data. This relationship can't be neglected, because as customers change, marketing changes, and the channels of engagement morph and data explodes. Ultimately, the partnership between IT and marketing will be the linchpin for new, emerging opportunities. Today, our marketing organization has a great partnership with the IT department. But it wasn't always that way. The relationship wasn't bad, just static.

Fortunately for us, Berni Mobley, SAS senior vice president of IT, was very open and proactive about the idea of her department becoming a business partner with marketing. Similarly, she also began to change the mind-set of the people in the IT department, helping them shift from thinking only of features and functions and more about our business objectives with the systems we put in place. Mobley and her team recognized that, in order to take advantage of new channels and data, they had to interact differently with marketing.

Traditional back-office IT—responding to issues, maintaining infrastructure, and considering only internal customers—wasn't going tocut it. The new IT department is strategic, targeting the same customers as marketing. Not only do the IT people attend marketing meetings, they participate strategically, advising marketing at planning stages. No longer does the marketing department send requests to IT after finishing planning and hoping resources are available. “Beinginvolved with marketing up front and hearing their business needs helps IT be more proactive in allocating resources and suggesting new technologies to help them reach their goals sooner,” Mobley told me. “As their partner, when marketing succeeds, my staff feels proud of the role they played and that fosters the desire to do it again.”

For example, when we undertook the effort to completely overhaul the SAS.com website, we worked with Mobley as cosponsors of the project to ensure that the site was not going to be merely informational, but that it would also have e-commerce capabilities and that its primary goal would be to create a different online experience for our customers.

Mobley even created a new position, an integration analyst, to help formalize the partnership between marketing and IT. The integration analyst is present at the outset of any marketing initiative to ensure marketing needs are met using the latest technologies that fit into the IT infrastructure. Instead of saying something like, “No, you'll create technical issues,” when we talk about a potential new project, IT now says things like, “Here's a cool new application that will fix that problem.”

To further solidify our partnership, IT and marketing both participated in hiring the best candidate to fill the integration analyst role, because we wanted someone who had technology chops and could speak the language of business. As Mobley explained to me, “It was very important to me that it was a joint decision on who to hire for this position. The integration analyst position benefits both IT and marketing. IT gains a much deeper understanding of the business and acts as a communication bridge between the two departments, which ultimately helps IT deliver a better product for marketing.”

Even though we now hire marketers with very technical skill sets, we are not competing with IT. The people we are hiring are using their skills to dig deeply into the data the IT folks maintain in a very complementary relationship.

Many organizations see IT, like marketing, as a cost center rather than a source of revenue. But, by partnering with us when supporting our analytical backbone, we can begin to share a story of how we jointly contribute to the bottom line.

This concept also applies to the continued analytical transformation in our global offices. As we undergo modernization efforts internationally, we already have the partnership with IT in place that allows us to debate and collaborate on the best solution for the entire organization.

We've evolved our system of record to be a true marketing analytics portal. Analytics, the reporting, the graphics, and our understanding of the trends have enabled campaign teams working with the sales organization to fully demonstrate value. Our marketing analytics portal is connected to all the systems and to a single view of the data. Building that portal and empowering people with data and analysis are critical components to delivering results, and ultimately to our credibility. But we couldn't have done it without IT support—data management, hosting, training, troubleshooting, and all the other ways it has supported us.

Establishing a deeper partnership between IT and marketing can take time, so enter this transition with patience. For example, James Weber, chief marketing officer and executive vice president at Comerica Bank, explained that at first, he didn't have a collaborative relationship with his chief information officer (CIO). But after the CIO retired, and with the help of an outside consultant, Weber said that his organization recognized that it needed to look at IT as a teammate rather than an obstacle, especially because the organization's outdated data architecture prevented marketing from effectively mining data. “We can't continue to do things the traditional way anymore,” he told me. “We need the ability to go in and mine the data, take insight to another level, and find the opportunities, especially when thinking about your own customer base. This impacts the customer experience.”

To help overcome those barriers, IT and marketing at Comerica came together to sponsor a data governance council to consolidate how the company was managing data across its different functional silos. “We didn't have a data architecture, data standards, or governance,” Weber explained. “It was being done in pockets. Some business units were skeptical that they would lose control of how they thought things needed to be done. It took time, but we broke through that.”

Using Analytics to Bridge the Sales Gap

Another internal structural change we've undergone as a result of our marketing modernization efforts is to cement our relationship with the sales department. The sales and marketing relationship needs constant care and feeding. It must be deliberate, measurable, and aligned.

While sales and marketing groups historically approach initiatives from different directions, they can use a common language (like leads, sales, retention, or loyalty) to maintain a constant dialogue and find new strategies that can lead to more sales. For SAS sales and marketing groups, there were huge amounts of data on the activity of a contact. Systems tracked a person from initial capture as a lead through his interactions with the website, events, and other campaigns. As in any company, though, there was often confusion about what the data meant and how the two groups interpreted the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

A typical challenge for the SAS marketing group was communicating the overall impact of outreach efforts. When they met, our sales counterparts wanted to know:

• How did different marketing channels perform?
• What types of interactions provided the best outcomes?
• Which assets were the most effective when engaging with the customer?

As an analytics company that develops dashboards, scorecards, and other business intelligence tools, SAS had long been ahead of the curve in working with marketing data. Still, many of the reports were based on outdated structures or cumbersome data schemes, and, as a result, teams (on both sides) found it difficult to access the data they needed.

This problem intensified at the executive level. Confusion at lower levels about the performance of activities made it more difficult to provide reports to sales and marketing executives. This compromised our ability to put the right amount of resources behind highperforming programs, especially if it was unclear which programs were, in fact, performing well.

We began the process of collaborating better by learning to speak a common language in which we could show salespeople the kind of digital and analytical information they needed to land new accounts. By relying on our marketing and analytical information, we could bring real, actionable information via the customer's digital footprint to the salespeople, which was like handing them the Holy Grail.

The sales organization talks numbers, so we as marketers need to talk numbers. All our efforts and investments are also now aligned to the sales organization's objectives and targets. A sales organization has a revenue number and a set of metrics related to customer retention. In turn, we measure the success of our marketing efforts based on the impact we have on building a sales pipeline, driving revenue, and influencing renewals. Our metrics include many of the traditional marketing assessments, but with a clear focus on how we are affecting the pipeline revenue for our overall business. We also provide the sales organization with a view into those results at contact and company levels. We can clearly define and measure impact at the bottom line.

Marketing Analytics at Work

Scoring Leads to Drive More Effective Sales

Leads are the lifeblood of any sales effort. But, not all leads are created equal. Some have a high value for an organization and represent a realistic opportunity to win business. Others are earlystage engagements that take months or years of development for a sales opportunity.

Because of this disparity, the question of “what is a lead?” puzzles many organizations. Sales and marketing groups have worked for years to formalize the definition of a lead and what it means within an existing business model. Regardless of your definition, one thing is consistent: marketing has to adapt its strategies to bring in more, better, or just different mixes of leads. The key question is, how do you get there?

The Challenge

Over the years, the SAS marketing organization built a complex method of passing leads from marketing to sales. The process was similar to what other companies have in place, that is, leads that met a set of rules were qualified and then sent to a salesperson to follow up. The system was effective but difficult to manage, especially when business needs changed.

To build a new model to score and qualify leads, the marketing team looked at existing data and then conferred with their counterparts in sales to reorient the lead management process to accomplish two main goals:

1. Increase the number and percentage of leads that convert to opportunities. This meant identifying the best leads and finding a faster way to pass more high-qualified leads to sales.
2. Improve the outcomes from the lead conversion process. Obviously, high-quality leads are essential to creating a larger pipeline of deals. The team needed a better way to score and then prioritize leads.

An added wrinkle was that the project had to be global, so a lead in Australia, for example, would have the same meaning as a lead in Germany. That way, the company could compare lead performance across geographies and fuel global decisions about what strategies would be more effective.

The Approach

While the previous rules-based model was geared more toward quantity, the team opted for a model-based approach to lead scoring that emphasized quality based on likely outcomes. The team developed an analytics-driven model that could evaluate the range of customer behaviors (registrations, website page views, e-mail clicks, and so on) to identify the best leads.

Beyond the quality-versus-quantity discussion, the sales and marketing teams agreed that the timing of the lead handoff to sales was also important. To accomplish this effectively, the model evaluated many behaviors, and once certain criteria were met, the information was added to the customer relationship management (CRM) system.

To improve the lead conversion process, the team also focused on converting more sales-ready leads. Not only did the new scoring model evaluate more behavioral data, but that information was passed on as a “digital footprint” for each lead. The salesperson now sees the interactions for the lead from within the CRM system, giving her important information to guide her initial outreach.

Additionally, the team decided not to send all leads to the CRM system. Since the model does a better job of classifying better leads, those that aren't routed to sales go to a lead-nurturing program, where the contact receives a cadence of relevant e-mails. The contact's behavior when receiving those e-mails (clickthroughs, registrations, website visits, and so on) are all fed into the model.

The Results

When the lead scoring model was still in the early stages, the initial feedback was positive. Salespeople appreciated that the leads they were seeing were more qualified and reliable. Rather than sifting through dozens of contacts, they know that leads have demonstrated an interest in SAS and its solutions. That was once a luxury for a salesperson; now, it's an everyday reality.

To fine-tune the model, analysts track the overall number of leads passed to sales and the number that convert to opportunities. The marketing team wants to make sure the rates continue to rise for both numbers. If there is a plateau or a decline, the analysts receive rapid feedback and can adjust programs as necessary.

SAS marketing analysts can also fine-tune the model as sales requirements change or the market evolves. The model is more flexible than the rules-based approach, allowing the team to adjust strategies rapidly. The team can adjust the lead conversion rate if there is a shift in internal focus or if a sales group has more or less capacity.

 

The report in figure 3-5 gives an example of the types of information available for sales and marketing. The chart shows leads created across different groups (commercial, enterprise, and field sales teams) from year to year. In simplest terms, the team can look at this to evaluate areas that are lacking in leads and where to focus in the future. It can then drill into more detailed reports to find the story behind the numbers.

The sales and marketing teams now use these reports to find opportunities for growth based on the past behavior of customers and the collective performance of campaigns already run. The data is now accessible by stakeholders, and this information can serve as a starting point for both strategic and tactical discussions. Together, we utilize this information to make decisions and adjustments as needed. “There's an old adage that says, with marketing, we knew that 50 percent of what we did was working,” said Gene Gsell, vice president of retail and consumer packaged goods at SAS. “We just didn't know which half was actually working. That was the worldwe used to live in. It was all based on getting marketing to get us the maximum number of eyeballs. But everything is different today. We're not guessing anymore. Today we are sending out more relevant and targeted information that has created a real feedback loop with our customers. We now know what works and what doesn't.”

One big step we took to facilitate the kinds of conversations that ensure alignment between sales and our marketing team was to create a new position in the marketing organization called “client manager.” Amanda Thomas, who has been working at SAS for twelve years, stepped up to take this role, which she described as “being that conduit between sales and marketing. My job is to look at marketing campaigns from a sales perspective.”

Thomas runs reports on the effectiveness of different campaigns we are supporting; she can slice and dice the data and results by business unit, territory, and even down to the granular level of each sales rep. She can then identify the key prospect leads that we are generated for the sales pipeline by those campaigns and then communicate those to the sales team members so they can see the best opportunities for investing their resources. Thomas then attends weekly and monthly meetings with different representatives of the sales team to help them understand where various customers might be on their decision journeys and what sales might do to interact with them more effectively. “Amanda participates in our meetings and gets the heartbeat of what we're doing,” said David Macdonald, vice president of sales and financial services. “She can then feed to the marketing team what's most interesting and exciting. Similarly, she helps us understand something like our upcoming company event schedule and which ones might be the best for us to make our own investments in, based on the potential fit of the attendees for our products.”

For example, she was reviewing the reports that showed which clients had the best response to the marketing campaigns run over the past eighteen months. When the sales team membersthen showed their follow-ups during that same period, Thomas saw something they had overlooked. While salespeople had been aggressively following up on clients who showed interest in solutions related to customer intelligence software, Thomas noticed they hadn't realized that many of those same prospects were also searching simultaneously for data management as well. Thomas was able to take a deeper look at the digital footprint those different prospects were leaving behind. Bringing that kind of analytical muscle to meetings has greatly expanded the level of trust that sales now places in marketing, because we can now report tangible results and not just anecdotal evidence about how a campaign is reporting. “And we can share that information with sales in real time,” Thomas told me, “which means we can help them follow up on the best leads faster.”

With Thomas's help, we also began to educate sales on the power of “social selling,” the idea of connecting to people via the vast number of social media channels, using the information in our customer's digital footprints. This took some adjustment, because the world of sales has changed as well. Cold calls no longer make sense. Why would you invest your time and energy in such an inefficient process when, by using the information from a prospect's digital footprint, you can multiply your productivity and effectiveness by a hundredfold? Gone are the days when you could only market to someone faceto-face at a trade show, when you might be able to land ten names for your pipeline. Today, we can create a list of ten thousand high-quality prospects at virtually no cost, which serves to greatly increase the effectiveness of a sales rep.

Gene Gsell admits that the relationship between sales and marketing continues to evolve, but it will keep improving over time as he and Thomas help educate the team about the new realities of the customer journey. “Culturally, it has been a somewhat difficult transition for the sales organization,” Gsell said. “Initially, we had peopleon our team saying that when they conducted online searches on certain keywords they thought were critical and SAS didn't show up in the results, they were upset. But when we talked to marketing and found out that the analytics proved that no one was actually using those terms, we could all get on the same page. The data helps us avoid making the kinds of assumptions we did in the past, while also saving us wasted time and energy chasing things that wouldn't help us achieve our shared goals.”

When we began to have conversations like this with the sales team members, we started to build their trust and respect for how the power of marketing analytics could actually make them into more effective salespeople. Similarly, our tools could help them retain their existing customers and identify other opportunities to expand those relationships. “The analytics can help lead us to better places and better decisions,” Gsell said. “Where emotion used to carry the day, we can now rely on much more informed opinions.”

Show Finance the Money

The more we as marketers are able to affect the bottom line, the better our relationship to track our activities—to show where we spent money and what the resulting impact was—is music to a finance person's ears. By doing this, we can change the kinds of conversations we have traditionally had around budgets, because we no longer only justify why we need a certain amount: we have the numbers, the results, and outcomes to show the finance people. That's helped shift their mind-set from thinking of marketing solely as a cost center.

To help build the communications between our departments, we have a dedicated liaison with finance for budgeting and expenses. Linda Hester works with me every quarter to generate reports, using our own software, that demonstrate the impact of our marketing efforts on revenue and on the growth of the sales pipeline. “By providing that kind of data, we are completely transparent,” Hester told me. “That has helped us establish a level of trust and respect that goes a long way. We have helped finance understand that marketing doesn't just spend money recklessly, but that there are goals and outcomes that result from the money we do spend.”

Hester said that one key result of that greater understanding of how marketing can actually prove the ROI of its budget is that, unlike every other organization she has worked in, marketing can propose its budget each quarter, rather than have finance give a fixed amount. Hester continued, “We've been able to move past the ‘spend it or lose it’ mentality into having much more of a conversation. Finance is much more flexible because they trust us more.”

Another result of this improved communication and collaboration is that we now have finance folks coming to us and asking what kinds of reports they can provide us that would help our efforts. And it's all because of the power of data and analytics. You might even ask yourself, what other kinds of interdepartmental relationships can you change in your organization using those same tools?

Going Global?

Another recent change is in the concept of using analytics to create more unified marketing globally. Now, other organizations are likely further ahead of us in this area. But SAS as an organization has been based on the idea of creating geography-specific teams and campaigns. Patrick Xhonneux, for example, headed up marketing for five countries in Europe—Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. He said that until a few years ago, he treated the markets in each of those countries as silos, where campaigns would be budgeted, built, and targeted to the customers based there. But that's all changed. “We recognize that the world is becoming flat and that there are no national borders anymore in the digital worlds,” Xhonneux explained to me. “All customers are now global. That means we need to change and understand their needs.”

What Xhonneux, who is in charge of marketing for all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, came to understand was that treating countries as their own silos was no longer good enough; he needed to craft campaigns that could cross all of them, with some degree of customization to account for language and cultural differences added in. The priority was to ensure that there was a consistent message from SAS, regardless of what country customers were in or what language they were doing their research in. A customer could attend an event in one country, for example, but actually be based in another country. If we didn't have a consistent message or way to nurture that prospect, we could miss out on turning him into a lead and, eventually, a customer.

To push that dynamic forward, Xhonneux restructured his organization; he created shared services that campaign teams across the continent could access. Not only did that reorganization create new efficiencies on the back end by ensuring that people weren't duplicating their efforts, it also helped to ensure the consistency of messages and content that was lacking before. Just three months later, conversion rates skyrocketed across all five countries. Xhonneux explained, “One key of modern marketing is that you need to continually reinvent yourself, because things continue to change so fast. This now begs the question of how much further can we go? We are asking ourselves if we can add more countries to our region. Is there a limit?”

Cameron Dow, the vice president of marketing who oversees Canada and Latin America, agrees that the dynamics of the digital age have transformed how marketing organizations need to be structured. “The advent of digital communications has broken down barriers and walls,” he said. “We were traditionally organized by business unit and country. But those borders are thin now.” When it comes to social media influencers, for example, Dow told me that it's no longer practical or even wise to think about simply targeting people based solely on their geography: “We need to think more about coordinating on a global basis.”

That said, going global with a unified approach to campaigns brings challenges as well. If we wanted to build a global campaign around a digital piece of property like an ebook, for example, would it be enough to simply translate it into twenty-five languages and push it out? “It might not be the right asset for every region,” Xhonneux explained. “It might be that one-size-fits-all may not be the best approach. I think it will come down to finding that balance between strategy and execution.” Dow agrees, especially because different markets have different adoption levels for technology and digital devices. He told me that, in the end, the priority is to remain agile and flexible with regard to what our customers are telling us. “We can't become wedded to any one strategy if we're not focused on trying to create value for the company as a whole,” Dow said.

Now that we have thought through some of the structural changes you will need to make in your organization, let's turn now to the people you will need to cultivate and the positions they will hold.

APPLYING THESE IDEAS TO YOUR ORGANIZATION

When Was the Last Time You Really Changed the Marketing Structure Itself?

What does your organizational structure look like, both within marketing and outside of it? Ask yourself whether the silos you have inside marketing are efficient and whether they might be preventing you from maximizing your limited resources. Do you really need separate teams for different channels or even products? There are no right or wrong answers. But consider how you might uncover more efficiency if you took a fresh look at your structure.

Similarly, what do the relationships with other departments in your organization look like? Are there ways you can bridge the gaps and change the kinds of conversations you have with, say, sales and IT? Are there ways you can create new partnerships with your peers there? The key takeaway here is to assess how you can rethink the role that marketing plays in your organization so that you can show the true value of your team's efforts to the company's bottom line

To assess your organization's structure, take your leadership team offsite for at least two days and go through the following exercise:

✓ If you could design a modern analytical marketing organization from scratch, what would it look like?

✓ Define the primary objectives (goals) for this modern marketing organization.

✓ List all the functions that should be in marketing (not the current picture, but what it should be).

– Identify functional dependencies.

– Define intersection points across functions.

✓ Prioritize the functional areas. Gain agreement; it is important for everyone to be on the same page.

✓ Use the resulting information to design a functional view of marketing, not an organization chart (see figure 3-2). Again, gain agreement.

✓ Finally, use this newly defined functional view as your template for redesigning the current organization.

– Identify areas of strength.

– Identify gaps in skill sets, investment, and so on.

– Determine the necessary staffing or business model (that is, outsourcing).

– Document a way forward.

✓ The leadership team, the objectives, and this functional view become your guiding coalition for change and drive the vision forward. The coalition will provide you, as the leadership team, with both alignment and an acid test for staying on track.

✓ You will make mistakes along the way, and you can make adjustments; if you don't make mistakes, then you should be worried.