Diary of a Marketing Insight Guy

The Salesforce.com customer conference in the UK this year took the form of CloudForce, a complimentary day of sessions and vendor showcases, held at London’s ExCel exhibition centre last week. It’s no revelation that Salesforce.com have long since moved on from simply being a salesforce automation developer. Today, they position themselves as “Force.com”, promoting the benefits of cloud computing - multi-tenanted, internet based computer platforms - that obviate the need to install software. Indeed, the “no software” message, and attendant logo of the word “software” with a line through it, was repeated at every opportunity. An amusing moment came when Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of The Telegraph Media Group, made reference to “your software” when joining Salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff, on stage during the main session. “Your platform I mean,” Cheesbrough quickly corrected himself, “there is no software.”
“Thank you,” replied Benioff.
“I saw it in your eyes!” quipped Cheesbrough.

The AppExchange platform that forms part of Saleforce.com offers a plethora of opportunities to expand the functionality of the base product. However, the ready integration capabilities of Salesforce.com and the Force.com application platform enable new possibilities, some of which I thought noteworthy. Force.com is particularly interesting, as it opens up the platform beyond Sales and Customer Service management to one that allows developers to create their own applications running on the Salesforce.com cloud infrastructure. To developers, Force.com represents the opportunity to deliver solutions based around the software-as-a-service ethos, without having to build the delivery infrastructure themselves. Adopters of these solutions, for whom not having to install software and maintain their own IT infrastructure is appealing, gain access to applications meeting their requirements that might not otherwise have made it to this delivery mechanism.

One such example is a complete accounting application from financial software developers Coda, called Coda2go. Based around their on premise solution, Coda2go runs entirely on the Force.com platform and integrates closely with Salesforce.com itself. I wrote recently about the considerations of integrating sales order processing within the sales and marketing “data ecosystem”, where I made reference to the point at which an Opportunity is closed and an order booked. With Coda2go, this process, together with resulting invoicing, is practically a one-click undertaking. Once the Opportunity is ready to be booked as a sales order, which would typically involve manually switching to a different system, all of the order details are picked up from Salesforce.com, transferred to Coda2go, invoices created and the rest of the accounting process put in train. I can’t speak to how good a financials solution Coda2go is, but this looks pretty neat!

Closer to marketing home, Cognos (now part of IBM) and QlikTech were offering Salesforce.com enabled versions of their analytics solutions. As well as enabling more sophisticated analysis, visual representation and dashboards than native Salesforce.com, these solutions will work across multiple data sources, holding out the prospect of unified marketing and sales reporting and analysis. Joining marketing data such as campaign execution, response and leads with converted opportunities and closed deals, the nirvana of true, operational marketing effectiveness reporting comes a step closer. Of course a variety of process implications still need to be considered, but at least data visibility is improved.

Finally, and firmly within the marketing realm, a couple of email campaign solutions and a data collection system caught my eye. Genius.com and ExactTarget both offer solutions for creating and despatching marketing emails with all the features you would expect, including HTML templates, personalisation, tracking and reporting. Naturally, this is integrated with Salesforce.com in terms of data management and reporting, making straightforward but relatively sophisticated email marketing very easy. Clicktools allows the creation of surveys, landing page and forms, enabling rapid generation of marketing response mechanisms, as well as questionnaires and so on. Between all of these solutions, it seems possible that best-of-breed marketing campaigns consisting of outbound email and rich landing pages with response tracking can be created relatively easily and inexpensively, without needing full scale and costly marketing automation solutions.

So, there you have my quick round-up of highlights from CloudForce ‘09, all without reference to meteorology or having my head in the clouds. Doh! Too late.

Writing in his “Optimize Your Data Quality” blog recently, Jan-Erik Ingvaldsen of data quality solution developer Omikron referenced an article on destinationCRM.com about a piece of research that’s a must have for anyone building their data quality business case.

In their recent research study “The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Creation”, sales and marketing advisory firm SiriusDecisions assert that following best practices in data quality led directly to a 66 percent increase in revenue. Whilst I’ve outlined some generic business case drivers in the past (see “Building a data quality business case“), this is the kind of quantitative study that can really grab C-level attention when you’re trying to justify investment in data quality. The research outlines how addressing quality issues early on in the data life-cycle has an almost exponential benefit in cost efficiency and highlights the importance of collaboration in driving quality improvements.

“It is something that your organization simply can’t afford not to do,” says SiriusDecisions’ senior director of research, Jonathan Block. No argument here!

This week saw the annual IDM Lunch taking place once again, an opportunity for members to meet, catch up and discuss current issues over lunch, followed by a keynote address. The calibre of the speakers is always high and this year was no exception, with “worldwide business and technology strategist and best-selling author” (according to the IDM) Don Tapscott occupying the slot this time.

Tapscott’s presentation set out to highlight some of the reasons to embrace rather than disdain “Generation Y”, to whom the Internet is second nature. Rupert Murdoch described them as “digital natives”, against those of a slightly older disposition for whom the Internet arrived at a later stage in life and therefore making them “digital immigrants”. This generation are “bathed in bits” and have a completely different approach to media consumption and social interaction. This of course is characterised by Facebook, Twitter and My Space, but also, critics assert, lack of attention span, insularity and general dumbing down.

Tapscott rejects this description though, and as a Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, among other roles, and having recently completed a $4m research programme in this area, I guess he should know what he’s talking about. The general thrust of Tapscott’s counter-argument was that far from leading to the atrophy of the skills needed in modern business, online technologies foster them. The collaboration, team work and leadership engendered and developed online create individuals far more likely to be effective knowledge workers in the future.

Tapscott also highlighted the attitude of Gen Y to email and a memorable way of characterising it. Email is regarded as a more formal means of communication than instant messaging or social media sites; in other words, something for the oldies to use! Though not a new observation, Tapscott’s research turned up the following gem: when asked when email would be used by today’s teenagers, the response was “when writing a thank you letter to my friend’s parents for having me to dinner.” The art of letter writing may well be on borrowed time…

You can enjoy the rest of Tapscott’s observations in more detail by reading his latest book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, so I won’t dwell further here. The other element of his presentation which interested me though was actually his opening gambit. Demonstrating that great minds think alike, as I had suggested this only moments earlier to my neighbour at the table, he asked for a show of hands as to how many Twitter users were in the audience. Of perhaps the couple of hundred delegates, about a third professed to using Twitter, which was a little higher than I might have expected from a relatively senior audience. (Although given the IDM’s strap-line “Digital, Direct, Data”, perhaps this was just the digital contingent.)

Now, I confess I’m not on Twitter, though it’s on my list of things to do. This result however, somewhat supports my assertion that few of the people I’d like to speak do use the service, making my presence a little futile. However, I’m not closed off to it, and I was only recently enthusiastically assured of it’s great utility by an industry colleague (you know who you are!). In view of the upcoming generation ensconced in this technology though, marketers surely need to take these channels seriously, and start learning how to use them to the mutual benefit of organisations and those they wish to influence. This is a similar situation to the early web, when companies built websites with a limited understanding of what they hoped to achieve. This has the danger of being self-fulfilling, but the web didn’t turn out too badly!

What interests me, to bring this back on topic, is the operational implications of these technologies. How can they be effectively integrated into marketing processes, measured and justified? Or is this counter to the ethos of Web 2.0, where such mercenary and quantitative thinking is counter culture? It would seem a shame if so, as Twitter’s “follow my Tweets” approach strikes me as the ultimate in permission marketing. Where’s Seth Godin when you need him? (Well, try here, here or here!)

Another snippet in support of getting the basics right, this time from well respected Cass Business School Honorary Professor of Marketing Metrics, Robert Shaw. In a letter to the London Financial Times recently, he criticised over-reliance on branding at the expense of executional considerations. In response to an article regarding strikingly similar new slogans from Pepsi and Coke, he said “it is the operationally excellent marketers that have a big competitive advantage over their wasteful, slogan-obsessed rivals.”

I mean no disrespect to my branding colleagues when I say I’m not going to argue with that!

I don’t tend to cover web related matters here too much, even though website management has formed part of my role at times. However, when specific opportunities come up for integrating or enhancing insight with web techniques, I’m always interested. At this week’s Technology for Marketing exhibition I stopped by online ad serving solution provider Mediaplex, for a run-down on their services. In brief, they hold advertisers’ online adverting inventory and serve it to media sites where advertising has been placed. In this way, the are able to ensure the latest version of an ad, appropriate to the audience in which it is being displayed, without the advertiser having the nightmare of managing myriad different advertising locations and creative executions manually.

Such services get more sophisticated though, in that they are able to recognise repeat visitors to a given site (through the use of cookies) and serve a version of the ad appropriate to such an individual; perhaps building on a creative theme or trying an alternative messaging angle. In addition, whilst at a rudimentary level, this technology is beginning to allow one-to-one advertising, or at least ads that are highly segmented. By linking their ad serving platform to an advertiser’s CRM data, it becomes possible to create customer and prospect segments to which specific messaging and creative can be targeted. By recognising visitors using previously placed cookies, highly relevant advertising can be placed, appropriate to the individual’s purchasing cycle or previously stated requirements, perhaps.

Mediaplex don’t have real-time links from their platform to CRM systems today, relying on relatively unsophisticated batch data transfer to share segmentation and ad targeting rules. The possibilities to build on this readily present themselves though, and apart from the usual privacy and “big brother” considerations, another powerful use of marketing data presents itself for improving relevance and effectiveness of marketing communications.

Previously, (see The secret to CRM & Marketing data management?) I’ve written about the benefits and hazards of creating independent marketing databases, and in particular the questions that need to be asked before taking such an approach. I’m currently involved in a debate over the long term approach that should be taken to the management of marketing data, and where it should reside, which raises some of these issues.

Take the real life example of a campaign automation system that is synchronised with a sales force automation (SFA) solution via a real time data adapter. Changes made to customer and prospect contact data in either system are exchanged almost immediately, together with leads and status updates. When it works, it’s fabulous, providing a real time view of data in either system, ensuring Sales and Marketing are seeing the same picture, whilst enabling them to use the best-of-breed system most appropriate to their respective requirements.

A new CMO and the prevailing economic conditions though have lead to questioning whether marketing data should continue to be managed in-house, rather than outsourcing to a marketing service provider. In reviewing the options for outsourcing however, one of the first issues (of many) that arises is how, if at all, should sales and marketing data integration be maintained?

Most out-sourced or hosted solutions tend to rely on much less sophisticated and timely batch data transfers, via ftp or similar mechanism, which are a long way from the real time synchronisation currently enjoyed. Is moving to such a mechanism and the attendant loss of immediacy important? “This is a really worrying trend,” says Shane Redding of business to business digital and data marketing consultancy Cyance. “It is disappointing to see companies make a backward step of this kind, which in my opinion is usually the result of not making the next step of really using the real time data in anger which then demonstrates the return on investment.”

Shane and I are very much in agreement, and here’s why.

1. Sales and Marketing users don’t, and shouldn’t need to, understand the intricacies of data integration. They just want to know that data in one system is available in the other; a Sales rep entering a new contact in the SFA system wants to know their prospect is available for marketing activity. It invokes much greater confidence if this transfer is immediate, without having to know about or understand overnight batch updates. Once control is lost, users feel disconnected and reduce their ownership of the process, leading to a rapid deterioration in data quality.
2. The sooner changes made to a record in either system are replicated, the less chance there is of subsequent changes to the same record in the other system being made before the data is transferred, leading to potential anomalies or corruption. This is particularly the case where records are merged or changes are made to many fields at the same time.
3. Marketing-generated leads need to be transferred to Sales promptly. Research shows that timely lead follow-up is one of the biggest determinants of successful lead conversion. If a lead or response relates to an existing contact or customer, Sales should be made aware as soon as possible, allowing a rep to handle their account in the most appropriate way
4. Best-of-breed marketing practices, such as trigger marketing based on response or other events, require good data integration. Explaining such requirements away saying “we don’t need to do that” won’t cut it. Your competitors are doing it.
5. Business is moving ever faster. It is expected that data changes are available immediately, especially between Sales and Marketing systems. Reverting to a batch system is a backwards step that fails to lay the foundations for modern and forward-thinking marketing capability.
6. System development and testing are substantially quicker and easier if changes in one system are reflected in the other almost straight away, rather than having to wait to see if configuration changes are working as intended.
7. Much of the complexity in data synchronisation lies in the business rules for handling updates, conflicts, mappings and referential integrity. Once these rules are in place, why not transfer data more frequently, reducing the volume and complexity of batch updates when they occur?

Marketing shouldn’t be ashamed to stand up for genuine business requirements, with demonstrable benefits. Don’t let internal politics or external suppliers tell you otherwise!

With thanks to Shane Redding for contributing to this post.

Just about this time last year, I outlined a fairly personal set of 6 crucial marketing automation system requirements that it was particularly important to us were incorporated into the system we were about to deploy. Business 2 Business Marketing magazine’s online companion site has just published an alternative take on marketing technology requirements which I thought complimented mine. Rather broader in scope, point four “Pilot your technology” particularly resonated with me, given its message of testing and phased roll-out, rather than taking an all-or-nothing approach (see “Testing, testing, testing” for my thoughts in this area.)

After the problems we’ve been experiencing this year, having rushed into production with key elements untested, this sentiment is particularly pertinent. Don’t let yourself think “I’m sure it’ll be alright” - if it can go wrong, it probably will!

I mentioned recently that I had signed up to the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ), who run webinars from time to time as part of the membership package. One such session took place yesterday, in the form of an “Ask-the-Expert” presentation by Danette McGilvray of US based information quality consultants Granite Falls Consulting. Danette outlined 12 Dimensions of Data Quality, including considerations such as integrity, accuracy and coverage. Although all crucial to attaining high quality data, I particularly liked no 12 “Transactability”, defined as “A measure of the degree to which data will produce the desired business transaction or outcome.”

In some regards this is a “softer” dimension than more quantitative ones like validity, but is at the same time what all data quality should really be about. DQ shouldn’t be seen as something that’s just good to do, but something with an ultimate goal, namely allowing us to do business the way we need to.

I recently stumbled across quite a nice piece entitled Six steps to better marketing operations management, which talks about the importance of efficient marketing processes and executional excellence, themes regular readers here will recognise. Marketing operations is considered in it’s widest definition, encompassing planning, budgeting and resource management, which is actually quite refreshing when you’re used to thinking in a narrower context of data and process. The article is actually quite old, having been posted in June 2005, but is no less relevant today, and as such I thought it worth bringing to attention here.

Coming from me, this will sound like rampant self justification, as well as a thinly veiled bid for a promotion, but bear with me. Marketing, at least enterprise/business to business marketing, is becoming ever more complex, with diverse activity across web, email, direct mail and myriad other channels. This activity usually takes place in the context of key account management, lead generation and opportunity tracking. All of this adds up to a significant level of detail that needs to be managed in order to successfully deliver on dynamic and sophisticated sales and marketing strategy.

The pertinent point here is “detail”. Consider a recent initiative to comprehensively revise a key account list to be used as the focus for prospecting and account development activity, across Sales and Marketing. “Here’s the initial account list,” said Sales Operations, “start working on matching it to the database and we’ll send the final version as soon as it’s ready.” How many problems immediately present themselves from that simple, innocuous statement?

• Why is the list being created outside of the database in the first place?
• If this is unavoidable, how are the account list and resulting matched list going to be reconciled? How will these accounts be identified in the database?
• How are the changes in the updated list, “once ready”, going to be communicated?

I could go on. In the inevitable rush to implement the new strategy though, Marketing Directors don’t have the time, let alone the inclination, to reflect on these considerations, intent instead on the ultimate objective of executing lead generation activity. The task, then, falls to the Operations team to sort out, which is fair enough. Marketing Directors aren’t there to handle fine detail and are rightly focussing on the bigger picture and the many aspects of a successful campaign.

The point is that if some of these aspects were considered early on in the process, a huge amount of work could be saved across the organisation, from generating the original list of accounts to identifying them in the database and enabling campaign activity. The conversations that put these processes in place though, frequently take place at too high a level for the detail to become apparent, and by the time it reaches the point of implementation, it’s too late to adopt the best approach.

A Marketing Operations Director, or similar role, working at the same level as a Corporate or Marketing Communications Director, would be able to participate in these conversations and strategy development and bring the attention to detail that is needed, even at this level, whilst also contributing to the development of wider objectives. Such is the role of the marketing hybrid, working across marketing and technology, fine detail and the big picture.

Roles like this should exist at a higher level in the Marketing organisation - and not just because I’m angling for that corner office!