I was at the Sirius Decisions Summit 2008 last week. The event was held at Henderson, Vegas. I would highly recommend this event for B2B marketers looking to learn about Marketing & Sales alignment and also best practices in this space.
Some of the topics that were discussed at the event are:
1. Marketing & Sales Integration Models
2. Marketing Measurements becomes Reality
3. Addressing the Sales Bandwidth Challenge
4. Extracting value from Social Media
5. Marketing Programs - A Global Approach
6. Reputations real link to Demand Generation
7. Sales Readiness from Concept to Critical
8. The Demand Eco-system - Progress and Problems
There were also customer case studies and presentations from:
1. Symantec
2. Cognos
3. Computer Associates
4. newScale
5. SAP AG
One of the topics that I really enjoyed was Marketing Measurements by John Neeson. This presentation was a great validation for our decision early on to invest in an integrated on-demand Business Intelligence solution to complement the execution engine of the overall solution. Some of the takeaways from the presentation are:
1. Alignment: Implementing effective Marketing Dashboards is an involved process and takes time to put in place. The exercise starts with an an intiative to bring cross functional alignment within an organization to agree on *WHAT* needs to be tracked and measured.
2. Selection: A clear definition of KPIs and Metrics that need to be tracked by an organization and also an understanding of the difference between KPIs and Metrics. John talks about how some organizations don't differentiate between KPIs and Metrics. It's been my observation too that business users tend to use these two terms interchangeably. I like the explanation of a KPI in a book called "The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators" by Eric T. Peterson. Eric describes a KPI as a metric that drives action. This is the polite way of saying, “Any KPI that, when it changes suddenly and unexpectedly does not inspire someone to send an email, pick up the phone or take a quick walk to find help, is not a KPI worth reporting.”
3. Design: A fully engaged Marketing Operations team to drive the implementation of the dashboards. One of the key challenges that a Marketing team needs to be aware of before embarking on this project is Data Quality. Dashboards are only as effective as the quality of the data that powers them. Some of the Data Quality issues that need to be looked into are Data completeness, Data Accuracy and Data Standardization,
4. Adoption: A well thought out and thorough plan to drive adoption. One of the key drivers for adoption is relevancy. We need to make sure that the underlying technology supports setup of role based Dashboards. Role specific KPIs & Metrics, Visualization Schemes and Overall Layouts are the key ingrediants to ensure relevancy and in turn drive adoption.
I would like to hear from our readers on their success with Marketing Dashboards.
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