Marketers Are Driven by Inward-Facing Pressures

By David Hatch, Guest Author

I just completed another major research study, and for the first time in a long while, I am surprised by the research findings. Not because I discovered something new or strange about end users’ actions and attitudes (that happens within almost every study), but more due to the fact that I was flat-out wrong in my assumptions at the outset of this project.

Before I launch a Business Intelligence market research study, I publish a “Research Preview” – a document designed to outline my research based on a hypothesis that I create after initial discussion of the study internally with my colleagues and externally with end users and vendors. This process yielded the document linked above. I then created a survey instrument, sent it out to the world and collected over 500 responses from companies all over the globe during a 10-day period back in mid September. If you don’t want to take the time to read my preview document, I’ll summarize my “flat-out wrongness” for you right here:

I sought an answer to the question: “What is the main pressure driving companies to invest in marketing performance measurement capabilities and technologies?”

My hypothesis: “outperform competition through smarter marketing spend and targeting”.

The survey said: “Establish marketing’s value to the organization”

In fact, the top three pressures listed were all of this same internally-focused nature. Not until we get to #4 on the list do we find “outperform competition”, and even then, less than 30% of respondents listed this outward facing pressure as a top business driver.

What does this say? Well, for starters, it means that marketing groups are still faced with a daunting challenge. Before they can achieve success and vanquish the competition by out-performing them in lead capture and brand awareness, they must first prove their value internally. In today’s Internet-driven environment, this means something different than simply showing an annual increase in the raw number of new leads added to the pipeline.

From a strategic perspective the “Best-in-Class” companies (those with the highest performance as defined by the marketing and customer metrics measured within the study) have done one thing exceedingly more effectively than industry average and laggard companies: they have aligned their marketing goals to sales goals. While this sounds simple, think for a moment about your own sales and marketing organizations. Are these two groups living in perfect symbiotic harmony? Or, like most places I’ve been, do they tend to live in opposing camps, lobbing “blame-bombs” at each other whenever goals are not met. I’ve heard sales managers say, when asked why business has not come in despite a healthy pipeline – “The leads are no good…”. And of course, marketing’s retort, when confronted with questions about why recent activity has not yielded any sales, is typically – “the salespeople don’t know how to deliver the message effectively…”

Research has shown it… quantitatively now, so let me state it again emphatically: Best-in-Class companies are aligning their marketing goals to sales goals. Why? To alleviate the top pressure they are facing: establishing marketing’s value to the organization. This may seem a bit cynical at first, but really, what is the end-goal?

From a technology standpoint, Best-in-Class companies are doing something else in much greater number. They are investing in “real-time analytics” technology. It is no longer sufficient to measure marketing performance after a campaign has ended. Today’s Best-in-Class marketers are collecting performance data in real-time. This enables management to make critical decisions about where to change direction, decrease or kill activity, and re-direct resources to more highly successful activities before all of the spend is done and over with. This sounds like the type of thing that relates more to outperforming the competition and not validating one’s own existence, but again, think of what this type of capability can do towards that goal.

So it is with humility that I gladly state “I was wrong!” And once again, the end-user community has allowed me to learn something new.