The Crisis in Marketing

Marketing is in crisis. The tough economic climate has shrunk marketing budgets while marketing has simultaneously become the main point of focus for the company’s survival, with everybody looking to marketing to generate new business and keep them on top of the latest trends and tactics. Marketing professionals are stuck between a rock and a hard place and are being told “Do more with less, and prove to me that it is working”.

How does Marketing organize itself for these challenges? If you think about it Marketing doesn’t really have a methodology. Sales has them: S.P.I.N, CustomerCentric Selling®, Miller Heiman®, and Solution Selling®. R&D has them: Agile, Waterfall, etc.

Marketing? The process is usually made up as you go along. And it is not Marketing’s fault. Think about it: What is the best method for email marketing? Nobody is born knowing email marketing, and by the time there is a class in it, the best practices have moved on, the game has changed. How can you develop the skills to tweak an HTML template so it renders correctly in Outlook, and at the same time write a subject line that will get a higher open rate? The answer: on the job. You learn by doing. And CMOs are having a tough time finding operations staff with the required skillset.

The pressures facing CMOs are pretty common regardless of the size of the organization:

• Prove what influence Marketing is having on pipeline
• Do more with less
• Resonate with customers and help sales win deals
• Keep on top of new tactics such as social media

It is no wonder that a lot of marketing organizations are in planning paralysis. They plan for months and months and debate the strategy and messaging, all the while sales are branching out on their own, for their own survival. The process takes over and nothing gets done. On the other end of the spectrum, there are organizations with no plan at all,  they are on the lead treadmill, just cranking out email campaigns and landing pages with no end in sight, hoping something with stick.

What is lacking in marketing is a methodology, a standard best practice, a framework, an organizing principle. This got us thinking. At Marketbright we implemented the Agile Method in our development organization. It worked so well, we thought, what if you applied this to Marketing? The result was very exciting. It was like a light bulb going off. As a result we have begun using this as an organizing principle not only for our product roadmap, but also in how our solution is implemented. Software alone is not going to do the job, Marketing needs a method, and we believe that Agile is the right path forward.

Development organizations have many of the same problems as Marketing. The “waterfall” method of developing software is very similar to the current planning method used in most Marketing groups. The waterfall approach employs a highly controlled progression between defined phases or steps. You cannot move on to the next step until the first one is complete. The waterfall model has some fatal flaws:

• Lack of flexibility
• Hard to predict all needs in advance
• Intangible knowledge lost between hand-offs
• Lack of team cohesion
• Long feedback cycle to see if what you planned worked

In 2001, a group of prominent  developers wrote the Agile Manifesto, based on some key values, including:

• Individuals and interactions (collaboration) over processes and tools
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

The group was trying to achieve agility, a nimbleness that would let organizations execute faster and better, not through a lack of processes, just more collaborative, lighter handed ones. And now, a few Agile principles (in which we’ve substituted marketing-related words for the developer-related ones):

• Welcome changing requirements. Agile processes harness change for your advantage. We all know that things change anyways.
• Iterate or die: the planning and feedback cycle needs to be reduced to daily and weekly, not quarterly and monthly.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The best marketing emerges from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Obviously, not all Agile software development methods transfer to marketing. More to the point is that marketing needs a methodology, and the spirit and intent behind Agile make it a very interesting example.

What Does Agile Look Like in Marketing

In applying this same principle to marketing, Agile Marketing enables organizations to quickly change requirements in days or weeks, not months or quarters, based on what’s working and what’s not, as well as the ever-changing competitive landscape. It provides individuals the environment and support they need to succeed, and forces teams to consistently reflect on and adjust their behavior to increase effectiveness.

How would you implement Agile Marketing? Here are some example ideas:

• Move from quarterly plans to six week “sprints.”
• Have daily 15 minute “sprint meetings”. Like reviewing “dailies” in the movie world, ask each person what they are working on, how things are going, and what if any impediments they have to getting their job done.
• Track your team’s commitments and understand the capacity you have and the velocity you can achieve. Make team production more predictable and repeatable.
• Embrace mid-course corrections based on testing or actual campaign metrics.
• Allow people to request that new items be added to the list and leave room in your project planning to accommodate last minute additions.

More importantly, Agile could provide the method by which marketers can meet the challenges they face:

• By being metrics driven, Marketers can provide a CFO dashboard that gives direct visibility into Marketing ROI in real time and demonstrate the value of marketing.
• By finding efficiencies and optimizing through iterative processes and collaboration, Marketing can reduce spend while improving performance
• By involving Sales early and often, Marketing can ensure that messaging and offers are based on what sales people know works on the ground
• By becoming more nimble, Marketing can stay atop of the latest tactics such as social media

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing more ideas and announcing new product features designed to enable the Agile Marketing Method. Starting in January you can register and attend the Agile Marketing Webinar Series.

As an organizing principle, the Agile approach turns out to be quite helpful when thinking about the challenges facing Marketing and provides the much needed methodology that Marketing has been lacking to date.