Strategic Design | marketing & branding thoughts by Nick Rice

Naras Eechambadi has a great article on making your marketing measurements count on CMOmag.com. It's hard to pinpoint which specific activity persuaded a prospect to turn into a customer. It's even tougher considering that industry best practice dictates at least seven touches need to be made before a prospect recognizes your brand. It's difficult to fully understand where your budget dollars go the farthest. This doesn't even touch the sticky mess that is short term ROI versus long term shareholder value.

Too many companies think that installing Siebel or Salesforce.com will automatically make all sales & marketing activities measurable. Anyone in the midst of a CRM roll-out knows that the devil is in the details. How clean is your customer database, are there duplicate database field names in disparate legacy systems, where did the inside sales team get their pre-show mailing list? There are too many questions to wrap your head around.

But you have to start somewhere. Start by mapping out what actions you want to take to be able to improve your business. Make the data available to base decisions on that inform those actions. Transparency and accountability are crucial elements required for success. And always keeping moving forward towards your end goal. Just remember, that which is tracked improves.

Here's the best quote from the article:

An honest diagnosis of current capabilities and an assessment of how suited they are to future strategy is a crucial step in improving marketing performance. Ensure that the organization is properly aligned to strategy and to the processes that are essential to execution. Develop the right processes and make sure people are trained on these processes. Align the incentives for all of the people involved in planning and executing campaigns.

technorati tags > marketing, CMO, measurement, ROI, CRM, programs, effectiveness, strategy