4.5

4.5 out of 10.

That's how firms rate their use of analytics, according to Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of MIT Sloan Management Review as described here. Moreover, Brad Peterson, Schwab CIO says get marketing to pay rather than IT. He used mobile app in his example thinking, I think, about capturing mobile data for analysis but why not use marketing budgets to better drive marketing analytics more broadly. Better yet, align costs to revenue and profits. And enable ROI calculations then maximize ROI.

Here are a few places to start:

• Move beyond web and email analytics. While hits, visitor counts, email opens and the like are critical, they are not enough. Marry this data with target company organizational structures, social graphs, CRM data and other internal and external data to get a full picture of the market or slice into territories.
• Let people drive the analytics based on their roles and needs. Sales reps can mine the data to look for past deal patterns and possible triggering events in search of next deal. Marketing can analyze previous campaigns and plot the next one. Managers, directors and C-Level can watch for longitudinal trends.
• View marketing data through different lenses. For example, sales interested in this quarter, marketing next and biz dev 2-3 quarters away in adjacent markets.

In short, capture whatever data you can from the market and from the field and let your servers and analytics algorithms do the work to crunch the data for you. And use the analytics in a feedback loop: Learn from how the system is used to determine results and let the measurable actions of those responsible for quota or P&L drive ROI calculations.

And turn 4.5 into 9's and 10's.

Real Time Web and Marketing Automation

I am reposting graphic from earlier post but applying to marketing automation. Although quite generic and almost ancient history (2008), it surprisingly pertains I think. But Real Time Web is People-to-People and so is B2B marketing.

Traditional marketing automation concerns itself primarily with managing campaigns (landing pages, etc) and scoring, routing and nurturing marketing leads or, more generically, contacts. Making real time means:

• 1:1 marketing - letting customers find and communicate with marketers while actively engaged. And vice-versa.
• Meaningful bidirectional notifications - keep customers informed based on their interest and marketers informed of customer actions and, critically, relationships
• Viewing marketing and sales process as well as a series of events - behavioral events, conversion events, inquiries, transactions
• Searching lead and other internal marketing data for contact, lead, prospect and customer actions - or of those in their business network. On demand and continually. So while customers are googling you or more usually solutions to their problem or deals, marketers can be looking for them.
• Correlate events and data across prospect network to uncover hidden triggering events.