Understanding The Critical Interdependence of the “Three P’s”
According to
the Pepper B2B Marketing Automation Report 2014[i], the top three obstacles to Marketing
Automation success were budget constraints, lack of skilled employees and poor
contact database quality. Not mentioned: lack of platform capabilities. The
simple fact is that all of the currently available MAPs have great
capabilities, but each is best suited for a particular combination of the Three
P’s. Your key to a successful (read: profitable) Demand Center is to understand
your process and coordinate your people with the available platforms, in that
order.
Understand your Process
Before
embarking on the Marketing Automation journey, you absolutely must
understand the marketing and sales processes you are attempting to automate. In
virtually every case I have been engaged to “fix” marketing automation, the
initial discovery finds a system implemented without process. It seems
intuitive, but the “Automation” in Marketing Automation should beg the
question, “Automate what?” If you
haven’t answered that question in detail,
you need to immediately address it before progressing. Key questions you need
to answer are how do we:
· Manage the Lead lifecycle?
o
Stage
definitions
o
Stage
triggers
o
SLAs
o
Documentation
· Manage Campaign execution?
o
Initiation
process
o
Documentation
o
Communication
o
Project
Management
· Interface with sales – both the initial Lead
handoff and in final disposition of a Lead?
o
Solid
MQL-SAL definition and SLA
o
Sales
Enablement tools and documentation
o
Campaign
Sales support
Understand Your People
Understanding
your people goes beyond a list of skill sets on a resume. Although listed as a
“top three obstacle” in the Pepper report above, often the personnel mismatch
has to do with both the organizational model and the skill set. In a previous {Demand Gen Brief} I explored Demand Center Organization
models and the required skill sets (the four-part series begins here).
The first
part of your people assessment is to inventory the existing skill sets among
your current staff. The Second is to understand the Demand Center organization
model you are implementing. You can reference my four-part {Demand Gen Brief} series for help there. Finally, you can
perform a gap analysis between your current skills inventory and those
necessary to effectively deploy your Demand Center model.
Understand Your Platform (Requirements)
Hopefully,
you have not yet made that decision. If you have already implemented a MAP, you
should probably spend more time working on the People and Process parts of the
equation before making any decisions on how to align your MAP to those
elements.
Notice the
“(Requirements)” added to the section title above. Too often, MAP purchase
decisions are made based on flashy demonstrations and feature comparisons. They
should be made based on a set of requirements generated as a result of studying
your processes and people (skills sets and organization model requirements). To
make the comparison simpler, let’s place it in another context, a vehicle
purchase.
If you need
a vehicle and your requirement is one that will efficiently get you to the
beach (we might as well make it a fun
analogy). If you require taking yourself, your significant other, two towels
and a picnic basket, a Fiat 500 would be a fun and economical choice. If your
beach excursion requires towing a 32-foot fishing boat, perhaps the Fiat isn’t
the best choice. Although the analogy is simple, you will want to use a similar
approach in defining your MAP requirements.
Notes:
Although we can’t possibly explore every
possible combination of requirements here, there are some general principles
that apply. These illustrate the interdependence of the Three P’s.
More complex your process requirements = Less
“friendly” the user interface.
You will need a team of platform experts to drive your platform.
People --> Platform
You will need a team of platform experts to drive your platform.
People --> Platform
More distributed campaign execution team =
More robust communications requirements.
You will need structured communications between distributed departments to prevent oversaturation and confusing messaging.
People --> Process
You will need structured communications between distributed departments to prevent oversaturation and confusing messaging.
People --> Process
More centralized Demand Center = More robust
programmatic processing abilities.
Centralized execution requires robust programming to extract value from repetitive processes.
Process --> Platform
Centralized execution requires robust programming to extract value from repetitive processes.
Process --> Platform
Organizationally distributed content and
campaign execution = simpler user interface.
Your user base will be less technical, requiring ease of use over power and flexibility.
Your user base will be less technical, requiring ease of use over power and flexibility.
Platform -->
People
People,
Process and Platform – the Three P’s. In next week’s edition, we will take a
deeper look into Process, and why so many organizations don’t adequately understand
the processes they are trying to automate.
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