Sales Thinks Your Leads Stink (Part 1) Because they Really do? And yes, you can fix that!

In the ongoing battle between Sales and Marketing, Leads are often the major casualties. Marketing claims Sales doesn’t follow up on its Leads and Sales claims Marketing only sends over garbage not worth any follow up.

Who’s right?

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to dig into some statistics provided by Sirius Decisions and ask the simple question, “Why?” Here is the data:

20% of Leads are followed up by Sales

80% of Leads are never followed up by Sales

Conversely,

20% of those same Leads never purchase anything

80% of those same leads buy within 24 months (usually from somebody else) – if they are nurtured.

That’s a big IF!
The finger pointing begins and our ongoing battle rages. Is Sales correct? Let’s look at the possibility Sales is correct, and assume for a moment our “leads” are really not sales-ready. Identifying the problem is the first step to fixing it. There’s a straightforward fix, and you can implement it in your Demand Center in a matter of weeks.

Step 1: Get on the same page
You absolutely must work with Sales to determine what will be considered a sales-ready Lead. You cannot do this on your own because, in order for this process to work, Sales must agree on the definition. Marketing cannot define it for Sales, so collaboration is essential. However, that agreement must be stated in objective, quantifiable terms, not just the subjective “sniff test” (which actually doesn’t stand up to its own sniff test). What should those objective characteristics look like, given your sales organization is unique?

These objective characteristics should be broken into two categories: Profile and Behavior. For B2B marketers, Profile is the combination of demographic and firmagraphic characteristics of the ideal prospect, such as company size, title and department. For B2C, Profile will consist entirely of the demographics of the individual. Behavior is the digital body language expressed in online buying behavior. Has the prospect visited certain web pages, downloaded something or engaged in click-to-chat?

Once Sales and Marketing have agreed to the Profile and Behaviors that comprise an ideal Lead, you can move on to Step 2.

Step 2: Put a ruler on your Lead

Simply stated, how will you measure your objective criteria? Again, Sirius Decisions has created a model you can easily adapt to your criteria. Its co-dynamic model assigns values to both Profile and Behavior characteristics to create a score you can use to evaluate the sales readiness of a Lead.

I also recommend adopting the Sirius Decisions Waterfall terminology for describing “Leads.” If everything is a Lead, then nothing is a Lead. By specifically describing a sales-ready Lead by a different name that every other “Lead,” you provide clarity in your communications to the Sales team. Once you’ve defined your measurement system and labeled your sales-ready Leads accordingly, you can move to Step 3.

Step 3: Act on this information

Some data points are actionable and others are not. For example, there isn’t a lot you can do to get your prospect promoted from Manager to Vice President. However, you can create content designed specifically for your Manager to pass on to his superiors, thereby creating the potential for additional Contacts entering your system. This is called an Audience Acquisition Nurture. There’s that word: Nurture! Well-designed Nurture programs have very specific goals, and the tactics and content should be designed to meet those goals.

Nurtures are NOT about sending repetitive sales-oriented content out to large, untargeted groups of prospects. That strategy does not work, and I have a very specific name for them: opt-out campaigns. Because that’s what they do, get more people to unsubscribe from your communications than respond to them.  

These three steps will effectively eliminate the “Your Lead Stink!” argument from Sales. How can Salespeople complain about Leads sent to them exactly as they requested? This is where the objective criteria and measurement comes into play. If they ask for VP and above in IT who have downloaded trial software, and that’s what you send them, the question then becomes why did Sales agree to that definition of “sales-ready?”

Notes:

You must identify the problem before you can fix it.

You must agree with sales on the definition of a “sales-ready” lead.

Your definition must be in quantifiable, objective terms.

You need to act on the information you have.

So, let’s say your Marketing team has agreed to a sales-ready definition, and there is still a problem with passing Leads to Sales that they still don’t believe are good enough. You have fallen victim to Cause A, the Sales argument that they are not receiving enough Lead volume. Like any other problem, Cause A can be fixed. Next week, I’ll tell you how.

Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 10) The Missing Link!

Last week we looked into the secrets to reporting, and we’ve got it properly lined up before we launch our campaign. We’re going to report on MQLs generated by territory for our new Wombat preventer SaaS software. We’ll need to consider both outbound sources and inbound sources from media, such as Wombat Weekly and The Wombat Report. Just one problem: we don’t have Australian contacts in our database, not to mention critical opt-in data. And the only market for Wombat Preventers in is Australia.

Incomplete and incorrect data account for many, if not most, of the problems marketers have automating campaigns.  We’ve mentioned before that data is one of the critical interdependencies required in the demand gen process. Data is the fuel that helps us make critical decisions. Bad data equals bad decisions.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of databases and, as you can guess, in 100% of the cases they contained significant levels of incomplete and incorrect data. The best I’ve ever seen contained 45% incorrect or incomplete records. You don’t want to hear the worst. Having said that, also in 100% of the cases, we were able to identify the problems and make significant improvements to the data. How? Let’s look at some things you can do to improve your data quality starting today.

Identify your requirements.
Where have we heard that before? Right, everywhere! Without an objective, there isn’t any way to know whether or not your data is right, wrong, or incomplete. How do you intend to use your marketing data? Make a list in the form of questions you need to pose to your database, and include all the decisions you will need to make. This list will include questions like:

What is the Contact’s vertical market?

Where is the Contact located?

Is the Contact a current customer?

How many employees in the Contact’s company?

These segmentation questions help you form the basis to understand what information needs to be accurately recorded in a Contact’s record in order to extract these answers.

What decision will I make based on this information?
This is a great way to determine how you need to record field-level information, often referred to as field standardization. There is no universal answer to this question, because every organization uses unique rules in their business. You will need to determine this in relation to every question posed in the requirements section above. Let’s look at a pretty universal requirement, “Where is the Contact located?”

This is almost always (if not, you need to consider why not) composed of several fields used in conjunction with each other, such as Address, City, State and Zip. Some businesses also use telephone area code to determine physical location. Your database may use different field names, but they are going to be similar. What decision will you make based on this information?

Are you determining sales territories for lead routing? Do you execute location-based marketing programs? Do you sell different products or services in different geographies? Are you a global marketing organization and need to consider email compliance in various countries? Does your marketing message need to be localized to consider different cultural implications?

The answers to these questions can range from very simple to extremely complex, depending on how the decisions intersect. In many cases, you will be making multiple decisions based on location and, if so, do these decisions have conflicting data requirements? For instance, are your sales territories (lead routing) divided by area codes while your market localization is divided by metropolitan area?

Where are the holes?

Now that we know what decisions we need to make based on our data, we can begin to identify the holes. Those holes always manifest in on of two ways: incorrect data or incomplete data. In our example above, we need to understand major metropolitan areas so we can create location-based marketing messages. Perhaps we have affiliate marketing programs with the local sports teams. If so, how does our system know that St. Charles is a suburb of St. Louis? Do we need a zip code lookup table, or do we need a field with a specific MMA value to determine our target market? In this case, we need to add a missing data element to make up for the incomplete data preventing us from making a decision.

Our use case also requires us to route leads by area code, because that’s the way our sales territories are divided. Since we know from previous {Demand Gen Brief} posts our data degrades at about 25% per year, our phone numbers can go bad at the same rate. People move, change jobs and retire all the time, so we need to keep our data fresh, so your sales reps don’t follow up on a hot lead only to find out John doesn’t work in that department any more. (Cue the snotty email from your sales rep.)

Data governance and regular hygiene are the answer here. Whether it is in the form of data plugins that constantly update your database, or in the form of quarterly refresh imports, your data needs a regular cleansing so it doesn’t start smelling like last week’s garbage.

To take this particular use case a step further, how will you act on the area code data? Does your MAP platform have the ability to use part of a field to perform programmatic decision steps? Can it use CONTAINS or STARTS WITH as operators in decision blocks? If not, you may need to consider how to extract area code into a separate field that is actionable in your system!

Data is the missing link most often overlooked when building a demand gen strategy.  Don’t make the mistake of not designing your database to very specifically answer the critical questions you outlined above. If not, you may be relegated to considering specious Bigfoot sightings to find your Demand Gen missing link!

Notes:

You can’t properly design and build your database without clear requirements.

Be specific when asking yourself, “What decisions will I make based on this data?”

Find the two holes in your data: incomplete and incorrect data.

Don’t let this happen to you! We’ve now reviewed the Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS, and I hope I’ve presented actionable solutions to those fails. Next week, we’re going to switch gears and look at why Sales thinks your “qualified Leads” stink. Do they? Really?

Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 9) Ex Post Facto Reporting!

Here’s the situation. Your Demand Gen team has been asked to create an email campaign for a new product announcement, Product X. This campaign includes several emails, product data sheets and a complete microsite with multiple links to assets. Being the great demand gen professional you are, you provide a checklist of metrics for reporting and ask your product manager stakeholder if these campaign reports are required and if any other reports might be needed.

Clicks from emails to microsite? Check.

Clicks from microsite to form? Check.

Form completion and abandonment? Check.

Campaign-generated MQLs? Check.

Anything else? No, that will do it.

Geography, named account clicks, other segmentation reports? No, what you said is perfect.

So you create, receive approval, launch and complete your campaign exactly as requested. Two months after the campaign concludes, the very same product manger fires off an excited email proclaiming the VP of Sales needs a report on the number of Product X named account respondents from Vermont for a meeting in 30 minutes. After wasting 10 minutes digging the document out of the archives, you send back the written campaign brief indicating the report requirements, which specifically excluded both geography and named accounts.

But the VP of SALES needs it NOW!

I don’t’ care if the Masters of the Universe and Elvis Presley want it, the data doesn’t exist and that report can’t be generated.

Well, you already know the rest of the story. The product manager fires off angry emails to the VP of Sales, CC-ing the VP of Marketing, the COO and Oprah, for good measure, indicating what a buffoon you are and how you could not produce a “simple” report. This is a classic example of Demand Gen Fail number 9: The Ex Post Facto Report (reporting retroactively).

You will be vindicated in the end, but damage has been done and a massive amount of your valuable time has been wasted defending your perfectly executed campaign. How can you prevent these situations? Three steps will dramatically help.

Review the written process
In a previous edition of {Demand Gen Brief}, Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 4) Where is the Menu?, we talked about formal process. IN that edition, our “menu” was the analog to the various parts of our process, including the order in which those tasks should be completed. Reporting is a key consideration for every campaign, and the metrics of success must be captured if success is to be measured. As a part of the campaign brief (or whatever you call the campaign design document), the elements of campaign success should be clearly outlined. Having the key stakeholder answer these three questions can capture those:

1.     What will determine the success or failure of this campaign? This should be an open-ended question. The stakeholder needs to document, in his or her own words, what those elements are. It should be in the form of X units of Y by when.

2.     What are the subdivisions of those success metrics? These categories will be the ways you can subdivide the whole of Y in the success equation. For example, if Y is expressed as MQLs, are those MQLs of a specific size, location, vertical or product line? How many ways does this need to be sliced and diced so that all stakeholders are represented?

3.     Are these report formats sufficient? This is a yes or no question. You should present examples of the reports representing the success metrics, and make sure the stakeholder understands what reports will look like. Never ask an open-ended question around report format, because you won’t be able to produce the magic dashboard that transforms mashups into clickable charts that perform “deep dives” into the thought patterns motivating buyers in Croatia, sorted by three levels of stakeholders breakfast cereal preference. This yes or no also allows you to respond to such requests before the fact (pre factum), eliminating surprises.

Get a signature
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? You have reached an agreement to deliver a specific product at a specific time, just like any other contract. So, get a signature, indicating agreement between the two parties – in this case, the Demand Center and the requesting stakeholder – defining the terms of the agreement. Reporting is one of those terms. No, signature? No campaign. If this were a contract to sell your house, would you proceed without the buyer’s signature? A signature indicates a commitment to the terms of the campaign. Ambiguity hurts both parties, so eliminate it as much as possible.

Broadcast your methodology

Let everyone know how your Demand Center operates. You act as an internal agency, so run your operations in the same way. In the example above, the VP of Sales would have known that there was a previous commitment to deliver specific reporting, so the questions would have been directed at the Product Manager instead of you. (VP to Product Manger, “You asked for reporting by geography and named accounts, right?”) It becomes very clear very quickly where the broken link was.

Don’t let your lack of project management certification of experience inhibit you from instituting basic project management in your demand center organization. Even basic management will reduce inconsistency, improve timeliness and reduce errors. Any of these improvements will likely reduce the #1 complaint!

Notes:

The right time to determine necessary campaign reporting before the campaign is designed.

Review the process with requesting stakeholders every time. It will get shorter and easier as stakeholders get familiar with the process, but the review is necessary to proper understanding.

Treat the process like an external agreement – complete with all the details necessary to understand that a campaign – including reporting - has been completed according to the agreed-upon specifications.

We now understand what reports are going to be required before we’ve designed the campaign. Fantastic! We’re going to report on MQLs generated by territory for our new Wombat preventer SaaS software. We’ll need to consider both outbound sources and inbound sources from media, such as Wombat Weekly and The Wombat Report. Just one problem: We don’t have Australian contacts in our database, not to mention critical opt-in data. And there’s no market for Wombat preventers in North America. Missing data? This leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 10: The Missing Link!

The Number One Complaint! Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 8)

Our modern word project derives from the Latin projectum which means “to throw something forward.” Sometimes that gets actualized as “throwing something over the fence.” Which does not really hold to the original meaning of the word.

More often than not, when projects do not get completed on time, on budget and of the expected quality, we can trace the root cause back to a deliverable that got thrown over the fence, usually too little, too late. Copy was a week late. Copy was a week late and full of errors and had to be re-written. Creative left out a critical CTA. Somebody forgot to run the finished document past legal. You probably have your own “favorite.”

While the components are all different, the root cause is consistent: failure to deliver components on time and to specifications. As a demand gen practitioner, you are at the end of the line, counting on campaign components delivered on time and to specifications. Your job requires the assembly of these “finished” parts into the executable campaign, ready for public consumption. In {Demand Gen Brief} we have often referred to demand gen as a “marketing factory” and this makes a great analogy. If you were the automobile final assembly plant, putting together all of the pieces built elsewhere and delivered to your plant, you would have a 100% expectation that these delivered parts would be built to spec, and be there when you needed them. Imagine how well your assembly line would execute if the engine delivery showed up a week late, or if the seats arrived without upholstery. Would you be expected to just “bolt it all together” and ship it out? I can only wish that were a rhetorical question.

We understand the problem (only too well, I suspect). Fortunately, the solution is really pretty straightforward: formal project management. And by “project management” I mean a systematic method for managing projects, not yet another software tool you need to buy and learn. The complexity of your project management (PM) system should reflect the complexity of your campaign execution process. The more resources, disciplines and project components required to build the campaign assets, the more complex your project management needs to be. There are definitely a few essentials any formal PM system needs to be successful.

Timeline
Everyone involved in the project needs to understand the timeline. In virtually every case, the major timeline needs to be broken down into component timelines. Start with campaign deployment date and work backwards. To understand the individual task timelines, start asking questions to the responsible stakeholders. These questions apply to every component task, and will help you determine how to stack up your tasks into a complete timeline.

1.     How long does the task take to complete?

2.     What has to be completed before you can start this task (dependency)?

3.     What external resources do you need to accomplish this task?

4.     Where does your finished task product go when you are complete?

5.     How will you transmit the completed work product?

A few tips you will want to apply here: start building your timelines in number of days, not pinned to calendar dates. You will want those tasks in both number of days (which reflects backlog) and number of hours (which represents the actual work effort required). These will come in handy in the future when you want to see how long it took to actually complete each task compared to the estimated time. Understanding these will help you better estimate in the future, and may help prioritize those backlogs!

Responsibilities
Everyone assumes they know who is responsible for what, but on those occasions where there is ambiguity around task responsibility, it is a recipe for disaster. Put a name or department name on every single task on your timeline. Make sure the responsible party or department head is aware of that responsibility. In addition, responsible parties need to understand any downstream dependencies, so the effects of on-time delivery are completely understood. The time to discuss responsibility is prior to beginning the project, not when tasks are due.

Specifications and Standards

This is another area where assumptions can quickly run a project off the rails. Make sure every responsible party understands what his or her deliverable is. In most cases, there should be standards or specifications for the deliverable. Those standards can be very simple, such as:

Email copy will be delivered in a Word document of no more than 200 words in length. All copy will be free of errors, grammatically correct and all external references must be validated. A double line feed will indicate paragraph breaks. Any links from within the copy will be highlighted by blue text and underlined. All link URLs must be fully qualified. All copy must be approved by legal prior to submission. Include the words “FINAL COPY” in the header of the document in 24 pt. RED font.

This single paragraph leaves little to the imagination about what final, submitted copy needs to look like.

Kickoff Meeting
While nobody wants to attend yet another meeting, project kickoff meetings will prove to be one of the most valuable meetings you will have on your calendar. As you have more of these, they will become very efficient and stakeholders will come more and more prepared to answer your questions and establish timelines. To make these meetings effective, you need to properly prepare, which will include some level of project breakdown. Otherwise, you won’t know which stakeholders to invite, and nothing stalls a kickoff meeting like, “Where’s Sally? She has to provide the copy for the Purple Chrome Widgets emails.” You should also include your project sponsor at this meeting. If a critical obstacle is encountered in this meeting, the sponsor needs to be aware and, if possible, provide direction on potential solutions. Your kickoff meeting agenda will vary, but here’s a good start.

1.     Project definition, stated objectives and success metrics

2.     Committed deadlines (this project deploys when?)

3.     Defined component parts (12 email nurture program with program logic)

4.     Stakeholder weigh-in on the five timeline questions.

5.     Timeline conflict resolution

6.     Commitments from stakeholders (everyone leaves committed to the timeline)

While this blog is not intended to be a comprehensive thesis on project management, or how to implement project management in your demand center organization, I hope it give you a good start in that direction. There are a number of great PM resources available online, such as:

www.projectmanagement.com

www.pmi.org

www.projectsatwork.com

Don’t let your lack of project management certification of experience inhibit you from instituting basic project management in your demand center organization. Even basic management will reduce inconsistency, improve timeliness and reduce errors. Any of these improvements will likely reduce the #1 complaint!

Notes:

Consistently ask the five timeline questions when building a project plan.

Make sure everyone understands who is responsible for what.

Specifications and standards reduce errors and improve timely delivery.

Project kickoff meetings will save you time and headache!

Now that you’ve got your project management ducks in a row, and are executing those campaigns efficiently and effectively, you know the next question is coming. How did my campaign do? Do at what? Opens? Clicks? Dancing the jig? The time to understand reporting and metrics requirements is before the Campaign is designed. Not after the data is collected and is missing the three critical metrics you needed to measure. This leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 8: Ex Post Facto Reporting!

Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 7) Testing One, Two, Three!

We like to associate the term “rocket scientist” with really smart people who accomplish amazing things. But without well-executed QA, even rocket scientists can make really dumb mistakes. Like with the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998.

Due to a miscalculation in payload distribution and a mismatched measurement system between different engineering groups, the thrusters produced more than 4x the necessary thrust. This resulted in a $320MM trash heap orbiting Mars (or so we think – nobody really know). My point? If NASA rocket scientists need active Quality Assurance, so does your Demand Center.

First, let’s define Quality Assurance (QA). Without a clear definition, we will all have a slightly different view of the subject. According to the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Quality Assurance is defined as: The planned and systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled. Now that we understand the definition, let’s look at some hallmarks of good QA in a Demand Center organization.

Hallmark #1: Culture of Quality
Is quality appreciated and held in high regard throughout your organization? If so, many of the hallmarks below will seem second nature. A culture of quality tends to permeate all departments within an organization, and affects the output of everything produced. “Good enough” is replaced by “Does it meet [insert your company name here] standards.” Do you immediately, and without question, re-work or reject anything that does not meet up to these standards? If so, you have a culture of quality. If you respect time or price over quality, you likely do not have a culture of quality.

Hallmark #2: Quality is visible everywhere all the time
Examples of quality work are on display. Awards are on display. Your co-workers talk about quality and it is the first question asked when a new idea is discussed. If your new ideas are initially met with “how fast” or “how cheaply” can the new idea be produced, you likely do not have a culture of quality. (Note: Even in a culture of quality, speed and price are important subjects, but they tend to NOT be the highest priority and are not the first question asked.)

Hallmark #3: There are defined standards and processes for quality
Notice this did not say “defined standards and processes for quality assurance.” If we go back to our definition above, quality assurance is not just a department or a check tacked on to the end of a project. That is a quality control step. Quality assurance is baked into the entire process, making sure that quality is produced and maintained in the entire production process. Whether it is a Rolls Royce engine or a six-touch nurture campaign, quality needs to be baked into the entire process to ensure that the quality control step is merely an affirmation of the quality already built into the end product. If you don’t have defined processes and standards or QA is a step in the process, you likely do not have a culture of quality.

Hallmark #4: Senior management is actively involved in quality
Quality is not so much dictated as it is lived. If senior management gives lip service to quality in town hall meetings and weekly newsletters, but every question concerning development or manufacturing concerns time or money, you definitely do not have a culture of quality.

Let’s view this from the perspective of a well-known, high-quality brand, like Rolls Royce. Imagine the meeting where engineers have an idea for a new, fuel-efficient engine. Does the meeting start with “How cheaply can we build it?” Or does it begin with, “Will this engine live up to the standards of a Rolls Royce?”

Key to delivering consistently high-quality programs, content and delivery mechanisms is creating a culture and process that promotes quality. This may force pushing back on internal clients when they fail to meet deadlines – one of the most difficult  process failures to navigate. But failure to build quality into every step of your production process leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 7: Testing, One, Two, Three.

Notes:

Quality Assurance is not a department or the final step in your delivery process.

Hallmark #1 of a high quality Demand Center is a pervasive culture of quality.

Speaking of client failure to deliver project components on time, in next week’s edition of {Demand Gen Brief} we will dig into that issue. It is by far the most common complaint I hear from demand centers concerning production timelines, and we’ll look into ways to avoid that situation in Demand Gen FAIL number 8: The Number One Complaint!

Is innovation killing innovation?

There are a million blogs, posts and comments about innovation nowadays. In fact, it seems innovation has become an end in itself - innovation for the sake of innovation. But is that a good thing, or is "innovation" actually killing innovation?

In the quest to find the next disruptive game changer, are we innovating things that require no innovation? Like a talking refrigerator? My refrigerator already has an LED display panel that tells me when to change, and even when to order, a new filter. I can only imagine a pleasant dinner with my wife being interrupted by Siri demanding that I change the filter in my refrigerator. Not the kind of "innovation" I want.

Granted, there are some real innovators like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk who are really looking beyond the horizon at products nobody knows about today, but everyone will want tomorrow. There is a real and valid place for innovation, but if everything is "innovative" then nothing is really innovative.

In a bigger sense, are we chasing innovation at the expense of building well what we already build? Are we gambling the incremental changes that make our products and services a little better every day for the potential game-changer that will "revolutionize" the industry? How much revolutionizing do we actually need, versus evolution that build on already-solid foundations?

Don't get me wrong, I am 100% behind true innovation. I just hate to see artificial innovation replace solid, incremental gains that turn good products and services into great ones.

Top Ten Demand Generation FAILS (Part 6) Lumpy Pancake Batter

As you anxiously take the first bite of your stack of hot buttermilk pancakes, dripping with maple syrup, you notice that dusty, dry sensation. The light, fluffy texture is interrupted by a giant glob of unmixed, uncooked flour, salt and baking powder. Lumpy pancake batter has ruined your breakfast.

What caused the lumps in the batter? Inconsistency. The inconsistency was caused by shortcutting the mixing process. Your grandma probably insisted you mix your batter 200 strokes. You probably use an electric mixer. But whether you are building your biceps with a wooden spoon or decorating your backsplash with an electric mixer, shortcut those 200 strokes and you get lumpy batter. And how many lumps does it take to put a ding in your otherwise glorious breakfast? That’s right, just one.

Let’s see how your Demand Center might suffer from lumpy batter. Even if you have properly assessed and documented your process and tailored an infrastructure and organization to work optimally in that process, shortcuts lead to lumps. We’ve all seen them and we’ve all experienced the outcome, either massive operational headaches or deployment mistakes. It’s a simple result of the Compound Delay Effect.

Under normal operations, a campaign deployment process looks something like this:

When early-stage tasks get delayed, the effect is compounded into later stages. Not only is there a delay in beginning the task itself, there are additional delays caused by re-scheduling. The task itself becomes larger because of the start/stop activities added to the mix. And resources are often shuffled to accommodate, meaning originally scheduled resources might not be available and other – and perhaps less ideal – resources are substituted. The compound result becomes distorted and looks more like this:

 

As any Project Manager will tell you, there are only two ways to combat this Compound Delay Effect: move the timeline or add more resources. Sometimes there are no additional resources and sometimes there is a dependency that prevents the useful addition of resources, even if they were available. Other times, the timeline is rigid and tied to an external event that cannot be moved (like a national trade show). Therein lies the great temptation to shortcut the process, leading to lumpy batter.

Nobody wants to shortcut the process. It is sometimes inevitable. When it becomes the norm, you have a real operational problem. Let’s look at a few outcomes, underlying causes and potential solutions.

1.     We’re not quite sure whether or not the project is on schedule, but we think so.

Projects are consistently delivered behind schedule and every deadline is a mad rush to the finish, resembling a college “all-nighter” prior to a big test.

Build project management into your process. Yesterday. If you have in-house PM expertise, figure out how to utilize it. If you need to hire project managers, do it. They will help you build realistic project plans that include all the dependencies, hand-offs and all those tasks you never thought to include in a project plan.

2.     QA is constantly seen as a “roadblock” to completion.

More than likely, QA is not the roadblock but, as the final step in the process, is receiving its assets too late to practically make deadlines.

QA should be considered an integral step in every process. As with any project plan, sufficient time and resources should be assigned. This plan should include time for the normal-case scenario, not the best-case, which is most often the plan. This means plan for mistakes and re-work. Because you know that is going to happen. If your assets were delivered mistake-free every time, you wouldn’t need QA at all.

3.     Tasks keep falling through the cracks.

You consistently think you are nearing completion, only to find out some details (or critical component) has not been completed. After much shouting and finger-pointing, somebody bribes some resources with beer and pizza to work after-hours to cobble together something you can pass off as a deliverable.

This is not an operational plan. Assuming you started with a project plan listing all of the tasks and associated deliverables, somebody still needs to be paying attention. Project Managers are responsible for making sure tasks are completed on time and in the proper sequence, handoffs are made and deliverables are delivered.

According to dictionary.com, the primary definition of inconsistent is “Lacking in harmony between the different parts or elements; self-contradictory.” Like lumpy pancake batter. Or Demand Center processes that don’t always follow process.

Assuming these solutions sound preferable to the alternative, inconsistent chaos, we should begin to see a pattern in the solutions. Project management helps achieve the discipline necessary to keep our execution consistent with our defined process. Failure to consistently manage our projects leads to Demand Gen FAIL number 6: Lumpy Pancake Batter.

Notes:

Your defined Demand Center processes must be consistently followed in the execution of each and every Campaign. Even small variances can lead to poor execution and a negative user experience.

Formal Project Management will help you stay on course and consistently execute according to plan. Implement some form of project management into your system.

In next week’s edition, we will look at Demand Generation FAIL number 7: Testing, 1,2 3! How to make sure Quality Assurance is actually assuring quality.