Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:
Recent Posts
Archive
Archive
Tags
Affective Action B2B business business model career development career management cause marketing collaborate commercialization Conflict corporate responsibility customer networks demand generation Design Duarte Communications early sales Ecomagination effective communication Empathy employee engagement employee retention GE generative green marketing high performance high touch/low cost hiring HR human resources innovation innovative thinking Institute for the Future investment Jeff Immelt leadership lead generation management managing women market development marketing marketing automation marketing metrics motivation negotiate nurturing prospects outperform passion personalized marketing philanthropy philosophy philosophy and business Presentations product introductions project management project portfolio analysis project selection prospecting regulatory expansion results sales Santa Clara University social-media social entrepreneur social venture Social Venture incubator Strategy sustainability TEDx Presidio the buying process the customer view The Onion time to market time to ramp use case venture program
- RSS - Posts
- RSS - Comments
Subscribe in a reader

Browsing Tags marketing metrics

Best Simple Operational Planning –Just 4 Slides

October 21, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

QZBJGG9HWXMN Everyone has a reason to hate operational planning. It takes too long. Worse, it takes all that time to do and is often forgotten. It gets confusing (“Isn’t this more of a strategy than an objective?” Argghhh!). And even when everyone manages to drag themselves through all that, reporting on and reviewing the execution of those plans gets so boring you wish you were the ones being executed.

These problems come to mind now because I am advising a small, but fast-growing company doing its first round of real planning. The benefits are high. It is worth trying to reduce the costs. So here it is, the Taia Ergueta Minimum Pain-Maximum Gain Operating Planning System.

The pieces:

One Page Strategy Summary
Operating Plan Initiatives List
Operating Action Plans
One Page Review Template

1. The One Page Strategy Summary

This assumes that you have done the strategy development already. If so, you have a ton of documents with options, analyses, dreams, obfuscations, spider diagrams, and assumption-laden spreadsheets to show for it. Now you just need all of that exquisitely distilled into one page. “Impossible!”, you say? We aren’t exactly talking Shakespeare here; it can be done. And it really has to be done. Give every employee a single, digestible page that shows what needs to change and by how much and you dramatically increase your chances of accomplishing and exceeding that.

Here is an example of a 1 page strategy summary:

To be clear, it is not just about fitting stuff on one page. The requirements for an effective one page strategy summary are:

1. Whole Entity Goals. There should not be more than 6 of these. These should indicate the actual numeric goal that the entity will achieve by the end of the planning period (a year, or half year if you are in the midst of massive change). In this case I have suggested:

A growth goal
A profit goal
A customer satisfaction or loyalty goal, and
Some version of an employee satisfaction or engagement goal

2. Strategic Intent Blocks

No more than 5 strategy areas. In the example above I have 4 strategy blocks:

Markets and Products
Processes
Employees/Culture
Finance and Admin

Each one has:

A description of the key strategic intent. This is a pithy phrase that captures the key CHANGE that you will effect. If there is no change word (“increase” “eliminate”, “accelerate”, etc.), try again. (Remember, these are not meant to cover everything that the organization will do. They are the areas which require extra focus and will produce big impacts.)
The main tactical initiative areas. Keep these broad enough and phrased as objectives; let your teams figure out how to accomplish them. They will be more engaged, develop more, and are likely to do great things you would not have thought of!
The very few key metrics — and associated specific goals– that indicate the size of the change needed and that will tell if you accomplished the strategy. Nota Bene: Always define the goals as a minimum (i.e., “at least” or “less than”) rather than as a specific value. Reseach shows that people will just meet a specific goal, but will consistently outperform that when the goal is open-ended. Go figure. Now you know how to increase your organizations output by 15% simply by learning how to type “<” and “>”.

2. Operating Plan Initiatives List

Once the strategy is clear, your teams or functional groups can go off and develop action plans. Warning, warning!: This is where the strategy can get undermined if people pursue all the projects they like and fit the strategic initiatives in edgewise. Negotiating to a 1-2 page list of all the major initiatives and their owners helps the management team drive focus and make clear trade offs. You’ll end up with a succinct initiative list for each function or group that contains:

Initiatives directly in support of the strategies: These are the highest priority.
Initiatives for some ongoing obligations: Some of these are essential and some may need to be examined for potential dropping over time.
Other initiatives: If there are a lot of additional initiatives, it is worth checking to see if they are justified and if they can be done without jeopardizing the strategic items.

A simple slide like this can capture the key elements across all the entities involved.

Well, that’s enough for now. The TEMPMGOPS, like wild boar, is best digested when consumed slowly. In the next post I’ll give you the final 2 templates.

Operating Action Plans
Operational Plan Review Template

Cheers!

Inquiries and Comments Welcome.

If you would like help with your planning, contact me by clicking here.

Your Marketing Needs Four Pillars Too

July 23, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Most tech businesses have product marketing. Sometimes Marketing starts and stops there. If you build it they will come, right? Or, as one manager told me when I suggested that we work on messaging, “Taia, the product IS the message”. Even among the more enlightened, Marketing is a lot like South America: People know the outline, but don’t ask them about the number or position of the countries.

So here it a short and sweet starting point for you. The four pillars of marketing. What functions fall under each. With whom they need to work most closely. And the key metrics for each. It can be you very own Arch of Triumph. Some assembly required.

Note:

This model surrounds Product Management with the important things that they often cannot do either because of the skills or time needed. With the addition of the Market (vertical) Management, full Marcom and Market Development you can address true customer needs and do modern demand generation. This is true commercialization.
From left to right, the key interfaces shift from Customers to Internal partners to Sales (“Field”). If you have a small team these interfaces can happen more easily. With large teams, you’ll need to actively manage this to ensure the right collaboration.

Download the above document: Linked Doc

Input Welcome

Are there key functions missing?

Do you have a better model of marketing?

Why Would It Make Sense to Generate the Same Lead Over and Over?

May 30, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

A product marketing manager asked me if we were just wasting money and time on lead generation: The sales force had just informed him that they already knew all the customers that his lead generation campaign had produced. Here is why generating the same lead repeatedly through Nurturing Demand Generation can be a very good use of money.

A customer in your target market is anyone who could use your product. A “lead” is someone who has the inclination and ability to buy your product in the near future. A customer goes in and out of that “lead” state over time as their needs and ability to buy emerge, get met, and eventually re-emerge.

If you are new to the target market, then your lead generation objective is to find people new to your company who should get to know you before making a decision. In contrast, if you have been in the market for a while you may have encountered many (maybe all) of the customers for your product. In this case, you have additional lead generation objectives: You want to make sure that you are top of mind and aware every time that they go into lead mode. Since customers are not always shopping with intent to buy, lead generation efforts are well worth the money if they:

Tip customers into “lead-dom” by stimulating an appetite for a new product
Make you aware when a customer you may already know, has become an active shopper – a real lead rather than a passive customer.

In the past, it was the sales force’s job to keep your product top of mind during the times when a customer was not ready to buy. Sales was expected to know when a customer became an active lead/buyer by staying in constant touch. Reality: This kind of “nurturing” was rarely practical outside of top accounts. Today, most sales forces don’t have the time or access for this level of intimacy across the needed number of prospects. Enter Marketing.

Marketing is the Cyrano de Bergerac to Sales’ Christian. By keeping in contact with customers, giving them a range of enticing offers to which to respond and carefully assessing their responses, marketing can precipitate and detect when a customer turns into an active lead. It is estimated that you need to communicate with a customer an average of 5 to 7 times before they are ready to buy from you. Marketing automation makes this kind of Nurturing Demand Generation possible.

Just as Cyrano provided the poetry, marketing can use automation to provide the attentiveness and relevancy that customers seek. In this world, Marketing’s gift to Sales is not a new name, it is the gift of high efficiency — a stream of old and new customers who are informed, intrigued and feel cared for and ready to be influenced and buy.

Input welcome: I’ve met so many customers who complained that they felt ignored by the industry. Similarly, marketing and sales people always get a big motivation boost from getting to know customers better and meeting their relationship needs. The possibility of High Touch/Low Cost personalized marketing and customer relationship management is finally here. It is in its early stage. What has been your experience with this?

The Mother of All Metrics

May 2, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

I nominate Achievement of Projected Sales Ramp Rate (Time to Ramp – “TTR”) as the single most important metric for your business.

To get resounding support for this, I’d better explain a few things.

First: What is the Sales Ramp?

It is the projected pace and level of orders projected in the first year after a product is made available. (The number of years may differ depending on the level of innovation or industry.)

Why is it important?

There are both Financial and Effectiveness reasons. I got a big lesson in these in the PC business, where we had no more than 3 months after product introduction to make money on products that had taken 12-18 months to develop. After three months, deep discounting would begin and you could abandon hope of making up the lost profits missed in those critical first months. The PC case may be an extreme case, but many people seem to think they have all the time in the world to make money on a new product. They don’t. I love a good delusion as much as the next guy, but the cost of this one is way too high.

From a financial standpoint, if you miss that ramp timing, your competitive position, lifetime revenue, and return on investment are all severely damaged. If you expect to sell fifty units of a product in the first year and, instead, it takes two years to do it, the return on that R&D investment will be much lower than planned. This is because of three unsympathetic and inescapable forces:

the time-value of money,
the impact of investing more money to get the same revenue, and
the fact that technology itself diminishes in competitiveness over time.

From an execution effectiveness standpoint, focusing on Time to Ramp ensures that you

Prepare the commercialization before introduction and
Identify and solve start-up problems early.

More on these topics below.

How is it Time to Ramp (TTR) different from Time to Market (TTM)?

Time to Market refers to time span from the start of development until the product will be introduced. The articulation is simple: “We will introduce [the product] by [month] of [year].”

This metric became very popular as the value of being first to market and then the importance of fast product iteration became clear. Those are still very valid concepts, but a narrow focus on time to market has a dark side.

Figure 1

Time to Ramp measures the span from start of development to the time at which the initial targeted order rate is reached.

At the outset of a project this metric would read as follows:

“By [target date] we will have developed and introduced [the product] and will have achieved the following level of order dollars: [$______]. Projected ROI of the project: [____]”

On the designated target date, the metric report would state one of these:

“All Metrics achieved”, or
“TTR goal not met, new estimate for TTR is [ _____] Revised ROI: [____]”,
Or, in your case, “Metric exceeded by $_____, ROI exceeded by _____”

Figure 2 summarizes the benefits of this approach.

So you see, this isn’t really about the metric; it is about the behaviors that that metric brings to light and the positive behavior and process changes that it drives. Some of those changes:

New introduction requirements that include more of what is actually necessary for the product to meet its early milestones
Ensuring that marketing and sales are aligned and investing in full commercialization rather than just introduction of the product
Elevating everyone’s position and engaging more of their talents by making them aware of and accountable for the project’s return on investment

So far I’ve highlighted the business benefits of adopting this metric, but among the most important benefits is that employees will be happier, broader and more confident in their future with the company. I am sure that either as an employee or as a manager you have seen how much employees worry when they see important things that are not getting done. They know or fear that those omissions will diminish the impact of their own hard work. Adopting TTR metric not only shows that management “gets it”, it prompts employees to raise and address many common gaps. Sure, that means more action items, but employees would rather have to prioritize from a full list of the actions that spell success than execute on a perilously incomplete list. The more holistic view of project execution also requires functions to work together. That kind of collaboration fuels employee development, flexibility and innovation.

Ok, I have to stop now before I find myself swearing that this metric can make your dog immortal or do away with world hunger. Before I sign off: Why the waterfall? A great metric is like the land formation under a waterfall. Both naturally lead diverse sources of energy into a flow that has extraordinary power, reach and impact.

_____________________________________________________

Future posts:

How to assess your Time to Ramp performance and solve key causes of underperformance.
How to modify Product Introduction requirements to promote great TTR results.

[Waterfall photo by Kevin Connors ]