Marketing Operations and Operational Process blog series Series introduction: Marketing Operations is a complex mixture of people, processes, and technology all working together to prove - and improve - the value of marketing to your company, your customer, and your employees. While the technology and people components of this “Marketing Operations Triangle” get a lot of attention, Operational Process deserves much more focus as a driver of value. In this blog series, we’ll be giving it the attention it so richly deserves. At its most basic level, process maturity simply means getting smarter about the day-to-day elements of all of your operational processes. By growing your process maturity, you’re able to (1) do more of the right things and (2) do them better with the same or fewer resources. At the end of the day, marketing maturity means building know-how and capability around your operational processes, enabling you to get more out of your marketing investment.  In this post, we’ll be exploring in-depth how you can understand and grow your organization’s maturity around operational processes. Understanding your current maturity level There are some obvious indicators of immature processes, recognizable by anyone: If you haven’t documented your processes, that’s a clear indication of immaturity.  Why? It's almost impossible to replicate a process unless it's documented in some way - and you want repeatable processes to be able to drive value. So, a mature process is documented and executed according to plan, then results are tracked in order to measure success/failure in reaching your goal. If you have a lot of manual processes, that’s another sign of immaturity.  We see immaturity a lot with data processes. Marketing and sales might both rely on multiple software systems to store and use prospect and customer data. About one-third of B2B companies today rely on manual processes to move data between tools.  We recommend that, for MOPS in particular, you should be deploying well-trained people and enabling technologies/tools to boost your process maturity. Foundation of process maturity: knowing your why Every process must have a business purpose and goal behind it. Every maturity journey should begin with that goal in mind and then plan for a multi-layered, staged approach to achieving it. Document which problems you’re trying to solve for with every operational process, how you’ll measure success, how enabling technology aligns to your business objectives, and who's accountable for each process.   It’s also essential that you’re assigning someone to be accountable for each process. We often attack process immaturity with an honest RASCI exercise: Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, and Informed. It’s a fairly simple exercise, but it’s critical that everyone impacted knows what’s expected of them to get the job done, and that they’re held accountable for their role in the process (and improving it).  Measuring process maturity: 4 levels Here at Sojourn, we work with a lot of clients who have different levels of maturity in their operational processes. We help them understand where they are in their process maturity journey, determine where they want to go next, and then help them get there. We have a methodology to determine process maturity that contains four distinct maturity levels. Detailed below are the different maturity levels, from beginning to advanced, with the indicators of each: Beginning/Foundational Maturity Level:  You’re at the beginning of the journey, with a long way to go, but at least you’ve started. You have a recognized operational model that defines how marketing “does” marketing; You have documented a campaign execution process; You have a documented change management process for marketing only. Low Intermediate Maturity Level:  You’re starting to see what’s possible and are growing your maturity from the foundational level. You have widely-adopted templates and best practices; You now have a change management process that’s cross-functional, going beyond marketing; You have a campaign cost-tracking process in place. Intermediate Maturity Level:  You’re upping your game around operational processes and adding more capabilities. You are using data to continuously measure operational workflow, errors, and performance; Your operational data now powers your planning and helps you identify issues before they turn into big problems.  Advanced Maturity Level:  You are adding real value to both marketing and the overall business with a mature level of operational processes. You can also prove and improve the value of your operational processes with data. You have optimized processes that create a competitive advantage for your business; Your continuous improvement efforts are effectively part of your culture. Grow your maturity As the four maturity levels clearly indicate, each “growth spurt” needs to be built atop the prior level of maturity. You can’t skip a level, since each one supports the next one. As in life, you build process maturity by trying things, building capacity, learning from your mistakes, and asking for help when needed.  We’ve taken clients from foundational maturity to intermediate in a few years, working with them to build more automated processes and drive adoption of standardized approaches to campaign management (we'll share a customer success story in a future post). Maturity takes time, but you need to know where you are today and where you want to go next.  Like growing your overall Marketing Operations maturity, growing maturity around operational processes requires a careful and dynamic blending of people, technology, and (yes) processes. We can help you locate where you are now and help you draw a roadmap for getting to where you want to go next.  Do you want to drive more value for your company? Your customers? We can help you evaluate and grow your Operational Process maturity - reach out  to start the conversation. Next post in series:   7 tips for Marketing Operations to improve Operational Process (post 3 of 5)

Marketing Operations and Operational Process blog series Series introduction: Marketing Operations is a complex mixture of people, processes, and technology all working together to prove - and improve - the value of marketing to your company, your customer, and your employees. While the technology and people components of this “Marketing Operations Triangle” get a lot of attention, Operational Process deserves much more focus as a driver of value. In this blog series, we’ll be giving it the attention it so richly deserves. Processes are one of the three enablers that drive the core functions Marketing Operations focuses on: lead to revenue management (also includes sales and marketing alignment), data and insights, and measuring results. We asked Andy Worobel, Senior Marketing Operations Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, to describe how the optimization of operational processes “fits” into the marketing operations triangle.  “Process is certainly the least sexy of the three enablers,” says Worobel, “tech gets all the glory with its “cool” appeal and people are the heroes who tell the story of marketing’s impact. Improving operational processes so often goes unsung as a value driver, and can even be mistakenly viewed as an obstacle to value creation.” Sadly, there is no “cool factor” in making sure things get done effectively and efficiently, but operational processes are a key part of the marketing operations triangle. Too often, marketers view process as a negative word. Yes, when you have bad operational processes, “process” is a negative word. But. Technology and people can also be negative words in exactly the same way when people and tech don’t have purpose and direction behind them.   Defining a “good Operational Process”   A good process is an enabler, just as good technology and good people are enablers. Too many marketers speak poorly about processes because they don’t understand what a good operational process actually is. Let’s address that lack of knowledge. A good operational process has a purpose: it meets the functional need and goal defined for the process. In other words, the process does what it was intended to do, which typically might be to reduce risks or ensure a quality output. The operational process should also work efficiently with its inputs of time, steps, and other direct and indirect “costs.” For example, if a content approval process is intended to ensure quality content, but requires everyone on a 12-member team to approve every piece of content, the process may be effective in ensuring quality but is also extremely inefficient and time-consuming.   All operational processes should be visible, transparent, and fully documented – they should make sense to those impacted on the inside and the outside. The cumbersome content approval process described above, for example, would make no sense to the internal stakeholders and would drive freelance content providers away due to extensive delays in gaining approvals. “A good process also needs to have a built-in evaluation and refinement process so the process can be periodically measured,” says Worobel. Only things that are measured can be improved – no operational process should ever be considered “final." A case in point   Worobel offers the example of a Sojourn client, a small and underfunded Marketing Operations team in the UK, that needed to create a tight operational process to manage the large volume of work coming in. The team also needed to reduce errors and deliver high quality outputs/content. They’d been taking work requests over the phone or via quick emails. The team was so busy with the day-to-day that they had little time left over to think about setting up a streamlined work management process.  “We worked closely with them to develop an end-to-end process that included an online process to submit work requests and allocate the work to the right people,” says Worobel. “We created reusable project plans to track large initiatives and established service level agreements (SLAs) so everyone knew what to expect.” What was the result of this process transformation project? “The small Marketing Operations team saw an almost 30% YoY increase in the number of campaigns executed - with 100% accuracy - and in spite of a 50% reduction in budget,” says Worobel. Editor’s note: We’ll devote an entire blog post later in this series to this particular “operational process success story.” Biggest challenges to improving Operational Processes Inertia and lack of awareness of process problems/bottlenecks may be the biggest obstacles to improving operational processes. Too many organizations never take a step back and actually look at their operational processes as a first step towards improving them. “It’s hard to know you have problems, let alone start improving them, without first understanding where you are right now,” says Worobel.  You need to schedule audits for processes, as well as have benchmarks to measure how you’re doing compared to other organizations. “Having standards and best practices around operational processes doesn’t erode marketing creativity, but instead empowers people with consistent ways of working that drive overall business value,” Worobel explains. Process improvement is also a challenge because it requires a concurrent change management process to make it work, either within the marketing team or working across multiple business functions. For example, having standardized processes for how everyone within the organization handles customer data is a prerequisite for having quality data to fuel campaigns and other marketing tools. As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”  You should have standardized operational processes for how people add and delete data, how lists are uploaded, and how data gets managed across your organization.   Related blog post: 10 steps for ensuring data quality to fuel B2B Marketing   Solving Operational Process challenges   “Improvement can only begin when you document and track your operational processes,” says Worobel, “starting with those processes that are most impactful to your goals.” Once you have a clear snapshot of where you are today, you can then move to benchmarking your processes. With this diagnostic information in hand, you can identify the gaps you face specifically in terms of operational process management. Once you know the scope and nature of your “process challenge,” you can sit down and brainstorm how you can improve and close the gaps. “It’s a good idea to get help from outside experts, people who have vast experience improving operational processes at multiple organizations,” says Worobel.  There’s no single, generally-accepted way to “do” process improvement, but it would typically involve:   Documenting each operational process and mapping out the steps and resources involved; Evaluating the effectiveness of the process in meeting its objectives; Evaluating the efficiency of the process. Could it be streamlined (steps cut out) while maintaining its effectiveness? Gaining input and buy-in from relevant internal parties for the intended process improvement. Training people in the new (and fully-documented) process and following a change management process to drive its adoption. Evaluating the new and improved operational process periodically. We help B2B marketers like you to drive Marketing Operations effectiveness by evaluating and improving their Operational Processes. If you’re interested in learning how we can help you, contact us  today.  Next post in series:   How Marketing Operations can grow Operational Process maturity (post 2 of 5)

Essie Reynolds, MBA, is a Data Analyst and Business Intelligence Consultant at Sojourn Solutions.   Modern marketing is fueled by quality data. Understanding and coordinating all of the parts of your data ecosystem is therefore critical to marketing success. Below is a ten-step process you can follow to drive data quality within your organization. As mentioned above, these steps represent an update to a post we did way back in 2017 – a lot has changed since then, especially around data privacy and an increased emphasis on quality data to drive marketing outcomes, and this updated post certainly reflects those changes. The 10 steps below are divided into three distinct categories: (1) surveying the data and ecosystem you already have; (2) the tactics of ensuring data quality; and (3) ongoing maintenance of your data and data ecosystem. Let’s begin. A. Survey:  1. Know your “why” for data  When you collect data just for the sake of collecting data, it can add lots of “noise,” increase the cost of storing your data, and lead to a poor user experience. In order to be more strategic about how you’re collecting and using data, you need to know what your organizational goals are for data, what questions you want answers to, and what you want to accomplish with data.    2. Be accountable and aligned on data Each functional area within your organization should have a point person who's accountable for maintaining the data in their realm of responsibility. Anyone touching that data should be trained so they have some accountability to data quality as well.  There are always going to be differences in what different functions or departments might need regarding data, so the appropriate identity management needs to be defined and set up. For example, if the marketing team is buying a new martech tool, they need to be strategically aligned with their organization on who owns the tool, where the data will be stored, and who gets access to the data. 3. Complete an audit Take a comprehensive look at all the data your organization is currently collecting. You’ll need to know where data is coming from, the tech tools that are involved, who's using what data, and why they’re using it. How is data being stored and analyzed? Knowing all this gives you a clear understanding of your entire data ecosystem. An audit helps prevent data redundancies and highlights gaps that need closing. Part of the audit would be creating a visualization of data flows. You might have data going from Salesforce into Tableau and from Eloqua into Tableau. It helps to visualize these connections. B. Tactical: 4. Outline rigorous data processes You need defined data processes to ensure that your data is consistent and standardized. Your values should also be standardized with tools such as pick lists or country names (US v. USA v. U.S.A.). Standard processes make your data cleaner and make your reporting more accurate. Make sure everyone involved with your data understands how these processes help drive data quality.  Have standardized routines for how data is added and deleted, how lists are uploaded, and how data is managed across the organization. 5. Automate with a contact washing machine (aka automated data cleansing)  Using a contact washing machine can make a huge difference in your data quality and save you time and manual effort in cleaning your data. It'll automate and streamline your data standardization. With a contact washing machine, you set up rules that are automatically applied when data flows in. Any data that comes in and deviates from your defined rules gets standardized by the contact washing machine. 6. Take advantage of third party applications You can use third party applications to normalize, validate, and add missing contact data. So an app can validate email addresses or tell you if a phone number is still valid or help you fill in missing pieces of mailing addresses. You don’t want to send email or direct mail to addresses that are wrong or invalid – that wastes your resources and hurts your numbers/KPIs.  7. Create and use templates  Templates are key to the standardization of data: they save you time and improve your data quality while helping your user experience. For example, if you're using templates on your websites and landing pages, and you use pick lists, they’ll standardize your data because users can't free-form type anything incorrectly. Your marketing team can leverage templates and won’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.  C. Ongoing: 8. Stay updated and compliant with privacy regulations  The number of data privacy laws are not just limited to Europe or Canada or California. You have to consider all the different data privacy laws in all the different places you're doing business in. You must comply with those data privacy laws so you can continue to do business in those places. In addition, customers want to see that you’re taking data privacy seriously. You should have a point person to ensure that you’re following relevant data privacy requirements.  9. Ongoing maintenance planning  Have a plan for regular maintenance of your data and data ecosystem. Routinely check on mapping fields between tools to ensure that the data flows are still accurate. In marketing automation, for example, you’d want to make sure that the fields you're mapping from Salesforce into your MAP are the relevant ones for what you need. And when you make changes in Salesforce, you must also consider how that affects your MAP.  10. Monitor the age of your database  If you have contacts that have been dormant for a year, you’d want to treat them differently than contacts who are brand new or very engaged. Those differences would determine how you're doing your nurturing and how you're tracking engagement. If you're not getting any new contacts or new leads, that would be a problem you’d want to analyze.  If there's no activity from a contact for a year, you're wasting a lot of resources trying to engage with someone who won’t engage. You might be able to save money if you say, “well, a percentage of this database hasn't responded to anything in a long time. Let’s make them inactive and target our efforts on contacts who engage.” Need more help with your data and/or data management processes? Reach out to us here . Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.   Related Data Management posts: Driving ABM success: How to leverage quality data to define and engage your target accounts How to create a culture of data to drive your B2B marketing: 4 steps to success How Marketing Operations enables data quality and the infrastructure needed to drive ROI

B2B customer journeys are complex and time-consuming, with lots of non-linear touchpoints. Prospects typically do most of their research online, gathering relevant data about purchase options, carefully evaluating offerings from competing vendors, and then reaching a purchasing decision (often by committee). The sooner B2B marketers and an aligned sales function can (1) “read” customer signals of buying intent and (2) respond to those signals with relevant, timely content that addresses customer needs for research/information, the more likely those B2B marketers (working in tandem with sales) can turn insight into action, prospects into buyers. Adobe wants to help facilitate and orchestrate these B2B customer journeys with tools like Marketo Engage , Marketo Measure  ( formerly Bizible ), and Adobe Real-Time CDP, as the recent Adobe Summit  made clear. During a presentation called Orchestrate Customer Journeys Across Marketing and Sales with Adobe  (registration required), Brian Glover , Adobe’s Senior Director of Product Marketing and Strategy, shared Adobe’s vision. It’s a vision for driving seamless personalization at scale across marketing and sales touchpoints, unlocking the power of unified customer profiles and AI, while enabling businesses to measure and maximize marketing ROI. Let’s explore that Adobe vision below in more detail. Enabling orchestration: 3 capabilities required “Over the past two years,” says Glover, “the hard shift to digital has completely changed how businesses compete to build [trusted] customer relationships in a noisy world where customers are more self-directed and can access endless amounts of information.” Glover notes that achieving personalization at scale across B2B customer journeys requires three distinct marketing ops capabilities: data excellence, orchestration agility, and a high degree of marketing and sales coordination. 1. Data excellence is the foundation for every personalized experience, informing how your organization understands and interacts with each prospect.  Insight is the prerequisite for action, but Glover highlights a common obstacle: ”75% of efforts to create automated, personalized engagement will not meet ROI goals because of inadequate buyer insight.” The ability to collect and share high quality data makes positive customer experiences (CXs) possible. 2. Orchestration agility means working as an aligned business across multiple channels to engage customers in data-enabled ways.  It means understanding customer context across every channel and adapting to each customer's unique journey with relevant, timely content. It’s not easy, explains Glover: “82% of marketing and sales professionals have recently observed new and changing customer journeys. It's now about meeting customers when or where they want with the right content or conversation and doing it with speed and scale.” Internally, the right hand and the left hand work together to build a great CX.  3. Marketing and sales coordination is recognized by everyone as essential for success – Glover mentions that “98% of mature companies believe that marketing and sales need to increase coordination” – but it’s not always enabled by the “right” investments in data, processes, and technologies.  Silos of mindsets, systems, terminology, and KPIs still need to be exploded so marketing and sales can work in tandem: “marketing and sales coordination has to be more automated and data driven in order to meet [evolving] customer expectations,” says Glover.  How Adobe enables seamless orchestrations Adobe is working hard to help B2B marketers across each of the three pillars detailed above by Adobe’s Glover.  Data excellence.  Last year Adobe introduced its Real-Time CDP  powered by Adobe Experience Platform. This data management tool “gives you incredibly precise targeting for more consistent, personalized experiences,” says Glover, “by bringing together real-time person profiles with account and opportunity data from across [multiple] systems.” You can connect multiple Marketo Engage instances to Real-Time CDP “so you have one place for all that engagement activity and can activate complete audiences in Marketo Engage, even creating missing leads or contacts to understand the impact of every customer interaction on pipeline or revenue.” Insight flows into action. Orchestration.  “ Adobe Marketo  is purpose-built for orchestrating inbound and outbound journeys across sales and marketing,” says Glover. Adobe also helps measure the impact of activities on revenues via Marketo Measure  and B2B attribution. “You can plan your marketing investments with speed and confidence because you know what’s working and what isn't. Adobe gives you deep visibility into the drivers of pipeline and revenue across channels and campaigns and down to the individual content or creative [asset],” explains Glover. That granularity allows the entire marketing and sales team, orchestrating their activities together, to make faster, data-driven decisions. Glover also announced a new “dynamic chat” feature for Marketo Engage that helps with orchestration, enabling “personalized customer conversations at scale, as part of an omnichannel strategy.” Website visitors can use the chat function to book a meeting or demo with sales, taking them to the next step of their journey.  Marketing and Sales coordination.  Both marketing and sales functions seek to engage with prospects who are most ready to purchase, following the Pareto Principle (or 80/20 Rule) that says most of your revenues (about 80%) come from a small slice (about 20%) of your customers/leads. To help marketing and sales focus on and coordinate activities around their best prospects, Glover announced “predictive lead and account scoring powered by Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe's AI and machine learning framework.” With the ability to predict the likelihood of a person or account becoming a sales opportunity or a new customer, marketing can drive higher quality pipeline (MQLs) more efficiently to sales. Marketo Engage gives each sales rep a prioritized list of their hot leads and gives them multi-step engagement tools and content right inside the CRM for a complete workflow.  Both sales and marketing can see and share the same customer insights and coordinate their actions to move the customer journey forward. When customer intent signals and predictive analytics indicate a sales opportunity is imminent, both marketing and sales receive alerts and next steps they can take. “With product browsing and purchase events, natively connected to Real-Time. CDP, marketing teams can use these activities for personalization [of outreach] with their Adobe Experience Cloud applications,” says Glover.  At the end of the day, Adobe seeks to enable omnichannel engagement across the customer journey and across the business organization (involving sales, marketing, and beyond). As Glover notes: “These innovations reflect Adobe's commitment to B2B marketing leadership.”  Want to learn more about how Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible) can help you prove/improve the value of marketing aligned to business outcomes?  Reach out  to us when you're ready to get the conversation started!

The new 2022 State of B2B Marketing Training Report , which surveyed 600 B2B marketers about their readiness for the future, says only 19% of them feel very prepared for their futures in marketing. And only 31% of them feel their team is very effective. Perhaps even worse, 58% of the surveyed B2B marketers describe themselves as either “ambivalent” about working in marketing or “burned out.” With those bleak numbers as a backdrop, employee engagement and retention is an obvious concern for marketing managers, especially as most marketers (88% in the survey) work either remotely or via hybrid work. Churn can have a highly negative impact on marketing effectiveness, and it’s a growing challenge: 64% of surveyed marketers are either “actively looking” for another job or “would be open to new opportunities.”  While training can be important for upskilling and retaining B2B marketers, 70% of surveyed marketers reported that their teams already participated in training -- so more training may NOT be the right answer.  Key findings: Training needs to be more relevant & practical What’s needed most, the report says, is training that has a different kind of focus. Let’s explore some of the report’s key findings around training for B2B marketers: 1. Training must be relevant and focus on existing, work-related challenges . Seven out of ten B2B marketers want their training “to focus on solving specific problems related to my current role.” Training must therefore be highly-relevant for tackling the specific, work-related issues marketers face every day. Only three out of ten marketers want training that focuses on challenges that “aren’t directly related to my current role.”  2. More skills assessment is needed, for both individual marketers and marketing teams.  Only 10% of managers have a formal process to assess what skills their team needs next. Gaps aren’t just going unclosed but also unrecognized. Only 15% of managers report that their training courses include assessments to see which skills their team needs to learn next. Overall, the current level of skills assessment can be described as “woefully inadequate.” 3. Training must include practice and exercises that connect skills to how they’re actually used in the real-world.  The biggest frustration marketers have with B2B marketing training is its focus on theory. Half of marketers are frustrated because they want more B2B training focused on work-related execution, not abstract theory. Despite the desire for practical application of skills, only 20% of training courses include assignments and exercises to practice new skills, says the survey. 4. Coaching and mentoring can offer feedback on employee performance and identify gaps that need filling.  But fewer than a quarter of B2B marketers surveyed say they actually have a mentor. Access to coaching is available on some marketing teams, but is highly dependent on personal relationships and team culture. 5. Lack of formal training budgets and/or related red tape can inhibit training and enablement. One of the most eye-opening findings from the survey is that three out of ten marketers have financed their own training, mostly because their organizations lacked a training budget or because the red tape involved in getting budget approval was so onerous that self-financing seemed to make more sense. So having formal structures is a good start, but making the approval process fast and convenient can be equally important for driving budget usage. The 5 factors of “very prepared” B2B Marketers The surveyed B2B marketers who reported feeling “very prepared” for their roles were much different from the rest, in ways that can illuminate the way forward for marketing teams and marketing managers. Those “very prepared” B2B marketers were 19% of the whole, but shared these common traits:  1. They have documented business goals, so they know where they’re going and what specific skills they’ll need to take them there.  2. They tend to be part of an organization in which ongoing learning is part of the culture and where the organization has a formal process to decide what training the team needs. 3. They tend to be part of an organization that takes a proactive approach to B2B training, instead of relying on individual marketers to request and justify the training they need.  4. They tend to focus their training on practical execution instead of theory, and take training courses that tend to include things such as concrete examples, templates, and frameworks. 5. They measure the impact of training, especially related to job performance and other practical KPIs. Marketing enablement is Marketing Operations What’s clear from these survey results is that marketing enablement (i.e., talent enablement within the marketing function) has some current challenges and should become an explicit role under the umbrella of marketing operations. Someone needs to take responsibility for the marketing team’s development of the necessary skills to do their job effectively. This "people enablement function" is also a key part of the technology management pillar in marketing ops, which involves people, processes, and technology all working together to prove and improve the value of marketing. People are listed first in that “value triangle” for a reason.  Marketing operations and technology teams have become highly proficient at the “processes” and “technology” part of the value triangle. But if the survey results are any indication, there’s much “room for improvement” when it comes to enabling people. Enabling talent takes time Anyone can buy martech in ten seconds with a mouse click and some money in the bank. Marketing talent, on the other hand, needs to be carefully hired, nurtured, and developed over years.  The key word here is “nurture.” You can’t buy or outsource culture. And while you can — and should — pay competitively for B2B marketing talent, you also can’t keep swapping (high-priced) new staff in and out, no more than you can constantly swap out technology. You need to enable and retain talent, rather than lose (perhaps to your closest rivals) the talent you’ve carefully (and expensively) nurtured.  The bottom line? You should have a framework in place to enable your marketing talent, the same way you have structures in place to optimize your martech. Use the five factors of “very prepared” B2B marketers listed above to help guide your efforts in setting up those enabling structures. If you want more help and information about customized training solutions to enable your B2B marketing team, feel free to reach out to us here  for help.

Marketo Engage  has a full roadmap for 2022, with new features and innovations coming down the line fast. Venu Tavisala, senior director of product management for Adobe Marketo Engage, described this 2022 roadmap in a presentation at the Adobe Summit 2022 (here’s the full, on-demand presentation  – registration required).  Tavisala began by detailing research from Forrester around the impressive impact Marketo Engage has had on its customers and their marketing efforts. Those impacts include:  an average ROI of 267% across Marketo Engage customers; 29% improvement in customer engagement; 59% improvement in lead conversion rates on top of the funnel and 25% conversion improvement from marketing qualified leads to sales. As Tavisala says, “we know that getting results isn’t easy these days, and that the challenges are many, including the pandemic, the pace of change, business disruption, and rapidly-evolving customer expectations.”   Marketo’s vision and strategy for 2022 Before he began getting into the specifics of Marketo’s 2022 roadmap, Tavisala briefly explained Marketo’s vision and strategy. “Our vision is to empower marketing teams, to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale in concert with sales to drive highly efficient demand with agility and measurable business impact,” he says. The Marketo strategy Tavisala detailed is multi-pronged, and includes: 1. Delivering industry-leading marketing automation for B2B that is optimized for both scale and time-to-value. 2. Providing the orchestration that powers marketing and sales engagement and effectiveness across all channels and stages of the customer journey.  3. Delivering best-in-class marketing automation in the context of Adobe’s full customer experience management suite, connecting with content workflows, customer data and profiles, artificial intelligence, analytics, commerce, and marketing workflows. 4. Supporting a wide range of marketing strategies, including lead based and account based, inbound and outbound, online and offline, so as to help customers adapt to changing conditions and advance their digital maturity. 5. Continuing to improve our ecosystem with strong partners and have an open architecture with pre-built integrations, allowing companies to create marketing stacks that will deliver value now and in the future. Marketo Engage 2022 roadmap highlights “Strengthening the core of the Marketo Engage platform is important to help our customers grow and adapt their winning strategies,” says Tavisala. As such, Marketo is launching a number of features and innovations on its 2022 roadmap, including these:  Predictive Lead and Account Scoring “We're really excited about predictive lead and account scoring because data is exploding, and it’s becoming imperative for our customers to identify and engage with the right contacts and right customers at the right time,” says Tavisala. The tool offers an intelligent and configurable propensity-to-buy scoring solution for both Lead and Account profiles, and includes: AI-powered scores that offer higher accuracy to increase Marketing ROI; Ability to configure scoring without data science expertise, enabling faster time-to-value; and Actual vs. predicted analytics to drive user confidence and boost adoption. “Customers will also get scoring insights that will clearly identify the reasons for the score,” says Tavisala, “which will drive transparency as well as better adoption.”  Predictive lead and accounts scoring will be available for Real-time CDP customers in the second half of 2022, and then will be rolled out to the rest of Marketo Engage customers after. Dynamic Chat “This tool maximizes every opportunity on websites with integrated, 1:1 personalized conversations without additional investment, moving buyers through the marketing and sales funnel faster through real-time conversations,” says Tavisala. B2B businesses can thus engage with prospects on the web in a personalized and contextual way, generating more qualified leads and booking meetings with sellers. Marketo went live with dynamic chat in March, and will be doing a phased rollout to all customers over the next six months. Sales Insight – Actions (Salesforce CRM) This feature improves the accessibility of campaign-context data for sales, so they can make informed decisions about their prospects based on a unified view of the customer/prospect. Marketo and Salesforce are platforms “our customers depend on to keep their marketing and sales teams in lockstep to close deals,” says Tavisala, so getting those platforms connected and sharing with each other is a big focus. “We have plans to expand Marketo’s sales insight capabilities to now include integrated sales actions, empowering sales reps to initiate personalized, one to-one conversations with their prospects, right from their CRM system,” he says.  Reps do not have to leave the sales insight panel within their CRM to access marketing, curated sales emails, and send one-to-one personalized emails to their customers. Insight and action can happen in one place and sales reps won’t need to toggle back and forth between different screens or systems anymore to go from insight to action. The feature has been available to Marketo customers as a limited rollout since February, with a broader rollout slated for later in the year. Adobe User Credentials   Constantly inputting your user credentials to access systems can be time-consuming and frustrating. This feature streamlines user administration and enables single sign-on across Adobe Experience Cloud. Product admins can manage users and user entitlements through a common Admin Console. In addition, IT/Security admins can manage Marketo Engage product instances along with other AEC products through a common console. The feature “also simplifies admin tasks, such as license management, user management, and entitlement,” says Tavisala. Marketo will start onboarding the new capability to new enterprise customers in the first half of 2022 and start migrating existing customers in the second half of 2022.  Conclusion Marketo has a lot of innovations and integrations coming down the road to help improve what its customers do, especially around connecting Salesforce and Marketo. Other improvements include enhancements to usability/UI and improved data sharing capabilities. As Tavisala says, “Marketo continually responds to our customer feedback” through our roadmap.  To learn even more about Adobe Marketo Engage and how it can improve your marketing efforts, reach out  to us. We  partner with Marketo  to implement marketing automation solutions that drive marketing ROI for our customers.

Scott Brinker , the renowned martech thought leader who’s been writing about  the marketing technology landscape since its inception, has been thinking a lot about the importance of data governance. The number of martech vendors, the sheer volume of customer data collected (and used), and the need for good data stewardship has grown over the last few years (GDPR, anyone?). So has the imperative for good data governance, which might best be defined as “the rules of the road” for who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, using what methods. Sojourn had the chance to chat with Brinker about data governance, and what follows is an edited version of our conversation. Why is good data governance so important now? Brinker: All businesses today are being driven by data, and the volume of data they're processing and basing decisions upon is simply massive. Data governance is ultimately about ensuring the quality of all that data, so that the conclusions drawn from it are accurate. Data governance is also about taking responsibility for the stewardship of data, living up to the promises we make to our customers around managing their data, as well as driving compliance with data privacy regulations. As with managing martech, data governance blends people, processes, and technology. And like martech, the people and the process side of the equation are far bigger factors than the technology side. The process side is incredibly important because data governance is only effective when it has visibility into all the data you have. If some of your data is sitting in silos outside the purview of your governance structure, you can’t have good data governance. Getting those processes right and getting all your people trained and enabled is such a big part of good data governance. What could go wrong in the absence of good data governance? Brinker: Most obvious would be all the bad outcomes resulting from poor data quality, such as making bad decisions, not giving customers the right experiences, liability for being in violation of data privacy regulations, and an inability to work across your organization in fully data-enabled ways.  How have changes in tracking cookies and data privacy regulations impacted data governance? Brinker: The arrival of GDPR a few years back was definitely the triggering event for most marketing organizations to get serious about data management and data governance. While many marketers were initially unhappy about having to take on that compliance responsibility, most of the ones I've spoken with recently are actually happy it happened because average data quality has risen tremendously. That increased data quality ended up improving the outcomes and effectiveness of marketing campaigns and the level of customer engagement. Marketers actually got a lot more benefit out of GDPR than they originally expected, and I suspect it will be the same with the looming death of third party cookies. As marketers invest more in first-party data, they will get more value out of it.  How can an organization begin to set up a good data governance program? Brinker: The answer is largely a function of the scale of your business. As I said, data governance only works if you’re governing the entire data landscape across your company. Larger companies typically have larger data landscapes, which increases the likelihood that there will be pockets where data is either trapped in some application or within some outside service provider or in some other data silo scenario.  Start by investing in an audit of your data landscape, and then use those audit results to inform and begin implementing a good data governance program. You need to understand the structure of what you have today and then understand the target state you want to reach with your data management and data governance. What is the role of marketing operations in developing and running an effective data governance program? Brinker:   The marketing operations team is the owner of marketing’s data management and the technology stack for marketing. So they should be marketing’s interface with the organization’s higher-level data governance team and program. Marketing operations people should be able to talk the language of data governance, understand the program requirements, and help implement the relevant data governance policies within the martech stack. Due to the evolving and complex nature of marketing operations and marketing technology management, it’d be impossible for anyone to know everything. Even though marketing operations are responsible for holding up marketing's end of the data governance contract, most of the team would likely need support in terms of training and enablement around data governance. Your company needs to invest in its marketing and marketing ops people in order to implement a good data governance program. What are the benefits for marketing of having effective data governance? Brinker:   It raises the bar for the quality of marketing data. But it also creates a bigger opportunity for having a global data governance infrastructure within a company, making quality data available to all teams and all departments. That creates a data ops environment where there's so much more data available to marketing and to everyone else – data from the sales department, from customer service or customer success, and from other departments. Marketing can feed all that data into customer analytics and customer segmentation, as well as personalization.  What is the role of technology in good data governance? Brinker: That technology would extend beyond martech: most people would probably call it something like data ops, a data layer, or a data stack. That being said, marketing teams should look at this technology like they would any other piece of martech – it's something they need to understand how to use, it needs to play well with other tools in their martech stack, meaning you don't have any data silos. Data governance needs to be baked into how we think about marketing technology, both for vendors who are creating products and certainly for marketing practitioners. So marketers should be considering data governance when they're purchasing martech, and marketing operations would be helping them with an evaluation process that addresses the growing importance of good data governance. To learn more about improving your data governance and overall data quality, reach out to us . You can also hear more insights on martech and data governance at Scott Brinker’s chiefmartec blog .

This blog post was co-produced by writer Chuck Leddy and Kelly Newton , Sojourn Solutions Marketing Automation Consultant (Kelly previously worked for Oracle Eloqua).  The current context First-party cookies are growing in importance because they’re blocked far less often than third-party cookies. It’s difficult for customers to browse the internet without accepting first-party cookies: they identify you as a returning visitor, remember your information, and help brands personalize the user experience on a domain. The big problem with third-party cookies (cookies that track across domains) is that they're increasingly being blocked by applications, by browsers, and by default privacy settings. How marketers collect and use customer data is evolving as privacy regulations/restrictions increase and as customers become more sensitive about how their data is being collected and used.  Apple, Mozilla, and Google have all announced the end of life for third party cookies. First-party data therefore becomes absolutely critical for how marketers build trusting relationships with customers. When marketers get better data, they can build better models and more personalization, and that equals better customer engagement, leading to more and better data (it’s a virtuous cycle).  Impact of crumbing cookies on Eloqua users  Many Eloqua updates are coming with their 22A release starting in February (2022), especially as it relates to Google’s Chrome 85 browser. Google made privacy changes as to how its browser handles referrers . The referrer provides information to Eloqua about a visitor’s browsing data and current location on a website. Google is changing their default behavior to be more restrictive as to what information gets shared via the referrer. As a result, Eloqua tracking will only capture the domain name and not the full path of the URL. You can’t track across domains (i.e., third-party cookies) by default. None of that third-party data would be available for segmentation, lead scoring, or reporting. First-party data around a specific customer action is now the most valuable data there is. Did the customer fill out that form on your brand website? Did they register for and/or attend your webinar? Did they purchase something or abandon their cart? That information helps marketers understand and engage with customers, which is why enabling the tracking of first-party cookies in Eloqua is so important. Oracle Eloqua Asynchronous Tracking Scripts Eloqua Asynchronous Tracking Scripts enable you to track visits to your website seamlessly without affecting the page load time for the visitor. So when customers visit a website that has those scripts deployed, cookies are placed in the browser and those cookies help identify a website visitor, according to their specific browser and computer combination in the event they return to the domain. Those cookies remain in the browser until the visitor deletes them manually or for 13 months.  To implement tracking for first-party cookies, Eloqua users would simply open an SR (service request) with Oracle cloud support. If you're using a secured microsite for your tracking domain, having a secure SSL certificate for your microsite on the tracking domain is strongly recommended. As part of your SR, you would provide all of the relevant information: your instance name, the tracking domain you want to use, and whether it’s secure or not.  When you're doing one domain, it's always easier to do all of them.  Strict Mode Tracking in Eloqua  Strict mode tracking enables you to not track visitors from countries based on their IP address, unless they've opted into tracking. This tool helps marketers remain compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR. It’s strongly recommended for any company with an international footprint. There are three levels with strict mode tracking scripts: (1) a default that would track all visitors; (2) opt-in for visitors by country – they’d get a pop-up permission request on the bottom of the screen that helps marketers comply with GDPR; and (3) seeking opt-in for all visitors, so nobody gets tracked unless they've opted in via a permissions request. That last one is commonly used by hospitals and for websites that deal in personal private information (likely covered by HIPAA). You don't want to collect any information that you shouldn't have unless it's relevant for you. How would an Eloqua user enable strict mode tracking? Users would open a service request with Oracle support and would get a link that essentially gives code samples for what they can plug in. Your internal IT team would then take those script samples and plug them in where it's relevant.  5 tips for optimizing marketing with Eloqua  1. Understand your requirements for the customer experience/CX across your entire organization. Doing so helps you figure out what types of data you’ll need in order to deliver those experiences. Different areas of your business will require more or less data in order to meet their CX goals.  2. Bring all your data together so that it can be validated and cleaned, standardized, and compiled to make it available to everyone who needs it, in the form and scope they need it. You need the right level of data governance  for the right users of the data, making sure that security settings around your data are aligned internally and externally.  3. Plan alternative approaches to collecting relevant data that you may soon no longer have easy access to. That might mean adjusting your mindset around having only the data you really need and then deciding how you want to prioritize its collection and use. The tough and essential question for marketers is ‘how do we get the data we need and how do we get users to opt in?’ There's so much to be gained from that conversation, and ensuring that customers have a good feeling about their relationship with your brand.  4. Take every opportunity to communicate transparently with potential leads and share real value with them. Work to understand why a consumer is coming to you in the first place, then use that understanding to nurture the relationship rather than using it in a transactional way. No customer wants to give you their friends’ email addresses when they barely know you, let alone trust you. Slow down and build those trusting relationships, providing value before you ask for something. 5. Develop the ongoing capacity to test and measure marketing impact. When it comes to marketing, it's never ‘set it and forget it.’ You need to keep tweaking and learning. With Eloqua, you can automate processes and utilize tools to create a network of data coming in, being cleansed, standardized and sorted appropriately. Then you can create campaign canvases that nurture contacts based on decision steps that ask, ‘is the customer engaged? How did they engage with our last email or our forms?’ You can automate responses based on so many specific customer behaviors.  For more information about implementing and using Eloqua’s first-party cookie tracking, reach out  to us.

Data governance defines the rules of the road for data, making it clear who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, using what methods, according to the Data Governance Institute . Without effective data governance, there’s no possibility of digital transformation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, personalization, or data-driven marketing outreach. For data to fuel all of these strategic efforts, good data governance is an essential foundation, one ensuring that data is high quality, readily available, and relevant for its intended use.  Garbage in, garbage out In the absence of good data governance, you have chaos, risks, and massive limitations around using your data. When data quality is poor, your organization has the never-ending headache of “garbage in, garbage out” when it comes to generating value (and revenues) from your data. Poor data governance leads to time wasted on boring, manual data cleanup tasks that can have your talent quitting in boredom and frustration. Poor data governance and poor data quality have real and multiple consequences. A 2019 McKinsey survey  found that poor data quality at the average company can “cost” employees about one-third of their working time (manual data cleanup is among the most monotonous tasks imaginable). At organizations with good data governance, on the other hand, cleaning up and/or fixing poor data costs employees only 5% of their time, according to that same McKinsey survey.  And while poor data governance can limit an organization’s ability to leverage its data for multiple uses, it can also trigger regulatory fines and penalties for the organization as more data privacy rules such as GDPR emerge. So it’s clear that a lack of good data governance can cost your organization in both direct and indirect ways, which begs the question: How should an organization go about creating good data governance that results in good data quality, enabling it to fully leverage data for multiple uses?  5 steps for improving data governance A 2020 report from McKinsey, Designing Data Governance That Delivers Value , offers the following steps for driving excellence in data governance and delivering quality data that generates ROI/revenue. 1. Get buy-in from your senior leadership team for improving data governance. As with any big, important effort in business, you must begin by building a solid business case for change, which means identifying the need, explaining the costs of doing nothing, proposing a solution, and then making a plan of action to implement (and measure) the solution. Since improving data governance will impact multiple business functions and will require large investments of time, effort, people, and budget, you’ll need leadership’s approval and commitment to make it all happen. As McKinsey explains, once you’ve identified and scoped out the problems/costs caused by poor data quality within your particular organization (we detailed some of them above), “the next step is to form a data-governance council within senior management (including, in some organizations, leaders from the C-suite itself), which will steer the governance strategy toward business needs and oversee and approve initiatives to drive improvement.” Data governance improvement needs to start with support from the top. 2. Link improved data governance efforts to ongoing digital transformation efforts. As detailed above, good data governance is foundational for ensuring that your data is high quality, relevant, and ready for use. Thus, data governance improvement will impact all ongoing initiatives involving data and digital transformation. As such, you should work to integrate your data governance improvement efforts with every ongoing initiative that involves data, because the two are inextricably linked. As McKinsey explains it: “Rather than governance running on its own, such initiatives [to link data governance improvement with other data-related initiatives] shift data responsibility and governance toward product teams, integrating it at the point of production and consumption.” Such integration simplifies both leadership buy-in and ongoing execution of enhanced data governance. 3. Start with the “low hanging fruit” and don’t try to “boil the ocean.” Apologies upfront for the business cliches. The basic idea here is to prioritize and focus your data improvement efforts on your most important data first, instead of trying to pull in and improve all your data and data governance at once. A larger project scope means slower progress, so start smaller. “To succeed,” according to McKinsey, “data assets should be prioritized in two ways: by domains and by data within each domain. The data council . . . should prioritize domains based on transformational efforts, regulatory requirements, and other inputs to create a road map for domain deployment. Then the organization should rapidly roll out priority domains, starting with two to three initially, and aim for each domain to be fully functional in several months.” That’s smart planning. And if you need external expertise in developing and/or executing on such plans, reach outside for help (we’re right here  waiting for you). 4. Apply the “right” level of data governance to the right data, because one size of data governance does not fit all data sets. Not all data is created equally, and some data sets are more sensitive than others (such as a customer’s personal/financial information). You should apply the appropriate level of data governance for the multiple types of data you need to protect.  As McKinsey says: “the design of [data governance] programs should align with the level of regulation organizations uniquely face and the level of their data complexity. Organizations with multiple, distinct businesses spanning many geographies have more complex needs than those with a business in only one geography; similarly, a high pace of data change or low level of technology automation increases data complexity.” Build your data governance to address your specific risks and needs around your multiple data sets. 5. Iterate your way to data governance success. Take lessons learned in the early stages of your “prioritized” implementation (see step 3 above) and apply those lessons to later stages. You will try things that fail and some that succeed. Scale up successful ideas and drop the failed ones. McKinsey offers this wisdom: “the key is to adopt iterative principles in day-to-day [data] governance. For example, if there is a backlog of known data-quality issues, review and reprioritize them daily, working to maximize the benefit to the business as priorities shift.” As we’re fond of saying here at Sojourn, “improvement is never, ever done,’” but must instead be treated as an ongoing, daily practice. To learn more about improving your data governance and implementing the 5 steps listed above, reach out to us .

Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending martech, people, and processes to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. No martech stack is ever “set and forget,” but must instead be continually maintained and updated to keep pace with strategic needs and new possibilities. Your people need to adapt too. How does MOPS help maintain and update a martech stack and the people using that stack? “It is essential for marketing organizations, led by MOPS, to track and analyze the innovation in technology trends with business goals and the technology roadmap  for context and to maintain an ongoing conversation with IT partners about what’s necessary today and what’s emerging for the future.” says Sojourn’s 2021 Marketing Operations Report .  Future-proofing your STACK 1. Put martech governance structures in place . Sojourn’s Global Head of Marketing Strategy & Operations, Kristin Connell, recommends the following steps: Document all martech , including who purchased it, who owns it, who administers it, who supports it, who uses it, along with vendor contact details (sales, support, customer success). “This documentation can be a spreadsheet that gets updated as martech is added, updated, and eliminated,” says Connell, “in order to prevent having to track all relevant info down when there’s a problem.” Create an internal tiered support structure . For example: (1) users might escalate to an internal admin, (2) your internal admins might escalate to the martech owner, (3) and the owner manages escalations to the vendor. “This clear support structure provides you with documented feedback loops on any technical issues within your martech ecosystem,” explains Connell. “Solicit feedback from your teams regarding the martech  to ensure it continues to meet their requirements, address any skill development needs, and request input re: new martech that’s come to their attention,” says Connell. Schedule annual martech reviews of your full stack , “which should include inputs from all relevant stakeholders and include benchmark performance results, new martech recommendations, and validation that your tools align to upcoming strategy and business needs,” says Connell. If, for example, you have an existing martech tool for a specific use case, but the tool doesn’t share data and integrate well with your other tools, your annual stack review should flag the problem. If a new martech tool becomes available that addresses the same use case equally well/better, and also integrates well with your other tools, you’d likely want to trade out the old tool for the new tool with superior integration capability. 2. Set up a small “center of excellence”/COE team within your martech governance team.  There are now over 11,000 martech vendors , making it a challenge to keep pace with emerging marketing technologies. You need to be scouting for what tools are emerging, even before you test whether the emerging martech might address your specific needs.  “A mature MOPS and CoE team can provide huge value here in creating a “lab” environment for identifying and testing martech in order to prove/disprove potential value within your martech stack,” says Connell. Obviously, the members of your CoE team should be some of your most tech-savvy, forward-looking, and enthusiastic IT and MOPS professionals. You should also have at least one “strategy-minded” person on the CoE team, because emerging technologies can sometimes open up new strategic opportunities you hadn’t even considered before.  Upskilling your PEOPLE  “Underutilization of technology is often traced to insufficient headcount, inadequate training or poor alignment between marketing and technology teams,” says Sojourn’s 2021 Marketing Operations Report . “Tech is only effective when the people using it have the knowledge, capacity and training to use it. Organizations with MOPS groups are nearly 2X more likely to strongly agree that “[they] have the right skills in place to execute our growth strategy.” If your people aren’t ready to adapt to change, even rapid change, your martech stack isn’t ready either. So how can you ensure that your people are as adaptable and future-proof as your technology? 3. Look to hire marketing talent who understand the importance of keeping pace with technology . MOPS professionals are so valuable because they look at marketing from a “big picture” perspective that embraces strategy, technology, processes, and the human/creative element. They’re people conversant in many areas of technology, which means they can ask the right questions, do the hard work of researching/learning, and collaborate with subject-matter experts in order to find the right answers. “When you hire for marketing operations roles,” says Connell, “always look for candidates who display curiosity and an open-mind around technology.”  4. Support your people when adopting new martech.  Obviously, this means initial training in the tool but also requires support all along the adoption journey. Tech-savvy early adopters, for example, can be used as coaches for slower adopters. It also helps to have managers check in with users about their adoption efforts and provide a more personalized level of support. Adoption and utilization of martech requires constant communication: what you might consider “too much communication” might be viewed as too little for many users, especially later adopters. 5. Support ongoing professional development.  Formalize support for professional development. For instance, have your managers use professional development around technology as a factor in employee evaluations. When employees know something is a focus of their manager, and when it’s tied to salary, bonuses, and promotions, they tend to take it more seriously. Make a lump sum of money available to each employee, which they can use to upgrade their technological skills – a kind of personal development budget. The company can also set up training programs and incentivize certifications around technology, creating a positive climate for learning and growth. The idea is to set up various incentives and support structures that catalyze a culture of learning within your organization.  “A mature MOPS function helps support the change management that exists in/around martech, and other areas of marketing. The organizations that are best positioned to manage change will have a clear competitive advantage ,” says Connell. When you hire and develop curious people who are willing to adapt/change, you also drive the adoption and optimization of your martech stack.  For more information about MOPS and martech, and how you can build your MOPS maturity in order to improve marketing outcomes, reach out to us . First three posts in this 4-post series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Developing a martech strategy (post 1 of 4) MOPS and optimizing martech: Getting martech integrations right (post 2 of 4) MOPS and optimizing martech: Driving the adoption, utilization, and optimization of martech (post 3 of 4)

Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending martech, people, and processes to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. “Eighty-seven percent of businesses with a MOPS function reported that marketing technology utilization is a strength of the organization.  As a partner to the IT/Tech teams, the operations group optimizes and informs key steps along the way, ensuring realization of the investment and reduction of risk,” says our 2021 Marketing Operations Report . Driving the adoption, use, and optimization of martech is important, says Sojourn Solution’s Head of Marketing Kristin Connell, “because only martech that is successfully leveraged will make a measurable difference on marketing outcomes.” If the people responsible for using a martech tool are not onboard and don’t pick up the tool, your strategic intentions in purchasing the martech will be thwarted and your expected outcomes will not be achieved.  The role of MOPS is to drive marketing improvement, but there will be nothing to optimize when no lessons are being learned because martech tools get orphaned, except that you need to improve how to build adoption into your martech strategy. Put simply, “adoption is a critical success factor and should be included in the implementation plan for any martech tool,” says Connell. If people don’t use it, martech is meaningless. Common adoption challenges: Change is hard Change is always a challenge for people, and adopting new martech requires setting up a change management process. At its root, hesitancy around martech adoptions are typically caused by people preferring inertia and the status quo to the energy it takes to change. MOPS professionals, and everyone else involved in the adoption/change management process, should listen for red flags and feedback like “we’ve never done it this way before,” “I don’t know how to use the new tool,” or “are you sure this new tool is going to work for us?” It’s essential not to ignore those who challenge the change or hesitate about it, because these non-adopters can influence others and disrupt adoption. They can also be your best teachers... Instead of asking non-adopters to ‘calm down and carry on,” integrate their feedback into an adoption plan that addresses ongoing feedback. If people don’t know why you’ve brought in new martech, you need to redouble efforts to explain why. If people complain that the tool is hard to learn and use, then redouble efforts around training and coaching. “Your martech adoption plan should address how the new martech fits into your existing playbooks and processes,” says Connell, “including whether new resources are required to help deliver on its value.” The crucial role of MOPS in driving adoption The strength of MOPS is having that “big picture” focus and being able to plan, structure, and execute solutions across the organization – and that includes solving for martech adoption. As with so many projects, it helps to start small, gain small wins, and scale up success. “For example,” says Connell, “if you’re implementing a martech tool for your sales team to accelerate pipeline, start by teaming up with the handful of tech-savvy salespeople who are usually seeking innovative new ways to do their work, the folks who are open to new ideas and eager to be a part of a project to help them improve sales results.”  MOPS can help by ensuring that you include a feedback loop and relevant KPIs/success factors into the pilot, as well as regular communication and formal documentation , so you and your pilot team know what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve the experience for a later, larger implementation to the entire team.  Obviously, training people on the new martech will be important, as will offering people ways to learn that address their different learning styles and preferences. “Some people might prefer learning with an on-demand video tutorial,” says Connell, “while others might want a traditional classroom setting or maybe hands-on exercises.” Ask people for feedback on how they learn best and adapt to that feedback.  Communication, even overcommunication, is a key for driving martech adoption and utilization. “Setting up feedback loops is key,” says Connell, “and could include live interviews with stakeholders and/or online surveys or listening sessions about ongoing challenges and concerns." Just as martech itself should never fall under a “set it and forget it” approach, neither should adoption and use. Improvement is never done. "Consider introducing a level of competition among your users around identifying and sharing new tips/tricks, or earning martech-related certifications, or even a quarterly ‘ideas’ exchange meeting or online platform.” A final (realistic) word on adoption It’s hard for MOPS and everyone else to admit an inconvenient truth – that sometimes people don’t adopt a martech tool because either: (1) the tool itself stinks or (2) the user stinks. As Kenny Rogers sang “The Gambler,” you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away, know when to run. “Regrettably,” says Connell, “the martech tool you purchased may turn out not to be the best fit for your organization. And some non-adopting team members may turn out not to be the best fit for their role in your team. Both of these possible scenarios present hard calls to make, but a mature MOPS leader recognizes the warning signs, investigates them, and addresses them appropriately to help the organization stay on track.” If you’ve tried all the recommendations described above, and you’re still not driving adoption and realizing the value of martech, you’ll need to make some tough decisions about the martech tool and/or your team. To learn more about driving martech adoption in order  to improve (and prove) your marketing effectiveness, reach out to us here . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Future-proofing your tech stack and your talent (post 4 of 4)

Marketing operations (MOPS) is an evolving, multidisciplinary, and multifaceted function with a single goal: to improve and prove the value of marketing. MOPS is about blending people, processes, and martech to drive that single goal. In this four-part blog series, called “MOPS and Optimizing Martech,” we’ll explore the role of MOPS in: (1) developing a martech strategy, (2) integrating new martech into an existing stack, (3) driving martech adoption by enabling people/users, and (4) maintaining and adapting a martech stack, with a focus on scaling and future-proofing said stack. In this post #1, we speak with Kristin Connell, Head of Marketing at Sojourn Solutions, about developing a martech strategy and how that strategy becomes a foundation for effectively selecting, implementing, and integrating all martech. As our 2021 Marketing Operations Report  explains, MOPS maturity is a key to realizing the full value of martech, from strategy to integration to adoption and beyond: “MOPS optimizes the relationship between marketing and technology,” says the Report. “It’s no accident that the stronger a company’s MOPS function, the better they do (1) deciding on the right technology and (2) integrating that tech into their organization, meaning, not just systems integration but also having the right people with the right training so that the technology actually delivers value.” Martech strategy: A GPS & North Star Martech optimization is a bit like chasing the sun. You might be able to see the destination, but reaching it is a never-ending journey. No matter how far you’ve come in your MOPS maturity or your martech stack, you can always improve marketing effectiveness (and your martech). Just because the journey is never done doesn’t mean you shouldn’t embark on it. You need to, actually. As with every worthwhile journey in life, you should begin with the destination in mind (spoiler alert: that destination is a place called “better”). You should also have a well-considered plan, along with a good roadmap for getting to “better.” Will you need to modify your plan and your roadmap along the way? Yes and yes, but that’s also an inevitable part of the journey. Having all of your marketers running in different directions chasing after the latest martech isn’t a plan or a roadmap: it’s chaos. Sojourn’s Connell explains that “investing in martech without a martech strategy already in place is like playing a game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey.’ Yes, blindfolded and dizzy marketers might occasionally get lucky and hit the donkey’s tail – even a broken clock is correct twice a day – but more likely than not they’ll miss the target, and those misses will be incredibly costly.” How to develop your martech strategy Don’t go out and buy “cool” martech because other marketers are buying it or because a vendor salesperson promises you eternal joy and sunshine. Strategy is important because resources of time, people, and money are limited – you can’t aim at everything and expect to succeed. Developing a martech strategy begins with choices and priorities based first on a clear understanding of your customers, their journey/touchpoints, and how you seek to address their needs with the resources you have.  “A martech strategy should optimize your customer experience, help empower your employee experience, and positively impact pipeline growth and revenue,” says Connell. “A martech strategy gives you a baseline to determine what’s working, what’s not, and the ability to pivot as necessary to improve your results.” It’s a needed compass and roadmap.  Good martech strategies are data-driven, with MOPS typically playing a significant role. Developing a good strategy is about asking a series of foundational questions, including: where do our customers spend their time, and if largely online, what channels/sites/communities do they frequent? With what devices? How do they prefer to engage with us? What does that engagement look like across their buying experience? Can we measure buying intent via signals we collect from our customer interactions?  “You need to drive your martech strategy with relevant data insights about your customers,” says Connell, “and these insights will help guide and inform what type of martech you need, with what functionality, as well as helping you understand what people with what skills/training you need in order to build and maintain a successful martech stack.” MOPS: Structuring an approach to strategy-building It’s not enough to ask and answer the basic strategic questions described above. You need a structure and a process in place to drive the ongoing development of martech strategy. Strategy can never be ad hoc or  “set and forget” because (again) you’re chasing the sun, trying to reach “better” every day, every month, every quarter.  “Depending on the size of your MOPS and marketing organization,” says Connell, "you should have a documented, structured approach that includes cross-functional governance for all martech investments. You should set up a process that allows anyone to submit a request and make a business case for new martech.”  A cross-functional team (including members from MOPS, IT, and business units) should be defined to review these ongoing martech requests, obviously considering relevant criteria like fit into the customer journey, available resources to implement, use, and manage the requested martech, budget-related considerations, and other business priorities that are part of your martech strategy. If the martech review team approves the request, they can then help determine next steps to work with martech vendors and internal stakeholders to onboard the martech smoothly.  “As part of any request for new martech,” says Connell, “the primary use cases for the martech should be identified, clearly described, and aligned with your martech strategy and desired business outcomes. In my experience, the best way to narrow down any martech decision is to identify and explain which martech tool best addresses these use cases. You obviously have to consider costs, support, and other factors, but none of those matter at all if the tool itself doesn’t meet your primary use cases.” A final word on the role of MOPS MOPS is simply crucial to developing and carrying out any successful martech strategy, and to enabling martech tools to fully realize their anticipated value. MOPS itself, and MOPS leaders in particular, have acumen and experience looking at the bigger strategic picture when it comes to martech, moving far beyond any individual martech request to guide decision-making that creates an outstanding customer experience and the greatest impact on pipeline and revenue.  When this strategic focus is lacking, when martech stacks are built in an ad hoc way and bolted on like some Frankenstein monster,  “it leads to wasted resources, unrealized value, and team members becoming frustrated, burned-out, and even leaving a company,” says Connell. It might seem like the costs of doing this important, upfront strategic work are high, but the costs of NOT doing it are absolutely devastating for any marketing organization. Buying martech without a strategic focus, one typically driven by MOPS, is marketing malpractice at its wasteful worst. To learn more about how to develop a martech strategy to improve (and prove) your marketing effectiveness, reach out to us here . Next post in this series:  MOPS and optimizing martech: Getting martech integrations right (post 2 of 4)