What Have You Done for Me Lately?

The third year.

By now, you've gone through two annual performance reviews (good ones, if you've done everything right), and you’re really in the groove. You know the markets, the competition, the product, the organization and you've learned what levers to pull to get things done.

This is your most dangerous time. But within the danger, there is also opportunity, if you recognize and seize it.

Now’s the time to “get out there, try something and learn from it – you’ll make mistakes, but you must learn from each one. The metrics available today allow learning in a real-time manner that was never possible before,” says Sandra Zoratti, Global VP Marketing, Ricoh. “Avoid paralysis and fear about trying a new way.”

The risk is complacency on your part and boredom on the part of the rest of the organization: your team, your peers, and your boss. Let’s take them one at a time.

1. Your team. You've done everything right, weeding out the chaff, selecting new talent and providing everyone with challenging opportunities. But they've now been doing the same thing for two years, and are starting to get restless. The stars (like you) are thinking about their next move and the good performers are falling into a routine. If you’re not careful, you’ll find a team that is quietly becoming dysfunctional.

2. Your peers.  What was once unique is now mundane. The good news is that they've now learned what marketing really is, are asking better questions and starting to develop a marketing mindset to everything they do. But they’re also starting to ask “what have you done for me lately?”

3. Your boss. Your most difficult – or easiest – challenge. His or her world has changed in the last two years – the success you've helped create has both positives and negatives. Of course, your boss is delighted with the results, because that helps with the board. But the board is starting to ask what next? and wondering if s/he can take the company to the next level. S/he is, in turn, wondering the same about you.

Never forget, says Eric Fletcher, CMO, McGlinchey Stafford, that “relationships trump everything – science, metric frameworks – it about connecting relationships and leveraging them. Make sure you have regular, frequent in-depth dialog with the CEO, COO, CFO, the rest of the c-suite and the governing board. Most marketers get into trouble because they are operating out of an island.”

Next: Setting the Agenda

Meaningful Metrics

First Things First discussed the first of five key things the CMO must do well*, getting the marketing mandate right. Allies, Agnostics and Antagonists focused on the second, building meaningful relationships with functional and business leaders. 

The third is agreeing on how to measure success.

Once you've agreed on the marketing mandate and started the process of building meaningful relationships, it is absolutely imperative that you agree on how success will be measured.

Joe Tripodi,  Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer of The Coca-Cola Company, advises CMOs to make the CFO a partner in their leadership teams as they develop marketing budgets and metrics. “Unless you have full transparency on everything going in your budget, you’re going to continue to have this marketing-as-a-black-box philosophy. Once you bring people into the tent and then say, ‘Listen, we have nothing to hide here,’ and jointly determine the metrics for measuring marketing effectiveness, you take marketing out of the little black box”

Says Maureen McGuire, CMO of Bloomberg, “every marketer has had this kind of experience: You want to run an advertising campaign to raise awareness and then everybody’s looking for leads and revenue and you say, well, the metric to measure this is whether or not we actually raised awareness. But people are saying, ‘How many leads did it drive and how come my phone wasn't ringing off the hook?’ One of the most difficult things to convince people of is that you should measure your marketing effort according to the objective you’re setting.”*

John Dragoon, CMO of Houghton Mifflin, says “we've rotated (maybe over-rotated) to marketing metrics – I’m fond of the term ‘the ROI of a handshake.’ No one’s written about the softer things – just because you can’t measure it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.”

So, how do you set meaningful metrics?