Design-thinking a marketing overhaul

Digital has changed everything, especially in marketing. But if you're selling complex services to senior executives, and you don't have budget for Tiger Woods, your digital strategy is likely not obvious. Many default to focusing on PR, hospitality, and a bit of "spray and pray" brand communications - yes, online. Which typically makes marketing lose the big table's seat.

Despite the promise of digital business reimagination, very few radically reframe the question of what marketing is, or is supposed to do. Similarly, for all the disruption talk and some notable exceptions such as GE's Comstock, there is little evidence of radical questioning of existing CxO's job roles. As I wrote earlier - everyone seems busy disrupting someone else's job, not their own.

As I took over an underinvested marketing function in 2013, in a company in the midst of a significant evolution, I had little choice. Necessity is mother of invention, and I got lucky. Here's what I found.

Reframe the question

First, I did try and change the question from "how do we get known more, and generate more pipeline" to “how might we create a frictionless customer experience, end to end, from reputation to revenue?”. In the era of digital, this would lead us to think about how to to progressively reduce the involvement of sales people from as much of the process as possible, replacing them with more scalable (and more automatable) marketing resources. I had probably read too much design thinking and digital strategy mumbo-jumbo - so I was high enough to try their predicaments out.

But our resources didn't match the company's growth ambition and its complexity, so whatever grand strategy we could have, we knew it would have to pass the efficiency and scalability test. As a result, the ancillary question became – “how might we create an operating model for the marketing function that optimizes the effectiveness of available resources”. It almost sounded like an operations job - and it actually saved us from a slow descent into corporate oblivion.

Explore the tenets of customer journeys

The operating model needs to closely map against the customer experience – from awareness creation to hand over to a sales person. What I found most useful has been to explore the customer journey, one persona (not just role) at the time, for instance “large buyer project leader getting smart about solutions” vs “small buyer needing quick project job” vs “institutional buyer + custom job”. By doing that exercise, one zooms in on the touch points that are useful for those personas, and can prioritize accordingly. That’s where design thinking is particularly helpful.

What most marketers focus on is the interaction between marketing and sales e.g. the handoff between marketing and sales can be optimized now that marketing automation (e.g Marketo) can handshake properly with CRM (e.g. Salesforce.com) as long as the data structures are set up consistently across the two. 

But I do think that’s a miss – there’s a lot more that marketing could do to make the model more scalable and effective, and also to support innovative offerings in line with a strategic pivot (given that most in the sales force and solution architects take some time before becoming conversant on radically new things). 

Deliver against the customer experience - at scale

To be effective at scale, the operating model must be deliberately engineered end to end, from front office (marcomms, which is the typical forte of marketing leaders, but also e.g. inside sales or tele nurture) to the middle (commercial operations, solution architects) to potentially the back office (solution engineering, potentially finance). For instance:

1. an important decision was the surgical choice of buying centers and target accounts, taken in concert with the sales and operations leaders – which effectively shrank the target audience and allowed us to be more effective
2. solution architects’ knowledge management is quite useful to create research and thought leadership for the front end – but the process must be designed properly
3. much customer intel gleaned from the commercial operations’ sales-support function can be combined with marketing intelligence to provide non-trivial insights

A lot of digital, yes, but also a lot of classic lean principles that forced us to reach deep inside our organization as well as outside.

Some of the results

• The creation of a proper “insight factory” and a research institute to make a dent into buying centers that resist promotional messaging. By tried to be helpful because we realized that marketing sells insight, and that executives pay with their time.
• We used this in concert with a pretty radical shift to targeted digital media (programmatic buying, Linkedin etc.) that allowed us to hyper target with very relevant information; and a radical strengthening of a website that now caters differently to both “information seekers” as well as “RFP scouts”
• The creation of an “account intelligence dashboard” that provides consolidated “heat map” information for the most important targets accounts – combining data from the website, social media sources, and CRM among others.

This is an example of what we call Lean Digital, a more cost effective use of digital technologies that uses design thinking to identify the real customer experience levers, and uses lean principles to structure interventions leveraging the organization end to end.

What about the RoMI?

In this case – starting with a fairly rudimentary marketing organization (traditional mix of events and PR) - we were able to boost awareness level manifold in our target audiences. Ditto for the pipeline generated by marketing.

Most importantly, marketing played a leading role in propelling the firm forward during our strategic pivot towards digital enabled innovation, because sales and solution architects were now pulled into the right type of conversations by prospects exposed to our message well beyond the superficial slogans. There was no way back.

And all of this with a marketing budget that makes us often outspent up to 15-to-1.

Clearly, there are still many things in progress, and if I were to go back I would do certain things differently (for instance, use design thinking earlier to get front line people embrace content based selling more, and get more brutal about names "not to be contacted" in CRM). But on balance, this was a good run.

In many respects, that's because it wasn't a marketing job. Or is that what a marketing job should be today? That would indeed be the ultimate reframing of the question.