How to ‘Sell’ Agile Marketing to Skeptical Leaders

Agile is still relatively new in the marketing world and most marketers working at the team level are pretty jazzed up about this new way of working, but their leaders may not be sold. They either think it’s a process only for the team, or they just haven’t been educated.?

If you want to get buy-in from the top of the corporate ladder, let me share with you some tried and true advice for getting the green light.

Identify Business Problems You Can Solve

Marketing leaders are there to solve business problems at a higher strategic level, so talking to them about the nuts and bolts of agile marketing is not going to get much of a reaction. However, if you can think about the business problems your organization is encountering, you may be able to explain how trying agile marketing can help.

Here are a few common business problems that agile marketing can resolve:

1) Speed-to-Market

Is your competition always coming out with a new product or service before you do? Is your company missing out on market share because of this lag time? Agile marketing allows cross-functional teams to focus on frequent delivery by removing the time needed to engage multiple departments. If your CMO wants to improve speed-to-market, working this way will definitely help.

2) Employee Retention

It’s really, really expensive to hire new employees, so keeping employees happy is an important piece for most CMOs. Hard-working, talented marketers who understand your products and services are invaluable. Yet many marketers don’t even last a year due to burnout and not feeling like they are making a valuable contribution.

Agile marketing has so many benefits for employees, and most marketers that work on an agile marketing team have reported greater job satisfaction. Agile marketing allows the team to work at a sustainable pace indefinitely, making work and life much more manageable and avoiding the burnout syndrome. Additionally, agile marketers are given a lot more empowerment to be innovative and experiment with new ideas, which keeps them engaged and learning, another important piece for employee retention.

3) Customer Satisfaction

Because agile marketing uses an inspect and adapt approach, marketers are able to tweak their marketing early and often to make sure it really resonates with customers. Agile marketing is so focused on customer-centricity that all decisions are made with that in mind, eliminating tasks and processes that only benefit the company—not the customer.

So if your CMO is feeling the pain of dissatisfied or only mildly delighted customers, agile marketing can help shift the team’s focus around the customer. And of course, it’s customers that keep us in business, so why wouldn’t we want to do this?

Don’t Sell Agile Marketing as a Quick Fix

Too many marketers sell agile marketing as a quick fix for all of your business problems, but the transparency around agile will expose a lot of your company’s problems that may have been lurking under the covers for years.

Agile marketing is a commitment, both from leaders and team members. The process of agile marketing will only get you a few surface-level benefits—companies that really benefit are ones where the leaders are informed that it will take strong leadership and commitment on their part to change culture. That’s right—agile marketing requires a lot of culture change to be able to work differently.

Once you’ve piqued your CMO’s interest, work with her to identify cultural barriers that may be present that would get in the way of agility and what support you need from her. Some things to address are:

• Very detailed planning for long periods of time rather than flexible planning.
• Stringent approval processes versus the team’s ability to quickly change gears.
• Rewarding individual contributions over team contributions.
• Working in silos.

Ask for an Experiment Rather than a Total Transformation

Learning how much is involved with agile marketing can be overwhelming to any leader, so don’t try to boil the ocean. Ask for support in a small way that you can measure. I recommend asking for a pilot team that is fully cross-functional and works very differently from the rest of the organization.?

This team should be dedicated to each other and not have any work from other parts of the company. You can use this as a benchmark against the pain points and see how this team works compared to the traditional way.

By addressing the business pain points to your leader, asking for support to make positive changes and taking baby steps through experimentation, you can ‘sell’ agile marketing to your leaders in a way that benefits them, is clear on what’s expected of them and is low risk because you are starting with a small experiment.

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