A Model to Drive Executive Insight from Department Metrics
Most of us in B2B marketing have a plethora of metrics at our disposal. Typically these metrics are aligned to departments such as web marketing, customer support, field marketing and corporate marketing. The challenge many companies are facing is that while these metrics, individually, are powerful tools for their respective departments, they lack organizational wide relevance. Our CMO’s cannot adjust well and or predict future growth within the context of website “stickyness” or email click thru rates. While these department metrics are key to operational performance, the challenge in front of us in Marketing Operations is to lend macro level relevance and business context to their meaning.
In thinking this thru, my belief is that we must first approach this from a business model standpoint. To this end, we know two things; ALL businesses have a customer engagement lifecycle and ALL businesses are changing. With these two things in mind, we might consider a macro model based on these two elements.
Element A: Customer Engagement Lifecycle Indices
Definition: Four key Indices which are based on a number of “children” department level metrics. Each index represents a key stage in Customer Engagement.
Element B: Business Logic (Metric Weighting)
Definition: A layer between department metrics and Customer Engagement Indices which allows for configuration of “weighting” to specific “children” metrics.
The Pyramid Visual
With these two elements in hand, we are now ready to pull it all together into an Executive view. One visual which I find useful is that of a pyramid. The bottom layer of the pyramid represents the department metrics, the middle layer represents customer engagement indices and the top layer often represents revenue or brand equity. This top layer is what we can regress with the indices in order to test the correlative effect of an index on the future value of say revenue or brand equity (more to come on that topic in a future blog post).
Finally, we add color to represent the attainment of success within BOTH department metrics as well as engagement indices. Remember that index achievement is simply a function of the weighted achievement of its “children” metrics.
It is helpful to use a standard, for example, color code based on quartiles of achievement:
0-25% of Goal – RED
26 – 50% of Goal – ORANGE
51 – 75% of Goal – YELLOW
76+ of Goal – GREEN
Below is a sample visual of the finished product (non Pyramid Visual for sample).
Quick Executive Analysis of the above sample may conclude:
1) “Our biggest challenge is maintaining relevance. This stems from poor data and relevant content assets. Further investment in data quality and content creation are a top priority.”
2) “As a result of our relevance challenges, we are receiving poor SEO Visibility and therefore our Inbound Marketing goals are at risk.”
3) “Once we get customers in our pipeline, we are very efficient. Therefore our sales enablement and supporting sales processes seem strong.”
4) “Generally customers like our product, they adopt it and are often referable. This however does not seem to be equating well to sentiment which may mean a broken social media channel.”
5) “All in all, regression analysis has proven that relevance is key to maintaining brand equity. As such, currently brand equity is at risk of collapse if the relevance problem is not solved.”
I hope you find this model simple to use and flexible to meet your organizational needs. As always, please provide feedback with constructive criticism and/or successes you have had implementing within your organization.
Ryan
(ryanrjkelly@live.com)
