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Happy New Year and welcome to the latest edition of Percassityperspectives, our bulletin containing industry updates, articles and news about what we’re up to at Percassity. 2010 will hopefully see the back of the credit crunch and resulting recessionary forces that have been gripping us for so long. A return to growth represents the opportunity to invest in marketing capabilities utilising the latest thinking in marketing technologies and techniques.
We’re looking forward to helping our clients in these endeavours and would like to hear about your experiences too. Let us know how you’re getting on, together with comments on Percassityperspectives, by emailing perspectives@percassity.com.
Yours sincerely,
Percassity Marketing Data Solutions
News Round-up
Next generation of CMOs to come from customer intelligence discipline
Announcing new research based on a survey of 300 senior marketers, Forrester Research analyst David Frankland has asserted that the next generation of chief marketing officers needs to come from the customer intelligence discipline in order for marketing departments to better leverage the data they have about their customers.
Amongst the headline findings of the report, The Intelligent Approach To Customer Intelligence, are that only one in four organisations are measuring the value of customer intelligence, but those that do see significant benefits. “There are a limited number of companies that have a strategic, integrated approach to customer intelligence. In fact in the published report, we point out that only 12% of the 301 companies that we surveyed are operating at a level which we call Strategic Intelligence,” says Frankland.
Writing in the Forrester Blog For Customer Intelligence Professionals, Frankland states that, “Customer Intelligence is evolving from a tactical and functional role to the future command center for businesses.” Advanced firms are using Customer Intelligence to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction, concludes the report, together with increasing revenue, profitability and customer value.
In separate research released earlier in 2009, Forrester have at last reviewed the UK database marketing service providers market. International marketers and UK companies seeking information on local suppliers and US-based MSPs contemplating possible acquisition targets were the drivers behind conducting the research. The Forrester Wave UK Database Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2009 report assessed each company on 77 criteria, giving them a score from a five-point scale for each.
Google’s plans for 2010
Nick Platten, SEO That Works
2010 is set to be another year of change for Google in how it will influence what we see and do online. The explosive growth in social media is forcing Google to move as fast as it can to infiltrate as much of this new frontier as possible in order to be able to provide the latest, most up-to-date information possible.
This required Google to update the way it “spiders” the web and then indexes those sites and pages it finds. Its aim is to be able to provide search results in “real time”, meaning that it has found and indexed the very latest content, categorised and ranked it as it has been published. This is no small undertaking, but one that Google has already started to implement.
Why is this important to marketers? The reason is that old, static, “once-was-at-the-top-of-Google” websites will just get buried by all the new content being published and forgotten by Google. In the absence of new, relevant content being added to websites and a continuing stream of web “conversations” going on, appearing on page one of Google’s search results will be out of the question.
So the choice is either to take action and ride this new wave of changes or sit back and hope that current websites and old promotional tactics keep on working. This means more frequently refreshed website content, greater use of social media updates to drive traffic and greater use of “off-site” content.
Rise of the chief customer officer
The growing role of the chief customer officer has been highlighted by recent research undertaken by technology market research specialists Vanson Bourne, on behalf of SPSS the analytics software developer. The survey of 100 senior marketing professionals across a range of industries found that just over half of the organisations interviewed already have a chief customer officer whose main function is to focus on customer acquisition, retention and service.
“By definition, a CCO offers in-depth customer insight to drive customer strategy that feeds the rest of the business,” said Colin Shearer, senior vice-president of strategic analytics at SPSS. Commenting on the results though, Curtis Bingham of the Chief Customer Officer Council questioned the high proportion of respondents whose organisations boasted such a role, saying “In my exhaustive research of CCOs in early 2009, I identified only approximately 250 throughout the world.” Nonetheless, two-thirds of marketers accept that a chief customer officer delivers value to their organisation.
Worryingly for Marketing’s aspiration to be taken seriously as a corporate function, the research also found that the most popular method to make marketing decisions was a ‘mixture of gut feel and proven results’. There’s plenty of scope for improving marketing systems and processes though, with one of the main reasons given as to why greater use isn’t made of predictive software being, “our systems and processes are not built to incorporate such software”.
Opinion
Head in the Clouds?
Charles Eaton-Hennah, Director, Database Marketing Consulting
It sounds like I’m not the only one who notices that everything in the world of IT is now given a ‘Cloud’ label. Check out this YouTube clip as Larry Ellison of Oracle gives his views.
I’ve been around long enough to see Three Lettered Acronyms come and go, and reckon this one is heading towards the peak of its hype cycle. Probably the best known example is SalesForce.com’s SFA (Sales Force Automation) application, but there are a growing number of vendors in the marketing automation space offering solutions too.
I guess the main point is that for our IT cousins, outsourcing functions that would traditionally be run in-house is something of a revolution. But for database marketers usually bereft of internal IT support, outsourcing strategic resources and expertise is nothing new and the revolution is actually evolution. Such is progress.
From the Blog
The second half of a recent post from our companion blog Diary of a Marketing Insight Guy concludes the best practice approach to implementing a CRM solution. (Sign-up to receive regular postings on marketing data strategy, operations and insight.) Read the first part from issue one of Percassityperspectives.
Eleven Steps to kick off your CRM system project
Having established feasibility, undertaken project initiation and established requirements definition, what are the remaining steps you need to consider in order to give your project the best chance of success?
4. RFI/RFP to vendors (and your internal Information Technology group) - you may or may not have an internal IT resource who feel they can deliver a Marketing automation/CRM project. One way to cut through the politics that are usually involved is to ask them to respond to the RFI like the other vendors – and ensure they price internal IT resources realistically!
5. Response evaluation and contract negotiation - allow plenty of time for this stage; there’s nothing like seeing the figures on the table to focus your attention, and the vendor will be looking to safeguard their own commercial position. A successful negotiation will allow both parties to share the risk of failure and success.
A further tip - usually there will be a significant up-front cost for development. A guaranteed contract term will allow the vendor to amortise the development costs over the period of the contract, maybe 36 – 48 months with suitable safeguards.
6. Project Plan and Timeline setting - make this realistic but not too long. You need to be able to keep the momentum going, but conversely it’s not great to forever be announcing delays. Try and structure the project to allow you to celebrate early wins; for example you may not need every single data feed to start gaining value from a single customer view.
7. Detailed Requirements and Data Discovery - if you’ve got a good requirements document this should be a straightforward process, but you should be looking for the vendor to respond to your functional prioritisation, allowing you to make informed choices before agreeing the Statement of Work (SoW).
Allow plenty of vendor engagement time for Data Discovery. You’ve probably lived with this data for a long period of time, but any external consultant or business analyst is starting from scratch, and there will be plenty of wrinkles, exceptions and aggregate values they’ll need to assimilate. You’ll also have to make your own knowledgeable internal data specialists available to the vendor, If you’ve got complete documentation on all internal systems and feeds - congratulations, that’s a first!
8. Development - it’s critical to ensure configuration and customisations adhere to the agreed requirements and specification, without allowing too much scope-creep (constant additions to the original functionality). Non-critical divergences might be added to a subsequent phase of the project but in any case this sort of development should be minimised. Every process or function should be scrutinised to gauge its real priority and whether “out of the box” functionality will suffice –it may well be cheaper to change internal processes. And remember your internal PR – you might conduct regular review and demo sessions with key stakeholders to demonstrate developing functionality, maintain the project profile and build confidence.
9. Implementation and migration - develop your data migration strategy alongside functional development. Ensuring the right data is available in the new system from day one is critical and users will be unforgiving if it is not. Many CRM implementations fail due to data issues, including data quality. Will you migrate all data from legacy systems, take the opportunity for some spring cleaning (it’s hardly worth migrating data you’ll never need) or apply rules and filters? What is the data model of the new system compared to previous ones, will there need to be a mapping process?
10. Training ‘Go-Live’ - don’t overlook training and plan this for well in advance of go-live. Avoid the temptation to just let users loose on a new system and learn it for themselves, but develop a proper training programme, with hands-on usage (even if it’s a late beta version) and plenty of exercises and review sessions – you probably won’t imbed expertise in one 3 or 4hr session. Aim to have training deliverables available (documentation, process guides or screen tutorials). Run post go-live sessions to re-cap key functions and be prepared for intensive user support including questions on general functionality as users start utilising the system.
11. Evaluation and On-going development - conduct reviews to ensure the system is delivering the required functionality. Survey users for their opinion on usability, how much they’re using the system and any key missing functions. Does it make their job easier? Put aside resources to make enhancements post go-live – don’t expect the job to be complete at this stage.
View the complete post on the Diary of a Marketing Insight Guy blog.
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Percassity Developments Percassity goes east
Percassity co-founder Charles Eaton-Hennah has commenced a strategic engagement working with Experian in Hong Kong for a major Financial Services client. Adopting the interim role of Marketing Operations Director at Experian Integrated Marketing, Charles commented, “This is the perfect opportunity to work with one of the world's leading Marketing Services organisations to put into practise some of the key Percassity Solutions philosophies in terms of data driven marketing strategy and marketing effectiveness.”
What Marketing needs from IT
Writing in respected industry journal Database Marketing recently, Percassity Director Simon Daniels outlined his outlined our thoughts on how the Marketing and IT functions can work successfully together. The increasing availability of outsourced solutions means that IT can adopt a role of "enablement", allowing Marketing more discretion and control. Read the full article and let us know what you think!
Events Forthcoming marketing operations and insight themed events and networking opportunities. The Unreasonable Prospect: How Irrationality Guides Buying Behavior webinar 27 Jan 2010.Join behavioral economist Dan Ariely in a live Webinar as he provides a clear, powerful overview of the irrational decision making of prospects and consumers. The next customer relationship revolution: Volunteered Personal Information 28 Jan 2010 The IDM Data Marketing Council investigates how and why Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) is transforming what it takes to succeed in marketing. Additional places available.
Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 1–2 Feb 2010 and Gartner Customer Relationship Management Summit 16-17 March 2009
Gartner’s annual BI and CRM conferences featuring high profile keynote speakers, analyst presentations, case studies and more.
Data Protection Compliance workshop 3-10 Feb 2010
Spend two days with a team of experts from the Direct Marketing Association who will help you to make sure that you are compliant with data protection law.
Technology For Marketing & Advertising 23-24 Feb 2010
Two-day exhibition covering a wide range of topics to do with data, CRM, digital and direct marketing solutions, together with a seminar programme and networking bar.
Email us with details of events you would like to be included in the next issue of Percassity perspectives. Elsewhere on the web... Our pick from the blogosphere and twitterverse. Let us know of anything interesting you've read that we should include next time. If you’re looking for a regular dose of data quality updates, keep an eye on Twitter hashtag #dataquality which features a number of regular high quality contributors. Scott Brinker, writing in his Chief Marketing Technologist blog, drew a fabulous comparison between marketing software and military drone aircraft and what that means for Marketers. Meanwhile, Brian Carroll makes an assertion, with which we can only agree, regarding treating data as a valued asset in his Lead Generation Check List series. And as 2010 gets underway, a couple of prediction pieces from Naylor Gray and Luli Adeyemo make interesting reading. Recruitment
In a new section to Percassity perspectives, we present a selection of situations vacant. Contact us if you have a role you'd like featured. Principal Consultant £65-75k plus benefitsA new Principal Consultant role has been created within the Grocery and FMCG division of this fast growing and hugely successful CRM Consultancy. You'll have experience of working with or for a grocery retailer, have an excellent knowledge of driving business through customer insight and an in depth knowledge of category management. Telecommunications Industry ConsultantProvide input to the UK telecommunications industry strategy in terms of market propositions, solutions and target prioritisation for this blue chip data warehousing and business analytics provider. Email Tristan Heywood at Oakstone. Senior Customer AnalystsSuperb CRM Analytics agency delivering customer loyalty for supermarket retailers is seeking SAS trained data analysts (£35-55K). About Percassity Solutions Co-founded by former Gartner colleagues Simon Daniels and Charles Eaton-Hennah, Percassity Solutions is a marketing data, operations and insight consultancy. We help to: - Enhance and obtain data for campaign activity, and ensure the best possible data quality
- Implement marketing automation systems and campaign execution processes
- Use analytics to optimise marketing activity targeting
- Refine contact strategy to maximise response and reduce disengagement
Read more about how we can help with your marketing data management challenges.
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