“Pet insurance is a business that has a huge amount of white space,” said Sabrina Sebastian. “There was a significant opportunity to expand awareness and penetration rate of pet insurance which is less than 3% for all pet parents today.”

In 2019, global insurance provider MetLife had acquired PetFirst, a pet health insurance company founded in 2004. After the acquisition, Sebastian, PetFirst’s former CMO, and now MetLife’s AVP for Pet Insurance Marketing, was tasked with growing the MetLife Pet Insurance division.

In 2021, there were approximately 135.2 million dogs and cats owned by Americans, with about 3.9 million U.S. pets (mostly dogs and cats) insured that year. As a growth-focused business, MetLife saw a significant opportunity to expand the pet insurance division. They’d been using a traditional marketing workflow with modular teams that were highly skilled in marketing. 

Said Sebastian, “If we needed to tap into other teams, we would do that, but it was a really traditional way of working. We discovered that we also needed to rely heavily on our tech partners, our data partners, and our business partners.” 

This need is what drove the shift from a traditional marketing approach to an agile marketing framework.

Bringing cross-functional teams together

Agile marketing, which has its roots in software development, is a way for marketers to respond rapidly to the changing needs of customers and drive successful business outcomes. It’s done through a team-based approach using collaborative practices. This new way of working empowers marketers to do the right thing for the customer at the right time, eliminating a lot of wasteful process overhead.

“It’s a very natural way of working when you need to tap into another skill set or another opportunity that exists outside your core team,” said Sebastian. “When we started to think about how we wanted to operate and work differently, we asked ourselves, okay, what do we need to be able to do that?”

MetLife was already using agile pods in certain departments within the organization. Their global CMO and other senior leaders within the company provided the support that Sebastian needed to move from a traditional marketing to an agile marketing approach.

“We had the support and the executive sponsorship of the MetLife global CMO. He was behind these efforts and got everybody else excited about that,” said Sebastian. “It was great to have that support starting at the top and from senior leaders in all areas of the business. It really does require a cross-functional team.”

In addition to buy-in and support from leadership, Sebastian was focused on how to put together her multidisciplinary marketing team. She ultimately approached all the teams that needed to be involved in the process including traditional marketing, content strategy, data and analytics, technology, and the more traditional IT and infrastructure teams. 

“We went to those leaders and said, okay, we’re putting together this team and we’re putting together a new way of working and we want to tap into the resources that you have,” said Sebastian. 

When bringing together cross-functional teams, Sebastian emphasized the importance of starting foundationally and understanding that not everybody is a marketer. Marketing needed to take a step back and educate various teams on what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they were planning to get it done. 

“Ultimately, we needed to get them ingrained in the actual business goals that we had in front of us, said Sebastian. “A lot of these people had never worked on Pet before. Then secondarily, a lot of the people had never been part of a marketing team before. So, we had to do a lot of training and education and really just make sure folks were on the same page.”

Getting agile off the ground

To get the agile group up to speed with the pet insurance division’s new agile marketing approach, Sebastian’s team did some on-site training to make sure that everybody understood the foundations and principles of agile marketing. This also allowed the team to get to know each other. 

“Part of the agile marketing process is just making sure that the team stays connected,” said Sebastian. “There are daily stand-up meetings and different ceremonies that take place throughout the process to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We also did a fair bit of education and work on our side to make sure that everybody was comfortable and getting to know each other as a team.”

The agile marketing approach is collaborative. That extends to the way teams are lead and managed. Instead of a single manager or leader, there are Product Owners (POs) that help facilitate communication and keep people connected. One of the principles of agile marketing is the team is self-functioning and self-governing. 

“It’s not that there’s not someone in charge,” said Sebastian, “But there’s not someone who’s the boss. You depend on the team to manage itself. We have a PO that does an amazing job of organizing all of the things that need and managing the activities that a PO should.”

Dig deeper: Introducing an in-depth guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator

Focusing on outcomes and business impact

One of the biggest challenges that Sebastian’s team had to overcome, beyond the de-siloing of teams, was to adopt a more business-focused mindset when it came to goals. That is, when teams are isolated from each other, they tend to focus on the goals of that specific team, whether it’s marketing, sales, technology, or business.

“The great thing about Agile is that the business goal is really the guiding principle of what we’re all working towards every single day,” Sebastian explained. “So we’re making sure that we stay close to that goal and understand the ‘why’ behind the work that we’re doing.” 

Said Stacey Ackerman, partner at NavigateAgile and MarTech contributor, “It’s really common in marketing to be going 100 miles an hour trying to do as much as possible, but if you ask anyone what goal they’re trying to achieve for the business or the customers, most marketers have no idea. What I love about agile marketing is that everyone from senior leaders to the team executing the work is aligned and working towards the same outcome. Therefore, marketers that are really succeeding with agile marketing are actually doing less work with better results,”

MetLife’s agile approach is focused on outcomes and adding value versus just being busy. It’s a big-picture mindset that ties marketing activities to those outcomes that add value to the business. “That’s one of the ways that we really have seen a shift in our team,” said Sebastian. “We’re not just doing things. We’re doing things that are really impactful, are adding value, and are helping us get closer to those big business goals that we have.”

Sebastian notes two key achievements from having implemented an agile marketing methodology within MetLife. The first is that, while there were already several other agile pods within the company, her agile team has been able to blaze the trail for agile marketing. “We’re laying out the foundation for how an agile pod should work. And we’re able to share that knowledge across the organization.”

Sebastian confirmed that they’re selling more policies now than they ever have. Year over year growth is in double digits. “This is definitely a way of working that we’d like to continue to expand at MetLife, specifically in the marketing space,” said Sebastian. “We’ve seen really significant impacts from the work that we’ve been doing.”

“The other thing that’s interesting is that we have a direct connection with the consumer. MetLife is a voluntary benefits company, so we have a large portion of our efforts concentrated in the group business, but we also have the opportunity with Pet to go direct to consumer. That’s one of the reasons that Pet was a good fit for agile marketing. We’re all about meeting pet parents where they are. Being able to connect in meaningful ways to the consumer, regardless of where you find them, has been really impactful for us.”

The post MetLife uses agile marketing to unleash pet insurance sales appeared first on MarTech.

The practices we’ve established in the Agile Marketing Navigator help drive culture change and the right behaviors for agility. Today, we’ll focus on Cycle Time, Waste Removal and the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads that can help you to take agile marketing to the next level.

Remove waste by overhauling old ways of working

When it comes to waste removal, a team can make changes if they can work autonomously. But more significant effort is required to make impactful changes in larger organizations where systems and processes reach far beyond the team.

Let’s say that several agile teams have identified that too many sign-offs are required to get work delivered quickly and with agility. Now you know this is a systemic issue across marketing that requires more than a Band-Aid repair.

The first step is measuring the problem’s impact on overall marketing delivery. It’s best to do this collaboratively, getting in put from representatives of several teams and levels in the company. You can break down items by the types that seem most problematic. 

Let’s say everyone says the process for launching a landing page on your website is really slow and has the most sign-offs. Take sticky notes and map out all the steps in the process, focusing on each sign-off. This allows you to quantify a baseline for just how many steps are in your process and how long it’s taking today. 

You’ll then look at the total number of average days it takes to deliver the landing page across the organization. In this example, we’ll say it takes an average of 45 business days to launch a landing page from start to finish.

Everyone should then discuss what seems like a more reasonable timeframe. This group decides to strive for 30 days. Now they need to uncover where they can get back those 15 days, most of which are tied up in approvals and wait time.

Because this issue is constraining all marketers, leaders need to be able to step up and be willing to radically empower the change from old ways of working. They will have to allow this change to happen and empower Lean thinking. This often means giving up a bit of security or safety in exchange for speed. And yes, mistakes may happen. But this is where trusting that people will learn from them and the overall change will outweigh the risk.

It’s this type of culture change that will lead to true agility. Leaders: You can’t just hand off agile marketing to your team and walk away. It’s imperative that you empower the teams to identify the issues while actively paving the way for them to implement new ways of working.

Lead Communities of Practice

As you mature in your agile practice and form teams around business needs, you break away from traditionally built departments around disciplines. However, as you involve more and more teams in agile marketing, it will be really important that those disciplines still have strong leadership and best practices.

A Design Community of Practice is a great example. The Practice Lead needs to work with all the designers across all agile teams to ensure branding quality and growth in the field happen. 

A Practice Lead in our framework is typically a department manager, but their role alters with agile marketing. They are no longer assigning or managing work, but they still need to work to ensure everyone in the field can be successful with skills, tools, knowledge sharing and practice standards.

If you’re working in agile today and have found that the functional roles are being diminished, immediately start operating a Community of Practice, and you’ll find that you can succeed with a delivery team that has multiple skill sets, as well as in a community where shared skills are maximized.

As you grow in agile marketing, remember it’s not just a check-the-box process or framework. Really good agile marketing takes great leaders that are invested in true transformation.

The post Scaling agile with the Agile Marketing Navigator framework appeared first on MarTech.

Organizations thoughtfully designed to run lean, easily adapt to changing priorities, and produce remarkable work at the speed of modern marketing, have an advantage over others.

They have clear, actionable rules of engagement for how they will and won’t operate. 

They’ve channeled these rules into a written set of operating principles to guide their people and business affairs and benefit tremendously. You may think your firm or agency has what I’m describing, but I’ve observed that most do not. Read on for examples and a way to put your organization to the test.

What do we mean by ‘operating principles’?

Operating principles create a shared internal mindset for how teams think, act and make decisions about their daily work. They are critical for alignment and smooth scalability. While “principles” is often used interchangeably with “values,” there’s a significant difference.

What are values? 

Company values define your culture. Firms and agencies typically present their values as a list of qualities or phrases that reflect how their people treat each other. 

Here are some examples that I’ve pulled from a variety of creative marketing firms:

• Integrity, accountability, listening, simplifying, persevering, collaborating.
• “Create amazing work,” “Be honest,” “Share your voice,” “Be bold and brave,” “Deliver value.”

It’s helpful for an organization to communicate how they believe people should interact with each other. However, the average list of values is not actionable, memorable or even differentiating. Principles intentionally differ.

What are principles?

Principles reflect your organization’s philosophies and beliefs about how your firm or agency should and should not operate. They are the line in the sand defining the things you will always do and those you will never do. 

Principles should not prescribe — they are not a “how to” instruction manual, leaving room for autonomy. But they should be actionable enough to guide how people think, act and make daily business decisions. 

As an example, if we took the value “be honest” from the values above and wrote it as a principle, we might say: 

• Tell the truth no matter what the cost. 

As a written, defined principle, it draws a line in the sand. I’ll share more examples and a way to test the strength of your own organization’s principles in a moment.

Competitive advantages from operating principles

You can gain many advantages from using a principles-based approach to leading your marketing organization.

• New team members can rely on your principles to guide their decisions.
• You’ll have consistency in the way people approach their daily work. 
• You’ll reduce the need for managerial oversight and prescriptive direction.
• You’ll be able to scale more smoothly without negatively impacting speed or quality.
• They differentiate your firm or agency and generate a competitive advantage.

Principles are critical for alignment and smooth scalability.

“If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring or controlling.”  

– Stephen R. Covey

In addition, when a creative marketing firm or in-house agency has strong operating principles about the quality of their work, their teams know when to push back on a client’s request if it conflicts with their principles.

To the team, being accountable to their principles is more important than being accountable to their clients. As a result, they are more comfortable saying no to unreasonable budgets or deadlines or uninformed requests from stakeholders to change their creative direction.

Relevant examples of operating principles

Here are some operating principles from creative marketing firms and other organizations.

TBWA

Referring to themselves as the “Disruption company,” TBWA’s principles help them “achieve the diverse, inclusive lens in our work and create real-world impact.” 

They state that their principles are the “standards we measure ourselves against; the standards we hold each other accountable to; the standards getting us where we want to go.”

Massive Change Network

This global design consultancy takes a different approach. They live by “The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” a list of 43 principles with explanations of each.

RedScout

The brand innovation consultancy, RedScout, lists five principles they use to drive meaningful change.

37signals

37signals, the makers of Basecamp and Hey, share their principles to guide internal communication.

Future Forum

Future Forum is a consortium focused on helping organizations build flexible, inclusive and connected ways of working. They have collected samples of principles being used across various companies to reshape how those companies work — specifically, to develop their flexible work models. 

How to define a set of principles

Since your principles will guide how your creative marketing firm or in-house agency operates, you should take a strategic approach to draft them. Consider the following questions:

• What type of service experience do your clients expect from you?
• What do your current and prospective employees expect from you?
• How do technology and digital channels impact your work and your target market?

1. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your clients

Over the past several years, client-side brand and marketing leaders have increasingly evaluated creative marketing firms based on criteria beyond capabilities and creativity. Client-side marketers are becoming more focused on how creative and marketing firms operate, per the 2018-2019 Global Digital Outlook Study by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) in partnership with Forrester Research. They want partners who can deliver with greater speed, nimbleness and value.

• Speed of delivery had become a significant factor in whether or not creative marketing firms won new projects. 
• A “more flexible and nimble working model” was cited as a top area of improvement that marketing clients wanted to see from their creative marketing partners. 
• And “price vs. value” was cited as the top reason clients terminate a partner relationship. They wanted greater value from their agencies. 

I’ve seen similar data reported in other industry research and regularly hear similar stories firsthand in my consulting work with creative marketing firms. Some have also shared that they’ve lost clients due to delivery speed. For them, it has become normal to receive RFPs and RFIs from client-side marketers with questions about their firm’s process, turnaround times and how they collaborate.

Whether you’re a creative marketing firm or an in-house agency, consider how you can draft your principles to help you meet your client’s demand for speed, nimbleness and value.

2. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your creative talent

Many years before the pandemic, there was already a lot of talk about the “future of work.” Businesses applied the principles and frameworks of different future work movements to redesign their organizations.

Some examples of the movements and frameworks that have been reshaping how companies work are:

• Re:Work.
• Holacracy.
• Sociocracy.
• Teal.
• Responsive.org.
• Lean.
• Agile.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of many values behind these movements and some of their practices. But, if you were to study these movements, you’d learn they are largely about giving people what they need to deliver great work. 

Some of the shared values behind these movements are:

• Trust.
• Transparency.
• Autonomy.
• Adaptability.
• Co-creation.
• Continuous improvement.
• Work-life balance.

An increasing number of companies are making significant changes to apply these values and create work environments that appeal to your talent pool. Can you afford not to do the same? 

When drafting your principles, consider how they can help you align your firm or agency with these values.

3. Define principles that help you adopt technology for a competitive advantage

Most marketing organizations focus on digital and online marketing channels, but many haven’t adapted to keep up with the variety, volume or velocity of content needed. Instead, they’ve continued business as usual or slightly adjusted their operating model. As a result, they’ve been building up what Steve Blank called organizational debt.

Organizational debt happens when a business grows but doesn’t invest the necessary time and energy toward adapting how it operates to keep it running smoothly. The firm or agency is too focused on just getting work done. Then, one day, they step back and realize they have a set of performance challenges.

When drafting your principles, consider how they could help you take full advantage of existing and emerging technology.

4. Define principles to clarify what you will and won’t do

I’ll leave you with two last questions to answer as you consider drafting operating principles for your creative marketing firm or in-house team. 

• What will you always do to create remarkable work?
• What will you never do to create remarkable work?

Remember, a well-drafted principle will draw a clear line in the sand, defining the things you will always do and the things you will never do. 

How to test if you have clear, actionable principles

Here’s how you can put your creative marketing firm or in-house agency to the test. Whether you’re drafting principles for the first time or they already exist, evaluate them against the following questions. 

• Are they actionable?
• Will they help someone make a decision?
• Can you logically argue their opposite? 
• Are they differentiating?
• Are they polarizing?
• Do they create a competitive advantage?
• Will you stick to them even if it comes at a cost or disadvantage?

The more you can give the right answers to these questions, the stronger the principle. 

To further make the point, Bill Bernback, one of advertising’s greats and co-founder of the highly-ranked worldwide advertising firm DDB, famously said, “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.”

Wrapping up

Operating principles are a tremendous tool for creative marketing firms and agencies. I’ve seen their power firsthand in my work. However, the work doesn’t stop with drafting them. You’ll need to ensure everyone in your organization understands them and knows when to rely on them for guidance. Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future article.

The post How to define your marketing organization’s rules of engagement appeared first on MarTech.

That may not be surprising, as agile marketing started about 10 years after it did in software development, but why are we still so far behind? What are the barriers that are getting in our way and how can we remove them?

In this article, I’m going to share with you three reasons why I think marketers are behind with agile implementations and what we can do to catch up.

1. Language Barriers

A few years ago I had an amazing opportunity to teach an agile class in Haifa, Israel. While I’d taught the content many times before, what I didn’t take into consideration was the language barrier. I’m sure I made a lot of American references that they didn’t understand, and when they went to do team activities, they all spoke in Hebrew, making it incredibly difficult for me to validate if the learning was registering. So while the learning can and does happen, the time to get there will expand in those kinds of circumstances.

But barriers can also be created by aspects of a common language — for example, acronyms.

When you see the term “PM” what do you think of? Depending on your perspective, this could be a project manager, program manager, product manager or even preventative maintenance — not to mention just “afternoon.” It’s really confusing.

When marketers are forced into translating terms from a language that was written with product and software development in mind, problems can arise because the language doesn’t speak to them.

2. Framework resistance

When I began moving my agile coaching practice into the marketing space, I quickly realized that I was trying to teach Scrum the same way that I did in software development. It wasn’t working. I was met with a ton of resistance.

Here were some common objections I heard:

• “Scrum is a process for IT.”
• “Scrum doesn’t make sense in marketing.”
• “The language in Scrum is for software developers.”
• “We don’t want a rigid process.”

I kept thinking about this resistance. The problem I concluded wasn’t in the framework. The problem was getting acceptance of the framework outside of the software world.

3. Reinventing the wheel

As an industry, more than 60% of agile marketers are implementing a hybrid or scrumban (Scrum/Kanban combination) approach, according to the 2022 State of Agile Marketing survey.

While inventing a hybrid approach seems like a great way to take what’s out there and customize it to marketers’ needs, the biggest challenge was that there was no consistent way that this was happening. Going from company to company, I saw a lot of marketers trying to reinvent the wheel, which meant it took them a lot longer to get off the ground while software teams were already flying.

However, if we look back at our agile history, software development had a similar beginning. There were dozens of methodologies that are no longer talked about today such as the Crystal, XTreme Programming, Adaptive Software Development and many more.

It wasn’t until Scrum became the gold standard in software development that real change began to happen. I believe it’s because, when everyone agrees on a common method and language, we have a mutual starting point. We don’t have to start at square one. We can just learn from there, all agree on the path and work on what’s really important — lasting cultural change.

Getting ahead!

Now that you know my theory on why agile in marketing is 10 years behind, how can we break the cycle and move forward? Here are 5 things to try:

• Avoid technical jargon or terms that people don’t understand.
• Don’t try to sell teams or leaders on a process, but rather what you’re going to do to resolve their business problems.
• Allow flexibility around agile practices and choice. By allowing teams to choose from a few options that meet their needs, they’ll be more accepting.
• Provide a clear roadmap for teams on how they’ll go from point A to point B.
• Clearly outline what success looks like for each team and steps for getting them there. 

For more ways on how we’ve bridged the gap between software teams and marketing teams with agile, read our latest eBook on how to get started with the Agile Marketing Navigator.

Download the free ebook here.

The post 3 reasons marketers are 10 years behind with agile — and how to catch up appeared first on MarTech.

Stacey Ackerman is an agile marketing coach who has written some 60 articles for MarTech on the topic. She recently launched the Agile Marketing Navigator, an in-depth guide to implementing agile within marketing foundations. Stacey was brought up in Minnesota but recently relocated to North Carolina where “the winters are much milder.”

We asked her about her route into agile.

Q: You’re the owner of Agilify Coaching & Training and recently became managing partner of NavigateAgile. How did you get into marketing — or indeed into agile?

A: I went to college for journalism and communications because I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but I ended up working in public relations and somewhat in marketing as well — dabbling in event marketing — and I kind of worked my way up to marketing manager. My husband worked in IT at the time. He suggested I look at IT project management; so I got hired doing that. My clients were ad agencies, so it was a nice hybrid of working with the agency side of things but also working with IT.

I had a colleague introduce me to agile [development] and I was really fascinated by it. Without having any formal training, I decided to use my client — unbeknownst to them — as an experiment. I saw such a night-and-day difference that I was sold on this: I’ve got to get out of traditional project management stuff and get into agile.

I started taking certification courses, became a scrum manager in IT spaces, and started working my way into being an agile coach — mostly in software in the beginning, but then in marketing and communications and medical devices, and kind of everything. In 2017 or 2018 I decided I had to take this back into marketing. That led to where I am today.

Dig deeper: What is marketing work management and how do these platforms support agile marketing?

Q: There’s now an extensive community of agile marketers. How and when did that start to come together?

A: I think there were some early adopters who wrote the original Agile Marketing Manifesto. That was ten years ago, the original pioneers. I think it was really in the last five years that there have been more of us stepping into this and seeing it work in marketing.

Download the free ebook here.

Q: Tell us more about your new venture, NavigateAgile.

A: Just in October of this year, Michael Seaton and I joined forces to create NavigateAgile. He has a much more extensive marketing background. Last April we launched the Agile Marketing Navigator framework and found a lot of people really excited about it as a kind of missing piece in the marketplace. There’s been a few really exciting developments since then. One is that I’ve had people coming from multiple countries wanting to translate it. We also have a certification course which just launched and a whole implementation program.

We’re also going to be launching a partner program. That’s on the horizon for later in 2023. We have a lot of content out there and want to start making those things accessible to people so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Q: In addition to creating all this content, you’re still planning to work directly with clients?

A: Yes, exactly. It’s been a really exciting year. In March, I’ll be speaking in Miami at an agile marketing conference and I think there will be more of those to come as we come back to in-person again.

The post Stacey Ackerman: Spotlight on the expert appeared first on MarTech.

What does this mean for marketers? It’s time to be more strategic.

By knowing where you’re headed, you can use agile marketing to focus on the work that’s going to perform best.

1. Know where you’re headed

So many marketers are working reactively. Until you know where you’re headed, you’ll always be spinning your wheels and throwing darts, hoping one will stick.

As a marketing team, it’s critical, especially in this climate, to understand what business goals you’re driving towards or you’ll be caught in an endless cycle of execution without much impact.

In agile marketing, we align on a Guidepoint that ties directly to our larger organizational business goals. The Guidepoint ensures that everyone understands what success looks like to the team, the business and the customers. It’s a shared understanding that keeps us on the right path forward.

2. Focus only on a few high-return initiatives

The biggest mistake that most companies make is too many projects or campaigns happening at once without evaluating the impact on the business results they are driving toward.

We’ve found that by measuring an idea’s impact, you can be more selective about the work that the team is spending time doing.

Here are a few things you can measure:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as clicks, interaction rates, traffic and page completion rates.
• Baseline metrics that measure your current performance.
• KPI goals for improving current metrics.
• Impact on your business if the KPI goals are met, such as a percentage of sales increase.
• Value in dollars that this brings to your business if the KPI goals are met.

When you take a little extra time upfront to understand the data behind a marketing idea, you get away from simply saying “yes” to everyone’s requests, which will lead to employee overload, especially if you’ve had a reduction in staff.

Dig deeper: The dangers of saying ‘no’ in martech

3. Continuously evaluate metrics

Once you begin launching your marketing, you can’t ignore the data. It’s imperative that you’re always monitoring performance at regular intervals and that you understand when to turn an initiative off.

Too many times as marketers we’re only focused on what we’re going to do, but we forget to ask ourselves what we’re not going to do, or what we’re going to stop doing. 

A few good questions the team should ask themselves are:

• How long will we let something run that’s underperforming from our goal?
• What’s our threshold for stopping work?

4. Quickly ditch low-performing campaigns

Evaluating metrics should be a continuous process that the agile marketing team does daily, or as soon as data is available. 

As part of the team’s Daily Huddle, looking at performance is something they can spend 5 minutes doing, and it will go a long way. 

Why waste time and money on low-performing marketing? Stop and pivot — that’s what agile is all about!

Dig deeper: Why doing less is more in agile marketing

Be quick and nimble in the face of uncertainties

As we head into times of uncertainty, we can no longer afford to work on every marketing tactic that our stakeholders request. 

We must take a consultative and data-driven approach to make marketing less of a cost center and more of a value-added partner.

The post 4 steps to becoming a more strategic marketer in 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

That’s what agile marketing coach and regular MarTech contributor Stacey Ackerman told me back in May 2022. Over the following months, in collaboration with her fellow agile coach Michael Seaton, and with the support of the agile marketing community, Stacey delivered on that promise in the form of the Agile Marketing Navigator.

Download the free ebook here.

The Navigator takes important principles of agile software development and transforms them into practices and processes that make sense for marketers and can be implemented by them. It also introduces new agile elements that marketers need but which traditional agile systems overlook.

Dig deeper: A new way to navigate agile marketing

In a series of 21 articles, Ackerman broke down the four main pillars of the Navigator — the Collaborative Planning Workshop, the Launch Cycle, the Six Key Practices and the Six Roles — into their component parts, setting out a flexible and practical framework for agile marketing.

Marketers today need to move at the speed of light to meet the needs of their audience and realize critical business outcomes. The Navigator makes a huge contribution to showing how agile principles can boost the performance of modern marketing organizations.

In partnership with Stacey, we now present an ebook that captures all you need to know about an agile framework designed specifically for marketers. You’ll find a free downloadable pdf at the link below.

Getting Started with the Agile Marketing Navigator

The post Introducing an in-depth guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator appeared first on MarTech.

The concept goes by many other names — tiger team, SWAT team, pods, task force, skunk works. But the general feature set is remarkably alike — a small group of people pulled from different specialties working together to solve problems. The customer value squad must be empowered to make decisions and be held accountable for the results.

Elements of such an approach were outlined last year in the two part series, “Return on investment is missing in action,” and “Static ROI metrics, meet dynamic marketing situation.”

Schaub’s customer value squad will run against the grain of the organizational chart, where power is hierarchical. In traditional companies, each department is a fiefdom. It jealously keeps data — and power — within the confines of its silo. A CVS must be able to draw information into its well in order to assess situations and act in real time, thus cutting through silos.

The legacy that refuses to die

Those silos marketers are trying to crack today are a legacy of the industrial age, Schaub told us. Early in the 20^th century, scientific management and organizational structure replaced the “chaotic, bespoke” way of making things. “The idea of grouping specialists together was a novelty,” she said. Efficiency optimized processes and management was professionalized.

“Over time, specialists became silos,” Schaub explained. “Once you put people together who are alike, they form their own cultures.” Information then travels vertically, not laterally. “Need to know” traps data. This way of doing things that can be resistant to change.

Only here, change is represented by “VUCA” — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The vertical, hierarchical structure of silos become ill-suited to operating in such a fast-moving, ever-changing business environment, Schaub pointed out.

Around what mission should a team be organized? “It depends on what area of value you are delivering,” Schaub said. It could be geographic, as companies tries to improve sales in specific regions. It could be account-based. It could be about revenue operations. Or product service. Or design support. Or the team could address marketing across channels.

Here the size of the team matters. Around six to ten is ideal, Schaub said. “Getting beyond that, you start formalizing and coordinating,” she said. Companies will also have to fill skills gaps, which become obvious when the customer value teams begin operations. You may need product people, communications specialists, or account managers. “There is no checklist,” Schaub said.

Not unique to marketing

The concept of the small team is not new. It has grown out of necessity in other industries and professions.

Schaub found her inspiration for the customer value squad in an unlikely place: the hospital operating room. In that space you find a collection of specialists: a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, several operating room nurses. Each has their own different skill set. But they have one mission: the care of the patient.

Human bodies are similar, but “every situation is a little different” for the team, Schaub said “They are empowered in the moment to make decisions,” she said, and they are held accountable for the outcome.

The specialists are drawn from different departments to form the team. There is still a head of a nursing and a head of surgery, Schaub pointed out. “[But does] the surgeon ask the boss to take action when the patient is bleeding out?”

This illustrates a point: that silos with a vertical hierarchy will inhibit agility, being ill-suited to acting fast when a situation changes on the line or at the edge.

Again, this kind of organization is not unique to the OR. Sports teams operate this way, Schaub noted. So does the military. A VUCA environment moves too fast for a top-down organization to manage. But a small, networked group can handle it, since it is closer to the action.

Yes, but how?

Implementing a customer value squad is a change project. It can happen one of two ways.

The first is the ideal situation, where top managers see the need for customer value squads (or something like them). They will retain consultants, then spend several years retooling the corporate culture to embrace agility. This eventually produces exceptional results, Schaub explained. This approach is rarely seen, she added.

The second approach is more likely. That is when a company takes one piece of its business and undertakes a small, incremental change, Schaub continued. It could be customer success management or account-based marketing, but it must be customer-focused, she said.

It starts by forming just one customer value squad. “Put the best people there and push it through.” Schaub said. Keep breaking things and fixing them until you succeed. These break-fix cycles are short, but iterative. Team members learn the lessons taught by failure, adapt, then try again until they find the right solution. This is more of a methodology rather than a recipe.

Once the team has ironed out its difficulties, it can then be replicated throughout the enterprise. Schaub likened this to opening a chain of candy stores. Start with one store, get it right, then scale up in batches.

Customer value squads will vary in composition but will have three basic components. The “people piece” is network organization, Schaub said. The method piece is agile operations. The brain piece is intelligence/analysis. People will find their way towards “complexity-wise marketing” as they understand how these pieces fit together.

That will take time. A company will have to tolerate a measure of small failures in this learning process. But the results will exceed the costs, provided all are pointed towards the same goal.

The post How to build a customer value squad — and why appeared first on MarTech.

Below, we introduce some of the basic concepts of marketing management. 

What’s inside:

• What is marketing management and why is it important?
• What are the different types of marketing management?
• Top marketing management processes to know
• Agile marketing management team development 
• Measuring the results from marketing management
• Resources for learning more about marketing management 

What is marketing management and why is it important?

Marketing management is a process that helps you plan, develop and implement promotional strategies and campaigns with the right team members and teams. With the best people executing the right marketing plans, you can promote your company’s services and products, adjust pricing, and increase your profits while reducing costs. This process may take time, including learning brand awareness techniques, increasing conversions, and expanding your business reach. 

Marketing management focuses on the strategies you develop and deploy to better engage with and reach your target market. As you face challenges with developing your products and services, marketing management continues to move your brand forward with that strategic vision. 

What are the different types of marketing management?

Good marketing management helps your brand initiatives and marketing campaigns stay on course. With so many areas to consider with your marketing efforts, here’s a quick breakdown of some important types. 

• Brand management: You maintain and improve your brand’s reputation by building brand equity, awareness and trust.
• Product management: This aims to develop or bring a new product to the market. It focuses on the successful implementation of your product lifecycle. This is closely related to “go-to-market” strategies.
• Sales: Your sales team’s job is to sell your products or services to customers, converting qualified leads into buyers.
• Business development: This process is essential to establishing and maintaining prospect relationships. Your business development team will also focus on understanding your buyer’s persona and recognizing new growth opportunities.
• Customer marketing: One benefit is that it goes beyond simply acquiring customers. You identify and market your products to existing customers, but you also work to retain them as longtime customers. Then, you can work to develop them into advocates for your business as part of referral generation.

Clearly, some types of marketing management are more relevant to B2B marketing or high-consideration consumer purchases than to mass marketing of low-cost products. They do, however, offer a quick snapshot of the options available. Your emphasis will change based on your relationship with your customers and your type of business. 

Top marketing management processes to know

A marketing management process isn’t a one-time deal you design and never use again. Instead, it should be part of your marketing plan. The process in many cases should extend over the long term and evolve with your company’s growth and development.

A strategic marketing management process aims to accomplish the following:

• Market analysis: Conduct a market analysis to determine how well your business is positioned within a particular vertical and how your competitors are performing.
• Customer analysis: Analyzing customer data involves understanding the composition of your market, its needs, and its satisfaction levels.  
• Product development: This refers to the entire process of conceiving, developing, and launching a product on the market.
• Strategy and goal development: This step involves developing your company’s specific objectives. 
• Monitoring and reporting: With monitoring, you check the status of your marketing management process. Then, with reporting, you review and analyze the outcomes. 

As you fully embrace the marketing management processes, you’ll take risks and push your company and your teams to perform better. All the while, you’re monitoring and reporting as you further optimize your operations. 

Agile marketing management team development 

Agile marketing is an approach which takes its cue from agile software development. It emphasizes teamwork rather than top-down direction, and the achievement of specific short-term objectives in a series of “sprints.”

One key to making agile marketing management work is putting the right team members in the correct positions. In addition, you must have team members willing to adapt to the new approach. Your agile marketing team has a flat structure where neither silos nor hierarchies exist. You will encourage your team to work collaboratively and cross-functionally on projects. 

To prepare a team for agile marketing, follow three key steps: 

• Establish what an agile team structure looks like for your company.
• Put processes and platforms in place for agile marketing management.
• Train team members on the agile way.

Building agility into your marketing is a simple way of helping your team and/or department respond to changes in a fluid manner.

Dig deeper: Learn about the Agile Marketing Navigator

Measuring the results from marketing management

Marketing management is likely to have the key objective of reaching your audiences and converting them at the lowest cost. You’ll use benchmarks, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine your overall results. Here’s a quick overview of that process: 

• Define how you will measure success as part of your marketing campaign.
• Determine your marketing channels.
• Calculate your KPIs by determining the cost of each marketing channel.
• Assess your revenue impact by measuring the ongoing (and ultimately lifetime) value of your customers. 

Resources for learning more about marketing management 

Marketing management sounds easy to understand, and the initial concept is simple. What’s more complex is how you take these relatively basic ideas and use them to manage the complexities of marketing in alignment with sales, product development, and customer service.

Despite the challenges, marketing management represents the opportunity to improve your sales and customer relationship management continuously. Your business can tap into and evolve with the channels and technologies to meet current and future needs.  

Here’s some further reading:

• Here’s an overview of the field from Western Governors University.
• Project management software vendor Wrike takes a deep dive into the concepts of marketing management.
• Here’s another deep dive from customer experience management platform Sprinklr.
• A related topic is the kinds of work management software available to support marketing management. You can download our “Enterprise Work Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” here.

The post Why we care about marketing management appeared first on MarTech.

Today we’ll dive into the Stakeholder role. Of course, the role of Stakeholder is not new to agile marketing, however, it’s not explicitly talked about in other agile frameworks. Here’s how we describe this role in the Agile Marketing Navigator:

“Stakeholders have a vested stake in the work that the marketing team produces. This group often comes from Sales, Product Development and Customer Service departments. Stakeholders participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop and offer feedback during the Team Showcase.”

How to identify your team’s stakeholders

There are many stakeholders in an organization, but the ones we’re concerned with in agile marketing are the people that directly care about the outcomes the team is producing. That list of Stakeholders might remain constant, or it could change regularly, depending on the nature of the work. Some teams have a large number of Stakeholders, whereas others have a select few.

To identify whether someone is a Stakeholder to your agile team, ask yourself the following questions:

• Did this person request work from the team?
• Do I regularly update this person on the team’s work?
• Has this person previously asked for a status report?
• Is this person responsible for delivering on business goals that tie directly to the work your team is doing?

How do Stakeholders request work?

While an agile marketing team is self-organizing, it’s important that they keep a clear line of communication open between the team and the Stakeholders. The work the team is doing should be transparent to Stakeholders at all times.

The Marketing Owner on the team is responsible for managing Stakeholder relations. The Marketing Owner ultimately gets to prioritize what work the team will do and in what order, but needs to be having regular conversations with Stakeholders.

As a Stakeholder that requests work, it’s important to share with the Marketing Owner why your work is important and how it fits into the agreed upon Guidepoint that you co-created. You may have to be flexible and understand that some trade-off decisions may need to be made and not all requests may get worked on.

The work requests will go on the team’s Marketing Backlog, as long as the Marketing Owner believes that the work will contribute to the value the team is trying to achieve. Some teams allow anyone to contribute ideas to the backlog, others set it up as a conversation with the Marketing Owner. Your organization can determine this process for what works best with your current culture.

Communicating with Stakeholders

The team needs to be transparent about when the work might get done and keep you informed in a timely manner if priorities change. The Blueprint document that gets created at the beginning of the project or quarter is meant to be a conversation starter between the Marketing Owner and the Stakeholders.

The Blueprint should be discussed during each Team Showcase (and more often on a 1:1 basis if needed). This way everyone knows what buckets of work are coming up next, if they’re still the highest priority, and if not, what priority may replace it (note: we aren’t adding more work, but switching out priorities).

Stakeholders’ role at the Team Showcase

During the Team Showcase that happens at the end of each Cycle, Stakeholders with a vested interest in the work should attend and be ready to ask the team questions and offer suggestions for future work. Keep in mind that this isn’t an approval meeting. At this point the team has delivered work, but it’s to see what they’ve done, hear how various tactics are performing in the market, and have a collaborative conversation around what work should follow, or how work that was done may need to be altered or improved upon for upcoming Cycles.

As a Stakeholder, try to leave your personal opinions out. Instead of saying, “I wish that button was red,” you may want to ask the team, “How have customers responded to the blue button? Have you tried testing it in another color to see if people submit more requests?” This empowers the team to take your suggestions in a data-driven manner versus merely an opinion.

Stakeholders’ role at the Collaborative Planning Workshop

Stakeholders should also participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop at the beginning of the quarter or project. As a Stakeholder, you are an active participant in this collaboration. We ask that you raise any objections to the Guidepoint if it doesn’t align with where you were hoping it would go. It’s important to have these transparent conversations early and get on the same page with the team.

From there, the Brainstorm happens and even if you aren’t a marketer, contributing ideas from a customer perspective adds value. After this session, the Blueprint gets put together by the Marketing Owner, but you should make sure that you are in agreement with the priorities shown. If not, it’s your responsibility to bring it up early and have a conversation with the Marketing Owner. However, at the end of the day, it is the Marketing Owner’s decision as this role has to balance all Stakeholders’ needs.

Note: This is the last article in the Agile Marketing Navigator series. A full list of articles appears below.

Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!

• Aligning on a Guidepoint
• How to hold a successful Brainstorm session
• How to determine the minimally viable launch
• Creating a blueprint
• Building a Marketing Backlog
• The Daily Huddle
• Cycle Planning
• The Team Showcase
• Team Improvement
• Customer Stories
• Story Points
• Work in Progress Limits
• Cycle Time
• Waste Removal
• Partnering
• Teams
• Marketing Owner
• Agile Champion
• Supporting cast
• Practice Lead
• Stakeholder

The post Stakeholders: Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator  appeared first on MarTech.