Research shows that businesses make up to three billion decisions annually and a recent survey by Gartner reported that 65% of decisions are more complex (involving more stakeholders or choices) than they were two years ago.

Many businesses today, and the marketers that serve them, need better insight to bridge the gap between massive amounts of data and business decisions. Only 24% of companies say they are “data-driven,” whereas others face missed opportunities, inefficiencies, and increased business risks. The average S&P company loses $250 million annually due to poor decision-making.

Decision intelligence is a framework that bridges the gap between insights and decisions. It empowers organizations to make better, consistent, and data-driven decisions. Leaders and teams can make informed decisions at every level of the company!

What is decision intelligence?

Decision intelligence (DI) is an evolving discipline that combines data, analysis, AI, automation, and experience to make better decisions. DI helps guide decision-makers with actionable insights using optimization, simulation, and decision-analysis techniques.

In contrast to traditional decision-making approaches, which rely heavily on intuition and experience, DI incorporates methodical, analytical, and data-driven approaches.

The focus of DI is not just on the technology but on how it augments human decision-making processes. It is a multidisciplinary field drawing on expertise from various arenas, including computer science, statistics, psychology, economics, and business.

According to Dr. Loren Pratt, chief science officer and co-founder of DI software provider Quantellia, and author of “How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World,” another key concept of DI is designing decisions like organizations design homes, buildings, and airplanes — by creating a blueprint first.

Much like a blueprint, a decision design helps align everyone involved in that decision — including stakeholders — around its rationale. She found that by treating decisions like a design problem, you can bring many design best practices to bear, such as ideation, documentation, rendering, refinement, QA, and design thinking.

In 2019, Google’s first Chief Decision Officer, Cassie Kozyrkov, established a new decision intelligence engineering discipline to augment data science with behavioral science, economics, and managerial science to focus on the next business advantage beyond the data.

Intelligent decisions are designed, simulated, automated, monitored, and tuned. 

Dig deeper: Why data-driven decision-making is the foundation of successful CX

What decision intelligence is not

Decision science. Decision science has usually been associated with the qualitative side of data. DS is the overarching term, while “decision intelligence” is the operational side. 

Strategic intelligence. Broadly, strategic intelligence means using BI insights to drive and support strategy. We also call this market intelligence which provides businesses with current industry trends and makes sense of consumer behavior to navigate a future course of action.

Calculated decisions. Not every output or recommendation is a decision, Kozyrkov says. In decision analysis terminology, a decision is only made after an irrevocable allocation of resources takes place. If you can change your mind for free, no decision has yet been made.

Applications of decision intelligence

DI applies to various decision-making problems, such as resource allocation, risk management, strategic planning, and, yes, marketing. I’ve used it in developing systems and platforms for complex energy, finance, policy, and marketing decisions.

Our last startup platform supported DI for go-to-market executives reducing the decision-making process from nine months to a fraction of time with greater visibility, training, and impacts.

DI has been applied in credit applications or fraud detection in financial services.  It has been used in retail to determine how much inventory to purchase, optimal stock levels, or price forecasts. According to Dr. Loren Pratt, employing decision intelligence can positively impact evidence-based decisions in a healthcare crisis.

Other use cases include customer satisfaction, marketing attribution, and competitive and go-to-market strategies. Designs of the framework of these decisions were standard for GTM; however, implementation required building an enterprise platform, training, and data support. But in the end, this decision-making time dropped from nine to one-to-three months. The average impact was over $10 million, including an apparel company discovering a new $90 million revenue stream embracing the platform. 

Dig deeper: Automating decisions with real-time situational context

Benefits of decision intelligence

McKinsey senior partner Kate Smaje states that organizations are now accomplishing in 10 days what used to take 10 months. Having DI supports the continually increasing pace of decisions required to stay competitive.

The first benefit is DI aids leaders in navigating complex decisions with more focused and comprehensive information. As you design the decisions, you can structure cross-organizational information toward specific goals or objectives. Having this kind of visibility facilitates navigating trade-offs between competing objectives. It eliminates more of the analysis paralysis found in most strategic and high-level tactical decisions. 

Next, DI reduces risk and uncertainty. Decision-makers with real-time data and insights can leverage DI to identify and proactively mitigate potential risks. With the visibility in trade-offs, organizations can better apply risk/reward plans to avoid costly mistakes hindering a competitive edge.

Decision Intelligence enhances efficiency and productivity. By automating specific decision-making processes and providing decision-makers with real-time data and insights, DI can help streamline decision-making and improve productivity. You are reducing decision latency. These processes can be built or programmed into systems to free up time and resources to explore more options or allocate to other important tasks and initiatives.

Finally, organizations leveraging DI gain a more potent competitive edge by leveraging data and technology by evaluating, then acting on, more intelligent and faster complex decisions which typically cripple momentum or transformation.

Limits and challenges of decision intelligence

With data, AI, and automation involved, it’s not surprising that there are some challenges and limitations that are also present with DI.

Ethics/bias. DI can methodically help reduce bias and reinforce ethical decisions. At the same time, with any data-driven and automated system, decisions leveraging DI built by humans still risk being developed based on biased or discriminatory data or algorithms. Awareness training, along with all other organizational data-driven efforts, is a must.

Data availability. Leaders and project managers must be aware of data access and availability limitations. Decision effectiveness is often challenging to find on smaller datasets. Sometimes things go wrong, but it’s more based on luck than data. For complex and infrequent decisions, an organization may need help to define an approach for measuring decisions. In such cases, technology limitations may prevent a solution. Organizations need to formalize such decision-making processes and can only use technology. Also, it’s worth highlighting what could be missing or the scope of what’s possible.

Resistance. An important part of DI is ensuring more transparency, consistency, and training in the decision-making process. The traditional culture of decision-makers will initially be resistant as it feels that it dismisses their experience or instinct or runs against their specific agendas. Those in charge of DI efforts need to communicate how DI benefits their efforts and leads to better outcomes for individuals and organizations.

Leaders can overcome these challenges and limitations through clear communication and a well-defined scope of its application. Each new initiative can grow and enhance an organization’s decision-making culture.

Tips and factors

• Choose a focused decision. Begin by implementing DI in functions where business-critical decision-making needs improvement (e.g., data-driven, AI-powered). Alternatives include large complex decisions or ones that can be scaled and accelerated through automation.
  
• Begin with outcomes. There’s a flood of data in your organization, but you should only gather relevant data to that outcome to design a decision model. Add additional data or test theories of additional information once you’ve started with your early set.

• Map out decisions. Document assumptions, thoughts, emotions, concerns, and fears involved in your decisions. Review them quarterly or semi-annually. It will increase your organization’s decision-making muscle.

• Don’t automate everything. Humans, especially when it comes to complex and sensitive decisions, are necessary.

• Authority should be to the decision. Provide authority to make decisions to the people closest to the point of impact of that decision. Ownership will incentivize effective decision-making.
  
• Develop new decision-making habits. Teach decision-makers to apply systematic best practices, such as critical thinking, trade-off analysis, recognizing bias, and listening to opposing views.

• Beware narrow framing. In the book “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors explain that a straightforward way to improve decision-making is to avoid limiting the scope of the frame. A decision is rarely just a “yes” or “no.” There are always multiple options, so have at least three available for any decision.

Conclusion

Decision-makers frequently need more information, time, and experience to make complex decisions. A study by Bain found that business performance seems 95% correlated to the effectiveness of decisions. Decision intelligence systems improve efficacy by explaining and justifying the decisions, learning from past decisions’ feedback, and comparing the impact to improve decision effectiveness.

Decision intelligence is a crucial tool that can help you make better decisions. By combining data science, AI, and human expertise, DI can help reduce uncertainty and improve effectiveness. However, DI has its challenges and limitations. You must be aware of these risks and take steps to mitigate them.

The post How to use decision intelligence to tackle complex business challenges appeared first on MarTech.

While not shocking, what stood out was their approach to the role and perceived context of the market. Why such a stark difference? Was it them or the client I was advising at the time? How do we collectively evaluate a fit to make an offer?

CMO candidates and selection committees don’t have it easy

CMOs have one of the most difficult jobs on an executive team. Hiring one can be equally challenging. Companies must triangulate the changing business landscape, mixed CMO responsibilities and varied candidate pools. In turn, CMOs must craft a moving target narrative to match those evolving expectations.

I’ve worked with hundreds of marketing and go-to-market leaders. We discovered and used a few insights to help us along. These are from an investor’s perspective and part of our greater efforts on resilient growth and cross-organizational value creation.

Within those engagements, we evaluated five CMO and one head of marketing roles. Several topics stood out about the candidates and selection committees.

1. Overlooking internal candidates

Personally, I tend to look closer at internal candidates. In three of five cases, there was a prevailing mindset that a new GTM or brand value strategy must always be external hires.

As an internal candidate

Prove that you have taken an alternative approach to your predecessor and can still navigate existing relationships. Most CEOs and boards who want a new CMO seek one that can think differently and execute well.

As a selection committee

Unless the GTM strategy is a pivot, look closer to internal candidates. Even those that have less experience have more incumbent advantages. Existing relationships, processes, knowledge and onboarding mean less time to value.

Also, you can incentivize these candidates with coaching and mentoring. It also speaks to a healthy retention culture. If there are no closely qualified internal candidates, then it could be worth revisiting and investing more in retention, talent management and succession planning strategies.

Dig deeper: Why you don’t need a CMO… yet

2. Siloed CMOs

A siloed CMO is a growth inhibitor. The most valued asset a CMO brings is maximizing the brand value of the product or service in the market. Among many things, modern marketing builds brand value and a stronger engagement with the marketplace. 

CMOs must integrate throughout as they serve as a conduit of energy and sentiment internally with the brand and the marketplace. That said, a CMO needs to gain interest and synthesize even more about the rest of the company.

As an internal candidate

You must understand how other C-suite leaders make decisions and navigate challenges. Illustrate this in your interviews. 

More importantly, as part of your personal brand, continue to share your curated insights and tips on this. They need to tell a story beyond marketing best practices.

As a selection committee

It’s not the CEO and board’s job to hold the CMO’s hand. But, if they show insightfulness, initiative and business empathy, it is critical to open doors and smooth out your reactions to their plans. 

When evaluating candidates, look for those stories of internal motivation, also how that translated into value creation across the organization.

3. CMO evangelists make poor candidates

For one of the companies, marketing was less of a priority. They had a “figurehead” and storyteller. This CMO severely lacked operational and organizational experience. Without an internal connection across the organization, the CMO came across as disconnected and lacking authenticity. 

The CEO must showcase the cornerstone of the brand and the purpose of the company. Evangelists primarily engage in the marketplace. CMOs primarily own the connective ecosystem and engagement. 

As an internal candidate

I am a huge fan of evangelists and, behind the scenes, have helped build and support evangelists. I’ve seen how their broad research and seasoned insights can be a boon in marketplace-level conversation. Also, they can provide innovative concepts from industry engagement. 

But CMOs whose primary talents are showing up to events, panels, podcasts and interviews make for poor operators and often poor leaders. Too much self-focus leaves little spotlight and attention for others. 

If you want to change that image, learn the platform, build a valuable use case and demonstrate it. For services, it’s a bit more challenging. Though standout candidates either adapt a version of this or invest time and help deeper within the sales process.

As a selection committee

Besides listening for “we” in interviews, I found top candidates showed culture building that encouraged ownership, experimentation, skill/experience training and collaboration. 

Sometimes marketing is less of a priority depending on headwinds. Top candidates in these cases discussed retention, education, partnership and community initiatives.

4. Correctly weighting tech capabilities

Originally from a computer and software engineer background, I surprised everyone, including myself, at how little weight I put on tech capabilities. Like traditional tech leaders, CMO candidates may not know how to use the latest code tools and languages, but they can add massive value by optimizing and positioning the impact of the stack on the business or ecosystem. “Why” is greater than “how.” 

Value creation is more important than stack perfection.

As an internal candidate

As CMO, it’s not important to know how to use these stacks. Instead, it is good to know what is in your core tech and which are the game-changing platforms/tools. 

Be ready to describe:

• How some major tech initiatives did at your last/current firm if any.
• How your brand value or productivity improved.
• What it enabled for the business.

As a selection committee

We’ve seen position descriptions shooting for the moon. It’s certainly unnecessary to filter out or give added weight to a CMO candidate based on the technology they oversee under their group. (Once, a candidate initially filtered out because of the “tech” mismatch, eventually became our selected candidate.) Another important success factor is how a candidate builds value-added relationships with vendors.

Dig deeper: 5 CMO tips to transform marketing operations from killer to dream fulfiller

5. Be prepared, but not hyper-personalized

While hyper-personalization may apply to customer relationship tactics, it gets too creepy in the selection process. 

It tends to come across as inauthentic, possibly overcompensating and showing a level of insecurity.

As an internal candidate

Key research on the company is a must. Over-indexing your deep and even personal research of interviewers can lead to an out-of-context situation or inappropriate behavior. For example, we had two candidates in two separate processes surprise interviewers with highly personal gifts during the interview.

Personalized thank you notes, within the context of the interview, are still most welcome. Stay within those boundaries. 

As a selection committee

The flip side is true as well. HR is required to do background research. However, interviewers who make assumptions about a candidate’s non-relevant history can lead to uncomfortable or inappropriate conversations. 

The hobbies/interests questions are a good way to get to know more about a candidate but stay within the rails of what they provide you.

Finding the right CMO role or candidate

There are many criteria you will use in your unique processes. In ours, the above points helped us differentiate between good and great candidates. They often weighed (positively or negatively) more than some traditional criteria.

Regardless of the experiences, I too am constantly learning and evolving my thinking. I certainly urge a constant curiosity about the role, changing perceptions and value opportunities within an executive team. These will be great additions to your selection process and support your business goals.

The post 5 ways to find standout CMO candidates appeared first on MarTech.

Below is the video’s full transcript.

Hi, everybody. It’s been a couple of days since the MarTech Conference in Boston, and I am still digesting all the great takeaways from it. But one thing that’s been running through my head has been, and it’s sort of an overall sentiment was, wow, I just feel like I received modern advanced training from executive management.

Hi, my name is Anand Thaker with IntelliPhi. You’ve probably seen me engaged in various aspects of the martech industry and lately, I’ve been leveraging martech as a lens and inspiration to elevate growth leaders and investors.

It’s been an exciting year for martech overall. Right? We’ve seen a flurry of acquisitions. We’ve seen lots of change and a rapid evolution of leadership. And we also know that the profession has been working to build these matching bookends – leadership and customer-centricity.

I thought the speakers did a great job in their sessions of not only how do you build those bookends but how to fill in between very nicely. I wanted to take you down three different themes that I saw throughout the conference.

The first is agility and disruption. If customers are dynamic, shouldn’t leadership and the talent be enabled and empowered to help business operations match that cadence? You know, extrapolating for that new evolution Scott Brinker talks to us and shares with us this concept of platforming marketing and how that is leading into these different levels of maturity throughout the organization starting from the voice of the customer, the customer experience within marketing.

Agile, elevates us from one stage of the next is where Matt LeMay comes in with the spirited support of his turtle, Sheldon, where they take us down a journey of agile adoption from denial to adoption. He also reminds us, and I got to hear this from some observations from fellow moderator Jeff Eckman and privacy expert Duane Schulz, where we all kind of heard this concept and where cross-functional approach is necessary to better understand the customer, but also to orchestrate how you engage with that customer and continue to build on that community. Marketing, technology and management as nearly and completely blended.

Also, while martech is transforming marketing, it’s also serving as inspiration on how the organization needs to change, and it’s creating that transformation.

One of my favorite analysts, Charlene Li, is the principal analyst at Altimeter Group. You may have heard of some of her books, “Groundswell” and “Open Leadership.” She’s recently released “Disruption Mindset,” which details how this is done. We got a taste of this at the conference. In her session she talks about these secret ingredients within strategy, leadership in culture, on why some companies make the transformation and thrive and others struggle through transformation or struggled after a transformation.

The second theme wasn’t necessarily about data, but it was really talking about how do you advance your tech focus beyond the acquisition of data? Right? So the second theme was about intelligence privacy. Oh yeah, and that operational thing where, guess what? It is the competitive advantage for next-generation brands. Smarter orchestration, adaptable operations, anything from taxonomy and personalization to privacy and attribution.

One of things fellow moderator and executive recruiter extraordinaire Erica Seidel talks about is this idea that there were a lot of conversations around the struggle between orchestrating, being creepy and the idea of convenience. So is it CDP? I heard this in one of the sessions is a CDP or CDB? So with that joke aside, we’re actually moving beyond the definition of customer data platforms. A lot of the focus has started to become how do we, more importantly, move from these disparate data sources and start to value and justify the investment in a centralized data source.

Of course, the next thing AI who isn’t talking about “to AI or not to AI.”  But I particularly loved Chris Penn’s session who really opened the box about AI and the practical uses in building a toolkit for marketing.

The third theme is marketing is facing an identity crisis. Perry Hewitt, Erica Seidel and Anita Brearton all held sessions that explored how to give yourself permission. One of the eight P’s of marketing, as Scott had delivered on his opening talk, will emerge beyond just order taking on tactics and starting to drive strategy.

So there’s tons to marinate on. What did I miss?

Please share your comments and thoughts. We look forward to seeing you in San Jose at the next event in April 2020.

The post MarTech East 2019: Anand Thaker on what’s next for martech in 2020 appeared first on MarTech.

1. Agility and disruption are needed to elevate us from where we are to where we want to be.
2. Answering the question about how we advance technology beyond the acquisition of data.
3. Marketing’s identity crisis. We need to move beyond just order taking on tactics and start to drive strategy.

Below is the video’s full transcript.

Hi, everybody. It’s been a couple of days since the MarTech Conference in Boston, and I am still digesting all the great takeaways from it. But one thing that’s been running through my head has been, and it’s sort of an overall sentiment was, wow, I just feel like I received modern advanced training from executive management.

Hi, my name is Anand Thaker with IntelliPhi. You’ve probably seen me engaged in various aspects of the martech industry and lately I’ve been leveraging martech as a lens and inspiration to elevate growth leaders and investors.

It’s been an exciting year for martech overall. Right? We’ve seen a flurry of acquisitions. We’ve seen lots of change and a rapid evolution of leadership. And we also know that the profession has been working to build these matching bookends – leadership and customer-centricity.

I thought the speakers did a great job in their sessions of not only how do you build those bookends but how to fill in between very nicely. I wanted to take you down three different themes that I saw throughout the conference.

The first is agility and disruption. If customers are dynamic, shouldn’t leadership and the talent be enabled and empowered to help business operations match that cadence? You know, extrapolating for that new evolution Scott Brinker talks to us and shares with us this concept of platforming marketing and how that is leading into these different levels of maturity throughout the organization starting from the voice of the customer, the customer experience within marketing.

Agile, elevates us from one stage of the next is where Matt LeMay comes in with the spirited support of his turtle, Sheldon, where they take us down a journey of agile adoption from denial to adoption. He also reminds us, and I got to hear this from some observations from fellow moderator Jeff Eckman and privacy expert Duane Schulz, where we all kind of heard this concept and where cross-functional approach is necessary to better understand the customer, but also to orchestrate how you engage with that customer and continue to build on that community. Marketing, technology and management as nearly and completely blended.

Also, while martech is transforming marketing, it’s also serving as inspiration on how the organization needs to change, and it’s creating that transformation.

One of my favorite analysts, Charlene Li, is the principal analyst at Altimeter Group. You may have heard of some of her books, “Groundswell” and “Open Leadership.” She’s recently released “Disruption Mindset,” which details how this is done. We got a taste of this at the conference. In her session she talks about these secret ingredients within strategy, leadership in culture, on why some companies make the transformation and thrive and others struggle through transformation or struggled after a transformation.

The second theme wasn’t necessarily about data, but it was really talking about how do you advance your tech focus beyond the acquisition of data? Right? So the second theme was about intelligence privacy. Oh yeah, and that operational thing where, guess what? It is the competitive advantage for next-generation brands. Smarter orchestration, adaptable operations, anything from taxonomy and personalization to privacy and attribution.

One of things fellow moderator and executive recruiter extraordinaire Erica Seidel talks about is this idea that there were a lot of conversations around the struggle between orchestrating, being creepy and the idea of convenience. So is it CDP? I heard this in one of the sessions is a CDP or CDB? So with that joke aside, we’re actually moving beyond the definition of customer data platforms. A lot of the focus has started to become how do we, more importantly, move from these disparate data sources and start to value and justify the investment in a centralized data source.

Of course, the next thing AI who isn’t talking about “to AI or not to AI.”  But I particularly loved Chris Penn’s session who really opened the box about AI and the practical uses in building a toolkit for marketing.

The third theme is marketing is facing an identity crisis. Perry Hewitt, Erica Seidel and Anita Brearton all held sessions that explored how to give yourself permission. One of the eight P’s of marketing, as Scott had delivered on his opening talk, will emerge beyond just order taking on tactics and starting to drive strategy.

So there’s tons to marinate on. What did I miss?

Please share your comments and thoughts. We look forward to seeing you in San Jose at the next event in April 2020.

The post Anand Thaker on what’s next for martech in 2020 appeared first on MarTech.

Start monitoring the CMO role.

Lately, we saw a flurry of announcements that brands are eliminating, at least for now, the chief marketing officer (CMO) position. Notable brands such as Uber, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, JNJ, Taco Bell and Hyatt have either distributed the responsibilities or keep the position unfilled.

Here are some of the headwinds:

From ego to empathy

Once upon a time, we revolved our lifestyle around what brands produced and brand-centric messages. Today, the more empowered, interconnected and dynamic consumers have essentially turned the tables on this model. Consumers are now telling brands what to make, deliver and even how to do it. As a result of this evolution, the consumer became a greater part of the product and changing the way a company does business. “Listening” with empathy is vital to adapt for a brand’s continued growth.

The digital consumer-to-brand shortcut

The impact of this direct to consumer shortcut was gradual. Then suddenly, the momentum accelerated. As brand value shifted to consumers, it launched even the most talented CMOs, in-house teams and supporting agencies into unfamiliar territory. CMOs faced further challenges because they were not empowered to impact product, innovation or operational parts of the organization with their insights. Especially in digital transformations, empowering the right marketing leadership to navigate operations across the organization enables brands to pounce on new opportunities and defensive strategies.

Nextgen CMOs are real unicorns

CMOs have to be empowered with more than creative. Latest stats indicate that CMO tenures dropped to 43 months, less than half of CEOs. Also, CEOs are challenged with how to recruit and hire that magical mix of right and left brain experience and newly developed leadership skills. The actual opportunity and reputation costs of a wrong hire (and their respective team) can easily cost not only the CEO’s job, but tens to hundreds of millions in revenue. Perhaps this challenge is the most impactful justifications for the trend on deferring the hiring of CMO roles.

What are these signals?

Brands are evaluating 2020 plans into the next decade on growth strategies. What a company will do with the CMO role will make a statement. The background of this new executive could provide insight on the growth strategy. Some examples include:

Unfilled – Still undecided on growth strategy.

PR + Communication – Focus on storytelling and evangelising the value of the brand.

Community + CX – Build or expand on the larger ecosystem of community, partnerships, advocates and the overall customer experience with the brand.

Innovation/Digital – Transformation not only of marketing, but expanding the operation and insight collaboration across the organization.

Product – Discovering new revenue streams, expanding offerings.

Revenue – Optimize and enhance the pipeline.

Retention – Improve customer success and developing advocates.

Culture – Responsible in shifting the recruitment, optimization and retention of talent. 

Who will be the voice of customers in the boardroom?

In a world where CEOs have started to embrace missions beyond quarterly shareholder value, relationships are the brand and community is the asset.

Let’s keep in mind marketing and the CMO role are entering another state of evolution. In some cases, it is a revolution. The hot debate on who serves as the “voice of the customer” in the boardroom will continue to, and should, rage on.

CEOs must be agile to match consumer needs. In the meantime, CMOs must think like a CEO to both grow and earn a seat at the boardroom. It’s entirely possible that the CMO position may evolve to be replaced as appropriate with a boardroom level role of Chief Growth Officer. This may not just be a title change, but set a new bar for operational and experiential customer whisperers.

The post Want to understand a brand’s vision for future growth? Look to the CMO role appeared first on MarTech.

As customer experience and centricity shifts are happening in the marketplace, it’s no coincidence we are seeing the marketing mindset play a greater role beyond the marketing department.

Here are my Martech ‘predictions’ through 2020:

Slower core innovation leads teams back to the customer’s experience

Crazy, right?

We won’t see much in the way of pure tech advancements in martech for a couple of years. With 6,829 marketing technology companies and research showing inefficiencies in technology use, marketing leaders are forced to regroup. Genuine innovation will either improve on management of the stack or through better use of existing tech in the queue. We’ve not even come close to leveraging AI, data or conversationals full potential.

While you can take a breath on that front, don’t expect the number of technologies, vendors or new tactics to slow anytime soon.

Innovation drive tends to have a coil funnel effect. From the start, we circle back and forth as we fundamentally progress and grow. AI and data are strong contenders for technological innovation in other areas of tech. Marketing is still navigating stewardship of data, connecting tech to match CX, better organize agile teams to orchestrate. Our industry will have some of the greatest tests in leveraging innovation, but also create the largest strides for the business community to follow.

Powerful innovation will come in connecting tech and data, collaborative teams, better customer relationships, orchestration and smarter investment decisions. Ask yourself if the innovation will uncover or magnify your team’s capabilities.

Greater utilization and faster adoption strengthen teams

As marketers and companies are approaching a calm in the storm, we are now gaining a better understanding of our respective digital strategy alongside how to organize teams. With any “new” technology or tactic that comes out, we will see greater adoption of the tools that are remaining in our stacks.

Adoption has been lagging the pace of marketing technology growth. According to the 2018  Maximizing the Value of Martech Innovations report, 63 percent of marketing organizations feel the landscape has rapidly evolved, but only 28 percent feel they are keeping pace.

As those stacks now have an opportunity to crystallize better, marketing technologist will see a significant increase in utilization. This will, of course, make it more difficult for vendors to penetrate established customer bases. As a result, vendors will accelerate building larger platform moats either through build or buy strategies.

Training, professional services and consultative implementation and support, and strategic advisory services will be on the rise. Take advantage of them. We have some incredibly smart people in our discipline.

Smarter productivity and collaboration tech empowers greater team agility

A common sentiment about automation tools in sales and marketing was they rarely automated anything. However, fast forward a decade and we see a plethora of tools and platforms which are incorporating smarter algorithms and better insights to enable us with greater intelligence. According to McKinsey, innovative business collaboration techniques can improve your company’s productivity by 20 to 30 percent. These trends toward higher productivity and collaboration will become paramount toward meeting ever-stretched growth goals. This is where true near-term innovation will come.

Hustling individually is wasteful. Successful growth-driven teams will push collaboratively, coupled with intelligence. Encourage a culture of experimentation and continuing education. Ensuring that you’ve empowered and emboldened your teams will create greater collaboration, especially across silos.

Operations tunes the marketing, sales, customer and product orchestration

Sales and marketing have taken up much of the conversation around account-based strategies, sales enablement and data/AI strategies. Few know better than I, the tremendous number of Martech tools and cross-organizational tactics that we are asked to evaluate, implement or experiment. The operations functions within marketing and sales are helping ground and create a disciplined approach towards tech and intelligence for greater productivity and utilization. By 2020, we’ll see successful companies have collaborative and robust marketing operations functions within and beyond the department.

Invest in an orchestrator of technology and operations. If you are in early stage, high-growth mode, empower your marketing operations lead with purchase decisions and ensure they stay light on tech, heavy on enablement. As you grow in needs and respectively marketing technology solutions, don’t be afraid to blow it all up and start again. Plan your data and process strategy to remain resilient to those changes.

The era of the Chief Growth Officer is renewed

I’ve long been observing and successfully navigating companies and investments mainly based in part on evaluating executive talent. I’ve defined 11 traits of these growth leaders and “thinking like a CEO” is at the top. As brands are defined by customers and the marketplace, its sensible that marketing background is critical for companies to grow.

The CMO has long been a focus of mine and where the future of marketing leaders take them beyond the department. Over three years ago, my push to see not only tenures grow for CMOs but where they own more responsibility for stewards of the company. One avenue is more CMOs on boards and as strong contenders for future CEOs positions. One conduit between those roles is the Chief Growth Officer (CGO) returning from its 2004 popularity. This board-level role works across departments and has responsibilities in line with the top line revenue like CROs and bottom line like COOs/CFOs.

Brand CMOs, your intuition and judgment about customers and the marketplace will become a central and critically unique skill. Further, enhance your capabilities with operational and cross-departmental experience to gain a board-level seat and promotional opportunities.

Resilience is core to growth

The continuation of the growth officer and marketing technology leaders is the need to incorporate resilience into the future growth of a brand. These risk management discussions typically found into operational and finance are now a responsibility for marketers. These risks occur far more quickly, cut deep and snowballs. Drops in customer satisfaction, AI ethics went awry, a tweet heard around the world and trust mismanagement is just a few unique to marketing.

At least twice a year, model and play out situations that could be detrimental to the brand. Have everyone understand these ‘wargame’ scenarios are a great way to ensure that your teams and organization are on the same page about early warning signs, policies and procedures to handle things that come up.

Balancing human decisions with Intelligence and automation

Use of Intelligence and entry-level AI are becoming table stakes. A person makes 35,000 decisions a day and that doesn’t include the elevated responsibilities of marketing leaders. There’s no trait that will become more important to the future of a marketer’s career trajectory than decisioning. Not only merely making strategic decisions, but think about responsibility for the people and technologies that are also decisions! With automation, data and analytics, our ability to make decisions are critical. AI-enablement and empowerment can only magnify you and your team’s strengths.

Develop a training and feedback process to democratize data, the narration of information and the flow of decision making.

Final remarks

The pendulum is swinging toward enhancing the human experience as it relates to how we digitally engage. Technology only magnifies the people, process and data behind them. To win into the next decade is to understand ourselves and our agility better to engage across silos.

The post Martech in 2020: Agility, operations and decisioning are vital to success appeared first on MarTech.