SlideShare a Scribd company logo
How Agile for Marketing drives
better performance
Conquering Top
CMO Challenges
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
To Understand Customers Better
To Cope with Rapid Change
To Align with Company Goals
To Foster More Experimentation
To Measure Marketing Performance
page oneWhat Keeps You Up at Night?
page twelveThe Agile Answer
2
4
6
8
10
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 1
Marketing hasn’t just changed.
Marketing is in a state of constant change.
As such, the role and responsibilities of the CMO are also in flux. While still suffering shorter tenure than
other C-level officers, CMOs are expected to do more, know more and impact more of the business.
Delivering greater impact on an organization, managing a higher volume of work, and juggling the
multitude of demands on today’s marketer require new ways of working. To achieve the step-change in
performance of the marketing team can’t be about doing what you are doing
better or faster. It has to be about operating differently to drive increased
efficiency and effectiveness. Marketers need to adopt a more data-driven,
disciplined approach to marketing operations that is centered on a test-and-learn
culture, enabling companies to iterate and have the flexibility to manage change.
This E-Book shows how a new approach to marketing
operations and culture, Agile for Marketing (A4M), can
begin to address many of these modern challenges.
 
DATA
DISCIPLINE
DRIVING ROI
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 2
To Understand Customers Better . . .
Asked ‘what keeps you up at night?’
CMOs top answer: ‘Creating sustainable
and engaging customer relationships and
improving customer experience.’
- Korn Ferry Institute
We recommend CMOs BECOME A CHANGE
AGENT FOR CUSTOMER CENTRICITY;
equip and empower the marketing group to drive this
agenda across the organization.
- CMO Council
The biggest mistake by B2B marketers is that they don’t
know their customers well enough.
– Forrester B2B Benchmark
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 3
{ }
Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
The number of CMOs and lead marketers who insights become the backbone of the work to
be done to grow segments, achieve marketing
KPIs, and set priorities that will drive value for
the customer and the business. The objective
is to assure that marketing efforts will
meet (or anticipate) the customer at each
touch point along the buying journey.
As part of the A4M discovery process,
agile teams work to define the customer
accurately through reviewing customer data,
interviewing both external customers and
internal stakeholders, as well as reviewing
survey data to help map out what they know
about the customer and to identify gaps. One
of the first A4M projects may be creating an
analytics solution to use thereafter.
name customer insight and understanding
as a key challenge is staggering. We often
hear about all the data available today, but
marketers still struggle with making that
data valuable on a customer level. Analysts
foresee marketing getting more and more
personalized; but to get there, we simply have
to do better at understanding and addressing
each customer in a personalized manner.
Agile for marketing (A4M) starts with the
customer front and center with a customer
discovery process that works through the
customer motivations, personality and buying
process to develop a clear understanding
of the personas, customer journey, and how
to best influence the customer to take the
next step with your product or service. These
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 4
To Cope with Rapid Change . . .
“The digital world is moving so fast—I can’t
seem to keep up with all the change and
its impact on resources.”
– CMOs in TrinityP3 Survey
Top issues in next ten years: Real-time marketing
– responding to customers and changes in the
marketplace faster. DEALING WITH SPEED IS
A BIG CHALLENGE and a big opportunity.
- Gartner Digital Marketing Hype
81%of marketing leaders surveyed said their
role will change in the next three years.
							 - Adobe Summit
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 5
{ }
The rapid pace of change in our world is
the new normal. The immediacy of digital
interactions with customers and the ease
with which any news—good or bad—can
be shared around the world have raised
the stakes for all brands. A4M helps you
manage these challenges by breaking
down your planning and delivery into
shorter time frames that give the team
the ability to adjust.
With A4M, annual and quarterly plans are
broken down into two-week plan-execute-
learn cycles. CMOs and their teams plan for
EXECUTE
Be Flexible in Planning
marketing effort doesn’t perform – the teams
can easily change course for the next sprint.
Each quarter is kicked off with clear goals and
objectives and budget estimates, but how
those goals are attained is flexible and can
shift until you reach the optimal result.
PLAN
LEARN
the year only at the highest level with their
vision and top-line goals. Teams then break
the work product down to items that can be
delivered in short time frames so you can get
them into market and learn.
Shorter time frames give the team the ability
to re-assess and adjust as they go. Work is
prioritized, but if those priorities change, the
market changes and you need to react, or your
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 6
To Align with Company Goals . . .
“Companies with strong marketing and sales
alignment achieve 20% annual revenue
growth vs. non-aligned which have a 4%
decline.”
– Aberdeen Research
“43% of CMOs surveyed (the overwhelming top
answer) said that the inability to align department
strategies and priorities was a hurdle to success.”
– Korn Ferry CMO Survey
“32% surveyed report dysfunction and friction over
priorities across the company as A BARRIER TO
BEING THE MARKETER THEY WANT
TO BE.”
– Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 7
{ }
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
A4M helps your organization set priorities
for the long and short term to place the
most important work at the front of the line.
The process helps drive alignment across
departments and silos about which products,
segments,andgeographiesaremostimportant
to the growth of the company. When
strategic priorities are clear, marketing can
be much more effective and efficient for
you and your team. With clear direction,
they can be more proactive in doing the
work that will help grow the business versus
reacting to the work requested by the rest
of the organization.
Marketing is notorious for fire drills. A big
customer, an executive, or a sales manager
can run to marketing with an “emergency”
that takes over the workday and disrupts the
Make Priorities a Priority
team. A4M imposes a discipline that holds
the team and leadership to the agreed upon
priorities. In other words, A4M helps you
value things that matter over things that
are urgent. When teams don’t prioritize their
work, the long-term initiatives that may be
more innovative and create more meaningful
advancements may never get off the ground.
The agile process also introduces a level of
transparency that most organizations are not
used to. With A4M, marketing’s work stack is
clear, the rest of the organization knows what
marketing is working on, and marketing is
reporting out every two weeks on what they
learned and where they are heading next.
This transparency helps drive conversations
about priorities and aligns marketing with
wider organizational priorities.
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 8
To Foster More Experimentation. . .
“Over 50% of lead marketer respondents
said that marketing should take more
risks, but only 30% consider themselves risk
takers.”
– Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey
“A full 80% of marketers tap into multiple
methods­—TESTING & EXPERIMENTING—
LESS THAN HALF THE TIME.”
-Adobe Digital Marketing Optimization Study
“65% of marketers say they are more
comfortable adopting new technologies once they
become mainstream.”
– Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 9
{ }
Most marketing leaders recognize they
need to build a more experimental test-
and-learn approach to marketing delivery
and management. By embracing a culture
of experimentation, marketing teams will
be able to assess efficacy on a smaller scale
and then adjust to improve and/or scale up
more broadly. The smaller bets and short time
frames of Agile for Marketing enable less risky
trials of new technologies, new messaging
or new creative. A4M is about mitigating the
risk in spending too much time and effort on
something when the payout is unknown.
Try, Try and Try Again
RAPID CYCLES
With the need to deliver aspects of work
every 2 weeks (sprint), larger projects are
broken down into smaller work product
that can be delivered, put in market, and
learned from more rapidly than is done
today. This enables companies to test new
approaches and get quick market learning
that will help inform how to best proceed
with the initiative.
FORMAL REVIEWS
We refer to our A4M sprints as “rapid learning
cycles” because each sprint ends with two
meetings, the Review and the Retrospective,
which serve as opportunities to present work,
share results and re-confirm priorities. Teams
present how a trial activity has gone, if and how
to improve it, and whether or not to scale it. If
something new was tried and failed, the amount
of money and time expended are limited.
RAPID LEARNING CYCLES
Agile marketing fosters experimentation in two keys ways:
“
What keeps YOU
		 up at night?”
www.cmgpartners.com Page 10
To Measure Marketing Performance . . .
40% of CMOs lack the ability to prove
short-term ROI, and 34% lack the ability
to prove it in the long-term.
– Duke Fuqua CMO Survey
What’s the biggest factor for low CMO tenure? 56%
answered, “…inability to directly CONNECT
MARKETING EFFORTS TO TANGIBLE
BUSINESS OUTCOMES.”
- Korn Ferry Institute
60% of CMOs feel pressure from CEO and/or Board
of Directors to prove value of marketing. 58% say that
pressure is increasing.
				 – Duke Fuqua CMO Survey
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 11
{ }
Marketing has long been challenged to prove
the contribution of marketing spend to business
impact. While this is not new, the sheer speed
of marketing, changing customer behaviors,
urgency of new requests, and competing
priorities has compounded the issue. Marketing
leaders frequently cite a need to keep the team
focused on the things that matter, to increase
accountability and to drive a performance
culture within the marketing team.
Agile for Marketing aims to increase
the marketing productivity of the team,
but also the marketing performance.
The iterative nature of the learning cycles
focuses teams on getting better over time,
measuring results, learning what is working
and not working, and making adjustments
accordingly. It helps align teams against clear
Be Accountable First
priorities to ensure that they don’t lose sight
of the long-term objectives – where they need
to get better and which new and innovative
marketing programs to test. A4M teams build
the priorities and clear definitions of what they
are trying to achieve into the process so CMOs
are able to drive accountability against delivery
and performance.
While it’s vital to have the right tools and
data to prove a contribution is critical, it’s
also crucial to build the operating rhythm
that supports a performance-driven culture.
Driving accountability within the organization
is a good starting point. Prioritizing data and
measurement components is something that
can be done over time. One of our clients
has a new measurement enhancement that is
completed every sprint to incrementally get
better at their measurement capability. With
A4M, they have the discipline to actually use
the data to enhance decision-making.
The A4M approach obligates
companies to stay on course
with the goals to which they
have committed. Teams build the
priorities—and their acceptance
criteria—into the process.
STAY THE
COURSE
The CMG Way
www.cmgpartners.com Page 12
{ }
	 Brands that are nimble enough
to react in real time are winning…you
must now be able to ideate and execute
faster and cheaper than ever in order
to keep up with culture. This is a trend
that will never reverse, so we better get
used to it.”
– Tor Myhren, worldwide chief creative officer, Grey
CMG Partners is a marketing
consultancy with over 17 years of
experience leading companies to
create more growth. When you
are ready to get agile, we work
with you to assess your marketing
organization’sAgileReadiness.Based
on that profile, we design, coach and
implement a custom A4M program
to fit your current needs. It’s time to
perform better, accomplish more and
work smarter. It’s time to be agile.
Please contact our A4M experts:
Garrett.Putman@cmgpartners.com
Russ.Lange@cmgpartners.com
The changes needed in marketing are not
superficial. They are structural and cultural—
one might even say transformational. It’s a big
shift to address the public demands of mobile,
social, always-on consumers. Customers
have completely changed their methods of
shopping, viewing ads, and interacting with
brands. Marketing needs to respond in kind.
“ More and more, marketers are looking
at agile processes to help them act more
quickly, respond more effectively to
customers, and prove their value to the
company and its goals. You may think agile
is just a buzzword, but it’s actually a proven
methodology that over 90% of all software
developers use to work smarter and more
efficiently, and now is being used globally
by pioneering marketing departments. *
CMOs who want to excel in today’s market
will need to stop defending their territory
and working the way they always have. It’s
time to organize your team around clear
priorities, effective ROI measurement and
an data-driven customer focus. It’s time for
change. It’s time for Agile for Marketing.
The Agile Answer
*VersionOne “9th Annual State of Agile”
Thank you
THE END

More Related Content

PDF
Marketing Velocity and the 5 Keys to Making the Cash Register Ring
PDF
Marketing Agility: The Missing Metric?
PDF
Rethinking the Role of Marketing
PDF
10 Things every Sales Manager Should Know about Sales Performance
PDF
2015 Guide to the “CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies” Infogr...
PDF
The ultimate guide to sales enablement of direct sales teams
PDF
CRMT- A Roadmap for Marketing Automation Success
PDF
Demystifying marketing-clouds
Marketing Velocity and the 5 Keys to Making the Cash Register Ring
Marketing Agility: The Missing Metric?
Rethinking the Role of Marketing
10 Things every Sales Manager Should Know about Sales Performance
2015 Guide to the “CMO Technology Blueprint for Midsize B2B Companies” Infogr...
The ultimate guide to sales enablement of direct sales teams
CRMT- A Roadmap for Marketing Automation Success
Demystifying marketing-clouds

What's hot (20)

PDF
Is the-future-of-sales-ops-as-successful-process-innovators
PDF
CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms
PDF
Your completecrm handbook-8
PDF
Sales-Leaders-Guide-to-Building-a-Revenue-Generating-Machine
PDF
The Secret to Building a Sales Enablement Powerhouse
PDF
My Awesome Guide to Marketing Automation Success
PPTX
The Death of the B2B Sales Rep 1.0
PDF
20 top sales_leaders_reveal_their_biggest_productivity_secrets
PDF
Strategic role product management
PDF
Marketing Automation: putting potential to work
PDF
Successful Marketing Starts With A Strategy
PDF
Beyond limits. The future of B2B Sales
PPTX
Sales and Marketing Alignment: How to Accelerate Revenue Growth
PPTX
CRM 101 – The Value of Implementing CRM Software
PDF
Trade Marketing The Ultimate Guide
PDF
Webinar Slides - An Empowered Sales Rep Becomes A Content Concierge
PDF
Rethinking Sales and Marketing alignment: [How Marketing will help close deals]
PDF
4 ways to improve your customer performance measurement
DOCX
How Great Processes Drive Business Growth
PDF
Visible Impact -- Sales Playbooks
Is the-future-of-sales-ops-as-successful-process-innovators
CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms
Your completecrm handbook-8
Sales-Leaders-Guide-to-Building-a-Revenue-Generating-Machine
The Secret to Building a Sales Enablement Powerhouse
My Awesome Guide to Marketing Automation Success
The Death of the B2B Sales Rep 1.0
20 top sales_leaders_reveal_their_biggest_productivity_secrets
Strategic role product management
Marketing Automation: putting potential to work
Successful Marketing Starts With A Strategy
Beyond limits. The future of B2B Sales
Sales and Marketing Alignment: How to Accelerate Revenue Growth
CRM 101 – The Value of Implementing CRM Software
Trade Marketing The Ultimate Guide
Webinar Slides - An Empowered Sales Rep Becomes A Content Concierge
Rethinking Sales and Marketing alignment: [How Marketing will help close deals]
4 ways to improve your customer performance measurement
How Great Processes Drive Business Growth
Visible Impact -- Sales Playbooks
Ad

Similar to CMG.Ebook.CMOsChallenges (20)

PPTX
Building an Agile for Marketing Strategy by CMG Partners for MENG
PPTX
Agile for Marketing 101 - The Backlog Series
PPTX
Building an Agile for Marketing Strategy by CMG Partners
PDF
Driving Market Impact by Operationalizing Agile Marketing
PPTX
Driving Market Impact through Operationalizing Agile Marketing
PDF
"Adopt Agile Marketing to Keep Pace with the Speed of Digital" CMG
PDF
MEET YOUR NEW CMO
PPTX
Charlotte AMA: Market 2016 Technology & Agile Marketing
PPTX
Boston Content Marketing Forum July 2014 By Frank Days
PDF
Rethinking the marketing function in a world of accelerating change - Tom Nic...
PPTX
Agile marketing
PPTX
An Introduction to Agile Marketing
PPT
The New Role of Marketing in a Networked Global Economy
PDF
Introduction to Agile Marketing
PPTX
MarTech 2017 - CMG's Agile Marketing in the Enterprise
PPTX
Agile Marketing: Managing Marketing in High Gear
PPTX
Rebranding Agile: How Marketers are Changing the Way they Work for Real-time ...
PDF
Becoming an Agile Marketing Team: The beginner's guide to managing creative ...
PPTX
What are the Best Real Life Examples of Agile Marketing?
PDF
Rise of the agile cmo
Building an Agile for Marketing Strategy by CMG Partners for MENG
Agile for Marketing 101 - The Backlog Series
Building an Agile for Marketing Strategy by CMG Partners
Driving Market Impact by Operationalizing Agile Marketing
Driving Market Impact through Operationalizing Agile Marketing
"Adopt Agile Marketing to Keep Pace with the Speed of Digital" CMG
MEET YOUR NEW CMO
Charlotte AMA: Market 2016 Technology & Agile Marketing
Boston Content Marketing Forum July 2014 By Frank Days
Rethinking the marketing function in a world of accelerating change - Tom Nic...
Agile marketing
An Introduction to Agile Marketing
The New Role of Marketing in a Networked Global Economy
Introduction to Agile Marketing
MarTech 2017 - CMG's Agile Marketing in the Enterprise
Agile Marketing: Managing Marketing in High Gear
Rebranding Agile: How Marketers are Changing the Way they Work for Real-time ...
Becoming an Agile Marketing Team: The beginner's guide to managing creative ...
What are the Best Real Life Examples of Agile Marketing?
Rise of the agile cmo
Ad

CMG.Ebook.CMOsChallenges

  • 1. How Agile for Marketing drives better performance Conquering Top CMO Challenges
  • 2. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” To Understand Customers Better To Cope with Rapid Change To Align with Company Goals To Foster More Experimentation To Measure Marketing Performance page oneWhat Keeps You Up at Night? page twelveThe Agile Answer 2 4 6 8 10
  • 3. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 1 Marketing hasn’t just changed. Marketing is in a state of constant change. As such, the role and responsibilities of the CMO are also in flux. While still suffering shorter tenure than other C-level officers, CMOs are expected to do more, know more and impact more of the business. Delivering greater impact on an organization, managing a higher volume of work, and juggling the multitude of demands on today’s marketer require new ways of working. To achieve the step-change in performance of the marketing team can’t be about doing what you are doing better or faster. It has to be about operating differently to drive increased efficiency and effectiveness. Marketers need to adopt a more data-driven, disciplined approach to marketing operations that is centered on a test-and-learn culture, enabling companies to iterate and have the flexibility to manage change. This E-Book shows how a new approach to marketing operations and culture, Agile for Marketing (A4M), can begin to address many of these modern challenges.   DATA DISCIPLINE DRIVING ROI
  • 4. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 2 To Understand Customers Better . . . Asked ‘what keeps you up at night?’ CMOs top answer: ‘Creating sustainable and engaging customer relationships and improving customer experience.’ - Korn Ferry Institute We recommend CMOs BECOME A CHANGE AGENT FOR CUSTOMER CENTRICITY; equip and empower the marketing group to drive this agenda across the organization. - CMO Council The biggest mistake by B2B marketers is that they don’t know their customers well enough. – Forrester B2B Benchmark
  • 5. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 3 { } Walk a Mile in Their Shoes The number of CMOs and lead marketers who insights become the backbone of the work to be done to grow segments, achieve marketing KPIs, and set priorities that will drive value for the customer and the business. The objective is to assure that marketing efforts will meet (or anticipate) the customer at each touch point along the buying journey. As part of the A4M discovery process, agile teams work to define the customer accurately through reviewing customer data, interviewing both external customers and internal stakeholders, as well as reviewing survey data to help map out what they know about the customer and to identify gaps. One of the first A4M projects may be creating an analytics solution to use thereafter. name customer insight and understanding as a key challenge is staggering. We often hear about all the data available today, but marketers still struggle with making that data valuable on a customer level. Analysts foresee marketing getting more and more personalized; but to get there, we simply have to do better at understanding and addressing each customer in a personalized manner. Agile for marketing (A4M) starts with the customer front and center with a customer discovery process that works through the customer motivations, personality and buying process to develop a clear understanding of the personas, customer journey, and how to best influence the customer to take the next step with your product or service. These
  • 6. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 4 To Cope with Rapid Change . . . “The digital world is moving so fast—I can’t seem to keep up with all the change and its impact on resources.” – CMOs in TrinityP3 Survey Top issues in next ten years: Real-time marketing – responding to customers and changes in the marketplace faster. DEALING WITH SPEED IS A BIG CHALLENGE and a big opportunity. - Gartner Digital Marketing Hype 81%of marketing leaders surveyed said their role will change in the next three years. - Adobe Summit
  • 7. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 5 { } The rapid pace of change in our world is the new normal. The immediacy of digital interactions with customers and the ease with which any news—good or bad—can be shared around the world have raised the stakes for all brands. A4M helps you manage these challenges by breaking down your planning and delivery into shorter time frames that give the team the ability to adjust. With A4M, annual and quarterly plans are broken down into two-week plan-execute- learn cycles. CMOs and their teams plan for EXECUTE Be Flexible in Planning marketing effort doesn’t perform – the teams can easily change course for the next sprint. Each quarter is kicked off with clear goals and objectives and budget estimates, but how those goals are attained is flexible and can shift until you reach the optimal result. PLAN LEARN the year only at the highest level with their vision and top-line goals. Teams then break the work product down to items that can be delivered in short time frames so you can get them into market and learn. Shorter time frames give the team the ability to re-assess and adjust as they go. Work is prioritized, but if those priorities change, the market changes and you need to react, or your
  • 8. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 6 To Align with Company Goals . . . “Companies with strong marketing and sales alignment achieve 20% annual revenue growth vs. non-aligned which have a 4% decline.” – Aberdeen Research “43% of CMOs surveyed (the overwhelming top answer) said that the inability to align department strategies and priorities was a hurdle to success.” – Korn Ferry CMO Survey “32% surveyed report dysfunction and friction over priorities across the company as A BARRIER TO BEING THE MARKETER THEY WANT TO BE.” – Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey
  • 9. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 7 { } 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A4M helps your organization set priorities for the long and short term to place the most important work at the front of the line. The process helps drive alignment across departments and silos about which products, segments,andgeographiesaremostimportant to the growth of the company. When strategic priorities are clear, marketing can be much more effective and efficient for you and your team. With clear direction, they can be more proactive in doing the work that will help grow the business versus reacting to the work requested by the rest of the organization. Marketing is notorious for fire drills. A big customer, an executive, or a sales manager can run to marketing with an “emergency” that takes over the workday and disrupts the Make Priorities a Priority team. A4M imposes a discipline that holds the team and leadership to the agreed upon priorities. In other words, A4M helps you value things that matter over things that are urgent. When teams don’t prioritize their work, the long-term initiatives that may be more innovative and create more meaningful advancements may never get off the ground. The agile process also introduces a level of transparency that most organizations are not used to. With A4M, marketing’s work stack is clear, the rest of the organization knows what marketing is working on, and marketing is reporting out every two weeks on what they learned and where they are heading next. This transparency helps drive conversations about priorities and aligns marketing with wider organizational priorities.
  • 10. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 8 To Foster More Experimentation. . . “Over 50% of lead marketer respondents said that marketing should take more risks, but only 30% consider themselves risk takers.” – Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey “A full 80% of marketers tap into multiple methods­—TESTING & EXPERIMENTING— LESS THAN HALF THE TIME.” -Adobe Digital Marketing Optimization Study “65% of marketers say they are more comfortable adopting new technologies once they become mainstream.” – Adobe Digital Roadblock Survey
  • 11. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 9 { } Most marketing leaders recognize they need to build a more experimental test- and-learn approach to marketing delivery and management. By embracing a culture of experimentation, marketing teams will be able to assess efficacy on a smaller scale and then adjust to improve and/or scale up more broadly. The smaller bets and short time frames of Agile for Marketing enable less risky trials of new technologies, new messaging or new creative. A4M is about mitigating the risk in spending too much time and effort on something when the payout is unknown. Try, Try and Try Again RAPID CYCLES With the need to deliver aspects of work every 2 weeks (sprint), larger projects are broken down into smaller work product that can be delivered, put in market, and learned from more rapidly than is done today. This enables companies to test new approaches and get quick market learning that will help inform how to best proceed with the initiative. FORMAL REVIEWS We refer to our A4M sprints as “rapid learning cycles” because each sprint ends with two meetings, the Review and the Retrospective, which serve as opportunities to present work, share results and re-confirm priorities. Teams present how a trial activity has gone, if and how to improve it, and whether or not to scale it. If something new was tried and failed, the amount of money and time expended are limited. RAPID LEARNING CYCLES Agile marketing fosters experimentation in two keys ways:
  • 12. “ What keeps YOU up at night?” www.cmgpartners.com Page 10 To Measure Marketing Performance . . . 40% of CMOs lack the ability to prove short-term ROI, and 34% lack the ability to prove it in the long-term. – Duke Fuqua CMO Survey What’s the biggest factor for low CMO tenure? 56% answered, “…inability to directly CONNECT MARKETING EFFORTS TO TANGIBLE BUSINESS OUTCOMES.” - Korn Ferry Institute 60% of CMOs feel pressure from CEO and/or Board of Directors to prove value of marketing. 58% say that pressure is increasing. – Duke Fuqua CMO Survey
  • 13. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 11 { } Marketing has long been challenged to prove the contribution of marketing spend to business impact. While this is not new, the sheer speed of marketing, changing customer behaviors, urgency of new requests, and competing priorities has compounded the issue. Marketing leaders frequently cite a need to keep the team focused on the things that matter, to increase accountability and to drive a performance culture within the marketing team. Agile for Marketing aims to increase the marketing productivity of the team, but also the marketing performance. The iterative nature of the learning cycles focuses teams on getting better over time, measuring results, learning what is working and not working, and making adjustments accordingly. It helps align teams against clear Be Accountable First priorities to ensure that they don’t lose sight of the long-term objectives – where they need to get better and which new and innovative marketing programs to test. A4M teams build the priorities and clear definitions of what they are trying to achieve into the process so CMOs are able to drive accountability against delivery and performance. While it’s vital to have the right tools and data to prove a contribution is critical, it’s also crucial to build the operating rhythm that supports a performance-driven culture. Driving accountability within the organization is a good starting point. Prioritizing data and measurement components is something that can be done over time. One of our clients has a new measurement enhancement that is completed every sprint to incrementally get better at their measurement capability. With A4M, they have the discipline to actually use the data to enhance decision-making. The A4M approach obligates companies to stay on course with the goals to which they have committed. Teams build the priorities—and their acceptance criteria—into the process. STAY THE COURSE
  • 14. The CMG Way www.cmgpartners.com Page 12 { } Brands that are nimble enough to react in real time are winning…you must now be able to ideate and execute faster and cheaper than ever in order to keep up with culture. This is a trend that will never reverse, so we better get used to it.” – Tor Myhren, worldwide chief creative officer, Grey CMG Partners is a marketing consultancy with over 17 years of experience leading companies to create more growth. When you are ready to get agile, we work with you to assess your marketing organization’sAgileReadiness.Based on that profile, we design, coach and implement a custom A4M program to fit your current needs. It’s time to perform better, accomplish more and work smarter. It’s time to be agile. Please contact our A4M experts: Garrett.Putman@cmgpartners.com Russ.Lange@cmgpartners.com The changes needed in marketing are not superficial. They are structural and cultural— one might even say transformational. It’s a big shift to address the public demands of mobile, social, always-on consumers. Customers have completely changed their methods of shopping, viewing ads, and interacting with brands. Marketing needs to respond in kind. “ More and more, marketers are looking at agile processes to help them act more quickly, respond more effectively to customers, and prove their value to the company and its goals. You may think agile is just a buzzword, but it’s actually a proven methodology that over 90% of all software developers use to work smarter and more efficiently, and now is being used globally by pioneering marketing departments. * CMOs who want to excel in today’s market will need to stop defending their territory and working the way they always have. It’s time to organize your team around clear priorities, effective ROI measurement and an data-driven customer focus. It’s time for change. It’s time for Agile for Marketing. The Agile Answer *VersionOne “9th Annual State of Agile”