[Presentation] How GE Built a Tech Stack to Run Marketing Like a Business

Editor's Notes

• #8: And the data backs this up. Gartner 290B in 2016 2017 = year CMO outspends CIO in martech…and guess what it’s actually happening. $$$ = oppourutnity
• #9: Yet…We’re put in a box where were the brand and creative side…logos on the pens…when we need to be strategic partners.
• #10: And here’s why…We suck at measuring at Revenue. We still can’t do it. Still a mystery for tha majority of the industry.
• #11: And we are paying for it Our bosses are paying for it CMOs 50% that of other executives
• #12: RYAN: I dislike this slide. Frame of reference is negative. Might work in general copy but I don’t want any inference that RH is having difficulty. Make it more positive. We have to do better.
• #13: RYAN: same as last slide
• #16: Neenu: I believe many of you are familiar with GE – a company that turned 125 years old this year (a birth month coinciding with my 10 year anniversary at GE). However, for some, GE Digital may not be too familiar. GE Digital is a software start-up within the big GE – we were founded in 2011 when 100 individuals saw the opportunity to build answers for some of the toughest challenges facing industrial businesses that no one was solving yet. Today we are ~26K employees worldwide defining what digital means in an industrial world by building software that transforms the way people connect with their data, devices, and machines. To give you a flavor of what that means – For the healthcare industry, Better connectivity means cancer patients can get access to life saving therapies more quickly, In the transportation industry, access to data means that planes and trains can run more efficiently to reduce carbon footprint And in the Energy Industry, connecting people to machines allows us to provide greater protection for plant operators against life threatening accidents at power stations and oil fields. While our mission is inspiring – we are solving big industrial problems with software and our scale is an advantage – our business challenges are unique. We are running fast to grow the software side of GE and the challenges are hard. Manage your legs are 125 years old – but you are trying to run a race alongside businesses who are just teenagers. Us marketers within the organization – we really need to make sure we can keep pace and get an edge on our younger competitors. The right technology and the right delivery of the technology helps us to to stay in the race. Sam: You’ve had to build a multi-million dollar business unit out of thin air – that’s amazing.  
• #17: Let’s pretend that we ask the chief executive of your company the overused icebreaker, “which 3 people would he/she invite to the dinner table.”  But instead of any person, it has to be a functional leader and instead of a dinner table it would be the company strategy session.  Do you think your marketing executive would be named?  Not according to the studies mentioned above.  I believe the most common responses we would get to that question are leaders of commercial, finance and product or IT.  But marketing matters – so how do we get a seat at that table?  How can we prove that marketing matters?  I feel strongly that it’s by adopting the concept of “running marketing” with dependence on data and metrics.   What do I mean by running marketing?  It’s different than doing marketing, which is the actual execution of campaigns and tactics.  Running marketing is the process and technology to plan, evaluate results against goals and drive better investment choices.  Allocadia was actually the company that brought me that concept.  Marketing Performance Management is an industry term that you may have heard of, but when Allocadia broke it down and called it “running marketing,” that really clicked with me.
• #21: Unwieldy with our global marketing team, biggest budget in commercial organization. Hundreds of vendors. Not easy to track, as some other functions woho maybe only have 5 key vendors, buy about 6 times a year. Massive undertaking, something that we would only get so far in excel. WEren’t connecting it to any activities. No way to connect planning to spend to results and so it was that point we realized there had to be a tool to help us.
• #24: I feel strongly that it’s by adopting the concept of “running marketing” with dependence on data and metrics. How can we prove that Marketing Matters? What do I mean by running marketing? It’s different than doing marketing, which is the actual execution of campaigns and tactics. Running marketing is the process and technology to plan, evaluate results against goals and drive better investment choices. Allocadia was actually the company that brought me that concept. Marketing Performance Management is an industry term that you may have heard of, but when Allocadia broke it down and called it “running marketing,” that really clicked with me. Today, I’d like to unpack 4 concepts that are rooted in data and metrics. You’ll see how we began to “run marketing” so that our leaders are seen as stewards and investors of dollars to drive real return for the company. So that we get a seat at the table.
• #26: So what do leaders care about? Campaign effectiveness. Pipeline penetration. Just to name a few. I think we can eliminate the term “vanity metrics” if we clearly define which metrics matter and to whom. Starting last year around his time, I began infusing a three tier metrics system in our organization. Activity, Output and Impact. These terms come from a Sirius Decisions model and a lot of best practice benchmarking and research. Activity – Activity metrics are for the execution teams, are often reviewed on a daily or weekly basis to make minor adjustments in campaigns and are very granular. For example, these metrics include clicks, impressions, bounce rates. We use a business insight tool to visualize these reports in real time for on demand reporting. Output – Output metrics are the result of the activities we perform as a marketing organization. For example, a campaign may be made up of inbound paid advertising, a demand generation email, a field marketing webinar, and a discovery workshop. The clicks and impressions are reported in activity. But the leads that together this campaign generated would be the output. The net new contacts to the database would be another output. These metrics are reported on a monthly basis to our marketing leaders, who use the information to make pivots in our integrated campaigns and small resource changes.  Impact – And finally, we boil our output metrics up to our impact metrics. These are the KPIs that show true impact of our work – most commonly to the sales or commercial organization. Examples of impact metrics include number and value of sourced opportunities, pipeline value, deal velocity and conversion rates. Each of these areas are impacted by marketing and tie much closer to the organization goal of making money - of driving orders, revenue and profit. We are in the habit of having monthly conversations about the impact metrics at our commercial and marketing leadership level. And the numbers and analysis shown help us pivot in agile fashion toward strategies that maximize return for our organization.
• #27: I’ve found that presenting our quarterly contribution to pipeline is nice. Showing the trends quarter over quarter raises eyebrows. But respect is earned through transparency of our decisions and results. How did we forecast and set goals? Did we reach the targets? What went well, what did not go as planned and what are we changing to improve? Adding this qualitative data to your quantitative analysis, goes a long way to achieving that seat at the table. Transparent investment was the hardest leg of our journey – and to be honest we’re not quite finished yet. We started our journey at a time when the company was in “start up phase” and I couldn’t even get the quantitative investment data with a high degree of certainty. Data was everywhere and sometimes nowhere. I knew we needed to be showing our investment by region, product, business unit, sales stage and marketing objective. I knew we needed to be able to set targets based on our dollar investment and then analyze the resulting pipeline impact to make strategic decisions on future investments. Ultimately, we needed to create visibility into our business. Visibility is the precursor to accountability and, in my opinion, to respect and a seat at the table. Transparency only comes from connected systems and clean data. But I didn’t have the data.
• #28: So step one, collect the data and understand our business requirements. Which data did we need? What was the process to collect it? What did we need to present out? I started small and iterated until I had a high degree of confidence in what we were collecting and reporting out. Then I moved to step two, scale. I couldn’t scale to meet the needs of our global organization with excel, so I searched for a solution to help take us to the next level. I invested in Allocadia. Caveat – the answer to data aggregation and reporting is not always by buying a tool. However, in this case, I understood my business problem and weighed potential solutions. For me, Allocadia was the solution that could help me plan, track, measure, predict and report with the scale I needed but also at the detailed level I required. Step three was to set our commercial and business goals, align our marketing spend, have real-time on-demand transparency into our budget, spend and forecasted spend and then report on the outcome of our spend in terms of pipeline. With Allocadia, I can easily segment our spend by those cuts I mentioned above – region, product, sales stage, etc. And I can track against campaign performance. I’m finally armed with the robust quantitate data to analyze spend. Step four – add the qualitative aspect to the story. Where did we reach targets, where did we miss and what are we changing? This is where we can prove that we’re stewards of our investments and have a laser focus on money and return on investment.
• #30: When I started monthly meetings with our commercial and marketing leadership, we struggled with lingo. Very often we were presenting compelling metrics, but they were getting lost behind terms that were not familiar outside the marketing organization. Terms such as buyer’s journey and marketing funnel labels or even lead statuses such as marketing qualified leads and inside sales accepted were not commonly understood. At first we tried to educate and define every word or phrase that might not be common. But we’ve since learned that it’s better to integrate into the common lingo of the audience.    Talk in the language the business cares about: money, investment. We have made a concerted effort to switch from talking about the buyer’s journey or marketing funnel to using the sales stages. We did however, work hard to align in such a way that while we use their terms, we added a new stage to explain the pre-opportunity work that we do (traditionally called awareness). So now instead of showing conversion rate from MQ to SQ, we are showing conversion from S0 to S1. Just that small change has opened so many doors – being included in strategic conversations of which content should be delivered and what sales activities should be conducted at each stage. We are now part of the pipeline building team.
• #31: While investment transparency is what I considered most difficult, the fourth and final area is probably the most impactful – tying your investment to the bottom line. Return on Marketing Investment. Companies define this slightly differently, but in order to be true to the original definition of ROI, one must evaluate revenue against all costs – this includes marketing discretionary spend as well as product and delivery costs. Keep in mind, many schools of thought believe you need a multi touch attribution model at a minimum to accurately perform ROI calculations. To be completely honest, we’re not quite there yet as an organization – we’re just 2 years old afterall. So, I’ve adopted a “yield” metric until we are mature enough to do full ROI or ROMI. For us, yield shows for every dollar we spend on marketing efforts, how much pipeline we generate. We factor in nurture time (meaning dollars spent in Jan do not necessarily product pipeline in Jan as we often need a few touches before an opportunity materializes). Yield has been our ticket. It has allowed us to educate our executives on why marketing matters. The return of our efforts and investment. We can now tell a compelling story of why marketing matters.
• #32: Return on Marketing Investment. Companies define this slightly differently, but in order to be true to the original definition of ROI, one must evaluate revenue against all costs – this includes marketing discretionary spend as well as product and delivery costs. Keep in mind, many schools of thought believe you need a multi touch attribution model at a minimum to accurately perform ROI calculations. To be completely honest, we’re not quite there yet as an organization – we’re just 2 years old afterall. So, I’ve adopted a “yield” metric until we are mature enough to do full ROI or ROMI. For us, yield shows for every dollar we spend on marketing efforts, how much pipeline we generate. We factor in nurture time (meaning dollars spent in Jan do not necessarily product pipeline in Jan as we often need a few touches before an opportunity materializes). Yield has been our ticket. It has allowed us to educate our executives on why marketing matters. The return of our efforts and investment. We can now tell a compelling story of why marketing matters.
• #34: 6Sense On24
• #36: Finance or could go find a new tool. Only looked at 1 or 2. New could not go with a enterprise...needed something that could plug in easily and make an impact easily. Stopped searching after found Allocadia and realized how critical it was to bring the pieces together.
• #37: Finance or could go find a new tool. Only looked at 1 or 2. New could not go with a enterprise...needed something that could plug in easily and make an impact easily. Stopped searching after found Allocadia and realized how critical it was to bring the pieces together.
• #38: can do pivot and v-lookups. ... Far too many dots have to connect. Big data. capturing commitment to budget. Actual spend. Each of these compenents are in different systems, excel could not give full visibility and depth.
• #39: Now we’re not just tying spend to activity, but showing investment in different ways. How much did I spend on DG vs inbound. Want to pivot. Want to know if we are overspending can we reallocate…that crosses budgets regions teams. Only way to do that million labels. Only Allocadia could show what we could be spending to pivot, that in general is the only way we can go and tell our Finance story.
• #40: Knowing I wouldn’t be solving the world Phased approach > change management, knowing what we want to tackle in those phases, who needs to come along with me in that journey. First part of the journey, smaller group of people before having it rolled out.
• #41: Pre: (Dark Ages): So focused on collecting data. Pre: review of technologies Phase 1 Getting data in, get it flowing: Allocadia – limited, base data, asking questions, what did leaders ask. Finance as a partner. (1Q implementation) Phase 2: Expanding to meeting reporting needs (2Q2) Phase 3: Scaling and maximizing tool capabilities (use it for more purposes, connect to other systems…maximize its utility!) (Just started will take maybe another year)
• #45: Instead of Finance chasing down quarterly close from multiple functional owners, they log into allocadia. Instead of building a budget from scratch, looking at the reports.
• #47: Acting more like a business owner, steward of the dollar CEO has handed to marketing. Transparency. Strategic conversation on investments.
• #48: And it’s working. We were slated for a budgetary cut in 4Q, but it was dismissed earlier this month. THAT NEVER HAPPENS. Especially within a marketing org at GE. And here is why: for the past year there was a rumor in the finance organization that global marketing understood their spending, was tracking with such precision and detail that they were being good stewards and carefully evaluating investment decisions. When we received a new finance partner in 2Q, we immediately gave full access to Allocadia and helped her understand the data through reports, dashboards and transparency into our leadership’s strategy meetings. Her partnership along with our data driven story of a strong yield from our investments led to this unprecedented decision by executives. You know what else? Our marketing leadership is being asked to many tables. We are at the commercial leadership table discussing proactive strategies to improve market share and cycle time. We are at the finance leadership table discussing budget allocation and target markets. We are at the table with our chief executive discussing growth plans. So how do I measure that we’ve successfully convinced leadership that marketing matters and achieved a seat at the table? By seeing how marketing is influencing the commercial strategy, aligning with right groups at right levels, and being part of infrastructure and foundational decision making at GE Digital.