(say 15%). To cap it off, the year-end is approaching; next year's targets are pushing the sales budget up by 50%. Your leadership is demanding that marketing improve contribution to business, but given your average performance YTD, you are told you need to do that with flat budget and you'll see no increase in FTE. Oh and remember, your demand generation targets must increase by 20% on top of the planned 50% sales growth that will come in next year's budget. Lastly (yes there's more!) is the real impact this has on your teams. They think they are doing great vs their plan, but are now being kicked by sales and commercial leaders for not being realistic. So you also have a team that is likely becoming disillusioned and thinking 'why do I bother'....
Well, its a situation that many marketing leaders face at one time or other in their career and one that leads many to toward change and transformation. Now I don't even pretend to try and tackle every permutation of transformation in this blog. It would be silly to try. But what I hope to show is that if you take a step back from the dance-floor of day-to-day work and watch the show from the balcony, you'll have time to start transformation in the best way. That starting-point is to break transformation down into bite-sized chunks, because it's a big plate of food to get through. Planning the meal ahead really is the first critical success factor.
Starters - Inspire a vision.
With the above example in mind, much of the immediate problem is likely to center around your current vision, the way you plan, manage stakeholders, set expectations and organize your team. Why? If your performance is 'on-plan' but the leadership are wondering why you can't improve the team performance, it is probably because you set the bar too low to start with. That means you need to re-evaluate your starting point - your vision. If you establish a new transformative vision that goes above and beyond the next three years business expectation, then you'll be setting yourself up for success. It's all about having a clear view of your destination - as Steve Covey says - start with the end in mind.
Fish Course
With a clear vision in place, you can work backwards and build a staged and clearly timed plan that gets you to your destination in iterative steps of business, organisation, team capability and knowledge, resources and performance development. Each part of that plan needs to run as a parallel course to the other as you'll have dependencies and common critical success factors to manage as you go.
Main Course
As you get into the meat of things, you'll quickly realize that it is hard to envision in isolation. To truly find the ideas that help you scale, you need to have a pool of best practices, stories, business models, processes and inspiration at your finger tips. The great thing is that there are so many places to go for help - hew are a few of my favourites:
Innovation from within - Dragons Den. This is one area you can quickly, easily and freely exploit. Set-up a Dragons Den type approach to uncover great new ideas. Crowd-source ideas from your own teams and invest in those ideas that hold weight. Test them out, fail fast, learn and find the next that works. It's an inspiring way for your team to get involved in your transformation. Talk with us if you'd like us to facilitate a program for you!
Innovation from outside - Attend conferences - especially those that deal with change and transformation. You can be inspired by networking with others going through similar change and hear from industry experts all at the same time. One of the worlds top 10 conferences dedicated to this is in C
Canada, called C2. You can check it out here.
Forced innovation - Look at your competition. It's always advisable to know what your competitors are doing, how they work and the experiences they give customers. Be careful not to be drawn into being a 'me-too' though. See what they do, learn from it but think how you can leap-frog the competition. A good book to read on leap-frog economics 'Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen' by Porus Munshi.
Leverage Trends - Ask Consultants. Using external consultants (like Vizibble) can help shorten your time to understanding the latest trends, insights and direction the market will go. Consultants can act as a fresh set of eyes to assess or help you navigate each stage of your transformation.
Use What's Online - A wealth of information. If you want something really straight forward, go online and check out ChiefMartec. Their view on marketing technology transformation is astounding.
Clearly there are many sources of support to help you envision and find ways to innovate. The key thing is that none of this advice matters, nor is applicable until it lines up with your vision and your destination.
