Operation: Make Marketing Agile(and more)

Presented by Sydney Ratzlaff

December 9th, 2015

Agile Is The New Black

Keep in mind: everything you hear today isn’t just applicable to Marketing; I geared it

toward Marketing because that’s my job.

These strategies could be used in finance, support, a fire department, etc.

Agile Is The New Black

Why is agility in Marketing so important?

Think of 3 reasons!

Agile Is The New Black

Agility (in Marketing) is essential because:

It gives marketing/business leaders the ability to

– quickly react and respond to the market

– adjust when things don’t work

– get to market faster, and be more responsive to customer needs.

Image from Pardot.com

David Beats Goliath

– Where is Agile Marketing taking place? …...Start-ups.

– “Small and midsize firms took 1.6 share points, or nearly $10 billion in sales, from the packaged-good behemoths over three post-recession years from 2009 to 2012, according to a report from IRI and Boston Consulting Group.”

– Natural agility of small players

Agile Advice

– Commit to being a learning organization– Encourage failures– Don’t wait for perfect (Doesn’t work in some

Marketing situations)– Nail it, then scale it

Starting With Stats

– Agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-agile companies (from MIT)

– "Adopting a way more Agile approach, we probably pulled off in 5-1⁄2 to 6 months what most organizations would do in 12." —Lisa Arthur, CMO of marketing applications, Teradata

– 67 percent of CMO’s Agenda survey respondents who adopted Agile said it resulted in a more motivated team

Starting With Stats

– In 2013, the marketing department created more than 200 collateral pieces— four times what it produced the previous year. Yet the department is less stressed. “We have our lives back.”

– “On one project, we had almost a 3,000-x lift in performance and drove a 30 percent increase in trials quarter-to-quarter, just purely because of this process. And we’ve done nothing else that was different other than use these processes on this one particular campaign.”

– While 63 percent of CMOs say agility is a high priority, only 40 percent call themselves Agile.

From CMO’s Agenda “Agile Advantage”

What’s a Marketing User Story?“As an evaluation lead, I want to be able to see within five seconds what differentiates your product from the competition so I can determine if you’re a fit for my preliminary list of candidates.”

Quick quiz: What is the success criteria of this user story?

What’s a Marketing User Story?“As an evaluation lead, I want to be able to see within five seconds what differentiates your product from the competition so I can determine if you’re a fit for my preliminary list of candidates.”

ANSWER: The success criteria is “pass a 5-second test for recall of our differentiators.”

What’s a Marketing User Story? Your turn!Right now we are creating a new product overview video. It will contain a 2 minute overview of what our system does and how we differentiate ourselves from the competition. Example: emergencyreporting.com

As a ______________________,

I want to be able to ______________________________________

so I can ____________________________________________.

What’s a Marketing User Story? Your turn!Right now we are creating a new product overview video. It will contain a 2 minute overview of what our system does and how we differentiate ourselves from the competition.

As a Fire Chief,

I want to be able to quickly see the benefits of using Emergency Reporting and the products that are available

so I can make an informed decision of whether or not to try a free trial of the software.

What’s a Marketing User Story? – If you say “build a demand gen initiative around X or Y,” or “create a storyline X

or Y”

– Person 1: “oh, this is a two-hour thing I can do with a blog post”

– Person 2: “this is a 20-hour project that needs creative resources and all these other things”

Emphasizes the importance of defining your user story, breaking up epic campaigns, and conducting regular retros/stand-ups.

The Important vs. The Urgent

– Marketing, like IT, is often the department people come to with perceived burning-fire issues seeking immediate resolution. And they think being “agile” means you’re going to drop everything and do it.

Honesty Hour

The Important vs. The Urgent

– Everybody wants everything now. Who can relate to that?

– The solution tends to be more ad hoc and ultimately very hard to manage.

The Important vs. The Urgent

You’re always going to be beholden to what’s urgently happening in the business today. That’s where Agile comes in and changes the game.

What’s the solution to this?

The Important vs. The Urgent

A transparent, public backlog– Enables team members and those making requests to have a more effective

conversation about priorities.

– “We can’t take that on board right now.”

– “I hear that your initiative is important. I agree it’s important. It is not as urgent as these other things that we are working, so I am putting it on my backlog and we will get back with you on when we can do it, not if we can do it.” (Think: The dangers of thrash)

– Encourage that conversation of: what must be moved off the board to put the request at the top?

The Important vs. The Urgent

Rapid response team/dedicated emergency work time

– Ex. HubSpot dedicates 25% of everyone’s time to doing overflow or emergency work

– Our dev team is dedicating 10% of their time each sprint to bugs/tech debt

– Our marketing department examples:

– “Oh no! We need this sales bulletin for a show next week.”

– ‘Hair on fire’ customers – always 1st priority

– Helping other departments

– “Marketing site is down!”

The Important vs. The Urgent

Designate a “go-to” champion – How else will the rest of the team stay focused on their tasks?

– A designated go-to person handles all incoming requests, explains the Agile process and takes the request to the group for prioritization.

– This keeps other team members from having to deal with interruptions and expectations.

AKA: the Marketing Product Owner

The Important vs. The Urgent

When you implement an Agile system, you’re providing a framework to deal with the unexpected and to deal with the more urgent things in a more structured and systematic way so it doesn’t have to be a fire drill every time something new comes up.

= More productivity, less stressful work environment, better velocity analytics

The Benefits

– Accomplish More, Deliver Faster, and Perform Better.

– By presenting ‘wins’ and easy to understand results you can earn more credibility within the organization. Get rid of the black box around Marketing.

– Our small, scrappy but full of talent team can help you achieve your design/campaign goals to the best of our ability.

What ER Marketing Is Doing

– Daily stand-ups (right after all company morning stand-up)

– Weekly sprint planning (usually has a lot of carry-over, working on optimization of that – asking the team what they can accomplosh)

– Celebrating wins, discussing what could be improved in retrospective meetings

– Hiring based on personality, trainability, fit with ER culture

– Prioritizing, but always flexible to change

– Using Trello to write User Stories and plan weekly sprints, as well as our physical Kanban (by Whiteboard Challenge)

– Constant collaboration, strong emphasis on Product Testing and customer feedback

– Multiple proofs/copyedits (similar to code reviews)

Where We Want To Be in 2016

– Limiting our WIP (work in progress) to 1-2 stories at a time

– Finding our individual team members’ key strengths, where they want to specialize

– Optimizing marketing content for our selected and heavily researched Customer Personas

– Stay up to date on trends, be active in outside design/CX/marketing community

– Have more Cupcake Tuesday’s (this Tuesday!) and Chai Latte Days, grow closer as a team

Questions?

– If you’re interested in seeing more of what we do on our day to day, take a look at our Kanban board or come see!

Resources

– http://www.agilemarketing.net/

– http://www.universitybusiness.com/moe/article/agile-marketing-makeover

– http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27316/four-steps-to-creating-an-agile-marketing-culture#ixzz3t7MJE8qs

– http://cmosagenda.com/

– http://www.cmgpartners.com/assets/agile.advantage.the.methodology.pdf