When done right, marketing drives growth, which is why so many leading global companies have invested in the creation of marketing excellence programs. So, how does your program stack up? Here are a few questions that will help you assess the maturity of your company’s marketing excellence program.
Are they lining up - or hiding under their desks? Are people asking to get onto your program or are you selling it hard? Is there palpable excitement around the program? Good programs create demand pull rather than relying on a strong push or mandate from senior leadership. A good way to create this demand is to clearly communicate the program benefits. Successful programs do a good job describing the mindsets and behaviors of different internal stakeholders and how they will be positively engaged and developed as part of the marketing excellence program.
Have you won true leadership support? Do they truly get it? Are key members of the leadership team able to understand and articulate the financial benefits of the marketing excellence program and how it will help achieve the strategic goals of the business? Are they providing more than lip-service? Key and influential leaders should be changing their behaviors - spending their time, energy, and resources differently - to help make the organization more customer-centric.
Do you have a compelling vision that clearly answers the question, “Why should I care?” Do you have a vision statement that evokes excitement and inspiration? Ideally this should be a clear and meaningful statement as to why different individuals and groups in your organization should care about your program – other than the fact that it will lead to terrific shareholder value and make pots of money for the Corporation. Try to put yourself in their shoes, as well as 50,000 feet above.
Do you have a clear set of priorities? Pick your battles. Do you have a clear focus on one or two aspects of marketing where you wish to achieve excellence first? Have you focused on accelerating time to results? We recommend taking the approach to pilot an aspect of the program first – even before building frameworks, training, or the other formal components of the program – in order to reduce risk and give you early proof points to build support and momentum for the program.
Do you have flexibility in the framework? Have you identified the must-have consistencies while allowing for adequate flexibility for the needs and resource conditions in different businesses and regions? Have you focused on the in-use experience? Is it fun to be in your program? If the experience of your program is characterized by a series of soulless process maps, mind-numbing templates, and the drudgery of form-filling — you might be in trouble. Marketing is supposed to be fun. Letting loose a small army of six-sigma black belts on to your marketers is going to suck the last ounce of inspiration and creativity out of them.
Have you partnered with HR? Have you changed rewards to align with intended behavior? People do what they are rewarded for — period. Working with HR to modify or add rewards is a powerful tool to ensure long-term sustained change in behaviors. As part of your reward program, make sure that marketers have a career lattice – a clear path in which to grow and achieve within your organization.
Hopefully this has given you some thought starters as far as assessing and developing your marketing excellence program. If you would like to read more information on marketing excellence, check out our white paper:
