There’s nothing more valuable than market, customer, and competitive intelligence when it comes to making fact-based decisions. Capturing this information often requires conducting research. A number of our customers have asked us about using an online panel and how to recruit panel members. This information will help you make your online panel more successful.

1.Actively Managed Panels: There are two types of panels: database-driven which is essentially a repository of email addresses and those that are actively managed where panel members opt-in and receive invitations to participate in online research studies. Actively-managed panels have been shown to produce higher response rates and data quality.

2.Qualify Panel Members: Experts typically rely on two methodologies to recruit panel members: open source recruitment which allows for anyone with access to the Internet to enroll and by invitation only (closed) where only pre-validated individuals can participate.

3.Reward Participation: The type of compensations if also an important consideration, because the type of rewards and proposition could influence the type of people who agree to answer a questionnaire or join a specific panel and can therefore influence sample quality. Panel providers utilize two primary methods for incentive fulfillment: guaranteed cash/reward incentive or sweepstakes prize drawing. Cash/reward incentives are awarded upon survey completion. The sweepstakes incentive method awards respondents by entering their name into a prize drawing for completing a survey. Prize drawings are done periodically and the number of eligible contestants varies. Guaranteed cash/reward incentives have been proven to yield higher response rates.

4.Manage contact frequency: For quality responses, limit the number of times a panel member is invited to participate in a survey over a given period of time.

5.Use a panel management system: Whether you are establishing your own panel or relying on a panel provider, use a quality management system that will identify and eliminate duplicate members, detect fraudulent respondents at the time of registration, and to guard against bad data.

Whether you decide to create your own online panel or use a third party, an extended and up-to-date profile data will increase your research effectiveness. A panel with extensive targeting is probably a more viable approach when trying to reach low-incidence or hard-to-reach groups.

How to set a performance target for a marketing program, initiative and/or objective is a critical component in developing an MPM framework and system. A performance target represents a commitment to achieve a specific and better quality or level of performance over a specified time frame. It is used to evaluate performance achieved compared to performance expected. For this example, a tactical program may be developed and implemented to generate qualified leads from a set of share determiners, so the performance target might be a range of some number of qualified leads per program.

Marketers that utilize performance management best practices intelligently set performance targets that are relevant to the organization’s objectives and outcomes. Unfortunately, difficulty in setting performance targets is one of the most common problems encountered on the MPM journey and many marketers neglect to set performance targets for their tactical programs. Without a stake in the ground, any results reported, while useful, do not necessarily demonstrate that marketing met its performance commitment. If you decide to make performance target setting a standard of excellence for your marketing organization, these 10 steps will help you set performance targets you can meet.

1. Have clear measurable outcomes and objectives. You need to know what where you’re headed and what you’re aiming for.
2. Define the time period for achieving these outcomes/objectives
3. Determine a performance baseline for affecting this type of outcome and objective. Historically, what have your programs produced? If you can’t use your own data to establish a baseline, consider using a benchmark from your industry.
4. Identify the performance measures you need to improve. Remember, a performance target is about taking your performance to the next level. You want to set a target that demonstrates improvement but not one that sets you up to fail.
5. Establish the purpose of the performance target. Be clear about what you are trying to improve.
6. Assess whether you need intermediary or milestone targets. You may find out that there are some interim performance targets you need to achieve before you can reach your ultimate target.
7. Chose the target value. For example, some improvement in the number of qualified leads, or some improvement in the average order value, or some improvement in the number of referrals that will convert to qualified leads, and so on. It’s often a good idea to use a range for your target value.
8. Develop an action plan to achieve the target.
9. Implement your plan of action.
10. Monitor, Report and Evaluate.

Is your sales organization still rejecting too many of the leads forwarded on by marketing? Sounds like you may need a better way to qualify leads and agree on what constitutes a lead worthy of forwarding to sales. If you want to get serious about lead management, there are three things marketing and sales should hash out together.

1.Behaviorally define each stage in the buying pipeline. When marketing, sales and management all speak the same language regarding opportunities in the pipeline, everyone can work together to nurture those opportunities that are the most promising in order to boost sales and revenue. Creating a glossary of standard terms for what your company considers a contact, suspect, lead, qualified lead, prospect, and so forth will go a long way toward reducing ambiguity and confusion. The best way to do this is to outline the customer buying process based on observable behaviors and then map these behaviors to the appropriate opportunity stage. Once you complete and validate the behaviors and stages, create and publish an opportunity pipeline glossary that documents how your company defines each stage.

2.Establish a set of behavioral criteria that everyone agrees signals that an opportunity is qualified and sales worthy. Now that you’ve completed this step, you can use the process to establish the criteria for a qualified lead. A key part of your qualification should be the opportunity score leads to better prioritize the leads the sales team should focus on first. Qualifying and scoring leads ensures the sales team doesn’t waste time and energy on leads that may not come to fruition.

3.Develop a lead scoring methodology and process for how to disposition leads within each scoring range. The concept of opportunity or lead scoring is relatively simple. Essentially you assign points based on how well an opportunity meets each of your qualification criteria. To create your scoring method you will want to make a list of all the buying behaviors as well as a list of all the characteristics of an ideal customer. This way you can assess an opportunity both in terms of the conversion potential as well as fit.

To illustrate this idea let’s say you score some of the behaviors and fit as follows:

Fit

a) In a target vertical where we have domain expertise – 5 points
b) In a target vertical but we don’t have domain expertise – 3 points
c) Not in a target vertical – 0 points
d) Our product is ideally suited to solve their problem – 5 points
e) Our product will solve their problem with some customization – 3 points
f) Our product will not solve their problem without a major investment on our part – 0 points

Behaviors

• Meeting held with decision maker – 5 points
• Meeting held with recommender – 3 points
• Meeting held with influencer – 1 point
• Provided product specification and buying criteria – 5 points
• Indicated they are funded – 5 points
• Indicated budget is approved – 3 points
• Contacted references – 5 points
• Requested references – 1 point
• Participated in on-site demo – 5 points
• Participated in online demo – 1 point

Create this type of point assignment process for all of the behaviors. Then add up all the points and establish a point and criteria threshold for which opportunities are worthy of passing to the Sales team. For example, qualified leads must be at least 20 points and must include at a minimum the following behaviors indicated they are funded, participated in on-site demo, and are in a target vertical.

At this step, Sales agrees to accept that opportunities who exhibit meet the criteria and point threshold and Marketing agrees to only pass those opportunities. The final step to discuss as a team is what to do with those opportunities at various stages in the pipeline so that they are appropriately nurtured.

It’s not uncommon for companies to have so many things they measure that its hard to know what really matters.  And when it comes to marketing, most companies today can measure a never ending sea of metrics – from impressions, to click-throughs, to response rates, to cost per lead, to marketing spend, to revenue, to lead conversion ratios, to customer tenure, customer satisfaction, and well, the list goes on. It’s normal to want to include everything, so one of the biggest dilemmas is deciding what to keep in and what to throw out.

When it comes to your dashboard, more isn’t necessarily better.  Think about the dashboard in your car, there are just a few gauges and dials and maybe a message center that sends alerts.  Quality is more important than quantity in your car as well as on your marketing dashboard.  Try to keep your dashboard to a few key measures. What should you keep?  At the executive level of your dashboard you need 5-10 core metrics and they should fall into four metrics categories that show:

· how marketing is moving the needle, that is whether marketing is being effective.

· whether you are making your performance targets related to customer acquisition, retention, and value

· your efficiency improvements

· marketing’s financial contribution and ROI

The measures you choose for these categories shouldn’t be based on what’s easy to measure or easy to find.  While impressions are easy to measure and find, it is hard to use this measure to make a strategic decision.  You want your measures to lead to actionable conclusions.  That means you need to measure things that really matter to your company and connect marketing to the business. Each metric you chose should be meaningful on its own and not overlap with other numbers.

A simple example from financial measurements can help illustrate this point.  It is somewhat redundant to look at both gross margin and net profit, because net profit is simply gross margin minus fixed costs and a few other expenses. In this example, you just need one, the one that will give you the insight you need.

Some times people are afraid to report on certain numbers because of the implications.  For example, profits per employee might lead to staff reductions.  If you want to be perceived as a strategic player, choose marketing metrics that will bring key issues to the surface for discussion and strategic consideration.

While you want your dashboard to show your performance, it is important that it serves as a decision-making tool.  That means you need metrics that will help you understand the impact of the change in that measure.  Select measures that will help affect your competitive position, your ability to succeed and will drive action. The metrics you report should help serve to monitor accountability on action. First and foremost you want to report on measures that will help you determine whether you are doing the right thing, not whether you are doing things right.  The TV show, The Amazing Race, provides some insight into this concept.  The concept involves teams getting from point A to point B with various obstacles and tasks in between.  If you are measuring efficiency, you might look at “miles traveled per day.”  And while this might be interesting, you could be traveling quickly but in the wrong direction.  No matter how fast you are traveling, if you are heading in the wrong direction you cannot win.  We hope you will revisit your dashboard to make sure the metrics you are tracking are helping you ask the right questions and facilitating strategic decisions.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

Many companies are attempting or are building marketing dashboard in order to communicate marketing’s value. The explosion of dashboard tools and technologies has sometimes made designing an effective dashboard even more challenging. Metrics and KPIs are the building blocks for your dashboard. The dashboard is the visualization of the data these represent. It is a visual collection of the data that provide the means to quickly get an overview of how your organization is performing and the reasons behind its performance. Therefore those metrics and KPIs that are the most effective at communicating your contribution to the business, alerting you to performance issues, and enabling you to make fact-based strategic decisions are the ones you should include on your executive and operational level dashboards. The goal of the dashboard is to provide actionable information based on past data which predicts future performance, allowing for effective decision-making. Before you develop your dashboard decide who is the target user. A dashboard aimed at the C-Suite and one that is intended to be used by the managers of the various marketing functions are going to be very different. They will need to be related and one may actually be a subset of the other. We recommend you start by thinking about the C-Suite at your user and then peeling the onion so to speak as you move further down the organization structure.

To create a dashboard you will need to understand, clarify and define the role of marketing, so that what you report represents what marketing is and/or is expected to do. Once this is completed these four steps will help you get started: (this sentence was written twice on the item you sent me, please check the original and fix)

1. Identify Business Outcomes. Start by identifying the things that your company must achieve in order to be successful. These are the needles your organization must move.

2. Map the Role of Marketing: Identify the linkages between these outcomes and marketing performance.

3. Select the Metrics and KPIs: Determine what metrics best demonstrate how marketing is impacting the outcomes. Use the metrics and KPIs that illustrate how marketing is making a contribution and the return on this contribution for your dashboard.

4. Establish the context. Context defines the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs. Context help you know what data is “good” vs. what is “bad” data and will ensure you dashboard avoids end users from drawing false conclusions. It is important to consider how the design and placement of controls within a dashboard. The layout of the data should be in a logical and fluent order.

The dashboard should also conform to the 3 and 10 second rules; within 3 seconds the user should have an idea as to the overall performance of the subject, and within 10 seconds the user should have a general idea as to why this performance is being achieved. Before starting on a dashboard consider the platform you are going to use because this will impact your functionality. Also consider the format of your data and how the data is going to be stored. (there was a typo here I fixed, please check the original)

By developing the metrics and communicating these in a dashboard, the learning organization will have the data they need to make fact-based decisions. It will also elevate the confidence of the CEO, CFO (this was CDO and should be CFO, please fix on the original) and other members of the leadership team in the marketing organization.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

One of the most critical steps in managing marketing performance is to identify performance gaps and the measurements that best capture the incremental impact of marketing.  This information is often captured and communicated via a dashboard.  In Stephen Few’s book, Information Dashboard Design (2006) he defined a dashboard as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. In order for your dashboard to be an effective tool it should help determine the impact marketing is having, provide insight into the value of marketing to the organization, speed decision making and facilitate alignment.  One of the biggest challenges marketers face when developing their dashboard is choosing the metrics to use.  It’s very likely you are measuring many things but not every metric needs to be included on the executive dashboard. Some will be integrated into your operations dashboard, others into your tactical/functional dashboards, and others may not be on a dashboard at all. The metrics you select should be relevant to the audience making decisions from them.

Here are two important things to consider as you select metrics for any dashboard:

1. What is the purpose of the dashboard, who will be seeing it, using it?

2. What decisions may need to be made as a result of the information being presented?

For the executive level dashboard you will want to add the following considerations:

1. Are the metrics tied to critical business outcomes marketing is expected to impact?

2. Do the metrics provide insight into how marketing is impacting these outcomes?

3. Do the metrics help demonstrate marketing’s effectiveness, efficiency and financial value?

4. Does the dashboard provide insight into what is and isn’t working?

By understanding your organization’s critical business outcomes and how marketing is expected to impact these, you will be in a better position to define your metrics.  For example if your company is focused on rapid growth and new customers are key, then marketing metrics that show how it is affecting the rate of customer acquisition and growth compared to the industry will be needed.  If growing top line revenue is a critical outcome then marketing will need metrics related to pipeline contribution, qualified leads, etc. If growth is going to come from new product innovation and adoption, then the metrics will need to tie marketing to these outcomes.  The message here is – the right metrics on your dashboard are those that connect marketing to what matters to the business.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.

Dashboards seem to be all the rage these days. The pressure to demonstrate value, be more accountable, and improve marketing return on investment is driving marketers to develop dashboards.  If you don’t have one, perhaps you are working on one. Or if you have one, perhaps you are exploring changes. When we start working with a company we ask to see what they are using today to report their performance. What we often see is really just a visual report that is tracking program progress and budget.  While this may be useful information at some level it is not a marketing dashboard. A marketing dashboard is typically a multi-layered graphical tool that presents critical information about the performance of the organization in order to facilitate faster and more accurate decision making, alert users to issues or problems, increate visibility into marketing activities, and improve effectiveness and efficiency.  Think of your dashboard as consisting of all the necessary dials and gauges that tell you where you are, where you’re going and at what speed – along with indicator lights that illuminate at the first sign of a problem. Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are the heart of any dashboard.  Knowing which metrics to track depends on your company’s business strategy.  So the first step is to define your metrics, KPIs, and performance targets and insure they are linked to the business outcomes. This is essential for measuring performance; otherwise you will not be able to relate your work to your contribution to the business.

The goal is for your dashboard to communicate the impact Marketing is having on the business and your progress against the performance targets.  Therefore your marketing dashboard should help you answer basic questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing.  The questions can be financial, operational or comparative in nature.  Here are some questions you may want your marketing dashboard to be able to provide insight into.

1. How fast are we growing compared to the market and our major competitors?

2. Are conversion rates along the pipeline improving on a month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter basis?

3. How many qualified sales-ready leads are we producing for the ABC market or segment or region?

4. Is our share of preference growing faster than our competition?

5. Did we reach our annual average order value for XYZ market or segment or region?

6. Did we achieve the rate of product adoption among customer set Z for product A?

7. Is our rate of customer acquisition on track?

8. Is the cost to acquire new customers within acceptable parameters?

9. How are each of the marketing programs performing against their performance target within the cost and time parameters?

In addition to providing this type of information a dashboard should also serve to alert users that something is amiss.  For example the dashboard should alert you to whether:

a. the qualified lead rate or pipeline contribution level is going below an acceptable level.

b. the average order value is falling below normal

c. discounting is going above the acceptable level

d. customer churn is going above the acceptable level

e. product/customers is going below normal

f. share of preference is declining below the target

You want your dashboard to help you know what if anything you need to change.  For example, should you increase your spend on a particular program or kill it or are changes required.  It takes data to create your dashboard, so you are going to need to know which systems or databases provide the data, the format of this data, how to extract, clean and analyze the data and where to move it to populate the dashboard.   Once you have developed and implemented the dashboard, the challenge is going to be deploying it and using it.  Companies that resource their marketing performance measurement and management initiative with the right people and tools and establish a process for collecting the performance data, for tracking and reporting marketing performance tend to be more successful in improving their performance and ROMI.

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.