Deloitte describes four-step model for customer-led marketing

Nine out of 10 organisations do not currently have the change management strategy or business processes in place to make their marketing automation and customer experience management ambitions a reality, Deloitte claims.

Speaking at the Oracle Marketing Cloud launch event in Sydney yesterday, the consulting group’s manager for customer technology, Calvin Yeoh (pictured), told attendees that technology is a fundamental enabler for optimising customer experiences and engagement in today’s digitally disrupted world.

But he claimed organisations will fail unless the right amount of investment into people, process and strategy is achieved.

Yeoh said nine out of 10 customers Deloitte works with lack a sufficient change strategy and purpose. Strategy includes setting KPIs, customer segmentation, program roadmaps, customer monitoring, lead scoring and using personas, he said, while change management includes training, audits and reviews, governance, successions planning, an operating model and strong process.

According to Yeoh’s formula for customer marketing success, only 20 per cent of the focus should be on technology, while the remaining 80 per cent should be spent on strategy and change management processes and people.

“We see marketing automation and the marketing technology stack as adding value, and as that central nervous system that allows companies to orchestrate these [customer] experiences at an operational strategic level,” he told attendees.

“But how about the people? How do we take them on that journey? Change is impossible without changing the people in our organisation too.”

Yeoh said he’s seen multiple organisations go through three or more marketing automation technology platform projects but fail to put the right transformation structure in place to make them successful.

“Without changing the strategy, you will just get the same result,” he said.

Deloitte breaks the key risks for marketers into two camps: Internal and external. Internal challenges range from a fragmented strategy to underperforming ROI and sales, low adoption and low morale. External challenges, meanwhile, include poor customer experiences and a weakened brand reputation.

“It’s critical to be as targeted as possible and have people to help you down that [customer] journey,” Yeoh said. Alignment between sales and marketing around a common lead scoring matrix and KPIs is another must in cementing this new customer engagement approach, he said.

"If marketing is to strive for a more strategic role, we must shift from a lead-generation mentality to a lead-through-revenue-management mentality," Yeoh added.

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Deloitte has also crafted a four-step horizon model to describe how organisations move towards customer-led and data-driven marketing.

The first horizon is transitioning from a ‘classic sales and marketing’ mentality to lead capturing and nurturing, and introducing key functionalities like segmentation. Yeoh said this also involves setting KPIs and engaging in A/B testing.

Horizon two is about integration of the customer journey, content strategy and program integration, while horizon three is about revenue performance. The fourth and optimal horizon organisations need to reach is agile marketing.

“Marketing is an evolving and growing space from a technology, people and process perspective,” Deloitte’s head of digital marketing, Chris Collacott, concluded. “This is about taking teams from soloist activities and occasional team-based activities, to true multichannel customer experience and start to think about scaling up that kind of orchestration.

“It’s important to realise you’re orchestrating symphonic experience for a person. It comes back to the mind of the customer.”

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