How Exceptional Marketing Teams Use Data To Inspire Enthusiastic Collaboration

The most effective marketing teams think creatively and collaborate with each other to make progress on a small number of common goals. They understand the metrics that will be used to determine if they are accomplishing those goals, and they trust the data that is used to calculate those metrics.

This is rare, and it doesn’t happen by accident. In this post I will share the process that we use at DiveTeam to help our clients use data to set goals and create a culture of honest, collaborative and productive communication.

Does anyone have a cure for the hiccups?

Don’t you love how helpful people become when you have the hiccups? The hiccups are a great example of a universal problem that all of us have worked on before. Those of us who have had some success curing the hiccups are excited to share our learnings with others. If you have the hiccups during a meeting at work, there’s a good chance that everyone in the room is going to try and help. Wouldn’t it be great if your team would collaborate with the same enthusiasm about hitting your goals?

I believe that four key ingredients are required for this type of enthusiastic collaboration, and here’s how they might look when someone has hiccups in the office:

1. A culture of creativity and experimentation - One person probably tells you to hold your breath while they count, and someone else might start looking for a lemon for you to bite or offer some other solution.

2. A sense of ownership that you can have an impact - Each person in the room believes that they have the cure for hiccups, and they eagerly await their turn to share a solution.

3. A clear objective - Everyone watches to see if the hiccups stop after each solution, because this is how the group will determine which solution is victorious.

4. Freedom to fail - No one is concerned about looking like a failure to the group if the solution that they suggest fails.

What does this have to do with data?

In my consulting career I have had the opportunity to work with about 150 marketing teams, and I can think of 1 that truly collaborated with each other as if they were working on a cure for the hiccups. I believe that the secret that this exceptional marketing team had unlocked was a different way to think about insights as a tool for stimulating creativity.

Here are two short case studies that illustrate my point.

Case Study #1: The Typical Marketing Team

Early in my career I was consulting for a quick service restaurant when the CMO announced a must-win priority for the organization: breakfast. The marketing team was split into several domains that each reported up to the CMO (public relations, customer experience, customer loyalty, customer acquisition, etc.), and each domain was responsible for creating a plan to support the CMO’s priority to expand breakfast sales.

A few months after the announcement the customer acquisition team was getting ready to launch their campaign, and so they asked me to create weekly reports to help them analyze performance. I asked a few questions to understand what they were hoping to accomplish with the campaign to make sure that the reports were useful, and the client responded: “just look for some quick wins to share with the team”. 

Eventually I realized that the client was asking me to dig through data every week in search of “insights”. They did not provide any specific direction, they did not have have specific KPI’s or targets to hit, and they gave me no theories about which tactics might work better than others.

I worked very hard on those first few reports. I came up with some KPI’s and started sharing my thoughts with the team weekly on how well the campaign was performing, but after a few weeks it became clear that no actions were being taken after these meetings. In fact, when I reporting anything that sounded like bad news (maybe the cost per acquisition was too high in some channel) the atmosphere became unbearably awkward. The client would question the quality of the data and continue business as usual.

Case Study #2: An Exceptional Marketing Team

A few years later I worked with a B2B firm that was seeking to grow their services business. Their goal was ambitious: to scale revenue from a specific type of service by 5x in one year. 

To break this ambitious goal into something more manageable, the leadership team analyzed CRM data to understand which marketing tactics had been most successful in the past. This allowed them to think creatively about how they might scale those high performing tactics, and then set smaller revenue targets for each. Before we even had a conversation about what should be added to a dashboard they had set goals for the number of deals that they expected to see in the pipeline by month.

The campaign launched with a robust plan in place, but the plan changed significantly every month. The team of ~12 people knew that they were working on an ambitious goal, and they were not afraid to share when a tactic was not performing to expectations. The team learned from their mistakes, came up with new ideas, and evolved the plan as they learned new information.

Which Example Sounds More Familiar?

The exceptional marketing team was constantly learning. They agreed on the goals and chose simple metrics that they trusted. They thought creatively and changed the plan often. They were not humiliated when something failed, and they wanted each other to succeed.

My theory is that those marketers who have never observed an exceptional team do not have a sense of urgency about creating one. It’s similar to the way my parents don’t think it is important to have sharp knives in the kitchen, and they are perfectly happy to continue smashing tomatoes with a butter knife.

The easiest way to determine if your marketing is exceptional or typical is to listen to they way they use the word “insights”.

“Insights”… The Fountain of Youth of the Digital Era

In a previous post on Modern Marketing we defined the “Digital Era” as a period that roughly lasted from (2000-2020) where marketing teams focused heavily on digital transformation. During this time it was common for marketers to claim that they were “data-driven”, and many of us believed in the power of “insights” to transform business. 

We repeated the mantra that data is more valuable than oil, and we expected analysts to be treasure hunters who searched for valuable insights that held the power to revolutionize the business. We commonly appointed a single analysis tool as the “source of truth”, and awkwardly imported data from various parts of the business into this tool with little regard for the context that is lost when you do this. We naively assumed that insights would always be unbiased, and we blurred the line between correlation and causal inference by repeating the cliché: “any analyst could tell you what happened, but a good analyst can get to the why” 🤮.

We do not repeat this narrative at DiveTeam. Insights are not valuable unless they inspire creativity and influence strategy. But many marketing teams fail to create the four ingredients necessary for enthusiastic collaboration that we defined above. They have not put in the work to create a culture of experimentation. They often do not understand and trusts their data. Most importantly, they do not feel empowered to explore new ideas without the embarrassment of failure.

Our Solution: Outcome Based Measurement Strategy

As a data and analytics consulting firm we believe that it is critical for us to help our clients build exceptional marketing teams, because this builds the trusted, long-term and mutually beneficial relationships. As a result, we have designed a concept that we call the “Outcome Based Measurement Strategy”, which is built at the beginning of every project that we work on.

In the rest of this post I will describe what the outcome based measurement strategy is, and share our methodology for creating it with our clients.

3 Characteristics of an Outcome Based Measurement Strategy

An outcome based measurement strategy is designed to clarify objectives and build trust in the data so that it can stimulate creativity and collaboration. It is a document (usually a spreadsheet) that is used to align teams around a small number of common goals, and ensure that everyone understands the metrics that will be used to determine if they are accomplishing those goals.

An outcome based measurement strategy will not change your culture over night, but it gives the team a core document to rally around. This document should have three characteristics:

1. It is simple.

2. It tells an inspiring story.

3. It draws a clear line between success and failure.

Keep It Simple. It can be extremely difficult to get teams to commit to a small number of specific outcomes when they are afraid of failure. The measurement strategy focuses your narrative, and removes the desire to search for “quick wins”.

Tell an Inspiring Story. It shows the team how important their contribution is to the success of the team. People want to feel like they are part of something important, and your measurement strategy should show how the actions of each person fit into the big picture.

Draw a Clear Line Between Success & Failure for the Team, not the Individual. No one wants to feel like a failure, but the most effective teams acknowledge when something is not working. Your measurement plan will need to be specific, but also evolve over time as you gather new information.

The Format We Use

DiveTeam has developed a specific template that we follow when creating an outcome based measurement strategy for our clients. This is intended to be a starting point that can be adapted to a wide range of businesses, and doing this well requires creativity and effort. 

The Process

An outcome based measurement strategy cannot be handed down from the top. Each domain leader (customer acquisition, loyalty, experience, etc.) will need to own their part of the plan. The domain leaders must understand and trust the metrics that they are responsible for moving, and they must believe that their goals are achievable. 

As a result, the process for building a measurement strategy typically requires three steps:

1. It is initiated from the top (usually by an outsourced consulting team, but ideally by the CMO). The vision (part 1 of the measurement plan) is completed by leadership. The purpose of the measurement strategy is explained, and someone with authority ensures that each domain team understands that it should be prioritized.

2. The domain teams work independently to create a recommendation that makes sense for their team.

3. The leadership reviews the plans to ensure they are complete, meet the three characteristics defined above, and appropriately challenging. Then consolidates them into a single coherent plan.

The Components

Part 1: The Vision

Start with your ultimate vision. This is a few paragraphs that tell the story you want your team to rally around. For example:

“We will aggressively expand sales in Europe!”

Part 2: Specific Outcomes

What are the specific outcomes you are trying to drive? These outcomes are usually presented in a table or spreadsheet. The goal is to make the vision that you laid out in part 1 tangible and clear. This is a business exercise, and you are not worried about the data or how you will measure outcomes at this point. For example:

Specific Outcomes
Make more people aware of our product
Improve the quality of leads that come through our website
Reach more customers in Europe

Part 3: Key Metrics

This is the hard part. For each desired outcome you will have 1 to 2 key metrics that tell you when you are achieving your outcome. These metrics rarely align perfectly with your desired outcomes, but they should be available within trusted data sources. Here are a few examples:

Specific Outcomes	Key Metrics	Data Source
Make more people aware of our product	Active users on the product details page	Google Analytics
Improve the quality of leads that come through our website	Closed/won opportunity ratio	Salesforce
Reach more customers in Europe	New accounts	Salesforce

Part 4: Targets

Everyone hates setting targets, but this is where you draw a line in the sand. Targets tell you if you are successfully moving the needle on your key metrics, and your team needs to agree to these targets before they are measured against them. Targets should be realistic, but they should also represent the return on investment you are hoping to get from the marketing activity. 

Leave nothing blank…Your plan should be nimble, and targets can change. When you really have no idea what to expect it is best to start somewhere and modify your target later when you have more information.

Specific Outcomes	Key Metrics	Data Source	Q3 Targets
Make more people aware of our product	Active users on the product details page	Google Analytics	100,000
Improve the quality of leads that come through our website	Closed/won opportunity ratio	Salesforce	20%
Reach more customers in Europe	New accounts	Salesforce	100

Part 5: Decisions

Finally, for each desired outcome you should also list out the decisions that will be made if we are not hitting our target. How will you modify the plan if it’s not working? Just like targets, these can (and probably should) evolve over time as you learn what is working, but it is an important brainstorming exercise. 

Specific Outcomes	Key Metrics	Data Source	Q3 Targets	Decisions
Make more people aware of our product	Active users on the product details page	Google Analytics	100,000	Change channel strategy.
Improve the quality of leads that come through our website	Closed/won opportunity ratio	Salesforce	20%	Test different audience criteria. Improve content.
Reach more customers in Europe	New accounts	Salesforce	100	Evaluate COA to reallocate budgets

This Doesn’t Sound Too Difficult

To be clear: this is difficult. Your goal is not just to create an outcome based measurement plan, but to use data to build the four ingredients of enthusiastic collaboration:

1. A culture of creativity and experimentation

2. A sense of ownership that you can have an impact

3. A clear objective

4. Freedom to fail

We encourage our clients to revisit these plans annually, and again when strategic initiatives are launching: new product launches, website redesign, etc.

We would love to help your team use data to build a culture of enthusiastic collaboration! To get started, simply schedule some time with our team to talk about your goals and explore if DiveTeam is able to help.