Let’s Start with Agility

If you look up the word agility in the dictionary, it says things like “nimbleness”, “the ability to move quickly”, and “the quality of being resourceful and adaptable.” All of which are good, but all of which beg the question: What are you moving quickly to do and what are you adapting to?

Since agile marketing has its roots in agile manufacturing, it’s illuminating to take a look at how agility is defined in manufacturing. The definition of agility in manufacturing is crystal clear. It is the ability to adjust supply to meet changing demand. The more agile your manufacturing process, the faster you can do this. If you can produce a product in a month, then it will take you one month to adapt to changes in market demand. If you can produce it in a week, then you are four times more agile, because you can adapt to changing demand four times faster. Now consider the competitive difference this makes if you are producing fashionwear or holiday gifts. The more agile competitor always wins in a fast moving market.

Marketing Agility Defined

Marketing departments, unfortunately, don’t manufacture products. Marketing supply and demand are much fuzzier concepts. Marketing is often described as the process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs to deliver value and make money. Marketing management is the process of adjusting the marketing mix to this purpose. Therefore, marketing agility is the speed at which you can adjust the marketing mix to deliver greater customer value and make more money. It is not the speed at which you execute your marketing programs; it is the speed at which you can take new marketing mix ideas and turn them into results. How fast can you change your product, adjust your price, deliver a new promotion or shift your channels to anticipate and satisfy ever changing customer needs? This is your marketing agility.

Agile marketing increases marketing agility by accelerating the marketing management process. By applying the five agile marketing disciplines, agile marketing speeds the process of turning marketing mix ideas into the concrete business results that increase customer value and drive company growth.

Agile Marketing Accelerates Marketing Management

The goal of agile marketing is to increase marketing agility. If marketing agility is the speed at which you can adjust the marketing mix to deliver more customer value and make more money, then by definition the goal of agile marketing is to increase that speed. In a previous post, I made the case that all marketers follow a fundamental marketing management process characterized by sourcing ideas for optimizing the marketing mix, then working inside and outside the marketing department to implement those ideas and deliver increased customer value. And finally, measuring the business results of that work and doing it all over again.

Agile marketing increases marketing agility by accelerating the marketing management cycle: ideas, work, results, ideas, work, results, etc. through the practice of the five agile marketing disciplines:

1. Measure value through the eyes of the customer
2. Minimize waste by reducing uncertainty
3. Maximize flexibility by working incrementally
4. Foster alignment and collaboration through transparency
5. Improve iteratively and continuously

When viewed in the context of the marketing management process, the buttons pushed by the five agile marketing disciplines to increase marketing agility become obvious. Customer value is the fundamental axis of alignment for marketing; producing anything that is not valuable to the customer is waste. The process of transforming ideas into results is rife with uncertainty, so it must be managed rigorously, or again there is waste. Delay is the enemy of agility; small, incremental adjustments to the marketing mix take less time to complete than large, monolithic adjustments. Marketing is not a black box. Marketing managers must reach well outside the marketing department to align customers with the company by facilitating marketing activities in sales, engineering, manufacturing, finance, etc. The more transparent the marketing management process, the more effective the facilitation. Finally, making more money implies that marketing results should always be up and to the right. This will only happen if marketing builds upon past successes and learns from past mistakes.

The Future of Agile Marketing

When change is the norm, marketing agility becomes a strategic business weapon. However, current agile marketing methodologies only scratch the surface of agile marketing’s potential to increase marketing agility. While they are incredibly useful for improving marketing team flexibility and productivity, agile methodologies like SCRUM that were designed for software engineering focus almost exclusively on the work within the marketing department. Marketing, unlike engineering, is an extremely outward-facing business function. Agile software methodologies do not adequately address the sourcing and evaluation of new ideas, the impact for constant customer interaction, the importance of collaboration outside the marketing department, or the accountability for concrete and often real-time business results. Software engineering teams are intentionally shielded from these highly uncertain, external marketing realities by product owners and backlogs, so they can focus on the process of producing quality software.

While early agile marketing methodologies have focused on internal marketing teams, future agile marketing methodologies should address the complete, end-to-end marketing management process to increase true marketing agility. They must encompass the complete, end-to-end marketing management process from ideas to results and take into consideration frequent, external marketing interactions with customers and the company.

Marketing managers must constantly source new marketing mix ideas, groom marketing mix backlogs and set marketing mix priorities. Then, they must oversee the implementation of those ideas, both inside and outside the marketing department, for example through a software engineering team. And finally, marketing managers are accountable for marketing mix results; results that may take months or minutes. To realize the full potential of agile marketing for increasing marketing agility, we must evolve current agile marketing methodologies to incorporate these characteristics.

Agile marketing should help marketing cast a wider net to capture better ideas and increase the speed at which those ideas are evaluated and implemented. It should streamline the work processes by which marketing managers facilitate marketing activities both inside and outside the marketing department. It should incorporate pervasive marketing metrics and direct customer feedback to not only adapt to customer needs, but to anticipate them. And, it should close the marketing management loop by focusing on business results that drive marketing performance and enable continuous improvement. In short, agile marketing methodologies should encompass the full end-to-end marketing management process. The goal of agile marketing should extend beyond marketing team agility to true marketing agility.

The post What is Marketing Agility? appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

In other words, the best approach to adopting agile marketing is an agile approach!

“The best agile methodology is the one that fits your team, not a preconceived recipe you have to follow.”

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Focus First on Agile Marketing Disciplines

The biggest benefit from adopting agile marketing comes from applying core agile disciplines. These disciplines are the foundation for improved efficiency, output and alignment, no matter what agile process you implement.

The core agile marketing disciplines are:

1. Measure value through the eyes of the customer. Whether you like a program is irrelevant — you are not the customer. Measure success only through real results and real feedback from real customers.
2. Minimize waste by managing uncertainty. Work on the things you can do today that will produce real customer value. Be open, clear and realistic about what you are doing when.
3. Maximize flexibility by working incrementally. Break big projects into smaller, manageable sub projects, so you can measure and adjust early, and recognize and remove barriers as soon as possible.
4. Foster alignment and collaboration through transparency. Broadly sharing information about plans, projects and results creates understanding and alignment, and encourages input.
5. Improve incrementally and continuously. Plan, do, check, act — in small increments. Don’t be afraid to fail, just don’t fail the same way multiple times. Learn as quickly as possible, improve, and iterate.

(To learn more about agile marketing disciplines, check out the ebook agile marketing disciplines)

It’s important to make these disciplines a part of your marketing culture. Discuss and debate them with your team. If your team understands the basics of these disciplines and applies them, you can be successful with a wide range of agile processes.

Building those processes is your next step.

Start with Basic Agile Marketing Processes

The key to successfully adopting agile marketing is to get just enough process in place to support your agile disciplines. Then, adjust the process to best fit your team. No agile methodology is right, or wrong. You may have heard of Scrum, Kanban, Lean and other agile methodologies, which have been borrowed from agile manufacturing and development, and applied to agile marketing. They may be ideal for your team, but they may also be too complex and intimidating as a whole. A simpler, easier path to adopting agile marketing is to start with some basics processes that you can quickly adopt, then evolve into a methodology that works well for you. The best agile methodology is the one that fits your team, not a preconceived recipe you have to follow.

To get started, here are some basic agile processes to consider. Try these, then adapt and expand them to fit your team.

✓ Agile Basic 1 | Create and Publicize a Backlog

Create a prioritized backlog that specifies what you will, and will not be working on (a great basic from Scrum).

First, make sure everyone understands each item. Any item that is unclear should sit at the bottom of your backlog until it is clear. Then, (mimicking a key part of Lean), rate and prioritize each idea along two dimensions: 1) the customer value it will create and 2) the amount of work involved.

Now, make sure everyone can see your prioritized backlog. No magic here. Share the list on your intranet, tape it to a wall, or use an app that shares your work with everyone – whatever works for you. Make sure everyone can see the list, because alignment and collaboration start with visibility of what your marketing team are, and are not, doing.

✓ Agile Basic 2 | Establish Defined Periods of Work

Bound and limit periods of work to create focus and increase productivity.

Create a defined period of time (called a “sprint” in Scrum), and choose projects from your prioritized back log to complete during that timeframe. Make the timeframe reasonably short, say two weeks, and don’t stretch it to fit more projects — you can get to them in the next sprint. It’s important to define a limited sprint, because it gives your team a clear end point by which to complete a specific set of projects. This allows your team to focus on those, and only those, projects assigned to that sprint.

Switching costs are a major cause of wasted cycles. So, be diligent about not adding new projects mid sprint. This may cause heartburn with colleagues who are used to asking for emergency projects. But in the long run, making your team more efficient will benefit everyone, so stick to your sprint plan.

✓ Agile Basic 3 | Break Big Projects into Small Projects

Divide all projects longer than one week into sub projects no more than one week (shorter wherever you can), and turn all unbounded work into bounded steps whenever possible.

Estimating work for big projects is rarely accurate, and commonly leads to missed dates, wasted cycles and stressed team members. When you break big projects into small projects, the work becomes more manageable, and predictable. Progress is more easily measured and monitored with small projects. If problems arise with a small project, you can take palliative steps when it’s only days late, instead of trying to fix a big project that is a month late. Smaller projects also create the opportunity to test earlier, and make corrections before follow-on work is done, eliminating wasteful rework (a basic adapted from Lean methodology).

Similarly, unbounded work is hard to manage. Many projects in marketing rely on creativity, where it is difficult to dictate bounded time frames. So, don’t try. Instead, find ways to define bounded steps in the process, like delivering first and second drafts within specific time limits. The total effort and endpoint of a big creative project may be unknowable, but you can start with and manage smaller checkpoints.

Work everything in manageable increments. Check and test as early as possible — and create opportunities for early improvement.

✓ Agile Basic 4 | Test Early with Real Customers

Focus on driving results with real customers above solely meeting project specifications.

This may seem academic, but is not practiced enough. If a marketing project meets all the requirements specified by its owner, can it be labeled a success? No. It can only be labeled a success if it drives the impact for which it was intended. For instance, is it more important to deliver email content that the team likes, or that drives prospect conversions?

Team input is valuable, but prospect or customer input is critical. Test outlines with your target audience before writing the full copy. Use A / B testing when developing new themes. Monitor sentiment on social media. Although it’s often difficult, the key point is to test with customers or prospects whenever and as early as possible to measure real reactions. Then, adjust according to the data and feedback. Everyone involved will be much happier with customer success than with perfect adherence to specifications.

✓ Agile Basic 5 | Run Regular Heartbeat Meetings

Create a regular cadence of communication and involvement.

“Stand-up meetings” (as they are called in Scrum and Kanban) are a great example. These are short meetings where the participants literally stand while briefly discussing what they have accomplished, what they are doing next, and any barriers they face. The meetings should be regular, held either daily or two to three times per week, and should be short and focused. Each team member contributes their brief update, and only their update. Topics requiring additional discussion should be saved for other meetings with only the necessary participants, not the whole team.

Regular stand ups expose barriers early, and reinforce the drive to complete projects. Who wants to repeatedly report to their colleagues that they have no progress to report, right?

✓ Agile Basic 6 | Share Everything

Make broadly sharing information a core part of your process.

Sharing information with others is foundational to agile success. Beyond sharing your backlog as discussed above, you should also share sprint progress (called a burn-down), sprint barriers, project performance metrics and team member assignments. Publishing information keeps others up to date, and also produces other big benefits.

Sharing aids alignment. When you share and encourage commentary on plans and problems, others become invested in, and aligned with, your efforts. Sharing also stimulates collaboration. Visibility of plans, problems and ideas in a workgroup is clearly critical to collaboration. But, sharing the same information beyond the workgroup can produce solutions and options that might be missed.

Whether you update an intranet or a whiteboard, or use a tool designed to automatically share your work, make sharing information a mandatory part of your process. And, when in doubt, opt to share more rather than less.

Adopting Agile Marketing on Your Own Path, Step by Step

The basic agile processes and the agile disciplines above will give you a great start when adopting agile marketing. You may be pleasantly shocked at the increased efficiency gained from just this simple start.

Is this all there is to agile marketing? Unquestionably, no. There are many other suggested processes. But, there is no prescribed methodology that you must follow to benefit from adopting agile marketing. As I led with, agile marketing is foremost a mentality and a culture based on flexibility, speed, true customer value and openness. So, choose your own simple steps to ease into agile. Try what you like from the basics above, or other processes. Test them. Learn from the results and improve. That is a successful method for adopting agile marketing. After all, it’s the agile way!

The post Adopting Agile Marketing | Take an Easier Path appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

That being said, I should point out that my marketing colleagues, Jen and Markie, for whom I have the utmost respect, have employed Scrum for marketing with outstanding results. Please be sure to check out their side of the story: Scrum for Marketing Rocks!

Scrum for Marketing in the Field

I’ve been doing field marketing and event marketing my entire career.  Some people may think I’m a dinosaur, but there are a few field marketing rules of thumb that you just can’t ignore:

1. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
2. Late means never.
3. Details matter.
4. Sh*t happens, so be prepared.

My field marketing team’s typical day consists of one of the five following activities:

• Making a list
• Checking stuff off a list
• Playing MacGyver when stuff doesn’t follow the list
• Schmoozing
• More schmoozing

Schmoozing and more schmoozing being the two most important of the five, because the better your relationships, the better the field marketing: happier customers, higher quality speakers, more press coverage, better booth locations, higher discounts on freight. You get the picture.

So when Jen and Markie proposed to the rest of the team that we go all out agile marketing and adopt Scrum for marketing in the field, I was skeptical, but game. While the field marketing team is all about agile and marketing, we’re not so sure about Scrum for marketing. The last event had been a disaster. Collateral hadn’t shown up until day three of the show. Our keynote speaker came down with the measles after taking his kid to Disneyland. And, the sales team was more interested in drinking with their favorite clients than working the booth (OK, that’s every show). I wasn’t quite sure how Scrum for marketing was going to help with any of this, but they assured me that it would. It didn’t.

What’s The Big Idea Behind Scrum for Marketing?

It started off just fine. We were kicking off the planning for our annual customer love-in, shin-dig where we bring in three hundred execs from our best customers and show them a good time with a choice combination of education and entertainment. The first step in the planning process is always THE BIG IDEA, because it sets the theme for the entire event. Generally, its best to lock down THE BIG IDEA as early as possible, because everything from the speaker tracks to the tchotchkes depend on it. If you can’t lock down THE BIG IDEA, then you have to juggle things around to focus on what you can get done until it is locked down. And, you usually end up with a fair amount of rework. One year we had to throw away 500 plastic water bottles, because two months after locking down THE BIG IDEA, our CEO decided to unlock it.

Anyway, back to why Scrum for marketing sucks. As I said, it started off just fine. We made our usual list for the event, only this time we called it a ‘backlog.’ Then we started working down the list in the usual fashion. First sprint, first item on the list: make the list. Done! Second sprint, second item on the list: have a BIG IDEA. Not done. Two weeks. Ten people. Five meetings. Nada. All we had were a bunch of little ideas and anything approaching a BIG IDEA was either too expensive or too risky to pull off with any degree of certainty.

Markie suggested that maybe we could break the BIG IDEA up into several little ideas that we could tackle separately. And I was like: Markie with all due respect, its called THE BIG IDEA, because it is BIG. We don’t call it the ‘bunch of little small ideas.’ So, for the third sprint we decided to table the BIG IDEA for a while and focus on getting some things done that didn’t depend on it. And I have to admit that at this point I was hard pressed to tell the difference between Scrum for marketing and my trusty old process of simply checking stuff off the list. But, we stuck with it.

Sprint three actually went OK. We focused on basic logistics that we knew we would need regardless of THE BIG IDEA, like booking the venue, getting a freight carrier, planning lunch menus and the like. And strangely enough, we also came up with THE BIG IDEA on the side. I say ‘on the side’ because it is my understanding that it technically was not on the sprint, but we checked it off anyway. Now that we had THE BIG IDEA, we could move on to the important stuff like securing relevant speakers.

The first couple of days of sprint 4 were spent drawing up our speaker dream team and putting together a call plan. The second half of the sprint we started calling and by the end of the sprint we had…nothing of value. Sprint 5, a couple of maybes. And this is when I started wondering if Scrum for marketing in the field was even possible. You see, its like I said in the beginning: there are a few rules to field marketing that you just can’t ignore. Unfortunately, the basic rules of Scrum for marketing ignore at least three out of four.

What About the People?

When applying Scrum for marketing in the field, it comes up particularly short in the area of schmoozing. You see, most people are not aware of the delicate interplay between project management and schmoozing that occurs in field marketing. The right relationship can reduce a seemingly impossible task from months to minutes. The best field marketing risk management plan isn’t a project plan at all; it’s a strong network of customers, suppliers and industry influencers. I still haven’t figured out how to account for this in a sprint.

So, after a solid try, I’m still not convinced that Scrum for marketing works in the field.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally bought into the basic principles of agile marketing. And I love’s me to be checking things off my list. But, I don’t see any reason to overlay some fancy new process on top of my checklist.  My checklist has always worked for me, and I think I’ll stick with it.

The post Agile Marketing Debate:
Scrum for Marketing Sucks! appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.

Marketing can be a mad house.  I’ve been working on the front lines in marketing for quite a while, and that’s one thing I’ve learned for sure.   We always have so many projects going on–and so many changing priorities–that it can be hard to know what to do next.

When I first learned about agile marketing and the idea of using Scrum for marketing, I knew it was the right way for us to go. Some people weren’t so sure, and you can check out their side of the story in Scrum for Marketing Sucks!  But, I wanted our whole department to adopt it right away!

Taming Chaos with Scrum for Marketing

Getting everyone to buy in was not as easy as I hoped, because some of my colleagues—who will remain nameless, Marco—are not exactly comfortable with change, if you know what I mean. While they bought into agile marketing in general, Scrum for marketing worried them.   But, there are a few lessons I’ve learned in marketing that you just can’t ignore:

1. There is always more to do than you have time or resources
2. No plan survives first contact with the customer
3. Flexibility can turn a loss into a win, so stay open to new ideas
4. Evolve, or die!

The principles of agile marketing and specifically Scrum for marketing seemed like the perfect solutions to bring some order to the chaos that was our daily life.   I mean, look at some of these typical situations:

So, although we a do a great job in marketing IMHO, it seems like we are chasing our tail too much and wasting a lot of cycles.  Scrum for marketing seemed like the perfect way for us to minimize the madness and kill some of the inefficiency, so I convinced our whole group to give it a try.

The Bumpy Road to Adopting Scrum for Marketing

Things started off a bit rough.  First, we put together a list of every program or project idea we could come up with.   Not so tough.  But, then we had to prioritize them for our first sprint.  What a mess!  People were certainly not OK with the idea that everything couldn’t be on the list.   “So why not just make the sprint longer and put more on the list?” some people said.  But, that is exactly the point of a limited work period.   If you really want to adopt Scrum for marketing, it’s critical you only include as many items in a sprint as can be realistically completed in the sprint’s timeframe.  Finally, people got it, and we had our task list for our first sprint!  Yeah!

Well, actually it wasn’t that easy.   Most experts on Scrum for marketing say you must put size estimates on your work. We almost had a fight break out over how to estimate the work for some tasks.  We were pretty solid on estimating work for things like setting up an email campaign or getting t-shirts printed, but we had some issues with a couple of our designers.   At first they flat out refused to commit to an estimate for new designs.  They kept saying you simply can’t rush creativity.  Having at least some sizing for your work is an essential aspect of Scrum for marketing, so we had to do something.   Eventually, we got over this hiccup by breaking the big ‘creativity’ up into smaller ‘creative iterations’.  The designers felt much more comfortable estimating time for a first draft, second draft and so forth with reviews in between.   With our first foray into Scrum for marketing complete, sprint #1 was now underway!

Everything was going great, but then it almost came off the tracks.  We were about halfway through our sprint #1 when the VP of Sales said he needed marketing to immediately produce a retention campaign for major accounts.  Sales had just lost one of our big accounts and he was worried more would follow.  One key discipline of Scrum for marketing is sticking to your sprint priorities. Big changes are supposed to happen outside the sprints in order to protect team productivity during a sprint. So I shared this with the Veep.  His response was not pretty.

Fortunately, Seemo (our CMO get it? 😉 ) is a big believer in agile marketing in general and Scrum for marketing in particular.  He showed the Veep of Sales what was on our current sprint list.  But more importantly, he highlighted that the sprint would be over in a week and we could bump up the retention campaign to the next sprint, IF AND ONLY IF, he thought it was more important than everything else on our backlog.

Turns out, we actually pushed the retention campaign to sprint #4, because the Veep of Sales had forgetten all the other stuff he’d put on the backlog!  Lesson learned on my end, Scrum for marketing is as much about managing customer expectations as it is about optimizing team productivity. +1 for SCRUM for marketing!

Adopting Scrum for Marketing the Agile Way

The whole Scrum for marketing process is going pretty well, now, but not everyone is a believer yet.   The daily standup meetings don’t seem to be everyone’s favorite, and overall the team is not great at estimating work for each project, yet.  But, I can tell you that early results of adopting SCRUM for marketing have been good.  Its  brought a lot more predictability to our group.  Our campaign flow and lead flow isn’t subject to fits and starts. Even some of my old school teammates (Marco) are starting to see some benefits, even if they won’t publicly admit it. More importantly, everyone outside of marketing has a better handle of what we’re up to and is far less anxious about it (i.e., the marketing complaint meter has definitely dropped by an order of magnitude). Time will tell, but, even with only a few sprints under our belt, I can already see that we are not wasting as much time on fire drills.  Everyone has a better idea of what’s coming, and the team is clearly happier.

Scrum for marketing rocks!

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Scrum for Marketing Rocks! appeared first on Markodojo - Marketing Management Software - Agile Marketing.