It was about three weeks into my new job at SIGMA (six months ago) that I had my epiphany.  I had finally figured out how to work the microwave without exploding my Grande Pike Place Roast or Maple and Brown Sugar Quaker Oats  (:30 seconds on high for 16-oz. coffee and :90 seconds for oatmeal, provided you don’t add too much water).  It was also around that time that I achieved a basic comfort and confidence level in navigating the confusing layout of our building, which is truly a maze of locked doors from one area to the next (for people and data security reasons). That’s when it hit me…our customers only care about one thing:  VALUE.

Anyway, I like to get into the office early, maybe even too early for my own good.  It’s often still dark and I tend to be the first customer at my local Starbucks.  There are two problems with getting to Starbucks at 5:00 in the morning.  #1 is that they’re not open yet, and I impatiently have to wait for the door to be unlocked.  Sometimes this happens at 5:15, but only if the barista gets in early (the sign on the door says they open at 5:30). Here’s the other problem – when they do let me in, the coffee’s not that hot yet.  So, this inevitably leads me to the microwave (my favorite is in the southeast pod on the ground floor) when I first get into the office.  I don’t do this every day, as I find it’s helpful only when my brain is full of ideas and in need of “ready-set-go” kind of morning.   It’s a ritual two or three days a week.

Getting back to VALUE… Full of dark roast and pacing my office rug to death, I kept asking myself, “How can SIGMA drill deep into the value proposition and get our clients more of it…and faster?”  What exactly do our clients value, really? I had to get crystal clear on what it is that our customers define as value, and if we have the chops to deliver it to them.  Is it hard work and commitment?  Is it our process? Is it our smart people (which we have in spades)?  Is it our knowledge?  Is it our personality?  No, No, No, No and No.  It’s none of those.

Here’s what matters:  Insights live within our clients’ data.  We are in the business of harvesting these insights and making them actionable. It’s our job to make sure we do that and do it fast.

Once I established this as our primary purpose, it only made sense that we remodel our company logo and positioning statement…SIGMA Marketing Group is now operating under its new name, SIGMA Marketing Insights.  After revamping our image on paper, it only made sense to update the look and feel of our office here in Rochester, NY. This included a remodel of our main lobby, and in addition, unused office cubicles were removed, which has enabled us to create a better, more open, “free-thinking” work environment – all designed to get our team thinking in fresher, more innovative, and, most importantly, more insightful ways.

Our most significant change is in the way we provide customer service value to our clients. Our re-engineered “open source” approach delivers client value seamlessly, with a multi-discipline access to each other, including skill and talent among operations, insights, and strategy. It seems to be working like a charm.

Finally, as part of getting our clients to value faster, we have had a full-court press on building out a killer technology platform called mi-Link^SM.  It’s our process and self-serve portal that integrates, scrubs, analyzes and serves up client data into highly visible interactive reports. You can check out the newly minted demonstration video on our home page. It is the high-powered engine that enables powerful insights. It too is winning the hearts of our clients and the team within SIGMA.

And that’s in the first six months…

Stay tuned.

About the Author:

Stefan Willimann is the Chief Executive Officer at SIGMA Marketing Insights.  Connect with Stefan on LinkedIn.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on mi-Link^SM. Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.

The wealth of information available with big data can be very useful in uncovering and delivering new insights to assist your sales teams with their sales engagement process. While it’s tempting to provide your sales teams with an in-depth view of available information, too much information can bring about decision paralysis. When insights are well thought out and delivered at the right time, they help foster deeper conversations, and assist you in defining and solving your prospects’ problems.

Sheena S. Iyengar, a professor at the Columbia Business School, spoke about choice and one of her field experiments in a TEDTalk (Nov 2011 TEDTalk, “How to make choosing easier”). While a graduate student, Sheena conducted a field experiment at an upscale grocery store in California.  During random times throughout the day, consumers were presented with one of 2 versions of a tasting booth: a selection of 6 flavored jams, or a selection of 24 flavored jams. You might think that having more choices would yield better results, but the results were surprising.

Although more consumers stopped to taste samples at the 24-flavor booth, consumers with limited choices were 6 times more likely to make a purchase. When faced with too many choices, “people chose not to choose” (Barry Schwartz, author of  The Paradox of Choice).

How can we apply the lessons from Sheena Iyengar’s studies on simplifying decision-making and choices? The recommendations in her TEDTalk are just as relevant to developing sales engagement processes and tools.

It’s tempting to provide your sales teams with all of the available information about prospects – firmographic attributes, finances, market share, leadership team, etc. A better option is to engage with your sales organization to find out what they look for in prospects and deliver insights accordingly.  What are the key 3-5 metrics they use to begin the engagement process?  What information is critical versus ‘nice to have’?

Where possible, apply visualization techniques to enable your sales teams to quickly assess options to move the sales engagement process forward.  Use of color and varying sizes and shapes are preferable to tables or lists to highlight which prospects need attention, new areas of opportunity, or product fit.

Sales processes generally become more complex as prospects move through the buying cycle. In the initial phases, discussions tend to take place at a higher level.  As decisions are made, the discussions go deeper and can become more technical. Supporting your sales teams by disclosing information only as it is needed prevents both your sales people and your prospects from facing choices before they are ready to make them. Tools that allow your team to drill down from high-level to lower-level insights present complexity within a simple framework.

Too often, we don’t spend enough time simplifying the decisions our prospects are being asked to make at the different stages in the sales process. This can then result in complexity in which it is easier for prospects to delay decisions than to make the choices that result in mutually beneficial solutions. By incorporating these recommendations into your sales enablement tools and processes, you can reduce the likelihood of stalling the sales process.

About the Author:

Vida Tamoshunas is the Vice President of Marketing Analytics at SIGMA Marketing Insights.  Connect with Vida on LinkedIn.

Get the new How To Guide from SIGMA: “4 Steps to Driving Smarter Sales with Analytics”

1.  Customer Engagement is not a passing fad. Customer engagement occurs every day on an offline basis in the branch banking environment.  The challenge for those branch-based institutions currently is replicating that level of engagement in the online world.  This will remain a key issue in 2013, especially as engagement must be thought of not only in terms of your engaging with your customers, but also with how your customers engage with each other about you.  For institutions without an extensive branch network, the challenge is to establish and then maintain an engaging relationship with and by your audience.

2.  Data Integration becomes mission critical.Financial institutions have always been faced with this challenge and were early adopters of MCIF (Marketing Customer Information File), CIF (Customer Information File), and other capabilities to bring data about their customers together.  However, the explosion of web analytics, social media and other digital channels has created new sources of data with different integration challenges, adding complexity to linking and managing both the online and offline content.  Bringing together this new, rich, unstructured content (and sorting it from the chaff) will be more crucial than ever before to get closer to understanding your customer.

3.  Marketing Analytics is red hot.This data fuels the growth in the importance of marketing analytics. But the new social conversations are generating a different data stream of unformatted data.  The number of people skilled in analyzing this data are difficult to find, and — in general — aren’t clamoring to breach the walls of the local financial institution.  Most institutions will need to rely on external partners for these insights, and will compete with most other companies for these resources. As Robert Wollan of Accenture says in the current issue of CRM Magazine, “Turning data into actionable insights is increasingly essential – and increasingly difficult.”

4.  Social Media Marketing will mature. While the rest of the world has jumped feet first on to the social media bandwagon, banks and other financial institutions have proceeded more cautiously.  In fact,some have gone so far as to say that social media is a waste of time for most banks and credit unions.   We think that banks and other financial institutions will remain cautious in 2013, but will begin to more strongly leverage social media as a marketing channel.

5.  Technology vendors are blurring the distinction between products and services. ASPs, Software as a service, “To the Cloud.”  Expect more technological confusion, not less, in 2013.

6.  Segmentation becomes schizophrenic.Cohorts, personas, or clusters — whatever segmentation methodologies you are currently using (you are, aren’t you?) should be reviewed in 2013 to ensure that you’re capturing and leveraging the new data that is now available to you.  A recent study by eDigitalResearch and IMRG shows that 65% of people are happy to make bill payments online.  Can you identify these groups in your database and do you incorporate them in your customer and prospect segmentation?

7.  “Touchpoint Attribution” emerges as the new buzzword for 2013. The challenge of allocating sales to a particular communications channel is somewhat easier in the financial services space, because financial institutions simply don’t do as much multi-channel marketing as non-financial marketers do.  As multichannel communications usage grows in FIs, this will take on more importance, but as for 2013, we can’t help but ask “Are we there yet?”

8.  Mobile marketing explodes. Not so much mobile marketing, but we expect that mobile banking will gain a much stronger foothold in 2013.  The recent growth in capable smart phones and other platforms (iPhone, Android phones, iPad, etc.) will make banking-on-the-go a reality for more customers in 2013. The ability to download an app to a mobile platform rather than relying solely on the Web lends at least an illusion of additional security that will aid adoption of this capability.

9.  Privacy wars heat up. For financial institutions, it won’t so much be “heating up” as it will continue at a full boil.   “Do not track” legislation that is being considered will add complexity and slow the adoption of full social media efforts by banks and other institutions in 2013, with some sitting it out until the legislative picture clears.

10.  “Right Touching” makes sense. Due to security and privacy concerns, multichannel marketing capabilities have been slower to grow in most financial service firms. Phishing scams have made many distrustful of an email from their bank and, outside of the “online only” banks and other FIs has complicated the rollout of full multichannel capabilities by those institutions entrusted with our financial security. But financial institutions also have a head start in this regard — existing networks of ATMs and online banking help to self-identify users, so the right message can be presented when that channel of choice is used.

We’ll be keeping an eye on these trends for financial services marketing as 2013 rolls forward, and we’ll compare notes to see how our projections pan out as the year progresses. What do you think 2013 will bring?

Many of our clients ask us to assess their needs and readiness for new marketing technology.  Whether they ask us to help them select a new email service provider, build a marketing database, or implement a marketing automation tool, we have learned that the best path to success is to create a plain-English document that clearly spells out what you are hoping to accomplish.

If 2013 is the year your marketing team plans to take on a significant marketing technology upgrade, your most important first step is to build smart business requirements to guide the team.

Three Reasons to Build

We find there are three main reasons marketers invest in new technology, and your reasons should be at the core of your requirements document. Driving more revenue – through more efficient customer acquisition, better customer retention or growth is a top reason to build. Capturing missed marketing opportunities that your current solution cannot react to is another. Improving your marketing operations because of a lack of access to data or insights, poor integration, or hard to use technology is a third reason to build a new solution.  Laying down specific improvement goals in each of these areas will strengthen your business case for the technology investment.

Start with Your Marketing Objectives

Your BRD should specify the marketing objectives you hope your new technology will help you address.  Is your most important objective the acquisition of new customers?  Or, are customer retention, loyalty and growth your primary concerns?  Very often we see marketers make technology investments with customer acquisition in mind, when the greatest benefits and the biggest payback actually can come from reducing attrition.  Carefully articulating the marketing objectives you expect the technology to meet is your starting point in your BRD.

Take some time to create a detailed list of the specific types of marketing activity you want the technology to manage, including the volume and frequency of marketing efforts and campaigns. Think about the level of automation you will want in your marketing efforts.  Will you need to trigger email communications based on changing data or events in the customers’ relationships? Many marketers chart a number of very specific and repeatable campaigns they hope their marketing technology will accomplish – along with the results to be measured. These are your “Use Cases” and can be a practical way for your stakeholders to understand new capabilities that may be impossible today. Do not make the mistake of creating super-complex campaigns just for the sake of using all the features of your new technology.  Create good, solid campaigns that you think will work better than what you can do today with a “crawl, walk, run” approach.

Identify and Evaluate Your Users and Stakeholders

Think next about your marketing organization and who will use, or be impacted by, the new system. Identify their roles and responsibilities clearly. You may find you have a skills gap and that the new system will require new hires or the support of a services provider.  Identifying the skill level of your users is important.  Too often, systems are built for very sophisticated users and then sit dormant because they are too intimidating for the existing team to use – a huge waste of investment!

Get the Data Right

Nothing will sink a technology build faster than bad or missing data.  The business requirements should include a major focus on what kind of data will be necessary to make your campaign use cases possible.  What source systems will feed data into your new solution? How good is the data you can get from source systems? How much data hygiene will be needed in a new system? Whose help will you need to get the data from the source systems? What data is missing that can be acquired from third parties? Include each of these in your requirements.

Identify the Risks to Success

You and your team will make a series of assumptions in the BRD. Write them down and include them in your document because assumptions are also risks. What happens if the assumption is wrong or something does not happen the way you believe it will?  What happens if you cannot get the budget you need? What happens if you cannot hire needed skill sets?

Collaboration is Critical

Finally, building business requirements is a team effort.  You will want to start by identifying all the stakeholders in your technology solution including people that will use the solution (your marketing team), those who will benefit from it (sales, retail, marketing partners or agencies), and those who will support it (your internal IT group, external services providers). Bring these groups together, explain your vision, and get their input.

Your final document should include clearly written requirements that can be understood independently. Ultimately they may each be budgeted, prioritized, planned out and checked off as your system is built. Getting your requirements right is the best hope for a marketing technology build that will deliver a successful long-term solution for your organization.

About the Author:

Martha Bush is SVP of Strategy & Solutions at SIGMA Marketing Group.  Follow Martha on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Marketers know that successful customer engagement involves leveraging customer data, turning it into intelligence and then making smart marketing use of those insights. Messaging and campaign tools will continue to evolve, and their claims of solving world hunger get more and more strident.  But very few of these tools take on the hardest, least exciting tasks of getting the data right.

At the core of successful direct and digital customer engagement is a solid customer database – Forrester calls this concept a “Customer Intelligence Hub” that creates a single source of customer knowledge. It may be blasphemy, but it is very unlikely that a comprehensive, flexible intelligence hub can be created inside most marketing automation tools without a fair bit of agony.

Too many of the exciting presentations from marketing automation, campaign management and email providers make light of the hard work to bring multi-sourced customer and prospect data together in a usable way.  These presentations are filled with talk of “pipes that are open to receive structured and unstructured data.” But, just because you have a garden hose, doesn’t mean you have a garden!

Think of the hub as an engine that can link, clean and refine customer data collected both online and offline from multiple operational systems. The hub must be flexible enough to regularly accept new data elements and sources. The intelligence hub should offer the business intelligence chops to create a robust portrait of your customer base, while giving you access to reporting and dashboards that can flow up your organization. Some marketing teams have more sophisticated analytical users who will be happy with the ability to easily pull data out of the hub into tools like SAS or SPSS to perform more customized deep data dives, or create robust predictive modeling. An Intelligence Hub helps marketers drive smarter marketing decisions and spend their resources more wisely.

We talk to too many clients who have struggled with implementing marketing automation tools. Many feel misled when they get into the project and realize that their IT teams need significant help in pulling data out of internal systems. They realize there is a huge skill gap in trying to make sense of the data for effective integration to a marketing automation tool.  Many of these implementations fail before they get off the ground. The promised “database inside” the tool will work only if the hard work of data consolidation, cleansing, business rule creation and automation of data extracts happens before data reaches the tool. This work is often beyond the capability of the internal IT or marketing team so the project stalls out. Building a customer intelligence hub between the internal systems and the marketing tool solves many of these challenges – integration, cleansing and delivering the kind of multichannel insights marketers need. This is the concept behind SIGMA’s mi-Link^TM solution – designed to get marketers the insights they need to make the most of their marketing automation tools.

We believe that the proper sequence of evolution to marketing automation is to build a customer intelligence hub first. Follow this by developing customer insights that can drive more and more sophisticated customer engagement strategies.  Once you have built some success with pilot programs and established what kind of investment return is possible for more data-driven marketing — then choose and build out your marketing automation platform – fed by smart, clean data from your intelligence hub.

About the Author:

Martha Bush is SVP of Strategy & Solutions at SIGMA Marketing Group.  Follow Martha on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

At SIGMA, we discovered a few truths in examining ways to improve the ROI of email campaigns for our clients.  We thought sharing this info might be of use to those out there trying to run successful email marketing campaigns.

The first truth is that the objectives of our lead generation email campaigns are to elicit a response, and then develop leads into a company.

We have modified our success metrics, and we are now continually examining our campaign performance by company: how many company responses and leads did the campaign generate, what % of the companies in our target universe responded, etc.

The other truth is that the more decision influencers from a company you include in the campaign, the better your chances of generating a response and then subsequently a lead into the company.

The simple truth is that the effort to obtain additional contacts for an email campaign is well worth it when compared to the overall cost of the campaign.  So for “high-value” prospect companies, we counsel our clients to obtain as many email addresses as possible of contacts into the decision-influencing team.

Indeed these truths are simple, but they have profoundly impacted our email efforts. Previously, we simply looked at response and lead rate per total pushed out. This gave a false and misleading evaluation of the campaign’s ability to generate “company” leads.

We also establish our contact target universe in a new way. We have continued to value-rate companies in a target universe. This is mainly used to provide a cutoff point for determining which companies to include. Now we segment the target universe into A-through-E-value tiers. For the higher-tier companies, we seek to maximize the number of valid contacts we have into that company.  We are going deeper and wider into the higher-value companies. We have transitioned from touching as many companies as possible to touching less companies but touching them more effectively. This has had the effect of improving our company response rate by ~3x.

The table shown here is from a recent campaign that demonstrates that the greater the number of contacts touched in a company, the higher the response rate tends to be for that company. So a company with 4 to 9 contacts per company had a 7x response rate, compared to one from a company that we only had a single contact for.

These truths can, and should, be applied to your B2B email marketing campaigns.  With business silos the way they are today, and company structural organizations, it’s critical to appeal to multiple decisions makers inside a single organization.

About the Author:

Nick Severino is the Senior Director of Application Development for  SIGMA Marketing Group.

Building marketing predictive models are proven to improve targeting for direct marketing initiatives. These models uncover the best prospects, those most likely to act. With this type of analytics, we will typically score an entire prospect population and then select the best contacts that meet the client’s marketing criteria.  The modeling is simply identifying prospects that look most like our client’s new customers. Often these models are produced without the benefit of data that identifies a prospect’s interest in the product.

Following development of the predictive models, we habitually compare the model results to those that actually acquired the product. Consistently we find that over the long term, the predictive models do a good job defining those most likely to act. However, we have seen from the results of individual campaigns that prospect scoring alone is not a strong predictor of campaign response.  We believe this is because we have not identified who is currently interested in the product. And, we have no way of knowing what the prospect company’s most pressing needs are and how our client’s product addresses the prospect’s current needs.

We believe it’s critical to develop approaches that uncover those who are interested in a client’s products. We are looking to identify the lead development “sweet spot.” The lead development “sweet spot” defines those that are both highly scored to act and that those have demonstrated an interest in the product.

To identify those with a demonstrated interest, we look for individuals who have searched a client’s website and we also examine email campaign responses and look for individuals who are engaged – those who have opened the email and demonstrated some interest.

As you know, a web visitor’s IP address can identify which domain they are coming from, and the domain can often identify the prospect company.  We look at the number of people from the same IP addresses that are visiting our client’s website and how involved they are in their products. When we notice above-average interest we include them in an appropriate direct marketing campaign.

We also look to the client’s prospect email campaigns to uncover who is interested.  First off, we often include multiple people from the same company in a campaign. We believe the more arrows into a company, the more likely you will achieve a lead and have a sales entry point. We then look to scale interest based on the responder’s activity with the email campaign. Shown at the left is a typical interest scale by activity.

Depending on the campaign requirements, we normally recommend that those in the “sweet spot” should be touched with more effort. That typically involves some level of tele-contact activity.

Learn more about SIGMA’s predictive analytics practice.

How do customers make decisions? This question has been at the core of marketing strategy for many years. As marketers manipulate the various principles of marketing, the consumers they seek to reach also change their decision-making criteria. So how does a professional marketer adapt to this evolving environment?  First, they need to understand the typical consumer decision-making process and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly.  Then they need to constantly evaluate their existing customers, as well as their prospect universe, to come up with a marketing strategy.

Are these consumer decision-making theories new?  Not exactly.  About 300 years ago, an economist named Nicholas Bernoulli (I knew the textbooks I saved from grad school would finally come in handy) developed the first formal explanation of consumer decision making. This foundation was later built on by other economists and ultimately called the Utility Theory.

The Utility Theory basically holds that consumers make decisions based on the expected outcomes of those decisions. This of course assumes that consumers are rational and likely able to predict the outcomes of their decisions.  As we probably all have learned, consumers are typically not completely rational or particularly good at predicting the outcomes of their decisions.  So the Utility Theory has some shortcomings.

Back in the 50’s, another economist, Herbert Simon, proposed a simpler model that was called Satisficing. This theory holds that consumers get to a point where they wanted to be and then stopped the decision-making process.  This could also be referred to as the “settling for good enough” theory.  While Satisficing addressed many of the shortcomings of the Utility Theory, there was still room for improvement in the area of prediction.  After all, if a marketing professional can’t predict consumer behavior, then how can he or she put a productive marketing strategy in place?

About 20 years later, two psychologist developed the Prospect Theory.  The Prospect Theory solved many of the problems of the earlier two theories.  The two major ingredients of Prospect Theory are value and endowment.  While value might be self-explanatory, endowment is a little trickier to understand.  Basically, the notion of endowment is that an item is considered more precious if one owns it rather than if someone else owns it.  This is probably the theory behind eBay’s success (winning something makes it better than simply buying something).

Understanding consumer decision-making theory is all well and good.  But it’s really just an academic exercise unless you have actionable marketing analytic insights to deploy your marketing plans.

Resources:

Image Courtesy:  FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Contact SIGMA today to learn more about how we can help you get control of your customer data.

OK, I admit, maybe the “social media” hype over the last couple of years has been a little overblown. It’s true, social media will not cure world hunger, fix the economy or create leads for your organization overnight. Many marketers today are desperately trying to figure out how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube help sell their products and services. Most know they need to incorporate social media as part of their marketing mix, they just don’t know how much and what their expectations should be when they do invest time and resources.

Take car makers and their dealers for instance:  Just 3 percent of 4,005 new and used car buyers polled last summer said social media influenced their purchase decision, according to a survey by market researcher R.L. Polk & Co. and AutoTrader.com, a car shopping Web site. Some could read into this statistic and get alarmed that time and effort isn’t worth it. Or could it be that as marketers, we haven’t really figured it all out yet, how to integrate and measure the true impact of engaging with our customers and prospects using social media channels? Perhaps we haven’t been able to harness the power of our best customers using social media.

Today, marketers are finding ways to engage with their customers using social channels to create what we call “social evangelists.” In fact, in the history of modern day marketing, has there been a better way, outside of face-to-face, to build relationships and awareness for your brand?

No quick fix and, yes, your SEM results can benefit.

A commonly discussed aspect of participating in social is that you can get improved search-engine results. Google, and other search engines who channel nearly all the visitor volume to marketer web sites, pick up on the social media chatter and it helps.

This social chatter helps marketer Websites appear on the first page of a shopper’s Google search, for instance. Most Google users select a Website from that first page.

So, from that standpoint, social media have an indirect but significant impact in raising shoppers’ awareness.

But what if we started connecting the efforts we have started to make in the social sphere to actually target and engage our customers? What if we turned our customers into “social evangelists”?

Customers operate in a multichannel world and so should marketers. Integrating content and communications among social communities and other marketing activities is the challenge. While it is a new discipline, like building any new skill, this will take some time for most marketers to master. Don’t be afraid to test, try new things. Most of all, get started.

The Four Elements

Here are four key points to consider as you look to engage with your customers within social media channels:

1. Can you identify your best customers who are social? Most marketers can’t.
2. Have you given them a compelling reason to engage with you via social platforms? What is in it for them?
3. Have you built a measurement and metrics plan to chart progress?
4. How are you integrating your social media activities with other online and offline marketing efforts?

Now go get social!

About the Author:

Tim Tully is a Practice Leader in the Healthcare and Consumer Markets for marketing analytics firm SIGMA Marketing Group.

Contact SIGMA today to learn more about how we can help you get control of your customer data.

In a recent “Get to the Point” e-mail from MarketingProfs, the topic was “Marketing Analytics” with the subject, “Get Smart.” It contained a very appropriate list of tips — minus one Big Tip that often gets missed in the B2B market.

The article states, “Especially in a down economy,” writes Barbara Bix in a Pro article at MarketingProfs, (http://www.marketingprofs.com/short-articles/1738/get-smart/?adref=NMA4310) “it’s important to understand where the opportunities are — and how to capitalize on them.”

She illustrated her point with an example from a mid-size provider of B2B software solutions. Their Marketing Analytics team is responsible for identifying opportunities in three areas:

• Collecting, mining and leveraging customer and prospect data. “For most businesses,” Bix says, “the fastest and most cost-effective way to win business is to sell into the current customer base. Therefore, it’s no surprise that this company devotes most of its market intelligence budget to analyzing and reporting on its customers and current prospects.”

• Conducting market research. “The primary responsibility for [this task] falls to the company’s product and industry groups,” writes Bix. “The market intelligence group, however, is responsible for ensuring the quality and consistency of that research across product groups.”

• Managing strategic planning. “Each year,” she says, “the market intelligence team works with each of the customer-facing groups to incorporate any changes in market dynamics, or customer requirements, which could affect the company’s long-term direction. Every six months, they also review the tactical plan and make adjustments, if needed.”

These are three important areas that leverage marketing analytics in any company doing smart marketing, but there is a major step missing that would help organizations “Get Smarter”:

Another critical use for insights from marketing analytics is to drive the findings and output to the sales organization.  Once customer and prospect opportunities have been identified and prioritized through the process of planning, research, mining and analysis, an organization can REALLY capitalize on insights if it pushes specific opportunity-level strategies and tactics to the individual sales representatives.

Armed with an intelligence-based “playbook” of identified and prioritized account level opportunities for each product/service in the portfolio, the sales representative has a focused territory plan, with resources aligned to drive customer and market share growth, while shortening the sales cycle.  Don’t leave the sales process out of the mix when applying marketing analytics and insights. Now that’s getting smarter!

Contact SIGMA today to learn more about how we can help you unlock those valuable consumer insights, by integrating your online and offline customer data.