Ask yourself this:

If you answered yes to any of these four questions, the timing may be right for you to consider focusing on performance management, particularly for your marketing organization.

Performance management is about understanding where money is being spent, for what purpose, and how these activities are affecting the business.  I suspect many parts of the your organization are already deploying performance management practices.  However, for many companies, one of the last frontiers for performance management is marketing. 

Many marketing organizations struggle with measuring marketing effectiveness and improving marketing accountability.  Assessing a marketing program’s impact based on customer and market data, and analytics as opposed to intuition and experience requires new processes.  Marketing performance management is about developing these new processes, processes that align marketing within your organization to achieve your business objectives.  These processes should be designed to maximize both effectiveness and efficiency and can be implemented by any size enterprise.  By establishing and leveraging these processes, your marketing investments will be focused on realizing meaningful business results.  

As the chief executive officer for your company, you play a critical role in directing the way your marketing organization manages and measures its performance.  It is up to you to set the expectations that the marketing organization will be required to perform, communicate and report against. A focus on marketing performance and the rigorous assessment and measurement of marketing investments improves your company’s ability to achieve its business results. This is accomplished by clearly identifying the linkages between investments and outcomes which then enables the marketing organization to maximize returns and generate better results for less and fulfill its charter: acquiring, keeping and growing the value of customers to generate profitable revenue.

For many marketing organizations implementing marketing performance management and measurement will require different and possibly even new processes.  What processes will your marketing organization need?  There are a minimum of four which are outlined in the following table:

So where do you start?  The first step is to conduct an audit or assessment of the current state of your marketing and marketing measurement.  Marketing performance improvement begins with assessing the marketing organization’s current proficiency on these processes.  A baseline needs to be set before performance can be improved.  A successful performance-driven marketing organization is reinforced by a culture that links rewards, compensation and promotion to measurable results.  As the chief executive officer you model the way and own creating this culture.  By communicating the value of measurement and discussing the implications of embracing measurement (or not) you send the message whether performance management is critical to your company’s success.  Of course, this also means that you will need to provide the budget and resources needed to train and develop the skills necessary for your marketing organization to make this transformation.

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