Amy Beaudoin (0:07): Hello and welcome to this insightful video clip.

Amy Beaudoin (0:09)I’m Amy Beaudoin, a senior director of product marketing at Uptempo.

Amy Beaudoin (0:13): And I’m delighted to have Jessica Liu, a Forester analyst as a guest speaker with me today to talk about the issues of inconsistent and cumbersome marketing processes.

Amy Beaudoin (0:22): We’ve all been there and also really how spreadsheets inhibit decision making across marketing teams.

Amy Beaudoin (0:29): Now a little bit about Jessica before we begin begin, she’s based in New York City.

Amy Beaudoin (0:32): She provides assistance to B2C marketing professionals by advising them on strategies and technologies that marketers use to win, serve and retain customers.

Amy Beaudoin (0:41): Before she moved into the marketing resource management arena at Forester, she evaluated social technologies including listening platforms, social ad tech and social suites.

Amy Beaudoin (0:51): Prior to that, she was on the agency side for over 10 years and she helped her clients with digital go to market acquisition and retention strategies.

Amy Beaudoin (0:58): Now over to you, Jessica.

Jessica Liu (1:01): Hello, I’m Jessie Liu.

Jessica Liu (1:03): I’m a senior analyst at Forrester in today’s world of evolving consumer behaviors and turbulent macroeconomic environment.

Jessica Liu (1:11): Marketing operations face this rapidly changing and competing priorities.

Jessica Liu (1:17): Marketers really have to pivot faster.

Jessica Liu (1:19): They have to have sophisticated analytical capabilities to really uncover consumer behavior and insights and they have to have clearly defined customer life cycles.

Jessica Liu (1:29): This of course requires marketing apps to be insights driven, design thinkers and tech savvy, which by the way is no small order at the foundation of marketing operations is that keyword process, unfortunately, process is often viewed as too complicated or burdensome or bureaucratic.

Jessica Liu (1:49): It’s considered a blocker to creativity and a waste of time.

Jessica Liu (1:52): None of that is true.

Jessica Liu (1:53): By the way, process becomes an issue truly when it is created in a siloed one-off or reactive manner.

Jessica Liu (2:01): For example, 53% of B2B marketing decision makers agreed that they lack a unified marketing and sales workflow process to associate individuals and activity with closed deals.

Jessica Liu (2:16): Some common marketing process breakdowns include things like poor design, unclear roles and responsibilities, broken handoffs in S L A service level agreements, input and output being unclear, deliverable reviews lacking guidelines, governance being inconsistent.

Jessica Liu (2:33): Tell me if any of those sound familiar to you.

Jessica Liu (2:36): But the worst of all, the worst of all is a constantly evolving process with a little or static documentation.

Jessica Liu (2:44): Things like spreadsheets processes that change frequently and have unclear, contradictory or non-existent documentation are really hard for marketers to adhere to static spreadsheets only exacerbate this issue and these processes are typically poorly implemented and communicated and there’s inconsistent use of the process across marketing.

Jessica Liu (3:08): And as I mentioned earlier, now, more than ever.

Jessica Liu (3:12): Marketers require connected processes because of this current state of rapidly evolving consumer behaviors and this very turbulent macroeconomic macroeconomic environment that we’re living in.

Jessica Liu (3:25): So established processes can help marketers to pivot faster and adapt to changing conditions.

Jessica Liu (3:31): So I think it’d be helpful to use a tangible example of marketing planning and budgeting and the process that it takes to do marketing planning and budgeting.

Jessica Liu (3:39): So building a marketing plan and associating budget and resources with those planned activities is a very collaborative process that requires coordination among all marketing leaders and budget owners.

Jessica Liu (3:52): A consistent process and supporting technology have to be maintained to develop a cohesive plan and create that alignment.

Jessica Liu (4:01): This process also requires continual evaluation of performance against the planning goals to make any necessary adjustments throughout the year, the quarter the month, whatever it might be, and marketers really need to operationalize the planning process by capturing those inputs, generating the deliverables and integrating with those execution systems downstream.

Jessica Liu (4:23): So I’ll walk you through a typical planning and budgeting workflow or work stream in order where you start with one, create a marketing plan, charter, two allocate budget, three set goals and define the measurement plan.

Jessica Liu (4:38): Four, define campaign priorities.

Jessica Liu (4:41): Five, generate a marketing plan summary, six, capture marketing team plans and then seven commit budget to activity eight.

Jessica Liu (4:50): Create that marketing calendar.

Jessica Liu (4:5): 2Nine.

Jessica Liu (4:53): You’ll want to reconcile spending 10, assess marketing performance and 11 assess budget performance.

Jessica Liu (5:00): So to pull off that kind of work stream.

Jessica Liu (5:02): A variety of technologies are available to operationalize planning and budget management.

Jessica Liu (5:07): Good thing.

Jessica Liu (5:08): Technology’s purpose in the planning process is to really document the planning inputs and the deliverables as well as provide transparency into the plan’s execution.

Jessica Liu (5:18): And technology can eliminate the need to use multiple spreadsheets and presentations that are so hard to maintain as plans evolve.

Jessica Liu (5:26): They also enable modeling of different investments, scena sonari and technology can integrate with marketing execution systems to really track activity against your original plan.

Jessica Liu (5:38): Now, technology categories like collaborative work management, marketing resource management, marketing performance, analytics, and marketing automation platforms can all play a role in the planning process by helping fulfill the requirements that I talked through earlier and now I want to call out marketing resource management in particular because M R M enables organizations to really manage planning, budgeting project management, asset management and performance analytics all within a marketing environment.

Jessica Liu (6:08): MRM tools really do streamline the planning process by automating some of the manual tasks and replacing disconnected tools and documents.

Jessica Liu (6:16): like spreadsheets with a common data repository for planning information.

Jessica Liu (6:21): So that was just one small example using the marketing planning and budgeting process to illustrate why spreadsheets just don’t cut it.

Jessica Liu (6:28): And while having connected processes may not be the most glamorous thing.

Jessica Liu (6:32): It does provide the foundation to ensure your marketing technology, your tech as well as your marketing department are operating effectively.

Jessica Liu (6:41): Thank you.

Amy Beaudoin (6:43): Thank you for watching and thank you again, Jessica for sharing the dangers of using spreadsheets to make decisions as well as a lot of the issues with current processes today.

Amy Beaudoin (6:51): Really?

Amy Beaudoin (6:52): Isn’t it time that we re-retire spreadsheets for good.

Amy Beaudoin (6:54): We’re happy to say that we have a solution that will help transform how marketing is run and give you full visibility into your operations.

Amy Beaudoin (7:01): Discover how uptempo can accelerate marketing’s impact by requesting a demo at uptempo dot I O slash demo.

Amy Beaudoin (7:07): Thank you again for watching.