It was great to meet you all at the E-Metrics Conference. I was excited in particular for one reason: You guys have the "Power Baton." I'm happy for you. But I have a warning: It won't last long if you don't get the ROI sorted out.
The Power Baton is something that comes from the CEO. It's like an anointing. You get a chance to be the bigwig, the person the CEO looks to for business growth and the maximization of opportunities. However, it's temporary. The CEO is always moving it around the organization, hoping that someone will dependably bring in the bucks and be able to prove it.
The Power Baton left the marketers several years ago, when the Web came along, and it was given to salespeople and webmasters. But then the bubble burst...and the Power Baton was shifted to CFOs. CEOs were watching every penny and trying to get their "numbers" up (especially earnings before interest, taxes and amortization--EBITA).
But now CFOs have lost the Power Baton, due to the accounting scandals (and the fact that many CEOs have realized that you can't grow by cutting costs and obsessing on budgets). Too many CFOs played too fast and loose with the power they were given, trying to "bend the rules a little" to make things easier for the CEO. It backfired. There's a lesson there--it's what I call the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should," lesson, something to keep in mind when interacting with customers electronically. You will lose the Power Baton if you step over the moral line.
You and others like you, with your combination of Web savvy, and IT and marketing backgrounds, have the Power Baton right now. It's sitting on your desk. You can only keep it if you make revenues grow and prove that your efforts made it happen. If you do this, the CEO will let you keep the Power Baton. If you don't, he won't, and you'll suddenly feel like a dog who has fallen out of the family car--while it was moving--and the family hasn't noticed you're gone.
I do believe that we all finally have the tools we need to track a sale from start to finish, even to the point of joining online and offline efforts. I also believe that we have the tools we need to match the buyer's buying process rather than force buyers to adjust to our selling process. These are essential to bringing in revenue, and being able to trace it to the source.
Having watched (and helped) many people try to keep the Power Baton, I have three suggestions for you:
1) Talk to your customers on the phone, regularly, as Derrith Lambka suggested. There is no better way to keep in sync with your customers--especially when they're suddenly changing direction. And your ability to "hold up the customer as proof" will help you win the majority of internal arguments, especially with salespeople, who are very good at making a CEO think that "the one customer they spoke with yesterday is an indication of a major trend."
2) Spend at least 10% of your time and effort on building tracking systems, both quantitative (web tracking reports, lead tracking, pathway analysis, registration, etc.) and qualitative (trend tracking through phone conversation surveys and online surveys). Having a website statistician/analyst on board will help you with this, if you can afford it.
3) Spend another 5%-10% of your time (or your department's effort) communicating with your internal audiences, telling them and selling them on what you are accomplishing--not only the improvements to your website properties/efforts, but ROI. If you can, hire a marketing communications type to do nothing but help you communicate what's happening and how it's helping the company. You can justify this expense by convincing the CEO that the website is a great resource but it won't be properly utilized if you aren't educating your audiences on it. If you can tie this person to your intranet and/or extranet efforts, it will be easier to justify the expense.
I would love to see you all keep the Power Baton, because I think you're smart enough, disciplined enough, and properly equipped to pull it off. Feel free to email me ( Kristin Zhivago <kristin@zhivago.com> ) -- I'll be happy to help you personally any way I can, and it will help me work more effectively with CEOs if I know what you're wrestling with.
