I fully expect that most if not all of the cross-silo discovery that needs to take place will be driven not by edict but at the hands of curious analysts. At some point, they will simply “have to know”!

And then, they will approach management on #4 - look what we found, what can we try? Hopefully these analysts will have silo partners to help out with the execution. Sounds to me like this is the experience Ned had. Painful, slow, but ultimately satisfying. Or perhaps they will “just do it“.

Re: segmentation / 1-2-1, on the Marketing side, for the most part you target at the segment level and execute at the individual level where possible through inline customization. In other words, the communication is delivered at the behavioral segment level but the content of that communication can be personalized.

How deep you go with this is a matter of cost; you stop breaking macro segments into micro segments when the lift you get versus control no longer pays for the effort.

On the Service side, centricity is pretty much a 1-2-1 deal I think, though certainly scrutinizing policies and products that create undue customer Friction is a broader idea that affectrs many. This “policy” thing is where the silo lines get blurry and require new thinking - how does a Marketing analyst get a customer service policy changed? How does a Service analyst get a certain product restructured or drive changes in Sales? You need people like Ned willing to drive, or…

In the longer run, I think people will realize that there is a best structure for moving all this forward: the “Center of Excellence” (COE) - where all the senior analysts play together, and the “Business SWAT Team” - the cross-silo execution arm of the COE. Focus and activities driven by the C-Level or (if you must) an EVP Steering Committee.

May I suggest that this structure above is quite similar to what most great web teams look like now, applied to the entire corporation? Cross-functional analysis and execution. Harder with an entire company - but incredibly challenging and a lot of fun!

I totally agree with you when you say that’s no reason not to try! But I do think *most* web analytics companies don’t message about customer centricity or marketing at the individual customer level because they can’t do it. That’s all I was saying. :)

The big question I have about all this customer centric stuff: are folks talking about one-to-one marketing on a individual customer basis or are we talking customer segment level or persona level?

To add to your list of why we don’t do it / excuses we make. I’d also add 4) managerial understanding of the importance and potential lift to revenue/profitability, which points at yr #2 above. Not all companies have CMO’s or marketing staff who get this stuff. And companies certainly do not have Jim’s/Akin’s/Kevin’s running around who get it like you all do at the masterful, super deep level. And 5) organizational structure issues. It’s silos, silos, silos, fiefdoms, fiefdoms, fiefdoms in some companies. Even if the data is out there, to bring it together in some companies that lack the managerial alignment/imperative to do must be really tough for some folks! Not that these are excuses, just obstacles, that companies that want to go from “good to great” can overcome.

Anyway, an excellent question you ask, and I hope to address on my blog at some point, some time, in the future!

Best,
Judah

Having a CCO/CMO with a strong vision certainly helps in that because of the ‘power of influence’, folks atleast will give it a try :-). I like your CCO idea better because I think this person will need to have not only the Marketing savvy but also needs to understand the basic technical and analytical tenets that goes with with certain channels (like online). A CMO in my mind is a bit skewed towards the softer side of Marketing — not sure how much confidence a traditional CMO might be able to generate across channels — as confidence is a key to buy-off.

You can come at it top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down would be the appointment of a CCO that isn’t just a “coordinator” across silos, this person needs real power to force unified metrics on the factions.

Bottom-up, the more likely and usually more painful scenario, is an analytical team that succeeds in *proving* there is financial damage being done by not having unified customer-based success metrics. This team would likely be working for the CFO or CEO. This frequently happens when companies are bought out or divisions merged, for example.

Either way, the only way to measure Marketing and Service success is at the customer level, and you would think with all the “centricity” going on, people would simply gravitate to customer-based measurement.

Ned

Agreed! Before anyone gets caught reinventing the wheel, why not start with what we know how to do first.

Plus, the biggest shame is that the team members from these various groups within Marketing aren’t cooperating today. When I ask audiences how many talk to their counterparts between online and offline the hand raisers are still far too few.

Email marketers could be a fertile group for cross polination. Often times these sit in the relationship marketing group but do talk to the web analytics people because of the inherent measurabilit of their activities. Alas, shame, because sending email is near free … they cannot resist the urge to spam instead of targeting their communications.

Is it just me but I had really liked the idea that AOL was going to charge for delivering email to their customers. Too bad that didn’t fly.

Keep up the good work.

Anyway Akin, on this one I got to agree with Jim. We are not suggesting that we throw out all the current metrics and create a new set of ‘multi-channel’ metrics. The key is to leverage what is in existence in each of the siloed world and then layer it with a sheet of uber-metrics (derived from the primary object as Jim puts it). So from the top we have a clear, integrated, and holistic view of the customer — and by drilling down we will get a tactical view of how the factions are doing. And Akin, this is where you come in and where your book will be extremely helpful. You provide a good framework for folks to understand the structural difference between the factions and possibilities on how they can integrate. Of course there can be no single solution to all problems — and this is another positive with this book. You teach them to how to fish (pardon the cliche) — and moving forward the readers can make improvements to their ‘fishing technique’ and customize to their fishing needs (vis-a-vis multichannel integration and marketing).

To round of the post, you are in the ring of thought leaders - whether you like it or not :-)

Ned

Ned, don’t you think the channel / communications model Akin provided in his book would help bring together the different factions? After all, it’s not so much that we want to *change* the metrics / MBOs for each faction, but to integrate them in a meaningful way, understand how one flows to another. Certain objectives, notably “Brand”, are simply what they are and have to be measured in less tangible ways.

I usually find the root cause of this conflict to be there is no single, clear, Primary Objective, followed by a ranking of other Objectives. Just like when optimizing a web site. Each faction can have their own Objectives, but they must be linked in a tangible way to the Primary Objective.

I think Akin’s model could really help people understand how to do this, don’t you?