Harnessing the fear factor

I was very touched that Andrew Buffrey from the DMA invited me back to speak at their 20/20 Vision event at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, UK.

This time round I'll be talking about how to overcome the fear of change in order to create innovation - personally, organisationally and creatively.

A copy of the presentation "Harnessing the fear factor" is available for download here:

http://slidesha.re/ftmY9E

Marketing Automation Adoption in Europe

Some quotes from me in this B2B marketing magazine article.

http://www.b2bmarketing.net/knowledgebank/marketing-automation/features/marketing-automation-technology-adoption-european-market

Last week's TFM&A show in London showed a lot more presence for marketing automation which was encouraging, and a sign of the times.

My main tack in this article is as follows:

“We believe that the future will fall into two camps...those who buy into one proprietary ecosystem platform and those who deploy interoperable modules glued together with common strands and protocols. Many vendors are developing proprietary ecosystems to manage the entire marketing process. Each module – content management, email broadcast and data processing–  is inter-dependant. However, most clients already have many of these components [and will prefer] a plug-in solution.”

You pay your money, you take your choice. Read the full B2B Marketing Magazine Article here....

Not getting it: An insult.

Maybe I'm getting old, but it used to be the case that accusing someone of "not getting it" was the ultimate insult in the marketing community. It was an accusation slung at the ad agencies by the upstart digital pioneers to set themselves apart and portray their competitors as dinosaurs.

So I was a little puzzled when I read that Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, said at the firm’s user conference  earlier this year that the CMO was the primary barrier to marketing automation because they "didn’t get it". This didn't strike me as a comment geared to ingratiate  marketeers to the idea of marketing automation, or his company's offering. 

So for the sake of balance, I'd like to offer an alternative view.

CMOs do get it - at least the ones we work with do. There are, however a number of challenges that they - and we - face:

1. Access to experience and skills to achieve success – the biggest impact marketing automation has is on internal processes which often need considerable re-engineering  
2. The relationship between the IT department and Marketing can be strained sometimes. You need someone in the mix to successfully bridge the gap 
3. Marketing automation creates complete transparency on the process and results.  For most, this is a blessing, as they are able to prove ROI attributable to marketing. However, for the few this can be an unwelcome spotlight

It's pretty important to understand these challenges and equip yourself to help if you're working with clients to introduce marketing automation into their workflow.