Pix taken from the back of the room by my blogging friend Ann


I was speaking on a panel this morning at M-Planet on the topic of "Driving B2B Marketing Success with Marketing ROI". I was in great company with Jim Lenskold, one of the ROI thought leaders, Jim Pedrick, CMO US Financial Division ING and Chip Reeves, Director Marketing & Sales Process, Dow Corning. We had very good attendance - about 300 people. I am actually thinking of writing a group post on our exchanges, but I thought I would post a transcript of my presentation for tonight.... You can also download my presentation here.


"Marketing was once the growth engine of a company, creating great products and driving demand through mass advertising. But the dynamics shifted. Markets got commoditized. Traditional media modesl were disrupted. Marketing's ability to produce results began to decline and marketing became quickly perceived as nothing more than creative spending. CEOs turned to other functions such as supply chain, IT or sales to drive profitable growth and Marketing took a back seat in the business equation. I strongly believe that we are at a turning point where Marketing can re-conquer its role of growth architect, provided that it can prove its direct contribution to business results.

Many initiatives were already underway but we launched a major ROI initiative at HP 18months ago to bring together all these initiatives under one umbrella. ROI is for us less about a specific measurement or model and much more an operational discipline that ties our key marketing activities to business results.

Let me share some specific examples of the shifts we are undertaking:

-Customer loyalty: we have connected our net customer loyalty to our gross margin improvements. This allows us to understand the direct impact of customer loyalty improvements to HP's results and has greatly helped drive better experience.

- Brand performance: Brand is a significant contributor to shareholder value and price premiumness. We measure our brand value for our various business segments, benchmark it and compare it to our company value.

- Campaign performance: we are putting a lot of emphasis on deploying the right tools to trace our marketing campaigns, re-designing the lead management and campaign execution processes and standardizing metrics.This allows us to understand the direct contribution of marketing to the sales pipeline and to revenues.

- Portfolio ROMI: we have more recently started developing sophisticated marketing mix models that connect all marketing levers and investments to revenues and profits.

We have made solid progress, but clearly have more work ahead of us. I thought I would share what we learnt during the last 18 months:

- It's all about operational discipline- ROI measurement is only the tip of the icerberg. It has to be accompanied by process rigor and standardization, automation and relentless focus on business results

- Sponsorship is key - from the CEO, CIO and CFO

 -Don't forget the I in ROI - too many companies forget that solid ROI models rely on a consistent and solid set of data - for example spend data. We have spent equal amount of time on the "I" at HP, for example driving adoption of the largest MRM deployment in the world

- Simpler is better - only one thing is worse that creative spending, it's creative ROI

- People make the difference - A ROI journey requires new skills, cultural change and new talent in the marketing organization"


That's all for tonight.... Here is the summary from B2B Mag
You can also check out the live coverage from other bloggers:
- Dennis Dunlap's opening address by Hyku and the always great Peter Kim
- Why New Media Matters on the MPlanet blog
- AT&T's keynote by Marketing Shift
- Customer Engagement by Magnosticism

And last but not least, I had the wonderful opportunity to finally meet my blogging friend Ann!