Marketers have struggled to measure their results and provide a comprehensive view of the return on investment (Marketing ROI). In fact, in a recent article in Strategy Magazine, Philip Kotler said, “CEO’s are understandably growing impatient with marketing. They feel that they get accountability for their investments in finance, production, information technology, even purchasing, but don’t know what their marketing spending is achieving.”

I will be speaking in a couple of weeks at the American Marketing Association M-Planet Conference on Marketing ROI and thought I would share a few thoughts on the very first step of ROI: the “I”. Many marketers talk about the need for ROI but have not established the foundational tools and processes to get the necessary visibility on their investment. At HP, my team has led the adoption of a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) system and associated processes. Be forewarned: rolling out a global deployment is not for the weak of heart!

Strong executive sponsorship is critical to adoption. Similar to what is happening on the sales side with pipeline information, an executive pull for metrics and visibility into the marketing investment is vital. If the information is used to make investment and planning trade-off decisions, the adoption curve will be greatly accelerated. Additionally strong leadership is required to ensure that the campaigns’ budgets are captured in a controlled environment (e.g. a Siebel 7.5 MRM tool).

Operational, process and planning discipline is required. I have seen too many companies focus on the technology without re-designing the associated processes, such as planning and budgeting. This situation results in additional work added to marketers’ plate vs. automating the work they already do. This is typically not an area of strength for marketing. At HP, we had to import Six Sigma process discipline from our quality team to ensure that we had the right operational focus.

Connect with finance. The adoption of MRM data by finance is one of the most critical success factors. Finance needs to request MRM data vs. separate information from other source systems or excel spreadsheets. We integrated MRM with the financial systems to ensure that our data was tying to the financial general ledger.

Expect cultural challenges and skills gaps. Process rigor, global standardization, automation, ROI discipline are all new concepts to marketing. Managing through process and behavioral change takes time, focus and effort. Don’t under-estimate the people and process changes that may be needed along with the system and technical requirements.

Take the plunge and learn. Initially deployed in one business group, it really took a couple of quarters of effort and learning before we knew enough to start the real planning process and drive system and adoption simplification. By jumping in, we got some experience and learnt from our mistakes. Manage the expectations that everything will not be perfect from the onset and continuous improvements will happen over time.

After 2 years with the MRM system in place, and thousands of hours of operational, process and planning discipline behind us, HP is beginning to yield the kind of data that enables effective marketing decision-making.

See you at M-Planet!