Become an agile revenue marketer

Pedowitz Group’s Angela Sanders shares three tips to help marketers make the conversion 

Jim Ewel writes that Agile Marketing takes inspiration from Agile Development and values “responding to change over following a plan, testing and data over opinions and conventions, many small experiments over a few large bets,” engagement and transparency over official posturing and “collaboration over silos and hierarchy.”

Marketers are attracted to this approach because of today’s rapidly changing technology, channels and market preferences. They need to be able to change their plans quickly to keep up with this new reality. On the flip side, CEOs and CFOs adhere to annual planning cycles. They need to be able to plan out their budgets and results for the next 1-3 years to successfully run their businesses.

How can today’s Revenue Marketer adopt an agile approach while planning sufficiently ahead to gain executive support and fund marketing efforts over time? Follow these proven steps:

1. Plan in categories, not specifics

Create a plan that uses major categories of channels, themes and markets rather than specific pushes for launching campaigns at specific times. This allows you to have the flexibility to plan the campaigns within those channels, themes or markets, while providing enough direction to secure the funding you need. Your budget requests should be based on the end results you want to achieve (e.g., increasing market share in a specific market by 5%), not based on specific activities.

2. Use pilots and reporting to show results

When you first start implementing agile marketing, it is effective to use pilot campaigns to show that an agile approach can actually produce better results. This will give you the ammunition you need with your executives to convince them to let you have more flexibility with your budget. Executives will react much better to hard metrics than to general changing trends in marketing methodologies. You need to show that it works for your business.

3. Make sure you have the right technology tools and processes in place

One of the biggest obstacles to being able to truly carry out agile marketing is having the closed loop reporting you need to figure out the value of your activities. If you don’t have the right tools and processes in place, you can’t report against them to determine the right activities to put into your next marketing sprint. And if you can’t show the results, you certainly won’t get ongoing executive support for agile marketing.

For more on Agile Marketing, listen to my episode on Debbie Qaqish’s WRMR – Power Talk Radio for Revenue Marketing Leaders.

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