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3 Ways to Succeed at Digital Transformation via Orchestration
This Week's Buzz
Adam Gelles
June 29, 2023
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
As many of you know, digital transformation is one of the most difficult initiatives for B2B CMOs to deliver successfully. But if your B2B go to market is orchestrated well, then transforming into a digital-first brand is much, much easier. Today I discuss how to orchestrate better in preparation to make digital transformation much more successful.
Want to understand more, we’ve developed an Orchestration Calculator to score how well your organization orchestrates it go to market? Let me know your thoughts on the calculator in the Buzz community.
And, of course, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for being part of the Buzz community. This endeavor is not possible with you -- our readers. For questions, comments, and feedback, please don't hesitate to let me know.
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3 Ways to Succeed at Digital Transformation via Better Orchestration
Digital Transformation is one of the biggest challenges for B2B CMOs to navigate successfully. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company research, less than 20% of digital transformations are considered successful. Nowadays, B2B marketing is transforming beyond just a digital-first experience into a truly data-enriched semi-automated digital experience.
To deliver this effectively and efficiently, B2B CMOs must improve the orchestration of their brand’s go to market. Most B2B brands aren’t ready for this shift in go to market, but improving your orchestration today can enable you to succeed at digital transformation tomorrow.
Improvement #1: Drive Collaboration
Many times when I walk into a B2B company one of the biggest operational gaps is a lack of a “culture of collaboration”. In turn, this leads to misaligned priorities and, frankly, missed goals. Creating a culture of collaboration is a fundamental responsibility of the c-suite. CMOs must be the leader on this front. Empowering their team and others throughout their company to collaborate - and be rewarded for it.
There is much talk about collaboration, but when you dig into the details few firms have organizational structures that support collaboration operational. By a collaborative structured organization, I mean thinking through shared solutions to drive business value. Take social media marketing as a quick example. Does your firm have a collaborated and structured approach to employee advocacy? If not, your firm is missing out on a great way to drive real measurable business value from its social marketing investments.
Improvement #2: Better Alignment
Alignment is key element in orchestration improvement to drive better digital transformation. This across your entire go to market effort including sales, marketing, customer success, and so on. Planning alignment is two dimensional. First, CMOs need to ask themselves, are our plans (and corollary reviews) inclusive, in terms of the right people involved in the process. Second, are your strategic plans in alignment with the tactical plans. I see quite often gaps between the two from mis-aligned business / marketing objectives to a strategic approach not embedded into the tactical plans (e.g., a prioritization of targeting key accounts).
Success measurement is a second part that must be aligned from the business performance level (i.e., revenue, margin, marketshare, shareholder value) down to the measurement of marketing campaign success. The key gap that I usually see is that their are strategic measures (e.g., marketshare growth) that don’t show up in tactical efforts’ success metrics. This mis-alignment creates two problems: poorly spent marketing investment and the team isn’t focused on the right priorities. Let’s take a quick tactical example that came up the other day for an ad campaign:
Campaign 1: $5k ad spend delivered 50 leads that lead to 5 meetings.
Campaign 2: $5k ad spend delivered 20 leads that lead to 5 meetings.
As a marketer, you’d look at a lower CAC in campaign 1 and that’s your winner. Meanwhile the SDR team found that 40 of leads from campaign 1 were not viable for meetings. So really, Campaign 1 delivered: 10 leads that were viable. With this in mind, the CAC for campaign 2 is looking much better. Never mind extending the analysis to revenue, CLV, etc. It’s super important that even a tiny campaigns goals are in direct alignment to business outcomes or your wasting resources.
Improvement #3: Synchronized Operations
The final area of orchestration improvement to deliver digital transformation is operations. And by operations I’m referring to process, technology and data. Let’s start with process. To improve orchestration in your processes is to map them in context of two perspectives: inter-departmental and intra-departmental impact. We use “swim-lane” charting to help visualize the dependencies, decision-making and desired outcomes. Then score those “maps” in terms of orchestration success. Identify improvements and re-build. But this exercise helps see the business impact of process failures, changes, and the improvements that can be generated.
Second, you want to look at your technology and data stack in a similar way. Map out your data tools and marketing stacks, if you haven’t already. And score the orchestration of these solutions. For example, too many point solutions can slow a team down from executing effectively and efficiently. You may give up some features, but if more people can contribute to getting it done by using a more platform driven technology approach the better the impact to digital transformation.
Want to learn more, we’ve developed an Orchestration Calculator to score how well your organization orchestrates? Share your feedback on The Buzz Community.
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