April 07 Interview

Martyn Etherington, Tektronix EVP of Marketing

This month we interview Martyn Etherington, SVP of Marketing for Tektronix, on the topic of metrics and dashboard for lead generation and awareness.

Kevin: When you joined Tektronix in 2002 what was the status of the marketing metrics, and dashboard?

Martyn: There was no dashboard, little accountability and they were unable to measure anything other than $ spent. There were no clear success criteria, and as is the case with marketing "looking good" was equal to or more important than "doing good"

Kevin: I understand you implemented 3 types of measurements, organizational level, program level, and predictive measures. What were the key measures in each category?

Martyn: We took an incremental change management approach to measurement. For me the concept of ownership and accountability were as important as the results early on. There are 3 primary measurement types we look at:

Macro Level Measures - Measure overall organizational health, efficiency and productivity, historical trends.
Program Level Measures - Measure of program execution against stated goals and organizational best practices.
Predictive Measures - Forward looking indicators that predict future performance and drive changes in activities.
Kevin: What makes Cost per Order Dollar a good measure of organization efficiency compared to other marketing metrics?

Martyn: It's a gauge, research from IDC's CMO practice suggest that companies in our category spend 3-6% of total revenues on marketing. In software the range is 4-8% and services 1-3%. So we measure CPOD and know where we are relative to our peers.

Kevin: How were you able to measure the quality of leads passed to Sales?

Martyn: Firstly get out of the "blame game", too often it is a case of sales says the leads are not good quality and marketing's retort is well sales are not closing them! Our Americas marketing team led an initiative where we sat down with account managers, marketing managers and a third party to set some definitions, expectations and quality metrics. Moreover we embarked on an education of expected behaviors from both sales and marketing. It will never be perfect but results show significant improvements:

We can now do apples to apples comparisons; there were no sales process changes and we are still seeing improvements in quality quarter to quarter.

Kevin: When you allocate marketing spend to closed deals, how do you allocate budget spent on awareness as opposed to specific lead generation?

Martyn: The big change we made early on was move from activity based marketing to outcome based marketing. How many times do you see marketers do an activity and try to measure the result? Outcome based marketing is a philosophical approach to marketing based on four simple questions:

  1. What outcome are you trying to achieve?
  2. What strategic objective is does it support?
  3. How will you know when you have achieved it?
  4. How can you make it better?
Moreover I am not interested in the actual activity per se but the outcome and that outcome is also bounded with conditions. The activity should be a secondary or tertiary conversation.

Kevin: Were you able to pinpoint the source of leads and was this important?

Martyn: The outcome is what matters, clearly if a series of activities produces the best outcomes we clearly learn and adopt across the whole organization. This is the beauty of an accountable and metrics driven marketing function. You must me continuously looking to review and adjust and be relentless in your pursuit for productivity.

Kevin: You mentioned that you drove lead generation costs to be below a certain cost per lead. How do you determine what the maximum cost per lead for Tektronix should be?

Martyn: Again it comes down to the outcome you are trying to drive. The way we determined what our lead bounding conditions should be was to walk through some simple math:

Simple math but this gives you a bounded outcome and now the conversation turns to making sure it supports a strategic objective and then and only then do you start to discuss activity or promotional/demand generation mix.

Kevin: Did you put more emphasis on producing a dashboard to help the marketing team do their job better, or an executive dashboard?

Martyn: We conducted peer research and found most dashboards were geared towards executive level communication. We felt that was the wrong initial audience. We targeted our management team and employees and made our dashboard far less "summarized" and more operational.

Kevin: What was the most important piece of advice you want to convey about designing and building marketing dashboards?

Martyn: Building an accountable marketing function requires a philosophical change not just a tool set. Change is hard and will take time and many of your current team may not adapt. Always be willing to review and adjust and my top 5 pieces of advice are:

  1. What you measure gets better
  2. Don't measure it if it isn't actionable
  3. Fact based decision making empowers people
  4. Don't apologize for incomplete data. 
  5. Always focus on where you are going, you can never go back!

Thanks Martyn for your great insights!