December 2022CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9If Sprints continue to add to above 5 basic goals, you should be on track to winning marathon.C) Periodic Pulse Check: A 6 monthly pulse check survey with senior sponsors as well as practitioners can help to gauge level of engagement within the organization. E.g., Do we continue to enjoy sponsorship and experience similar excitement as at the time of original kick-off? Internal engagement is usually the deciding factor towards achieving measurable business impact.I would suggest looking at NPS score trends for this survey as early indicator of need for review.D) Changing technology landscape: With power of cloud computing, advances in artificial intelligence and access to fluid architectures, ability to construct MarTech leapfrogs every few years. E.g., if you originally planned to buy a campaign management platform in year 2 of the program, should you still go ahead and buy traditional multi-channel marketing platforms built on legacy stack or review maturity of new age platforms like journey orchestration platforms or CDP?I will typically suggest reviewing MarTech roadmap every 18 months before making next big purchase.E) Keep an eye on Organizational change: Finally, organizational changes are a constant and such changes can disrupt sponsorship, delay momentum, create confusion leading to unintended impact on your MarTech roadmap. Critical that you keep an eye on same to ensure that value being delivered from MarTech stack is consistently communicated across management team. Any miss here can potentially reduce the business impact of MarTech program.I see any organizational change as an opportunity to supercharge sponsorship and revitalize MarTech roadmap. However, if ignored can lead to loss of narrative for MarTech.Organizations can typically ask themselves many more questions, however in my view above 5 tend to produce robust analysis. The most important thing to remember is that no one understands your organization better than yourself. So always ask these questions before you invite another herd of ivy league consultants to guide you on next big thing in MarTech space. Remember, you will need that next big thing only if you do well on the first big thing you ventured into. Happy Customer engagement! should deliver results within 6 months and tend to pay forward within 12-18 months. Besides 6 monthly review of business benefits achieved; I will also recommend forced review at 18-month mark.If you are directionally hitting original benchmarks every 6 monthly Sprint, I will suggest continuing the path towards marathon.B)Stick to basics: Data driven customer engagement is about building intelligent experience engines by sticking to basics in 5 areas i.e. a) Connecting data signals and insights from range of sources; b) Enabling a layer of automated decisions on top of these data sources; c) Activating these decisions at scale as experiences across channels to engage customers; d) Making available set of reports and dashboards from these engagements so that automated decisions continue to improve ­ typically a layer of adaptive intelligence and e) Continuing to ingest new features within the stack to improve array of use cases.building a data driven customer centric MarTech stack is a like a marathon that needs to be run in short Sprints
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