Align Marketing and IT to Drive Business Results

CONCLUSIONS PAPER

Insights from a webinar sponsored by the American Marketing

Association and SAS

Featuring:

Adele Sweetwood, Vice President of Marketing, SAS

Berni Mobley, Vice President of IT Enterprise Services, SAS
Wilson Raj, Global Director of Customer Intelligence, SAS

SAS Conclusions Paper

Table of Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Marketing Needs IT More Than Ever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
First Steps to Align Marketing and IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Designate a cross-functional analyst/advocate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Involve IT in strategic planning discussions.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Expedite vendor assessments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Digitize the business.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Create a marketing analytics portal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Closing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
For More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Align Marketing and IT to Drive Business Results

Introduction
Marketing has changed. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all campaigns,
massive email blasts and measuring direct mail campaigns by their weight.
Customers expect their interactions with the brand to have a greater
immediacy and personalization than ever.
Many companies routinely launch thousands of campaigns to millions of
customers through a wide variety of channels. No matter how creative or
appealing the message, you cant afford to broadcast it to indifferent or
unlikely recipients.
Get it wrong and you could be seen as noise diminishing your return on
marketing investment while throwing money at people who have simply tuned
you out.
Getting it right requires data lots of it. Analysis of customer and marketing data can
reveal opportunities that would otherwise be missed. Optimization balances constraints
and resources to arrive at the best possible decisions in big-picture context. Consistent
customer data empowers the entire organization, not just marketing, to deliver better
customer experiences and profitability.
If organizations arent there yet, the problem sure isnt lack of data. Marketing systems
churn out gigabytes of data about customers, channels and campaigns. However, few
organizations can assemble it all to make the best decisions across multiple campaigns,
organizational units and business objectives. To do that requires new levels of agility and
speed in data integration, data quality, metadata management, application deployment,
analysis and reporting the province of IT.
All of this points to one inescapable reality: Marketing had better be on really good terms
with IT. But often marketers are frustrated by what they see as lack of support from their
enterprise IT departments, while the IT team complains that marketers have unrealistic
expectations and dont consult them as they seek out new systems and technologies.
This topic of marketing and IT collaboration has been top of mind for a number of years
and is rising to a crescendo, especially given the increasing complexity of marketing
and the advent of big data and analytics, said Wilson Raj, Global Customer Intelligence
Director at SAS. SAS and the American Marketing Association hosted a webinar to
discuss alignment of these functions, featuring executives from our own marketing and
IT departments.

SAS Conclusions Paper

Marketing Needs IT More Than Ever

Data has become a huge topic in the field of marketing, said Adele Sweetwood,
Vice President of Marketing for SAS. As before, marketers are still focused on driving
results and revenues and building a pipeline. Those things have not changed. What
has changed is how we go about doing it and how we know whether or not weve met
expectations.
Our customers are different, said Sweetwood. They interact with us differently. They
have more channels to interact with us and give us information. We have a broader
base of channels to promote with them. This complexity leads to a proliferation of data
types and new data streams more information than we ever before dreamed of as
marketers. [Richer data] enables us to try different approaches, to be more creative
with our inbound marketing efforts as well as outbound marketing, and to use all that
information to be more targeted in our approach and more analytical in our thinking.

The marketing environment has

been reshaped by the digital
culture and mobility. Even small
to midsize retailers now reach
customers through a dozen or
more channels, from traditional
call centers, direct mail and
email to mobile apps, locationbased services and social
media.

Forward-thinking organizations are taking advantage. Raj presented results from an

Aberdeen study that asked 180 marketers to choose which of five strategies they
considered most vital to remain competitive. More than 40 percent of respondents from
best-in-class companies pointed to the ability to assess the effectiveness of campaigns
and channels. Nearly 40 percent focused on better targeting offers to optimize ROI.
Companies that were not in the top two performance deciles ranked these same focus
areas in the same order but to a lesser extent.
For this study, Aberdeen defined best-in-class companies by attributes of which
marketers dream. For the best-in-class performers:

Marketers need IT to deliver

Marketing initiatives directly contribute to 60 percent or more of the sales pipeline.

tools that can be used for data

Marketing campaigns deliver 10 percent year-over-year growth in sales.

aggregation, segmentation and

Marketing is credited for nearly 10 percent year-over-year improvement in

customer retention.
If the top-tier marketing organizations are getting results like that, its probably worth
noting what they do. If they believe data-driven decision making is integral to marketing
effectiveness, maybe its time to be much friendlier with the IT teams who help manage
that data.
Consider that the customer experience is based on interactions across all business
areas marketing, sales, customer support and all of those functions are based on
systems or data that are provided or supported by IT, said Berni Mobley, Vice President
of IT Enterprise Services at SAS. On the operational side, data is essential for executing
more effective campaigns, justifying marketing investments and proving the value of the
function. So IT has the opportunity to bring a lot to the table. The more IT can enable
access and sharing for more data integrated, quality and analytics-ready data the
more value were going to create across the entire organization.
The value is clear and quantifiable, said Sweetwood. By using analytic techniques,
weve seen reductions of 30 to 40 percent in opt-out for email campaigns, for example.

analytics to support customercentric marketing strategies,

tactics and campaigns.
Extracting customer and market
data and translating it into
insight about new business
opportunities, customer
preferences and high-value
market segments lies at the
core of marketings goal of
improving customer relevance
and profitability.
Accenture study, Joining Forces:
Aligning Marketing and IT to Drive
High-Performance Revenue Growth in
Insurance (2011)

Align Marketing and IT to Drive Business Results

Click-through rates have increased by 30 percent. Were getting higher-quality leads

and higher conversion rates from list targeting and being able to score inbound contacts
to deliver the right offers to the right people. Ultimately these gains have led to 50 to
60 percent improvement in pipeline numbers and related gains in revenue numbers,
increasing year over year. All of those results have to be attributed not only to smart,
creative marketers, but to their ability to take data, analyze it and understand it to make
better decisions.
The data foundation that generates this value has grown more sophisticated, requiring
a different relationship between marketing and IT, said Sweetwood. Marketing has
traditionally had a lot of analytics in place, but the growing adoption of advanced
analytics changes the nature of IT requirements. When you get into the realm of
advanced analytics, its not about just turning up a system or keeping the lights on, but
about fully engaging with IT on things that can change daily, and getting information out
to marketers to make strong decisions.
Marketing cannot do this on its own. We need IT to support all aspects of the marketing
engine. The IT infrastructure has to change, because marketing is shifting into new
journeys we have not been on before, into a realm of different data types, data volumes,
channels and customer expectations.
As marketing has changed, IT has recognized the need to change as well, said
Mobley. The traditional IT role has been in the back office. In the past, we focused
primarily on being responsive, keeping the infrastructure up and available. However,
now we need to be more involved up front. We need to change how we interact with
marketing to help them take advantage of these new channels. It is a journey, and we
need to be on that journey together.

Quantifiable Results from

Marketing Analytics
Email campaign opt-outs down
30 to 40 percent.
Click-through rates up 30 percent.
Higher-quality leads and higher
conversion rates.
Pipeline numbers up 50 to 60
percent year over year.
Revenues up proportionately to
pipeline growth, year over year.

Analytical technologies have

totally changed the way we do
marketing, evaluate marketing
and deliver the results to the
organization. We can do that
because were very visible to the
organization. The reality is that
we cant do that without IT.

First Steps to Align Marketing and IT

For all the merits of aligning the marketing and IT functions, few companies are fully
there. In an informal poll of the webinar audience, only 8 percent of respondents
described their relationship with their CIO or IT department as a total partnership. More
than one-third of the audience said their organizations were aligned but still challenged,
and another 22 percent were just beginning their quest for alignment. Almost 30 percent
of respondents said marketing/IT alignment was hindered by divergent priorities, budget
limitations, tension or simply lack of communication.
Our presenters took heart in the fact that more than 40 percent of companies
represented in the webinar audience were well on their way to full alignment or already
there. This tells us that as marketers, weve come a long way, but even here at SAS we
would assess ourselves as aligned but challenged, said Sweetwood.
SAS has a distinct advantage in bringing marketing and IT closer, because analytics is its
core mission. In a company founded on analytics, its not a hard sell to convince people
even creative marketing types that analytics is important and therefore IT is more
than an adjunct support function. Mobley and Sweetwood described several initiatives
SAS has implemented to help create the necessary alignment.

Adele Sweetwood
Vice President of Marketing, SAS

IT has traditionally thought

of the customer as being
the internal business units
we serve. We need to shift
that perspective from being
an internal service provider
to looking at the companys
customers jointly with marketing
to enable them.
Berni Mobley
Vice President of IT Enterprise Services, SAS

SAS Conclusions Paper

Designate a cross-functional analyst/advocate.

A new integration analyst position was created to bridge the gap between marketing
and IT. This analyst is part of the IT organization and brings both technical expertise
and marketing acumen to the table. This person is very engaged at the beginning of
any marketing initiative, bringing a broad understanding of current and future trends in
marketing needs, said Mobley. At the same time, this person can be very proactive
in working with marketing and suggesting ways to take advantage of the latest
technologies.

Involve IT in strategic planning discussions.

To be more responsive to marketing priorities, we couldnt work by the traditional
model, where marketing sends a request over the wall to IT just in time and hopes
IT resources will be available, said Mobley. Now IT is involved early in strategic and
proactive planning discussions with marketing.
Important questions about the data infrastructure and processes can then be
addressed early on in the process. How do you want to capture the data? Store it?
Whats the best approach for sharing and protecting the data? How do you want to
analyze it? How do you want to present and use the results? These are things IT
definitely needs to work with marketing to understand, said Mobley. With so many
choices available in platforms, deployment options and analytical techniques, IT can
play a valuable role in determining the right options for marketings purposes.
Collaboration continues beyond project implementation, Sweetwood said. On a regular
basis, my organization teams with the IT organization to demonstrate how we use the
IT resources and what results were seeing. So theres an ongoing exchange about
how were doing things and what works, which leads to more dialogue but also more
opportunities that we werent going after before.

Expedite vendor assessments.

Mobley knows marketing will have some needs that are best fulfilled by hardware and
software from outside vendors. A new third-party vendor assessment process enables
IT to be more responsive in making these selections. Weve changed from IT saying,
No, you cant do that due to technical issues to being more proactive looking at
alternatives that make those marketing initiatives possible without adverse impacts.
In some cases, another area of the company might be doing something similar, and
marketing can take advantage of synergies among projects.

A lot of organizations will state

alignment as a goal, but you
have to articulate how youre
going to communicate and
collaborate to achieve this
alignment. Thats true not only
in aligning marketing and IT but
in creating alignment across the
enterprise.
Adele Sweetwood
Vice President of Marketing, SAS

The marketing/IT integration

analyst has enough technological
expertise to be helpful to IT but
also enough business expertise to
be helpful to the marketing side.
Adele Sweetwood
Vice President of Marketing, SAS

Align Marketing and IT to Drive Business Results

Digitize the business.

The various groups within the marketing organization field-based marketing,
traditional messaging and positioning teams, digital marketing, advertising, public
relations, etc. are unified in a framework that digitizes the marketing business, said
Sweetwood. In addition to enabling our digital channels and improving the customer
experience, this framework modernizes our internal and external communications.
Digitizing the business has enabled us to be more effective and collaborative with
everything from problem solving to elevating hot topics to being more innovative and
collaborative with marketing initiatives in general.

Create a marketing analytics portal.

A multiview information portal helps guide, track and assess marketing activities.
Through the portal, users can understand the marketing continuum from a vantage
point suited for their roles. It might be understanding the contribution of marketing on
pipelines and new revenues, or seeing the digital path an online customer took from
point of entry to conversion. It might be a high-level view of active and predicted trends
for an account or region, results for a set of campaigns, or an executive-level view of
budget flows or investment forecasts. The insights might be delivered at contact level,
organization level or enterprisewide.

To be more responsive to
marketing priorities, we couldnt
work by the traditional model,
where marketing sends a request
over the wall to IT just in time
and hopes IT resources will be
available. Now IT is involved
early in strategic and proactive
planning discussions with
marketing.
Berni Mobley
Vice President of IT Enterprise Services, SAS

IT provides real value as an integrator and aggregator to the business in bringing all
this together, said Mobley. We do the technical work behind the scenes to link all the
information together across all customer touch points to create a 360-degree view of
the customer and then serve it up for marketing and others to take advantage. It really
takes strong collaboration and partnership to do this.

SAS Conclusions Paper

Closing Thoughts
For a variety of reasons, marketing and IT are forced to work together better to
align, collaborate and communicate, said Sweetwood. This collaboration gives new
perspective to team members on both sides, so they have a deeper appreciation
for each others roles and a more thorough understanding of how their roles support
and enhance customer experiences. The marketing/IT partnership really opens up
opportunities for people to think more strategically and have different experiences.
Even if marketing teams have a greater appreciation for IT these days, they still have a
big wish list to get more from IT, said Raj. When asked where they felt IT could better
support marketing, our webinar audience was divided. Half of respondents wanted
IT to help them enhance marketing insights and improve marketing performance. No
surprises there. Nearly one-third wanted faster response to service requests and faster
deployment of new technologies. No surprises there either.
But it was surprising and heartening to find that 20 percent of respondents said they
wanted IT to take a more strategic and proactive role. As marketing increases its
dependence on data and its expectations for just how much can be done with that
data, how fast IT becomes all the more critical as a partner in marketing success.
We need to look at data differently, treat it like we would our own 401Ks said
Sweetwood. [Data sources and processes] need to be managed and occasionally
fine-tuned, and that doesnt just happen by itself. Marketers need to get over the
notion that data is ITs problem. We both own it, and we have to get together and treat
it differently.

For More Information

Download related SAS white papers:
Argyle Conversations: Evolving Role of the CMO: sas.com/reg/wp/uk/44180
Argyle Conversations: Building a Marketing Analytics Culture:
sas.com/reg/wp/ca/58290
For more details about customer intelligence solutions:
sas.com/software/customer-intelligence
To read more thought leader views on marketing, visit the SAS Customer Intelligence
Knowledge Exchange: sas.com/knowledge-exchange/customer-intelligence
To get fresh perspectives from marketing practitioners on the SAS Customer Analytics
blog: blogs.sas.com/content/customeranalytics
Twitter: @SAS_CI

We need to provide more value

than just keeping the lights on
and making the data available.
We need to champion the tools
and the technology platforms
that can enable an analytical
culture that best serves
marketing and the organization
as a whole.
Berni Mobley
Vice President of IT Enterprise Services, SAS

About SAS
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