August 2005

Interview with Denise Peck – Current trends in Marketing Operations

Denise Peck is currently on our WIC advisory board and is vice president of marketing operations at Cisco Systems. We recently caught up with her to discuss trends that she’s seeing in her current role in marketing operations. We asked what tips she could give our consultant community to prepare for future trends. Read on for more details on the interview.

WIC: What is your role at Cisco and describe your responsibilities?
Peck: I run marketing operations for Cisco. My role is to enable and make the Cisco global marketing community more effective and efficient through process, systems, collaboration, and change management. We want to make marketing at Cisco best-in-class and we strive to be the best marketing organization in the industry. The goal in our marketing operations group is to enable this vision.

WIC: What trends are you seeing in your role that you could share with the WIC consulting community?
Peck: Let’s talk about marketing operations, a role in which I see more companies investing. There is a growing necessity for having marketing operations at companies today. Traditionally, marketing in the high tech industry has been about product marketing, events marketing, getting headlines, and getting the attention. The problem is that during the boom, it was fairly easy and fairly subjective to judge marketing by some of these factors. This is because much of the marketing during the boom was not necessarily tied solidly to return on investment (ROI) metrics. During the downturn, the companies that didn’t have a handle on the ROI data behind the projects saw significant cuts in the marketing budget. When larger companies are making a sizable marketing investment, they want to know how their programs link to their ROI. What am I getting out of my marketing investment? Am I maximizing my return? How do I get my CFO to invest more money in marketing?

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a trend for marketing to have greater accountability and tying its activities to business results. There has always been the notion of creativity behind marketing, but we are also moving more toward combining that with the science of marketing, and understanding how you can link marketing investments with campaign results. For example, how is your marketing driving brand value? How is marketing driving incremental revenue or acquiring new customers? To address those questions, you need to have robust core marketing processes and practices, systems to automate them, and change management practices to ensure people know how to use the processes and systems collaboratively and productively. You also need to have a focus on developing and deepening your marketing workforce’s skill set, so that they can be as effective and insightful as possible about customers and markets. And finally, you need to instill a culture of constant optimization.

WIC: How can understanding marketing processes affect an organization?
Peck: Having a deep understanding of marketing processes helps you to understand where you are in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
What are a company’s core marketing processes? Are they documented, standardized, practiced and measured? If we understand our marketing processes, understand inputs and outputs, the roles and responsibilities that each department or organization plays relative to each process, then we can use process metrics to help fine-tune our behavior and ultimately our investment, mix, and internal and external impact. We can also then take a more systems approach to automating the processes. This is where the systems and process go hand-in-hand. Sales automation and customer relationship management (CRM) have been a big trend for the sales function in the last 15 years, much like enterprise resource planning (ERP) for manufacturing. Marketing is one of the last functions to be automated end-to-end.

WIC: Where do you see the biggest area for growth in marketing processes for consultants today?
Peck: What I have told consultants I’ve talked to is that we don’t have a lot of people out there who understand end-to-end marketing processes and can re-engineer them and develop the business architecture for how we are going to automate them to maximize productivity and drive business results. I think this is a very ripe area for many companies! There is a wide open space out there for consultants who have this expertise in marketing process re-engineering, marketing system architecture and implementation, and effective change management skills. I am referring to people with Six Sigma black belt experience in marketing, people who have done complex, transformational change management projects, and people who understand how systems and process interconnect. And yes, it would be very helpful if they have been marketing practitioners as well!

WIC: What types of skill-sets do you find you are lacking the most at Cisco?
Peck: We need people who understand business process management techniques and people who understand measurement. How does it link to a bigger business objective? You see many companies using sales dashboards all the time. We need to have marketing dashboards with the appropriate marketing metrics to help guide effective and timely business decision making. I think that marketing dashboard development is another emerging cottage industry that is ripe for some consulting expertise.

We need people who can understand how to make marketing more predictable. Have you done work to understand and predict your customers’ behavior and responses using advanced analytics? How do we understand why customers don’t buy from us or the untapped hidden market segments?

WIC: What advice would you give to someone who is trying to break into marketing operations, and understand marketing processes?
Peck: Research more on what is happening with marketing operations. Talk to other marketing operations professionals. IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice has done some work in this area. On the systems side, Gartner published an article on Marketing Resource Management application offerings a couple of years ago. Talking to people who have defined and automated their marketing processes is a good idea.

This interview was made possible by the efforts of Sherry Prescott-Willis, WIC Secretary, and our WIC Member Communications Co-Chairs, Kathie Smith and Sandy Thorpe. For further questions on this article, please contact info@womeninconsultilng.org.