The ultimate standoff lies in the symbiotic relationship between marketing and IT. Often this leads to a stale mate. The IT team cannot tell you how long everything will take as they don’t know exactly what the business priorities are and what they will be working on.
Marketing cannot prioritise what is needed unless they can understand the cost of each marketing initiative.
For example, say marketing wants to address the improving the email. This could be a fantastic project, upgrade to a system with split testing and segmentation can drastically improve sales/leads and the learnings can translate across the business.
Linking leads to sales is also a great project, when you know which marketing efforts return the most ROI you can start to drastically improve your marketing spend.
If you know a key word such as “free xxxx” never converts you can save significant spend by dropping those campaigns.
So now how do we choose between two projects so we can understand how to choose between 100.
The business model framework can be useful here as a starting point, who can benefit and how much is the benefit for each project.
With each project its good in the business case to establish an estimated return with error. From here IT can estimate how much and how long it may take. Its important here to include an error estimate as people need to feel the saftey of estimates not being quoted back. Also its important to solicit suggested breakdowns and lean versions of projects.
It may result that a full move of the entire email system could be months and a large sum, however a lean approach to pulling a few lists into another system will provide a POC for value. As such with the connection of data from leads to sales may be possible with 50 percent of the data with some simple project.
From here with an understanding of estimated return, cost and time we can then prfioritize and choose next steps for testing and validating assumptions.
If you are in this position from IT or Marketing, compile a list of of projects and make a list of columns and start a few meetings to understand this as a map.
Look at airfocus.com or Jira.com as a starting point.
