Team Chemistry - Sports and Analytics

Late March is as good time to speak about teamwork. For basketball teams, the right group chemistry is essential, and this on display in the winners of the NCAA tournaments. You can also see how fragile team chemistry can be, in the shift that results when an NBA team adds a "superstar" yet changes their whole approach to playing. The coach has to decide how to best leverage the new individual talents while still maintaining a winning framework.

If you are growing or leading a sales or marketing analytics group, you have choices to make:

- the mix of hands on analysts versus consultants

- whether to staff in house or outsource, or even offshore

- having people steeped in your industry as well as other categories, for a fresh perspective


Then of course, the coaching and training are critical. Analytics is rooted in mathematics and algorithmic techniques which have been around for decades. Yet there are innovative digital, multichannel methods. Thus a leader must find the right mix of setting standards, yet delegating and allowing the group to develop some new innovative thinking.

Teamwork Triad and the Digital Campaign Launch

What is the benefit of working in a small, focused agency without walls? Multi-disciplinary teamwork and relentless focus on high performance.

My department has three components: analytics, campaign management operations, and media services. All of these are both consumer and professional. In larger agencies, these functions are in different departments, even different divisions or buildings. For The CementBloc, all these functions sit together, literally in the same workspace on the same floor.

The benefit of this has become really apparent to me this year as we launch our series of digital campaigns, complete with media promotion and operations.
Take a look at a few of them:



* Professional diabetes
* Consumer cosmetic dermatology
* Consumer social community for breast cancer

As campaigns like these are prepared, the disciplines work together to prepare promotional planning, insure smooth operations, and design for measurability. Once we are up in market, the energy is palpable. Folks literally running to each other's computers, hovering around the same screen as the hourly results come in. How did the email blast go? What are the search click throughs? Which banners are getting highest response rates? Most importantly: how can we keep optimizing!?!

Nothing like it.

Campaign Management Playbooks

It's a great deal of effort to design a relationship marketing campaign, from the first brainstorming of business goals, to the user experience designs, through to the final creation of communication pieces and the media planning. It's critical not to let that careful thought go to waste as you are about to head into market.

The campaign management playbook is where all of the operational specifications sit in one well-structured document. The playbook includes the segmentation specifications, and how segments are computed at registration time, or from the database. It maps out the communication plan by segment, and the business rules for determining under what conditions each communication is sent. Also included are the fulfillment requirements for each communication, and each testing plan.

The playbook should not be massive or burdensome; 10 to 25 pages, including figures and tables. This is the necessary script that all vendor partners must follow, so put time into a clear design.

Having this playbook is critical to insuring that when executed in market, your relationship marketing program brings the consumers or healthcare professionals have the experience that was designed.

Is this topic a bit dry? Sorry about that; but the intention with playbooks is to avoid the excitement of in-market mistakes later.

Hacker's dictionary of gone by 1990s; still useful for CRM

When I am crunching (HIPAA compliant) data, or searching though files, deep into a project, I sometimes recall the bizarre "nerd" language of my grad school days at the MIT Lab for Computer Science. Most of these terms can be found at the Hacker's Dictionary Website

These terms are still coming in handy as one analyzes large CRM or PRM data sets and merges many disjointed files:

My favorite, with interpretations.

*Hack: To program for an extended period of time, and really love the creation.

*Munge: To analyze large data sets, and "work your magic" to get insights.

PERL, AWK, and SED: great Unix command line programs I wish I still had, for munging large text files.

*Snarf: To borrow from a colleague a file or document (electronic or paper)

*Grok: To pore deeply over an analysis, a code listing, a book, or a report, and really understand it

Try these terms yourself the next time you are grokking a few thousand rows of anonymized survey responses, or munging a ten-fold larger website click stream data set.

Holistic Learning: Optimizing your CRM or PRM Campaigns

When developing a learning or measurement plan for your relationship marketing campaigns, don't stop at the dashboards, charts, and graphs. Be sure to anticipate the potential enhancements you may implement to optimize your campaign, depending on what the results are.

Improvements to RM, whether for consumers or healthcare professionals, can range from the most concrete to more abstract decisions, as itemized below:

* Operational Improvements

* Media Optimization

* Promotional Tactical Changes

* Adjusting Program Elements

* Changing the Offers or Incentives

* Adjusting Segmentation

* Re-Thinking the Campaign Strategy

Certain types of measurement findings are more indicative of each of these required changes, and a combination of insights can "triangulate" or combine to support particular optimizations rather than others.

For these reasons, campaign measurement reviews should be holistic, and should gather data from all facets of your campaign: media, promotion-response, website and call center activity, RM participation, and incremental conversion and adherence.
Making decisions based on reports from one class of metrics is, well, sub-optimal.

Don't forget the campaign operations planning!

I have seen this time and again, across multiple clients and brands, over the years. Marketers launch a series of concurrent marketing and sales tactics at the same time, and yet do not plan for the operational coordination between them. How does this show up? Here are some examples:

* Banner ads or print ads drive to web, and the landing page is not ready yet.
* Media on a coupon offer is launched late, and is not in market until the expiration date is almost offer
* Registration form questions that are inconsistent in print, website, and phone channels.
* Patient feedback systems like Infomedics are underutilized and misunderstood by the sales force.
* Not being able to tell which acquisition tactic brings in leads, due to lack of source coding.
* Direct mail is sent to long expired addresses, not cleansed by change of address.

I could go further, but these are just examples.

The consequences: bad customer experiences, and missed opportunities.

Campaign management and operations is a discipline that insures reliable patient and physician experiences witin relationship marketing. It is a combination of database skills, project planning and oversight, and optimization. Make sure your agency has specialists who can bring these skills, and make that investment. Also, check out the Direct Marketing Association for best practices.

Not only are problems avoided, but there are positive benefits to campaign operational planning. Cost savings, better targeting, and better patient and physician loyalty.