by Chris Geiser, Chief Technology Officer at The Garrigan Lyman Group
My flying car has yet to arrive. And even if it had, I can’t tell you that I would be ready for it. I have no knowledge of how to fly a car. No idea how to navigate the airspace, and perhaps most importantly no idea how to land if I do manage to get airborne. Yet, somehow, I still find myself thinking about it when I see the self-parking car ad. It’s a step in the right direction I suppose, but it’s solving a problem I was already ok with. I can already park a car on my own. Will the self-parking feature add so much value that I can’t live without it? Are the parking areas of where I live in New York City really made for me to be able to self-park my car or am I borrowing trouble.
Now let’s shift that mindset to a hot marketing technology topic. Any topic. Pick one. Your favorite. For mine I will use personalization. Not because it’s my favorite but because it recently came up as a topic for discussion in a CMS Experts peer group. The discussion wasn’t what you would think. It wasn’t how do we drive the concept of personalization further, faster, because you know, there’s all this proof out there of how magical it is to a customer relationship, and because all the tech stacks now have deep seated analytics engines that let you, blah, blah, blah.
Nope. This conversation was different. A seasoned group of martech pros discussing where personalization was really netting out. “Is that still a thing? Are we still on that?” The discussion turned from the topic itself to something more important. (This is where your favorite hot marketing topic comes back in. Do you have it ready? Good.)
What value do the features provide to business owners that don’t have the capacity or readiness to use them?
Much like my flying, (or setting the bar lower to the self-parking), car, if the technology were to magically appear, what would be my propensity to use it? As the discussion evolved, Mark Demeny from Contentful raised one of the primary issues that businesses face with buying new technology. “Sell the vision”. While I can’t remember all of Mark’s exact words, the concept of selling the vision was the main message. The tech providers survive and thrive on selling the vision of how wonderful it will be to have that self-parking car. Or how wonderful it will be to send that perfect message, to the right person, at the most opportune time to “deepen that relationship” and become a personalization machine. But as we got to in the discussion, only a small percentage of martech buying businesses are ready to take advantage of what the promise of the vision is. They are not ready to take advantage of what the potential of the tech is, but they bought the vision, and the vision sits. And waits. And waits. For the resources of the business to catch up to the vision. Of course, by that time, we are on to the next version, and the next vision.
Nevertheless, product teams keep pounding out features, sales teams keep demonstrating them, and business customers keep buying the promise of the vision without enough attention to their end of making the vision happen.
If you are not buying into this theory, please hit up my good friends at Solodev – their demonstration of how to use machine learning to personalize something as seemingly simple as a Netflix-type recommendation engine for movies reveals just how much engineering goes into the kind of personalization that is often discussed as table stakes.
Welcome to the Messy Middle
The world of the agency, integrator, or consultancy becomes a mess of balancing what is known about the client’s requirements with what is being sold in the demos or on the spec sheet. Prior to the tech stack vendors arriving to pitch their wares, we are spending time with the client discussing their current state and what they would like to see in their ideal future state. As we watch their eyes grow bigger with every slide in the tech stack pitch, there is a responsibility to be the realist in the room. The coach. To translate the everyday realities of the client’s roadmap to the features being demonstrated. If the car comes with self-parking enabled, it’s our job to ensure that the client understands that they primarily park in a driveways or do mostly highway-driving in rural areas. If the feature is something as deep and detailed as personalization, we must be ready to set the stage for the crawl-walk-run cadence that comes from undertaking such a huge effort.
Chris Geiser from GLG speaking to the CMS Experts in Seattle (February 2020)
The client likely won’t be thinking about the constant creative and messaging support that it requires, the editorial calendar that focuses the messaging, and the arduous task of pouring over piles of analytics that tell them if their efforts are working. OH WAIT – that last part is supposed to happen automagically.
The proper role is coach. The stakeholders know their business, the platform sales team knows their platform. Success in the process is dependent on a great coach to create a plan that provides the stakeholders with the greatest value in the short-term and long-term, from the chosen platform(s). Then to set expectations properly about what short-term success and long-term success look like.
The role of coach dictates the right conversations as the dust settles on the cavalcade of tech stack demos. Having real conversations with the stakeholders ensure understanding of what is available, and what the level-of-effort attached to each feature is, is the critical next step in the process. Differentiating the vision from reality and being real about it will help to set the stage for the where and when of stakeholder expectations. “Yes this feature is included, but it will add 3 weeks to the implementation timeline to make it work”, “no, that feature that they demonstrated is not yet generally available, and is actually an additional cost to the licensing”. This is the time for clear and realistic expectation setting and drawing the line between what is out of the box, and what will require extensive customization.
Transformation is Hard Work
The word “transformation” is loaded with glorious overtones, but it’s hard work. It is a people process more than it is a technology process and requires a commitment from the top of the client organization to be successful. That commitment can be difficult to come by when the people who just wrote the big check for the new whizbang thing, don’t understand the realities of the implementation. Setting those expectations correctly will help them buy into the people part of the process and commit the resources that they need to be successful. Understanding how the technology features map to their business, and that you are not building Amazon or Google is critical. Their business is their business and the requirements, platform choices, and implementation, and sustainment strategies need to match what the long-term capabilities of the business are.
And now the hard part. Much of the impactful work will seem menial. Organizing product data, locating assets, making decisions about workflows, critical business decisions will need to be made and they will be, at times, exhausting. But it’s part of the process and it cannot be skipped or shorted. Setting expectations for what those decisions mean in the short-term and the long-term will allow stakeholders to understand the impact of their decisions on the implementation process and the roadmap overall. It’s a process, not an outcome, to borrow from James Clear. The process needs to be celebrated, and success criteria in the process need to be defined.
Borrowing yet again from our CMS Experts session – it was shared by several that the most successful outcomes in enterprise projects emerged from a ratio of 60%+ planning, and 40%- development. Illustrating that fools do indeed rush in, the planning is essential, and is a key contributor to the outcome. But as those processes start to materialize, success will be evident, and confidence will build.
And Finally, The Outcome
Starting with an understanding of who and where your stakeholders are, will help to drive the successful outcome. Rushing to the whizbang or shiny pennies before the stakeholders are ready to commit to what it takes to sustain them is essential in a successful transformation.
Processes drive outcomes - it's not about the launch button. The journey to the end matters. Support from within the entire organization and allocation of resources along the way will ensure a delivery that meets and exceeds expectations.
Be a great coach. Your stakeholders are depending on you. Oddly, so are the tech stack vendors, whether they know it or not. To create an implementation that meets your stakeholders expectations and demonstrates the value of the platform is a modern miracle.
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Mark Demeny has expanded on some of the concepts from the personalization discussion here: Is the hype around personalization dead?