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Reporting On a Report From the Executive Suite |
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Recently, I hosted a panel discussion at the annual DMA conference in Boston. The topic was Customer Intelligence in the Corner Suite -- How Senior Marketing Executives Are Making Real Time Decisions. With me were three highly experienced marketing executives from General Motors, SunTrust and Liberty Mutual who made my job of moderator very easy.
I will not rehash what they had to say that day, but they said a lot. Attendees were lucky to hear from such accomplished marketers. However, what I did want to remark on was their abiding commitment to fact-based decision making. Each of these individuals is responsible for making multi-million dollar decisions that can have, as we learned during the discussion, hundreds of millions of dollars of impact for their respective businesses.
In their own ways these executives have learned many of the same lessons, which became apparent as they swapped stories and regaled the audience on what they had found worked best for them.
First, they noted that in the higher realm of C-level decision making, it is vital to have unassailable information that you can rely on to: (1) report on the current state of affairs, (2) determine the best courses of action to take, and (3) measure the outcomes of your decisions. This has led them to assemble large integrated repositories of customer and marketing performance information, use a variety of analytics to garner insights from that information, build a corporate memory around those insights, and institute processes to leverage that information in decisive actions.
Second, they have learned that in order to get the attention of C-level executives they had to focus on decisions that would have truly significant business impacts. So, they had to understand quickly which decision mattered most and what information was needed to help with those decisions. They looked for actions that would affect large percentages of their target populations and would produce the biggest gains.
Third, they had to simplify the message to their superiors so that it could be comprehended easily. They noted that C-level executives are extremely busy and you will likely get only one shot at making your case. Don’t bury the key insights and recommendations in a blizzard of statistics and charts, but tell the story succinctly and compellingly, they advised.
And, fourth, they emphasized that there needed to be a well-thought out plan to implement the decisions so that what you just promised could be accomplished, would be accomplished. This, they said, was often overlooked and caused promising initiatives to fail.
Pretty sound advice from three seasoned players. It may sound simple, but success is often found in the simple and straightforward.
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