Stealing advice from the developers: how to make your small marketing team more prolific, less stressed, and able to knock out deadlines like Holly Holm did to Ronda Rousey.

1. Operation:
Make
Marketing
Agile
(and more)
Presented by Sydney Ratzlaff
December 9th, 2015

2. Agile Is The New Black
Keep in mind: everything you hear today
isn’t just applicable to Marketing; I geared it
toward Marketing because that’s my job.
These strategies could be used in finance,
support, a fire department, etc.

3. Agile Is The New Black
Why is agility in Marketing so important?
Think of 3 reasons!

4. Agile Is The New Black
Agility (in Marketing) is essential because:
It gives marketing/business leaders the ability to
– quickly react and respond to the market
– adjust when things don’t work
– get to market faster, and be more responsive to customer
needs.

5. Image from Pardot.com

6. David Beats Goliath
– Where is Agile Marketing taking place? …...Start-ups.
– “Small and midsize firms took 1.6 share points, or nearly
$10 billion in sales, from the packaged-good behemoths
over three post-recession years from 2009 to 2012,
according to a report from IRI and Boston Consulting
Group.”
– Natural agility of small players

7. Agile Advice
– Commit to being a learning organization
– Encourage failures
– Don’t wait for perfect (Doesn’t work in some
Marketing situations)
– Nail it, then scale it

8. Starting With Stats
– Agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30
percent higher profits than non-agile companies (from MIT)
– "Adopting a way more Agile approach, we probably pulled off in 5-
1⁄2 to 6 months what most organizations would do in 12." —Lisa
Arthur, CMO of marketing applications, Teradata
– 67 percent of CMO’s Agenda survey respondents who adopted
Agile said it resulted in a more motivated team

9. Starting With Stats
– In 2013, the marketing department created more than 200 collateral pieces—
four times what it produced the previous year. Yet the department is less stress
ed. “We have our lives back.”
– “On one project, we had almost a 3,000-x lift in performance and drove a 30
percent increase in trials quarter-to-quarter, just purely because of this process.
And we’ve done nothing else that was different other than use these processes
on this one particular campaign.”
– While 63 percent of CMOs say agility is a high priority, only 40 percent call
themselves Agile.

10. From CMO’s Agenda “Agile Advantage”

11. What’s a Marketing User Story?
“As an evaluation lead, I want to be able to see
within five seconds what differentiates your
product from the competition so I can determine
if you’re a fit for my preliminary list of
candidates.”
Quick quiz: What is the success criteria of this user story?

12. What’s a Marketing User Story?
“As an evaluation lead, I want to be able to see
within five seconds what differentiates your
product from the competition so I can determine
if you’re a fit for my preliminary list of
candidates.”
ANSWER: The success criteria is “pass a 5-second test for recall of our differentiators.”

13. What’s a Marketing User Story?
Your turn!
Right now we are creating a new product overview video. It will contain a 2 minute
overview of what our system does and how we differentiate ourselves from the
competition. Example: emergencyreporting.com
As a ______________________,
I want to be able to ______________________________________
so I can ____________________________________________.

14. What’s a Marketing User Story?
Your turn!
Right now we are creating a new product overview video. It will contain a 2 minute
overview of what our system does and how we differentiate ourselves from the
competition.
As a Fire Chief,
I want to be able to quickly see the benefits of using Emergency Reporting and the
products that are available
so I can make an informed decision of whether or not to try a free trial of the
software.

15. What’s a Marketing User Story?
– If you say “build a demand gen initiative around X or Y,” or “create a storyline X
or Y”
– Person 1: “oh, this is a two-hour thing I can do with a blog post”
– Person 2: “this is a 20-hour project that needs creative resources and all these other
things”
Emphasizes the importance of defining your user story, breaking up epic campaigns,
and conducting regular retros/stand-ups.

17. The Important vs. The Urgent
– Marketing, like IT, is often the department people
come to with perceived burning-fire issues
seeking immediate resolution. And they think
being “agile” means you’re going to drop
everything and do it.

18. The Important vs. The Urgent
– Everybody wants everything now. Who can relate to
that?
– The solution tends to be more ad hoc and ultimately very
hard to manage.

19. The Important vs. The Urgent
You’re always going to be beholden to what’s
urgently happening in the business today. That’s
where Agile comes in and changes the game.
What’s the solution to this?

20. The Important vs. The Urgent
A transparent, public backlog
– Enables team members and those making requests to have a more effective
conversation about priorities.
– “We can’t take that on board right now.”
– “I hear that your initiative is important. I agree it’s important. It is not as urgent
as these other things that we are working, so I am putting it on my backlog and
we will get back with you on when we can do it, not if we can do it.” (Think: The
dangers of thrash)
– Encourage that conversation of: what must be moved off the board to put the
request at the top?

21. The Important vs. The Urgent
Rapid response team/dedicated emergency work time
– Ex. HubSpot dedicates 25% of everyone’s time to doing overflow or emergency
work
– Our dev team is dedicating 10% of their time each sprint to bugs/tech debt
– Our marketing department examples:
– “Oh no! We need this sales bulletin for a show next week.”
– ‘Hair on fire’ customers – always 1st priority
– Helping other departments
– “Marketing site is down!”

22. The Important vs. The Urgent
Designate a “go-to” champion
– How else will the rest of the team stay focused on their tasks?
– A designated go-to person handles all incoming requests, explains the Agile process and
takes the request to the group for prioritization.
– This keeps other team members from having to deal with interruptions and
expectations.
AKA: the Marketing Product Owner

23. The Important vs. The Urgent
When you implement an Agile system, you’re providing a framework
to deal with the unexpected and to deal with the more urgent things
in a more structured and systematic way so it doesn’t have to be a
fire drill every time something new comes up.
= More productivity, less stressful work environment, better
velocity analytics

25. The Benefits
– Accomplish More, Deliver Faster, and Perform Better.
– By presenting ‘wins’ and easy to understand results you can earn more
credibility within the organization. Get rid of the black box around Marketing.
– Our small, scrappy but full of talent team can help you achieve your
design/campaign goals to the best of our ability.

26. What ER Marketing Is Doing
– Daily stand-ups (right after all company morning stand-up)
– Weekly sprint planning (usually has a lot of carry-over, working on optimization of
that – asking the team what they can accomplosh)
– Celebrating wins, discussing what could be improved in retrospective meetings
– Hiring based on personality, trainability, fit with ER culture
– Prioritizing, but always flexible to change
– Using Trello to write User Stories and plan weekly sprints, as well as our physical
Kanban (by Whiteboard Challenge)
– Constant collaboration, strong emphasis on Product Testing and customer feedback
– Multiple proofs/copyedits (similar to code reviews)

27. Where We Want To Be in 2016
– Limiting our WIP (work in progress) to 1-2 stories at a time
– Finding our individual team members’ key strengths, where they want to
specialize
– Optimizing marketing content for our selected and heavily researched Customer
Personas
– Stay up to date on trends, be active in outside design/CX/marketing community
– Have more Cupcake Tuesday’s (this Tuesday!) and Chai Latte Days, grow closer
as a team

28. Questions?
– If you’re interested in seeing more of what we do on our day to day, take a look
at our Kanban board or come see!

29. Resources
– http://www.agilemarketing.net/
– http://www.universitybusiness.com/moe/article/agile-marketing-makeover
– http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27316/four-steps-to-creating-
an-agile-marketing-culture#ixzz3t7MJE8qs
– http://cmosagenda.com/
– http://www.cmgpartners.com/assets/agile.advantage.the.methodology.pdf