What are your biggest opportunities and challenges for the next 12-24 months?
As a professional services organization, our biggest challenge (and our biggest opportunity) is the unification of marketing and business development into an account-based marketing (ABM) organization. This evolution recognizes how valuable existing accounts are to the marketing organization and the role business development plays in the targeting strategy for the new account pipeline. The net effect is providing sharper visibility into the complete account acquisition cycle. Not only is this shift challenging from a cultural perspective, but also from a data perspective. Platform vendors offering software solutions promise seamless information coordination to achieve the same results, but in my experience, they rarely live up to the hype. True success comes from the change in culture, not the change in software.
What keeps your clients up at night?
Our clients are responsible for developing and delivering the next generation of medical devices, aerospace platforms and industrial controls – quite literally, they are inventing the future. The complexity of this challenge is immense. Three out of four new products never even reach the marketplace! Of those that do, nine out of ten fail to deliver a positive return. Frankly, you have better odds at the roulette table in Las Vegas than you do in product development. When we work with our clients, not only is their company’s future on the line, their careers are on the line as well.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
Most of our clients deeply understand product/portfolio lifecycle management (PLM). This methodology has helped them achieve success in very challenging markets. However, widespread connectivity of all devices (aka digital product strategy and the Internet of Things) has thrown a monkey wrench into the standard stage gate process. The quantity and quality of real-time data has shortened product lifecycles and dramatically increased user expectations for iterative improvements. Helping our clients not only understand the implications, but also embrace the changes to their internal processes, continues to be a challenge. To help fill the gap until the MBA-programs catch up with comprehensive curriculum, Logic PD is planning to launch a digital product strategy training program in Q2 2016.
What are some unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
As often as we hear about common data platforms, more intuitive CRM applications, and predictive analytics, data quality remains the critical missing piece. As the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. Tools rarely work as well as their demos claim because in most organizations, data quality and integrity are poor. Yes, that is a cultural issue (who hasn’t been a part of a “data cleaning” project?), but martech vendors seem to completely miss the mark on this one. There are tremendous opportunities to assist marketing professionals in keeping data integrity intact in order to prevent ‘Excel fixes’ after the fact. As an industry, if we redirected even ten percent of investment in those tools, we would see an outsized return in results. (I’m looking at you, VCs. This may not be the next sexy unicorn, but the hearty donkey still needs to eat!)
What social network do you anticipate accelerating growth in the next year?
For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the go-to platform. But I’m concerned. It has been a bit of a victim of its own success and its own need to deliver outsized returns to its shareholders at the expense of the network’s core values. We see the same plateau with Twitter. Facebook (on the B2C side) has done a much better job continually
innovating, but it has also seen pressure for image-based social networks such as Instagram. For us, our primary objective in marketing is to educate and assist our clients before they ever need us – that’s how we build our brand. Whatever social network can best deliver the platform for building those relationships has our marketing dollar.
–Jason Voiovich is Chief Customer Officer at Logic PD
