Sustaining Success Beyond Implementation
Getting your engineering team to stand up MarTech software, easy-ish. Getting them to keep supporting it, that’s the real challenge. 🙀
Steven Aldrich
In the general mantra among engineering teams, value is tied to the speed of bringing new features to market. This prioritization leads to an implementation approach of “give Marketing a better foundation” and let the tool do the work. If you’ve gone through one of these for a marketing automation tool in the last year, you’ll likely see this take form as a set of standard events like page views, combined with some factual attributes about your users. Great, they’ve given you a runway, it’s time to take off baby! 🛫
But we all know what happens next; Marketing builds a bigger plane and needs a longer runway to take off. Enter the painful, arm twisting process of getting engineers to support building that runway on an existing tool. Never mind if the original engineering team is long gone. 🤦♂️
So how do you build consensus and alignment amongst your engineering peers to continually support your MarTech investments? Bake cookies? Sure! 🍪 But the best way to build a partnership is to share the same value: driving incremental revenue for the business.
Here’s a method you can use to set up a good partnership:
1️⃣ Take your wishlist of marketing programs and specify what core behavior you’re trying to drive
2️⃣ Estimate the size of the audience you can potentially reach
3️⃣ Based on the level of effort and significance of the change, estimate the impact
As an example, let’s look at a HealthTech company with the following use case: Increase pre-appointment consultation form completion for prospective patients.
They have 50,000 prospective patients per month who engage with the form; Of those, 35% will complete it, giving them 17,500 new patients.
The marketing team has identified leveraging partial form completion fields to personalize their abandoned form series. They involve engineering and receive an estimate of 2 sprints to make those fields available.
So now marketing needs to justify the investment into this plan. They have an addressable audience of 32,500 users monthly or ~400,000 annually. They estimate a 4% lift in conversion based on a proxy test they ran for members. That means they can drive 16,000 new patients. With each new patient representing an average 1-year LTV of $200, this program would drive ~$266k in monthly incremental revenue ($3.2M yearly).
This may seem like a no brainer, but they also need to factor in the cost to the business to bring this program to life. With each sprint costing the business $160,000, the initial investment is $320,000; this means the investment won’t return positive revenue until month 2, but that’s a relatively great return on a new feature.
You can take this model and apply it to any other team you need support from, even outside agencies; what’s important here is the financial due diligence that ensures you’re spending your resources smartly. 🤓
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