The Marketing Resourcing Delimma
A piece from AdNews that has a few comments from me on the marketing resourcing dilemma:
Andy Lark, CMO at software company Xero, and former CBA CMO, said a big challenge sits simply with human capability in the martech area – followed by process definition and invention.
“There is a serious lack of talent capable of implementing, running and then executing on today’s marketing platforms,” Lark said.
“Most CMOs now bear the burden of not just selecting marketing platforms and managing their deployment, but in reskilling, retraining and hiring the talent needed for them.”
Innovation Rate
How do you measure the rate of innovation? For many, its the percent of sales from new products over a given period. Like Heineken who is at 9%. Macquarie is much higher over a five year period, making them an innovation leader.
Measuring innovation in this way is useful in more traditional industries where new products and services eat the old. But what about cloud businesses who constantly innovate – where the product refreshes daily with new features and categories? Essentially all sales come a new product in any given period.
And this is what sets legacy software businesses from cloud businesses. In one, the rate of innovation is throttled by significant technical and business model debt. In the cloud, innovation isn’t just a constant, its the fuel on which the business runs.
