Tactical Project Work Example

I've found there are general stages in the process of attacking a specific database marketing challenge; these stages are described below.  It is useful to break up the process like this so all the players understand what's involved and progress can be tracked.

Projects involving customer data also require resources on your side for the pulling of data.   My approach is to teach your people through this process how to go about developing ideas and programs themselves; the initial investment in time and resources pays off many more times in the future as you improve internal skills.  You may or may not need to go through all these stages, depending on the progress you have made so far.

Stage 1:  Initial overview - learning the details of the business.  Goals, problem areas, past experiences, research material (surveys).  I will also want to review the customer reports you have, particularly those covering transactional activity of any kind (purchases, page views).

Stage 2:  Data scrutiny - seeing what kind of data is available.  Dump the data or a sample and review it for content and integrity, get a feel for the manifestation of the business in the data.  Ideally, I would like to see raw data records and if you use a marketing datamart, the summary data available to users. 

Stage 3:  Follow-up on data - confirming my perceptions of the data with data owners.  This can sometimes be more of an IT type idea, where I make sure I understand very clearly what the data is and where it comes from, verifying the data sources and usually asking for new kinds of reports to be developed.  The new reports are "customer behavior mapping" tools - the organizing of your data around customer behavior.   It's the idea at the core of my Drilling Down method, and is a one-time exercise you can continue to benefit from down the road.

Stage 4:  Formation of thesis - what do I think can be done, what kind of program can be developed?  The kinds of ideas generated at this stage would be similar to these: "you're giving away the store on discounts to best customers and you don't need to", "you have a whole customer segment that could be profitable but your campaign timing is off", "you have a serious best customer defection problem", and so on.  This is grinding on the data, running scenarios, looking for clues.  I can document what I did or we can do it together; the general idea at this Stage is to teach you what to look for.

Stage 5:  Gut-check thesis - does it make sense to the program owner?  I run through the basic first thesis (test idea) with the owner, tear it apart, rebuild it, and get commitment to a test of some kind.  This stage includes program delivery decisions (e-mail, snail mail, CRM rules-based execution, personalization of pages, etc.)  We will also finalize who will be targeted, what the offers should be, and creative in this gut-check stage.

Stage 6:  Execution - nuts and bolts.  Choose the list, design creative, execute the program, wait for results to come in.  I probably don't have to be involved in this, unless you want me to monitor results as they come in and suggest adjustments.

Stage 7:  Results Analysis - was the thesis correct?  What are the key most profitable behavioral trigger points?  Which customer segments are the most profitable, least profitable?  We're tearing apart the data, looking for clues.  Again, I can document what I did or we can do it together.

Stage 8:  Final Presentation - wrap up the first thesis.  Interpretation of the results, ideas for improvement, review of new facts and ideas generated by the test of the first thesis.
** 1 - 3 hours **

From here, you essentially repeat Stage 4 - Stage 7 over again using new information generated by the first test - with or without me.  A new or modified thesis is developed, gut checked, executed, and analyzed.  You repeat this cycle until profits are maximized and this initial approach is tweaked out as far as it can go for the specific challenge at hand.  I expect you will need less of my time on each repeat of the Stage 4 - Stage 7 loop since you'll be learning the process, and eventually won't need to talk to me at all (sniff, sniff) until you want to "go to the next level", if a new level is practical based on what we learn about the behavior of your customers.

In general, the best approach is to start with the broadest, highest increase in revenue / reduction in expense idea possible, and tweak this "big idea" until it is maximized; this is the process described above.  The "next level" is a subdivision of the big idea into 3 - 5 sub-ideas, which are then maximized by looping through the same process as above.

Each time you maximize a level, you make a decision on whether to move to the next level by further splitting ideas into sub-ideas.  At some point, you run into diminishing returns with the first big idea, and the challenge has been met.  From there, often you end up moving on to a new tactical challenge, which you will have undoubtedly discovered along the way as a result of going through this process and becoming familiar with your data and customer behavior.  

The process continues to iterate, each idea generating more ideas, and it never really ends.  At this point, you are probably doing this all on your own, because you understand the process and know how to find the ideas. 

You can visualize what the end result of all this looks like by thinking of individual tactical challenges as pyramids; the "big idea" is the base of the initial pyramid.  Each level you add to the base big idea is more targeted and more profitable, until you reach the capstone, where you have maximized the entire idea at every level.  Then you move on to the next challenge and big idea, and build that tactical pyramid level by level.

Over time, you can have many profit-driving pyramids (for example, one for first-time buyers, one for best customers, one for each product category, one for each area of the web site), all operating simultaneously to maximize the profitability of your business.

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