Defining Alignment for Performance Management

I noticed there continues to be a lack of good solid definition for "Alignment" and therefore how to achieve it gets lost in various discussions.

Here is my best current definition for Alignment, in the context of Corporate Performance Management in general.

Alignment is the state of "collaborative agreement on company objectives", based on a common framework or tool for measurement of success, and linking the dependencies of target outcomes between people, projects, programs and objectives.

Ideally alignment is the "degree to which the separate pieces contribute to the outcomes" within their divisions and how well they lead to the overarching goals.

Metrics Questions for hiring your next CMO

Interviewing Marketing Executives

When Interviewing CMO candidates, the best approach is to first ask open ended questions and then allow descriptive stories to emerge that reveal culture, interaction and expectations from the candidate.

1. Which marketing metrics are most important to firms in general?
2. Your last firm (job position) in particular?
3. Which metrics were you most successful at improving?
4. How were you recognized for that improvement?
5. What specific goals or targets were used?
6. How were these negotiated and by whom?
7. What was the percentage change you impacted?
8. How did you do it? Over what period of time?
9. And how did your staff work with you?
10. Why did they trust your plans and ideas that they supported?
11. What mechanisms did you employ to gain consensus within your team?
12. Across other related teams (sales, production, engineering, service, support)? What does accountability mean in the context of a marketing department?
13. How is accountability managed between marketing and advertising?
14. How is accountability managed between marketing and sales? Does the VP sales agree?
    
15. How are results measured, communicated and interpreted?
16. Are the people achieving the measurements the same people who own the data and report results?
17. How did you come to trust those results?
18. For you past firm, how did you understand the metrics which influenced sales volume?
19. Describe the interaction of team roles that achieved results in your team?
20. What experience selling or in sales management do you have?
21. How did you establish credibility with VP of sales?
22. What inputs and influence did you have with regard to sales models?
23. What inputs and influence did you have with regard to the go to market strategy?
24. Which systems and processes were established before you arrived?
25. Which systems and processes were established by you?
    
26. How do they interact or relate to each other?

Asking candidates about the attribution of credit across their team, and the cause-and-effect influence on internal performance metrics can reveal a lot. Having their thoughts on what was measured, its validity, and what could be measured, gives you insight to their ability to create value in your organization. Also it reveals potential synergies or conflicts when working with sales and product organizations

Advertising Ecosystem

One of my startup clients is in the advertising tools space, so its useful to provide links to images that pertain to that market and those interactions.

FLICKR photostream


Do you have others you would post and share??

--Chris

Collaboration between firms in Information Technology

Here is my Blog article from 1997, ancient past, in Hal Varian's first course on Strategic Technology. Joint MBA and EE/CS class experiment at UC Berkeley.

Its still online in its original format!

Collaboration between firms in Information Technology

Web 2.0 -- What is it?

A couple of decent resources:

http://adaptivepath.com/images/publications/essays/What_puts_the_2_in_Web_20.pdf


YouTube Show

This gives you some context.

Cheers, CR

Custom or Opensource Spreadsheets??

Some of my colleages have asked me about using or obtain new custom spreadsheets in the past. Which raises the question: "Is there a business model for spreadsheets, that is similar to opensource software?". I doubt it, but I am interested to hear opinions from others. Most spreadsheets solve person or departmental data collection and decision support. They don't "scale in value". No one would pay support fees for spreadsheets right?

--Chris

Forthcoming Paper: CMO and CFO

How would you get the CMO and CFO on the same page? Sounds like a stretch right?

There are secrets, and I will be sharing some of them shortly. Here is the background paragraph on my new paper, the reviewers have it today, but should be available here next week!

Check back.

Linking the Objectives of the CMO to the CFO

using Key Performance Indicators

BACKGROUND

So you want to hire this hot new CMO, but you want to ensure that his/her performance is linked to the goals of the company, and not just linked to requests for big budget expenditures? What do you do? How do the goals and actions of marketing influence sales results? And how do we ensure that the marketing leadership will fit with and evolve our sales culture and the specifics of our market? What can we measure to get us started? What dangers are there in picking metrics and using them? That is the subject of this series of papers. This paper is part 1 in a series, and is focused on roles, objectives and understanding of marketing metrics as they link the CMO to the CFO.

Cheers, Chris

Welcome to the Launch

Hi all, this blog is forum on defining, using, challenging and questioning the use of Strategy Metrics. Or more long winded, the use of performance management metrics in measuring the success of stategic plans, campaigns, and the like.

So topics will range from Strategy to cause-and-effect linkage, to balanced scorecard design and more. I will have a natural bias to Internet-based companies, Mobile applications, and startup ventures. Just because I find this more interesting.

I welcome questions, comments, links and posts from you -- the readers.