“It’s human nature to do work when we hear about a deadline,” writes agile coach Stacey Ackerman. “The idea behind the ‘sprint’ is to have a short time-boxed cycle for planning and executing work. A sprint helps your team create a sense of urgency and allows them to only plan in detail at the last responsible moment.”

We’ve probably all heard of agile sprints, but what does it mean to implement them for marketing teams? 

Watch an episode of MarTech Live featuring Stacey Ackerman here.

The starting-point is a prioritized list of work, with one owner (the Product Owner). The tasks on the list should be “sized” in order to gauge whether they can be completed within the sprint time box. (More on agile estimating here.)

The sprint needs a goal: the identification of the main focus of the sprint, not just a regurgitation of the tasks which need to get done. Teams need to commit to the work they believe they can accomplish in the time box, and the work needs to be broken down into its component parts. “If your team has struggled with completing work, taking the extra time to estimate the tasks in hours can be helpful for gauging time commitments,” writes Stacey.

Read her detailed advice here.

Marketing teams that are able to excel at spend management, financial agility, and optimized planning will be the ones that set themselves apart in 2021. In this webinar, we’ll break down the three key areas where marketers can strengthen the relationship between the CMO and the CFO to continue to grow the business at scale. Join our experts and learn the importance of proper spend management how to best calculate customer value and build financial acumen

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Implementing a CDP can reportedly have many benefits for marketers, but what is the benefit for marketing operations? CDPs remove manual processes for operations, a major benefit of implementation, said Gabrielle Schneider, a solutions consultant at CDP vendor BlueVenn.

Watch Schneider’s full MarTech presentation here.

“Marketers, even in data-rich organizations, face a number of challenges,” said Schneider. “Things like data living in disparate data silos throughout the organization, requiring manual processes and cross-team collaboration to access the data, which makes it nearly impossible to have a single source of truth within an organization.”

To prepare for life with a CDP, marketers should have a well-planned-out strategy with both short-term and long-term goals. Use the opportunity of implementing a new CDP to also review your marketing stack, making sure there are no repetitive tools or platforms. The stack should be prioritized by features, activities and actions that occur the most often in the consumer journey. CDP implementation allows marketers an even deeper analysis of the customer journey via reliable data sources.

They also start to uncover previously hidden product insights, said Schneider. With data silos removed, marketing operations teams experience a more efficient data process, allowing for more in-depth analysis of their data.

Read more here.

We hear a lot about how to choose a solution for your martech stack, but less about what you do once you’ve made a decision. At the recent MarTech virtual event, one session took on that topic: “So, you have a new CDP… Now what?” 

“We chose a vendor, everything’s going to be awesome,” said Ben Thompson, director of e-commerce analytics and tag management for Bluestem Brands, the parent of Fingerhut. “But it doesn’t always go that smoothly, does it?”

Even after Bluestem committed to adopting Tealium’s Audience Stream CDP, Thompson described a situation in which key stakeholders were anything but enthusiastic about getting the technology into place. 

Read More>>

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Customer service software provider Zendesk has announced a strategic partnership with WhatsApp that allows companies to engage customers in the moment — both to distribute information and respond to questions — across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram.  

More than 175 million customers a day use WhatsApp to engage with brands, said Zendesk in a release. The partnership makes Zendesk one of WhatsApp’s first core solution providers, enabling brands to quickly and easily engage with customers, for example to assist with social commerce transactions and customer service issues.

Why we care.  Messaging channels are a key place for brands to meet their customers today. It’s appropriate that customer service vendors like Zendesk are involved in facilitating this.

Insightly, the CRM platform, this week announced new features for its marketing automation offering, Insightly Marketing. The enhancements are aimed at simplicity of management and alignment with sales teams.

The new features include:

• AI-powered prospect ranking;
• Advanced list segmentation based on digital activities (website interactions and downloads, webinar attendance, etc.;
• A drag-and-drop landing page designer;
• A/B and multivariate testing; and
• Enhanced analytics.

Why we care. We’re seeing innovation and upgrades here from one of the smaller players in the CRM/marketing automation space.