TechBytes with Sam Melnick and Debbie Qaqish – Allocadia & The Pedowitz Group

By Sudipto Ghosh On Nov 22, 2017

(Left) Debbie Qaqish
CSO – The Pedowitz Group
(Right) Sam Melnick
VP, Marketing – Allocadia

Last month at the Martech Conference in Boston, The Pedowitz Group (TPG) and Allocadia announced a key partnership to give Marketing Operations leaders an edge on how they optimize marketing spend for maximum revenue impact. An educational initiative, the industry-first partnership is focused on making marketing operations perform optimally and thrive in today’s customer-centric, buyer-driven marketplace. To understand more about the Allocadia-TPG partnership and their impact on adoption of Marketing Performance Management tools, we spoke with Debbie Qaqish and Sam Melnick.

MTS: What’s the central doctrine driving the partnership between TPG and Allocadia?
Sam Melnick: The Pedowitz Group and Allocadia believe it’s critical for marketers to have confidence in where they spend every dollar in their business. This requires marketing operations leaders and CMOs alike to run marketing like a business, optimizing their spend for maximum impact. This partnership strengthens an alliance between two leading organizations in Marketing Performance Management.

MTS: How do Marketing Performance Marketing strategies align with the principles of Revenue Marketing?
Debbie Qaqish: At their core, both MPM and Revenue Marketing are about creating business impact. More specifically Revenue Marketing and MPM are not focused on the activities marketers are “doing” to execute day-to-day, they instead support the operational strategy behind the scenes. They each focus on the People, Process, and Technologies that marketers use to set goals that align with the business and then help those same marketers deliver results that meet or beat expectations.

MTS: What are the opportunities and threats for B2B CMOs in optimizing marketing operations at scale? How do you see the millennial-focused MOs shaping up?
Sam: There is a challenging juxtaposition for the CMO today. Gartner reported that Marketing spend in 2016 was $290B and marketing budgets rose for the third straight year. Yet at the same time, the CMO’s tenure is half that of other executives (e.g. head of sales, CFO.)

This highlights the fact that there is a HUGE opportunity for marketers today, but if they do not have the correct processes, technologies, and people in place to properly manage and measure it, they may lose their jobs. This is where Marketing Operations comes in. They are behind the scenes “mechanics” of the marketing organization, the chief of staff to the CMO, responsible for proving Marketing’s value to the organization through strong planning, investment and budget management, operations, and advanced measurements such as revenue, attribution, and ROI. Without a strong marketing operations function the CMO will never be able to run marketing like a business to take advantage of the opportunity at hand.

MTS: In the build-up to GDPR, how should marketing leaders strategize their Marketing Performance Management without disrupting their ROI forecasts?
Sam: As with any regulatory changes, marketers and marketing leaders must take GDPR very seriously. However, this should not fundamentally change their approach to MPM or Revenue Marketing. Instead, it underscores the importance of having a talented marketing operations discipline internally who can create transparency and accountability within all data collected by Marketing efforts.

Debbie: Leading up to May 2018, GDPR goes into effect, marketers should put together a roadmap of any adjustments needed within their processes or data collection/sets in order to comply with the regulations. This will allow them to continue to focus on the drive to hit their ROI goals.

Also Read: The Right Time for the Millennial Marketer

MTS: How easy or hard would it get for B2B companies to manage marketing investments as the gap between online and mobile platforms continue to increase?
Sam: As marketers continue to invest more time and money into digital properties and activities it further highlights the need to fully understand ALL marketing investments. Many marketers are moving to more digitally-focused execution, but are still living in spreadsheets as they try and track plan, spend and measure results. As our “do marketing” tactics evolve and continue to innovate, the way we “run marketing” must evolve as well to support them. Those marketers who use marketing performance management software are not only easily able to manage both digital and non-digital investments but also tie those investments back to results to understand ROI measurements.

MTS: What are your forecasts for #RunMarketing and #RevenueMarketing in an AI-driven MarTech ecosystem?
Sam: AI is absolutely coming for marketers and will impact everyone. However, before marketers are ready to realize the full benefits of AI they must stabilize and build the foundation of the marketing organization. For both#RunMarketing & #RevenueMarketing, there is a lot of work to be done around foundational technologies like Marketing Automation, CRM, and Marketing Performance Management, including data management and processes.

Debbie: Without a strong foundation in these areas, marketers who try and leverage advanced technologies and practices like AI will fall short of their expectations and be distracted from the first task at hand: creating a foundation upon which to manage their marketing organization like a high-performing business.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Sam Melnick and Debbie Qaqish.
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