Introduction
Adopting MMM is far too difficult today - we want to make it easy!
This article is part of Sellforte's MMM Procurement guide. We are in chapter 1A of the guide, as illustrated below:
In this article we will discuss the typical steps in a journey to adopt an MMM solution to drive more sales and profit for your company. Each step in the process has sub-topics that we will cover in deep-dive articles over the coming months.
1. Getting started
At the start of the MMM journey, three things are important.
Understanding the journey ahead: It is important to understand the steps that are typically needed to implement MMM. For bigger companies it might take several months (or in the worst case years) to get there, but for small and agile companies, you might be able to fast-track the process and get to results in weeks or days. The more you know in advance how to manage each step and decision point on the journey, the faster you get to realizing the benefits of MMM. On the other hand, each misstep in the journey can make the process longer and outcome more unpredictable.
Conducting research on MMM: Marketing Mix Modeling can be a complex topic to get introduced to, since you can look at it from so many different angels. Data scientists can get excited about the science of MMM, the marketing team can excited about finding the perfect budget allocation for the next campaign, and the C-level executives are excited to see what is the marketing ROI in general and is it getting better. It's important for you to know the basics of MMM, so that you can credibly talk about it with different stakeholder groups.
Identifying your stakeholders: It's not a one-man journey. It helps if you can early-on identify the people in your organization who you need to bring with you for the journey.
2. Getting approval for MMM
After you have taken the first steps, it's time roll up your sleeves. In this step, your objective is to get approval for MMM from your management team.
Build a business case for MMM: The easiest way to rally the troops for any project is to demonstrate how it will create value for the company. A project with high ROI and clear link to increasing sales and profits typically gets priority over projects with less tangible benefits. Luckily, the business case for MMM can be easily calculated. Calculating the business case should be done very early in the process to evaluate whether MMM brings enough value for your company or not. For example, if your company is investing very little in marketing, the business case might reveal that the benefits are not worth the investment.
Define MMM use-cases for your company: After the business case is ready, it's important to define the specific use-cases how your company would utilize MMM to realize its benefits.
Get management approval: Now you are ready to get approval to open an MMM project by explaining the value of MMM to your management. But what's the best way to do that?
In this article, we will share a simple approach for building a business case for MMM.
3. Choosing MMM approach and partner
After you and your management are convinced about the benefits of MMM, it's time to decide how MMM is implemented at your company. The objective in this step is to arrive bring investment proposal to your management team, which
Choosing MMM approach: There are three main alternatives for implementing MMM:
Consulting approach: Use MMM consultants to measure marketing ROI in a project (or e.g., annual projects).
Build an own solution: Form a data science and development team that builds, operates and maintains an MMM solution for your company.
MMM SaaS: Adopt continuous ROI tracking with an MMM SaaS solution.
All of these options have their pros and cons, and we will go through them in a separate article. Consulting approach has been the traditional way of doing MMM for decades. In 2010s companies have started replacing consulting projects with MMM SaaS solution which enables continuous ROI tracking and more granular results. Building an own solution is an option for the largest corporations.
Shortlisting MMM partners: It is VERY HARD to compare MMM companies and MMM solutions against each other just by looking at their websites, or even after hearing sales pitches from different companies. It is important to understand what are the criteria how your potential MMM partners differ from each other. In this article, we will also offer a comparison of different solutions. Based on this information, you should be able to create a shortlist of MMM partners you want to engage more deeply with.
Deciding your MMM partner via competitive proposal or RFP process: After you have a strong hypothesis of your MMM approach and you have a shortlist of potential partners you want to engage with, it's time to get in touch with those partners. It's important to be very structured in this process:
Communicate your requirements for the MMM solution, so that the potential partners can share how their solution fits to the requirements. Requirements include for example use-cases, technical requirements, service requirements and so on.
Collect responses and additional information from the potential partners (i) in written format, (ii) by hearing their pitch, (iii) testing a demo of their solution.
Evaluate responses of potential partners against each other by scoring them with the information you have received
Make your recommendation based on the scoring
Present your investment proposal to your management team: [To be added]
4. Running a pilot
To be added
5. Extend and expand
To be added