I was a guest speaker at the IDC Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) conference [1] yesterday in New York on the CMO panel for effective strategies for marketing performance measurement. I had the opportunity to discuss MPM with competitors, large and small tech companies as well as with the IDC CMO advisory folks. I thought I would share my own key takeaways on the state of MPM in the tech industry.

Takeaway #1: marketers are implementing MPM out of fear. MPM is gaining momentum in all marketing organizations because marketers are trying to justify their budgets and resist the pressures from the CEO and CFO. Obviously the wrong attitude. MPM is a great lever for the marketing organizations to shift the conversation from marketing as a cost (and therefore leading to cost reduction) to marketing as an investment that can be traded off against other investments in R&D or sales.

Takeaway #2: there is still a major disconnect between marketing and finance. The traditional financial systems do not allow marketing to track spend by marketing initiative or campaign, thereby undermining marketing’s ability to have a ROI discussion. I strongly believe that there is an urgency and imperative for marketing organizations to implement Marketing Resource Management (MRM) systems that would allow marketing to track spend along these dimensions. We have been implementing the Siebel MRM system for the past 2 years at HP and, despite the technical implementation challenges and change management issues, we are starting to really benefit from the insights.

Takeaway #3: Great progress is being made on linking marketing and sales across the industry. We are really starting to see common strategies between marketing and sales, common definitions of leads, clearer hand-offs and end-to-end lead management tracking enabled by deployment of CRM systems. This will greatly help tie the contribution of Marketing to improving the pipeline and accelerating sales results.

Takeaway #4: MPM in the tech industry could greatly benefit from consumer goods MPM. Techniques such as marketing mix modeling that have existed for a long time in the consumer goods industry are only emerging now in the tech industry. Tech marketing will need to embrace more sophisticated statistical modeling to drive future marketing investment trade-offs.

Takeaway #5: MPM is still not fully embedded into marketing processes, especially marketing planning. Some tech companies such as HP and Xerox are embracing Lean Six Sigma techniques to drive more rigor and discipline into their marketing processes and embed measures in the very core of these processes.

Takeaway #6: I still love New York in the spring and still love NYC steakhouses, although I did not try the 32oz “bone steak”…. Thanks Rich!

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