I have several clients who have adopted agile marketing, and they are trying to make changes to their marketing systems as rapidly as possible. They are all large companies and they have big changes to make fast. But how do they know when they are moving too slow and when they are moving too fast?
A big part of the decision revolves around the organization itself. I like to draw a matrix that shows how rapidly the company can roll out new marketing systems:
| Forced to Use | Free to Adopt | |
|---|---|---|
| Requires Behavior Change | Slow down for releases | Full speed ahead |
| No Behavior Change Required | Full speed ahead | Full speed ahead |
If your latest exciting change to your marketing requires that your personnel or your customers change their behavior, and they are forced to use your new system when you launch it, then you need to treat it as a standard software release. You need to consider whether you need training, communications, a formal launch date, a way to help people trying to do it the old way, and other kinds of software release types of activities.
For example, think about a change where you want your phone sales reps to choose different scripts for different kinds of customers. You probably need some kind of training for them and you most definitely at least need to communicate with them so they are ready when it happens. This is a forced change requiring a behavior change–you need some kind of release planning.
But if both of those conditions do not exist, then you can roll out your change whenever you want–what software people call “slip-streaming.” If people are free to keep working the old way or if they don’t need to change their behavior, then you can innovate at will and see what happens. Fortunately, most of the changes marketers want to make fall into this category, so that makes things easy most of the time.
Suppose the same company was using a system where each time a call is connected, the script for that customer is shown on the screen. In that case, there is no behavior change, so the change can be made at any time. Or suppose you were making it optional as to when sales reps started using the new scripts–then they would be free to adopt (or not), so the change can be made any time.
Because slipstream changes are so much simpler than releases, it is sometimes worth compromising how you approach the change so that you can do it in slipstream fashion. Regardless, you need to consider what is required for each kind of change to know how fast and loose you can play it.
