The 70% Solution

I'm doing a lot of thinking lately on program effort.   You might remember a few years ago we talked a lot about execution pain.   Basically if you look at the whole marketing pie and divide your time between execution and actual marketing you will probably find that 70% of your time is dealing with execution.

I think marketing is easy.   Its basic; you simpli want to listen and respond appropriately.  You want to find new people to begin relationships with and then nurture and maintain those relationships for mutual benefit....(I'll discuss mutual benefit in a later post)

Peter McCormick one of my partners with ExactTarget has this saying about Boiling The Ocean.  I think this is what happens to most marketers.  We attack the entirety of a problem.   My experience has been that you can get to 70% of a solution with about 20% of the effort.  All the pain comes with the remaining 30% that consumes 80% of the resource.

Couple of big problems here:  For one, there is no such thing as 100% of solution in anything related to marketing.  It's never over.  Marketing is about incremental improvement. 

What I see happening, even in my own environment is creep.  "Boy let's use city as a segment".   "Yeah, great idea and then lets add last purchase date and the compatible product with that sku".   

"Uhhh....  Sure.....but that data is in a different system"  "let me go get (insert IT here) and see how to get at that"

See what happens??   Nothing.