Not EPM, not CPM, but analytics of a marketing kind

This podcast is dipping its collective and metaphorical toe outside of the warm and cozy confines of performance management with a conversation with a guest whose job, passion, and personal interest is understanding the relationship of human behavior with business through the lens of marketing analytics. Join us, won’t you, on this fascinating conversation with Kevin Lawrence that is most definitely not within the scope of traditional EPM but most definitely within the scope of your interest.

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The journey to marketing and analytics

Kevin’s had an interesting path, one that isn’t really the norm in our profoundly boring and all too predictable fascinating EPM world: from the arts to nonprofits to the Fortune 100 to Find The Loose Brick.

Numbers without an understanding of the nexus of business and people are meaningless. Kevin’s professional life has deeply informed how he and his clients understand how you and I interact with corporations and their products, services, and oh yeah: each other.

The past actually is prologue

For you wee lads and lassies who weren’t around to hear this song when it first came out to witness the change in tools and corporate culture and customers (us) and of course analytic tools and how they are used has changed the introduction to this podcast will be informing.  You’ve never had it so good.

For those of us who were, the evolution analytics path mirrors our own beloved performance management products.

Regardless of our experience, the need to understand how companies and their customers interact has remained exactly the same.

The present and the future of marketing analytics are in Kevin’s professional purview and should be for you as well.

Fascinating stuff and well worth the listen (I encourage you to enjoy both the video and the podcast but not at the same time) if you want to expand your horizons beyond the finance side of a business.

Hear the conversation

  • Start – 6:40 Intros and start of Kevin’s career
  • 6:40 – 18:40 Development of 1990s analytic tools
  • 18:40 – 28:20 Moving from non-profit to large corporate and then to independent
  • 28:20 – 31:30 Selling the value “analytics” before the industry really existed
  • 31:30 – 34:00 Today’s tools, Google suite
  • 34:00 – 40:20 Connection to EPM
  • 40:20 – 44:00 Is there a Finance and Marketing divide?
  • 44:00 – 46:00 Demonstrating dollar value of marketing
  • 46:00 – 52:05 Does marketing analytics always require big, expensive tools?
  • 52:05 – 60:50 Why are there FOSS or low-cost tools in Analytics but not EPM?
  • 60:50 – 64:30 Do low-cost tools support large corporate data requirements?
  • 64:30 – 76:30 Will EPM move as fast as Analytics?
  • 76:30 – 84:45 What’s in the next 5-10 years for Marketing Analytics?
  • 84:45 – End Outro

We hope you like the episode as much as we do. If you do enjoy it, please give us a good rating on the provider of your choice as it both bathes our ever-needy egos and also – and rather more importantly – allows listeners to more easily find us.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM doesn’t get a lot of polymaths, does it. Yet Mike is exactly one of those.

A polymath is, “a person of great and varied learning” although Mike is too modest to agree with that description. If you but listen to this conversation, you (and he) will see that it is a fair characterization.

NB – The above graphic isn’t for n00bs but instead for veteran EPM practitioners who recognize the graphical genius of the long-gone and much-lamented Arbor Software’s training decks. Mike has several ties to this as you’ll hear.

But wait, there’s more

In addition to Yr. Obt. Svt., this conversation also has Natalie Delemar as our guest host and regular John Booth. This varying cast of characters is what I hope is the (or at least a) future of EPM Conversations. Tim, Celvin, John, and I are wonderful (ahem) hosts but there’s much, much, much more to EPM than us, cf. our guests and Natalie.

I’ve known (at least I was at the same conference although as I really and truly worked 100 hours that week in addition to presenting and working a booth so if I did meet Mike I have no recollection of it) Mike since Kscope 2009 in Carmel.

What I didn’t know was how much Mike has done: Atari 600xl owner, COMPUTE! magazine subscriber, English school teacher, roofing product computer operator/developer, operations management, Hyperion course writer, Essbase consultant, Planning consultant, Essbase PM, Big 4 consultant, startup analytics evangelist, Big 4 (but a different one) leader, and I’m sure a few more roles I’ve missed. What is crucial to understand and what is central to what Mike does and cares about is making sense of data, i.e. analytics.

Hear the conversation

  • Start – 2:55 Introduction
  • 02:55 – 14:56 How Mike Started with Analytics and EPM
  • 14:56 – 25:41 EPM vs Analytics
  • 25:41 – 28:05 Adoption of Tools in Different Organizational Functions
  • 28:05 – 36:04 Tools That Can Merge Financial and Operational Datasets
  • 36:04 – 43:44 What EPM Technologists Should Know About Analytics
  • 43:44 – 53:30 The Medium Term Future of Analytics
  • 53:30 – End Outroduction

We hope you like the episode as much as we do. If you do enjoy it, please give us a good rating on the provider of your choice as it both bathes our ever-needy egos and also – and rather more importantly – allows listeners to more easily find us.

Join us, won’t you?