The late Ed Koch, former New York City mayor, famously eschewed public polling and would instead buttonhole citizens in his travels through the boroughs to ask them, “how we doin’?”

The “we” here was cleverly ambiguous. In terms of recognizing citizen needs, he was aksing, how is our relationship? Or more generally taking a pulse: how do you assess my mayoralty? But I think he meant it more colloquially, how are YOU doing?

Ed Koch came to mind recently when I heard for the third time in a week from a MarTech leader at a Real Story Group subscriber sharing that their roadmap decisions and future plans were coming under closer scrutiny. Meanwhile, other MarTech leaders are assertively self-scrutinizing their stacks and operations – and with good reason, given the rising demands of AI, omnichannel, privacy, and the like.

Well, I’m happy to report that RSG has just made available a freemium MarTech Effectiveness assessment and benchmarking service.  Try it out!  It should take you less than 15 minutes to complete but will provide more than a little to think about…and act upon. How so? Read on…

Challenge yourself, and your team

This exercise will be more than just getting a score and a comparison.  It will likely challenge you, and perhaps your team.  Here are some key themes why.

“Effectiveness”

I’ve never been fan of “maturity models,” as they seem to imply an almost inevitable progression to, well, growing up.  RSG assumes that what you really want to know is how and where your environment is effective. Of course, there are several dimensions to this, which brings us to…

Structured

The effectiveness model spans five dimensions, with specific questions under each:

• Operations
• Data
• Content
• Decisioning
• Technology

This alone offers a grist for deeper internal review.  Are your efforts proceeding more or less in sync, or have you under-invested in a given area?  Where could your future priorities bear the most fruit?

Informed

For the past decade, RSG has been advising enterprise MarTech leaders on their stack strategies.  That experience is wrapped into the questions we ask.  But we also incorporated specific feedback from early testers among our MarTech Leadership Council members, who had useful additions around business readiness, privacy, and other topics.

Future-ready

Truly omnichannel customer experiences will never happen unless Marketing takes the lead.  In the meantime, AI is fixing to roil nearly every tier in your stack.  The effectiveness model incorporates both topics throughout, so you can evaluate your readiness to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

Comparative

This is the fun part. You can benchmark yourself against a general industry average, while paid RSG subscribers can compare to industry-specific and other types of averages.

Shareable

Share your results with colleagues in and outside your company; they may have valuable perspectives to lend.  RSG subscribers get ready-to-use PPT read-outs, as well as the ability to save and share their assessments digitally, to compare over time.

Here’s the link again.

So I have to ask…

For those of you who completed the assessment: how you doin’?

I mean that as Mayor Koch did. That is, how did your firm fare? How did you find the exercise?  What else would you like to see from RSG here?

Let us know!

P.S. As always, RSG will only use information collected for anonymous aggregate analysis. We will never sell or give away any of your personal or corporate information.