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1. Executive Summary
Steering Committees Increase Program Success
Developing a strong governance process requires cross-functional alignment on
marketing decisions. Implement a Sales & Marketing Steering Committee to
formalize your strategic planning, prioritization, decision-making, investment, and
performance measurement processes. Use Demand Metric's downloadable Steering
Committee Charter Template to kick-start the formation of your committee and
establish your mandate.
What are the Benefits of Steering Committees?
• Increased Buy-in - including Senior Management and leaders from other
departments in your decision-making process will help you sell the benefits of
a proposed initiative as other stakeholders can support your business cases.
• Reduced Decision-Making Risk - along with increasing buy-in, a
collaborative decision-making process will certainly help you avoid making
poor decisions that have an impact on another department.
• Better Resource Allocation - as your committee works to measure
performance of marketing investments, it will become much easier to
determine where budgets & resources would be most effectively deployed.
Key Responsibilities of Steering Committees:
• Provide Strategic Leadership - the primary responsibility of the Steering
Committee is to ensure that all department activities are aligned with
corporate goals & objectives, processes, and initiatives.
• Prioritize Investments - a secondary objective of the committee is to
ensure that marketing investments are prioritized correctly with other
corporate budget and resource allocations.
• Measuring Program Performance - collaborative evaluation of previous
investments is the key to developing a performance-driven marketing culture.
Levels of Strategic Planning & Governance Maturity:
Level 1: Initial/Ad Hoc - regular governance practices such as review meetings,
creation of performance reports, and investigation into problems take place, but rely
mostly on the initiative of the marketing management team.
© 2009 Demand Metric Research Corporation

2. Executive Summary
Level 2: Repeatable/Intuitive - senior management is involved only when there
are major problems or successes. The measurement of marketing performance is
typically limited to technical measures and only within the marketing function.
Level 3: Defined Process - specific procedures for management covering key
governance has been developed. These include regular target setting, reviews of
performance, and project planning and funding for any necessary marketing
improvements.
Level 4: Managed & Measurable - target setting has developed to a fairly
sophisticated stage with relationships between outcome goals in business terms and
marketing process improvement measures now well understood.
Level 5: Optimized - marketing governance practices have developed into a
sophisticated approach using effective and efficient techniques. There is true
transparency of marketing activities, and the board feels in control of the marketing
strategy.
Action Plan:
1. Learn Governance Best Practices - read the Demand Metric Best Practices
Report entitled, Measuring Marketing Governance Maturity, to learn how you
can improve your maturity of this essential process.
2. Discuss with Senior Management - secure buy-in for this process by
communicating the benefits of establishing a Sales & Marketing Steering
committee in your organization.
3. Assemble Committee & Set Mandate - approach leaders from each
relevant department and secure their commitment to join the committee. Use
our downloadable Steering Committee Charter Template to help you set the
mandate for how this governance process will work.
© 2009 Demand Metric Research Corporation