Episode highlights:

There is a vast number of businesses that are trying to run all of their marketing through very basic tools. For example, some companies attempt to use Mailchimp, an effective email tool as their CRM. This results in poor reporting and missing crucial data.

Fractional CMOs entering such a company often create a new way to organize the company’s data to make it usable. As soon as they create the new structure, they incur a “debt”; the debt being all of the pre-existing data that does not follow the new structure.

When implementing a new data structure, “net new” refers to the records created under the new format. For example, net new customer records could have tags related to their purchases, but if those tags are brand new then none of the older contacts have them.

While there is no one solution for paying off the debt in the prior example, it is still something that you as a marketing leader need to tackle. It’s imperative that you spend time thinking about how to balance the net new and debt.

When you deploy something too early without considering the potential long-term implications, it can come off as a half-baked rollout.