Teach Your Company to Learn

by Susan Cohen

Truly successful companies are great not only for a day, a week or a year or two – they get better over time. How? By constantly learning from experience and improving every day.

"Learning organizations" is the buzz phrase that describes companies that learn from their business activities for continuous improvement. These organizations have established a culture, invested in technology and developed processes that facilitate the learning process. The result is consistent improvement in their business practices. For example, the evolution of an organization's marketing programs garners better response rates. Consistent improvement in purchasing procedures yields lower costs. And better sales activities bring steady improvements in profitability.

While learning organizations coordinate their strategies across the range of business functions, we'll focus here on how marketing groups can become learning organizations. Many of the concepts here can be applied to other functional areas.

Complete the Circle
Probably the most critical element of any learning organization is creating a process that's a complete circle – one that loops learning back into planning. Some call this process "closed-loop marketing." In closed-loop marketing, the marketing cycle never ends because each planning phase utilizes all of the previous learning phases. Marketers apply learning from the entire organization to each marketing plan to maximize results and share their knowledge with the entire organization to benefit other areas. Marketers can – and should – maximize their learning during each phase of the cycle:

• Plan – using all available information gleaned from throughout the organization.
• Target – based on analysis of a centralized data warehouse.
• Act – in a way that uses your learning, with a fully automated marketing system that manages outbound and inbound communications.
• Learn – leveraging all available analytical tools, then make the learning easily available for future planning.

Centralize and Systemize
Valuable information is collected across and beyond your organization – from call centers, sales systems, Internet and third-party contacts, and elsewhere. Creating a centralized view of your customers will increase the efficiency of learning while it increases the value of what you learn. A data warehouse is the most common and convenient way to create a centralized data repository.

Developing a system for analytics can expedite the learning process. Additionally, investing in a comprehensive marketing automation solution will enable you to analyze prior campaigns during the planning phase. Such an investment is sure to deliver ROI quickly. Since each campaign will be better than the last, results can grow exponentially.

A marketing automation solution can help close the loop between learning and planning to make each campaign more effective, deliver higher returns and increase lifetime customer value. For example, such a system can help you efficiently segment and target customers; develop the most profitable offers; create personalized permission e-mail programs; select the most effective marketing channels; and even determine which customers aren't worth marketing to, saving valuable resources.

Commit to Lifelong Learning
Learn something new every day – or at least every campaign! It's all too easy to complete one marketing campaign and rush off to the next project without ever looking back. Take the time to stop and perform complete analyses. An organization can promote a commitment to learning by rewarding individuals for learning and applying learning in their work.

Learning organizations value learning. They reward employees for learning and applying what they've learned to their work. No matter how good your systems are, your people need to use those systems to reap the rewards. A culture that values quality, that measures results and that demands improvements over time encourages individuals to take the time to learn from their experiences.

Share the Knowledge
Creating a learning organization becomes even more difficult when outside agencies, such as advertising and public relations agencies, are participating in the learning and planning in addition to in-house staff. Again, the right culture and technology can foster learning and the application of what you've learned beyond the organization. With advances in technology, lack of trust is the largest barrier today to sharing all learning. But the benefits can make the risk worthwhile.

Working in a learning organization can be very challenging, rewarding and fulfilling. Instead of rushing from task to task, employees pause between tasks to understand how to garner better results next time. These pauses create higher returns, as well as smarter and happier professionals.