The One Metric That Matters in the PRC Process

When you’re in charge of the entire review and approval process for your promotional materials, determining the most important things to measure and optimize can be daunting. Most life sciences promotional review solutions provide basic metrics about the review and approval process of your life sciences marketing collateral – how long it takes for a content piece to go from draft to approval in workflow, how many workflow jobs are in progress, how long it takes for each individual to review jobs in a timely manner, etc.

But unless you are truly a numbers person, even the default reports can be overwhelming. And without basic default reports, you may not have the time to scour through raw performance data or run fancy algorithms to assess the performance of your promotional review committee (PRC) process. That’s why many life sciences companies use a One Metric That Matters (OMTM) mentality to simplify performance measurement of their PRC.

Recently, we surveyed marketing operations experts across the industry about their OMTM. Their answers weren’t surprising, but gave insight to what data needs to be easily accessible in today’s promotional review workflow solutions.

But first, what exactly is the One Metric That Matters?

OMTM is the one number to use to measure growth and performance. Yes, you have access to a lot of data about everything and anything across marketing operations, but mountains of data can give you a lot of noise and misdirection about the performance of your marketing operations. OMTM represents a single metric that highlights performance against the one problem that you are trying to solve. By focusing on one metric, you can make decisions quickly and with more clarity. This Fast Company article talks about how to find your OMTM.

What life sciences marketers reported as their one metric that matters

Our survey of marketing operations experts who own the promotional review process were asked how they measure their department’s performance.

No. 1 metric category: Speed to market

The majority of respondents (46%) reported a OMTM that fell in the theme of speed to market. In other words, marketing wants to optimize the process for moving content from approval to publication. That’s not surprising, given the role of marketing operations.

Some example OMTMs from our survey:

• Number of jobs approved on first round of review
• Overall cycle time
• Number of expedited job requests
• How many times a piece has to go through review because of mistakes
• Timeliness of review process

Most promotional review workflow systems provide metrics on all jobs in the system; we’ve also heard requests for reporting at the individual job level. Job-specific metrics enable a deeper analysis into patterns of why certain jobs drop below target performance. Case in point: if typos trigger multiple rounds of review for a certain product or agency, marketing operations can intervene and coach teams on best practices that eliminate preventable, repeat trips through the approval process.

No. 2 metric category: Return on investment, or ROI

ROI seems to be a common buzzword that everyone wants to measure, but it’s easier said than done.

Our respondents deconstructed ROI based on:

• Cost and time saving capabilities
• Measuring the quality of material submitted
• Sales revenue

Using your promotional review system to measure ROI presents some challenges. Promotional review systems often only provide metrics that track the review and approval process but not the performance of the content. You may have to dig deeper beyond your promotional review system to find your ROI metric, such as website analytics or sales rep ratings after approved content is published.

Other OMTM answers

Additional noteworthy OMTM answers from our survey:

• Adherence to process; resource capacity
• Sales revenue
• Total job submissions
• Number of content expirations

While these are strong OMTM candidates, we feel that one in particular misleads teams in terms of true business value: total job submissions. If total number of jobs is your OMTM, you’re not really tracking success. Putting out a lot of content doesn’t mean that the approved content is any good. It’s important to declare a OMTM that supports and reinforces the overall goals and purpose of marketing.

Thank you to everyone who took our survey. Even though the answers varied, one common theme rings true: marketing operations cares about the entire content supply chain process – you want to help produce great content quickly and find ways to continuously improve the ways your teams achieve this objective.

If you need assistance in finding the OMTM for your organization or using a promotional review system that can help you with your marketing operations, please don’t hesitate to contact us.