Why Aetna Needs Agile Marketing for Its Digital Transformation

Digital transformation at 165-year-old health insurance company Aetna doesn't happen overnight. But CMO David Edelman facilitates growth and transformation at the company by applying iterative, agile principles to evolve workflows and foster constant collaboration between teams. Edelman spoke with eMarketer’s Jillian Ryan about why and how he updated marketing processes to move the company forward as part of eMarketer’s May report, "The Modern Marketing Department 2018: Evolution Through Digital Transformation."

We needed better cross-functional collaboration between marketing and sales so that the sales team could act on those leads. We built internal processes that provided sales with more context about the leads and their past marketing touchpoints.

Building that workflow takes a lot of legwork out in the field—it's not all digital. A lot of it is about co-workers simply collaborating. Making the change requires really getting out there physically and working the new system.