Over the course of the last two weeks I have dug into the Gartner article, "8 Top Findings in Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2018-19" - today we will finish looking at the last points.
No. 6: CMOs prioritize customer experience and customer analytics but risk overlooking acquisition and retention
No. 7: CMOs value awareness more than ROI and market share
No. 8: Personalization prevails and its meaning varies widely
When these points are looked at together they paint a bleak picture. Marketers are correctly focused on brand awareness, nurturing programs, and ensuring sales teams have enough leads in the funnel to meet their sales targets. However, this survey points to the fact that many CMOs are putting more emphasis on the areas that are harder to measure, and in doing so, are putting their businesses and their own careers at risk.
Harvard Business Review shared an article titled “The New Pressures Facing CMOs and How to Overcome Them." This article goes into the four main growth areas a CMO must work to collaborate with their peers upon:
- Brand
- Product Marketing
- Data and Analytics
- Sales Support
Sales support/enablement is the area where CMOs seem to be shying away from according to the survey. Today’s CMOs must work to tightly align with sales to generate revenue and demonstrate measurable ROI. The marketing and sales teams must work in unison to achieve acquisition and retention goals without sacrificing the customer or brand experience. How do we make this happen?
- Marketing needs to create assets that the sales team will use.
- Materials must meet brand and compliance guidelines while being flexible enough to be lightly personalized to meet individual sales use cases.
- Sales and marketing teams should focus less on what systems the other is using and focus more on ensuring that the systems work together in unison.
- Marketing needs to know what content is helping sales move leads through the sales funnel and then learn why that content is having a positive affect. Create more of this type of content and less of those pieces that no one is using.
The HBR article says it well:
“In many cases, the incapacity to successfully support the sales operations has been the downfall of a CMO. That is because of the simple truth that revenue and sales always win. In some instances, the sales organization ignores marketing altogether and takes over, leaving only the corporate brand to the marketer.”
If you want to be an effective CMO you need to collaborate with your peers, especially those in sales, ensuring that you are providing them what they need, when they need it. If you don’t, they’ll simply go their own route and soon enough you'll be looking for a new job.
More from this series:
Why Bigtincan is Becoming a CMO's Best Friend
