The CMO role is changing, yet at the same time is becomming more of what it's already been. The question is whether you see marketing as a game of american football - turnbased, hard-hitting, and regimented, or hockey - high speed, quick plays, and persistent awareness? This post will take a fresh look into this ever evolving role, and provide 5 suggestions for what the CMO should focus on.
Background: The Modern Marketer
Marketing isn’t what it used to be, yet at the same time, it’s more of what it has always been. Value proposition and target market segmenting remains, but the modern marketer has a renewed focus on customer experience and data driven insights like never before.
Today’s marketer is more collaborative, both internally and externally. The CMO knows that delivering consistent customer experiences and value requires leading a multidisciplinary team and playing an integral role in pulling together the various functions of a company.
Marketing has always been a game of information, but as the cost of data continues to fall and the speed and volume of data increase, the CMO uses precision customer insights to map buying stages, not just segments.
Every year brings more communication channels and more competitors. Today’s CMO knows that success is not about integrating promotions anymore, its about creating customer intimacy and long-term relationships by designing customer decision journeys that deliver a consistent positive rewarding experience at every stage of the buying cycle.
All of this starts from within. Today’s CMO is a leader and a motivator, tasked with attracting others in the organization to adopt the vision and aspirations set out for the company; building bridges across departments for a consistent customer experience.
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, today’s CMO is a high speed, high endurance machine. The market changes fast, and customers are more likely to defect, making marketing a job of swift, effective, and often times, anticipative decision making.
Technology has been the reason for much of this shift, and Marketing Automation is right at the centre of it; dashboard analytics give the CMO a real time view, all the time. Technology alone doesn’t create a CMO though, and in this post we examine the qualities of a successful CMO for the changing marketing environment.
Introduction: The Changing Marketing Environment
Nobody can deny that Marketing has changed; the marketing environment has changed, and marketing has always been about adapting to the marketing environment.
Marketers have always focused on segmenting their target and persuading the market with a value proposition, aptly coined as: data capture, and batch ’&’ blast marketing. (The Guardian, 2014)
This explanation I found perfectly illustrates the current situation, I inserted the appropriate pieces from above to enhance the phrase. (Source: PRWeb, 2014)
Not unlike a game of Football (American); Marketing was a regimented and turn-based ordeal, researching and planning (data capture), understanding the market (batch), creating comprehensive a plan, hard-hitting implementing (blast), then repeating.
Technology has turned this upside down. There are more channels, both for suppliers and buyers, there are more mediums of communications, there are a greater number of competitors, and technology has allowed marketers to see information shifts in real time, and in greater volumes.
Breaking through the noise seems a growing challenge and competitive advantage shelf life is on a continued decline. (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2014) All of this has turned Marketing into an endurance sport, with no room for pauses, an always shifting environment, on-the-fly decision making, and a need for full-time awareness; Marketing is more akin to hockey today, than the football reference. (Source: PRWeb, 2014)
Paradigm Shift: What is Marketing?
Marketing is now about adapting to the changes, and delivering what the customer wants, value! The customer is more empowered, and the interaction between the brand is about influencing perceptions, and two way conversations. The Marketer now represents “the voice of the customer” in the company, just like The President of the USA represents “the voice of the people” in the government.
Consider these comments from today’s leading marketers: (Source: Adage, 2013)
“We should be thinking of ourselves as chief value officers” – ConAgra Foods CMO Joan Chow
“My job is as much a chief growth officer as anything” – General Electric CMO Beth Comstock
“CMOs really need to be chief innovation officers” – Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn
“CMOs must handle enterprise wide leadership, driving change and being connected very directly to business results” – Korn/Ferry Senior Client Partner Caren Fleit
At GE, marketing is now a “consolidated effort”, the functions of marketing, sales, and communications have been merged, and marketing is brought in at early stages of product development.
What this all means is that marketing is, just as the market it services, a very context sensitive endeavor. The CMO must create their own way of being the voice of the customer and driving organizational change.
The Data: The Role of Marketing Automation
Though customers are more empowered, with more information and greater 2-way communication, so are Marketers. Marketing automation programs allow companies to supercharge their CMO and Marketing team, allowing them to maintain a real time view of the customer, automate interactions, shorten the planning phase, and improve delivery of marketing programs. Without automation, those marketers will be out-innovated by today’s pioneering marketers. (The Guardian, 2014)
The issue arises when every marketer is using automation, and everyone has up to the minute knowledge of their marketing environment, strategies, and company wide databases. The challenge now is less about early-funnel data awareness and more about cross-company customer-centric consistent operations and interactions.
Playing a Different Game: Top 5 Qualities of a Strong CMO
The shifting marketing environment has called for a different marketer, and there are common elements among today’s world-class CMOs. Here are the top five qualities of a next-gen CMO.
1) Collaborative
A good marketer must take on the ambiguous role of integrating the company. Communication and promotions aren’t enough anymore, customer experience happens at every touch point. World-class CMOs are comfortable pulling together all departments for a cohesive customer-centric experience.
The CMO is like the organizational “glue” that ties every function in to an experience that the customer is looking for, while achieving business goals and growth, and positioning for the future. CMOs are tasked with using their strong communication and creative skills for internal change. (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2014)
One area that needs a little more collaboration is sales and marketing. In my opinion, sales and marketing alignment is among the best strategies a company can implement for the purpose of consistent and effective digital content based interactions.
As the quotes from above have shown, some companies are at the bleeding edge of alignment, moving forward with the idea that both teams are really trying to achieve the same thing, differing only in scope of communications. (One-to-one vs. one-to-many) Others are not.
Achieving sales and marketing alignment depends on a number of things, including how entrenched the current selling model is, how effective the CMO is at communicating his or her strategies, how empowered the CMO is at changing the organization, and etc. <I could go on forever with this.
There are some best practices worth noting, and I invite you to check out his post about why use sales and marketing alignment, with 5 best practices. If you already know about sales and marketing alignment, and want a deeper understanding of the way it ties into sales processes, you’ll like this post about achieving sales and marketing alignment for a viable sales strategy.
2) Data Driven
Automation does a lot in aggregating and creating accessibility, but it is merely the beginning. The next generation of data insights must be precise, and world-class CMOs are already taking the next step by mapping entire buying cycles with precision insights. CMOs understand that buying is contextual, and use data to target buyers with the right messaging for their lifecycle stage, mindset, and purchase decision stage, not just a demographic segment. (Source: PRWeb, 2014)
Breaking through the noise means data driven, targeted communications which have maximum impact because they happen when the customer needs to hear it, not between every commercial break.
In fact, traditional thinking being applied to digital content marketing is, in my opinion, precisely why very few (9% to be exact – Source: CMO Council, 2013) buyers rate vendor marketing content as their trusted source of information.
When you try to position as a trusted and reliable source of information, then go and create content that specifically and only sells your product, you really wouldn’t be making much progress.
Imagine if this blog post was only about the ways that Skura Corporation and Skura sales enablement solutions assist your marketing efforts. You’d probably stop reading.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for it, and I do my best to help the reader solve problems while considering our solutions, but directly telling you pricing and features won’t keep you reading, moreover, it’ll push you away.
But I digress, the challenge with this point is applying data for actionable decision making. Data insights are tough to capture if you’re not using the right tools. Marketing automation is amazing because it automatically captures consumption and is capable of associating these insights into CRM for persona optimization over time.
But keeping in tune with sales supporting activities, marketing content tends to miss the mark when being applied to end of funnel interactions. The opinion of sales reps is often ignored, or relegated to anecdotal insights.
The trick is being able to capture insights from the end of the funnel in the same way that marketing automation does in the beginning of the funnel. It all centers around CRM and data.
If predictive insights sound enticing, you’ll want to check out this article about how to leverage the CRM system for predictive sales enablement.
3) Customer-Centric
Now more than ever, the CMO is the “voice of the customer” within the business. The CMO must know what the customer wants, how they think, feel, buy, and reflect, at each purchase stage, and for each lifecycle stage. Communication is no longer a pre-purchase persuasion, but rather, a persistent two-way value-driven influencing interaction.
The CMO is concerned with mapping and developing a customer decision journey which is consistently positive, and rewarding at every single stage. (Harvard Business Review, 2014)
This builds off the comments I made in the earlier point, with respect to traditional thinking being regularly applied to digital content marketing.
Effective use of content is all about dripping the right information to the right buyer at the right time for an experience that allows them to progress at a comfortable pace, yet keeps the value deliver relevant and contextual.
Which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage is something that is explained in great detail in this article, and is worth a look if you’re interested.
4) Leader and Driver
Today, the CMO is focused on creating working relationships across the departments of the company. The CMO is tasked with motivating a multi-disciplinary team, many of whom have functions which the CMO has never done personally. The CMO attracts others to embody a corporate vision and culture that the customer wants to buy from, pushing for departmental change while acknowledging and ensuring that everyone is meeting their own goals in the process.
As the concept of “voice of the customer” develops and customers become more empowered, the CMO must be a driver of customer value for the entire company.
5) High Speed, High Endurance
Automation is standard across many leading companies, and as the adoption peaks, the need for prompt and consistent marketing effort will grow. A CMO must be prepared to change tactics often and whenever necessary, and must ensure that they continually invest in a fuller picture of the customer.
The CMO must be persistent, as competitive advantage erodes fast, and the consumer mindset is fleeting at best; the game has shifted in favour of the agile and persistent marketer.
This one single factor is why smaller companies can overtake marketing juggernauts through content based interactions and blogging. A smaller firm has more maneuverability, social media still only gives you one voice, and lead generation through content favours the biggest brain, not the biggest wallet.
This kind of tactical maneuverability is also why it’s more crucial than ever that sales and marketing teams align their strategies and communication controls.
This means up to the minute control of sales rep communication materials, the ability to see distribution across the globe, and campaigns that can be implemented and retired in an instant.
This is also why we created adaptive sales enablement, to enable marketing teams with the ability to coordinate campaigns and control customer communications in the face of shifting business environment trends.
Check out this article we recently composed that explains what is sales enablement, and a sales enablement definition for 2015. The article uses statistics, studies, trends, and several industry definitions of sales enablement to help frame the real use of sales enablement for the CMO and marketing team.
Sale Enablement: The Real Customer Focus
Marketing Automation lacks in one key area, connecting the Sales Force back to the Marketing Team, or, enhancing closed-loop-marketing. Sales takes MQLs and content, and tries to develop relationships in an effort to induce a sale and future sales. Sales Teams are perhaps the greatest point of contact between the customer and the brand, and possess vast swaths of information about them.
Without integrated content consumption insights from the end of the sales funnel, all marketing effort becomes a push-function to Sales, rather than a closed loop of information sharing.
[RELATED CONTENT] For more about the role that analytics play in digital content and sales, check out this whitepaper on the topic.
If you’re a CMO or in the marketing team, and realize that you don’t have the tools and functionality needed to control end-of-funnel communications, let alone the tools to capture consumption insights and associate them with the CRM; feel free to request a demo and let us show you how this kind of command and control enhances integrated marketing communication.
