The complexity of marketing has increased exponentially. The question on many CMO’s mind’s range from:
- Do I have the right technology?
- Am I using what I have well?
- What else do I need?
- Are my processes efficient and effective to take advantage of the technology?
- Do my people have the right skills, mindsets and capabilities to deliver on all the various aspects marketing has expanded into – from SEO, to demand gen, to lead conversion, to e-commerce, to branding, storytelling and brand personas, to email, social and digital marketing…?
- Are my strategies going to create the kind of lead conversion rates that will enable to expansion of my team and the respect that they should garner from the senior leadership team?
- Do I have the right customer analytics strategy and can I execute on the data and data warehouses that are required to really know my customer and service real-time information where (channels & devices) when they need it?
To help CMOs meet skyrocketing customer and boardroom expectations, The CMO Club, along with Oracle, released “The CMO Solution Guide for Building a Modern Marketing Organization.” The guide, which is based on interviews with CMOs and digital marketing leaders from major brands including Dow Chemical, JetBlue Airways, MasterCard, PayPal, Quiznos, The Hershey Company and Viking River Cruises, includes insights and best practices that CMOs can apply to build customer-first marketing teams that drive measureable results.
To help marketers successfully manage this transformation, the new CMO Solution Guide provides practical advice from 20 in-depth interviews with CMOs and digital marketing leaders from organizations of various sizes and different industries.
Pete Krainik, CEO, The CMO Club said, “While the number of tools and amount of data available to marketers continues to multiply, the age old challenge of capturing and leveraging the right data to create engaging customer experience across all channels still exists. The first step they must take is to establish the appropriate organizational alignment to successfully create this type of customer experience. While no organization is exactly the same, this guide helps provide easy-to-implement changes that any marketer can use to drive transformation.”
While there is no organizational model that fits every company universally, four key themes emerged during the course of the interviews that informed the organizational decisions that CMOs make: Acumen, Alignment, Agility and Accountability. More on those below:
- Acumen: To become more effective modern marketers, respondents reported that enhancing the skills within their department has become a top priority. From developing valuable customer insights through data mining to investing in content creation and the need for greater evaluative analytics, leading marketers are investing heavily in helping their teams learn new skills.
- Alignment: From top to bottom and across all functions, the guide shows that it is critical for all departments to follow the same processes and company culture in order to effectively engage customers across all touchpoints.
- Agility: To meet consumer demands for exceptional customer experience, the guide noted how important it is for businesses to have strong cross-functional teams and the flexibility to pilot something new to test and learn best practices.
- Accountability: To demonstrate marketing’s impact on the bottom line, the guide recommends establishing the right measures from the outset and instilling a culture of personal accountability around those parameters.
Along those lines is a larger question that looms in most organizations. That question is who should be the general manager of the overall customer experience? CMO’s are well positioned to be that person, but there are risks as well as rewards in taking on that responsibility. I’ve outlined some of them in a new report Should the Chief Marketing Officer Oversee the Whole Customer Experience? And I look forward presenting the accompanying webinar coming up later 2016.
While most brands may not realize it, they are competing on one important variable: customer experience. With all other things being equal, we are in a service economy and there’s nothing that is more important than the experience customers have with companies. And it’s not the brand promise creating by marketing that makes up that customer experience, but also the experience customers have with sales, service and back office operations. It’s not an easy question, but one that must be answered by every senior leadership team and their board of directors. That is what digital disruption is all about and companies not understanding this will go out of business or be acquired or merged for their customer list and cash flow. Poor customer experience, no business. Period. It’s that simple.
@DrNatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Covering Customer Facing Capabilities of Organizations to Deliver on Better Customer Experiences