I know you’ve seen these types of dramatic headlines before: The CMO is dead. But in actuality, the roles in marketing, sales, and customer service that once governed how business “gets done” are shifting. This best practices report, Data-Driven Marketing Campaign Optimization is about how CMOs can use big data and analytics to transform marketing campaign decision-making and advance corporate innovation and revenue.
What’s driving this shift? A great deal of the shift in roles is being driven by technology that is now available. In attending many conferences over the years, especially in the last 2 years, the technology has changed very dramatically and delivers on many of the promises CRM (Marketing, Sales and Service) wanted to deliver on, but just honestly the technology wasn’t there yet via its fullest capabilities to do this.
Now that we have technology that can deliver more than ever before, we have to make sure that people know how to use it and use it well. You can read the rest of this blog post to understand my point of view on this or jump right to a snap shot of the report.
The Report: Data-Driven Marketing Campaign Optimization The report is about how CMOs can use big data and analytics to transform marketing campaign decision-making and make better decisions about their businesses. It looks at how to ensure you’re using big data to optimize not just your marketing efforts, but your whole company. A few of the juicy tidbits from the report are that it:
- Contains a 5 level evaluation marketers can use to determine how well they’re incorporating big data into their marketing efforts
- Reveals how CMOs can use big data to enhance marketing decision-making and advance corporate innovation and revenue (Level 5)
- Helps marketers contribute value to making the best possible customer experiences and drive higher customer lifetime values
- Ensures Marketers become an essential member of senior leadership team that is responsible for driving revenue and showing that’s so by using data-driven marketing
- Addresses the politics, the “not invented here” and the silly finger pointing (that should actually be a while collar crime) that often happens in companies…
Progression of Marketing Decision Making to Innovation and Revenue Creation
CMO‘s Paradigm Shifting To Innovation and Revenue Officers I know it’s often tough being a Marketer and not getting the credit due. You might find yourself suffering from what I call the Rodney Dangerfield Affect, meaning you don’t get enough respect in your organization. I get it. But let’s put that idea in the past. You can get credit; you just really need to know that there is a new way to do marketing and the tools and platforms are there to support you.
In the past CMOs were charged with top of the funnel activities, driving qualified leads to Sales. It was then Sales job to take the lead and close as many as they could. But just like we know the earth isn’t flat (old paradigm) revenue generation is now not just the mission of Sales (new paradigm). In fact, the CMO role is changing and changing fast. The reason? Because the technology today can show what the Marketer has contributed to the bottom-line. And that’s what you as a Marketer need to know and need to focus on— for your career and for your company.
While there’s lots more to cover in the transition from the old paradigm of Marketing as “top of the funnel” people – to the Chief Information and Revenue Officers— if you are a Marketer who is interested in the “new world”, this report is a good first step in taking a look at not only where your organization is at with respect to how they view marketing, but also how you, as a Marketer are approaching Marketing. I’ve created a 5 level of Marketing Automation and Campaigns capability matrix (see the above figure). Often times you may not know what level your organization is at or what else you could be doing. This maturity level overview helps you to see where you are and also what other levels you can achieve.
How Can You Get Started?
- Begin to have a revenue mindset
- As you choose technology, ask yourself, can I show how I generate revenue with this technology?
- And if I have the right technology, how am I going to present that I am contributing to the bottom-line to the senior leadership team?
Change Means Politics Heat Up As part of any change in an organization, you’ll want to be careful of organization change management issues that come up with change. The roles of Marketers and Sales are both needed and provide great value. But if Marketers are becoming Chief Revenue and Innovation Officers because they have a lot of data and know how to use it to close sales, make sure to think through how that might affect other departments (Sales, IT, Customer Service…) And if / or when Marketing transforms into a “Revenue and Innovation Organization” what now is the role of Sales, IT and Customer Service?
Redefining Roles In one particular company that I worked with on this this transformation, Marketing became responsible for the top and middle funnel revenue drivers. Sales then transitioned into executive account management and renewals: they were really the relationship builders and maintainers. And Customer Service delivered on the “promises” made by Marketing and Sales by integrally working together with Marketing and Sales. This meant that all three departments knew what their new roles were and the importance of customer lifetime value (CLTV). They knew that all three department’s goals were to collaborate to increase CLTV so that customers, whether it was a B2B or a B2C company, spent more time and money with the company over longer periods of time- hence increasing the customer life time value.
What business experts are really striving for with Big Data is to create blue ocean strategies where the competition is irrelevant; we learned that from the authors of the Book, Blue Ocean Strategies, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. We also learned from W. Edwards Deming, that if we listen to our customers and our employees and take that data, we’d have better products, services and companies — which help to build companies that become their own marketplace or live in an uncontested market space. And that’s what can be done with all the data that we have today — if CMO’s know what to do with it.
Making Cross-Functional Collaboration The Most Rewarded Executive Activity In this particular company, when cross-functional collaboration was a primary part of their culture, Marketing wasn’t spending millions of dollars to acquire customers only to have the other departments provide such poor relationship building and service that the customer’s defected. Instead they made sure that once the customer had bought and come on board, Customer Service delivered on promises by Sales and Marketing. (In your company, it might mean people in these departments have to talk to each other…) Now that’s an interesting concept!
This is just one company’s take on how they approached these issues. I’d love to hear what you think about the report. There’s much more I could / need to cover in this area. This report just a first look at the idea of CMOs transforming into Chief Intelligence and Revenue Officers.
@DrNatalie
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