Human connection and effective collaboration will be critical drivers of success for businesses as budgets tighten, consumer demand increases, and technology evolves.
Marketing departments are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they are adding value to the bottom line. However, Hubspot’s “Not Another State of Marketing Report 2021,” indicates that proving the ROI of the marketing activity is the top marketing difficulty for 39 percent of marketers. How can marketers demonstrate their value while enabling connected organizations to respond swiftly to market shifts and client demands? This is where the “Unifier CMO” comes in.
According to a McKinsey study “Marketing’s moment is now: The C-suite partnership to deliver on growth,” organizations with a “Unifier CMO — someone who builds robust, collaborative partnerships throughout the C-suite” enjoy the most growth. Leading marketers are aligning their companies around the customer experience by breaking down cross-functional silos, linking technology, and empowering internal and external teams to collaborate efficiently.
They are defining the new rules of collaboration in the process: connecting technology and data sources to show the big picture, gaining real-time insights into the work being done by teams across the company, and enabling secure, frictionless sharing for collaborators inside and outside the organization.
Here are three examples of how marketers are aligning their companies around the consumer experience and, as a result, setting new rules for collaboration.
Eliminating functional silos
Marketing leaders are bridging the gap across levels of management, growing in their ability to impact the company as a whole. These CMOs are called “unifiers” by McKinsey , and they are masters of cross-functional collaboration.
These unifiers is to ensure that marketing has a clearly defined function in the eyes of C-suite peers, adopt the mindset and language of other C-suite executives, and showcase how marketing can help meet the needs of the C-suite.
These marketers help to define the company’s overall strategy. They participate in key decisions and help their marketing organization as a whole gain more clout.
The role of the marketing organization entails more than simply reaching out to the market. It’s all about making a strong connection with product and sales. To enable that customer love and build the synergy people have for the product, marketing has to be so tightly intertwined with the product and sales experience, and it has to be completely seamless.
Despite the importance of a strong sales partnership, most marketing teams have room for growth. Because marketing controls the majority of the buyer journey, it’s critical that they know everything there is to know about sales as a function and stay up to date on sales practices, priorities and goals.
Sales can impact the marketing approach, and marketing can affect sales prospecting and outreach approach by breaking down silos. A well-informed sales team can follow up on leads generated by a virtual marketing event in a timely manner, resulting in conversions that matter to the company. A marketing team that knows the sales pain points can provide collateral, thought leadership, and targeted efforts that can prime customers for sales conversations.
Connecting technology
An integrated and robust martech stack can improve the marketing and sales collaboration even more. Marketing technology has grown in recent years, and it is now an essential component of any successful marketing team.
Despite the fact that 26 percent of marketing budgets are dedicated to martech, nearly a quarter of respondents believe that marketing technology adoption, strategy, and use is one of their top three weaknesses in their organization’s ability to drive customer loyalty or acquisition, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020.
Getting martech right is a never-ending task that can make or break a marketing organization’s success, so it’s important that they don’t tackle it alone. To achieve martech interoperability, CMOs should collaborate with IT.
Collaboration with IT allows for a faster, more seamless rollout and acceptance of marketing technology. One way to collaborate with IT is to partner with them to utilize technology that will unify organizations – like the collaborative work management (CWM) platform. A CWM platform that integrates with the customer relationship management (CRM) system of record, for example, can help break down silos by allowing teams from various disciplines to coordinate and consolidate efforts in real time and refer to a single source of truth as they execute on aligned goals.
