Why Your Marketing Organization Isn’t Built to Support Growth 

CMOs have long talked about collapsing organizational silos, creating a single view of the customer, and fostering a genuinely holistic business approach. Many even fancy themselves as working toward that. But in today’s economic climate, where contributing to measurable, meaningful growth and aligning their goals to the business’ has become part of every CMOs charter, it will likely come as a surprise that others see marketing not as part of the solution but part of the problem: Recent research from Gartner finds that 55% of business collaborators say marketing inhibits the success of cross-functional initiatives. 

Too many marketing organizations are not built to support the needs of the business. Often, marketing isn’t contributing to growth in the way that it theoretically should, because it can’t. Misalignment between functions – frequently sales, marketing and product – has created a series of disintermediated metrics and key performance indicators. The result is that there is too little (and sometimes zero) alignment on business-level goals.  

The C-suite, especially CEOs and CFOs are losing patience and becoming more vocal about what matters: Return on investment. Revenue attribution. Pipeline progression. Intersection with sales. What they’re sick of hearing? More about marketing creative, Net Promoter Scores or metrics that are disconnected from financial performance. CMOs need to think in terms of business performance. 

As organizations integrate more demand generation capabilities into their strategy– this puts increased requirements on relevant content, integrated sales and marketing data, and the need for holistic customer experience understanding in too many ways, they are still a throwback to the decades-old approach of spraying, praying and pushing people along in the funnel.  

The entire marketing process must be optimized to support in-market demand generation use cases.  

We know it isn’t as sexy as spending on award-winning advertising campaigns. To find meaningful growth, CMOs need to focus on operating processes and lay the organization-wide groundwork for integrated brand-to-demand strategies. They need to think about GAAP performance measures in addition to Cannes, partnering closely across the C-suite to focus on business metrics.  

Is Your Organization Built for Growth? Answer These Three Questions 

CMOs have been sprinkling the right buzzwords into their strategy plans for years, and many talk a good game around the integration of brand and demand. However, the urgency is increasing: Sharper tech and increased focus on ROI make it increasingly futile for CMOs to hide outdated marketing processes. Growth-oriented CMOs should consider these three immediate-term steps and ask themselves:  

Are your brand and demand marketing teams truly integrated?

Think hard about the demand marketing processes already in place. Are they written into and coded within marketing automation? Is everyone clear about the brand governance touchpoints throughout the performance marketing process?  

What are we learning and where can we experiment to optimize our efforts?

Solution-focused CMOs are always looking for growth, which means establishing and piloting next-gen demand marketing use cases. This often starts with an evaluation of historical in-market performance against benchmarks to review areas for improvement and experimentation. These experiments must be ongoing, defining and pressure-testing updates to process and operating models. Those insights will help inform end-to-end campaigns that bring teams together, documenting and codifying the process from the very beginning, making it easier to replicate them. 

Does your team have the right mix of skills to deliver across both brand and demand requirements?

Customer-centric and growth-minded CMOs need to balance the right capabilities to deliver against expanded requirements of end-to-end brand and demand campaigns. This means having the ability to scale creative and content across channels and touchpoints AND supporting performance optimization with analytical rigor.