The changing needs and behaviors of the customers, industries, and the market has led to the evolution of the role of the CMO in the boardroom.
In the past, the purpose of marketing had to do with developing multiple promotional campaigns to strengthen the purchase decision of the prospective customer. However, customers today expect more than just a few promotional campaigns, which has broadened the aspects of marketing that CMOs must look after. It can be a challenging task for CMOs and marketing operations to efficiently navigate through the growing complexity of the B2B marketing landscape of sellers, purchasers, and competitors.
Moreover, another daunting task for these marketing leaders is to have effective interactions at all the touch points to enhance the value of marketing campaigns and increase ROI. Many CMOs find it difficult to have transparent communication in the boardroom and set realistic expectations for the board members. Today, the role of the marketing leader has significantly evolved, and CMOs need to monitor all the trends and latest developments in the industry to stay competitive and accomplish the desired goals.
Here are a few ways how the CMO role has evolved in the boardroom:
Creating a Perfect Alignment with the CEO and Executive Board
Poor communication or lack of information flow can create hindrances in the operations and misalign the marketing operation with the board’s goals. Many CMOs might be confident in their capabilities to develop, execute, orchestrate, and report on their go-to-market (GTM) strategies, but that does not mean that the journey to accomplish the business goals will have zero obstacles. One of the crucial aspects that modern CMOs have to consider is creating a perfect alignment between the goals of the board and the marketing operations.
Moreover, lack of clear communication with board executives can create massive challenges that can lead to development of programs that aren’t aligned with revenue objectives. To create a perfect alignment between the business goals and marketing operations, CMOs are expected to hire skilled resources, integrate the right tools in the MarTech stack, and optimize the budget to have efficient marketing campaigns.
Establishing Revenue Operations (RevOps) Teams
As the B2B purchase journeys have evolved tremendously, it has become increasingly challenging for the marketing teams to deliver the expected results and enhance the customer experience. Businesses need to develop cross-functional teams that help to accomplish all the business objectives. Today, marketing leaders are expected to develop RevOps teams that create a perfect alignment between presales, sales, and after-sales. The board members expect the marketing operations to be active members during the sales and after-sales interactions as well as to enhance the customer experience. There are multiple cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that CMOs can consider integrating into their MarTech stack to offer a holistic view of their performance to the board members.
Overcoming the Data Challenges
If CMOs want to be in alignment with the CEO and other board members, they should set up the right expectations supported by data and analytics.
In the majority of marketing operations, many data systems and analytics tools have tremendous gaps, which lead to inaccurate reporting and a lack of a holistic view of the entire data. As the current marketing landscape has become increasingly competitive, presales operations working in siloes will hamper the CMOs credibility in the board room. Marketing operation teams have been concentrating on gathering and delivering leads and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Presales leaderships need to concentrate on integrating the right data tools in the MarTech stack that enables them to overcome most of the data siloes to have an accurate understanding of their performance.
Chief Marketing Officers need to stay relevant to the market needs and the expectations of board members to succeed at their job and create a perfect alignment between marketing operations and the goals of the board.
