3 Things Every Successful CMO Should Know

The biggest challenges a CMO faces today are steep and sometimes insurmountable depending upon how well a leader can navigate Sales, Finance and Customer Success. That is, to maximize marketing’s impact on the business—and prove it.  Marketing has a seat at the revenue table but it shouldn’t be held responsible for revenue completely. For high tech B2B SaaS companies, sometimes a CMO is responsible for acquiring free trial customers and converting them into paying customers. Beyond that, anything that’s touched by sales is an assist. Likewise, Sales should never be given full credit for revenue because without at least a brand identity and channels to acquire customers into the pipeline, marketing is contributing to revenue (albeit a small contribution).

The best investment that CMOs can make to sales pipeline is to have a strong, relevant and differentiated brand identity and messaging. And drawing a clear, straight line from marketing investments and activities to business impact is a modern mandate. On top of proving marketing’s contributions to the success of the business, marketing teams are navigating constrained budgets and always-changing market conditions that require the ability to do more with less—all while working fast, flexibly, and efficiently.  

Marketing’s value to the business is clear. What isn’t is marketing’s ability to answer critical business questions; the answers to which are likely hidden in the data—and have the power to make or break marketing’s success and impact.

Here are three key things marketing leaders must be able to demonstrate to empower their team, energize/rally the company, and maximize their ROI: 

1—Marketing Performance Across All Channels

The need—Marketing leaders need to keep a proactive pulse on all marketing activity in real time so they can quickly and confidently identify, report on, and act on gaps and opportunities across channels. And marketing analysts and ops teams are on the hook for enabling marketing leaders with trusted, accurate, actionable data and insights.  

The problem—Most marketing teams use generic reports that don’t give marketing leaders a full view of channel-specific performance because the data fueling those reports is often stale or incorrect—and comes from a bunch of disconnected sources that are difficult to integrate. Without a single source of truth, marketing analysts and ops teams are forced to keep track of and pull data from many different tools—and navigate the time-consuming process of cleaning and prepping data for consumption. What’s worse, reporting from marketing automation and analytics platforms are out of sync with sales data from CRM so there becomes an issue with credibility. The consequences of not having a complete or true view of marketing performance across channels are difficulties evaluating performance and making decisions that improve it. 

The solution—By bringing disparate data sources together in CRM as a system of record that provide real-time updates and easy consumable reports tailored to specific questions, marketing teams can quickly and confidently answer business questions based on relevant data. Marketing and sales ops can create dashboards and reports that enable leaders to trust and act on data-driven insights to improve marketing TOFU performance across channels including MOFU and BOFU marketing influence. And marketing leaders can quickly and easily figure out the ROI of each marketing channel to improve overall departmental performance.  

2—Pipeline Visibility for Marketing Campaigns

The need—Developing a tactical strategy that is fueled in on message content across all touch points should be founded in past data and understanding which channels are working, which are not and why. Knowing which marketing tactics to deploy and the pipeline results to expect is critical to setting the right expectations and an accurate revenue forecast. That means looking at top level data and all the way down to clicks by audience segments.

The problem—Without the ability to look at accurate historical performance and real-time data they can’t be responsive to the changing competitive landscape and ever-changing business needs.  

The solution—The answer is a unified view of data across sources in easy-to-read-and-share dashboards and reports. No longer are marketing leaders in the dark about what levers to pull proactively to boost channel performance. 

3—Customer Lifecycle Marketing

The need—Marketing leaders need to proactively communicate to the C-suite how marketing is contributing to overall company success—in a way that’s backed by trusted data. It’s about more than just perfecting each marketing channel, program, initiative, and tactic—it’s about keeping a pulse on the entire marketing program so leaders can accurately and proactively ensure pipeline coverage and acceleration.  

The problem—There’s nothing worse than working with stale, inaccurate data from disparate sources. Marketing can’t present a clear or holistic picture of overall marketing performance across each stage of the buying process—all the way to customer retention.

The solution—With a single platform that is deeply integrated and that ties data from disparate sources together, it is easy to find the where conversion is dropping off or campaigns are not resonating with audiences. One of the biggest advantages comes in the way of understanding the CAC and where savings can be found in campaigns and/or channels that are not performing. Marketing leaders can run their part of the business with confidence that they’re doing their part to contribute to revenue.  

On becoming a modern marketer

Today’s CMO needs to understand the fundamentals of marketing (e.g. the psychology behind a brand) as well as a technical marketer (i.e., one that intimately knows the technology, the data, and how to visualize and report). Modern marketers have their hands on trusted real time and historical data—which separates them from the rest and gives them a meaningful and impactful seat at the leadership table.

A success story—marketing leaders using data to position an invisible brand and move up market to attract larger customers

A recent fractional CMO engagement with a high-tech SaaS B2B SMB company was struggling to find the right marketing leadership having gone through 3 leaders within a year. The brand was virtually invisible to the industry but it was a low cost provider that was scraping the bottom of the bucket for customers and Sales had to touch each lead in order to convert them into paying customers.

The team was suffering from a lack of confidence, with little to no insight into which channels were working and which weren’t, and the brand identity was not strong, clear and differentiated. Each leader failed to accurately consolidate all its pipeline data together in one dashboard so it could precisely target each customer.

With data-driven insights from data visualization sofware reporting from Salesforce (a system of record for all pipeline activity), marketers were able to begin assembling historical and real time data to inform what inputs to use for an updated brand identity, validate assumptions on how messaging should evolve to target ‘up-market’ audiences, and begin testing channels for acquisition and retention. Data was used to support a marketing budget, campaigns and forecasts to meet revenue targets. With the confidence of both marketing and sales ops teams, these so-called ‘actionable insights’ accelerated key decision-making and overall impact on marketing campaigns.