future marketing departmentJanuary 2, 2025 — The Future of Your Marketing Department

Your reality has indeed changed with distractions now minimized and new levels of responsiveness and accessibility becoming your modus operandi. Your marketing organization has transformed as well.

Customer-Centered: You think about the tremendous progress your company has made in transforming its own antiquated marketing practices. Thanks to the hard work of your Marketing Operations team, your company has finally learned how to engage with customers and prospects on their terms. Your team now thrives in producing timely, relevant and compelling content that is valued by customers and prospects as they move through each stage of their buying journeys. It’s a breeze for your channel partners and strategic account champions to sell the value of your products, solutions or services – they are fast becoming as effective at representing you as your own direct sales force.

Impactful: Marketing is greatly-appreciated within your organization for its role in bridging cross-functional silos and dramatically increasing enterprise accountability, alignment and agility (the 3 As). When a marketing team member talks, people listen — whether they are in sales, finance, IT, customer experience, communications, operations or the C-Suite. Continuous mastery of the three A’s by each member of your team ensures that they are as valued for their business savvy as they are for their creative contributions. And visa versa.

Aligned: One of the keys to your marketing organization’s heightened respect in the enterprise is its evolving ability to leverage data, processes, metrics and technology to optimize marketing investment and deliver customer experience that is well-aligned with brand promise. Everyone is now well-equipped to build business cases, vet options, articulate change opportunities, socialize potential solutions with peers and secure executive sponsorship and buy-in. Breakthrough thinking is now being embraced from individuals who once were struggling to be heard.

Agile: Marketing has become the hub for insight and a champion of enterprise-wide agility. Your team owns the not just the customer and market data, but is tightly aligned with other functions to collect, track, manage and enhance the enterprise’s knowledge assets. No more knowledge silos. Each team member can access the intelligence they need to do their jobs completely and support others to execute their responsibilities.

Accountable: The decision-making process is no longer a mystery, controlled only by those in authority. Every decision or action that will impact the effectiveness of others is transparent, accessible and well-documented — from underlying assumptions to alternative viewpoints to rationale for going forward. As a result, teams within marketing and cross-functional teams are accountable to one another, fully buy in to decisions and wholeheartedly apply their energies to make every strategic objective a reality.

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