future marketing teamJanuary 2, 2025 — Better Experience at Play for Your Customers

Imagining what life as a marketing professional could be in an ideal world, recommendations in earlier parts of this series included paradigm shifts in being customer-centered, impactful, aligned, agile, and accountable. In this vision, these changes in CMO leadership and marketing organization effectiveness are positively impacting the experience of your customers and their loyalty toward your company.

On Demand: Thanks to the infrastructure your future marketing team has built of data, tools and processes, you intimately understand the needs and buying preferences of each of your customer segments. Relevant just-in-time content is a reality, not just an aspiration. Your customers can now direct their own buying journey, ensuring that they receive the exact content and level of engagement they want – when they want it. Alas, the buying journey and sales process are tightly aligned, so your customers’ needs truly come first.

Dependable: Because your organization has effectively transitioned from people- to process-dependency, your team has already followed-up on the most critical tasks and proactively addressed execution gaps that used to upset your customers and cause you to lose sleep at night. You beam with pride as you think about how your marketing organization can finally function like a well-oiled machine, even when key people are unavailable or move on. No more dependency on heroes, martyrs and superstars! Everyone pulls their weight and your customers and stakeholders are feeling the love.

Innovative: As you convene your team meeting that afternoon, you marvel at your team’s ability to quickly grasp your vision, articulate your strategy and translate it into practical action. Just a few years ago, you were constantly frustrated with your staff’s inability to keep up with you. What a breakthrough when your organization discovered the power of co-creating the future of your marketing organization with leading subject matter experts. Today, your team can not only understand strategic concepts from the best thought leaders in the business but can practically absorb, apply and adopt that thinking as a new behavior. Your team’s growing ability to co-create has optimized your company’s innovation practices both internally and in partnership with customers and allies.

Open: You’ve always appreciated the big picture thinking external consultants bring to the party and your people love the how-to guidance. The problem with using consultants is they are only as effective as your organization’s wherewithal to be reap value from their expertise. To justify a consulting engagement these days, significant due diligence is expected. Just like your customers, you and your team spend a majority of the time in this process before you are ready to talk budget, SOWs and, especially, new supplier onboarding. Consulting can be expensive and invasive to begin prematurely. That’s why you really resonated with the idea of a middleware approach as way for your entire team to get virtual consulting value without engaging a consultant or consulting firm until the time was right. Your customers value your company’s ability to give them innovative do-it-yourself solutions and, as a buyer yourself, you appreciate them too.

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