Silo-busting was the theme on the third day of the Marketing Operations & Technology Summit. Christine Crandell, CEO of New Business Strategies, is a renowned expert on marketing and sales alignment and she mesmerized the audience with profound insights about what it takes to collaborate and harmonize in the customers’ and company’s best interests. She pointed out several sources of distrust and drivers of misalignment. Some of the exciting insights included:
- Customers do NOT want a relationship with a brand
- Customers are religious about the experience they need: how can you help me get my outcome?!
- Neither marketing or sales is inclined to talk about the outcome sought by customers, which is necessary in shifting their orientation to customers
Companies that have aligned marketing and sales have the following in common: shared metrics, goals, rewards, and budget. In truly aligned organizations, the CEO owns the customer experience, and everyone sees the business through the eyes of the buyer. Marketing and sales seating is interspersed, with a strict code of conduct that marketing never discusses metrics like click-throughs outside of the marketing organization, but speaks the language of business: booked revenue, pipeline, renewals, customer satisfaction.
The CMO’s View of MO was presented by Kent Huffman and Eric Fletcher, co-authors of 8 Mandates for Social Media Marketing Success. They emphasized CMOs’ need to bust silos in order to create cohesive strategy and an integrated entity. Organizing around customer insights is the key to overcoming silos. Four P’s for Marketing Operations (MO) to embrace in supporting the CMO are problem-solving, perspective, passion, and purpose. Descriptions of these watchwords were inspiring and entertaining.
Small group discussions explored challenges of the MO organization and career paths. “Connecting the dots” was the overall consensus about MO’s ticket to transitioning to strategic positioning as integrators, facilitators, and change agents.
Conversations are continuing among the Summit attendees, and if your calendar didn’t lend itself to making you lucky enough to attend, we welcome your inputs here. Join us in taking these insights to heart, experimenting with pilots for deploying them in your organization, and laying out the specific topics for the next Summit that will help you most.
