The New Face of Marketing Leadership - questions from our webinar audience
Thanks to everyone who was able to join our webinar, The New Face of Marketing Leadership. We had a great turnout and received several questions from the attendees, which we have answered below.
If you weren’t able to join us for the live webinar, no worries, you can still catch it on demand here, where we share emerging trends shaping the future of the lead marketer and discuss where marketing as a function is headed. If you have any questions after viewing the presentation, post them here and we’ll get back to you with answers.
What should a director or VP of marketing who reports to the CMO take away from this research?
A couple of things stand out. First, CMOs on the path to being a transformative leader, as described in CMO 2.0, need talented people to help them drive change inside the organization as we have talked about. To that end, much of the same apply to theses “lieutenants” in terms of interpersonal skills and alignment with strategy and objectives of the organization. You can take the action plan we have laid out and adapt the essence of it to better support your head of marketing and the initiatives that you are leading.
Secondly, this research can be used with your CMO or head of marketing to discuss where you are as a marketing function and what you as an organization can do to ensure the marketing function is creating maximum enterprise value. You can help foster alignment with business objectives and assist in communicating across the organization to ensure alignment.
Who do you think are successful CMO 2.0s in the marketplace today?
Jeff Hayzlett, soon to be Former CMO of Eastman Kodak, breathed life and transformation into a historically mega brand that had lost its relevance over the years (e.g. finding a new way to differentiate and bringing the customer back in focus). In his new book, “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?” Hayzlett coaches business owners how to thoughtfully yet aggressively evaluate, deconstruct, and then reconstruct one’s business in order to focus on its bottom line.
Chris Moloney, Former CMO of Scottrade now at Experian, has a keen focus on customer experience and loyalty and how this can unite an organization and determine operations (e.g. distributed call response by local branches vs. mega call centers).
Keith Pigues, CMO of Plygem (formerly with CEMEX NA), maintains a strong focus on customer value creation and linking that to a measurable value proposition. He has a new book coming out this summer “Winning with Customers”, Wiley Books.
What are real life examples of ways CMOs are using technology effectively to be more customer-centric?
One large diversified financial services company is using CRM technology to gain a single view of a customer across the portfolio of products (insurance, investments, etc.).
In the realm of social media, many CMOs are listening, or in some cases, engaging in the conversation with all the usual suspects like Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, etc.
What really does a relationship plan look like for growing relationships across the c-suite and have you ever done it?
Well, we aren’t CMOs, so we have not done it ourselves, but based on our client experience and research, relationships are the key to leading transformation inside an enterprise, but real tangible value has to be created as well. In many of our conversations, there was much more focus on the “value” a leader was bringing, which created opportunities to build a relationship with a peer or the CEO.
A phrase that applies here is, ‘you have to give, to get’. You have to give value to receive something in return. If you are united with your peers around the success of the enterprise and understand the value you bring and ultimately deliver, your peers will allow and welcome relationships to be born
That said, I am sure that there are some savvy relationship builders out there, but without meaningful value being delivered, the relationships can fall out of favor over time.
You’ve outlined a lot of things the CMO 2.0 can do, but wondering about more of the intangible behaviors and attitudes that are underlying the successful CMO 2.0?
The only thing that stand outs is a true passion for the business. It seems simple, but these jobs, especially when taking on transformation initiatives, require a lot of a person and having a passion for what you are doing will keep you motivated when things get tough… and they will.
Can you please expand on the marketing effectiveness, specifically the measures that really separate great performance from good performance?
In our Marketing Performance Advantage research, we address marketing effectiveness as both the measurement AND management of marketing efforts. It is the management effort that many organizations lose sight of.
The measurement frameworks that marketers seem to have more success with map very closely to the measurement frameworks of the c-suite. We highlight an example along these lines in the whitepaper, The Marketing Performance Advantage.
Lastly, I have heard from a number of folks that measurement is not something that should become stagnant and unchanged. One executive I was chatting with recently said that finding the right measures was like a never ending quest for truth because each time they found a measure that was working to help improve performance, it would become less valuable over time and they would need to find a new one. With this in mind I would advocate holding two opposing thoughts in your head: a) I have to measure and this one seems to be working, b) This measure could be leading me astray and I need to find a new one.
Does customer centricity always mean a central database for all customer engagement and communications?
The simple answer is no. Databases are tools which aid in customer information collection and segmentation methods. Customer centricity is a much more macro concept, which begins to address the orientation of your business behaviors (not just the communications) from internally driven to externally customer focused.
This webinar and information is based on our recent research study, The 2nd Annual CMO’s Agenda. The CMO’s Agenda, published annually by CMG Partners, surveys, examines and summarizes critical challenges facing lead marketers today, trends CMOs are watching, the importance of marketing performance management and thoughts on and approaches to transformational marketing. This ongoing research effort cumulatively represents more than 60 one-on-one conversations with lead marketers and CMOs within mid-sized organizations to Fortune 500 companies.
