Take the Lead: A New Opportunity for CMOs to Empower the Entire Revenue

The landscape of marketing leadership is changing, and fast. It is no longer enough for a marketing leader to build a brand and drive demand. To excel and thrive in the new world of growth, CMOs must empower the entire organization to play to win across every revenue touchpoint. To succeed, CMOs will need to take charge in breaking down walls and forging deep operational connections across sales, customer success, and product teams. With 83% of CEOs now saying that they see marketing as a critical co-owner of the growth agenda, progressive CMOs are going beyond their traditional role of campaign enablement and forging new ground connecting end-to-end GTM programs that impact every experience a buyer has with the business. That includes sales, customer success, and in-product engagement experiences. For marketing leaders, that means learning about sales and embracing marketing’s role will be essential to success in 2023 and beyond. But it takes partnership with other leaders, and who better to take the lead in forging those partnerships than the CMO? CMOs are systems thinkers, relationship builders, and dot connectors who can integrate experiences, tools, data, and plays across the entire funnel and do it from the customer's perspective. 

After a decade of cookies and basic demographic segmentations, demand generation has become flooded, expensive, and far less effective. Dropping your marketing plan into a social channel’s parameters and funneling lead forms directly to sales has become the new “spray and pray.” What’s more, B2B buyers are increasingly navigating their own journeys dodging attempts to connect them with sales quickly. The number of team members involved in the decision-making process has increased and our outdated modes of supporting their processes negatively impacts their experience of our brands. 

Now, with markets turning and budgets tightening, CEOs are looking to marketing to directly affect the pipeline, and CMOs are looking for new ways to achieve more with fewer resources. And the pressure to do so is stronger than ever, as a recent McKinsey & Company survey found that 23% of CEOs believe that marketing is ‌still not doing its part to contribute to the growth agenda. CMOs are struggling to figure out where to start. 

Let’s Start by Taking Out The Trash

The path to efficient growth might be more obvious than you think. In fact, we’ve recently helped multiple clients reduce budgets by 50% or more, just to achieve the same or even better results to leads and pipeline. What we often find at first look, is a gross amount of spend wasted by growth marketers who are squarely focused on meeting an MQL goal. “The more the better” is what they’ve been told. We hear from sales leaders that the leads they get from marketing are often junk resulting in lots of wasted time and effort. But when marketing and sales are aligned around the same definitions of quality, running in the same direction, and taking co-ownership of the entire buyer experience with a modern ABX model, we find surprisingly simple ways to quickly remove the junk and accelerate deals. When opportunities are fully warmed, and sales are closing more deals faster, trust between sales and marketing improves, and so does growth, retention, and brand experience for the buyer.

Embrace ABX for Everyone

Despite being a 20-year-old practice, ABX is ‌all the buzz in B2B marketing as of late. In fact, a recent Forrester survey found that 75% of CMOs say ABM programs deliver a higher return than any other form of marketing. A sophisticated ABX model can certainly lead to better results with less budget. But only if the partnership between sales and marketing is solid and thoughtfully mapped out with the digital demand engine in service to it. We find most marketing leaders' idea of alignment is something along the lines of regular status meetings and a few shared assets. But what we often see in the field is this arrangement tends to fall flat and leads to a lot of finger-pointing not to mention a poor experience for buyers. Instead, marketing and sales need to move beyond alignment and into a new era of integration. 

The Biggest Challenge in Sales and Marketing Integration is the CMO’s Greatest Opportunity

One of the biggest questions we hear in working with sales and marketing teams is “Who takes the lead?” The transformation to integration is a make-or-break proposition and the right leadership is key. Call us optimists, but where many CMOs see an insurmountable challenge, we see their biggest opportunity. Now is the moment for marketing leaders to be bold problem solvers. Leaders who embrace this challenge and re-write their role to be the driving force of exceptional sales and marketing alignment and chart the path to integration will likely find themselves at the forefront of the new wave. Those who continue to fear and run from any sales responsibility risk being left behind. It’s no longer a matter of if, but when. And for those who want to secure their place at the forefront of this shift, that time is now. 

As the current market conditions accelerate the need for more efficient ways of driving growth, the urgency for a cultural shift to true sales and marketing alignment is increasing. With the ability to understand both sides of the equation – marketing strategies and how they interact with sales operations – now is the moment for the CMO to define what their role will be in this new alignment. The CMO is best positioned to lead this new charter of alignment between marketing and sales teams because they have the power to shift an organization's focus from short-term gains towards long-term value creation by activating and supporting organization-wide customer orientation. As the company’s resident communications strategist, customer expert, empath, and cross-departmental collaborator, the CMO has the skills to move everyone into this new way of thinking and new way of working.

When done correctly, an ABX program focuses on creating strategic partnerships between marketing and sales teams across every stage of the sales funnel. By aligning these two departments, businesses can leverage a common set of data and customer insights to guide coordinated, buyer-centric marketing motions and sales plays to accelerate the sales cycle and lead to higher ROI. In fact, a recent Gartner Report found that sales organizations that prioritize alignment with marketing are almost three times more likely to exceed new customer acquisition targets. But in this co-partnership, who takes the lead? Sales or marketing? And where do you as a marketing leader begin? The answer is…it’s complicated, but not impossible and the effort in doing so will reap huge rewards by way of qualified accounts, accelerated pipeline, increased revenue, and joint success for both teams. 

The Path to Change is in Your Hands

So how does a marketing leader take the reins to integrate marketing and sales? One of the most effective approaches we see is by applying an ABX framework to orient tailored experiences for your ideal customer profile (ICP) and orchestrating the roles of marketing and sales to this model across the funnel. This requires teams to align to the same metrics and KPIs and leverage data-driven insights to increase efficiency and throughput. By making sure that data is leveraged effectively at every touchpoint, marketers can identify and target the right people in accounts that are most likely to convert and coordinate their efforts to surround these buyers with meaningful experiences, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved ROI. 

With ABX at its core, organizations have a unique opportunity to create meaningful connections between the right customers and brands while providing maximum efficiency across departments. For ABX to be truly successful, it requires a tight remit between the marketing and sales teams. It is no longer enough for marketing to throw leads over the fence. To achieve maximum results, these teams must be in lockstep all the way down the funnel to keep the conversation moving forward, and continually optimize plays. 

Overall, true alignment between marketing and sales requires ongoing communication and collaboration throughout the entire funnel. When done right, this type of alignment results in increased ROI by targeting prospects more accurately while improving conversion rates through better customer experiences.

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Infinite Edge is a consultancy of marketing and culture experts that helps companies build trust and navigate today’s rapidly evolving market environment while providing all the marketing services you'd expect from a top-tier integrated agency. Allow us to help you transition your marketing operation from reactive to responsive and develop a roadmap to help you thrive through the coming unknown.