Why the ‘C’ in CMO Stands for Change

Rhoan Morgan is a regular contributor to CMSWire. She helps CMOs and marketing leaders lead with customer experience and establish a clear connection between their efforts and the business’s bottom line. This post originally appeared on CMSWire.

Examining how marketers can equip themselves with the knowledge they need to facilitate the change to a digital customer-centric system that drives revenue.

Marketing has undergone more transformation than any other business function over the past decade.

As a result, CMOs face constant challenges in their quest to stay on top of a diverse and changing landscape and be the driving force for revenue growth and customer experience for their organizations.

This first article in this series will address how marketers can equip themselves with the knowledge they need to facilitate the change to a digital customer-centric system that drives revenue. We aim to empower marketers to understand their role as change agents and customer experience champions.

Change: The Catalyst for Marketing Progress

Today’s marketers operate in a hyper-digital world with sophisticated buyers and heightened expectations. They must now be the masters of change. In addition to traditional marketing, they are now the owners of a majority of the customer journey, sophisticated customer engagement and management platforms, content development and activation, data architecture and governance and managing an ever-changing and complex tech stack — all while reporting on and proving their impact on revenues.

In 2016, there were approximately 3,500 marketing technologies to choose from. By 2022, that number had grown to a total of 9,932 martech solutions. Image credit: chiefmartec.com.

Change also involves mastering a new mindset. Every marketer knows that “the customer journey” is the path to revenue generation, but building one requires a far-reaching plan that brings together people, processes, technologies and data into a customer-centric system that encompasses every business line, not just marketing.

We need to think differently about everything, including marketing’s purpose in the organization, its relationship to other business functions, and the role technology plays in supporting the overarching strategy.

Technology: Your Ticket to Scale and Improved Experience

Not only are CMOs facing the rapid digitization of their discipline, but the marketing and martech landscapes are shifting rapidly beneath their feet.

The good news is that today’s marketing technology is more stable, reliable and easy to integrate, adapt and manage. With the right mix of technology and strategy, marketers can now scale operations exponentially through automation while enhancing the customer experience through responsive technologies, personalization, new forms of media, broader sets of marketing channels and connection points.

It’s easy to see technology as the silver bullet. However, it’s not the technology alone that will bring about the change needed to become more competitive. It’s also moving away from the old habits that seem harder to kick than anticipated. We need to refocus on connected strategies, revenue influence and creation and the data and analytics that will drive growth. We need a framework for identifying and leveraging the resources we need to deliver business growth. We need a framework for change.

The Revenue Ecosystem®: Know the Customer

Every successful organization is a customer-centric organization. And because marketing has become the champion of the customer experience, we have a central role to play in building a Revenue Ecosystem® that connects the organization’s greatest resources — people, processes, technology, and data — to support insight, agility, collaboration and a better customer experience at every step. It’s important to view each step with the destination in mind: to serve the customer better.

When we start thinking about technology in terms of a revenue ecosystem, it helps us shift the marketing mindset away from one-off campaigns and tactics. It helps us think big and positions us as revenue drivers within the context of the organization’s mission-critical revenue generation cycle.

How the Revenue Ecosystem® drives CX results

• Connects organizational resources to provide a better customer experience.
• Helps shift from one-off campaigns and tactics to connected strategy.
• Positions marketing as the revenue driver.
• Sets off a chain reaction that breaks down the organizational and technical silos that fragment the customer view and experience.
  revenue ecosystem

Ultimately, the Revenue Ecosystem® framework creates corporate change agents and aids in your quest to understand and create the ultimate customer journey with your solutions.

Adopting a New Marketing Mindset

Marketers today operate in a hyper-digital world where opportunities seem endless, and support for change is imperative. With new marketing technologies emerging, maturing, gaining traction or melting into oblivion daily, marketers must adopt a new mindset and embrace a new paradigm for customer engagement to transform business. With help from the Revenue Ecosystem®, marketers can revolutionize how they listen to customers and deliver on the promise of accelerated revenue and bottom-line growth.

Follow along next month as we share how to “Go from Providing Excuses to Producing Revenue” and give you helpful tips to take your company to the next level.