5 Facets Of The Highly Effective Marketing Organization

by Lou Guercia
President & CEO
Scribe

The highly effective marketing organization of 2013 will stand out as a master of leveraging smart customer data insights–insights culled from the deluge of information coming from digital, social, and mobile to drive meaningful business outcomes.

These organizations also will be commended for their close collaboration across marketing, IT, support, and sales for their smart use of technology and data, and for their ability to drive revenue.

Let’s take a closer look at what such an organization looks like. Highly effective marketing organizations. . .

. . .Bring Down The Organizational Siloes
Companies that succeed in 2013 will surpass their competitors by tearing down organizational siloes and becoming truly customer-centric. In fact, a recent survey from the CMO Council points to how close marketing and IT executives have come together in their thinking this year, bound by a common directive: to work together on using analytics to make core data available across the organization for actionable business insights. According to the survey, the majority of marketers and IT executives state that the relationship between the two departments is critical to the execution of customer-centric programs. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done. Very few organizations are actually achieving this alignment. Those few, however, will be this year’s winners.

. . .Will Stop Talking And Blaming And Instead Take Action
Effective marketing organizations will not be among the ones that have IT wagging their fingers at marketing for skirting around IT, deploying its own systems. Their marketing departments won’t feel “marketing was simply not a priority for IT,” as most CMOs surveyed by the CMO Council felt. Rather, they will work closely with IT to define requirements from the get-go to ensure their entire organizations are connected to the data they needs to get the job done for sales, marketing, and customer service.

. . .Are Masters Of Smart Customer Data Insights
Rather than struggling with paralysis, effective marketing organizations will do a better job than their competitors at figuring out which data is relevant. These groups already know that it’s not about gathering all of the data, but rather about identifying data that matters–data that drives the business and customer-centricity, and can be used to make companies faster, smarter, and better presented to their prospects and customers.

In addition, these nimble organizations will be very efficient with their dollars to demonstrate ROI. They will answer key questions to propel the business forward: How can we get the farthest with the fewest dollars? How do we leverage newer and evolving channels, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, to learn from and reach our customers? How can marketing equip sales with the right insights to reduce the sales cycle, sell more, and keep customers happy?

. . .Embrace Best-Of-Breed Technology Solutions 
To get to the right data, effective marketing organizations will embrace best-of-breed technology solutions to empower sales and marketing to understand the customer and identify the triggers that move the revenue needle. Such organizations will use proven marketing automation, CRM, data integration, and business intelligence platforms to achieve a 360-degree view of their prospects and customers and analyze customer behavior across platforms.

. . .Will Drive Revenue In Lockstep With Sales
Those organizations that closely align sales and marketing toward a common shared revenue imperative will sell more in 2013. According to Marketo’s “Benchmark on Revenue Performance” report, aligned organizations have a 60 percent higher business close ratio than those that don’t–40 percent vs. 25 percent. To achieve shared revenue alignment, nimble companies are bringing sales and marketing teams together to agree on definitions, process, and qualification of leads to enable the seamless passing of marketing leads to the sales teams, and vice versa. With strong agreement among the stakeholders in place, these organizations are equipping their front-of-the-line teams with the right prospect and customer data to make the revenue magic happen.

Becoming a highly effective marketing organization is no longer a matter of choice–it should to be top priority for businesses looking to get the most our of their people, data, and technology to drive customer centricity and revenue in 2013. Embrace the principals of highly effective marketing organizations, or watch your competitors pass you by.