The demands placed upon B2B marketing have changed. Eighty-three percent of CEOs now expect CMOs to be key revenue contributors. Many CMOs rely on legacy strategies that can’t meet the requirement, and are consequently suffering from ever-shortening tenures.
The good news is that modern CMOs can meet and exceed revenue expectations and remain relevant by embracing a growth-driven approach to marketing.
You can learn how to implement an effective growth marketing system at your own organization by following the actionable, easy-to-follow steps laid out in our latest ebook, The B2B CMO’s Guide to Growth Marketing.
This guide features the insights from CEOs, CMOs, and other marketing thought leaders. It walks marketing leaders through the steps necessary to…
- Unify revenue teams
- Identify success metrics
- Implement measurement plans
- Run growth experiments
- Learn from data
…and ultimately transform your marketing efforts into an efficient revenue-driver that adds immense value to the business at large.
Here are a few highlights about aligning revenue teams:
Unifying Customer-Facing Departments Around Revenue
Growth marketing only works efficiently when all departments that make up the revenue team have the same visibility into the entire customer lifecycle. Working with the same data and metrics gets marketing, sales, customer success, and other customer-facing departments on the same page. This is necessary for productive collaboration.
Here are some best practices for pursuing interdepartmental alignment and visibility:
Work From a Single CRM
All customer-facing departments should work off a single CRM. This helps:
- Eliminate the overhead needed to maintain syncs between databases
- Minimize interdepartmental friction over what data and metrics to trust
- Ensure cohesive handoffs
Collaborate on Record Design
Account records should be a single source of truth for telling the story of a prospect’s buyer’s journey with your organization. To make sure CRM records have the right data to accommodate the needs of each department, make their development a collaborative experience.
Build enough data to make records useful for every member of the revenue team, but be mindful that too much information can make records hard to navigate.
Use Shared Dashboards
Break departments out of their silos with dashboards set up to demonstrate the relationships between department initiatives. Rallying marketing, sales, and customer success around shared metrics for pipeline growth and revenue can help guide stakeholders toward success, as well as offer data-backed proof of a CMO’s effectiveness as a revenue contributor.
Action Items
Ready to take your first steps?
- Conduct a systems consolidation audit: Check your marketing stack for feature redundancies and consolidate tools wherever possible. Connect with vendors to see how they can help. You may be able to cut some overhead costs.
- Host a record or dashboard design workshop: Gather stakeholders from marketing, sales, and customer success to contribute to the development of shared CRM records and dashboards. This helps ensure every team gets what they need to succeed, and offers departments visibility into what their revenue team peers value most, encouraging cooperation.
- Schedule regular interdepartmental lifecycle and revenue reviews: Regular check-ins with stakeholders across the revenue team are an effective way to ensure the insights from every department are taken into account. Interdepartmental reviews of lifecycles and revenue also reinforce alignment across departments.
Check Out the Ebook
Growth marketing takes work to implement and time to master, but the rewards are substantial, both for organizations aiming to drive more pipeline and revenue through marketing efforts, and for CMOs looking to demonstrate their value to their CEOs.
If you’re ready to see what modern CMOs can do to earn the trust of their fellow executives and achieve their organizations’ growth goals, check out The B2B CMO’s Guide to Growth Marketing now.
