Why Marketers need insights for exec buy-in

In August 2022, we performed a series of qualitative interviews with 30 leaders from selected parts of the internal value chain to understand the challenges that effect the customer experience (CX). 

The value chain is the collection of an organisation’s strategic and supportive activities that generate customer value (margin).  A value chain study allows us to assess where true value is created and where improvements should be made.  A company can gain competitive advantage by performing these activities more effectively than its competitors.

For the Marketing leader interviews, we spoke to those from small to large sized companies of 5 to 1000+ employees.  Industries included Technology, Energy, Financial Services, Recruitment, Education, Biotechnology, Transportation, Healthcare, Legal, Professional Services and FMCG.

What does a senior Marketing leader do?

A senior marketing leader is responsible for developing and overseeing the marketing strategy of a business. The work includes research and analysis into the customer, market trends and competitors relating to an organisation’s products or services to develop marketing strategies. They will be responsible for planning the marketing of the business to grow a customer base and optimise sales and profits.  Their remit covers all the brand communications across the business for Sales, service messages, social media, events marketing, in-product messaging, and branding to name a few.  In essence, marketing owns the customer relationship and touches every part of the organisation …or at least it should.

How has a Marketing leader’s role changed?

An article from Gartner highlighted how Marketing leaders are taking on more responsibility and ownership of every aspect of the customer experience (CX) in the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, place, people, physical evidence, process) …. And this extends into technology, customer data and analytics, existing account growth and, ultimately, impact on the bottom line.  Today, Marketing leaders and their teams need to be absolute experts on customer behaviours and trends. It’s no longer an option to operate without a powerful insight engine.  Another big shift for Marketing success is identify and optimising customer lifetime value (LTV or CLV) — this relates to both short-term transactional goals as well as sourcing and keeping the right customers that deliver long-term value to the organisation.  In summary, Marketing leaders have a significant influence on the organisation’s growth and strategy, but they need to clearly communicate the value of marketing through insights and research.

Lack of insights and data analysis

There is increased pressure from the board/investors to deliver ROI and, although large organisations have purpose-built insights and strategy teams, majority of marketers are operating in a reactive state due to the lack of current insights and customer data analysis.  Marketing leaders wanted “analysis and findings that are properly translated into insights and actionable recommendations– what does it mean for us?”  Insights would create a proactive approach to evaluating new emerging markets, validating the product market fit (value proposition) and refining the UX/CX sales and product experience… in the end creating effective marketing spend and resources. Marketers need a market map, particularly in a recessionary market, that allows them to proactively avoid the pitfalls and capture the opportunities.

Limited skills, capacity, and process for scaling up

Most leaders are constantly justifying and prioritising limited resource (people & budget) to maintain brand awareness and consistency.  One leader innovated through interns which provided the cost relief, but the significant onboarding time investment was lost within a few months when the internship was over.  They need to maintain a balance of generalists and specialists whilst embedding new capabilities and scaling up to match demands. There is a need to scale-up effectively with rapid scale-ups not addressing the operational impact (process, systems and team set up) whilst others had to suddenly scale back with layoffs.  Most found the best approach was to “offset resource gaps with short-term external agencies” who require less handholding (time) but must have a clear brief and scope.  Leaders found time demands and context switching complex to maintain as they are having to wear many hats and views of the organisation. With the talent shortage in senior and mid-range roles, marketers would benefit from an on-demand approach to allow them to help them scale up processes and systems that is fit for purpose.

Siloed working with limited alignment or process and operational integration

Most marketers strive to align the marketing plan with the business plan, but the struggle is more with the internal functional teams’ alignment.  There is a co-dependency between marketing and other teams and many marketers struggle with operational issues, marketing strategy alignment and slow decision-making and autonomy from the board/parent company.  Some suggested that a Chief Revenue Officer might force better alignment between Marketing and Sales whilst others recognised that Account Based Marketing (ABM) could be the strategy to align these teams… but they did not have the experience on how to implement ABM. Additionally, beyond sales, many expressed a desire to do more work with their partnership team (existing and new), align objectives and increase partner leads.  Marketing and the organisation would benefit with a combined strategy that aligns and prioritises high value client activities and delivers reports and insights that both sales and marketing can leverage to increase revenue.

ROI / performance

Where a new senior marketing position or team has been created, leaders felt the pressure to quickly demonstrate their ROI and justify Marketing budget and headcount.  Marketers felt the art of creating a brand story and positioning has been lost.  This was difficult to justify as it has a long-term effect, and they are under pressure to show immediate returns.  The cadence of marketing activity has a mix of short-term and long-term returns and it’s important for marketers to define the difference in any marketing activity and set expectations with the board and help them understand how marketing supports short-term and long-term goals.  They need to strike a balance between creating a Commercial marketing focus and a brand focus.  Many marketers use generic marketing performance measurement coupled with industry or product specific metrics, but it’s often (1) difficult to make the direct connection to marketing activity AND (2) doesn’t always tell the story of whats REALLY going on.  “We don’t have the capability to specifically understand our Martek stack, reporting and analytics and systems integration” which they know could deliver more insightful insights that affect strategic change.  Having a closer relationship with the IT team, performing a CX review and acquiring support/headcount for data analytics could (1) Identify what info/systems requirements are needed and (2) Show strategic gaps/opportunities.

A resonating customer value proposition and CX

Many leaders highlighted the importance of internal engagement and buy-in across senior leadership team and front-line staff to create a REAL transformation. A surprising amount are suffering from capability and capacity issues “we don’t have the expertise to create value propositions and customer personas”.   This is the meat in the marketing sandwich which will carry your marketing budget further when you have a great offer, and you are targeting the right customers.  Marketing leaders will need to research, create, and justify the customer segments, brand positioning, value proposition and customer experience (CX).   All these need to echo the customer, company values and the product market fit.  The last step is to roll out/launch the positioning and proposition internally to gather support so that all customer experience (CX) touchpoints link to the positioning.  

The balance between short-term and long-term

Marketers are under pressure to deliver short-term tactical lead generation campaigns and returns … many are operating without a Marketing Strategy.  There is a sharp difference in approaches between small and large organisations where the small to medium sized marketers are struggling to switch to a strategic and commercial focus and need to justify the long-term value to their board.  For example, many B2B marketers recognise the value of Account Based Marketing (ABM) in the long sales cycle but have very little understanding of what it means and what it looks like.  Others need support to develop the aligned Sales and Marketing ABM strategy, campaign plan, tools and processes for Sales, Marketing and Accounts teams.  “How do we get to ABM and scale up?”  Additionally, insights pops up again as an issue where there is little understanding of industries and customers making it hard to deliver a strong message or an ABM campaign.  Some felt that they operate in a comfort zone in current markets and lack autonomy or competitor insights to take that step to switch strategies.  The reality is that the investment risk is reduced when market insights and data highlight the opportunity or gap and gives marketing leaders the permission/justification to their board of why they should make a strategic move.  Any first step to diversify or create long-term customer relationships is effectively reducing your long-term risk of sustainability and customer churn.  Putting in the work now addresses long term risks and increases your opportunities.

Summary

Marketing leaders in small-medium sized organisations feel the impact of any market changes quicker and they get to play a valuable part of how to react to the market, but they could put themselves on the front foot with their board in both ROI and resource requests through insights, processes, and stakeholder engagement.  Stakeholder alignment and insights would justify their business case and processes would help them scale up to build longer term strategies and teams that are proactive and aligned to deliver a balance of short-term quick wins and long-term goals.

Alternate Opportunities

During scale or changes, marketing leaders are low on resources and lack the capability to create these proof points to justify their moves or resource requests and they recognised that some of this work would be easier to overcome with an external research expert that would ….

• Identify and close the operational gaps in systems, structure, tools, and process for the wider organisation to deliver a great customer experience (CX) based on customer pain points.
• Creates an unbiased and researched view of the competitive sweet spot formed of the 3 aspects – customers, competitors, and internal resources, that maps out opportunities and positioning.
• Facilitate decisions for activities, acquisitions or diversification with market and industry data that evaluates attractiveness.
• Upskill Sales, Marketing, and the senior leadership team about the principals of ABM and create alignment and buy-in.
• Map out a clear ABM framework to kickstart the ABM journey to show where to focus your resources, how to leverage your current Martek stack and which KPIs measure ABM ROI.

If you need some help overcoming some of these challenges, drop us a line or read more about our services here.