Strengthening internal and external relationships
Section 4
Brand investment will receive an exponentially greater degree of focus in the years ahead. Businesses must develop a clear and consistent brand that establishes who they are, what they do, and what they stand for. Strengthening the relationships between customers and brand requires businesses to look inwards, as well as outwards.
Creating strong brand identity is something that B2C has been getting right for decades, but it is only recently that B2B marketing has been following in its footsteps. Kyle suggests that the big shift in thinking that’s required from the board is towards creating a personality for your business. In other words, making it relatable, likeable, reliable, and, ultimately, human.
The other aspect of strategic brand development requires making sure that key personas are exposed to targeted messages over a much longer period than traditionally expected from demand generation activity – for example, planning for 18 months down the line.
It will also require more than checking the pulse through a few surveys. What’s needed is a calculated, long-term approach towards building future demand and consideration, with the right trackers in place to regularly monitor the effectiveness and contribution that brand is making towards pipeline and revenue.
Making sure that the company’s brand is consistent, reliable and authentic requires transparency and integration throughout the business.
For a long time, we’ve been speaking about the need for marketing and sales to unite. And, after years of beating the drum, it appears that this mutual relationship between sales and marketing is starting to flourish. In fact, many sales teams now know that the best way for them to engage their own targets is through close collaboration with the marketing department.
As Cat Dutton, deputy CMO at Atos, says: “You should be absolutely fully aligned [with your sales team], and that goes alongside business metrics, but also objectives and bonuses… It’s worthwhile investing time in those relationships because it shouldn’t be one department over another. It should be full collaboration between the two.”
However, marketing must integrate much further beyond sales. Brand is experienced whenever a customer engages with your business. Julie Knight-Ludvigson, CMO at Unit4, makes the point:
"It’s about educating everybody who is in [the CX], which really means everyone in your company. It’s not just sales, it’s not just the marketers who are maybe writing content. It’s also your accounts payable people and every touchpoint in your organisation."
Leading brands are now aligning and integrating marketing, sales, business development, customer success, product and support teams. Teams critically involved in revenue generation are no longer exclusively those which bring in new customers. Instead, reduction of churn, good CX and brand loyalty are contributing to revenue success.
Brand is experienced whenever a customer engages with your business.
For Gursaran Marjara, “Developing a holistic view of the complete customer lifecycle is the ultimate goal for marketing, to be participating in that entire journey, and impacting it.”
Net new business should not be the board’s primary focus when there is so much to be gained from increasing existing customer lifecycles. This is especially true for businesses providing anything as-a-service. The key to unlocking additional value is providing an outstanding CX.
“People realise you’re only as good as your last interaction – and contracts can be cancelled at almost any time,” says Julie Knight-Ludvigson.
As the integration of marketing is driven throughout a business, it will establish a clearer view of individual customer relationships, allowing for greater personalisation, more relevant communications and revenue growth.
It’s within the context of these authentic, unguarded relationships with your brand that new opportunities for customer satisfaction and revenue growth can be discovered. However, breaking down the functional silos is a huge challenge.
Cat Dutton says that she would love for Atos to have total visibility of the customer journey from end to end. They’re not there yet, Cat admits, but this is the goal. Kyle Flaherty shares this ambition – he wants to see the entire customer journey for each individual customer, starting from the very first moment, through to five years later. This would entail automating, integrating and mining for insight. It’s no easy task, but it’s clear that both believe a long-term investment in CX will return dividends in the boardroom.
It’s becoming increasingly common for businesses to appoint a chief revenue officer (CRO) whose role will include developing an oversight of these discrete functions. This will require more accurately tracking CX as it moves across different touchpoints, so the CRO can relate this to generated revenue.
For Cat Dutton, the CRO is a useful ally for marketers seeking to prove marketing’s success to the board.
“[In marketing], we’re focusing more on the content and the brand, and how we’re positioning ourselves in that space, but linking that back through to the business and those financial targets… that’s where the CRO would come into play.”
A CRO with an overarching mandate could ensure there is balance across these touchpoints,
and seek to justify this with reference to the revenue outcome.
However, there is a point of contention whether marketing should report into the CRO. For Kyle Flaherty, he prefers that the CMO and CRO remain separate roles, saying that this creates a healthy friction that creates a more efficient go-to-market overall.
The insights we’ve seen here certainly align with the work of our forward-thinking clients. With constant change, integration is a constantly moving target. Integrating teams with different skills and mindsets is tough. The integration of all your data across all your systems is arguably tougher.
The investment in time and money for both is significant. And, the returns take longer to recognise so patience is crucial – but the evidence clearly shows that these strategies offer the best chance for stable growth and share value.
To generate demand and revenue more efficiently, everyone should align with brand values to enhance CX. Relentless perseverance on ungated and relevant content will build brand saliency. And the partnership between CMO and CRO should lead teams with one integrated objective.
