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Of all the jobs in an organization, the marketing has to be the hardest. With job tenure typically under three years, the person and the role is under constant scrutiny. As one highly successful, serial CMO shared with me over lunch today, “everyone has an opinion, mostly uninformed, about everything you are or should be doing.” The media is no clearer about the role of marketing. Headlines range from “Become a Modern Marketer” to “Marketing is Broken” to it’s the route to become a CEO.
Instead of debating theory and concepts or turning marketing in everyone’s favorite political piñata, let’s look at what defines top performers.
Act-On, an integrated marketing automation vendor serving SMB and Fortune 500 companies, commissioned a study with Gleanster Research to understand what top performers do differently. Having surveyed 750 midsize B2B marketing leaders across a wide range of industries, their study identified four noteworthy differences that set the bar for everyone else.
- Focus on customer retention and expansion.
While most marketers focus their time and budget on net new customer acquisition, top marketers focus on keeping customers happy and loyal. They spend 23% and 25% of their time on retention and expansion, respectively, compared to average marketers’ 18% and 15% time, respectively. In terms of budget investment, top performers spend 30% of their budget on expansion whereas average marketers spend only 20%.
- Proactively manage the entire customer lifecycle.
Top marketers make it a point to be the central conduit for customer lifecycle engagement. They see their role as managing the relationship between their company and the customer and consider their function effective at managing the end-to-end customer lifecycle. The result is that best-in-class marketers have more happier customers. Average marketers believe sales and support own the customer experience and that marketing has a peripheral role. While average marketers would like to own their end-to-end customer experience, they don’t know how to go about it.
- Manage to metrics is a core competency
Top marketers are twice as likely as average firms to tie objectives to the entire customer lifecycle. Technology plays a key role in executing and measuring sophisticated marketing strategies. Their use of personalization and behavioral targeting and segmentation is 30% to 75% higher than average firms. In other works, top marketers know how to leverage technology to more effectively engage prospects and customers. And they manage metrics like response rates and satisfaction scores instead of traditional measures like number of leads.
4. Know their teams can make or break them
The amount of energy spent on defining, recruiting and keeping the right set of skills is much higher than average companies. Over 92% of top performers consider having the right skilled resources a big challenge compared to only 50% of average companies. When top performers have the right skills in place that understand emerging B2B marketing trends, practices and technologies, they invest in keeping those teams aligned to objectives and external and internal customers. Average marketers, by comparison lack accountability for process improvement and do not place enough value on understanding emerging B2B tactics.
The bottom-line is that while everyone is talking customer-alignment only top marketers, a small percentage of all marketers, actually own the end-to-end customer lifecycle. The struggle within average companies is that no one is accountable for optimizing processes to manage and measure customer experience. Their results are further challenged by not knowing how and where to use technology to effectively engage the customer across the entire lifecycle. The place to start is by emulating the best practices of top marketers.
