There’s no doubt that how businesses attract and engage with customers is forever changed. Gone are the days where your buyers are known, predictable, and loyal. Instead, today’s B2B buyers act more like B2C consumers, leveraging their digital devices to discover and learn about your brand. In fact, according to Forrester, 68% of buyers prefer to research on their own, while 62% have made a purchasing decision based on digital content alone.
This is both an opportunity and a risk, as today’s CMO must quickly adapt. Eighty-eight percent of organizations agree that the CMO’s remit has changed in the last two years and that the role will change continuously over the next two years! To continue to drive growth, today’s agile CMO must:
- Personalize the journey – Let’s face it, the B2B buyer journey is not linear. Increasingly technology such as AI will be employed to better identify the right message to the buyer regardless of their position in the buying cycle.
- Leverage insights to make decisions – Today’s CMO must move beyond collecting data to generating and leveraging insights to make decisions. This includes engagement metrics in social and other digital channels, content consumption insights, and product usage data.
- Orchestrate internal collaboration – Modern CMOs must be expert collaborators and “growth hackers” with the ability to guide and influence the product, operations, sales, and finance teams. To create a seamless and relevant experience, CMOs must engage and partner with other teams to implement new technology, to unify the experience, and to show a return on investment.
For marketing and sales leaders that are looking to delve deeper into the changing role of the CMO, TiEcon 2019 will further explore the topic during the session “The Role and Impact Of The CMO” on Friday, May 10th at 11 am. This year, we are honored to have three amazing CMOs from some of the industries leading firms to talk about their successes…and challenges, including Jeff Titterson from Zendesk, Sydney Sloan from SalesLoft, and Robert Chatwani from Atlassian. We hope to see you there.
