How CMOs and CROs can collaborate to optimize customer value

#1. Make resource-efficient automation choices to fast-track sales and marketing alignment

A recent survey by The CMO Council and KPMG Customer Advisory revealed that 70% of marketers plan to invest in marketing, sales, and service automation, resource and workflow management platforms in 2023¹. A key motivation for CMOs and CROs driving this is the need to guide sales and marketing teams towards greater efficiency. That starts by redirecting resources where they will optimize collaboration opportunities and boost performance. Over half of marketing teams are now involved in areas like sales enablement and upselling and cross-selling that were once within the exclusive domain of sales teams. That means marketing and sales collaboration will likely serve as a key revenue driver for most organizations this year—and that means a tight alignment around ROI.

The solve: Choose solutions that integrate seamlessly and optimize resources across marketing, sales, and service

While that sounds like an “easier said than done” concept – the right technology, when used collaboratively and with the right data, makes it work.

Making the right technology choices is critical, as 61% of marketers say fragmented technology across marketing, sales, and service in their organizations limits better sales-marketing alignment¹. That means tech tools should work for all stakeholders with equal efficiency—and the blend of legacy and newer or more innovative tech should fit seamlessly into existing workflows, allowing for teams to implement changes at a reasonable pace. It also means that automation tools should work across teams and channels without onboarding times that drain productivity and drive-up costs in the interim. The simplest way to ensure that automation choices are resource- and ROI-focused is to focus technology integration around a single goal: accelerating the end of sales and marketing silos. Not only does a proactive approach to sales and marketing alignment help CMOs and CROs optimize resources, but it also helps them deliver on ROI by making it easier for teams to create a customer-focused strategy.

54% Of marketers state that budget and resource constraints hinder their ability to test and learn about new ways to align sales and marketing functions¹

What are various sales activities in which marketing is actively involved?

Top 5 answers

61% Sales enablement

61% Upselling and cross-selling

50% Sales strategy and planning

47% Account planning

47% Opportunity management

#2. Exit the silo

Sales and marketing teams often struggle with the same issues: sales and marketing tech stacks that don’t play well together or share data, increasing limited budgets, and intensifying ROI pressure. Unfortunately, many teams also work to connect with, engage, and convert customers in silos—they build a customer strategy and implement it separately from other teams, using whatever tools and data they have at hand. Not only does this make it harder to sync with other teams around ROI (teams that often have relevant insights and tools available) but it means that many CMOs and CROs are faced with hard choices when it comes to resource allocation and ROI goals—often with an incomplete picture of the challenges their teams face.

The solve: Unified analytics and reporting

Even though most CMOs and CROs know that a collaborative alignment around ROI would help amplify productivity and streamline budgets, upending old ways can be an arduous process. Access to the right data can solve this. Unified analytics and reporting around the customer journey mean that every sales and marketing stakeholder gains access to a single source of truth about the customer. It allows teams to access the guidance that they need on demand to identify and apply solutions in real time. It also helps ensure that fresh performance data flows back into the organization to update strategy and ROI goals in a timely fashion. That makes it easier for sales and marketing teams to collaborate and sync strategy since data access and customer insights are available equally and highly accurately.

50% Of marketers will invest in unified analytics and reporting to accelerate marketing and sales alignment¹

#3. Create a data-driven sales and marketing collaboration strategy focused on CLV

Governance isn’t just for data—it should also come into play when CROs and CMOs are thinking about how to ensure sales and marketing alignment can scale efficiently. As sales teams are taking on more marketing duties and vice versa, data access and insight optimization can serve as a guardrail—allowing teams to keep doing what they’re best at while preventing them from wasting productivity on strategies that might fall short of performance goals due to incomplete or outdated customer insights.

“Both marketing and sales need to align on short and long-term goals, and then play off their strengths to achieve results together,” states Jason Galloway, Principal, KPMG Customer Advisory. “From a marketing perspective, this involves taking the time to understand how sales operates and how to speak their language. It can be difficult to develop cross-functional objectives when you are speaking different languages in terms of goals and metrics. After figuring out where marketing and sales want to go and what they can achieve together, they need to put the resources and tools in place to enable consistent collaboration and accountability.”

The solve: Create a data-driven strategy to focus actionable insight use around the customer journey

Use data-driven insights to direct the use of data? Yes, please! Even rich customer insights are worthless if they can’t empower teams to take specific, goal-focused actions or they don’t help accelerate and organization’s progress towards ROI, marketing, or sales goals. Use the power of your first-party data to connect the dots between new information and the specific needs of your organization. Look for insights that can provide a path towards. Ask these questions when attempting to identify new insights as relevant and actionable:

• Will it help our teams remove or limit pain points from the customer journey?
• Could it support sales and marketing team efforts to optimize the impact of consumer touchpoint interactions?
• Can it support an existing or new strategy to increase customer lifetime value (CLV)?
• Will it deliver unique, relevant, and actionable data that will help us achieve any of the above goals?

Of course, data won’t meet all of these standards—but alignment with at least one should be top of mind as you select insights to share.

63% Of sales teams are now involved in customer segmentation and targeting¹