Revamping the four P’s of marketing
Learn about the 4 P’s that are the overarching marketing KPIs for our front office transformation.
Joining KPMG US in January 2020 as the CMO, I found the company on a journey to transform the front office using best-in-class Salesforce technology. Our goal is to improve how we develop, nurture, and manage client relationships across sales, service, and marketing. At the same time, we are re-aligning our back office processes so clients are the center of our focus.
One of my first tasks was to help our marketing organization optimize its structure and operating model to better serve clients. KPMG has three lines of business—audit, tax, and advisory—each maintaining its own strong, long-standing client relationships. We saw an opportunity for these businesses to work in a more integrated, collaborative way. To that end, we created Centers of Excellence to make partnering across marketing teams more organic. We can leverage central marketing expertise and employ best practices for all our digital and creative needs, connecting dots across service lines and representing the full breadth of KPMG to the market. Today, we can market ourselves as a single company, making it easier for clients to engage with us across all business lines.
Getting the most out of technology has much to do with how people work together. Our shift in how marketing is organized also prepares us to extract the most value from our implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. While Salesforce is best known for its leading CRM technology, the company has spent more than a decade developing and acquiring a best-in-class marketing technology (or martech) offering. We’re onboarding the full Salesforce Marketing Cloud suite to benefit from the magic of front-office technology that seamlessly works to turbocharge the sales and marketing partnership.
Organizational and technology transformation can be overwhelming. I find it helpful to remind myself of what we aim to achieve, so we can focus on important outcomes. Taking our cue from the traditional 4 P’s of marketing, we’ve identified a new set of 4 P’s to guide us.
1. Partner
While it’s obviously important that the marketing team can now work together better, it’s even more critical for marketing and sales to collaborate. Over the last year, my priority has been creating stronger processes and communication with Julia’s sales team. When COVID made digital marketing mandatory for the business, we quickly stood up a lead management and distribution process. This provided a consistent way to hand all leads—from online interest forms to webcast attendance—seamlessly to sales.
I believe the fundamental difference between sales and marketing arises from a lack of shared metrics of success. Marketers fixate on top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) activities, while salespeople hone in on BOFU and converting opportunities to closed deals. When our sales and marketing orgs share data on the entire sales funnel and work toward common goals, KPMG will be positioned for maximum productivity and growth.
2. Priortize
Marketing is fundamentally about understanding customers; we can’t do our jobs without knowledge about what our customers need. Yet in so many organizations, KPMG included, marketers create overlapping, “spray-and-pray” programs that inundate our target audience. CRM data collected by Salesforce technology will provide KPMG marketers visibility into customers and the pipeline, so we can better support our sales colleagues by creating tailored, targeted messaging and sales materials.
3. Personalize
Today’s customers—whether B2C or B2B—expect personalized experiences. The more information marketing can extract from CRM, the more personalized campaigns can be. Salesforce will enable us to automate personalized outreach so that KPMG account teams can be even more proactive in helping clients meet challenges.
4. Produce
Right now, KPMG has little insight into which marketing activities are connected to closed sales because our analytics are based on a last-touch attribution model. When Salesforce provides data and insights into the tactics that work, we’ll plan campaigns with more confidence, and most importantly, live up to marketing’s true raison d’etre: to generate growth.
These new 4 P’s are the overarching marketing KPIs for our front office transformation. We’ve got the right people and team structure; soon, we will have the right technology to complete the process of focusing marketing on the client.
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