The “Must Have” Conversation for Aligning the CMO and CRO in 2024
The business buyer is taking longer to purchase, budgets are tighter, and buyer behavior has shifted online. This presents opportunities and challenges, and it's critical that CMOs and CROs are aligned. As reported in Harvard Business Review, according to a LinkedIn report, 90 percent of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment between teams across strategy, process and culture.
Clearly, the CMO and CRO must address this misalignment. The "must have" conversation for 2024 focuses on the real work that is needed on the front lines to bring these two teams together. These two leaders need to build a vision together, starting with shared KPIs like opportunities and revenue attainment. But, the conversation can't stop there. It needs to include all the strategic and tactical work that is required to achieve these common goals. This means using market insights and customer data to align with the company's ideal customer and being consistent in delivering the value proposition.
Agreeing on the Ideal Customer
When sales ask for everything to be high priority, the marketing team can't prioritize what matters most. In a resource-strapped environment, this creates major inefficiencies. Similarly, if marketing makes assumptions about what sales need, they can get it wrong and waste valuable time and budget.
A recent study from Forrester found that in particular, sales leadership and front line marketing need to be aligned on goals and activities and then take the time to prioritize and make clear tradeoffs. This means that the conversation is focused on shared KPIs and on the data – both customer and company performance data that will help teams stay focused on delivering on their KPIs. These two leaders must focus on today's true buyer behaviors for their ideal customer profile (ICP), not outdated assumptions. With an accurate understanding of what buyer behaviors and attributes matter, marketing and BDR teams can deliver more qualified opportunities to sales, and sales can close more leads successfully.
Anteriad recently went through a series of acquisitions and a rebrand, which meant that our executive team had to redefine what we do, why we do it, and confirm our ideal customer profile (ICP). We looked at specific customer attributes and defined the ICP that serves as the "north star" for all marketing activity, from targeted advertising to events to opportunity creation.
We also work together to layer in intent data that provides us with a smart way to prioritize opportunities that show high-intent signals. It's critically important that marketing and sales work together to be able to react quickly based on intent insights, or risk losing out to a competitor. When it comes to intent, our teams "walk the walk" and we get in front of opportunities as a result.
It can be difficult for sales teams to deprioritize or ignore an active lead, and it can be tempting for marketing teams to include less qualified leads in their handover to sales. We've learned from experience that the CMO and CRO need to be diligent in getting everyone on the front lines to prioritize our ICP and spend time on the most valuable high-intent actions, even if that means putting some leads on the shelf.
Delivering a Consistent Value Proposition
A company is most successful when the customer's expectations are aligned with the core value proposition and product offering. My CMO and I looked hard at our core competencies as an organization and worked together to ensure that our value proposition was consistent and clear across all marketing content and messaging to create better qualified leads for sales.
We also identified that we needed a regular cadence of meetings to break down where we are winning and losing, new regions we can explore, and any misalignment on current activity that needs course correction. I share a sales breakdown that can help my CMO adjust marketing messaging and strategy as well as inform the BDR activity.
Thought leadership benefits from alignment as well. We strive to "think beyond the PowerPoint." With a clear ICP and a defined value proposition, our marketing team is much more confident in investing in research and other thought leadership content. We can make bolder statements and uncover more relevant insights than if we were dealing with uninformed assumptions or were trying to appeal to too wide of an audience.
Bringing Brand into Focus
I also work closely with our CMO to understand the right balance between brand and demand marketing. We need to create awareness and create authority for "air cover" and top-of-funnel growth. Our rebranding as a company, becoming Anteriad, established our authority as a full-funnel data-driven B2B marketing solution, and we work to reinforce that in a number of ways.
Just as one example, in early 2023, our work together was the catalyst for a research study about data driven B2B marketing, which is our sweet spot. We were able to use that data across a wide range of marketing activities, creating a clear message in the market about our new positioning and attracting potential buyers who wanted to learn more about how to better use data in their own marketing practice.
Our alignment sets the tone for the rest of the teams that we're all working towards the same goal. It's tempting to play the "blame game" when times get tough, but it's been proven that misalignment just makes things worse, hurting company growth. By aligning the teams early and often, CMOs and CROs create a culture of collaboration and improvement, setting the stage for long-term growth.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Peter Larkin is CRO at Anteriad.