Insights Blog

Every day in large corporations around the world, hundreds of decisions are made about products (what is offered) and marketing (the customer experience). Individually, these decisions may seem benign, but in the aggregate, they are bet the company decisions.

Are you struggling to keep up with the frenzied pace of the changing digital landscape? Have you run a series of digital "pilots" on Facebook, Twitter, Mobile, and others but don't know how they all relate to each other? Are your digital campaigns smart, snazzy, and even productive from a demand gen perspective but one-off events rather than a scalable digital presence?

Times have changed. The power in a B2B transaction has shifted dramatically to the buyer. Gone are the good old days where if you had good sales people, you typically won the deal. Back then the salesperson drove the sale because she had the customer relationship, the information on how to solve the customer’s problem, pricing authority, and the ability to manage the sales cycle from lead to deal.

No CMO will want to miss a recent report from The Economist Intelligence Unit entitled “Outside Looking In: The CMO Struggles to get in Sync with the C-Suite.” Based on a survey of nearly 400 executives around the world and in-depth interviews with leading CMOs and marketing experts, the report provides many insights into the challenges that CMOs face, but one challenge in particular screams out to us. In section 2, “CMOs Are Swimming Upstream,” the researchers note that “fully half of all CMOs say their ability to play a more strategic role is limited by the lack of relevant skills among marketing executives.” We aren’t surprised by this finding – we encounter this problem among our clients all the time.

One of the biggest obstacles in achieving marketing-led growth is having the right talent with the right skills in the right positions. The only way to ensure that the organization can attract, retain and manage high-quality marketing talent across the globe is by creating a competency model for marketing.

The authors discuss a new approach to consulting which integrates training with the solving of real business problems. It simultaneously moves the business forward in real time and deeply embeds new, sustainable skills and competencies to your organization. Delivered through a genuine collaborative model and a “learn-by-doing” approach, the methodology ensures your organization gets the traditional benefit of solving your immediate business problem.

Emerging markets clearly offer the best opportunity for growth in most business sectors. Since the 1990s, IMF estimated rates of real GDP growth have trended upward in emerging and developing economies while declining in advanced economies. Emerging markets are expected to be responsible for 76% of projected growth in global GDP between 2009 and 2025. However, most marketers lack experience executing in immature markets. This month, we discuss the common challenges we've seen and outline our proven strategies for overcoming them.

We recommend this short interview with Mike Kitz, an instructor at Notre Dame and the former CMO of OfficeMax: "Why Are Firms Failing To Transform Marketing?" He highlights the issues involved in marketing-led transformations and the challenges faced in becoming a change agent.

At EMM Group, we have seen this up-close at many organizations. While change is hard, growth is getting pretty hard in today’s world too. So many companies are realizing that if they want to get growing, they must get really good at the growth drivers like marketing and innovation. Any leader that embarks on such a journey may want to keep a few things in mind:

One of the biggest challenges CMOs face is a lack of necessary capabilities within their teams to deliver on their plans. They simply can’t get the right work done effectively. While we recognize that the CMO role is also expanding, social and digital strategies are making the job more complex, and budgets are constrained, this continues to be a common challenge.

How do you measure health? It's more than just how good you feel. When you go to the doctor for a check-up, you want to know if your heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs are healthy in comparison to other people, especially the strongest and healthiest specimens. Your marketing program deserves the same perspective.