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The Evolving Role Of The CMO In Sales Readiness And Effectiveness

Forbes Business Development Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Gopkiran Rao

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Sales and marketing. Marketing and sales. The two are inextricably linked, largely because so much of the buying process takes place before a prospect even speaks to sales. It's little wonder that CMOs and sales leaders have each other’s backs when it comes to revenue goals. In fact, research by Forbes Insights and the Trade Desk found that increasing revenue was the No. 1 management expectation, according to the CMOs surveyed.

Historically, CMOs built processes to find and generate demand and invested in increasingly sophisticated lead generation motions for volume inbound as well as targeted, account-based marketing. These efforts, best conducted in active dialogue with the CRO, also blur the lines between lead generation and deal influence as well as boundaries in the front-office tech stack, including customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation. The emphasis is increasingly on engaging and shepherding leads from cold to warm to active prospect.

Despite this increased collaboration, it can often feel like the Twilight Zone on either side of the handoff to sales, with neither side feeling fully satisfied that the right capabilities are being used to maximize sales potential. Preventing this loss of fidelity — and, by extension, trust — is where sales enablement and readiness are absolutely mission-critical. It drives the collective confidence that every customer-facing interaction will bring the prospective customer value and maintain the quality of interaction once the opportunity is registered. This is the critical next mile of the customer experience.

Adding continuing value to the customer experience even after the handoff to sales is a critical driver for the modern CMO. With the means, budget and technology available to support this objective, they are arguably in a better place to help the head of sales move the needle forward. Forrester Research seems to think so, too.

In their October 2019 research report, "Predictions 2020: B2B Marketing And Sales," the authors state that, “Gone are the days of the midfunnel flip on lead ownership. Modern buyers engage a varied mix of digital and human assets at all stages of the buying journey. As B2B marketing begins to take on responsibility for architecting an engagement strategy for the entire buying journey, we expect that more than 50% of B2B organizations will realign the SE function to marketing.”

As much of the buying process has moved online, CMOs and their organizations have evolved to leverage data collection and analysis to effectively nurture leads through the buying journey. With an extremely granular level of visibility across the marketing and presales motion, fine-tuning of the content used to engage prospects has become a bedrock of marketing. That experience and know-how give marketing leaders a unique vantage point to partner with sales on engaging across the opportunity life cycle.

But they could be doing more. This is because, for CMOs and their CRO colleagues, even if content is acceptable, there's a big capability gap when it comes to the interactions driving the last mile of the customer’s journey. Until recently, it was exceedingly difficult to define the behaviors and measure and monitor the underlying knowledge and skill proficiency of customer-facing teams, as well as when and how to remedy critical gaps. This is where CMOs can extend sales enablement to sales readiness to actively help their revenue counterparts.

Clearly defining the mission-critical soft skills and hard skills (encompassing product knowledge, technical sales skill and customer engagement) is critical to how sales, support and services team members should be and are interacting with prospects and customers. It informs how the marketing organization can develop content and programs that fill sales professionals’ knowledge gaps, round out their skill sets and make them ready to positively influence the customer experience and, ultimately, succeed in the field.

So, given all of this, it makes sense that CMOs should maintain a strategic presence in the buyer's journey through the sales process. In this way, they offer a clearer line of sight into the sales leader’s objective, which is delivered revenue. And with a data-driven approach, CMOs have the power to help the sales team shorten the sales cycle, better engage with the customer and drive revenue by staying connected to the sales process beyond lead generation.

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