The Art Of Collaboration: How CMOs Can Prioritize People, Purpose And Processes
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are the ones responsible for understanding and representing the customer within the business, identifying new market opportunities and developing strategies that align with overall business goals. Our insights drive progress.
However, to truly play a transformative role, it’s important to acknowledge and harness our unique position that enables us to draw on the talent from departments across our organizations.
Swapping Isolation For Collaboration
CMOs can bind and unify an organization; to be successful, it is important to develop a core understanding of how data, money and resources flow around the company. By positioning yourself at the intersection of technology, strategy and communications, you can become the epicenter of broader business transformation. However, many struggle to fully utilize this opportunity to leverage talent across businesses.
As Gartner reported in December 2022, cross-functional collaboration is currently yielding unfavorable outcomes for businesses, with senior marketing executives who described their approach as “independent” outperforming self-described “collaborators” on annual revenue targets by almost a quarter when looking at customer acquisition goals. However, it’s important to note that it’s not the concept of cross-function collaboration that’s the problem, but the way it’s being executed.
The solution to the problem is to replace isolation between silos with collaboration and communication. As Aaron Dignan, founder of The Ready, said, “There’s no such thing as a big company … it’s 50 small companies that are just under the same banner with a set of shared principles in a marketplace with each other.”
A company’s size is irrelevant—it’s how effectively the divisions within it communicate with one another that determines whether it will function efficiently and successfully. CMOs are responsible for shaping a narrative that employees can unify behind. As such, it is critical to embed values and communicate a clear vision that everyone—no matter where in the company they work—believes in.
Indeed, the goal of a CMO is to effectively deliver values and brand promise across the customer journey—a journey that involves many (if not all) other functions, from supply chain to client handling. To forge a sense of collaboration while still preserving efficiency, agility and hitting targets, CMOs need to represent the voice of the customer when providing input and advice to other functions.
This is the case when helping the communications function with internal messaging. CMOs need to use persona-based, human-centered strategies so they can represent the customer as effectively internally as they do externally. The challenge is ensuring that this communication is both tailored to individual functions while retaining a joint underlying message. As experts in communications, we can collaborate with other executives in different business functions to provide guidance on what strategy and messaging will resonate most within their team to create a positive, long-term result.
The Right Tech, The Right Way
A study by EY and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School found that putting humans at the center of the drivers of business transformation can improve the odds of success by 2.6 times. This successful transformation relies on CMOs’ effectiveness to instill collaboration, care, inspiration and empowerment into the teams they build and lead.
The research found that 71% of workers agreed that for a corporate vision to become concrete, leaders must communicate clearly why the change is needed, not just what they want their employees to do. As such, it’s obvious that genuine belief can only be built from evidence. Members of the C-suite simply stating their business objectives will only result in a half-hearted effort to collaborate.
A key ingredient that will help CMOs spur cross-functional collaboration is the right technology. In EY’s research, nearly half (48%) of respondents said their organization invested in the right technologies to meet their needs, versus only 33% in companies who qualified as going through “low-performing transformations.”
However, it has to be the right technology and used correctly. Research from Howspace in January 2023 found that technology is currently reducing collaboration rather than improving it, with employees stating that it’s geared more toward independent work. This needs to change; part of our role as CMOs is to ensure that we are leveraging technology in a way that encourages, as Ilkka Mäkitalo, CEO of Howspace, states, “synchronous and asynchronous work to take place seamlessly in a fluid environment.”
Technology has long been a part of CMO efforts. Data is central to providing a more connected, intelligent and anticipatory customer experience. The intertwinement of data, creativity and innovation has meant CMOs have been increasingly partnering with CIOs and other executives to build technology and automation into their marketing and advertising.
This synergy has been amplified by the generative AI boom at the end of last year. Excitement about the potential impact has reverberated throughout our industry—like countless others—because it is, as you know, huge. Adding generative AI into current marketing strategies has the ability to transform any workflow and be an effective tool across the business.
This is an example of when cross-functional collaboration is necessary. We need to work with other executives to inform the functions of the business (whether that be supply chains, procurement or R&D) about generative AI’s transformative capabilities, remove any hesitations and agree upon a companywide strategy of how to best implement it.
Final Thoughts
Nurturing ecosystems and fostering partnerships is key for any CMO when dealing with change, complexity and disruptions. It’s a fundamental skill we need to possess if we are to be successful in communication and change management. Ultimately, employee satisfaction, drive and output increase when they’re embedded in collaborative teams—75% of employees rate it as necessary to their role. Remaining siloed will only hold us back.
Today, more than ever, it is important to empower employees, implement efficient processes, and demonstrate the importance and context of working in synergy with other business functions; that way, the corporate whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Metadata: Originally published on Forbes.com on 14 December 2023.
