Editor’s Note: CMO Coffee Talk is an open space for more than 1,300 CMOs to come together weekly with their peers and discuss timely, crowd-sourced topics. Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing co-hosts these dynamic, illuminating conversations with 6sense CMO Latané Conant.
For B2B marketers, research is literally never done. Answer one question and you’ll come up with three more. Discover one insight and you’ll want to examine four new splits of the data to see what else it can teach you.
Knowing how to read, cross-tab and interpret the data can be both an art and a science. The insights aren’t always self-evident.
Last week at CMO Coffee Talk, Jamie Barnett revealed her findings and analysis of our 2022 State of the B2B CMO survey. And right there in the middle were a handful of slides that made it painfully clear how to drive greater impact and generate more consistent revenue-centric results as a marketing leader.
The insights pivoted on two simple questions:
- Are you hitting your marketing goals?
- Is your company hitting its sales goals?
Based on these yes-or-no answers, Jamie examined the rest of the data in equally binary terms. Were there decisions, priorities and investments that were heavy on the “yes” side, and clearly absent on the “no” side? Let’s take a closer look.
Five Keys To Marketing Leadership Success
The answer is yes there were places where marketers eagerly invested and underinvested. Here are a five key investments that stood out:
1: BDR Management
Who owns the inside sales team (whether you call them BDRs, SDRs, whatever) between sales or marketing doesn’t matter as much as having a clear, defined process. Clarity of roles and consistency of implementation was clearly evident and actively present for the marketing leaders consistently hitting their number.
2: Active In Board Meetings
Not every marketing leader (even those with a CMO title) are regular attendees and participants in their regular board meetings. Those marketing leaders consistently hitting their numbers aren’t just active in board meetings; they present some of the most valuable information in those meetings — such as market sizing, competitive threats, industry trends, etc.
3: Dedicated Content Marketing Team
Even marketing teams with just a single content marketer were nearly twice as likely to be hitting their marketing targets as those that didn’t have dedicated content-creation resources.
4: Documented and Consistent Core Messaging
Having a formal positioning framework makes a difference as well, in hitting both sales and marketing targets.
5: Conversational Intelligence Tools
A surprisingly small percentage of companies polled are already using tools such as Gong, Chorus, and others to record and analyze prospect and customer calls. But the organizations that actively use these tools appear to have a distinct advantage in hitting their numbers.
Coming Up on CMO Coffee Talk…
In our next CMO Coffee Talk meet-up (which is just around the corner!), we’ll deep-dive into findings from a unique new study on CMO salary and compensation. What differences should you expect (and negotiate!) based on company size, stage, industry and more? Don’t miss this one!
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