Member Article

CIO-CMO alignment is key to contented customers

Discover how breaking down Marketing and IT silos can lead to high levels of customer satisfaction and improved data-driven Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Today’s marketing is data-driven. Marketing and IT therefore need to remove any departmental silos that exist between them and put aside any arguments about who owns what. Their joint endeavour now has to be about delivering on the data-driven marketing, IT and business goals of their organisations.

Data-driven marketing campaigns become more successful when CIOs, CMOs and their associated departments collaboratively work well together. Data is the fuel of any organisation – large and small – as it can inform a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and its users about customer preferences. The insight gained from it enables Sales and Customer Service Representatives to up-sell, cross sell or simply to help customers to solve their queries.

In other words if you put fuel into a car you can drive forward. Both engine and fuel need to work together in order to go anywhere. This principle applies whenever a company wants to use data to increase customer satisfaction levels, or if it wants to sell more products and services to either existing or new customers. Conversely if CMOs and CIOs (the engine) aren’t present the business (the car) just won’t move forward.

Nicole Laskowski, Senior News Writer for Techtarget’s Search CIO writes in her article, ‘Strong CIO/CMO alliance paves the way for [a] data-driven marketing strategy’: “IT and Marketing executives illuminate the need for building a strong CIO/CMO alliance…” Her article supports the view that CIOs and CMOs need to connect more than they have done in the past, and it offers some suggestions about how collaboration can work effectively.

In essence, collaboration is about winning in today’s digital and increasingly mobile age. It has changed the role of the CIO, for example. The role of CIOs today has become more strategic, and they can help organisations to increase their sales by developing new mobile applications, for example, that deliver a new opportunity to capture and analyse customers’ buying and browsing habits. Mobile applications can be designed by CIOs team with the help of captured marketing data in order to develop new revenue streams and to improve customer experience.

The bridge between the CIO and CMO divide then has to kick in because mobile applications, for example, won’t always sell themselves. Marketing has to promote them to raise customer awareness of the issues they can solve or about the new services they offer. By doing so it will drive customers down the right sales funnel. Marketing and IT are still integral to the completion of this customer journey because CMOs need to work with CIOs to either develop new products and services, or to develop improvements to existing ones by using customer insight from their organisation’s CRM system’s data.

In summary effective data-driven marketing and CRM is about mapping the customer journey through the sales funnel, and CMOs need to work with their CIOs counterparts to ensure that the CRM system and other related solutions are designed in such a way that encourages the breaking down of departmental silos, while allowing each other to share data and customer or even technical insights. As a result of achieving this goal your organisation will improve its customer satisfaction levels leading to an increased ROI per customer and sales volumes. Remember now is time for collaboration not disconnection.

Takeaways

• Identify CMOs as chief experience officers (CXOs).
• Accept IT as a strategic partner with Marketing, not just as a platform provider.
• Agree on key business levers for Marketing and IT alignment, such as access to customer data vs. privacy and security.
• Change the skills mix to ensure that both functions are more marketing and tech-savvy.
• Develop trust through collaboration.

Find out how you can take advantage of the benefits of improved CIO and CMO collaboration to drive your data-driven marketing campaigns and sales by copying and pasting this link http://bit.ly/1LdPHjd into your browser and reading: ’The Ultimate Guide to: Creating customer centricity with CRM’

This post first appeared on the Redspire blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rick Lyle .