The alignment of Sales and Marketing has been a focal point of B2B Marketing for years. As Marketing automation gained traction over the last decade, so did the notion of “SMarketing,” otherwise known as the collaboration of Sales and Marketing. Through the power of lead generation and marketing automation, Marketing and Sales became intertwined in lead generation and lead management. Over the years, this has blossomed into a greater partnership well beyond the handling of leads. Sales and Marketing work together to generate opportunities, enable the customer experience, provide 1:1 communication, and accelerate the pipeline. It’s morphed from pure lead generation to customer lifecycle management and, in some cases, a combined effort of revenue operations.
The path wasn’t always easy, and it’s taken years to build the maturity model in place today. Yet this partnership has paved the way for account-based marketing efforts, sales enablement, and the proliferation of content marketing within Sales. SMarketing is no longer a buzzword. It’s a requirement for B2B organizations that plan to accelerate their pipeline, increase revenue opportunities, and enhance their customer’s journey. While the intersection of Marketing and Sales is still crucial in the B2B world, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the collaboration of Marketing and IT is becoming just as critical in our ever-growing, data-driven world.
Marketing’s quest to provide deeply personalized customer experiences, whether B2B or B2C, necessitates closer ties between Marketing and data teams. Marketers need to be smart in their collection, storage, and unification of data while also having the means to segment, decision, and action off of that data. This requires a deep marketing technology stack that fits into the organization’s greater platform architecture. As the world enters this new era of 1:1 communication based on real-time behaviors and interests, could MarkIT be the new SMarketing?
Three Ways to Bring Marketing and IT Together
Data Management
Customer data is proliferating at greater velocities and volume than ever before. This data spans all kinds of information from profile, preference, and memberships to action-based behaviors such as app and web browsing, purchases, returns, social interactions, and customer service conversations. In most organizations, this data lives in a variety of systems, sometimes in silos that are not easily accessed or shared among systems or departments. In the most robust of organizations, this data may live in a data lake or warehouse where it can be queried. However, that often leaves marketers lagging without the proper resources to extract and utilize the information. Collaboration between Marketing and IT is required to make sure this information is properly aggregated, unified, and available.
Marketing needs a unified source of the truth for its customers. This means that marketers must work with IT professionals to ensure a CDP or similar is being utilized to create customer profiles through proper identity stitching. This ensures that marketers can see customers completely, and they can segment, decision, and action off of that data. It’s important for marketers to work with IT on building the proper systems to ensure data access and proper integration with marketing systems such as ,marketing automation or customer experience platforms, advertising management tools, BI systems, and the like. In many cases, Marketing also needs to work with IT on aggregating the proper data from various marketing channels such as websites, ecommerce sites, apps, etc. to ensure behavioral data is captured and merged with proper profiles. This creates one view of the truth for that customer from which all teams are utilizing.
Marketing technologies and their capabilities are paramount as Marketing has become hyper-focused on personalized communication through the customer journey. Marketing and IT need to be joined at the hip when evaluating and choosing platforms that can not only provide the capabilities required by Marketing, but also integrate natively with the larger data platforms utilized by the organization. Marketing and IT need to ensure data activation is seamless and resource requirements are not outside of reach.
In addition to utilizing data for marketing and customer experience purposes, Marketing and IT should work hand-in-hand when it comes to privacy regulations, compliance, and opt-in management. Marketing plays a critical role in ensuring data privacy and collection policies are kept in place. Marketing teams need to work with IT teams to ensure these policies are universal throughout the organization. Consent and privacy laws need to be managed at a global level to ensue that data cleanliness, removal, and security are governed consistently and judiciously to avoid legal issues. Marketing and IT need to be on the same page regarding the use and management of customer data.
Segmentation and Decisioning
Data management is a big puzzle piece, but it’s only one. In addition to creating one view of the truth for customers, data must be easily accessible for segmentation, targeting, and personalization. Marketing and IT need to ensure that audience creation and management is easy for marketers to access and develop without continual need for developer resources. This often requires a CDP with segmentation with visualization capabilities that get beyond the need for SQL or other programming languages. These audiences then need to migrate to marketing technologies that can utilize those segments for campaign orchestration. Similarly, customer data needs to seamlessly integrate alongside these audiences, so marketers can personalize and make decisions in real-time based on profile and behavioral information that lives within data warehouses.
Trigger-based marketing and real-time behavioral actions are also important considerations. In this real-time, data-driven world, marketers need to converse with buyers in real-time, when and where the customer is interacting. This means that data streaming from online and app channels need to integrate with marketing tools to allow for immediate messaging seamlessly. It also requires real-time communication among various technologies to allow transactional messages to be sent (think purchase and shipping confirmations) and customer journeys to be created based on real-time behavior (think abandon cart or browse). This requires collaboration among a variety of constituents to ensure purchases, behaviors, and online events are captured, shared, and integrated among teams and tools.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly paramount, AI capabilities will need to be reviewed among teams, including enhanced messaging strategies that utilize recommendations and next-best action communication or routing. Other AI technologies are imperative to review, spanning those related to analytics, targeting, orchestration, content management, and more.
Reporting and Analytics
It’s not enough to manage data and messaging orchestration. In marketing, measuring engagement, such as opens, views, clicks, or interactions, is not enough. Marketers must measure the impact of their efforts on revenue. What impact did Marketing have on the business? To answer these questions, there needs to be a strong link among marketing programs and campaigns, offline customer interactions, and purchase/conversion data. This requires strong collaboration among various teams in the organization, most notably Marketing and IT.
Measuring the true impact of orchestrated journey workflows, campaign messaging, multi-channel outreach, and in-person events requires aggregating marketing, purchase, engagement, and, potentially, in-store behaviors. The aggregation and unification of this data will require Marketing and IT to work together, devising attribution and analytics models that meet business requirements. BI tools such as Tableau or PowerBI typically live at the intersection of Marketing and IT, and they are often managed by data analysts who work with both teams. Strong collaboration is required to ensure the proper reports, dashboards, and visualizations are created for reporting.
Coming Together
As the lines between marketing technology and IT continue to blur, Marketing and IT will need to work together even more closely to ensure the marketing stack is working in unison with the organization’s overall technology stack. Cross-functional teams must be created, and workshops in which requirements and outcomes are shared need to be held regularly. Truly unified customer experiences require internal digital transformation that brings together Marketing, Customer Experience, Sales, and IT in ways like never before. As data continues to drive the customer experience, Marketing and IT need to come together in unprecedented ways. MarkIT is just beginning. If you’re looking to bring your teams together, Relationship One is here to help.
