A CMO’s Guide to Growing Revenue With Fewer Resources
In today's marketing landscape, budgets are under greater scrutiny than ever before, and this trend is likely to continue. As CMOs face tighter budgets and higher revenue targets, the question arises: What marketing strategies will pave the way for success now and in the future?
To make your existing resources go further, find new growth opportunities amid shifting expectations, and hit revenue targets, something needs to change. In this blog, we’ll break down the challenges CMOs are facing, what top CMOs are doing differently, and how you can think about growth in a uniquely challenging market.
Challenges CMOs Are Facing
While budget inevitably does play a factor in marketing outcomes, strategic planning and execution become even more critical during times of financial scrutiny. Indeed, the problem for many CMOs lies in their organizational processes, core skills, and implementation rather than their wallets.
Underused Tech
What good is adding a new martech tool to your belt if you don’t even use your old tools to their full capacity? According to Gartner, marketers used just 42% of their martech stack overall recently—a decrease from 58%.
As more tools emerge, it’s important to remember that your biggest source of untapped potential might be sitting right there in your URL bar. If you’re unsure where to start to get more bang for your buck, try auditing your existing tech stack.
Underdeveloped Skills & Support
There’s a simple reason a greater portion of marketers might be underutilizing their tech stack: they don’t know how. A majority of martech leaders (64%) agree that their teams lack both the technical skills and support required to operate and increase the usage of their martech stack. Plus, as more marketing organizations take on the ownership of their tools, this presents a real challenge for internal teams.
Where’s the ROI?
Finally, a pervasive problem facing CMOs is proving the ROI of their tools and processes. Gartner estimates that, despite marketing budgets allocating 31% of resources to marketing operations (MOPS), 72% of MOPS pursuits aren’t resulting in success.
If CMOs are going to be serious about growth during an era of budget squeeze, ironing out the challenges of ROI for the martech stack AND operations is key for success.
The Solution: A Shifting CMO Role, New Focus, & Smart Growth
If anything, recent times have demonstrated just how far the CMO role has changed. Whereas success used to be more nebulous and targeted to a few small marketing areas of focus, today’s success is much more narrowly defined.
Jim D’Arcangelo, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer of AWeber, says the CMO role of today encompasses much more, including:
- Utilizing dozens of channel options with dozens of media players
- Owning GTM plans from end to end, including client engagement and upsell campaigns
- Purchasing the right tech to enable the strategy
- Ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of all marketing activity with the data to prove it.
Where CMOs Should Focus
So with all the changes, where is the best place to focus? Bryan Law, CMO at ZoomInfo, believes that it’s in creating a shift in focus from driving volume to driving value instead. That means aligning with sales across metrics, target accounts, campaigns, and outreach.
How Can CMOs Do This?
- Be consistent and distinctive in your marketing approach to capture mindshare.
- Invest in and leverage the right technologies that enable alignment and eliminate silos.
Short-Term Wins, Long-Term Focus
Ultimately, Lisa Ames, CMO at Norwest Venture Partners, gives a word of caution to CMOs making adjustments to not get near-sighted. While a focus on ROI-driven performance with short-term demand gen is important, it should be balanced with a long-game effort to improve brand building and market trust.
Final Takeaways: How Inverta Helps CMOs
At the end of the day, CMOs can jumpstart growth if they make key adjustments to their strategy and teams that exist today. That might look like investing in your existing team through skill development, creating repeatable workflows so your martech is put to better use, doubling down on proving ROI in the areas where you know it works, or bringing on a marketing consultancy to build immediate pipeline while your team, processes and technology get properly sorted.
At Inverta, our team of seasoned marketers can help in all of these areas, from helping with developing more efficient processes and workflows, improving the use of your tech stack, or simply getting pipeline-generating campaigns out the door so you can satisfy that need while making fundamental changes that will benefit the long term success of your team. Let's talk.