Bring Precision to Customer Acquisition.
The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE) is a CMO Council strategic interest group that curates practitioner-based knowledge to empower, enlighten and enjoin functional marketing leaders in tandem with their counterparts in direct sales, field, branch office, and indirect channel organizations.
CLOSE was developed out of a need to assist, activate and engage the front line and demand chain on both a centralized and distributed intermediary level, in order to leverage resources, truly optimize performance, improve effectiveness and maximize business growth and pipeline potential.
The CMO Council is dedicated to providing information that empowers sales, aligns process and function with marketing, and amplifies the voice and influence of trusted sales agents with their customers. It believes marketing must actively assume the role of predisposed prospect identifier, sales cycle facilitor, conversion enabler, after-market value builder, revenue optimizer, as well as relationship, experience and retention architect.
Strategic Imperative
Sales and marketing are under pressure to redefine their relationship to enable new customer-centric purchasing paths. This requires an entirely new way to collaborate across customer strategy and data, initiatives, technology, activities and metrics.
It is now critical for marketing and sales teams to integrate data and optimize touchpoints across the entire customer journey. They need to focus on finding the shortest, most efficient, profitable and satisfying path to transaction, repeat purchase and after-market experience.
Most sales and marketing organizations haven’t been able to pivot fast enough to the new digital buyer. This means they risk falling short of their revenue mandate. More than 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey, according to a new CMO Council report, produced in partnership with KPMG LLP.
Key findings from recent CMO Council studies and reports show:
The CMO Council’s recent report -- “Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration” -- examines the marketing and sales relationship and how it should evolve. The report found that the ability to share customers insights, gathered by data science as well as AI and machine learning, with the sales team to inform the pipeline is one of the defining traits of the new sales-marketing relationship.
Key findings include:
CMOs are advised to adopt four sales-marketing alignment initiatives to better support the digitalized customer journey and self-reliant buyer:
To sell effectively to the new self-reliant digital buyer and enable the purchasing paths customers seek, marketing and sales teams need to have the same goals, speak the same language, and hold each other accountable. The keys to building a strong sales-marketing relationship include:
With limited digital marketing resources and expertise, local businesses are falling behind in digital transformation. They need a better understanding of digital marketing tactics such as search, social and online review management — critical areas for building brand awareness in an increasingly digitalized customer journey. More
This joint study by the CMO Council and Sendwithus reveals that marketers are spending more time in meetings about collaboration than acting on opportunities to grow relationships with customers who opt-in to more deeply engage with brands. &nb ... More
This study by the CMO Council identifies and chronicles best practices in SMB marketing, partnering and co-innovation. The full report includes best-practice interviews with marketing executives from Capital One, Cox Communications, OfficeMax, SAP, S ... More
In this CMO Council report marketers identified critical tactics and strategies to deepening engagement. Nearly 60 percent said they intend to improve customer segmentation, profiling and targeting, while 30 percent reported they were embracing ... More
Localized marketing has become a critical area of strategic focus and competitive advantage for brands. Yet, just 12 percent of marketers believe they have highly evolved campaigns and analytics on a local level in contrast to nearly 50 per ... More
