B2B CMOs First 90-Day Priorities

Representing the voice of the highest authority

The #1 Role of a B2B CMO

The highest authority voice in any company does not reside in a board room, the C-suite, or with any investor. The most important voice in any company is the customer. A customer-centric approach focuses on building long-term relationships with high-value clients. By listening to the voice of the customer, B2B companies can gain a deep understanding of their client’s needs, pain points, and priorities and drive decision-making processes from product development to marketing and sales strategies.

Gartner reports on the evolving role of the CMO to “Chief Customer Officer” as pivotal to the company’s success, citing that CMOs are now required to lead the charge in CX, which often extends to influencing beyond the marketing function.

The CMO can then play the most critical role in the company by representing the voice of the customer and helping to ensure that the company is delivering and communicating the value that meets the customer’s expectations and beyond. Ultimately, by prioritizing the voice of the customer, CMOs can pave the way for building stronger, more profitable relationships with their clients and attracting customers that drive business growth.

The real power for CMOs comes when they are seen as the company’s leading experts in representing the customer.

CMO’s Priorities for the First 90 Days

The first 90 days should be a deep dive into four areas of customer and insight exploration.

Conducting in-depth customer interviews with top decision-makers.
Gaining insight into the key challenges and problems that salespeople address on a daily basis.
Reviewing the competitive landscape for how competitors are solving similar problems.
Understanding the current product offerings, their advantages, and their weaknesses.

Although this process sounds like a finite project, it is always ongoing, as is the role of the CMO.

Many companies and CMOs fall into the trap of customer familiarity. We regularly hear feedback, are in sales meetings, field product requests, and read industry news, but this is never a replacement for understanding their key motivations to purchase, which requires real expertise to uncover. Emotional purchase drivers are a perfect example. Gartner reports that B2B buying involves more emotions than most marketers assume.

“Customers are making complex decisions that may put their job at risk, negatively impact their organization, or cause distrust with other stakeholders when it comes to allocating budgets in the future.”

Another overlooked facet of customer insights is their view on the future, trends that have the most impact, and how they can incorporate them into their business. These last two examples of customer insights rarely happen from ongoing customer interactions. They must be proactively sought out.

The CMO’s Secret Sauce

B2B CMOs have a platform that most other companies do not.

Every B2B company has the ability to digitally transform its client’s business. Deloitte states digital transformation is the essential bridge between the business of today and the business of tomorrow.

Accenture says, “Today, all companies are tech companies; all CEOs are tech CEOs. Digital transformation puts technology at the core of business strategy.”

This means that B2B companies have the power to elevate their client’s entire business. Yet this is rarely a part of the core messaging or brand story that establishes B2B companies as true partners, acting as consultants and suppliers of digital transformation.

The first 90 days of a CMO on the job should result in a core messaging platform that unites the deepest insights from the customer with the company’s digital transformation capabilities in a way that elevates the entire sales and marketing process to be perceived as a partnership with customers.

The Mechanics of Change

CMOs must not only be great customer explorers but salespeople internally who lead through insights that directly and positively impact both product development and sales enablement.

This means the resulting brand story from the first 90 days needs buy-in from everyone from the C-suite through product and sales. This story needs to span the capabilities between a very focused brand promise to the nuts and bolts of solving problems that key personas have on a daily basis. However, the brand is often not well articulated, and certainly not across all the mentioned levels.

Below is a checklist of the core messaging documentation that needs agreement from all key stakeholders internally within the company:

Competitive Analysis
Client Insights/Recommendations
Brand Promise/Positioning Statement
One Sentence Brand Description
Home Page Headline/Sub-head
One Paragraph/Boilerplate for PR
Elevator Pitch
Core Brand Beliefs
Brand Strengths
Problems Addressed
Added Value Statements
Messaging Hierarchy (Top 10 Promises)
Reasons To Believe
Persona-Specific Problems & Positioning
Call-To-Actions
FAQs
Brand Voice/Tone
All-New Success Metrics (KPIs)

The key to success is to determine not only if you have a well-articulated strategy across all these key strategy documents, but are the insights that fill them based on a deep understanding of the client, the company’s competitive advantages, and industry trends — plus agreed upon internally?

Conclusion

Marketing has historically been plagued by misalignment with sales regarding the support delivered. One enlightening example of this is the fact that salespeople don’t use 60% to 70% of marketing content. That means that about two-thirds of the investment in content development — often as much as 12% of the entire marketing budget — might simply be wasted, not to mention the costs associated with promoting this content.

Additionally, 70 percent of marketing’s time and efforts are spent on tactical work , and only about 30 percent is spent on strategic activities. This model needs to be flipped upside down. CMOs must be the drivers of strategies that cross-pollinate departments emanating from their evolving role as the Chief Customer Officer.

The CMO must position the company as a client partner, enabling their success. Through deep insights and digital transformation, there is an extremely unique opportunity for B2B CMOs to trigger.

To learn more about how to create highly successful, revenue-producing content marketing and sales enablement strategies based on deep customer insights, please CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.