Dawn Mueller, CMO of Vitech Systems Group, discusses the importance of strategic interfunctional coordination in driving company success. She highlights how market orientation, including customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination, can boost profitability and customer satisfaction. Dawn emphasizes the CMO’s role in fostering cross-departmental teamwork and breaking down silos for effective coordination.

“Challenge yourself to learn about different areas. You don’t have to be an expert, but just understanding them follows the axiom of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.” – Dawn Mueller

Dawn Mueller’s insights emphasize the importance of building strong inter-departmental relationships for effective strategic interfunctional coordination. She highlights the pivotal role of the CMO in driving customer orientation across all business functions. Companies can enhance their market orientation by investing in analytics and maintaining customer feedback loops. Dawn underscores that fostering an environment of unified goals is key to breaking down silos and achieving business success.

Follow Dawn Mueller on LinkedIn

Follow host Steve MacDonald on LinkedIn

[Transcript]

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have an extraordinary guest today, and we’re going to discuss a subject we all need to know more about but don’t often consider—strategic interfunctional coordination. We’re here with Dawn Mueller.

[00:00:28] Steve MacDonald:  Now, Dawn, you’re the CMO of Vitech Systems and a two-time CMO. You hold a PhD in marketing and management, and you’ve worked at top consulting firms like Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and IBM. I’m curious to hear your thoughts today on driving company success through strategic interfunctional coordination, even though the term doesn’t roll off the tongue.

[00:01:06] Dawn Mueller: It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but thank you for the kind intro. I’m excited to be here with you, Steve, and to talk about this important topic.

[00:01:18] Dawn Mueller: Just a bit of background—yes, I have an academic degree, but I’m not an academic, which my cohort would agree with. However, it’s been useful in business. It’s interesting because many concepts from academia take about 20 years to reach the corporate world. When they do, they pick up momentum. The idea of market coordination, especially interfunctional coordination, is starting to gain more attention now.

[00:01:53] Dawn Mueller: One way to think about it is people often say the CMO and others in executive roles need to become a T—having deep expertise in one area while also gaining broad knowledge across the enterprise. That’s where interfunctional coordination helps.

[00:02:13] Steve MacDonald: We frequently talk about why B2B CMOs fail so quickly, and it often stems from their inability to connect the C-suite and various departments to operate as one team, rather than in silos. This is something many companies struggle with.

[00:02:42] Steve MacDonald: The CMO is in a prime position to bring these groups together because they represent the customer. Gartner has even said CMOs should be more like chief customer officers. As CMOs, we have a seat at the table to represent the customer’s voice, provided we’re doing our job right.

[00:03:09] Steve MacDonald: There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’d love for you to break down some of these terms. You mention market-oriented companies and interfunctional coordination. Could you explain why these concepts are so important?

[00:03:26] Dawn Mueller: First, these concepts were important to me because I wrote my dissertation on them. But more importantly, I’m passionate about marketing, and I love learning, formally or informally. The concept of market orientation was first defined by scholars like Narver and Slater, and Kohli and Jaworski. Their research shows that market-oriented companies—which have a customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination—tend to be more profitable. 

[00:04:11] Dawn Mueller: These three components make up a market-oriented company, which leads to greater profitability—something every company wants. Many of the world’s most successful companies are market-oriented, and they focus on these principles.

[00:04:25] Dawn Mueller: We were discussing Amazon’s customer orientation earlier, and I’ll go into more detail on that because you shared a great anecdote. In essence, a market-oriented company ensures that all departments communicate and collaborate. You mentioned silos earlier—that’s not how a CMO should operate. I work closely with finance, IT, legal, and many other departments, not to say, “This is what marketing is doing,” but to find ways to collaborate. I aim to be that T.

[00:05:08] Dawn Mueller: I want to be integrated so that everyone says, “You know what? It’s not just that we need her marketing view, but we want her strategic thinking and perspective.” That’s where it comes into play. It’s the idea of a rising tide lifting all boats.

[00:05:24] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. Here’s a question for you. You talk about working with IT and other departments that weren’t traditionally part of the fold. But what about the external buying group? Over the last 10-15 years, the size of this group has grown significantly, and we sometimes lose deals because of internal roadblocks like IT or procurement. We need to build relationships with the CFO, depending on the situation.

[00:06:05] Steve MacDonald: I like this approach because it applies not only internally within our own company but also externally to the companies we’re selling into.

[00:06:26] Dawn Mueller: You make a great point. Being customer-oriented means thinking beyond just who we’re selling to, especially in a B2B context. We also think about their customers. For example, at Vitech, in the pension and insurance administration space, we don’t just consider what we can sell to the insurance company. We think about how their users will benefit from it. That’s a key part of customer orientation—focusing on your customer’s customer.

[00:07:04] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. In terms of market orientation, customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination, is there a story that brings this to life?

[00:07:21] Dawn Mueller: Yeah, I’m kind of laughing a little bit because when I was really rolling up my sleeves and digging into this whole concept and doing some research on it, I used a large world-class company as an example. They were market-oriented, and whether they knew it or not, they were fulfilling all the tenets of it. I also compared them to a government agency, and as you may have imagined, the customer orientation was drastically different between them, as was the competitor orientation. The government doesn’t see itself as having competitors, but they do, and the interfunctional coordination was night and day—just drastically different.

[00:08:04] Dawn Mueller: Part of that research involved surveys and analytics, and the success and perception of that world-class market-oriented company versus the one that wasn’t showed a huge disparity. There was dissatisfaction, and someone even suggested I could take this research to help government agencies, but I didn’t want to go there. It was an interesting experience. One thing I didn’t mention earlier is that market-oriented organizations are also affected by the composition of who they hire. If you hire people who just want to keep their heads down, they’re not going to have that customer orientation. I love Amazon’s “chair of the customer” idea—leaving an empty chair at meetings to represent the voice of the customer. If you hire someone who doesn’t care about that, it will impact the business. The same goes for competitor orientation—if you think you’re fine without competition, you may not achieve what you need. And interfunctional coordination requires people who are willing to go beyond their assigned roles.

[00:09:24] Dawn Mueller: I think this also highlights why it’s so hard for CMOs, who face a lot of pressure to perform. But we also need to think outside the box and make a positive impact across functions. Who you hire makes as much of a difference to supporting a market-oriented structure as the structure itself.

[00:09:45] Steve MacDonald: Couldn’t be said better. Happy employees lead to happy customers when you hire the right people for the right roles. I talk to CEOs who have different visions for their CMOs and CROs, but we need one market alignment and orientation, with roles that support that. Without that guidance, we contribute to silos internally.

[00:10:17] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, I think we should accentuate this idea that came from Amazon. They’re kind of supported and known as the most customer obsessed organization in the industry to the point where there’s lots of studies that have shown, we can get things now with a prime membership in like two days. 

[00:10:36] Steve MacDonald: I also think we should emphasize Amazon’s idea of being the most customer-obsessed company. Their studies show how they’ve set new standards, with Prime deliveries in two days influencing even B2B expectations. Our buyers expect a certain experience with us. That empty chair should remind us, whether we’re on Zoom or in person, to ask how we’d decide if the customer were here.

[00:11:07] Steve MacDonald: What I hope you can explain more is the CMO’s role in interfunctional coordination.

[00:11:18] Dawn Mueller: Yeah, there are a lot of players, but I think we can become the cohesive glue, so to speak, to be the champion for interfunctional coordination by speaking up at meetings. One of the things that can obstruct CMOs is having good data to report.

[00:11:36] Dawn Mueller: Sometimes we get caught up in measuring what we can, not necessarily what we should. One of the first steps is investing in a decent analytics platform so that you’ve got your multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, and predictive analytics.

[00:11:51] Dawn Mueller: What that does is quiets a lot of the noise. For example, marketing is adding value, and here’s how we’re going to add more. Speaking up is important. I think a lot of marketing professionals are a bit humble. A lot of marketing has to be strategic.

[00:12:08] Dawn Mueller: We have that tendency to be strategic thinkers, but we don’t always feel we can demonstrate that across the board. That’s where we need to step up—quiet the noise, quantify the value marketing is bringing, and then speak up.

[00:12:26] Dawn Mueller: For example, “Hey IT team, Cybersecurity Month is coming up in October. What are we doing to promote the fact that we have a more secure platform that benefits both internally and externally?” Asking these questions adds value and creates awareness.

[00:12:43] Dawn Mueller: Sometimes these questions may not directly impact marketing, but if you view yourself as leading interfunctional coordination and connecting the dots, that’s where you’ll find more value. Let me give you an example.

[00:12:59] Dawn Mueller: We recently invested in a tool that helps with lead nurturing, lead development, lead generation, and demand generation. It acts like a virtual BDR for us—AI-powered. During a conversation with HR, they asked if they could use it for recruiting and talent outreach.

[00:13:32] Dawn Mueller: I said yes, we can adapt the tool for that purpose. So now we’re adding value across departments, and the exchange of ideas becomes much more fluid. It’s very gestalt, and I think the CMO is perfectly positioned to add that value.

[00:13:48] Steve MacDonald: You know, one thing nobody can contest is when the CEO plays the role of the highest authority, especially when they understand the ICP—the ideal customer profile. If you know that best, it trumps every decision made within the organization.

[00:14:15] Steve MacDonald: We’ll talk more about the ICP, but I wanted to mention that the CMO as a facilitator is key to making this happen. One of the most important things we can do is ensure every department understands their role from the customer’s perspective and how they support that. HR, for example, plays a huge role in hiring the right people to support interfunctional coordination.

[00:14:57] Steve MacDonald: And if you make every department feel really important, not just an ancillary part of the organization but a critical part of its success, then they’re going to want to participate a lot more as well.

[00:15:12] Steve MacDonald: So, the importance of the CMO’s involvement to avoid failure due to misalignment with other departments is clear. Tell me more about that failure. We’ve talked a lot about what it takes to be successful, but I was intrigued when you mentioned that before.

[00:15:29] Dawn Mueller: I think the worst thing, or the biggest predictor of failure for a CMO, is when nobody knows what you’re doing, or they have a wrong perception of what you’re doing. That’s a big part of it too. And making sure you’re part of the conversation, amplifying the voice of the customer—whether it comes from marketing, product development, or any other group—is huge. It ties into the analytics I mentioned earlier.

[00:15:58] Dawn Mueller: What is the value marketing provides? Make that a topic of conversation, and address it right away. Having the right tools and building relationships across the board is critical.

[00:16:10] Dawn Mueller: If you’re not building those relationships, not talking with those departments, you may miss opportunities. I’ve had departments say, “If everything’s going well, we don’t need to talk.” But I disagree—I want us to be in sync, regularly discussing things, even if it’s just casual conversation. Underestimating the need to build rapport is a mistake. Yes, it takes work, but it’s the same kind of work good leaders do with their teams. Think of the whole company as your team. You’re going to have those touchpoints.

[00:16:48] Steve MacDonald: Great analogy. We need to break down silos. We usually don’t think we have silos within our own team because we invest in them.

[00:16:56] Steve MacDonald: But if we invest the same time and effort into relationships across departments, why don’t we see the same benefit?

[00:17:04] Steve MacDonald: Misalignment is one of the top reasons why CMOs fail, especially the misalignment between marketing and sales. We’ve introduced this customer-centric approach. How do you get the customer’s voice? How do you understand it and translate it into the process?

[00:17:30] Dawn Mueller: We need input mechanisms for that, Steve. One way is through voice-of-customer interactions, where we ask a series of questions. It could be one-on-one with the product team, sales team, or customer success—marketing is involved, too. We gather that one-on-one feedback, which might be part of a quarterly business review or something similar.

[00:17:52] Dawn Mueller: Another method is surveys. We recently did one on something as simple as how customers prefer to communicate—email, phone, chat. You find patterns that way, so surveys are important.

[00:18:05] Dawn Mueller: We also hold a combined client advisory board and user group meeting, a client summit. We have a main session and then split into smaller groups—some participate in the advisory board, others in the user group. That’s another great way to extract valuable information. I love the Amazon analogy—the customer’s chair is always in the room.

[00:18:29] Dawn Mueller: We try to ensure we’re thinking about the customer and checking with them every step of the way. As I mentioned, we use different mechanisms. One thing we brought back is a newsletter, sending it to clients and prospective clients to share updates and give them a voice.

[00:18:50] Dawn Mueller: Clients can say, “I liked that article” or “Why talk about this? It’s not relevant.” Giving them these feedback mechanisms is a key part of that process.

[00:19:02] Steve MacDonald: So, what I’m getting is that we need to find every opportunity to learn from the customer. Whether it’s sales calls, product discussions, or surveys, we should not only keep talking to them but also keep finding new ways to learn, as they are the highest authority.

[00:19:18] Steve MacDonald: The CMO has to represent the customer’s voice in meetings. If the customer were here, who would speak for them?

[00:19:39] Dawn Mueller: Right. Exactly. 

[00:19:40] Steve MacDonald:  You’ve got to sit in that chair and play that role. It’s an interesting way to think about it.

[00:19:45] Dawn Mueller: And don’t guess, right? It’s funny because I’ve seen commercials on Bloomberg during the day, and there’s a theme: “Why don’t we just ask the customer what’s important?” It sounds simple, but people often speculate. Let’s just ask them and find out.

[00:19:59] Dawn Mueller: A demand generation program can include a survey, giving us data to share with external audiences. We tell customers, “This is what you told us; is it accurate?” So, it’s one thing to gather input, but it’s also about confirming that we heard them and are addressing their feedback.

[00:20:15] Dawn Mueller: Closing that loop is key. If I’m a customer, I’d want to know, “Did you hear me?” Oh, you put that in your newsletter? Okay, you heard me.

[00:20:31] Dawn Mueller: So, we gather information from customers. What are we doing with it? How is it changing things? If I’m a customer, I’d ask, “Did you really hear me?”

[00:20:44] Steve MacDonald: We’ve covered a lot here. Is there something we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure we cover today?

[00:20:57] Dawn Mueller: Oh my gosh, there’s so much. But I’d say, make the effort. Talk.

[00:21:01] Dawn Mueller: Also, as I mentioned, be a lifelong learner. I’m comfortable with marketing, but I’m less comfortable with finance. I’m currently struggling through a Coursera course on finance for non-financial managers from Rice University.

[00:21:23] Dawn Mueller: Challenge yourself to learn about different areas. You don’t have to be an expert, but just understanding is key, like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It helps to understand rather than to be understood.

[00:21:44] Steve MacDonald: I love this never-ending learning. It’s kind of like a doctor. You have to constantly be in a continuing education. You’re required to be in continuing education. What you’re saying is we should require that of ourselves.

[00:21:59] Dawn Mueller: Yes. 

[00:22:00] Steve MacDonald: So, you’ve accomplished a lot in your career. PhD and working with some of the biggest consulting firms. In all that you’ve done, what are you the most proud of? 

[00:22:11] Dawn Mueller: You know, a couple of weeks ago, I might have had a different answer, but it changes all the time. I am most proud of my team here at Vitech, their effort, and their commitment.

[00:22:24] Dawn Mueller: People say there’s a lack of work ethic these days, but these guys move heaven and earth. They are committed to delivering the best experience for our customers, ensuring they know what they can get. So right now, I’m most proud of my team.

[00:22:40] Steve MacDonald: That’s a great way to reinforce what you said earlier about the importance of their role. If we’re not proud of our teams, we haven’t done our job in bringing them together. You need people who will do the job and make you proud. Sounds like it’s all working. That’s great.

[00:23:00] Steve MacDonald: We can’t retain more than about three concepts at a time. But if there was one thing you wanted people to take away from this episode, what would that be?

[00:23:13] Dawn Mueller: Build rapport with your colleagues in other departments and teams. It’s worth it. They’ll add value to your career and job, and you’ll add value to theirs. Overall, it gives you a much higher degree of satisfaction.

[00:23:31] Steve MacDonald: Words of wisdom. Thank you. I know people may have questions after listening or watching. Would it be okay if we provided a link to your LinkedIn profile so they can reach out to you?

[00:23:43] Dawn Mueller: Absolutely. I’m happy to communicate. I might be a little backlogged because work takes up a lot of time, but I’m always happy to respond.

[00:23:51] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Dawn, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I really appreciate it, and I know the listeners do too.

[00:24:00] Dawn Mueller: Thank you, Steve. I really enjoyed our conversation with you.