Transforming Your Marketing Organization: Insights from Gartner's Recent Webinar
Marketing has come a long way from its traditional roots. Today’s marketer needs to be nimble, dynamic, and customer centric. Fortunately, organizations are embracing the changes required to bring marketing into the digital age.
During a recent webinar hosted by Gartner, Sally Witzky outlined some of the key organizational shifts that are happening for enterprise marketing teams. In this blog, we’ll provide some of our key takeaways from the presentation and offer recommendations on how technology can support and impact this transformation.
Marketing organizational structures have changed drastically, and they still aren’t done changing.
Marketing leaders are reassessing everything from their operating models to their agency mixes, talent mix, and team skill sets. The driving force behind this need for change is multi-faceted. It started during COVID, but it’s extended with the transformative shift to a more customer-centric culture, and in support of disruptive buyer habits and increasingly burdensome cross-functional collaboration.
In short, the siloed, hierarchical marketing organizational structure is no longer cutting it. 86% of CMOs agree that their marketing organization must make significant changes to how it works to achieve sustainable results.
The end goal of transformation? Making the team more impactful and effective.
The two key goals of today’s organizational transformation are:
1) Eliminating silos to ensure the marketing organizational structure is not impeding workflow
2) Having greater ability to prioritize high-value, critical jobs-to-be-done
Marketing leaders are also aiming to reduce internal competition and ensure their team can more cohesively work in the same direction, as well as cross-functionally with other departments.
Technology can enrich organizational transformations in marketing.
As CMOs continue to work through these widespread changes, significant capability gaps have emerged. Most notably, a lack of customer understanding and experience management. Employee skill sets and organizational structure play vital roles here, but so too can technology.
For instance, investing in an enterprise-level work management system like Adobe Workfront can bring cross-functional teams together in a single place to request, track, and execute work. This breaks down barriers and makes orchestrating work across the entire marketing lifecycle much more seamless. It also supports better work prioritization (i.e. is this request high-value based on our overall strategy?) and resource allocation (i.e. do we have the right skills sets working on the right projects?).
The benefits of a platform like Workfront can extend outside of marketing, too. By bringing Legal/Compliance, HR, Sales, and other functions into the platform, organizations can achieve greater visibility and improved collaboration overall.
And while adding new technology in support of a transformation is great, it’s also important to take inventory of what you already have. Are teams using separate systems that are slowing down collaboration? Is there a lot of manual work taking place behind the scenes? Do your existing systems “talk” to each other or is data being duplicated across multiple platforms? Rationalizing your existing stack can help you ensure you have the right tools, integrated in the right way, to gain greater insights into customer behavior and improve customer experience.
Success comes down to how you implement (and communicate) change.
Even with the best new organizational structure and/or technology, transformation requires a strong change management plan that includes buy-in from stakeholders, evangelization of the benefits of the transition, and upskilling employees who may be doing the same job differently. To ease the transition process, we suggest starting with a pilot project to test-run new techniques and approaches. This way, you can quickly eliminate or revise any ineffective practices.
In summary, CMOs are aware of the need to transition to a more modern, customer-centric marketing mode…yet it can be a daunting.
By taking a comprehensive, phased approach—one that focuses on people, processes, and technology—marketing leaders can overcome challenges that usually arise during an organizational transformation and be well on their way to becoming a strategic, adaptive powerhouse.
Megan Cacioppo, Director of Marketing
