In this week’s edition of Podcast Recappers we look at an episode of Marketing Smarts hosted by Kerry O’Shea Gorgone. Part of the Marketing Profs podcasting network, Marketing Smarts gives listeners advice about a wide variety of marketing topics through interviews with some of the biggest names in marketing.
This episode’s focus is career management and features Teradata Applications CMO Lisa Arthur, an industry thought-leader, 30-year technology marketing veteran, and the author of Big Data Marketing: Engage Your Customers More Effectively and Drive Value.
Kerry and Lisa talk about the role of the CMO today and tomorrow and what it takes to be effective in the role.
Right off the top Arthur gives some great advice for aspiring CMOs: Develop a collaborative leadership style. She says that because CMOs are “change agents”, they’re often too focused on the customer and then hammering through the internal changes needed to achieve that growth and value.
She added, “To drive change, too often I’ve seen CMOs (including myself) break a little glass or too much glass and it ends up hurting the credibility of the programs and initiatives that they’re driving.” Arthur went on to say that it starts with alignment in the C-suite and then extends to the teams leading the change.
A key takeaway was how CMOs and marketers need to use data and technology better in their work. “As we bring in (this) data, as we consolidate our channels, as we improve our customer centric processes, the technology is there to help us deliver on this long term vision of individualized marketing,” Arthur said when asked about it.
She advised CMOs to consolidate technology tools where possible, use data to create individual experiences for customers (especially in the B2B market), and provide value at all times to the customer, since they’re the ones in control today.
According to Arthur, results are the biggest key to success for any CMO, and to do that marketers must use an “outside-in focus versus the inside-out focus that we’ve traditionally thought about.” Think of the customers first and then figure out how to deliver the most value to them from within.
When it comes to B2B marketing specifically, Arthur stressed the idea of story-telling. To her, “story is critical.” But it can be a harder sell to the B2B C-suite because they don’t quite understand the importance of stories to the brand. She suggested that B2B marketers must“be great storytellers, educate (everyone) on why story is important, and (then) prove it with results.”
Maybe someone has been reading our B2Bnn excerpts of Mark Evans’ book on why startups should turn to storytelling?
To listen to the rest of the conversation with Lisa Arthur on Marketing Smarts, check out the podcast here.
