SAAS | 8 MIN READ
To prove their staying power, marketers need to serve the entire customer journey
New technology has done more than merely test the mettle of marketers; it has transformed the means by which marketers engage. Today, Marketing is a discipline comprised of finite domains of expertise leaving many marketers ill equipped to handle this new era of specialization. As Global Vice President of Marketing for Cisco’s multi-billion-dollar Security business, Jeff Samuels has observed this paradigm shift from its epicenter, Silicon Valley.
According to Jeff, a principle responsibility of a marketer is to act as the voice of the customer. The key benefits of espousing the customer’s voice are to design more effective customer conversations while elevating and scaling customer engagements. In today’s era of digital transformation where most customer buying decisions are happening both physically and digitally away from the company, marketing is one of the most—if not the most—important priorities for every company.
Most firms attempt to define customer journeys as a way to support their intended go to market activities. Typically, functional organizations that touch customers have specific, and often misaligned, points of view on the best way to engage them. Sales, Services, Customer Success, even Engineering, all design and often deliver experiences to customers with the best of intentions but also with inherent disconnects.
“Each team often works on a separate point of the customer journey or creates their own unique journey with different moments that matter. When one team’s version of the journey is even 2% different from another group’s version, the resulting misalignment will have a substantive impact on the customer experience, and by extension, business outcomes. The modern marketing organization is often perfectly positioned to bring that perspective to the broader business.”
By representing the voice of the customer across their full lifecycle, Marketing can help its colleagues be more impactful and function as a true growth partner. Jeff would know. He’s navigated these business conversations well. For him, success, in part, comes down to rethinking one of Marketing’s oldest friends: data.
Marketers are no strangers to data. However, with an ever-increasing number of tools and measurable customer touchpoints, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the volume of data, and the new approaches to analysis. To continue advancing a modern go-to-market strategy, and a corresponding set of business outcomes, marketers will need to adopt a nimbler and more refined way of divining meaning from data. And in doing so, they will provide insight into the customer journey for the entire company.