You know it’s critical to focus on your customers. But when it comes to everything from planning to processes, most marketers face challenges with making organizational shifts – and making them quickly.
Forrester has included Eric Dukart, Perficient’s Salesforce practice director, in its recent report Five New Perspectives on Marketing Process. Released today, the report highlights why smart and streamlined processes are a must for customer-obsessed marketing. It notes, however, that 43% of B2B marketers are currently organized by channel-specific domain expertise (email, advertising, social, etc.). In addition, “Only 18% of marketers said their organization was ‘fully supportive of customer journey over functional silos.’”
The new report is intended to help CMOs and other marketing executives establish and scale effective processes to better coordinate resources, reduce costs, and orchestrate cross-channel experiences.
Progress Over Perfection: Why It’s Often a Struggle
Organizational immaturity. Rapid expansion. Under-resourced initiatives. There are many reasons why marketers focus on what, rather than how when it comes to processes.
But if improvements aren’t regularly incorporated, those advancements are typically only one-time gains. That means, for many, the right step may be a process reboot.
As noted in the report, Perficient’s Eric Dukart came to this realization after a one-time rebranding effort at Sundog Interactive, which was acquired by Perficient in 2019. “Developing a strategic messaging architecture took our brand to a new level. It took over a year to define it, implement it, and get team members to understand that this is how we were going to market,” he said. “Having realized the impact on our marketing, we made the decision to address message management as an ongoing process, not a project.”
5 Dimensions to the Customer-Obsessed Marketing Process
To evolve, Forrester recommends evaluating process through five different lenses:
- Structures: team composition and cross-team engagement
- Systems: technology, applications, and data
- Patterns: workflows, tasks and generally how work gets done
- Evaluations: well-designed and documented processes
- Outputs: both external (content, events, and campaigns) and internal (research plans and budgets)
Now What: Next Steps for the Marketing Process
The report includes several specific recommendations to help B2B marketers fix problematic processes, from mixing up team compositions to modernizing and consolidating your marketing technology stack.
“At Perficient, we have gone ‘all in’ on being customer-obsessed,” noted Dukart in the report. His biggest passion is simple: helping Perficient’s clients do the same with their own customers.
Want to learn more about improving your marketing processes or make a bigger shift toward customer-obsession at your organization? Contact our experts, and tell us what challenges are in your way. We’d love to help.
