Meta Karagianni

• With the uncertainty created by COVID-19, CMOs must ruthlessly prioritize where their teams place their focus to drive future success
• B2B CMOs should use the next few months to surface, align and prioritize critical areas of improvement across the entire marketing organization; running a well-focused function is more important than ever
• The SiriusDecisions CMO Diagnostic provides an analytical platform CMOs can use to identify critical gaps and develop an action plan

• The SiriusDecisions 2019 Global CMO study validates the ongoing imperative of communicating marketing’s full value to the business
• The new SiriusDecisions B2B Marketing Value Model helps CMOs communicate the overall value marketing creates for the business
• It takes five simple steps to adapt the B2B Marketing Value Model to the needs of a specific organization

• As B2B CMOs and marketing leaders continue to transform their organizations, they struggle to articulate the value that marketing creates for the business
• Revenue-centric KPIs are a key component of marketing’s performance, but they’re no longer enough to articulate marketing’s value in a holistic way
• B2B CMOs/marketing leaders must expand the way they articulate marketing’s full value to the business

• Confidence among B2B marketers is high; most of the more than 200 global CMOs surveyed expect their marketing budget to increase over the next two years
• North-American, EMEA and Asia-Pacific CMOs support different growth strategies that shape their marketing strategies and influence their marketing priorities
• Although North American, EMEA and Asia-Pacific CMOs have similar plans to add resources, marketing leaders must pay special attention to region-specific needs

• As the B2B revenue engine evolves, alignment must expand beyond the way sales, marketing and product engage and convert buyers
• Revenue leaders must gain a clear understanding of all the possible areas where alignment can support the attainment of key business objectives – including growth and profitability
• Failing to understand and operationalize alignment across new areas that support revenue and profitability will cause revenue leaders to fall behind

• The time is ripe for field marketing to redefine how it provides value to the business or risk becoming irrelevant
• CMOs must encourage field marketing leaders to move from hiring generalists to building a function able to support four specialist areas: defined demand, channel, customer and account-based marketing
• CMOs should leverage the SiriusDecisions Field Marketing Job Family to define a forward-looking view of the field marketing function and address dilution and pollution causes

• The role of the B2B CMO is evolving, and we have identified six critical areas of success
• CMOs must move beyond being great marketing leaders; they must show enterprise-wide leadership, drive change and be strongly connected to business results 
• CMOs must evolve and understand the new demands and expectations being placed upon them 

• The hype surrounding agile marketing is increasing, but the definition of agile remains unclear
• CMOs/marketing leaders declare that they want their marketing teams to become more agile
• Agility does not mean chaos; agile marketing borrows agile principles and requires planning, clear processes, roles and responsibilities

• B2B CMOs report marketing planning is the number-one internal process that needs to be fixed or revised
• Cumbersome planning processes and the lack of a consistent approach inhibit B2B marketing organizations today
• There are three main reasons that drive further organizational changes across EMEA marketing teams

• EMEA CMOs continue to evolve the organizational structure of their marketing teams
• Seventy-five percent of EMEA CMOs have moved away from siloed country operations
• There are three main reasons to further drive organizational change across EMEA marketing teams

• CMOs and marketing leaders face a growing marketing skills gap that they must address
• A “spray and pray” approach to marketing enablement is insufficient, wasting resources and delivering suboptimal results
• Establish a path that connects newly acquired knowledge to application of the knowledge on an ongoing basis

• Although becoming agile has emerged as a common desire at many B2B organizations, for the majority it remains a wishful state
• When building an approach to becoming agile, Symantec first needed to ask, “how often do we need to be agile?”
• This led to the genesis of a framework that allows the organization determine the potential impact of any market-triggered event

• We still have some way to go to truly embrace digital and benefit from its potential
• Understanding buyers and their behavior is paramount to high-performance marketing and customer-centric innovation
• Develop a holistic understanding of interaction patterns, both self-guided and human-to-human

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