There’s Less and Less Daylight Between CMOs and CIOs

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Chuck Kapelke

When the pandemic started in early 2020 the sales team at ANA member GE Healthcare — which manufactures a slew of hospital equipment like X-ray machines, MRIs, and ultrasounds — was forced to suspend onsite customer visits, which left the marketing crew scrambling to find alternative ways to provide customers with the information they needed. “When you’re talking about buying two-million-dollar pieces of equipment, the site visit is like a test drive; it’s an expectation for the customer,” says Sonia Sahney, CMO for molecular imaging and computed tomography at GE Healthcare. “We really had to pivot quickly to a new model where we had virtual site visits, using 360-degree visualization technology, to recreate the experience.”

Sahney’s marketing team was able to implement the digital tools they needed in large part because they have a strong working relationship with the company’s IT department.

Marketing and IT share updates regularly at GE Healthcare, while the company also has a sales enablement department dedicated to providing commercial sales reps with up-to-date digital marketing materials. “The CMO and CIO have regular touchpoints to make sure that everything is aligned, and the different teams are connected,” Sahney says.

Marketing and IT working in unison is de rigueur at GE Healthcare. But that’s more the exception than the rule.

Only 23 percent of marketing leaders have a “very effective” working relationship with their CIO, and nearly 40 percent describe the relationship as “moderately effective” or “not effective,” according to “Making Martech Pay Off,” a recent report by the CMO Council and KPMG based on the responses from 200 marketers across 12 industries.

“The CIO and CMO have always had a competitive relationship — for resources and for stature in the C-suite,” says Tom Kaneshige, chief content officer at the CMO Council. “What’s changed is that the CMO is now responsible for digital transformation and customer experience, and they’re expected to tie revenue growth to their marketing activities. To pull that off, they need excellent decision-making and execution on martech and on data analytics. They really need an effective relationship with the CIO to get it right.”

Retest the Dashboard

To build a stronger connection with IT, marketers first need to check the status of their company’s marketing technology stack and locate the trouble spots.

“Facilitating candid conversations can start to bridge the gaps between teams, and help them to understand and shape priorities together,” says Janet Balis, marketing practice leader at ANA member EY.

To align marketing with IT more effectively and determine who owns “martech” — marketing or IT — companies may consider hiring someone to fill a bridge role and shape a strategic vision based on dual ownership. If too much technology sits in marketing, for instance, brands should develop a cross-functional team with the IT side to ensure compliance with the company’s broader technology goals.

“It’s about building that partnership, taking skills from both the technology and marketing organizations, and putting them together so one plus one equals three,” says Bret Sanford-Chung, a managing director at KPMG U.S. Advisory Services, Marketing Consulting, part of ANA member KPMG LLP. “Those two mindsets will come at a customer challenge differently, and that’s a good thing.”

Marketing and IT leaders should also jointly adopt formal governance structures to ensure accountability and oversight. Nearly half of CMOs in “very effective” relationships with IT (47 percent) employ three or more governance techniques, compared to those in “effective” (33 percent) and “moderately effective” (17 percent) relationships, the CMO Council-KPMG study says.

“The biggest mistake firms make is that marketing takes a lead,” Kaneshige says. “When you see a relationship that’s not equal, you get a lack of participation, you get things thrown over the wall. It’s not just saying, ‘We’re going to be equal partners.’ There have to be governance structures to execute on that.”

Governance structures could include “RACI” (delineating who is “responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed” for different initiatives), and cross-functional steering committees that provide strategic direction.

“Without governance, teams may just stagnate and spin, or they make a lot of decisions quickly and overload themselves with too much to get anything done,” says Craig Rutkowske, a director at KPMG U.S. Advisory Services, Marketing Consulting. “The steering committee needs to be willing to take recommendations from everybody on the team, and their decisions need to have teeth.”

End Goals

CMOs don’t necessarily have to know the ins and outs of their marketing technology, but they have to understand how everything fits together. “We need to say, ‘This is where we want to get; this is end stage,'” Sahney says. “All of this is really about customer enablement, making sure they get the experience that they need. We’re just trying to facilitate.”

Thomas Husson, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, adds: “Companies with greater marketing and technology collaboration are more likely to improve the end-to-end customer journey (from order to fulfillment) instead of focusing on digital customer interfaces. The result? They become more profitable by increasing revenue, boosting loyalty, and reducing costs.”

Marketers should also work closely with their IT colleagues to help inform a holistic view of the company’s martech efforts, as brands cater to increasingly diverse audiences.

“It’s important to not assume anything can be one-size-fits-all, given the differences in regulation and privacy, and data availability,” EY’s Balis says. “The ability of the CMO to work across the organization to bring all that together into a singular point of view on priorities has tremendous value to the CIO, as they try to build the right architecture and organization to support that future state.”

Strength in Numbers

A strong relationship between CMOs and CIOs also leads to better returns from martech investments. According to the CMO Council report, 75 percent of marketers with a “very effective” relationship with the CIO regularly collect and provide insights and recommendations, compared to 11 percent of those marketers with “moderately effective” CIO relationships.

Marketers with a very effective relationship with CIOs use more than four KPIs on average, compared to 2.6 KPIs on average for those with “moderately effective” relationship, according to the survey.

“Companies where marketing and technology are tied at the hip use not only marketing KPIs, but also technology KPIs, like whether the system is up for an appropriate amount of time, or whether customer data is kept safe,” Rutkowske says. “They’re looking at all of these things through the same lens, and not only do they report on them, but they’re more likely to actually derive insight and actionable changes from them.”

When the CMO and CIO align their KPIs, they also have an easier time engaging their colleagues at the C-level. “If the CMO and the CIO are coming to the C-suite with one strategic plan, with integrated short-term and long-term KPIs, and an integrated scorecard and budget, the CFO is happy,” Sanford-Chung says. “And if the CFO’s happy, the CEO is happy.”

With online analytics and data management now synonymous with marketing strategy, the onus is on CMOs to cultivate — and broaden — their relationships with CIOs. “Don’t wait to make that connection,” Sahney says. “Even if you don’t have shared objectives on day one, making that connection early will help you get to a vision that you can work toward.”