The role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years. Dozens of CMO positions have been axed from some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including McDonald’s which replaced the role with a new SVP marketing technology position. CMOs who remain will need to prepare to handle even more pressure to prove their organizational value in 2020, says a new Forrester report.

In 2018 Forrester predicted a decline in Fortune 100 CMOs. Since then, organizations have started to part ways with CMOs, reallocating their responsibilities to leaders such as the CIO. 2020 is predicted to be a critical year for CMOs to deliver seamless customer experiences with their martech investments and, crucially, generate attributable revenue from those martech-enabled experiences. 

Martech spend continues to take a solid chunk out of CMOs’ budgets, and while spending slowed this year, the report warns that CMOs approach martech investments cautiously — and more strategically. “Rather than blindly dumping more money into tech spend, we’ve delivered growth with a strategy built around creative engagement with our customers through existing channels,” Chris Brandt, CMO of Chipotle told Forrester.

1. A marketing back office renaissance. That drop in marketing budgets is largely due in part, according to Gartner, to marketing leadership being too distracted by tactics and execution. For that reason, we predict a renaissance of the back office – meaning a greater focus and investment on the strategic arm of the marketing organization (basically everything that is happening behind the scenes within marketing.)

2. Alliance between the CMO and CFO. As budgets are tightened, marketing teams that succeed in 2018 will build a closer relationship between Marketing and Finance.

3. A new Chief of Staff to the CMO, Marketing Operations. These trends, along with the newfound pressure for marketing to run more like a business, have created a new VIP on the marketing team; Marketing Operations. For many organizations, MOPs has emerged as the most capable resource to step in and help the CMO in their quest, especially with responsibilities related to data cleanliness, marketing resource management, and marketing performance management.

And these challenges are reflected in the findings of this year’s CMO Spend Survey:

CMOs have pulled-back on the proportion of budget allocated to martech, falling from 27% of the marketing budget in 2016 to 22% in 2017.
Marketing analytics investments represent the single biggest area of investment, taking 9.2% of budget in 2017, but questions abound regarding how well aligned analytics efforts are to delivering strategic measures to CMOs.
CMO’s relationships with CFOs are uneasy, not surprising when half CMOs still use basic techniques to build their budgets, rather than modelling the returns that their budget will deliver.

See the trends that are having the greatest influence on changes to b-to-b marketing strategies over the next two years.

One: Start collaborating: Today’s b-to-b buyers expect a seamless customer experience.
Two: Accelerate customer experiences: Focus combined efforts on an understanding of the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle.
Three: Productive technology infrastructure deployments.
Four: Robust security and privacy. In the interest of protecting customer, prospect and organizational data, organizations must understand the data privacy regulations in every region they operate in, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (coming in 2018) or HIPAA rules in healthcare.
Five: Common measurements. 
Six: Joint processes and alignment.
Seven: Aligned leadership and communications.

Here are five takeaways from the playbook that every CMO should consider as they lead their teams:

1. Exercise your financial muscles. Do whatever it takes to ensure you and your team are able to translate your activities to the top and/or bottom line in the right language. 

2. Represent brand purpose and hold the line. 

3. Culture is King. Period. 

4. Before you invest in one more campaign, invest in your team, and yourself. Providing the right tools, training, and development opportunities for your entire team, including you, is essential for survival not just a nice-to-have. I’m not talking about technical skills – you’ll have a long list of those that will continuously evolve — but soft skills that will help everyone on your team tap into their true potential and work better together. 

5. Everyone needs help, so ask for it. 

Senior marketers say the most important quality/ability of a successful CMO is to be the voice of the customer at the leadership table. Check out what else the CMO Survey discovered.

1. Up: CMOs are promoted into new roles.

In this path, CMOs take on a new title and position, with responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience and other growth-oriented functions.

2. Over: CMOs take over new responsibilities.

In this path, CMOs keep the same title, but are given responsibilities over other areas affecting the customer experience such as e-commerce, product, customer service, and digital transformation.

3. Down: CMOs lose influence and authority. 

CMOs can find themselves on a downward path for a variety of reasons. Some research indicates that CEOs hold CMOs responsible for disruptive growth more than any other position in the C-Suite. Yet CMOs don’t feel they are positioned to disrupt the status quo or achieve aspirational growth. Sometimes the CEO sets the growth agenda but CMOs either aren’t interested or don’t have the skills to go on and reshape the customer experience and drive organizational change. In other scenarios, the CMO is interested, but the CEO doesn’t see their role as being more than running campaigns and generating leads. In this case, the CEO may bring in a new role over marketing.

4. Out: CMOs leave the organization.

CMOs move out of organizations for many different reasons. Sometimes they don’t fit with the direction the company is going, as was the case with Coca-Cola. Sometimes it’s because CEOs want their CMOs to drive growth and transform the experience, but don’t give them the mandate, resources, or span of control to do so. Eventually, the CMO serves as a convenient scapegoat when the company doesn’t deliver on its growth commitments.

Demand generation CMO’s can no longer support the massive complexity and spend required to support today’s challenges.  CMO’s seek simplification and scale from technology while improving the efficacy of existing staff.  Leading CMO’s expect more staff augmentation for scarce skills.  The continued onslaught of regulation will lead to a greater reliance on technology solutions to achieve scale.   As technology improves, demand generation CMO’s can apply the creative aspects of the Brand CMO and improve engagement in campaigns that reflect the brand and deliver contextual relevancy.   CMO’s can expect this market to transform in the next 24 to 36 months.

CIOs will need to take on the challenge of marketing disruption with the following approaches:

o Partner with the CMO

o Focus on Marchitecture and Integration

o Help CMOs Evaluate MarTech Options

Key Investments for CRM 3.0
• Business Intelligence Engine

o Supports Real-time Processing

o Flexibility to Ingest New Data Sources

o Scalability

o Data Prep and Analytics Automation

o AI/Machine Learning

"One official definition of systems thinking is “a management discipline that concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the components that comprise the entirety of that defined system.” In other words, it gives you a framework to assess the importance of individual parts of the puzzle, as well as their cumulative impact and how different parts of your marketing strategy affect broader outcomes. That’s what a CMO does differently than a marketer who’s running from tactic to tactic trying to achieve results. They set the vision, assess different options for getting there, and then craft a road map that’s designed to get you there.

Technology futurist Brian Solis developed a framework that he calls the “Wheel of Disruption.” I strongly encourage any marketer who’s feeling overwhelmed to take a deeper dive into it, but here’s the fundamental idea: In the field of marketing, there are disruptive technologies that come along and disrupt everything else. Just as marketers adapted to online processes, they had to start thinking about mobile. Now, as the digital experience is redefined, we’re starting to think beyond the screen to virtual reality, voice-based technologies, and fully immersive digital experiences. Before social media platforms, the relationship was direct for marketer to consumer. Now, there are communities, user-generated content, and conversations about your products and brands that you can’t control."

As smart CMOs figure out they need a new way to organize, some new terms that describe new organizational structures have been born. Consider these:

• Smarketing and SMOPS – This evolutionary function combines sales ops and marketing ops, thereby creating a true line of sight to the entire customer journey that enables almost real-time response and shared insights.
• Revenue Operations or Rev Ops – Another transformational role, this function looks at all revenue points and sets up the operations to support revenue attainment across the entire customer life cycle. Rev Ops tends to include every part of the company that touches the customer from customer service to sales to marketing – any touchpoint that can help create revenue.
• Customer Ops – This is an expanded view of the more traditional customer operations job that provides a holistic and connected view of the entire customer life cycle.

Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels says the degree to which business executives are putting CIOs in such precarious positions is up for debate because surveys don't paint the whole picture. In short, the statistics vary based on who is telling the tale, with respondents excluding some forms of technology from their consideration.

For example, U.S. business executives Forrester surveyed in 2016 claimed that 32 percent of their total technology purchases were made outside the purview of IT. But Bartels says this can't be accurate because he estimates that 70 percent of all technology spending is on MOOSE, or maintenance fees, outsourcing agreements, telecommunications services, operations and maintenance staff, as well as associated servers, storage, PCs and other hardware equipment IT typically controls. The remaining 30 percent of U.S. tech spending goes to new projects, where business involvement is greatest.

There are seemingly endless ways that marketing can work with IT to reimagine business and customer outcomes, but the right support is needed to make this happen. To this end, here are five things CMOs want CIOs to know to help marketing teams do what they do best:

1. Speed Matters

2. Solutions do not Always Need to be Built

3. Understand that We Live for the CX

4. We Need the Right Infrastructure and Tools

5. Be a True Business Partner

Here's a sneak peek to some best practices in developing a harmonious relationship with your finance counterparts: 
 

• Employ a marketing finance expert to bridge the marketing and finance gap. This individual will have a background in finance and marketing, bringing expertise in budgeting, accounting, and balance sheets. Their expertise will help marketers calibrate those hard KPIs, like ROMI and ROAS. 
• Involve finance in the marketing planning process. You can’t measure campaigns to business goals if you don't understand the metrics that matter to the business.  Financial professionals that are included in the marketing planning process can set the right metrics and KPIs to measure, help to develop forecasts, and determine if a marketing initiative is going to be profitable.  
• Bridge finance and marketing systems together.  Marketers and financial professionals that have access to marketing performance and transaction data will help to gather the necessary information to calculate incremental lift, revenue and true costs.