A recent report from Gartner tells us that marketing automation will be the fastest growing category in CRM over the next four years and that by 2017, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will have a bigger IT budget than chief information officers (CIOs). This should be a real wake-up call for any B2B marketing group that has delayed jumping into the marketing automation and social marketing fray. The message is clear: if you want to remain competitive, you’ll need to master these technologies.
During this early stage, there may be many obstacles, including:
- Executives who do not see how marketing can play a significant role in revenue. This happens most often in larger and more traditional organizations that are driven by sales. The company is constricted in their views due to complex and siloed organizational structures and/ or older executives with no experience in marketing beyond the traditional aspects.
- The VP of sales sees marketing as the “event” and “make it pretty” department. Since sales and marketing alignment is such a critical success factor for revenue marketing, being unable to change the perspective of the chief sales officer can almost guarantee failure or a long, hard battle.
- The current marketing team is uncomfortable talking about revenue or having any responsibility in this area. “This is not what I was hired to do” is what we hear and what many marketers are thinking. This happens in companies of all sizes and is often a surprise to the executive leading the change.
Debbie Qaqish, Rise of the Revenue Marketer
