Marketing: The Cross-functional Adhesive of Customer Experience

The market landscape for modern-day marketers is different from their predecessors. Connected customer experiences have become a touchstone in customers’ mind. To meet with their expectations, marketers are adopting new tactics and evolving beyond traditional purviews.

Delivering the right message on the right channel at the right time is paramount for effective marketing, but that is not enough. For higher performance, marketing teams are now leading the customer experience initiatives across their broader organizations.

54% of high-performing marketers lead customer experience initiatives across the business.

One of the defining challenges for marketing is structural, that is how marketing should be structured and its functions be woven across departments.

Marketing is being centralized across organizations and newer marketing team structures that start with the customer are increasingly being implemented. Companies, a majority of them, are presenting a unified CX across departments like sales, product, and marketing. So, marketing needs to be more cross-functional, agile, and focused on customer personas.

Marketing is one such department that closely works with almost every customer-facing (customer service, sales, customer success, etc.) and backend (engineering, product, legal, etc.) teams.

So, there is nothing wrong in saying that marketing is the cross-functional glue to customer experience.

Integrated objectives and workflows across disparate departments are key to this leadership, but the best marketers know improvement starts from within. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of marketing leaders say that individuals and teams within their organization are more aligned with each other than ever before.

In other words, marketers are increasingly focused on supporting and complementing each other’s work to drive cohesive customer journeys, rather than focusing exclusively on their own channels or functions.

Furthermore, we will explain how integration of Marketing with some key teams can help establish smoother workflows and ultimately operations within your organization.

• Marketing & Sales

Aligning sales and marketing has been a talking point for a while now. But sky-high customer expectations are raising the bar for business purchases too. Increasingly sophisticated customer experiences are the driving force behind this. Thereby, it’s critical for sales and marketing to collaborate.

More than a half (52%) of marketing teams that share a good level of collaboration with sales say that they share common goals and metrics. A similar number enjoys a free and open flow of customer data between the teams.

Collaboration of both these teams becomes even more vital because they both are the biggest contributors to an organization’s revenue.

Marketers need concrete information about the market to understand the audience and Sales folks directly deal with people. They know better than anyone what people need and what people are asking for.

Similarly, Salespeople also need input from Marketing like marketing collaterals, and persona data to understand the people they will be interacting with.

Both of these teams are bound to work together for a better understanding of market, audience, competitors, and ultimately for brand value.

• Marketing & Support

Support, nowadays, is one of the contributors to revenue generation. They interact with your customers to solve their problems at every stage. Your customer share and discuss feature ideas or things that can be improved.

Those inputs from customers are of utmost importance for marketers to understand the psyche of consumers and for personalizing marketing efforts.

Thus, collaboration between both the teams can help the marketer come up with new ideas for content generation and personalizing the marketing experience.
Similarly, marketing would be able to share marketing collateral that customer service needs at different stages in order to close cases.

• Marketing, Product Development, & Engineering Teams

Don’t three of these departments share the same goal — a successful product and a thriving, growing company? They certainly do. It is just the communication silos that come in the way.

Enabling a greater degree of collaboration is what can bring them to work towards the same goal, help maintain transparency and communication throughout the process.

Marketing should be thoroughly involved in the product development process to devise marketing awareness strategies accordingly. Similarly, product and engineering teams also need input from the marketing team about what competitors are doing, what they can do differently, what kind of functionalities people in the market need, etc. so that they can streamline their product roadmap accordingly.

Conclusion

Marketing, within an organization, is the heart that keeps your whole organization running. Aligning Marketing with other teams is no longer a herculean task, technology has made it easier.

Sinergify — a Salesforce & Jira connector is one such solution. The product is a boon for brands, that are hugely invested in Salesforce and Jira, and enables a seamless integration of both the platforms.