The B2B revenue process is under siege. Changing buying behaviors are making traditional ways of marketing irrelevant. The buyer journey is now complex and focuses a lot on self-research. The overreliance on lead generation metrics is obscuring the bigger picture of revenue impact. With marketers still focusing primarily on driving new logo pipeline and acquisition, they are missing the other 61% of revenue opportunities made up by their customer base. It’s time for CMOs to step up, make changes, and take ownership of the entire revenue cycle before it’s too late.
The CMO’s Expanded Remit
To navigate these challenges, CMOs must broaden their scope. It’s time to move beyond lead generation and focus on revenue contribution. This expanded remit includes filling the following roles:
- A leader of change: driving change across the entire customer lifecycle, from awareness to advocacy.
- An engineer of alignment: ensuring cross-departmental shared goals that focus on customers to drive exceptional customer outcomes with revenue benefits.
- A harnesser of capabilities: leveraging capabilities and competencies across the organization to find new and improved ways to deliver increased customer value.
The CMO’s Mandate In Revenue Process Transformation
Revenue process transformation is more than a buzz-phrase; it’s a strategic imperative. Revenue processes as we know them today are collapsing due to changing buyer behaviors. Buyers are increasingly self-servicing in the education and awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and don’t respond to calls to action until very late in the journey. Because of this, a transformation needs to happen in the revenue process today to shift our mindset in terms of what constitutes “leads.” CMOs need to embrace their expanded remit and apply them across revenue process transformation efforts. By changing their focus from leads to opportunities, harnessing buying signals and looking at intent data, and expanding focus from new logo acquisitions to the full revenue opportunity, CMOs can start to move the needle in the right direction.
Understand what CMOs need to do today to lead the change in revenue process transformation, and decipher how to translate the CMO’s expanded remit into practical steps to transform the current revenue process of the organization to meet the rapid changes of buyer behavior and maximize revenue opportunities.
Join me at Forrester’s B2B Summit APAC on October 1 in Singapore as I explore why CMOs play an imperative role in preventing the collapse of the B2B revenue process.
