This was originally published on Medium.
In 2013, I wrote an article about the “CRM of the Future” which included three key components: (1) Out-of-the-box Lead Recommendations, (2) True Canonical Leads and (3) Pipeline Transparency. At the time there wasn’t a term for these components, but in Gartner’s recent report on the Hype Cycle for Customer Analytic Applications and Forrester’s TechRadar on B2B Marketing Technologies, the banner of “Predictive Marketing” encapsulates these three use cases. We’re seeing a monumental shift in the way business software behaves; with Microsoft buying LinkedIn and Oracle buying Netsuite, software is now more unified than ever before. The expectation of future executives will be that CRM, ERP, and Marketing Automation (MAT), will be linked and a true representation of their business.
Larry Ellison’s comments in AdAge from a few years ago predicted the CMO of the future will be the revenue center, customer success center, and ultimate driver of the business. The main reason for this shift is that CMOs control the acquisition budgets of the business and these budgets now have a direct effect on revenue growth. With a CRM that automatically recommends new customers, sales teams can be effective, and technology now allows both B2B and B2C CMO’s to acquire customers in a data-driven fashion such that every marketing program can be attributed to a prospect in the funnel and that prospect’s stage within the funnel.
Why CMOs Need Predictive
CMOs looking to grow their business need to allocate budget to three key areas:
- Identifying new prospects
- Growing share of wallet with existing customer
- Re-engaging prospects who did not buy before.
CMOs will need a predictive analytics solution that will both mine their existing CRM and MAT data as well search externally to uncover opportunities in each of these three areas.
Ultimately, if the CMO owns the revenue growth of the business and needs to maximize growth from these three areas, Predictive marketing platforms will enable better market entry and budget allocation decisions for modern CMOs. Predictive becomes not just a one of the many integrated tools attached to your CRM and MAT, but a new backbone layer – the system of insight that drives the strategy of every marketing organization.
Predictive Completes The Marketing Stack
Fortune 500’s are adopting Predictive marketing platforms by the day and that’s not only apparent to analysts like Gartner and Forrester, it’s also apparent to us at Radius.
CMOs are buying a Predictive platform because current systems don’t deliver the data transparency and predictable results they’re looking for to drive revenue and growth for their business. In essence, the “Future of CRM” that business leaders expected from dashboards, analytics solutions, and “big data platforms” hasn’t come to fruition — CMOs need a specific Predictive suite to get value out of the investment their business has made in CRM, ERP, and MAT.
Predictive fills a logical gap in the marketing stack, one that other categories have failed to fill.
If CMOs drive the growth strategy of the enterprise and the CMO’s view into the health of their business is through a new Predictive marketing platform, CRM and MAT becomes more commoditized than it already is.
Predictive Delivers Valuable Data Insights
On top of the predictions, quality data has become table stakes for these predictive platforms. Often times marketing organizations say data quality is a barrier to entry because they don’t have confidence in their customer data.
In fact, a recent study from Demand Metric found that 80 percent of marketers blame marketing and sales flops on data quality.
CMOs need true insight and in order to ensure that insight is correct, Predictive marketing platforms must offer the truth around account data and contact data. We’ve seen that most companies don’t even bother to keep their CRM and MAT data clean anymore because it is just too difficult.
Relying on a platform that keeps data up-to-date such that the business does not have to worry about it is a must for CMOs.
The Future of Predictive
In time, these predictive platforms will evolve to enable new ways to attribute revenue and enable CRM to be more valuable.
Marketing organizations are taking on more responsibility within enterprises because technology has enabled marketers to target key accounts directly and funnel these opportunities directly to their sales team. The faster a marketing organization can automate this workflow and have confidence in a platform that offers data transparency and real predictions, the faster they can focus on making their products and creative better and more differentiated.
Learn how we’re bringing B2B data into the age of intelligence with Customer Network Effects.
