Valentine’s Day Guide to Helping Your CMO Fall in Love with Your Data

You: You’re a data-driven marketer. You get excited about a good A/B test. A 5% boost in conversion makes your day. For you, fine-tuning your campaign segments is a fascinating pursuit in and of itself. You love data.

Your CMO: Not so much. Your CMO likes big plans and big successes that can be touted in executive meetings, and doesn’t sweat the details one bit.

Your CMO is an artist and poet at heart, but you’re a scientist. You want your CMO to appreciate you, your data, and your data-driven approach to everything. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, and after an hour sitting in a waiting room paging through magazine articles on relationships, here are some campy, but effective ways to help your CMO fall in love with your work and your data.

1. Flattery Will Get You Everywhere.

Everyone likes to hear great things about themselves. Aside from the usual MQL/SAL/SQL reports and website traffic, give your CMO something new that demonstrates your leader’s own success. Share a report showing your company’s Top five Campaigns Based on ROI. It’ll help your CMO shrug away any sense of self-doubt that might be lurking in his/her head.

2. Give Your CMO Something to Flaunt with His/Her Peers.

There’s always a little bit of rivalry between Sales and Marketing. Give your CMO some data that can just be casually thrown out there in conversation before an executive team meeting. Image your CMO saying to the pompous Head of Sales, “You know, I’m just so proud of the way my Marketing team is accelerating your team’s sales cycles. I just saw that last quarter, 80% of the contacts in your target account list have consumed content Marketing created. Isn’t that incredible?” <commence gloating now>

3. Share a Secret.

Sure, you publish stats all the time, and everybody knows the usual ones. Show your CMO something they haven’t seen before. A few examples: % of Leads in Your Marketing Automation Database That Match Your Buyer Personas, Target Account Coverage Ratio, or Top 10 Most Active Accounts. Anything that your CMO can use to spark a conversation with people on the team and demonstrate that your CMO is indeed engaged in the work everyone is doing.

4. Heatmaps Are HOT. Give Your CMO…a Heatmap.

There are heatmaps for website visitors, and those are nice, like a box of chocolates, but if you really want to impress, give your CMO a heatmap of marketing’s campaign coverage of target accounts, by buyer persona. Here’s an example. Chances are your CMO doesn’t already have one, even if there’s an ABM initiative underway. This is real data bling your CMO can also show off to the CEO.

Don’t have high enough data quality at your fingertips to give gifts like this? Take some time and work on improving your data quality. Take the first step and see what you have to work with using a free Data Diagnostic.