A company’s chief marketing officer is responsible for their organization’s growth and reputation, but most CMOs don’t have enough control. Their organization works in departmental silos, functional leaders pushing their own solutions and feeling satisfied with functional KPIs.
Exponential growth that creates unstoppable momentum requires a company’s customer-facing departments to fight for the customer instead of their own departmental wins. The CMO isn’t the only one who notices—but they are the only one in the perfect position to do something about it.
In their new book CMO to CRO, industry experts Brandi Starr, Mike Geller, and Rolly Keenan show CMOs how to bring revenue to the forefront and make every team’s #1 objective a seamless customer experience (CX). This book presents a revolutionary approach to not only unite the silos, but position the CMO as an innovative leader and finally uncover what CX is really about: revenue growth. I recently caught up with Brandi, Mike, and Rolly to learn what inspired them to write the book and their favorite idea they share with readers.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
As a management team, we would meet once every quarter and spend a few days together in an Airbnb. We would use this time to work through tough discussions and make decisions. It was a few days away to not be distracted by the inevitable daily emails and communication in our business. There were times where we would get very “big picture” about our strategy and where we’d like to see Tegrita in the future. During one of these management retreats, we began to discuss what our clients actually needed. We acknowledged that there were common flaws in the systems of our clients, and we needed to do something about it. We began talking about a Revenue Takeover. In reality, we wouldn’t have arrived at the concept of a Revenue Takeover without all 3 of us being involved. We have each led ambitious, innovation-forward careers that happened to complement each other’s areas of expertise. Not only that but our experience combined with our work at Tegrita and the variety of clients exposed a need.
We had clients that performed different elements of Revenue Optimization very well. However, none of them did everything well and it caused revenue to slip through the cracks. When we looked at the problem, we found that the areas clients struggled most were usually outside of their control. These areas were the responsibility of different departments who had different goals that didn’t align. When the individual departments would try to solve the problems themselves, they were only managing to fix the symptoms that impacted them. From our view, we were in passionate agreement that the only way to truly fix this was to effectively “take over” the revenue of all the front office functions.
Equipped with this solution, we then had to decide how we should communicate the issues we could see from our vantage point. We decided to document our findings in a book to give our current and future clients enough detail to confidently enact change.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
Our favorite part is the creation of the Revenue Operations team. This is where we take all the Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, and IT Ops people responsible for revenue and combine them into a single team called “RevOps.” This is the first big step in changing the organization from having multiple groups driving revenue into a single group driving revenue.
Having the creation of the RevOps team as the first step is exciting because it puts technology at the forefront of revenue generation. With RevOps, you start to have a single group manage and own ALL of the technology that customers interact with. This makes it much easier to see where improvement is needed in the customer experience. Not only is it easier to spot CX friction but RevOps has the people, resources, and tools to implement the changes. There would be no need to negotiate with other Ops teams and prioritize.
The final element that makes the RevOps team a critical first step is that it centralizes connections between the other functions (Marketing, sales, etc.). This changes the conversation from marketing-sales alignment to marketing-RevOps alignment and Sales-RevOps alignment, and so on. Except RevOps serves all these organizations, they are in essence RevOps’ customers. Departments stop working in silos with conflicting goals because RevOps provides a communication fulcrum. This enables RevOps to better support the Marketing, Sales, Support, and other customer facing teams as similar requests from these groups will lead to a positive improvement all around.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this lesson in your own life? What has this lesson done for you?
RevOps teams come with an inherent “rising tide raising all ships” proposition that closes gaps between departments. It highlights the importance of collective rather than departmental goals and their impacts on revenue. With the value of the collective so stark, we asked ourselves honestly, how would our current service offerings align to our vision for the future of revenue?
As a result, we have revamped one of our key service offerings. We’ve always offered Modern Marketing Healthcheck Assessments that focused on evaluating the marketing automation platform and integration. Our clients found these extremely valuable. It helped them understand what’s working and what isn’t in their marketing automation. However, after defining what RevOps should look like, we realized our offering left marketing leaders with a blind spot. Leaders need a rounded understanding of how their functions and systems were performing and their level of maturity before they could move seamlessly from marketing ops to RevOps. Our Healthcheck assessments didn’t quite cover it.
Our realization led us to completely redefining this service offering. We didn’t just modify the scope because we didn’t think that goes far enough. Instead, we created an offer that is a research backed methodology for assessing performance and building a roadmap to drive growth and maturity within the marketing function. As the future of revenue and customer experiences relies on frictionless inter-department communication, our road map creates a smooth path for marketing and RevOps integration.