Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

Yet, how many of our colleagues will agree with us and proclaim that marketing is the most important function? How many indeed? Not enough. Especially not enough of our C-level and Board-level people, those legal and financial leaders, who typically occupy those positions.

We need everyone engaged and committed, not simply compliant, if we are to deliver the best end-to-end customer experiences across our businesses, from operations, to customer service to sales, from multi-channel to omni channel.

In attempting to make this customer first vision happen, how many people will marketing have to interact with? Everyone, almost. Yet how many of those people will report to marketing? Very few.

This reality means we must generate impact without direct authority. It means we have got to be incredibly good at mobilizing. We can’t just be doing marketing, we must be leading marketing.

• Mobilising our boss
• Mobilising our colleagues
• Mobilising our team
• Mobilising ourselves

Unfortunately, doing this, generating positive momentum, is typically difficult in most traditional, hierarchical, matrix-structured, geographically distributed organisations populated by silos.

In this complicated landscape marketing is often not truly aligned with the business.

All too often there is a trust deficit, a credibility gap.

In marketing we are talking about the future, which is what we must do. However, what we have claimed about the future often has not been realized. Too often we have focused on our perceived need to build tomorrow’s brand whilst not aligning with the business around the commercial imperative to generate demand today. In contrast the people in Finance and Operations, are mostly focused on the factual present and the past.

Too often we are not talking the business language of our colleagues? What Chief Executive talks about Google analytics vanity metrics, or is genuinely interested in our augmented reality trial campaign or gets animated about our new Customer Data Platform. Maybe the CEO should get interested in the CDP, but the other stuff?

What Sales leader gets excited about MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)? Shouldn’t we be focused instead on SALs (Sales Accepted Leads), our marketing-sourced leads that the sales team is agreeing to own and progress?

And don’t we understand why customer service gets irritated by our shiny new brand campaign that promises a bright blue sky when they know the reality for too many customers is thunder, lightning & gale-force winds?

To close this trust gap we must align with the Chief Executive and the organic growth goals, that critical intersection where customer and company needs meet. Marketing must balance the inevitable tension between shareholders and stakeholders.

This means we must first close the skills gap. Marketing leaders must build a team with the best mix of creative, analytical and leadership skills – and then foster trust and excellence.

Marketing must be important to everyone, especially the Chief Executive. Marketing cannot be the discretionary operating expense budget number that is the first to be sacrificed when the EBIT target, our profit target, is threatened.

Fundamentally, we must inspire and credibly measure our impact. Profit and planet. Shareholders and stakeholders. This is how we ensure that we build a great marketing-driven, values-based, genuinely diverse company, that people want to work with not for, want to subscribe to rather than buy from. The marketing-led companies who get this right will out perform their peers, grow faster and deliver sustainable profits. And marketing will have a seat at the top table, recognized as the most important function.

Reinforcing a point The Guardian made back in 1986:

Check out his interview delivered on the sidelines at a recent business technology conference.

Lazerow says the revolution in transparency is redefining the rules of business, government, and beyond, as all of us are being forced to act more responsibly and with greater authenticity.

“If you’re a company that misuses data, if you’re a government that misuses data, you will be overthrown,” he claimed.

“You can’t do stuff that is stupid, if you there is always a camera, there is always something on.

“You will be exposed as being fake if you are not a responsible actor.”

Optimistic perhaps, but his riff on the Internet of things and the Internet of customers and what that means in terms of transparency works for me.

If you are going to be naked, and our digitally-enabled and hyper connected world means you will be, you’d better look good.

It is our planet’s biggest business event, which last week attracted 135,000 registered delegates, including 6000 non-profits and NGOs.

The standout session, from a crowded field of contenders, was the conversation between Salesforce.com’s founder Marc Benioff and Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The discussion did not focus on Facebook (which Sandberg is credited with transforming into a revenue engine), but instead it pivoted around the key themes of Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.

“No matter what progress women have made we are still really far from getting our share of leadership roles, in any industry, in any country, anywhere in the world,” Sandberg said.

“It is stereotypes and cultures. What is so striking having now been all over the world talking to women is that our cultures are so different – China, Korea, France, the United States – except for one thing. Our stereotypes of men and women are actually exactly the same everywhere. We believe men should be assertive, aggressive, leaders. Everywhere in the world we believe women should speak when spoken to, raise their hand, give to others.”

It starts in the playground. Assertive girls are “bossy”, whilst boys displaying similar assertive traits are encouraged.

Imagine how much more effective marketing teams and companies in general would be if the talents of their female employees were effectively cultivated and utilized.

Sandberg recommends that we all (men and women) “lean in” and strive to work better with 50 per cent of the workforce. Do it effectively and you enable a competitive advantage.

Prudential’s billboard captures our attention with its simple statement. What will this fact mean for marketing?