| If your Chief Focus Officer (CFO) were to join Cirque du Soleil, it would be as a tightrope walker, high above the stage. The CFO has a dangerous balancing act to perform for your organization.
One critical role is obviously to keep the organization focused on the brand. The other is to grow the business. Finding the correct balance and developing a blueprint for growth is an on-going marketing nightmare. I suggest that with all our sophistication we still practice SANDLOT MARKETING. Remember when we were kids and played tug of war? That's what marketing is today - a continual tug of war. Internally, marketing is always tugging for the firm's scarce resources. Externally, marketing is tugging on every consumer to buy our brand. These are not mutually exclusive tug of war games. They are intrinsically intertwined.
The winning CFO will not necessarily align MORE resources on his or her side of the rope. Rather, aligning the RIGHT resources will generate the greatest leverage. And that is where most marketers and CFOs fail.
According to a recent CMO Council survey that was widely reported in various trade publications, while marketers want to improve relationships with customers, they still have a long way to go. Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, notes that, "Everyone is spending money on demand-generation programs, but they are not taking their existing customer data and leveraging it." Their study reports that only 6.8% of CMOs said that they have excellent knowledge of the customer when it comes to demographic, behavioral and psychological data, while 52% said they have fair to little knowledge of the customer.
In a summary of the research as reported in B to B magazine, "The study found that only one-third of global marketers have strategies in place to win back dormant or lost customers, and only half have strategies to further penetrate or monetize key account relationships." The most critical finding of the study is that maximizing relationships takes a back seat to new leads.
The study confirms that too many marketers' chief focus is getting new customers in the door and that all the hype about CRM is just that - hype. The internal tug of war between marketing, a legacy IT team more concerned about equipment and software than helping grow the business, and a finance department worried about short term results rather than long-term growth usually results in management paralysis. The CFO can only balance so long before falling off the tightrope.
The Marketing Implications
Accept the fact that you are in a sandlot tug of war. Focus on the internal resources that you can control and make the ones you can't control irrelevant. Organize your resources to give your brand maximum impact with every consumer. Put as much (maybe more) focus on your current customers as getting new ones.
This week's AH-ha! for you to consider is this: Filling the pipeline with new customers is a waste of marketing dollars if you do not have a plug at the end of the pipe to keep them from escaping. That means not only understanding the customers' demographics and psychographics but the dynamics of how they interact with your brands.
It's really not that complicated or difficult if the CFO aligns the marketing initiatives by focusing on four key priorities:
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