Are marketers cannabalizing marketing? Finding and keeping customers is marketing’s purpose. But a new study by the CMO Council shows that marketers are disconnected from customers.
More than half of the marketers surveyed rely on sales for customer conversations. Nearly 75% lack a customer advisory board.
Then
how do marketers connect with customers? They don’t, really.
Approximately one third of the survey respondents rely on CRM systems
as their primary customer information source — and 40 percent said
their CRM systems were weak or very weak. Mmmm…
“Marketers
face the danger of rapidly marginalizing their own operations. They
rely on sales to engage the customer and they rely on customer support
to satisfy the customer,” according to Christopher Kenton, senior vice
president of the CMO Council .
It seems to me that marketing
still has too much of a manufacturing mentality — producing ads, Web
sites, press releases and other stuff. Maybe it’s time to make customer
conversations as important a marketing responsibility as creating
marketing materials.
As my friend Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace, says, “Marketers need to learn how to shut up and listen.”
