How does top leadership view the operations of its marketing teams? A new report from the CMO Council looked at not only how marketing performance is rated by the C-suite, but also at what are considered the top 5 shortcomings of their marketing teams. 

The report was based on a survey of 120 senior executives from a variety of companies of different sizes and industries. Almost half of the executives (46%) rated their marketing team’s performance as very good or exceptional for 2020, while 45% rated their team’s performance as moderate.

The top 5 deficiencies identified by the executives as needing more skills, proficiency and capability were:

• A lack of modernization of the marketing organization, systems and operation
• Managers in key digital roles who lacked competence and technical knowledge/ability
• Insufficient customer knowledge and market understanding
• Decision making based not based on good data
• Inability to justify marketing spend

The survey respondents identified these areas as the top 5 needing improvement:

• Demand generation and sales pipeline development
• Campaign ideation, execution and impact
• Customer journey, acquisition and conversion
• Marketing planning to support digital growth strategies
• Effective use and action on customer data insight

To improve the areas above, survey respondents suggested bringing in new ideas and perspectives from outside the organization with interim or fractional marketing leaders.

Other study findings included:

• 80% of respondents said that the top deliverable for marketing is revenue and sales growth, with customer acquisition and profitability coming in second (71%).
• 69% of respondents are extremely or moderately confident in their marketing team’s ability to lead growth recovery in 2021.
• 84% of respondents rate their interaction with their marketing team as close, regular or increasingly interactive.
• Just over one-third (37%) of respondents said that the collaboration and alignment between lines of business, functional areas and marketing are close, balanced, effective and well integrated. The same percentage of respondents said that the collaboration and alignment is improving all the time.