Adweek Research: Quantifying the Impact of Collaboration

About a year ago, Xerox Holdings Corp. chief marketing officer Deena LaMarque Piquion approached her company’s chief technology officer with a small ask: Could she get the tech team’s help to eliminate duplicative data from an email marketing list? The CTO said yes, of course. But when the marketing and tech teams started working together, they realized there was a much bigger benefit to cross-silo collaboration. What started as a quick and easy data deduplication initiative led to a unifying, companywide data platform focused on delivering greater value for customers, efficiency for operations and impact for Xerox’s business. “It went way beyond marketing’s needs to be able to email more effectively,” Piquion said. As the Xerox story illustrates, when CMOs collaborate with their C-suite peers and across functional silos, the impact can be transformative. Yet, ask any CMO: Collaborating effectively is easy in theory and difficult in execution. Despite being a cause de rigueur for boards and C-suites, collaboration is one of the most challenging corporate activities to understand, measure and build replicable processes around. It’s also one of the most subjective. Does good collaboration mean communicating consistently and transparently? Does it mean working together on every major business initiative? Is being an effective collaborator just another way of saying “people person”? To answer these questions, Adweek partnered with B2B research company NewtonX to conduct a quantitative, in-depth analysis of CMO collaboration today, which included a survey of 80 CMOs across the United States and Canada as well as a series of qualitative interviews with marketing leaders on how they collaborate. What we found was astonishing: The marketers we identified as successful collaborators—whom we call “Great CMOs”—drove two times the revenue growth and achieved nine times greater customer satisfaction than their CMO peers. They were also six times more innovative. How have these Great CMOs done it? Digging into the data, we found that they've succeeded by adhering to a common set of principles. Great CMOs believe all high-priority business initiatives require cross-functional collaboration. While all the CMOs we surveyed said “most” top priority organizational initiatives require cross-functional collaboration, Great CMOs believe “all” do. They see cross-functional collaboration as critical for both them and their direct reports to achieve top priority OKRs (objectives and key results), KPIs (key performance indicators) and other performance metrics. “The first component for successful collaboration across any C-suite is focus, with fluidity a close second,” said Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president of marketing and communications and chief communications officer at IBM.At IBM, when discussing strategy as a leadership team, the team galvanizes around a clearly defined set of shared outcomes while not letting the confines of organizational structures hinder them, Adashek said. Great CMOs collaborate more effectively with critical non-marketing departments—and prioritize building personal relationships with them. Great CMOs build strong relationships not only with their CEO, chief financial officer and chief sales officer, but also with senior leadership and management in other departments. They hold one-on-one meetings with peers from other departments at least once a week, compared with Average CMOs, who only meet a few times per month. “You need to have both the large cross-functional group meetings and the ability to just pick up the phone and call someone or Slack them if something is going off the rails or to preempt issues that might arise,” said Laura Jones, CMO of grocery delivery service Instacart. Great CMOs value innovation and creativity significantly more than their peers. When asked about the top skills required to succeed as a CMO, 37% of Great CMOs valued “innovation and creativity,” compared with 16% of their peers. What’s more, 67% of Great CMOs said marketing has more of a role in innovation than it did four years ago, compared with 54% of Good CMOs who hold that view. Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer for Mastercard, said he and his CFO collaborate extremely well because they have learned to speak the same language and can align on how to position the brand for future growth. “Our shared interest in innovation and staying at the cutting edge is a great example,” he said. Great CMOs are much more connected to data and analytics teams. Seventy-three percent of Great CMOs collaborate very effectively with their data and analytics colleagues, the highest reported percentage of any cross-functional department. Having a personal relationship matters most here: 73% of CMOs who claimed to collaborate very effectively with people in data and analytics also held a personal relationship. Importantly, CMOs who are much more connected to data analytics teams are 110% (or two times) more effective on customer satisfaction and 52% more effective on innovation. As our research shows, CMOs are well positioned to be collaborative leaders in their organizations, working together with their C-suite peers to turn functional expertise into above-market growth. To do that, they need to change how they work—and how they work together. This story is part of the Connections and Collaboration special feature. For the full report, visit https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/how-great-cmos-collaborate/.

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Adweek Research: Quantifying the Impact of Collaboration

These principles distinguish top-performing CMO collaborators from their less successful peers

Paul Barbagallo

Paul Hiebert

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Paul Barbagallo

Paul Hiebert