High-performing CMOs implement a different approach to marketing execution.

High-performing CMOs implement a unique approach to marketing execution. The most successful marketing organizations are customer-driven, owing their success to a unified marketing vision, modern technology, and an efficient execution process. They swiftly and flawlessly execute their marketing plan, using real-time data to satisfy real customer needs. They get it right the first time, without requiring costly iterations or delayed decisions. Product, Sales, CX, People, and Finance teams feel included in the marketing process as they actively participate. While competitors miss opportunities, these organizations have the right platforms in place to identify and capitalize on them.

Top-performing marketing organizations have another common trait: they've successfully replaced reactive processes and decision-making with a streamlined, collaborative, and automated execution process. They've moved marketing managers and their business partners from individual spreadsheets and boards to a system of action and prioritization across all functional teams, ensuring the entire organization prioritizes programs aligned with strategy and goals.

The best marketing leaders don't just run marketing; they lead the entire organization with inspiring go-to-market opportunities, aligning stakeholders around the company's next milestone. This requires breaking down the black box of marketing execution and decision-making, providing transparency, and collaborating with the entire organization. This approach results in alignment and trust between marketing teams and their colleagues on the frontlines of the business, reducing the risk of missed dependencies and costly communication lapses—a risk that has multiplied in the remote work era. Everyone at the company understands the marketing priorities and their role in bringing the vision to life. By continuously collaborating on marketing plans and ideas with business partners, marketing organizations accelerate time to market, increase revenue, and consistently double their marketing output.

In 2021, CMOs face a pressing problem: how to include non-marketers in marketing work while reducing the marketing team's workload? CMOs need to replace the old approach, spanning tens of different tools, with a dedicated system of record and action. However, none exists.

Why?

Marketing Automation is becoming increasingly autonomous, with intelligent software performing customer-facing tasks like purchasing ads or optimizing campaigns. We can visualize the evolution of autonomy in customer-facing marketing through examples like Google ads. Initially, humans set up the ads, defining distribution parameters, messaging, and creative elements. Today, Google Ads is intelligent and can autonomously modify the creative and copy of the ad to maximize performance and deliver the expected results users set up.

The typical mid-market marketing team implements between 20-30 unique point solutions (many already include AI capabilities) to create customer experiences, support sales and CX teams, and launch programs to market. The MarTech stack universe is expanding rapidly, with over 7,000 solutions (2020) across 46 categories and over $141 billion spent globally.

Yet, AI hasn't caught up with marketing execution management, and it remains an underserved pain point, dominated by manual tasks, spreadsheets, boards, request forms, and very little intelligence.

Ten years ago, 83% of marketing leaders preferred using spreadsheets to view their marketing and budgeting universe quickly. Little has changed. Companies like Asana and Monday have since introduced solutions to upgrade the experience, but their products don't address marketing exclusively and are still manual work heavy. They created generic capabilities to appeal to multiple organizational departments and a slightly better-designed version of a spreadsheet with basic automations. Their solution for marketing needs is pre-defined templates (a better version of a user-created spreadsheet). Other companies like Allocadia and Plannuh attempt to automate and streamline a single marketing process - budgeting - appealing to CMOs with a CMO/CFO alignment message. These solutions (though offering some relief from a long and exhausting budgeting process) don't address the entire gamut of the marketing execution process and position budgeting as a siloed process.

The disconnect is astounding. Companies invest millions of dollars into modernizing customer-facing technology, making it more intelligent and autonomous, yet marketing work management lags far behind. While other executives in the C-suite have already adopted unified platforms that deliver daily efficiencies, the CMO has no suitable solution. As a result, marketers and companies are paying the price:

CEOs expect marketers to perform at near real-time speed to support business growth, but marketers struggle to handle the volume of work and requests. Inefficiencies in manual planning and execution, combined with sporadic access to data and low visibility into the marketing plan, result in losing as much as 20% in potential revenues (IDC).

Individual marketers manually recreate processes that suit their work style to align with company-wide mandated collaboration and task management tools (like Jira, Monday, or Asana). This practice offers no consistent standards across the organization. The result is a slower time to market and an increased unnecessary workload due to every task created from scratch for every program or initiative. Marketers rate above all corporate functions with a turnover rate of 17%, and a staggering 83.3% of them experience burnout every year. Despite being the glue that ties all go-to-market functions and activities together, marketing lacks the tools to collaborate and work with its colleagues and is still considered an organizational silo.

Friction is accelerating within the marketing team and between marketing and their business partners (CX, Sales, Finance, and People teams), who trigger many of the programs that make up the marketing plan. In fact, with Gartner predicting that by 2023, 25% of companies will integrate marketing, sales, and CX into a single function, we can expect this friction to escalate as business partners demand more visibility and transparency in the marketing execution process.

At marketer, we believe it's time to reinvent the playbook, reimagine how companies deploy marketing, and end chaos marketing once and for all. We're building a company-wide, AI-powered, and autonomous marketing workspace with a self-driving marketing plan at its core that orchestrates programs and initiatives 10x faster, allowing non-marketers to easily partake in marketing execution. Atrea is less like traditional software and more like a marketing vehicle on autopilot, designed around collaboration, speed, and performance. Machine learning powers automated workflows, unified by data and intelligence, to trigger the marketing planning mechanics, prioritize initiatives, initiate programs, allocate budgets, and activate expert resources.

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