Historically, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and IT have operated as single rooms with closed doors (and soundproof walls). That’s because tight integrations between different processes, technologies, and data weren’t always possible, so we had to make do with what we had. On top of that, different “rooms” had different KPIs and built their systems and data to drive to those. The result could be similar to combining décor from the best of HGTV with that from your teenage daughter. More frustratingly, if the marketing team wanted to integrate with the sales process, they had to knock on the sales team’s door and hope they answered. The same was true for Customer Service, Operations, and so on.
However, as technology has enabled D2C companies to design a cohesive consumer experience across all of their rooms, that expectation has become more and more common from clients across all industries, including B2B. More and more, we’re seeing that it pays to look at everything holistically and strategically instead of individually by room. When you only focus on one room of your house, that room’s data won’t flow correctly through the other rooms. And data that doesn’t flow correctly can result in a disjointed customer experience.
Many years ago, when reading The Fountainhead, I marveled at the hero’s ability to architect buildings and drive their aesthetics based on their ultimate function and setting, rather than just the trend of the moment. Over the last few years, technological advances have made cohesive connections between groups and systems possible (e.g., integrating marketing automation platforms and CRM systems with a larger variety of other systems across all groups). As a result, the ability to drive an integrated executive strategy across both technology and business processes is now not only possible, but indispensable.
Today, if a VP or C-level executive wants to improve operational efficiencies and drive revenue growth, they need to look across all rooms in their house. When it comes to process and technology, you want these historically isolated systems to have a seamless integration and an open flow of data. They don’t have the luxury of only staying within their own room anymore.
Don’t hide out in your bedroom with the door closed
The first touch a customer usually has with a company is through their demand generation efforts. Marketers have traditionally only integrated their marketing automation platforms with a CRM because that was the main integration possible — and the easiest one to setup. Now, organizations can integrate additional systems that were once more standalone — such as ERP, ordering, and production management systems — to talk to their prospects and existing clients. And they’re benefiting from new sets of actionable data as a result.
Here at BDO Digital, we like to describe the C-suite — the heads of Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT, and so on — as being different rooms of the same house. Treating each silo as its own house (i.e. trying to grow each functional area individually) will end up costing you a great deal in terms of lost customers and revenue that you’ll have to account for later. A project that’s a priority for Marketing but not for Sales, for example, can lead to solutions that don’t really meet the requirements for either. Customer Service not being able to view sales and delivery data because they weren’t brought in early enough to share functional requirements can cause friction and miscommunication.
That’s because your customers don’t just live in Marketing or Sales or Customer Service. They eventually visit every room in your house — some more than once. Enabling that initial engagement to connect to the other pieces of your house through process and technology is essential to a customer-centric approach. If you don’t, your customer may think (and rightly so) that different people own different rooms — or worse, that everyone lives in a different house. And that’s a first impression that can be difficult to erase.
The good news is that taking the time to knock down these walls benefits both you and your customers, putting equity back into your home (company) and making your guests (customers) want to stay awhile longer.
So, how do you knock down the walls that separate your data, technology, and processes?
In the past, we found ourselves running into these types of issues on a regular basis. That’s because our clients didn’t have a holistic roadmap across their customer-facing systems and processes. And now, traditionally non-customer-facing systems like ERP systems often need to exchange data with customer-facing ones. Fortunately, we’re finding that fewer and fewer marketers are believing the hype that a single piece of technology is going to solve all their problems all by itself and realizing they need to take a higher-level approach.
Now that DemandGen has joined with BDO Digital, we’ve greatly expanded our ability to take a more holistic approach and work with our clients to integrate these systems together. We’re no longer limited to designing a single room (MarTech); we have the know-how to design an entire house. We now also have expertise across IT- and Finance-owned systems, for example, with data that can help optimize revenue generation activities or, conversely, can even benefit from the data in different MarTech systems.
We can look at technology and process holistically and design a strategy across all the rooms of our client’s house. We can wire the stereo system so you can listen to music in every room. We can setup smart lighting so you can turn on the lights in the bedroom — from the living room. We can integrate the kitchen with the family room for an optimal Super Bowl viewing experience. And we can tear down walls to optimize the flow throughout each of the rooms. This type of approach benefits everyone: leadership, individual departments, and, most importantly, your customers.
Below are a few examples of how we can now help clients more holistically and create an open flow of data across the different rooms of their house:
- Integrate existing customer data from internal customer service systems with marketing campaigns and CRM to drive a more holistic view of client engagement, leading to better automated nurture conversations and effective sales discussions
- Develop an aligned technology roadmap across IT, Finance, Marketing, and Sales during the consolidation of systems from an acquisition
- Help manufacturers with long lead times to understand the full customer journey and revenue cycle by Integrating ordering and ERP systems with CRM and MarTech data to a centralized analytics platform
- Create custom data connections to integrate in-house applications for client delivery with marketing tools for personalized customer marketing
Projects like these require a strategic, executive-level approach and a heavy change management component. Having everyone at the table from the beginning — all the executives in their rooms working together — can drive adoption and get results a lot faster than one leader working along in a room and then trying to convince the others to get on board.
Make your guests feel welcome
If you’re not taking a holistic approach and strategy toward the entirety of your house design and architecture, you’re also missing out on opportunities to capitalize on your existing data and make your guests —your clients — feel welcome, no matter which room of the house they’re in. A holistic executive strategy makes it faster to focus on customer-facing problems than internally having to continually get alignment between the different groups. That’s because when you don’t have that strategic buy-in from the beginning, a lot of your budget has to go toward change management and driving adoption in order to make the project successful.
If you want to help ensure an integrated client experience across different systems and areas within your organization, which the vast majority of today’s companies do, the most efficient way to do that is to bring together everyone in the C-suite at the very beginning, regardless of which department “owns” the technology. Companies that prioritize their focus on building those tight integrations are going to reap substantial benefits when they look to scale afterward.
When you want to make major renovations to your home that involve tearing down walls, you bring in an architect and a general contractor. When tearing down the walls between your C-suite, bringing in a professional who can see the big picture and has already successfully done it countless times can save you time and money in the long run. BDO Digital can help drive that conversation and strategic alignment, in addition to building out and executing on a technology roadmap to do X. It all starts with a conversation.
Over the past 9 years, Ryan has helped clients large and small and across a large variety of industries to design and optimize strategies and processes for their revenue growth objectives. As the Director of Advisory Services, Ryan leads the BDO Digital team responsible for providing the business strategy to drive client objectives and success. He and his team are focused on the entire range of strategy for all of the BDO Digital Demand Generation Group’s services and work closely with the Technology Services team to design comprehensive solutions for our clients.
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