Marketers are looking for more strategic and business focus in their roles

Marketing leaders want to be more business-focused and strategic in their roles. A recent survey conducted by Forrester Research’s CMO Group and Heidrick & Struggles validates this overwhelming desire for business alignment, finding that almost two-thirds of CMOs want more involvement in business strategy development and increased P&L responsibility.

How can CMOs make this happen? CMOs need to proactively insert themselves into the strategic process, demonstrating their abilities to understand the business and apply their knowledge and expertise to drive growth and profitability for the organization.

Analysis of the survey data indicates that the proactive activities and strategies that CMOs should pursue include:

• Spending more time on personal and career development. Marketing leaders’ top two career aspirations are either to become the CMO of a larger company or business or to become a CEO — two positions that demand a wide range of business success and backgrounds. CMOs will have to increase time spent on professional growth, especially if they want to reach their desired next steps.

• Seizing the opportunity to lead the organization towards customer-centricity. Marketers are in a unique position to ensure that the customer is at the center of everything the company does. Evolved CMOs will leverage a range of resources to increase their customer understanding. That understanding will be widely infused within the company to develop successful business strategies that create brands and offerings that are highly relevant to their customers, helping acquire new customers, drive stronger customer loyalty, improve retention, and enable bottom line growth.

• Building credibility through the marketing team and leadership contributions. Building a strong marketing function is a necessity if CMOs are to gain credibility, increase their influence, and secure a more strategic role. Also, marketing leaders recognize the importance of forging strong relationships with the executive team -relationships that facilitate better alignment with corporate strategy.

• Developing cross-functional leadership experience. Successful marketing leaders must search out and obtain cross-functional leadership experiences; increase their knowledge of different departments, operations, and processes; build best practices across multiple functions; and use those skills and knowledge to develop trusting relationships with key influencers across the business.