The CMO's Role In Closing The Customer-Employee Gap

This report, originally written for application development and delivery professionals, includes content relevant to chief marketing officers (CMOs), especially those leading marketing for business-to-business (B2B) companies. Here's why: Buyers throw off significant and valuable data in the process of considering, purchasing, and incorporating technology in their businesses. Simultaneously, companies invest more in technology to listen to and capture this data and to communicate and collaborate internally. However, many do not weave these investments together in ways that help meet customers' growing expectations for consistent brand experiences across all touchpoints because valuable customer insights lie dormant and fail to inform business decisions and tradeoffs. This report introduces Forrester's model for bringing these investment streams together, amplifying the returns on each, and ultimately evolving to a differentiated "customer-activated enterprise." CMOs who lead this transformation can create a more competent customer engagement model that is capable of winning, serving, and retaining more discerning, technically sophisticated buyers.