Being a CIO isn’t getting any easier. Cyber security threats are more sophisticated. Cloud migrations are in progress. Every type of as-a-Service offering is making your system, network, processes, and procedures more complicated. And you are facing all these challenges with a constrained budget and overworked resources. Let’s take your relationship with your CMO, for example. She’s implementing a marketing automation tool — Marketo for example. There are a multitude of factors CMOs take into consideration when incorporating a marketing tool. Solutions like Marketo allow you to scale multi-channel marketing campaigns and measure their overall effectiveness. But it can’t work in a vacuum by itself — in order for Marketo to provide a full lead-to-win measurement system, it does need to be integrated with other applications within your company, as well as potentially with applications in your partner companies as well. For example, your CMO may need help integrating Marketo with your company’s telemarketing vendor call management software, or maybe your lead enrichment vendor. Both entities need access to the Marketo’s data, not to mention that Marketo also needs to be integrated with your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system.
With this in mind, telling your CMO that your technical resources are tapped and don’t have any way to support integration will likely serve as the equivalent of lobbing a Molotov cocktail into her office. Here’s what you have to keep in mind:
1. Yesterday’s Best Is No Longer Good Enough
Even if you know the estimated timeline for a project you presented to the CMO is reasonable and accurate, it’s probably too long. Just as IT is under pressure to do more, faster, with fewer resources, CMOs encounter the same expectations. She has a certain number of marketing qualified leads to generate and a certain dollar goal to contribute to the sales pipeline. And she has to do this within a certain timeframe.
In many cases, marketing efforts build on each other, so throwing off the timing of one project has a domino effect. Your CMO’s success is measured partly in terms of what she contributes to the pipeline. She can’t wait a year for fully integrated solutions.
2. She’ll Do 3 Possible Things In Response To Delayed Integrations…None Of Which You’ll Like
What can you expect from your CMO when you deliver “bad news?” One response is that she will wait. In the long run, though, the CMO will begin to look at IT as a liability. Your reputation and relationship across the company can become damaged.
Another response might be that she will say, “Forget it!” Your CMO knows delays can stunt business development, and may choose to reconsider their integration request entirely. Can you even begin to estimate the opportunity costs if Marketing does not have the tools in place to perform a core function for the company, i.e., generate demand?
The third response is the most common and the most deadly: she might decide to do it herself. But the CMO isn’t a data or security expert, so she doesn’t know (or might not care about) the potential damage she could inflict upon the company.
3. Consider Providing “Self-Service Integration”
Simply said: IT has to deliver integrations on Marketing’s timeline. If the old way of doing things isn’t sufficient, a new way must be devised. But that doesn’t mean IT should have to do the integration themselves.
You don’t have to drop everything to make Marketo integration your priority. Instead, work to empower your CMO, not enrage her by providing automated, intuitive and straightforward integration tools that can be operated by business users, while still allowing IT to retain control of the company’s data and system integrity.
So the next time your CMO presents an integration request, delight her by saying you can enable her team to do it, and help keep them safe and secure, too. Just be sure to catch her as she faints.