Learn To Thrive In An Intense World, Marketo CEO Tells Marketers

B&T’s man on the ground, Andrew ‘Birmo’ Birmingham is on the ground at the Marketing Nation event currently being held in Las Vegas. And he’s filed this…

Tomorrow’s marketers need to move fast, learn fast, fail fast and — most importantly — thrive in this intense world, according to Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez.

“Yesterday’s marketer was a support function for someone else,” he told the 5400 delegates in attendance at the company’s Marketing Nation event in Las Vegas.

“You handed off leads to someone else. But today’s marketer is a crucial customer executive.”

Fernandez quoted Gartner research which suggested that 80 per cent of companies now compete on customer experience — a figure that is up from mid 30s just four years ago.

Such changes mean that, while the role of marketers had already changed significantly, the pace of change will increase rather than slow down in the years ahead, he said.

“I think we are at a tremendous inflection point. It’s the biggest inflection point since we first started 10 years go. There are vast forces at work that will change our jobs, change the mission of the marketer, and change our staff. It will transform our companies and how they work.”

Fernandez said tomorrow’s marketer can not afford to ever leave the side of the customer. “You have to see everything through the customer’s eyes. That means you need to think through the entire customer experience.”

Marketers will be charged with building individual, personalised and durable relationships with customers and they will need to do it at scale across the world’s largest enterprises, he said.

“Today’s marketer is a strategist. You are sitting not just at the revenue table but you have become a key competitive weapon right at the seat of everything.”

But a broader context is emerging, he said. The modern customer executive has broken out of the boundaries of just marketing — “The customer context is everywhere.”

According to Fernandez, whole organisations are thinking of transforming and tomorrow’s marketers have to transform as a part of this trend. “When your agenda is the entire company’s agenda that’s a different way to think compared to when you are just thinking about a marketing agenda.

“We need increased digital intimacy with all your customers. We need to think far beyond customer acquisition.”

On Project Orion, he said, Marketo wanted to help its clients lay a digital fabric across the whole enterprise while also delivering a high performance analytics architecture.

That meant building higher capacity, higher volumes and a whole new architecture to cope with a world where transactions are measured in billions, not just millions.

Thirty customers are already online, and by the end of the year all Marketo customers will by using Orion, he said.

Andrew Birmingham is editor of the digital business site ww.which-50.com

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