How To Untangle The Threads Of Discord Between Marketing And IT

The threads of discord between marketing and IT are a reality in most companies. This piece outlines steps toward weaving a harmonious relationship between these two departments.

As marketing continues to become a technology and data-driven operation, the working relationship between IT and marketing takes on a higher level of importance.

Yet according to 2016 research from Forrester, discord abounds between these two critical functions: “A CIO for the digital era is adept at using technology in service of customers and working alongside the customer-savvy CMO to deliver world-class digital experiences. Yet, marketing leaders tell us that working with tech management leaders to adopt new strategies is one of their top three challenges; and only about half of marketing leaders say they have ongoing communication and partnership with their tech management leader.”

The impact of this discord on the organization is that revenue and profit goals may be missed, opportunities will be missed, marketing will be frustrated and miss its annual goals, and IT will spend more time being reactive instead of proactively helping the business grow. This article examines three major threads of discord—uneven power sets, disparate values, and conflicting goals—and offers some practical advice for untangling the threads.

The Three Most Likely Threads Of Discord

In recent years the business alignment discussion has largely been about marketing and sales. While sales and marketing alignment is still a significant issue, a misalignment with IT is adding to marketing’s problems.

Perhaps coming to a better understanding of why we don’t get along will provide us with guidance on how to improve the situation. Organizational discord may be linked to conflict arising in the following three areas: power, values, and goals.

Power

Differing power bases can serve to accelerate inter-organizational success when they are directionally aligned, or conversely, they can catalyze an existing organizational conflict into a tailspin. In situations of IT-marketing discord, it is usually the case that IT has positional power and also expert power in technology and data.

Marketing has expert power in the customer, the markets, and perhaps the levers of business success. Positional power, also called legitimate power, comes from the position a person holds in the organization’s hierarchy.

In many cases IT has been given the authority to make all major technology decisions for the entire organization. This means it has the positional power to veto marketing SaaS initiatives, for instance. It is understandable why this power is centralized in IT. After all, IT is expected to be the expert in all of these technologies, but it can lead to conflict when marketing attempts to slide around this power base and implement a new SaaS solution.

Marketers have expert power around the customer and the markets. Marketers may also have clarity about why there is an immediate competitive need for a technology to greatly improve the customer experience, but they have been unsuccessful at reprioritizing IT resources and projects to facilitate new technology. Customer expert power meets IT position power (and technology expert power) and probably loses, especially if they attempt an end run.

Three things you can do to untangle this thread of discord:

• Marketing, don’t try an end-run around IT and implement a new technology yourself.
• IT, learn to treat marketing as a customer, not just as a group of users.
• Link your decisions up to organizational goals served, not to the functional goals. In so doing, there should be no need for IT vetoes or marketing end runs.

Values

What are the organizational values? Innovation, customer success, results, quality, profitability, integrity, employee wellness? These company values cascade down to functions like marketing and IT and can take on different meanings and levels of importance, driving different behaviors. They become strongly held beliefs at a group and individual level. The same value could actually drive two functions into conflict. For example: customer success.

Marketing interpretation: Have a customer service mentality. Understand that the sales group is our customer, and the end user is our customer. Customer experience is the next competitive battleground so we better get good at it. Shift from being product-centric to being customer-centric. Understand that position power and knowledge power are dwarfed by the growing buyer power. Be flexible and agile, and adapt quickly to changing demands.

IT interpretation: Protect customer data at all costs. Ensure all systems that customers interact with are available all the time. Marketing, sales, and finance are all system users with technology requirements that need to be considered, aligned, and adopted in a well laid out plan. This plan must have minimal impact on customer systems availability, minimal impact on productivity of other user groups, and no negative impact on security or data integrity.

Total quality management guru W. Edwards Deming said, “Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.” To maintain high quality in their services, IT values hone in on process, regulation, measurement, and methodical incremental change. Marketing, on the other hand, is in a frenzied battle to keep up with changing buyer needs, experience, and with marketing technology advances. Customer success means delivering great customer experience, which they cannot do with three-year-old technology.

One function values predictability, stability, and process as a means to minimize risk and maximize results. The other values adaptability, speed, risk-taking, and experimentation as a means to leap frog the competition. Conflicting interpretations of the core values and the resulting culture at a functional level are a source of discord.

Three things you can do to untangle this thread of discord:

• Marketing, learn what IT values, what drives the culture, and couch your requirements in terms that will resonate with IT staff.
• IT, understand that marketing is trying to keep up with the buyers’ pace of change, so drive to become even more agile without accumulating risk to systems and data.
• Add a marketing technologist in IT funded by both organizations.

Goals

If IT had unlimited resources, would there be a conflict? Yes. Even if it had a large staff, deep pockets, and contractors ready to dive in during peak times, the answer would still be yes. Resource constraints and budget priorities can certainly exacerbate a conflict, but they are probably not the source. A significant source of marketing and IT discord arises from conflicting needs based on conflicting goals.

The organizational needs and goals for marketing and IT are defined at the executive level. They are cascaded down to every individual in each group, into their quarterly and annual goals, and sadly they can often set two organizations on a head-on collision course. Let’s take an example: A 2017 goal to grow revenues by 25% and net profits by 20%.

Marketing rolls out supporting MBOs and KPIs measuring the number of new customers, new lead acquisition, improving customer lifetime value, etc. And in so doing it requires new technologies to support better customer experience, expanding social presence, analyzing customer behavioral data, predictive lead scoring, etc.

Marketing boldly takes accountability for revenue and supports the 25% revenue growth goal. Marketing needs to generate more demand for the sales channels, it needs to drive up customer lifetime value by improving the customer experience, it needs the business intelligence data to help invest its program budget effectively, and it needs to deploy technology to automate manual processes and support the increased profitability initiative.

In support of the same organizational goals, IT tightens up its processes, reduces the number of planned system maintenance initiatives, cuts some planned data enrichment efforts, prioritizes some sales enablement initiatives, doubles down on its support for sales operations, and registers its support for cost control, driving up net profits, and enabling sales to grow by 25%. IT needs to keep data and systems secure; it needs to keep applications available; it needs to balance the needs of every function in the organization; and in this case it needs to control costs while supporting revenue growth.

The conflicting needs arise out of opposing or ambiguous functional goals, conflicting priorities, misaligned budgets, and limitations on staff and funding. The reward systems, quarterly and annual bonuses, may in fact be in direct conflict for individuals in marketing and IT at the same peer level.

Three things you can do to untangle this thread of discord:

• Marketing, document your technology and data requirements with the information that shows how it meets IT and organizational goals, not just your marketing goals.
• IT, invite marketing to help prioritize their technology and data roadmap in the context of the broader company initiatives you own. Drive the dialog around meeting company goals.
• CMO and CIO, align goals and incentive compensation more closely in both functional groups to support and encourage working together.

In Conclusion

The threads of discord between marketing and IT are a reality in most companies. The dissention arises from their different power bases, their different interpretation of company values, conflicting needs arising from different interpretations of the organization goals, and are exacerbated by limitations on resources and budgets.

The good news is that the steps outlined above are proven to weave a harmonious relationship between marketing and IT. When this happens, companies are much better positioned to achieve their top level goals and everyone wins.