MarTech Interview with Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia

Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia talks about the importance of building cross-functional teams to drive end goals and marketing impact:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jennifer, tell us about yourself and your marketing journey over the years…we’d love to hear more about your new role as Acquia’s new Chief Market Officer…

Over the course of more than two decades, I’ve worked across different areas of marketing, including public relations, digital marketing, demand generation, partner marketing and managing inside sales. Before joining Acquia, I held CMO positions at Brightcove, Avid Technology, Progress Software, Alfresco Software (acquired by Hyland), Software AG, and Workhuman (formerly Globoforce). I’ve also held senior marketing roles at Microsoft, Information Builders, and PeopleSoft. Through these experiences, I’ve developed a passion for helping tech companies revolutionize their go-to-market (GTM) and positioning. I’ve been a customer and a partner of Acquia in the past; now, in my role as Chief Market Officer at Acquia, I’m excited to combine my buyer/user experience with my market experience to allow us to focus on continuously innovating for the better of our customers. Innovation comes in all forms – technology is at the heart of what we do, and our customer obsession is focused on bringing innovation across all areas of business including our digital channels and communications.

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We’d love to hear more about your view point on the need for Chief Market Officers in B2B or how certain aspects of this position is crucial to overall marketing.

Traditionally, marketing has been focused on the execution of campaigns and programs, with a primary focus on how to achieve the best ROI. Often, marketing teams consist only of communications and campaigns teams with product marketing, strategy, pricing, and competitive resources residing outside of marketing. In my experience, this approach has led to a lack of understanding the customers’ needs, market changes and competitive positioning.

This in itself can negatively impact the performance of programs and tactics but more importantly, it can mean marketing is not feeding back value customer insight into the organization. For Chief Market Officers, the shift in perspective is to focus on ‘markets’ rather than ‘marketing’ and being able to fuse moving components of the go-to-market structure around customer outcomes. It goes hand-in-hand with ensuring every interaction along the customer journey is personalized and consistent. You can only do that with the right market knowledge and insight relevant to customer needs.

How can B2B marketing leaders today structure their teams (in terms of roles/hierarchies) and processes to drive more intuitive sharing of insights that create better unified customer journeys: we’d love to hear about some processes you’ve been actively pursuing in this area to grow teams in the past?

It’s prudent to build cross-functional teams, especially when it comes to creating a unified customer journey. Cross-functional teams are able to unify with a goal of understanding how their program execution is impacting customers, while examining data to fully understand today’s buyer.

This is especially important when considering the role of marketing in the context of broader GTM planning. In order to execute a comprehensive GTM plan centered around customer needs, processes like market intelligence, competitive analysis, value proposition creation, marketing campaign production, sales enablement, pricing, follow-up, and win/loss analysis have to be included and require the collaboration of different teams. GTM frameworks drive purpose and consistency, while regular reporting keeps everyone aligned on the goals.

What do you feel B2B marketing leaders need to focus on in a challenging year like 2023 where market and economic conditions are demanding more ROI and performance driven initiatives?

Every marketing leader today faces the challenge of gaining customer attention in a crowded digital landscape. Creating personalized digital experiences at scale requires the right technology, the right content, the right data, and the right resources. Understanding what content is driving audience engagement allows us to maximize spend and drive greater efficiencies. Using intent data helps us understand known and unknown buyers.

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Take us through some of the top B2B SaaS Marketing trends that you feel will dominate through 2023?

Personalization, Data, Content and AI are my top 4 choices. How do we bring all of these together to create better experiences for all our audiences? What is worth our investment of time to research and what is hype? First-party data will continue to become increasingly important. Marketing leaders will need the ability to track, consolidate, and analyze data in a way that gives us a holistic understanding of our customers. Most importantly, personalization will remain key to delivering experiences. The ability to deliver personalized marketing at scale will lend itself to the trend of open and composable tools, which I believe will lead to more innovation and more efficiency in marketing.