The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, produced in partnership with Televerde, published a new report, “Rising Above The Fray: How Marketers Can Right The Revenue Ship.”

The new report details how the self-reliant buyer and a chaotic, digital-first customer journey have flipped much of the sales action to the top of the funnel, making marketers responsible for nearly half of a company’s revenue. Yet scarce resources, mediocre data skills, and a skeptical CEO threaten to undermine marketing’s efforts.

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The insights are based on a survey of over 150 brand leaders and in-depth interviews with executives from companies including Cisco, F5, Pitney Bowes, Five9, PepsiCo and Henkel.

Rising Above The Fray highlights the pressure marketers are under to grow revenue. They face many challenges, including the need to show marketing attribution to revenue and make investments in data analytics and MarTech pay off. Here are a few of the major findings:

* 63% of marketers say they’re under very high to extreme pressure to deliver revenue growth
* 53% say they’re only moderately confident or worse that they’ll meet their revenue targets
* 57% think their CEO is only moderately satisfied or worse with marketing’s performance

“What can marketers do to improve their odds? With limited resources, marketers need to go deep on a handful of strategic initiatives. Digital experience, content strategy and omnichannel should be top priorities,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council.

Marketers must close a data literacy gap inside marketing and make better use of customer intelligence to engage and acquire new customers. To this end, marketers are increasing investments in MarTech aimed at leveraging data, while AI promises to bring speed and scale to the data-insights-action process.

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Data-related key findings include:

* 85% of marketers have data literacy gaps inside their teams
* 79% are only moderately successful or worse at leveraging data for customer segmentation
* 73% are only moderately successful or worse at applying data analytics for customer insights
* 75% are only moderately successful or worse at actioning on customer insights

“There are many touchpoints along the journey to revenue that need to be appreciated, measured, and refined to get to the revenue outcome. Leveraging data-driven insights to make data-driven decisions will enable marketing leaders to set new KPIs to demonstrate success in conjunction with enabling greater predictability along the pathway to sustainable revenue,” said Deanna Ransom, Global Head of Marketing and Marketing Services and Chairperson of Diversity and Inclusion at Televerde.