Why multi-disciplinary, cross-silo teams are best at analysing and actioning data collected along the customer journey

Enter 2021, 90 years since the famous McElroy ‘Brand Men’ memo also marked the start of the shift of ‘brand activities’ from advertising to full ownership of everything needed to produce business results: ‘Where brand development is heavy and where it is progressing, examine carefully the combination of effort that seems to be clicking and try to apply this same treatment to other territories that are comparable.’ The explosion of sales and marketing channels since has spawned a plethora of marketing specialisms and seen businesses come almost full circle, with marketing departments focusing solely on incremental growth and campaign ROI, sometimes at risk of losing control of core activities. The pandemic of the last two years has accelerated the growth and importance of digital media and sales channels – another typically siloed team – in how customers research, consider and buy. Change is not only taking place in more obvious consumer markets, but also in B2B, where both customers and suppliers have been forced to move more of sales and service processes online. This is delivering surprisingly positive outcomes in many cases, with McKinsey’s research showing that buyers and sellers alike prefer the new digital reality. As the need to connect ‘base nurturing’ activities (which tend to be owned by sales departments) and ‘growth activities’ (usually led by marketers) becomes clearer and as the digitalisation of both sale and marketing becomes more mainstream, we are seeing the re-birth of the ownership of ‘line of sight to results’ across functional silos. This is happening with the creation of roles such as Chief Growth Officer, Chief Customer Officer and new-style CMOs or CSOs who take a data-first approach and tend to look further than their own discipline along the entire value chain for the customer. This hybrid position bridges traditional departmental silos such as business development, sales, marketing, operations, customer support and information technology. While those organisations are striving to understand their customers’ omni-channel jouneys and add value all the way across this complex ecosystem of interactions, some historical models of analysis may no longer be able to cope with today’s cross-silo, omni-channel reality that requires end-to-end insights for many teams across the business. In this article we examine various useful, relevant, data science based approaches on which modern executives can rely to understand this new interconnected reality, allowing them to understand, nurture and grow their customer relationships, even in times of uncertainty and rapid change. We use examples of how traditionally marketing department-led activities such as customer segmentation and marketing investment analysis can evolve into a more cross-functional approach delivering better insights and, importantly, more value to the business.