There’s been a series of articles and studies published recently that indicate a lack of certainty or a ‘trust gap’ with the minds of CEOs. Dell Services published a study with the Economist Intelligence Insight that found, “Less than one-half of C-suite executives rate their CIO positively in terms of understanding the business and technical risks involved in new ways of using IT.”
Several weeks later, FournaiseTrack published a media release stating, “80% of CEOs admit they do not really trust and are not very impressed by work done by Marketers- while in comparison, 90% of the same CEOs do trust and value the opinion and work of CFOs and CIOs.” Like the Economist Intelligence Insight research which claims lack of business understanding in CIO suite, this study claims the 80% of CEOs perceive the Marketers don’t understand short, medium, and long-range financial realities. Is there is a connection here?
Many a financial officer has been embarrassed (and fired) in the task of accurate revenue forecasting and cash-flow management. Questions of projected future cash flows along with revenue growth can be solved with the integration of data from Salesforce.com and your financial systems. Establishing a projected future flow is just one part of a total cloud solution and we at Dell help organizations like Camico & Buxton do this every day.
A hidden ‘lever’ in cash-flow management, that also vexes our CEO, is the Marketer. An SMB could effectively engineer the process from marketing to cash-flow. Marketing creates leads, leads convert to opportunities; opportunities convert to sales which result in revenue and operating cash flow (OCF). Marketing Automation solutions allow companies to measure and understand the flow from marketing leads to revenue and OCF. Without these systems, companies tend to reduce marketing investments blindly when financial performance suffers – often worsening the situation.
Closing the loop between marketing and cash-flow is a key to accurate forecasting and financial performance. Solutions that allow a company to effectively track and measure marketing effectiveness can eliminate the knee-jerk reaction to cut marketing spend when revenue dips and instead use data to focus marketing dollars where they most influence revenue.
Dell Cloud Business Applications offers Marketing Automation software because we believe Marketers can have more impact on the business when they have the right applications to control and measure their efforts. And when those applications are tied to other business software, like Salesforce CRM and Intuit QuickBooks, the whole executive suite gains new visibility into the financial health of the business.
The average time-on-job for a CMO is 18 months, while the average tenure for a CFO is 12 years. Perhaps the CMO, CFO, and CIO should work more closely together to find solutions that drive company performance and earn the CEOs respect?
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