CONNECT THE DOTS
WE HELP TEAMS PERFORM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL
BETTER BUSINESS RESULTS
CMO Consulting Group exists to help senior leaders create competitive advantage by delivering superior marketing strategies, building great brands and creating high performing organizations.
We take an integrated, cross-functional approach, blending what we know about marketing with what we know about your industry. Our goal is to deliver outstanding results that can be sustained over time.
DRIVE MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS
True, sustainable marketing performance requires more than just catchy campaigns or digital tactics. We believe that effective marketing starts with a fact-based, comprehensive strategy directly tied to defined business outcomes.
We bring extensive operating knowledge and apply real-world, battle-tested business insights to diagnose and solve complex problems, develop marketing strategies and build organizational capabilities that will improve your business performance. Our applied experience helps us anticipate and manage obstacles, allowing us to draw from a comprehensive system of tools and methods needed to help accomplish your goals.
Our approach is thorough. We define and prioritize customer and business segments, identify competitive whitespace, and evaluate customer demand creation and loyalty strategies. We audit your past marketing investments and identify opportunities for improvement. And we work collaboratively to develop new capabilities and strategies—all designed to generate profitable growth.
DRIVE MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS
PROVEN SYSTEMS
We’ve developed comprehensive, proven systems to diagnose and address a wide range of Marketing Performance Opportunities.
Disciplined strategic marketing always starts with clear intent, and drives toward specific measureable brand, customer, and business outcomes.
DRIVE MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS
DRIVING MARKETING EFFICIENCY
The CMO of a leading Financial Services company asked CMO Consulting Group to develop a strategy and plans to increase customer acquisition efficiencies to help combat new competitors
Business Challenge
- The leader in their lending segment, the company was under pressure from new competitors with aggressive pricing and online marketing
- Indirect channels accounted for the majority of sales, while direct channels generated greater efficiencies
- A lack of recent product innovation compounded the impact of competitive pressure
Applied Solution
- Launched a learning agenda encompassing segmentation and decision path analyses – to generate insights for product development and marketing planning
- Created a direct marketing playbook, guided acquisition of new marketing tech tools, and stood up a new direct marketing function including full suite of digital tactics
- Created new marketing plans for largest channel – third-party agents
Results Delivered
- Learning agenda segmentation study led to creation of two new products in year one
- Grew direct-to-customer business from 35% to 50% of total revenues
- Secured new indirect partners, reducing distribution concentration and improving marketing efficiencies
IDENTIFY GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES
Sustainable growth provides fuel for future profits, but it can be tough to grow existing businesses in already-competitive markets, and even tougher to decide where to focus and develop strategies for new ventures.
Markets change, technologies change, customer needs change and even your own capabilities change over time, so growth strategies require constant oversight. We believe that sustainable growth requires focus on both performance and capabilities, so we’ll help you objectively appraise the potency of your company’s Mission and Vision and provide guidance on whether to revise or stay the course. We’ll assess and prioritize market growth opportunities and evaluate options to drive innovation.
We’ll evaluate your current capabilities against potential opportunities, to identify required investments and potential vulnerabilities. Our goal is to help you succeed with innovation where others fail.
IDENTIFY GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES
DECIDE WHERE TO PLAY AND HOW TO WIN
IDENTIFY GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES
STRATEGY FOUNDATION FOR GROWTH COMPANY
In 2014, CMO Consulting Group was asked by the CEO of a financial technology firm to develop a company vision, long-term competitive market position, and growth strategy.
Business Challenge
- Important to define a growth strategy for a well-funded entrepreneurial company in the emerging online lending category
- In 2014, 80% of consumer loans were for the purpose of credit card debt consolidation. Imperative to diversify into new loan areas to accelerate growth and reduce risk
- The client had very low awareness, but an ambition to build a strong brand
Applied Solution
- Worked with ”C-team” to create strong, clear overall mission, vision and values for the company
- Developed strategic brand position for lenders and borrowers, based on extensive market and customer research
- Completed detailed analysis of $3 Trillion US consumer credit market, and worked with CFO and CRO to prioritize growth segments: medical, education and home improvement
Results Delivered
- Tripled loans to $3B in two years, and improved marketing efficiencies to achieve first profitable year in 2015
- Successfully diversified into target segments in 2015 through acquisition of a medical lending company and partnership with home improvement company
- Activated brand position through customer experience to deliver 68 NPS score among borrowers
DIFFERENTIATE BRANDS
While frequently touted, the role and value of a brand is still not universally understood, and is sometimes even reduced to superficial ’branding campaigns.’ We see your brands as a core element of your overall business strategy and as a key means of differentiating your company. Your company brand should clearly reflect your core values and define your relationship with customers, creating a blueprint for both your customer experience and employee engagement.
CMO Consulting Group’s approach to brand development follows five key steps, customized to fit your situation. Our comprehensive process begins with an assessment of your overarching company strategy and goals and ends with a 360o Brand Roadmap to drive activation across all customer touchpoints while inspiring employees to bring your brand to life every day.
DIFFERENTIATE BRANDS
5 KEY STEPS
Our approach to brand development follows 5 key steps, customized to fit your situation.
DIFFERENTIATE BRANDS
NEW BRAND DEVELOPMENT
In 2013, a Fortune 500 client needed to defend against price-driven brands, and asked CMO Consulting Group to help develop and launch a fighter brand.
Business Challenge
- Develop disruptive new brand proposition to compete with the growing pre-paid monthly price-driven segment, particularly MetroPCS
- Deliver new product idea capable of success with minimal marketing support, to be sold through third-party distribution
Applied Solution
- Developed entirely new brand proposition, inclusive of name, pricing and product strategy
- Hired agency and oversaw development of marketing and advertising campaign development
- Launched new brand – GoSmart Mobile in 2013
Results Delivered
- Achieved successful launch and goal of sustained distribution
- Delivered $100M+ annual revenue, disrupting MetroPCS in key markets
DESIGN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
While it’s widely accepted that a focus on Customer Experience (CX) improves business results, far fewer understand how to operationalize and scale the effort.
To deliver the holistic and personalized experiences customers expect, we work to design and implement a strategy that can exist across your entire enterprise. We make sure this approach is repeatable and adaptable, as customer needs change and platform technologies evolve. We also make sure it balances your outside-in customer needs with inside-out business results.
We offer a full suite of CX services, from strategy development, design and mapping through roadmap sequencing and execution. Our applied experience gives us the expertise to meld CX design (marketing) with CX platforms (technology) and CX operations (sales and service) to successfully scale the personalized and self-optimizing experiences customers want from your brand.
% of CX leaders who have calculated a positive relationship between CX or satisfaction and financial impact
DESIGN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
SIX KEY STEPS TO CX
Our approach to CX follows 6 key steps, customized to fit the challenge.
Our unique end-to-end process attacks strategy, design, and delivery.
LEVERAGE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES
It’s common to see those who grew up as digital natives wrestle with classic marketing disciplines such as brand development, and just as common to see marketers with traditional backgrounds hesitant to embrace cutting-edge technology. And regardless of whether you’re a traditional or digital marketer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the thousands of technology platform options available today.
We believe that technology should be used to enable effective marketing strategies. This philosophy requires that companies develop a close bond between IT and Marketing, forming an unbreakable alliance that is firmly embedded into your culture rather than just tasked to a project.
We take full advantage of marketing technology by following seven strategic steps. Our process begins with an assessment of your marketing strategy and goals, and ends with effectiveness measurement, creating a learning loop for continual improvement.
LEVERAGE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES
BUILDING A MARKETING TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE
This process can be comprehensive but is often used on specific trouble spots as circumstances dictate. For example, a firm experiencing attrition issues may be in need of a website redesign or content development and deployment to increase customer engagement.
LEVERAGE MARKETING TECHNOLOGIES
CUSTOM MARKETING TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION
Assisted a major technology company in implementing a custom marketing database solution, including the use of analytics, predictive modeling and campaign management tools for B2B and B2C.
Business Challenge
- All direct marketing technology had been handled in a black box by an external agency; there were few company employees who understood the underlying technologies necessary for a 21st century approach
- A supplier had been selected, but no marketing leadership was involved, nor able to give direction
- Budgets were decentralized and project management had no governance process
- The first campaign from the DB had significant errors
Applied Solution
- Created a governance process which pulled the supplier, project management and end-users into one decision-making body responsible for flawless implementation
- Implemented new teams to oversee areas such as analytic tools, data acquisition, digital usage, PII management and addressable channels
- Upgraded supplier account management
Results Delivered
- Completely retrofitted data originally built into the design to enhance deliverability and accuracy
- Commissioned series of predictive models to drive response rates
- On a total budget of $15M, successfully avoided several million dollars of additional costs
- Database is now the system of record for driving people-first marketing initiatives across all targetable media
IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
While brand strategy can help define a winning customer-based reason for being, brand clarity can be a cultural lynchpin and catalyst for organizational change. We work to balance your need to drive near-term performance with the investments required to build organizational capabilities that lead to better results over time.
We have the expertise necessary to efficiently assess, identify and support the development of higher-level capabilities to drive your organization’s effectiveness. We work to diagnose and address marketing performance opportunities while considering organizational structure, talent, strategic partners, infrastructure and systems, work-flow and processes, governance and decision-making, as well as overall company culture.
We will assess your current organization performance to identify areas of strength and opportunity. And we’ll develop a roadmap for improvement while addressing key opportunity areas, such as process engineering, agency relationships, technology partner sourcing and others.
IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
BUILD ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES TO DELIVER SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE
We take an integrated 360 view of organizational capabilities, assessing performance, needs and opportunities across 7 key dimensions.
IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
STRENGTHENING THE MARKETING ECOSYSTEM
CMO Consulting Group was asked by the CEO and CMO at a Fortune 500 client to help assess, update and strengthen the roster of agencies supporting the company’s marketing efforts.
Business Challenge
- Our client’s roster had grown to 103 agencies and marketing partners, with some redundancies and several capability gaps
- The relationship with the primary AOR had deteriorated and performance and results were suffering
- In part as a result, the over $500M annual marketing budget was no longer delivering an acceptable ROI
Applied Solution
- Completed a thorough analysis of the roles, capabilities, investments in and performance of 103 agency partners – scaled back and/or terminated several agency relationships
- Identified 12 core agencies across marketing disciplines, clarified roles, and updated performance goals and SOW’s for each
- Conducted an in-depth review of the AOR and developed a shortlist of recommendations for both the agency and client to improve the relationship and performance outcomes
Results Delivered
- Primary AOR went from under performance to exceeding expectations within 12 months
- Identified need for, ran selection process and hired specialist social media agency
- Refocused and improved the efficiency and effectiveness of 12 key agency partners