8June 2021IN MY OPINIONBy Eric Johnson, SVP & CIO, SurveyMonkeyThe Next Frontier for CIOs: Finding More Meaning in the Existing Marketing DataGoogle the term 'marketing software', and HubSpot is one of the first companies you will read about. With solutions for CRM, content management, social media, and more, it seems to have its fingers in almost every pot. The company has historically been quick to anticipate--and service--every marketing need. So, what does it mean that HubSpot has acquired PieSync: a data syncing tool? It means that marketers are recognizing the same problem that CIOs have been wary of for decades: data silos.There are too many poorly integrated silos within marketing--a situation that has recently been made worse by the explosion of marketing technology solutions. Of these, many of the 'best of breed' solve only a narrow set of use cases, forcing companies to layer more and more solutions to the stack and, of course, creating more silos. Marketers often have direct lines of access to a type of data that should be valuable for almost everyone in the company: the voice of customers. It sounds like a buzzword, but the interactions that marketers have with customers often produce insights about their problems, preferences, needs, and deeply held beliefs--the kind of information that ultimately determines whether your company is successful.SurveyMonkey's research found that 91 percent of people believe that companies should fuel innovation by listening to buyers and customers, compared to only 31 percent who think they should hire a team of experts. What could a software developer accomplish if they could have first-hand access to information about the features each user finds the most confusing? How would a product manager change their decisions if they knew which webinars their customers found most interesting?Right now, many employees only get access to information by actively seeking it out or having it reported to them. As of 2017, the average enterprise used 91 different cloud marketing solutions. That number has probably only gone up. So, part of the problem might be that employees have no idea what kind of information their peers are collecting in systems like HubSpot, Marketo, or Salesforce. Those peers are probably similarly in the dark about the value of the data
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