Forrester’s Christina Schmitt makes some good points in her blog article “Ditch The Old Playbook: B2B CMOs, It’s Time To Lead The E-Commerce Charge”. This was an excellent post. There were three points that I think are spot-on, and I want to give my POV on two of them, and then address what I think is a significant miss in the post on the last point.
First, the post talks about how “decision-makers are accustomed to seamless online experiences in their personal lives”, and “today’s B2B customers will not only prefer to shop online but will demand it.”
Agreed. If you’re buying for your company, you are likely to be disappointed when your buying experience doesn’t measure up to your buying experience on Amazon.com. It’s a fallacy to believe that your B2B website doesn’t have to have a high-quality user experience like Amazon’s; put simply, Amazon influences all buyers’ behavior regardless of where or when they are shopping.
Second, Christina’s point about achieving commitment across the organization first is spot-on. I have lived through the difficult times when ecommerce was considered the red-headed stepchild in the company; and it suffered from lack of internal resources, cooperation, etc. Ecommerce is the most cross-functional of any corporate discipline; so a lack of cooperation from any department can drag it down. This commitment must manifest itself by means of CEO messaging and support (allocation of resources), as well as compensation structures that give every contributor skin in the game. This is true for B2B, B2C, and DTC.
The blog post goes on to make several other valid points. But I think something is missing, and I’ll explore that a bit here.
I don’t agree that CMOs should be in charge of ecommerce. It’s like putting a cardiologist in charge of pediatrics. Sure, they’re both medicine, but they have various important differences. CDOs should be in charge of ecommerce, and should be peers and partners of CMOs, CIOs/CTOs, et al.
Ecommerce is the ultimate cross-functional discipline. It includes and intersects with merchandising, marketing, IT, legal, and operations. Everything in ecommerce is not just part of those functions; it's also a superset of each of them. It’s that “superset” part that will give most CMOs problems. Ecommerce leaders have both a specialized set of skills and a broader set of skills compared to other CxOs. The ecommerce leader needs a solid understanding of digital marketing, merchandising, digital product management and IT operations, customer care, legal, and vendor management. To be effective, the ecommerce leader has to be a partner with the merchants, the marketers, the IT guys, legal, customer care, and so on.
A typical CMO is not going to be a great ecommerce leader:
They will not have the digital product management/IT capabilities, nor technical project management skills, not to mention the bandwidth to focus on these topics.
A typical Merchandising VP is not going to be a great ecomm leader either, for much the same reasons, and online merchandising is totally different, a superset, of offline merchandising.
Lastly, a typical CIO/CTO/IT leader is not going to be a great ecomm leader; they have the opposite issues of the CMO, and, the ecomm technology stack is different from all the other technology stacks the organization uses.
In each case, any other C-level exec is going to be stretched thin, in terms of bandwidth and expertise, to accommodate ecomm’s needs. Ecomm has its own needs, and they need to be focused on - they need more than part-time attention from the ecomm leader to be successful. Ecommerce needs a Chief Digital Officer, or a VP of Ecommerce (or a Director in a small company).
If you isolate ecomm under any of those departments, your ecomm function & team will be hamstrung and starved for oxygen (i.e., resources including bandwith, money, attention, etc). I've seen every structure imaginable, and the only one that has ever made any sense is as a separate department that reports to the CEO. This applies not only to B2B, but also to B2C.
© 2024 Rick Wingender, SmallBizCoach.biz
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