Forbes CMO Practice also has a new report, funded by CDP ARM Treasure Data. The focus is marketing accountability but they did find that 61% of high-performing marketers have a single customer view. That’s seems high but remember that was just high-performing marketers. Alas, they didn’t provide an average.
Short of randomly asking “But will it scale?” you can always sound smart in a meeting by saying the real challenge is people, not technology. Here’s proof: a survey of Fortune 1000 executives from tech advisors NewVantage Partners, which found that 95% of respondents cited cultural factors as blocking big data adoption, compared with just 5% citing technology. You can almost hear the teeth grind as fewer claimed measurable results than in last year’s survey.
Maybe CMOs would be more successful if they spent less time answering surveys. Here’s one more, this time by partner marketing specialist WorkSpan. They found that just 11% of marketers are confident their budget is spent effectively. Perhaps hoping to save marketers some time, WorkSpan reported results in a press release without publishing the report itself. And, I was just kidding about CMO surveys: 68% of study respondents held non-CMO titles.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.