CXOps When clients ask me to fix their martech problems, I’m thinking: it’s probably not your technology. It’s your organization.
You’ve implemented an impressive connected marketing cloud. But did you restructure your teams? Rethink how you measure success? Reimagine your customer experience?
That’s not fair to you or your customers — continuing to activate expensive experience management software without examining how you actually conceive, create, and activate experiences.
The Hard Truth About Digital Transformation
I’ve spent nearly 20 years in this space. Getting software approved, implemented, and integrated is challenging. But changing an organization? That’s exponentially harder.
Early in my career, I lived through a digital transformation that replaced our technology AND fundamentally shifted how marketing, IT, and digital teams worked together — their structure, incentives, everything. Being in the belly of the beast gave me perspective on what consultants and vendors won’t tell you:
The technology implementation is the easiest part.
With software, to succeed you primarily have to adjust how you think about investment and time. With people and organizations entrenched in decades of behavior? That’s where the real work happens.
The Orchestra Problem
The word “orchestration” appears constantly in discussions about AI and agentic systems. That’s no accident.
A conductor has purview over strings, brass, winds, and percussion. Everyone looks to them for when to enter, crescendo, and stop.
Now think about most digital marketing organizations: web, email, social, and media management split across teams. Product managers for shopping, support, and loyalty working independently. Different conductors for the tubas and violins, each wanting their section to shine.
Individually, they might feel they’re delivering amazing performances. But from the audience? Cacophonous.
Yet this is how most organizations operate even after adopting new tech— then wonder why their customer experience feels disjointed and operations feel so hard, as consumers move from search to website to retargeted ads to retail.
What Actually Needs to Change
Structure: Expertise to activate experiences in specific platforms is necessary, but the fundamental strategy and coordination of that work must evolve.
Governance: Not control with an iron fist. Think of traffic laws — white lines, speed limits, traffic lights. These create predictability so thousands of vehicles travel safely while drivers maintain freedom and responsibility.
That’s the governance needed for personalization at scale across every customer touchpoint. Not to limit what people can do, but so we’re all following the same rules as we move together to deliver and improve customer experience.
Measurement: Traditional channel-specific metrics (bounce rate, open rates, CPM) have value. But when planning end-to-end customer experiences, there’s significantly more nuance required to determine if the experience as a whole is working.
There’s actually more freedom for channel managers in this approach — understanding that a decline in one area may not be bad if customers are still engaging through another channel.
A Real Example
During our digital transformation, we competed with telesales and retail. We’d never direct website customers to call, because that meant giving away “our” transaction. This mindset prevented us from succeeding together.
During a checkout process deep dive, we discovered customers selecting products and picking plans would completely drop out. After testing and surveys, we learned why: some needed to split payments across multiple credit cards or use a gift card plus credit card for down payments. Our channel supported only single payment types. Telesales could handle multiple.
Our pride in channel conversion numbers was turning away committed, ready-to-purchase customers.
The fix: We displayed a message for customers requiring significant down payments, offering a telesales number and cart ID to complete purchase with multiple payment forms. This saved thousands of customers quickly.
The unlock: We weren’t competing with telesales. We each had a role in delivering for customers and business.
The next week, instead of hiding the telesales number, we made it the largest element on shopping pages — plastered across every page in a brightly colored banner, throughout the checkout process. Customers always knew they had a safe way to finish transactions.
We negotiated with finance so web and telesales could share conversion metric success. Everyone showed up as winners.
The technology was trivial: A simple A/B testing tool and web content update. The hard part was redefining success for channel leaders, measuring across channels, and building agreements between teams for shared success.
This eye-opening change, and how we partnered across channels to deliver a better customer experience, was one of the first in a series of larger organizational changes that had us coordinating go to market, promotions, and customer experience holistically over the next three years.
The Bottom Line
New tools unlock new capabilities. But they’ll rarely be your hardest struggle.
Rethinking organizational structure, how you conceive and implement omnichannel experiences, and how you measure success — that’s always the harder part of digital transformation.
But it’s the only way to realize ROI on your technology investment.
The journey is worth it.