2024 marked an interesting but challenging year in PE. According to Pitchbook, U.S. firms closed 46 first-time funds, raising $9.2 billion—a significant drop from $21.5 billion across 121 funds in 2023. PE also encountered sustained headwinds on entry with the cost of leverage up to 10% in 2024 vs. 5% in 2022. 

As PE combats a few tough years, green shoots are starting to emerge. PE exits in 2024 were at $902 billion compared to $754 billion in 2023, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. This is still well below pandemic-era highs but leaves renewed optimism for 2025. 

This stalled deal activity has made clear that while private equity (PE) firms have mastered the art of financial engineering, operational efficiencies, and strategic acquisitions, today’s PE environment requires an expanded toolkit of revenue and growth engineering to unlock value. One that specifically focuses on unlocking the true potential of a well-defined and executed CMO or Growth Officer agenda post-deal.   

What stands out in Prophet’s experience working with a network of trusted PE partners and their portfolio companies is the power of value unlock potential beyond the deal. Specifically, bringing in a growth-oriented playbook alongside an operational and financial engineering one that focuses on four targeted actions with seismic potential to accelerate time to value. 

Crafting a Compelling and Coherent Story of Value: Rethink Your Company’s Identity to act as a Greater Value Multiplier 

Alongside operational and financial levers, the impact of a strong story of value and brand positioning can have on strengthening enterprise valuation cannot be understated. We’ve seen investor valuation models shift towards more forward-leaning expectations and storytelling. A strong story of value is an essential foundation in supporting the brand and can help reduce customer churn, enable premium pricing and attract top talent.  

The story of value has two parts: the corporate story, which is investor-focused and catalyzes leadership and business value, and the brand story, which is customer-facing and drives awareness and customer consideration and retention. 

These all work together as important signals to a much broader set of stakeholders, ultimately enhancing exit appeal to strategic buyers or IPO markets. A well-structured brand system should go beyond a creative exercise to crystallize business ambition and serve as the essential wrapper that catalyzes a new growth thesis. The creative strength of the work is also not trivial; new strategies can fall flat or get lost in old design systems and messages. 

It is essential to nail the blend of both stories to create a symbiotic relationship that enhances overall enterprise value. 

Driving a Customer-Led and Commercially Minded Go-To-Market Reconfiguration: Fix the Leaky Funnels and Unlock New Sources of Revenue 

Companies may risk struggling with stagnant growth, inefficient go-to-market strategies and underperforming sales motions post-acquisition. Partially changing leadership through the transition of ownership can risk decelerating progress in the short term. Post-investment, the primary goal is to avoid harming existing businesses and commercial momentum while reorganizing and integrating new technologies and products. 

However, changing leadership creates new opportunities to get closer to customers and the marketplace, uncover new insights and revisit outdated go-to-market processes by re-engineering the experience from first principles. This allows the organization to realign its brand, marketing and sales tactics in a way that can improve conversion, expand share of wallet and shorten sales cycles. 

The real unlock is creating a new or improved system that successfully drives leads and follows them through an improved sales channel, enhancing both demand generation and the sales process. These types of transactions can also serve as welcoming opportunities to deliberately engage with customers more broadly. Specifically, conversations that expand the frame of reference of the new entity and open opportunities to deepen relationships or cross sell more effectively. Finding new processes for this that can scale in broader roll-ups can accelerate the time to exit for portfolio companies.  

Using Culture as a Catalyst to Power Change: Get People to See, Believe and Live the Change 

When PE firms acquire a company, there’s often a disconnect between leadership priorities, business strategy, organizational culture and the financial growth plan. Change is expected and constant during these transitions but is often not well communicated or orchestrated. New leaders are brought in to drive the change but need to lean heavily on legacy teams, especially in the beginning.  

The HR function is often undervalued, but culture is critical at deal time. Building a unified culture accelerates integration and leverages an energized organization to achieve objectives. Post-deal, the focus shifts to attracting and retaining the right talent for the company’s vision. Highlighting both the initial integration and ongoing talent strategy is essential. A well thought out story of value and brand from empowered CMO and/or Growth Officers should be deliberately activated internally to shift employee culture to drive impact externally.   

Where’s Your Playbook? 

Prophet understands the essential role of revenue engineering for PE value creation—and more importantly, how to define and accelerate the right company efforts to gain a competitive edge in an increasingly complex valuation market. We routinely see PE firms with great playbooks and partners for rapid due diligence going into a deal that outlines strategic routes and assessments of where to play post-deal along with the risks associated with the moves.  

However, post-acquisition can be the ideal time to bring in a growth-led “think and build” partner capable of accelerating the CMO or Growth Officer agenda to move quickly to execute how-to-win strategies that unpack new customer insights, depict a more coherent story of value, develop a refreshed identity, reimagine new customer experiences and power a renewed sense of culture. 

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We regularly have the great fortune to spend time with clients at their marketing leadership offsites. As they assess how effectively they have delivered against their current year plans, it is equally critical that they begin to look towards emerging trends that impact next year’s marketing plans.  

Marketers today are wrestling with seismic change in understanding rapidly changing customer experience needs, marketplace disruption, competitive landscape and organizational challenges. At least 40% of U.S. CEOs expect CMOs to focus on five key growth challenges: revenue, market share, competition, reputation and company narrative.  

The expectations for return on investment have never been higher. Navigating the noise and delivering business outcomes is the CMO’s new mission. It requires new skills, insights, measurement and tremendous focus on execution. In our recent analysis of key trends facing marketing leaders, we found four emerging trends for 2025 planning to build your strategy for staying ahead.

1. Integrate Brand and Demand  

More and more clients are evolving their annual marketing plan to integrate brand and demand into a single growth plan. Some are even substituting the customer journey for the funnel as the backdrop to uncover gaps or identify more opportunities at every touchpoint. Our ongoing research, ”Brand and Demand Marketing: A Love Story” backs up this approach to break down silos and plan brand and performance plans together. Winning organizations are 3X more likely to take a fully integrated approach to connect brand and demand. Whether you’re preparing a brand or product launch or need to find other routes to growth, this could be the year you take integrated planning to a new level, building stronger relationships across the organization and a foundation for bigger impact. You’ll hear much more from us both on launching brands and how to integrate brand and demand as our latest research report launches.  

2. Provide Marketing’s POV on AI 

AI in marketing being top of mind won’t be a surprise to any marketer reading this post. It is estimated that AI will drive $100 billion in revenue by 2027. With more money than ever being funneled into new AI technology, it should be apparent that the impact on customer experience, insights and new ways of working will reshape how marketing is delivered. With a perpetual need to drive more personalized communication in the market and meet the insatiable need for content that resonates with buyers, AI holds great promise to deliver more with less resources. The C-Suite is grappling with broad-ranging opportunities to leverage AI technology, and the marketing leader is uniquely positioned to think through the firm’s position on AI, how it can be used to enhance customer touch points and how AI can drive more scale in marketing efforts. AI can be integrated into nearly every section of your 2025 plan. See how we started to organize use cases here to maximize AI’s value.  

3. Embrace the Next Wave of Data-Driven Marketing 

Delivering data-driven marketing and advancing customer insight remain a key domain of the modern marketing leader. Understanding the customer has been a staple of marketing’s role within the organization and there are more ways than ever to get more data on customer wants and needs. However, efforts to capture customer data and find prospective customers in the wild are growing more complex and challenging. More companies than ever before are embarking on building sophisticated first-party data understanding and reach. In addition, marketers are developing new lead generation and management capabilities that deliver more contextually relevant and personalized experiences. All of this is happening with a relentless focus on attribution, measurement, and the ability to prove business impact. More than half of brands (60%) quantify the value of engagement on social in terms of revenue impact, 57% use it to track conversions and sales directly resulting from social efforts and 51% use it to optimize their product development or marketing strategy. Data enrichment, identity management and the ability to leverage new technology are the newest set of differentiating skills that marketing leaders are addressing. 

4. Rethink Effectiveness in an Ever-Evolving Media Landscape 

Worldwide ad spending will grow nearly 10% in 2024, for a total of $992 billion. Almost 70% of that will be spent on digital advertising, which will see a spending increase of more than 13%—well above its 2022 and 2023 growth rates. As ever, diverse forms of media play a key role in the toolkit for marketers, with continued growth in out-of-home (OOH), fueled by digital OOH and eyes on emerging retail media. An evolving landscape in how media is delivered and regulated is creating significant disruption and opportunity. Global advertising spend continues to increase, as cookie-based advertising is being turned off, FAST TV is emerging, the influencer market is maturing, and there are a swath of regulatory and legal decisions pending. Each of these changes brings opportunity, a need for new capability building, impacts on budgets and an increase in marketing leadership needs.  

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How do you gain market share and attract the best talent in a market that looks like a sea of sameness? Where clients, partners, and talent see you and your competitors as interchangeable? Asset managers have long operated with this mindset when it comes to brand positioning.   Compounding this challenge in recent years is the need to navigate challenges that include fee compression, market volatility, shifting regulatory environments and talent friction.  

Consequently, asset managers have rapidly expanded their areas of focus: taking on a new tension around focused expertise vs. expanding the set of offers to serve investors (e.g., new industries, specialties, alternative investments, ESG investing, real estate, digital assets, etc.). Many have used expanded offers to deepen their relationships with clients and successfully compete but at the price of sometimes murky associations around specialization. Such go-to-market strategies have made it confusing for new investors to confidently invest and, at times, for asset managers to confidently sell a broader set of investments and capabilities.  

Facing New Opposition  

Rising interest rates, inflation, inverted yield curves, disruptive technologies (AI, digital assets), and rising global tension have shrunken available Assets Under Management (AUM), which has only increased investor trepidation as they conserve cash at a time when access to capital is more costly.  

Automation and AI are also shifting the paradigm for acquiring AUM, and there could be a semi-industry rotation. The sales and client engagement processes are also evolving as a consequence of technology. It’s less about being “close” to investors for AUM and more about being “ubiquitous” and/or “famous” for something.  

The theme of 2021 was a world of too much money chasing too few assets. The theme of 2023 is too little AUM for too many asset managers and their expansive sets of offers. 

Consolidation is the next imminent frontier we are seeing. Franklin Templeton’s $1bn+ purchase of rival Putnam Investments and Lansdowne Partners’ plan to acquire UK equity investment manager Crux Asset Management are only the beginning.  

The Asset Management Brand-Demand Challenge  

While consolidation will make newly combined entities more competitive and allow them to capture efficiencies, it will not solve the two underlying challenges present in the asset management space:  

1. A need to establish or regain slipping relevance: Every asset management brand covered in Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index (BRI) saw a decline in relevance from 2021 to 2022, and all but one declined in relevance versus other brands from 2022 to 2023. Relevance, which directly relates to the bottom line, is noteworthy to all stakeholders. It creates importance to investors but also attracts and retains premier talent in a tighter AUM environment and bigger asset management ecosystem—building both brand and demand for the business.
2. A need to create coherence: As entities combine and grow, it is critical to ensure that not just the company but also its offers and capabilities are well-articulated, organized and understood—making it easier for investors to buy and asset managers to sell.  

5 Actions for Building a Winning Asset Management Strategy  

1. Acknowledge and understand your unique audience motivations.

Asset managers need to manage a range of stakeholders and monitor the emerging patterns in behaviors. For example:   

• Investors: Institutional and individuals are typically seeking risk-adjusted returns that outpace the other options available in the capital structure.   
• Portfolio Companies: Seeking sustainable growth through capital and expertise, but also looking for purpose and values alignment.  
• Capital Allocators: Seeking value creation, preservation of capital, and risk management for both the firm and its clients.  They also need the best talent to convey expertise, broaden access to capital, and drive outsized performance. 
• Talent: Looking to build unique career knowledge, gain experience, and get rewarded by working with the smartest people at asset management firms with the strongest cultures.  

2. Establish a clear brand purpose.

Asset management brands tend to place too great of an emphasis on what they do (alternatives, quant, fixed income) vs. answering bigger questions on how they do it (resources, ecosystem, talent) or, even further, why they align their purpose, promise, and principles to a particular vision. Brands that can’t get past what are likely to simply float along in a sea of sameness. Many asset management positionings have migrated to being ‘safe’ through a few primary lenses: looking towards tomorrow, spotlighting integrity and/or trust, and a focus on driving long-term value.  

We believe many of the declines in brand relevance for asset managers can be attributed, in part, to a decline in various key client sentiment heart factors as outlined by Prophet’s BRI. Heart factors encapsulate the emotional connections that the audiences will forge with brands, e.g., ‘connects with me emotionally’, ‘makes me feel inspired’ and ‘engages with me in new and creative ways’. The erosion of these heart factors vs. more rational head factors which have remained stable, e.g., ‘know I can depend on’, ‘delivers on a consistent experience’, and ‘makes my life easier’ reinforces the idea that asset managers have reached a perceived parity across products, services, and the overall brand.  Such underscores the likely importance of conveying a clear ‘how’ paired with a well-defined ‘why’ in the brand purpose with clients.    

A clear how may include things like:  

1. Your investment philosophy and approach 
2. Your organization’s talent, values, and principles  
3. Signature stories of lasting impact on employees, investors, companies, communities, and ecosystems 

A well-thought-out purpose is:  

1. Authentic – ties back to what you do 
2. Inspiring – connects with employees and customers emotionally 
3. Shared – creates connection and builds community 
4. Actionable – lived every day 

In Vice Chairman at Prophet David Aaker’s recent book The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding, he outlines the use of inspiring, and mission-driven signature social programs that deploy resources to address the most pressing societal challenges.  One shining example of this is State Street Global Advisors who commissioned the bronze sculpture Fearless Girl overlooking the New York Stock Exchange in anticipation of National Women’s Day.  This serves as a symbol of a part of the organization’s purpose to position on the gender equality gap and reinforces its position on taking an aggressive stance on its expectation that all portfolio companies hold at least one woman on its board.  The organization mentions it is prepared to cast proxy votes against board leaders when companies do not meet their diversity expectations.  

3. Power brand from within using a visible human-centered approach.

It’s hard enough to articulate a clear purpose in the crowded asset management space but even harder to ensure that brand purpose connects meaningfully to people and clients. The brands’ purpose needs to align with prospective talent and customers. Shaping a visible culture plays a critical role in attracting and retaining the best people which in turn garners the attention of clients. Bridgewater Associates famously pioneered a workplace culture relying on truthful and transparent communication dubbed “radical truth and radical transparency” as part of Ray Dalio’s principle-based approach. A human-centered approach involves bridging your brand purpose into a visible culture supported by a strong employee value proposition that:  

• Articulates what makes your company a strong place to work  
• Improves winning in the broad talent marketplace 
• Develops an enhanced foundation to support future and evolving talent needs  

Doing these three things requires building from the organization’s purpose but also driving careful consideration around the Employee Value Proposition and employee experience.  In some recent Prophet qualitative research in the asset management space, we found building a winning EVP requires deliberate care to the employee experience levers talent is looking for beyond compensation, such as:  

• Autonomy – giving employees the freedom to make decisions that matter to them 
• Mentorship – surrounding talent with leaders that inspire them 
• Clarity – on how the organization will value their performance and the capital available to them  
• Resources – being equipped with the right support to guide decisions and accomplish goals 
• Innovation – seeing their work and the work of the company evolving toward the future 

4. Revisit architecture, nomenclature, and value propositions.

Increasingly adding incremental investment products and services will raise organizational capabilities with impending M&A in the asset management space compounding that effect. But these new products, services, and areas of focus often get added to the existing array of capabilities that slowly stifle brand and portfolio coherence. Asset managers need to revisit the growing complexity of their investment focuses and develop an architecture and naming strategy that still complies with regulatory requirements but removes friction for both buying and selling offers designed to increase their AUM. Coupling this with strong value propositions that don’t just indicate what investments to provide but also how to pursue those investments in a way that serves to improve investor consideration and demand in addition to improving the ability for advisors to promote their services. The necessity for these services becomes evident when we consider a key finding from BRI, which reveals asset management brands fall short of advantageous relevance drivers that connect to aspects of having a strong brand architecture, use of nomenclature, and/or value propositions resonate with people in meaningful ways:  

• Emotional resonance (connects with me) 
• Value alignment (has a set of beliefs and values that align with my own) 
• Essentiality (I can’t imagine living without).   

5. Experiment to win with experience both internally and externally.

In an industry where both brand and culture follow predictable patterns and a substantial amount of investment follows critical business-as-usual actions around quality reporting, transparency, educational resources, technology, etc., it can be easy for marketing, business development/advisor activities, experience investments, and cultural investments to follow these patterns. Applying a portfolio construction theory to marketing, hiring, and culture investments to experiment with actions that set a brand’s purpose and culture apart can yield huge returns. Asset management company, Vanguard, is famous for owning the retirement space not just for investors but also employees whom they affectionately name their “crew”. The Vanguard Retirement Savings plan for this group offers 4% in matched contributions and an unheard-of 10% company contribution without limit.  

Acknowledgment: The authors would like to thank Prophet Partner Adam Tremblay for his input in creating this article. 

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While there is no crystal ball, slow economic growth and an inverted yield curve continue as headwinds for the banking industry. Both have already exposed vulnerabilities of large regional banks like Silicon Valley and Signature Bank, as well as G-SIBs such as UBS and Credit Suisse. While the speculated wave of consolidation may be overblown, there will no doubt be M&A activity during the foreseeable, uncertain future.   

HBR continues to cite that between 70-90% of acquisitions fail. In addition, MIT Sloan studied 200+ M&As with values exceeding $250M during a 10+ year period starting in 1995 and learned that in nearly two-thirds of those deals, brand strategy was deemed to have a low to moderate influence in pre-merger discussions. This approach leads to the new identity or identities post-merger in a suboptimal place with limited clarity and often stems from a gap in brand expertise during the M&A process and following.  

Specifically, we see five common mistakes related to brand that hinders speculated growth performance and increase costs during and post-acquisition:  

1. The deal strategy undervalues customer upside and risks: To complete a fully informed financial forecast, due diligence must quantify current and future demand, change tolerance and emerging customer requirements. 
2. There is limited understanding of purchased brand assets: For a truly shared optimized portfolio post M&A, companies must understand how all brand assets work to drive choice, revenue, and pricing power. 
3. Integration teams have a narrow framing as primarily a “re-branding” effort: M&A presents a rare, point-in-time opportunity to articulate a new corporate narrative, upgrade customer perceptions and drive lasting cultural change within the organization.  
4. Integration planning without a go-to-market plan to win: Integration priorities should pair synergy plans with growth moves: product, service and experience innovation to drive growth through the new asset base. 
5. The new enterprise under-leverages culture and employee engagement: Successfully informing, engaging and enabling employees BEFORE launching externally is critical to retaining human capital and driving cultural engagement. 

As inevitable market forces drive sustained or increased M&A in the banking industry, new and exciting opportunities emerge. Here are three practical things to consider that relate to your brand (and business) during M&A:  

1. Consider customer context early and often: Ensure all functional discussions include conversations around customer impact and set a precedent that addressing the customer impact and experience is a priority. This is especially true at retail banks, often built around specialized customer focuses or geographic footprints with entrenched identities.  
2. Evaluate the value and values of brand assets to guide the right transition plan: Typically, fewer stronger brands win out in banking. While long-term efficiencies exist for consolidating brands, careful work must be done to explore different end-states and migration scenarios. Perform the right evaluation ahead not just to understand the brand’s value, but also the inherent values the brand holds, and the customer perception to guide the right transition plan in context.  
3. Discover or rediscover purpose and power it through culture from within: Banking consolidation done wrong can feel like a mismatched transformer coming together with messy operating model discussions and integration cadences that unfold over time. This can be especially distancing for distributed employees working in branches or regional offices closest to the customer. Investing early in the process to better understand and sharpen a combined new culture with a more meaningful purpose can serve as a North Star for smoother and more engaged integration.  

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Blockchains and the tokenization of assets allow marketers to unlock new forms of community development and value exchange with consumers. In this article, we outline how marketers will need to re-evaluate brand building in Web3 based on nine observations. To do this, we’re drawing perspectives from the recent launch of Moonbirds, a non-fungible token (NFT) developed by PROOF Holdings.

While many likely don’t know Moonbirds as a brand, we’re using it as a case because we admire the brand-building mechanics this project is demonstrating within new Web3 possibilities. Moonbirds is an Ethereum-based collection of 10,000 unique Profile Pictures (PFPs). Each token doubles as membership of sorts, granting owners access to an exclusive Discord (a server where owners chat and hang out) along with unique in-real-life (IRL) events and digital membership benefits. The brand mirrors and further builds on proven tactics leveraged by NFTs like Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) from Yuga Labs.

For context, Moonbirds launched on April 16, 2022, raising $66 Million in a matter of hours. In just 48 hours from its launch, it became the top traded NFT by volume, created more than $210 million in additional secondary sales and had a floor price of $62,000 (the cheapest bird available for purchase). Additionally, Moonbirds is already pushing into popular culture. Celebrities like Jimmy Fallon have even changed their verified NFT profile pictures on Twitter.

Though it’s the early days of brand building in Web3 with Budweiser, Taco Bell, Campbell’s, Adidas, Twitter, Gucci and countless others having launched NFTs, we can see why many of these big brands have been comparatively less successful in adopting some of the new rules of brand building.

Let’s use Moonbirds to illustrate nine brand-building lessons for Web3.

People are at the Heart of a Brand’s Reason to Believe (RTB)

Moonbirds was built out of PROOF Holdings which had already successfully launched PROOF Collective, a proven NFT community. The belief in the team – Kevin Rose (Revision3, Digg), Ryan Carson (founder of Treehouse), and Justin Mezzell, an experienced artist, illustrator, and product designer – is the core of why there is a demand for this project. At Prophet, we talk a lot about human-centered transformation. So, much of a brand’s success in Web3 will be built around having strong people committed to building the brand in addition to driving demand, engagement and the overall experience.

Leaders that Drive Brand Content Development and Community Engagement

Content and community for Moonbirds have been largely driven by its founders. Kevin is an avid podcaster (Proof, Modern Finance) and Ryan is one of the more prolific people on Discord and Twitter. Ahead of the launch, they’ve been on a roadshow translating the brand’s vision and building demand and understanding of the project. Web3 brand building will require a greater emphasis on leaders’ ability to be the marketers building demand for their brands vs. the legacy approach of the most junior or outsourced teams managing customer relationships, content creation and communications.

Evolved Monetization Strategies Pushing Perpetual Brand Building

Moonbirds is committed to reinvesting all raised funds in delivering for the community. This means that token holders are delivered value ahead of the brand capturing it. Over time, Moonbirds allows PROOF Holdings to build valuable infrastructure like new technologies, a strong team, community and much more which can be monetized in the future. Tokenizing these assets broadly contradicts the “create demand and sell” model of traditional commerce in favor of developing an always-on, brand-demand flywheel – one that creates ongoing value for a community of token holders. Web3 will push business model design to create sustained demand that engages communities gated by tokens. This will allow brands to collect perpetual royalties in a brand-demand flywheel.

Influencers Become a Rising Channel for Brand Building

Moonbirds unlocked a host of ecosystem partners beyond PROOF’s 1,000-member community to grow the brand. This includes some of the most influential bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, social posters and other Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in the space. As media is becoming increasingly decentralized, brands will need to partner and engage KOLs to play a very important role through longer-form audio, video and visual content.

Community Shares in Brand Marketing and Brand IP Ownership

Moonbirds (and other Web3 projects) violate a long-held brand-building belief on Intellectual Property (IP) rights being sacred to the brand. Every owl in the Moonbirds collection is owned by the community member that buys it. These owners have unique rights that unlock new possibilities; from making it their digital identity to designing clothing, to creating a gin brand featuring their unique owl. Some creators go as far as putting brand-built IP for owners into full creative commons (CC0).

“Prophet sees the next wave of brand building in Web3 where marketers rethink IP ownership and its value exchange with their communities.”

While this won’t happen in all industries, Prophet sees the next wave of brand building in Web3 where marketers rethink IP ownership and its value exchange with their communities. These communities will play a powerful role in the brand’s marketing army, sharing in the monetary reward, and helping the brand unlock uncommon growth.

Disruptive Design and Brand Visual Identity Systems

On the surface, Moonbirds design is basic pixelated art. That choice was deliberate so the art itself can live fully on the blockchain. What’s innovative about each bird is a design system that stretches the visual identity of the Moonbirds parent brand into unique community expressions of the owl for each community member. This flexible design system allows for many permutations. The process for building these also involves greater inclusion using a panel of diverse team members to inform design decisions. While not all Web3 brand building will result in individual NFTs, the design will stretch brands into more flexible, disruptive, inclusive, and adaptive visual systems that allow the brand to be more self-expressive, community-minded, and unique.

Continuous Brand Feedback Loops

Moonbirds leverages the 1,000 members of PROOF Holding’s PROOF Collective community to build the brand. These members became an idea engine and feedback loop that drove continued innovation for the Moonbirds launch. Decisions large and small were sourced to make the project more exciting and successful. We see a future of brand building in Web3 that doesn’t purely rely on smart product teams and strategists building brands, but also on open-sourced innovation and rapid, continuous feedback loops from brand communities that shape a number of brand-based decisions and capabilities.

Brand Roadmaps with an Ongoing Sequence of Innovative Activations

Moonbirds’ day-one announcement included a set of innovative experiences and activations they had planned for the communities. These included community meetups along with other IRL events, exclusive merchandise and access to a new version of the Metaverse called Project Highrise. Many legacy brands that have launched NFTs have fallen short by not thinking through such ongoing engagement and gamification or play with their communities. The best brand building in Web3 will solve the Brand-Demand equation by using a series of unique, ongoing and inspiring activations that will propel the brand and communities forward.

Moats Build From a Brand’s Unique Capabilities

Well-known personalities such as Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), Tim Ferriss (best-selling author), Gary Vaynerchuk (entrepreneur), along with artists like Snowfro (also ArtBlocks founder), Xcopy, Larva Labs and Justin Aversano make up a partial list of the powerful network built by the founders of Moonbirds. This network allows the team to drive unique relationships and brand activations that can’t be achieved by others. One such signal for Moonbirds was the development of birds with unique space helmets, possibly getting special private tours of the SpaceX facility. We believe the future of brand building will rely on connecting tokenized goods like an NFT into gated access passes to both digital and physical products and experiences that only your brand can uniquely provide. These sources of value will be the true moats for brand building in Web3.

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In our report The State of Digital Selling, we surveyed 500+ sales professionals to uncover how they are meeting customer needs to drive business results. Check out our infographic below to learn more about the four drivers propelling top B2B digital sellers.

Today, marketing plays an outsized role in shaping the experiences of customers and prospects. Chief marketing officers are increasingly responsible for delivering on company growth objectives, which means playing a larger part in the selling process. And this trend is intensifying as more customers demand highly-personalized interactions, requiring much deeper marketing and sales alignment.

These shifting dynamics position a CMO as the best tool, ally and salesperson the company may have. Let’s uncover five traits of great salespeople, where many CMOs already excel.

1. They’re hungry.

The best salespeople are eager to take on new accounts— aggressively delivering for the company.

With more digital marketing and measurement in place for most firms, the C-suite now expects marketing to not only contribute to growth objectives but also lead and deliver in a measured way. Increasingly, CEOs expect marketing to drive the bottom-of-funnel demand generation. With availability 24 hours a day, the modern marketing engine is constantly targeting advertising to attract new customers. More targeted marketing leads to more targeted customer-segment success. Both, marketing and sales teams are eager, hungry and incentivized to take on business outcomes by delivering an insightful view into how best to attract, convert, and serve the most desirable customers.

Many marketers are already there. Our Altimeter 2020 State of Digital Marketing report finds that the top objectives for digital marketing are to acquire new customers (40%) and increasing revenue from current customers (39%) are the top objectives for digital marketers.

2. They’re empathic listeners.

Top sellers have to be great listeners. They must understand the customer’s needs and how best to position the company, its products and services to suit them.

Listening to customer needs and delivering insights isn’t a new marketing function or capability. What has changed is the breadth and depth of that involvement for marketing. Marketing is much more involved, using insights to drive segmentation strategies leveraged by many different channels to sense and differentiate experiences based on segment needs.

Emerging self-service and “always-on” digital channels that can initiate interaction and carry it through to a sale are becoming more common, even in complex B2B selling scenarios. As marketing plays a critical role in developing customer experiences, the need for more personalized content, driven by marketing and sales, is also growing. As before, marketing must play a key role in listening to customers in all channels to generate meaningful insights. Marketing is also best positioned to enable more and better interactions, playing back sufficient empathy for customer needs in real-time.

Our research found that 95 percent of companies can personalize messaging and experiences based on customer data, with almost one-fifth using AI-driven predictive analytics to do so. (Altimeter 2020 State of Digital Marketing)

3. They build trust.

Effective selling requires strong relationships built on trust. That includes internal relationships. 

There has been a notable increase in collaboration with sales, with 75 percent of companies in our research said they have stepped up the way the marketing and sales functions work together in the last two years. And 60 percent have increased collaboration between marketing and customer service.

As prospects enter a firm’s funnel, marketing plays a critical role in capturing, quantifying, measuring and reporting more data on behaviors exhibited by different prospect groups. As marketing’s personalized interactions drive interest and affinity, the coordination of sales and marketing efforts highlights opportunities to build trust and loyal relationships with customers.

Just like a good salesperson remembers birthdays and children’s names to build familiarity, marketing is now capturing important details to reinforce important and tailored messages. Marketing can also scale this level of intimacy with existing customers to improve repeat purchases, cross-sell, up-sell and grow advocacy to gain new customer referrals.

There has been a notable increase in collaboration with sales, with 75% of companies increasing collaboration between marketing and sales in the last two years, and a 60% increase in collaboration between marketing and customer service. (Altimeter 2020 State of Digital Marketing)

4. They are prepared to optimize efficiencies.

The best salespeople are always well prepared. For full closed-loop reporting and deep customer insight to be achieved, marketing and sales are linking their data to back-office data.

Stitching together this back-office account information to customer behavior is the next big play for companies. It’s how they can deliver better experiences, improve operating models to focus on business outcomes and enrich overall decision-making.

It’s not surprising that the most desired skills for digital marketing new hires were data analysis (42%) and marketing automation expertise (39%).

Much of this work starts with more alignment of sales and marketing incentives and integration of their processes. This complete view allows the organization to coordinate marketing and sales efforts for greater efficiency. Marketing can then leverage AI/machine learning to automate many processes, delivering both marketing and sales interactions. Marketing can now sense the next customer need. When marketing is fully prepared, sales can show up ready for anything, armed with the right insight and offer at just the right time.

It’s not surprising that the most desired skills for digital marketing new hires were data analysis (42%) and marketing automation expertise (39%). (Altimeter 2020 State of Digital Marketing)

5. They’re polished.

Even the most likable salespeople underperform when they aren’t professional and organized.

While it’s wonderful that so many sales departments are rebuilding Customer Relationship Management systems, Content Management Systems and Campaign Automation technologies, these silos need to be linked together effectively. Whether they are from Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce or others, they can become vast repositories of disconnected data.

“When marketing is fully prepared, sales can show up ready for anything, armed with the right insight and offer at just the right time.”

Companies can and are stitching these technologies together to drive integrated workflows for both sales and marketing. One central area that highlights this collaboration is demand generation, where marketing and sales integrate information for identifying, scoring and routing marketing leads. This streamlining and automating joint sales and marketing processes drive speed and efficiency, allowing both marketing and sales to show up as thoughtfully coordinated. They can deliver a polished customer experience.

But it isn’t easy. Fifty-two percent of our respondents say that integrating technology in this manner is their top digital marketing challenge. (Altimeter 2020 State of Digital Marketing)

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As chief marketing executives put the finishing touches on 2021 plans, it’s clear that marketing’s role in accelerating digital selling has become a top priority. And they know it’s the only way to achieve meaningful growth. The problem is that they are not sure they can pull it off. Only 5 percent of CMOs are highly confident in their ability to impact the direction of their business, influence strategic decision and get support for their initiatives, according to a study published recently in HBR. That’s the lowest self-ranking of any role in the C-Suite.

More evidence that pressure on CMOs is building? The Gartner’s 2020 CMO Annual Spend Survey finds that CMOs are holding increasing accountability for sales. Return on investment (ROI), marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads are the top three focused metrics. That compares to measures like brand health/brand tracker at No. 8.

“The Gartner’s 2020 CMO Annual Spend Survey finds that CMOs are holding increasing accountability for sales.”

And at the same time, CMOs must do more with less, with 44% of CMOs facing midyear budget cuts as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And 11% are chopping budgets by more than 15% according to Gartner.

All this shows in the increasingly short tenure of CMOs. The average CMO stayed in his or her position for just 41 months in 2019, down from 43 months in the prior year according to search firm Spencer Stuart.

There are plenty of underlying reasons for this pressure, including unhappy CEOs, impatient customers and a more urgent need for growth. But perhaps the best reason for CMOs to make this shift is that they finally can, leveraging the digital innovations they’ve been building over the last several years.

Many of the companies we work with say marketing is now responsible for bringing in the best potential customers and getting these eager buyers into the hands of sales at the right time. And they know they must do it cost-effectively.

Behind the Convergence of Marketing and Sales

In many ways, this isn’t new. CMOs have long tried to make it easier for sales teams to reach the right audience in the right ways. But there are several critical differences now, making digital sales acceleration an urgent mission, not just something nice to have in the marketing plan.

The first, of course, is COVID-19. It’s disrupted the selling process in many businesses, and in some industries, it’s been crippling. In organizations with high-touch, agent-assisted sales processes, personal sales calls became impossible. That’s forced a quick–and often flawed–transition to digitally powered solutions.

Second, many CMOs are aware that marketing needs to do more to spur sales growth. And armed with increasingly sophisticated digital marketing tools, they are aware they can enable sales as never before. They are targeting quick wins and longer-term payoffs through digital selling efforts, making them a primary focus in 2021.

They know returning to growth is essential, and many are aware they weren’t delivering, even before the pandemic. (Their bosses know it, too. A study from McKinsey finds that while 83% of CEOs say marketing can be a significant driver of growth, 23% don’t believe that their marketing organization delivers on that growth.)

Customers, with their continually rising expectations of digital experiences, are also driving the change. People no longer have the patience for the old-school approach to the sales funnel. In the digital age, they expect highly personalized transactions, offered in multiple channels. Forrester anticipates that more than 50% of B2B companies will realign the sales enablement function to marketing to serve these buyers better (currently at 23% as of Q3 2018), further highlighting the convergence.

Three Ways to Speed Up Digital Selling Efforts

Just because CMOs understand it’s time to shift their agenda to help with demand generation and digital selling doesn’t mean they’re clear on how. CMOs have to define new capability requirements, reconsider their organizational design and operating model, hire new skills while upskilling existing talent, and redesign customer sales and service experience.

The smartest companies start with fundamental questions about which 2021 marketing priorities are best accelerating digital selling. And they are often building initiatives in three key areas:

1. Nurture and Engagement: Moving from One-to-Many to One-to-One

These efforts prime the buying interaction through the successful deployment of relevant and personalized content. They are empowering sales with digital content that can be updated and customized with shorter lead times. And typically, they use advanced analytics and “next-best-action” logic.

2. Experience and Innovation: Bridging Journey Inconsistencies Toward a Smoother Purchase

CMOs are looking for ways to get rid of friction, framing the buying process around customer personas. They’re dissecting the buying journey to prioritize and address high-value digital pain points and opportunities. And they are investing–sometimes heavily–in service design that leverages supporting technology to improve the entire purchase experience.

3. Organization and Culture: Spanning Siloes in Integrating Workflows

These efforts focus on training specific skill development, such as social selling. Sometimes they require work on a company’s operating model and an organizational redesign, comparing the current model to new priorities and jobs to be done. They also include business-case development, pilots and reinforcing mechanisms that can transform culture and drive buy-in. And they include defining and implementing critical shared metrics, aligning the organization as a whole (and individual teams) around common goals.

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While the financial services industry is undergoing almost constant transformation, fintech startups drive most of it. As these rising stars continuously find new ways to introduce customer-centric innovation, incumbent financial institutions are struggling to keep up. “The 2020 State of Digital Transformation,” a new report from Altimeter, a Prophet company, finds that even as these tech-savvy newcomers surge to record valuations, 68% of traditional financial services companies report that they are only in the early stages of digital transformation. And they say that COVID-19 has slowed their progress even further.

While validating the obstacles many legacy companies face as they navigate their way forward, this research makes clear that this is no time to slow down. The sooner companies lean in and accelerate digital efforts, the more revenue and market share they can reclaim from newcomers.

Fending off the fintech onslaught

There’s no doubt that capital markets are favoring these fintech startups. In 2019, KPMG reports that investment hit $135 billion. These companies are growing in scale and revenue, with 68 achieving “unicorns” status, a valuation of at least $1 billion, as of this past September, according to CB Insights. And while they span consumer banking, payment solutions, insurance technology and trading, they have plenty in common: They’re disruptive, customer-centric and digital to their core.

Chime, a neobank startup offering digital cash management services and debit cards, is one of our favorite examples. It has tripled its transaction volume and revenue this year, achieving a $14.5 billion valuation.

“The sooner companies lean in and accelerate digital efforts, the more revenue and market share they can reclaim from newcomers.”

And Robinhood, a commission-free brokerage platform, saw daily average trades skyrocket to 4.3 million in June, surpassing all traditional brokerage firms. Among the household names left in the dust: TD Ameritrade, with 3.84 million, Charles Schwab at 1.8 million and E-Trade at 1.1 million.

But some traditional banking institutions, such as Marcus, Goldman Sachs’ consumer banking platform, have also seen rapid growth during the pandemic. It’s grown to more than $27 billion in savings from 500,000 customers, indicating that even legacy companies can successfully transform into digitally-powered institutions.

How legacy companies can catch up on digital transformation for financial services

Altimeter’s report delves into how incumbents are trying to catch up. Based on an in-depth survey of 600 executives, including 137 in financial services, three clear imperatives emerge.

1) Move faster. The majority of financial services firms are still early in their digital transformation journey.

Altimeter’s research measures digital transformation through a five-stage model. First, companies make their case for investing in digital. Next, they develop foundations for more comprehensive investment, seeking to understand customer journeys and improve employees’ digital skills. From there, they build operations, digitizing them at scale. Fourth, they integrate these platforms to use data more strategically, and finally, optimize for growth, leveraging data and AI for great customer experiences.

Only 25% of the companies in our study have moved beyond this to the final two phases. Financial-services execs say they are moving even more slowly. Some 68% say their companies are still in the first two years of their transformation journey, and only 38% say they’ve reached the third phase (building operations). That compares to more than 50% of healthcare, tech and retail companies.

And that’s far too slow for consumers. The latest banking satisfaction research from J.D. Power, for example, shows that the more digital the customer, the more significant the satisfaction gap. And dissatisfaction is highest among Gen Z customers, a fast-growing demographic.

Source: The 2020 State of Digital Transformation 

2) Make new ways to reach customers a higher priority

Optimizing internal processes is a compelling reason to pursue digital transformation, named by 40% of respondents and 33% name responding to COVID-19. And to create the resilience to navigate the current economic and health crisis, financial service executives recognize that their digital transformation should focus on improving operations and enable them to operate in a more agile and flexible way.

But our data suggest that these companies should give more weight to the many ways digital transformation could provide firms with opportunities to reach customers through new digital channels, particularly as more consumers look to engage primarily online.

As the market continues to change, and consumer preferences and tendencies evolve significantly due to COVID-19, financial services brands are picking up on the need to leverage advanced technology and data to become more flexible and agile.

Source: The 2020 State of Digital Transformation 

3) Acknowledge new barriers

Transformation has not been easy, given legal hurdles and inherent resistance to change. And COVID-19 is creating new challenges. With urgent demands for supporting remote work and developing digital marketing and selling tools, the pandemic has hijacked many corporate priorities. In fact, 45% of our respondents say pandemic response and related budget considerations are the most significant challenge they face. And of course, traditional obstacles like risk management, resistance to change or rigid structures haven’t gone away.

Source: The 2020 State of Digital Transformation 

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It’s clear that emerging Fintech and Insuretech entrants are shaking up financial services. Across the board – from large to small-scale companies – we’re observing an accelerated need for more digitally fluent marketing organizations to tackle new challenges in an evolving market.

To understand the challenges and priorities impacting the insurance and banking industries today, we turned to Prophet’s digital analyst group Altimeter surveyed 68 global financial services executives as part of their industry-wide 2019 State of Digital Marketing report that spoke to over 500 executives in North America, Europe and China.

“Altimeter surveyed 68 global financial services executives as part of their industry-wide 2019 State of Digital Marketing report.”

The report surfaced three primary digital marketing insights specific to where financial services executives are betting their marketing investments to address business challenges:

1. Lead generation and customer experience are the
   top digital marketing priorities.
2. Scaling marketing innovation, the right talent and proving impact
   are the greatest challenges.
3. Data analysis, marketing automation and UX design are the
   most sought after skills.

Let’s dive into the results.

1. Lead generation and customer experience are the top digital marketing priorities.

Lead generation and customer experience came out on top (see Figure 1) – ranked higher than brand awareness and brand health – a top priority across other industries.

To measure digital marketing success, financial services companies are placing greater emphasis on customer loyalty/customer lifetime value (CLTV) – even before direct revenue (see Figure 2).

We see these forces working within financial services companies that are investing more to acquire customers through digital demand-building activities. Specifically, with the increases in the promotion of banking, investment and insurance products going more digitally direct-to-consumer. We also see loyalty as a rising metric to diagnose and resolve potential attrition challenges before being confronted.

2. Scaling marketing innovation, the right talent and proving impact are the greatest challenges.

Financial services marketing organizations are navigating several challenges with their focus on lead generation and CX development, particularly around scaling, hiring and proving business impact (see Figure 3).

In addition, we learn that compared to other industries, financial services companies are experiencing a much greater challenge in seeing a return on investment for their marketing technology spend with 32 percent saying that it took a long time before they saw any return. Consequently, it is now considered to be their top Martech challenge.

3. Data analysis, marketing automation and UX design are the most sought-after skills.

Financial services companies are now focused on building capabilities in data analysis, marketing automation, and user experience design (see Figure 4) to enable the scaling of marketing innovation across the full enterprise and ultimately to prove business impact.

Financial services companies as a consequence are finding the need for capabilities to apply digital marketing in new ways previously not considered.

These evolving digital marketing priorities are making way for the future

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Over the past several years insurance companies have faced increased product commoditization due to ubiquitous online presence, more sophisticated aggregators and the increased availability of insurance products. They are faced with the challenge of driving growth while managing their risk profiles to be less capital-intensive. In a market with heightened expectations for digital experiences – which the COVID-19 pandemic raised even more – the likes of Oscar, Lemonade and other new DTC market entrants are raising consumer expectations, spurring companies to develop more experience-led strategies to drive engagement and value. Then there’s other players like American Express and Chase making their play.

Where should insurers look to drive growth?

Against this backdrop, Life, Health and P&C insurers are turning to new services to drive growth and engagement. Services create more compelling and differentiated solutions that focus on customer needs, going above and beyond basic insurance coverages. This enables insurers to identify new streams of less capital-intensive revenue and increase demand for existing products – especially in a category that has historically struggled to drive engagement at moments outside of the core product moments (e.g., purchase, premium payment and claim).

Based on our extensive experience and research within the industry, integrating a services strategy also translates into impactful business outcomes for insurers globally – from initial purchase intent to long-term customer retention. The results speak for themselves:

1. Customers were twice as interested in an insurance product when sold with relevant services (Source: Prophet Insurer Research)
2. The presence of services impacts broker interest with three-quarters of brokers stating that services are critical to their choice of provider when recommending to clients (Source: Prophet Insurer Research)
3. Insurers who offer three or more services on top of the core product see NPS increases between 20-40 points.

When it comes to services, who is doing it well?

Insurers are already recognizing the value services can bring both to their customers and their business. However, as many insurers do not have exclusive relationships with services providers, avoiding services replication across the industry is key. Insurers are therefore partnering and acquiring across the services ecosystem to uniquely deliver new customer value.

P&C providers are already seeing strong integration of services into their offers given their ability to utilize customer tracking and connected devices, not only providing product discounts but also additional services on-top. For example, Progressive Insurance has partnered with TrueMotion to launch Snapshot, a service that monitors and measures driver data through either their smartphones or a plug-in device. This enables customers to understand their driving habits and generate personal discounts. Progressive is continuing to explore expansions to the program and invest in partnerships to combat distracted driving.

“Integrating a services strategy also translates into impactful business outcomes for insurers globally – from initial purchase intent to long-term customer retention.”

Health and Life are also now capitalizing upon the opportunity to integrate services into their portfolios by exploring the way they can utilize health tracking to adjust premiums through improved health. From a global standpoint, Vitality is one example of a brand that has developed a personalized customer health and wellness tracking and support platform. In the U.S. specifically, John Hancock has partnered with Vitality to provide discounts and tailored recommendations to their customers based on their health tracking. While in Asia, AIA has made a focused push to expand the solutions they offer to customer across the region.

Health insurers also are exploring the role of partnerships with preventative health start-ups to help customers manage chronic illnesses. For example, Cigna has partnered with Omada Health to offer customers a personalized preventative health solution to mitigate risk against diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Six actions for insurers to create impact and drive growth through services

We believe there are six actions insurers take to develop a winning services strategy:

1. Understand what customers want. What is the foundational understanding of customer wants and needs to guide services development?
2. Identify the business opportunity. What role could and should services play for your business and what business objectives should your services strategy inform (i.e., acquisition, incremental revenue, retention, efficiency)?
3. Prioritize unique and relevant services. What are the set of unique services most relevant to your customer base that you will prioritize developing?
4. Drive engagement. Where and when within the journey do customers become aware of services and how do we improve interest for them?
5. Improve the experience of access and use. What is the right experience behind driving easier services access and use to deliver greater customer value?
6. Identify the right internal owners. Who within the organization is responsible for funding, building and managing our services strategy?

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