At Expleo—a global engineering, consulting, and technology services group supporting major companies in their transformation—Christine Ravanat leads the marketing and communication teams across all countries. Drawing on her strategic leadership experience at groups such as Accor and Air France, she embodies a marketing function in full transformation within this organization of 18,000 employees and an annual revenue of €1.4 billion.

Faced with the increasing complexity of her role, Christine Ravanat brought in Spaag to help structure marketing performance management, implement shared operational KPIs across her teams, and support them in advancing their data maturity. In this interview, she reflects on the challenges that shape her daily life as a CMO—from commercial diversification and AI adoption to resource optimization and the pursuit of impact.

‍

What are the major challenges you face today as a CMO ?

Christine Ravanat: One of our biggest challenges today is diversification. More than a growth lever, it’s a matter of survival in a market where key accounts—such as in the automotive and aerospace sectors—are under pressure. We need to sell new offerings, in new segments, to new stakeholders, and in new countries. This is a major challenge for the sales teams, whether they are developing existing accounts or pursuing new ones. Marketing is on the front line to support them.

At the same time, we are expected to do as much—or even more—with limited resources. It’s a balancing act. That pushed me to completely reorganize the marketing and communication team around three pillars: Marketing, Brand and Communication, and Operations. The goal: improved clarity, efficiency, and impact.

This balance is even harder to strike at Expleo because our marketing organization is designed to support global industrial verticals while adapting to local market specifics. We are now re-evaluating what can be managed centrally and what truly requires a physical presence on the ground.

‍

How are you approaching AI in your marketing activities ?

C.R.: Innovation is at the heart of Expleo’s purpose. As such, every department is expected to rethink how it operates by integrating AI. Each is encouraged to define its own roadmap. I’ve implemented a test-and-learn approach. We start by identifying tasks or functions with potential productivity gains, then look for tools that can help us, and finally test them. The key is grounding this approach in reality—no overpromising.

In this area, I foresee increasing budget pressure. In the future, I may need to prove that AI can reduce marketing costs by 20%. That’s still premature, but we need to anticipate it now.

Today, AI is seen as a potential answer to demands for higher productivity and cost reduction. This remains to be proven, but it’s already considered one possible alternative—alongside relocation, meaning the transfer of certain tasks to lower-cost regions.

‍

How do you decide what should be done in-house versus outsourced ?

C.R.: We operate with a hybrid model for most topics. For instance, for our website, I have one person in-house and supplement with a freelancer during peak periods. This model works, but it has limits—especially in terms of cost.

For marketing campaigns, I strongly believe in a team/agency balance. On the MarTech side, with the countless tools available on the market, I need external support to prioritize automation choices and an internal profile to manage the technical implementation and user adoption.

I’m also considering better coordination of lead generation agencies. Currently, it’s very fragmented and localized. We lack cross-functional governance to drive more coherent action.

‍

What has the collaboration with Spaag brought you ?

C.R.: We reached out to Spaag when we were ready to step up our performance management. I joined Expleo four years ago, and after two and a half years of mobilizing the teams, it became essential to precisely measure the impact of our actions to steer our activity more effectively: what really works? What builds brand awareness? What generates commercial leads? What drives employee engagement?

Spaag helped us gain perspective and reintroduce strategic vision into our performance monitoring. As true sparring partners, they helped us build a KPI matrix organized by priority, challenged us on the right indicators and levels of analysis, and involved all stakeholders across various markets. This was done in co-construction with the teams. The result: each team can identify with it, and everyone can follow the metrics that matter to them. After our discussions with Spaag, we even refined a job description and hired a business analyst to industrialize data collection, visualize it, and interpret it with added value.

‍

What future do you envision for the CMO role ?

C.R.: Marketing has become significantly more complex. A CMO must be a strategist, operator, technologist, and analyst. In my team, expertise has deepened. Today, I need experts in content, social media, and data. We’ll need to create career paths for these talents, and expose them to different facets of marketing and communication to shape the managers of tomorrow.

But the real challenge is to become more predictive, more relevant, and more powerful in detecting weak signals. If I were a CEO, I’d expect my CMO to tell me where to go, why, and with what tools. We’re already seen as change agents—it’s time to fully embrace that role. And to do so, we need to surround ourselves with the right partners.

‍