Marketers need to be accountable for every dollar invested in acquisition and retention programs, and they need to demonstrate an ability to drive both top-line revenue and bottom-line yield. But the transformation is far from complete, and along with the new requirements for financial accountability, marketers face a host of other challenges they need to understand in order to manage.

Companies serious about marketing exert tremendous pressure on marketers to transform their operations. Marketers must assimilate new technologies, benchmark business processes and develop entirely new skills to leverage emerging channels and respond to global competition. They must integrate more effectively with sales, justify their programs to the CFO and develop closer working relationships with IT. And at the end of the day, they are expected to deliver precisely targeted customer acquisition and retention campaigns that strategically position the company while driving measurable revenue and market share gains. With all of these challenges to address, who has time for customers?

In fact, that may be the most significant question marketers face in navigating and negotiating the new requirements for marketing. Despite the resurging trend in brilliant theories and bestselling books about customer-centric organizations, the reality on the ground appears to be that many businesses are becoming increasingly disconnected from their customers. This at a time when customers are increasingly leveraging social media to take control of brand positioning and messaging. At precisely the time when marketers need to improve their ability to engage customers directly, they’re increasingly distracted by a relentless focus on internal customer data systems and business process management.

In this age of increasingly advanced CRM systems, marketers report an overwhelming reliance on their data systems as a primary source of customer intelligence, with very little insight gained through customer service, distribution channels, customer organizations or communities, or even online customer networks. The reliance on CRM might be acceptable if systems were robust, but a study I managed last year with the CMO Council showed on average 40% of marketers rate their customer data systems as “weak” or “very weak” in critical areas, including the timeliness and depth of transactional data; the availability of useful data, reports and analytics and the relevance of available data to marketing strategies. Despite the fact that businesses have generated strong customer relationships for centuries before CRM existed, marketing executives have grown so focused on marketing technology that in the CMO Council study, they cited the complexity of data and system integration requirements as the most significant barrier to achieving optimal customer intimacy.

As important as it is for businesses to build effective CRM systems, creating a technology infrastructure that serves, measures and responds to customers is not sufficient. Companies need to follow the lead of businesses that have succeeded by first building a passionate customer following, and then building a customer data system to support growing demand—businesses like Apple, Nike and Nokia. Marketers can’t afford to get lost in the weeds on internal systems and processes while losing their connection with customers. In fact, direct engagement with customers should be the source of inspiration driving technology systems and business processes.