Why Marketing Leaders Must Connect the Dots

In a recent article for dmnews.com, Mike Colombo, the CMO of Cloudwords, argued that many CMOs aren't ready for a seat at the C-suite table. According to Mr. Colombo, many CMOs aren't winning a seat at the "grown-up" table because they're still relying on performance metrics that are inconsequential to company leaders.

Recent research has confirmed that many marketers aren't doing a great job of communicating the value that marketing contributes to the business. In the 2016 Marketing Performance Management Benchmark Study by VisionEdge Marketing and Demand Metric, only 23% of survey respondents said their CEO would give marketing a grade of "A" on its ability to demonstrate its value and contribution to the business.

A disconnect between marketing and the rest of the C-suite can exist if CMOs don't clearly communicate the relationship between marketing programs and the business outcomes that matter to other C-suite executives. Most marketing leaders tend to focus on the programs they're running and the direct results of those programs (response rates, downloads, pageviews, etc.). The problem arises when these direct program results aren't linked to the high-level objectives that C-level executives really care about.

The ultimate mission of marketing is to drive revenue growth. Virtually all companies have a revenue growth goal as one of their top-line strategic business objectives. Many companies also have specific goals for new customer acquisition, customer retention and growth, and market share, but these objectives are all directly related to revenue growth. Therefore, every marketing activity is (or should be) designed to generate (or contribute to the production of) revenue.

To effectively communicate the connection between marketing activities and revenue, marketing leaders must develop a revenue growth strategy, which, at its most basic level, is a hypothesis that describes how the company will grow revenue. A revenue growth strategy is essentially a big if-then statement that says, "If we execute these specific marketing programs, then we will meet our revenue growth objectives."

However, many marketing activities don't directly produce revenue. Some marketing activities are several steps removed from the realization of revenue, but they are essential components of the revenue generation process. Therefore, a revenue growth strategy is a set of if-then statements, each of which describes a specific marketing activity and the anticipated results of that activity. These individual if-then statements are then combined to create chains of cause-and-effect relationships that connect individual marketing activities to the realization of revenue.

A simplified version of one of these cause-and-effect chains might look something like this:

• If we publish a blog that offers readers access to compelling content resources, then more potential buyers will identify themselves and consume our content.
• If more potential buyers identify themselves and consume our content, then we will generate more qualified sales leads.
• If we generate more qualified sales leads, then we will create more legitimate sales opportunities.
• If we increase the number of legitimate sales opportunities, then we will close more sales.
• If we close more sales, then we will produce more revenue, and that will help us reach our revenue growth objectives.

In short, CMOs can fail to earn a seat at the C-suite table if they don't "connect the dots" between marketing programs and revenue growth. To create and sustain credibility with other senior company leaders, CMOs must understand the links between individual marketing activities and revenue growth, and they must make those links visible to the CEO and other members of the C-suite.

For more on this topic, take a look at Laura Patterson's recent article at MarketingProfs. 

Illustration courtesy of Lisa Plummer via Flickr CC.