CMOs are in a unique position to create natural, lasting alignment among the key functions required for growth. By tackling an issue I see as the biggest hindrance to effective marketing – a lack of strategic focus in marketing and a resulting deterioration of the function – CMOs can set the stage for the type of alignment that makes growth a habit, not an initiative.
Regardless of marketing talent, results will fall short in organizations that don’t clearly and realistically define the marketing role with a focus on growth. The CMO must provide such clarity, effectively communicate it, and get buy-in from other leaders – including the CEO. It is this buy-in process that naturally drives alignment discussions.
Whether you are a CMO who wants to make marketing a strategic contributor – or a CEO looking to make growth a habit – this article is a quick read that can get you on the right path.
Marketing: a strategic component of growth…or ready supplier of reactive tactics?
In my career as a marketing leader, I’ve been central to more than a few notable growth successes at small, medium and large companies. While the products and markets vary, each success story has two common attributes:
- The company struggled with growth while marketing operated mostly as a service function designed to react to incoming requests from sales, product and other internal clients.
- Growth became the natural outcome – a habit – only after marketing, sales, and product collectively focused on high-impact work in lockstep with each other, working to advance shared priorities and exceed shared goals.
It seems simple: work together. It’s a no-brainer, right? In reality, lack of alignment among key functions required for growth is so common it’s a cliché. And where alignment is missing, you’ll likely find these same functions competing with each other. Look a little closer and you might find official departmental goals that inadvertently incent the competing behavior.
While this might sound like a cross-functional mess that would be difficult to solve without a lot of finger-pointing, I’ve found that the marketing leader is in a unique position to be a catalyst for unforced alignment. In fact, the very act of doing what I suggest in this article – focusing marketing on growth – is a great way to precipitate cross-functional alignment.
Marketing focus and role clarity: the difference between useless activity and growth-driving work
When focused on high-impact priorities, marketing is an effective lever for growth…measurable and predictable. If this does not describe marketing at our company, you’ve got some work to do – but it will be well worth the effort. Further, the process of focusing marketing naturally highlights where key growth functions are not in sync, setting the stage for cross-functional solutions to create alignment.
Useless Marketing: A bunch of activity that will never pay off
It’s unfortunate, but the role of the marketing function varies significantly by company and expectations are often not founded in reality. It’s not uncommon to see magical hopes of windfall customer adoptions from a few perfect tactics, expectations of impossibly precise and quick ROI, or both. Without a clear role definition and a focus on high-impact realistic outcomes, marketing can easily be expected to function as an infinite shape-shifting solution to everything that is not covered in the definitions of other functions. The scope, driven by an onslaught of new ideas and second-guessing, becomes unmanageable, random, and distracting – making it impossible for marketing to perform in any meaningful way. While that kind of function may be called “marketing”, it is not marketing.
Marketing as a Growth Engine
Marketing is a science that is quite measurable. Think of it, for the purpose of this article, as the science of defining, finding, and engaging prospective customers to drive business growth, where the business value of the customer exceeds the cost of acquiring the customer. Marketing tactics are so readily measurable today that results are often analyzed in real time and can be tweaked to optimize results daily. Much of the mystery has been removed and so has the need for pivots based on gut instinct and artistic judgment.
For marketing to work well as a lever for growth, it requires careful planning and consistent execution. Sometimes it requires patience and consistency to allow momentum to build as tactics create awareness, credibility, and interest with audiences – precursors to purchase. Sometimes it requires impatience – the readiness to pivot when the data indicates less-than-optimal results.
By focusing marketing on high-impact priorities, clearly defining its role, and connecting outcomes to growth, it becomes the powerful function it was meant to be. When the function is understood company-wide and people trust that the decisions are driven by data, it becomes a stable discipline – a vital growth tool that can be a concrete part of long-term planning and company goals.
Shifting a culture to embrace marketing strategically
CMOs who seek to shift company culture to embrace a strategic approach to marketing will have to work to get all leaders on the same page about what marketing will do and won’t do, how it operates, where and how it connects with other functions, what decisions it owns, how it will be measured, what it will report to whom, and how it will optimize results using data. It will be the results, however, that seal the deal. When marketing results are shared frequently, exactly how they were explained, and in a way that demonstrates their connection to company goals…the transformation will begin.
Getting buy-in for growth-focused strategic marketing may require some serious selling, especially when you are speaking to leaders who are accustomed to tossing two or three new ideas to marketing every week. I’ve had the most success – and have seen more “light bulbs come on” – when I’ve set the stage with marketing funnel basics, shown my team’s marketing plan and tactics related to that funnel, and then stepped more deeply into the very specific market information, followed by an outline of specific tactics and measures in every funnel stage.
For example, it will go a long way to have the entire leadership team on the same page about these things:
- How marketing drives mass adoption incrementally by addressing audience segments based on the stage in the marketing funnel
- How your plan and the various tactics are designed specifically to build awareness, create engagement, generate interest and ultimately bring prospects to purchase
- The finite nature of your specific marketing challenge:
- The size of your market
- Market share assumptions: goals and timing
- How you define likely buyers and prioritize them
- The buyers’ pyramid concept: a small percent of likely buyers are ready to buy, a very large percent need various degrees of awareness, information, and convincing. Convert percentages to actual numbers wherever possible.
- Your marketing plan and how it directly connects to sales numbers and other company goals
- How your tactics find and engage audiences based on their readiness to purchase
- The metrics you use to measure effectiveness at every stage
- The metrics you’ll report to the leadership team – and why they are the appropriate metrics for leadership discussion
- The metrics, like open rates and click-thrus, that you use for daily decisions in marketing to optimize results – and why you don’t see these as leadership topics
Focusing marketing on impactful work naturally drives alignment discussions
I noted earlier that focusing and clarifying the marketing role would naturally drive alignment discussions. It will. The crisper your definition of marketing becomes, from input to output, the more it will highlight poorly defined processes and concepts that connect to marketing. Product’s interaction with marketing may not be clear or consistent. Maybe timelines are not managed well. The definition of a sales qualified lead may be unclear…or nonexistent. Some issues may require difficult conversations while others may be easily solvable. Avoid surprises by identifying potential alignment gaps as early as possible and proactively suggest solutions.
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