80%-plus of CEO polled say marketing would have more credibility if they spoke the language of business and demonstrated a stronger commercial understanding
A couple of weeks back I highlighted a survey by the UK-based marketing agency Propolis. They polled business leaders, primarily CEOs, and found most of them have little faith in marketing.
The survey found most of them don’t think marketing helps the business; it’s a cost center. I proposed an experiment to test that assumption: turn marketing off. The effect on growth – whether it continues or stagnates – will provide a definitive answer.
I don’t anticipate many taking up that experiment. Sales would scream. I doubt even a marketing-skeptical board would endorse such a plan. Such a move poses career risks for a CEO if it doesn’t work out. So, the status quo will continue to reign.
Unless marketing (and PR) steps up to change it. The survey has some findings that speak to marketing’s obligation as well.
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The biggest marketing budget hitch for CEOs are these:
- 81% say marketing budgets are harder to justify than sales budgets;
- 76% say budgets are too tight to spend money on non-lead-generating marketing; and
- 76% can no longer justify marketing investment unless it generates leads.
This causes marketers to capitulate and pour all their budget into short-term campaigns – performance marketing – because it’s easier to measure clicks. That decision comes at the expense of long-term awareness and reputation building.
That has an impact. If you subscribe to the 95:5 rule, just 5% of your total addressable market is looking to make a purchase. That means most of the marketing budget is falling on deaf ears. There’s evidence to suggest this also impacts legal, finance and procurement departments, which are increasingly involved in purchases, and they aren’t being educated.
I’m becoming more convinced that when businesses cut marketing budgets, the sales cycle grows longer.
Some marketers don’t have the vocabulary or understanding to make the case, according to the CEOs polled in this survey:
- 88% think marketers would be more credible if they spoke the “language of business”;
- 83% would trust marketers more if they showed stronger commercial understanding; and
- 79% want marketers to talk less about creativity and more about results.
Most marketers, it seems, don’t dispute this finding. Just 18% of B2B marketers polled in the same study say they can demonstrate business impact to the C-Suite.
Marketing measurement is hard. There’s a new survey every month that suggests marketing struggles to measure its impact. Such surveys have more or less had the same conclusions over my entire career. I suspect it has more to do with a lack of business acumen than it does with measurement.
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Marketing – and PR – has an obligation to be curious – to be perpetual learners. The things we should collectively ask are basics like this:
- What is the addressable market size?
- What is the problem your solution solves?
- Where do prospects hear about you?
- What convinces them to engage sales?
- What are the top objections your sales team receives?
- Why do they choose your solution?
- Why do they decide against choosing your solution?
- When do customers churn?
- Why do they churn?
Those are conceptual questions that will drive better positioning, messaging and marketing programs. You should ask these questions of prospects, existing customers and the sales team too – and make note of the similarities and differences.
Marketing also needs to have a basic understanding of the financial metrics:
- What is the cost-per-lead?
- What is the cost-per-customer acquisition?
- What is the breakeven point?
- What is the company’s run rate in terms of ARR or MRR?
- What is the delta between NRR and GRR?
- What are the NPS and CSAT scores?
- What is the renewal rate?
- What percentage of the marketing budget is spent on leads and awareness?
If you understand what motivates customers and can relay marketing programs in terms of influencing these metrics, you’ll have a whole lot more success making the case for brand.
Marketing also has to be tech-savvy. We need to understand how to use the automation tools and be able to mine them for data. If you don’t know where to start, I’d suggest picking the last five deals won and auditing the history:
- When did they engage the company?
- What did they engage?
- Where did they engage it?
- How frequently did they engage?
- What were the pivotal steps that moved the deal forward?
Marketing can’t lead with the art – it has to lead with the math and social science. If you are in PR and you have a strong grasp of this stuff, then you’ll be inherently valuable to a range of business functions. We’ve got to understand the challenges, hopes, dreams and aspirations of our target audience. And then we need to communicate our efforts to influence those factors in the language the business understands.
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