As a marketing leader, marketing should be viewed only as a collection of business cases. No campaigns. No channels. A collection of business cases.
This would mean that when someone asks to cut the budget by 30%, the pain is not on your corner, but on the stakeholders you support.
This would mean that you are always able to tie campaigns and tactics to business value.
And it would be clear that with these resources, you can execute these 5 business cases, but if you want more, you need more resources.
And this would take the marketing planning to the management team: What business cases do you want to execute, and what do you see as valuable on a later date?
Because if you don’t invest more, this is the value you leave at the table.
After the last webinar about how to change the narrative around marketing from cost to investment, I had a conversation with one of the attendees and a marketing leader. We discussed how it makes you, as a marketing leader, think about marketing not in a new way, but maybe from a more business perspective.
For business stakeholders, marketing is a tool. It is a tool to achieve your business objectives. Nothing more, nothing less. And after +100 management team member interviews in complex B2B companies during various projects, the typical challenge for investing more in marketing is the lack of believable business cases.
Now we get to the challenging part.
In sales, there is one metric to rule them all: closed revenue. That tells the company how well we did. In marketing, value is more fragmented across different areas, and even after you, as an industry, have tried to find one metric to communicate the total value of marketing in a single metric, there is no one metric that would convey the whole marketing value.
What helps our clients is to think of it more like how an IT department might talk about their value:
• We decrease cost by stopping unnecessary licenses and changing to cheaper ones
• We increase productivity by investing in these X and Z tools to automate
• We take this new business platform live to build new business opportunities
Similar to marketing, IT does a lot of things “under the hood” to achieve these business cases. But that is in the ownership of the IT department. The discussion then focuses on the business case and the “why” they do these things.
How would it play out if you were to arrange your marketing to only 3-10 business cases? And if those business cases need to cover all the things you and your team do.
Have a great week and enjoy the warm weather we now have around the Nordics.
-JH-
• 14 core questions to drive marketing’s transformation into a business partner
• So, you want marketing to be a business partner? The challenging questions you need to answer
• The end of the form-fill: How will B2B marketing prove value when the lead is gone?
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