"If we increase your marketing budget by 10%, how much will sales go up?"
Now, more than ever, top marketing leaders need to deliver business results. If you, as a Marketing leader such as a CMO, walk into a board meeting like the one pictured here, you will be asked difficult questions like the one above.
The days of branding and measuring impressions is over, gone, kaput. Most of today's B2B marketing executives are expected to connect marketing to revenue. CEOs now ask Marketing leaders questions like "If we increase your marketing budget, how much will sales go up?" Marketers need to equip themselves to answer such questions. Only fully developed revenue marketers can answer such questions.
Unfortunately, this journey is not for the faint of heart, or the impatient.
The white paper from my new employer, The Pedowitz Group, CMO Imperative Revenue Marketer Transformation, specifies three steps in your journey:
Step One: Admit you have a problem, and define the problem.
Transforming into a true revenue marketer requires changes and adjustments in many areas of the business. This means you need the support of the C-suite more than ever before. You need to connect your marketing activities to revenue. Unfortunately, this is unfamiliar territory for most marketers today.
Step Two: Get familiar with the new territory.
In a recent study of CMOs by IBM (which we have been writing about on this blog), it was found that ROI was the number one metric for gauging success. But nearly HALF of CMOs reported that they feel insufficiently prepared to deliver hard numbers. So it is more important than ever that marketing leaders get educated in this new revenue marketing world.
Step Three: Define where you are and where you need to be.
You need a roadmap for this journey. The white paper defines four stages in the journey to revenue marketing:
- Traditional
Traditional marketing organizations focus on outbound marketing activities like advertising, PR and tradeshows, as well as producing internally focused content like brochures and sales collateral. They are likely to "dump leads" on sales, without any qualification. - Lead Generation
Organizations in this stage are sending email "blasts" (I hate that term!) to drive leads, with very little qualification or information. They focus on driving down "cost per lead." - Demand Generation
In this stage, companies are doing marketing in alignment with sales goals. They have also invested in technology like marketing automation and CRM. They are nurturing prospects and scoring behaviors. But they lack the metrics, processes and approaches to deliver consistent revenue growth. - Revenue Marketing
The highest stage. Revenue marketers have implemented strategies and processes so that their contributions are repeatable, predictable and scaleable. Their marketing operation is fully thought out and documented, so they can continually tune it for optimal operation. A good example of revenue marketing is the "Secret Sauce" presentation by Jon Miller, Co-founder and VP of Marketing at Marketo.
Step 4: Map Your Unique Journey using RM6
The Pedowitz Group has developed a model to measure where you are in 6 areas:
- Strategy - the plan for growth, communications and change management.
- People - ensuring the right people are in the right roles and you have executive support, as well as alignement with sales.
- Process - documented processes for "as is" and "to be" covering the entire prospect and customer life-cycle - lead management, nurturing, scoring and data quality.
- Technology - this is the entire marketing stack in your company that supports revenue marketing.
- Content - this is the "bait on the hook" to win customers. You need comprehensive buyer personas, and alignment with buy cycles.
- Results - this is the way you measure and control your revenue marketing operations. This means the metrics and measures to track attribution of revenue and delivery of ROI.
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