By Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, The Pedowitz Group
In the world of B2B marketing today, if you don’t already have some kind of direct revenue accountability as a marketing executive, don’t worry, you will. As I’ve watched and helped many marketing organizations make this transition, I’ve also seen a lot of marketing executives completely ignore this fundamental shift in the role of marketing. We’re talking about head-in-the-sand behavior, at worst, and delegating this obligation to a lower level role and treating it like a tactic, at best.
By Debbie Qaqish, Principal Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, The Pedowitz Group
In the world of B2B marketing today, if you don’t already have some kind of direct revenue accountability as a marketing executive, don’t worry, you will. As I’ve watched and helped many marketing organizations make this transition, I’ve also seen a lot of marketing executives completely ignore this fundamental shift in the role of marketing. We’re talking about head-in-the-sand behavior, at worst, and delegating this obligation to a lower level role and treating it like a tactic, at best.
This observation causes me to ask a few questions about the role and responsibility of the B2B CMO:
- What is the responsibility of the CMO in direct, measurable revenue growth?
- What if the CMO doesn’t take the time to explore this potential role in revenue growth?
- What if the CMO continues to insist “that’s not my job”?
Unfortunately, I see this too often in B2B companies, especially larger B2B companies. This results from two things:
First, lack of education. Many CMOs are senior, a little older and educated in an era where the four Ps, positioning and branding were job requirements. Even today, you are going to be hard pressed to find an undergraduate or graduate program that has any type of focus on B2B marketing as it relates to technology geared for an executive.
Even today, we are NOT preparing our future marketing executives to handle this new challenge.
Second, today’s CMOs are learning on the job and it’s not strategic. As marketing dynamics have changed they’ve been responsive in moving from print to online to improve company positioning, branding and awareness. They’ve also learned a thing or two about social — mostly because it is such a hot topic. What’s disappointing about this on-the-job learning is that it is being applied in a tactical manner. There is little that is innovative or leadership-inspired.
This non-strategic breed of marketing executive is in great danger, but until final extinction occurs, he is damaging the company by maintaining the status quo of marketing.
For me, this raises questions of what is the true responsibility of any marketing executive to the shareholders and if they are not optimizing a proven model for revenue growth through marketing efforts? What’s the penalty? Further, even if other executives still see marketing as the ‘event’ or ‘make it pretty’ department, what is the responsibility of the CMO to lead change in this kind of environment? Just because the CEO is fine with how marketing is doing, is that really enough? Shouldn’t the CMO be working with the organization to look at all available models where marketing can impact revenue? Where is the true marketing leadership?
This particular situation is an example of agency theory in practice. Agency theory explains the conflict between individual executives (the agent) doing what they want versus doing what is best for the shareholders. It also describes this “hidden” cost to a company of an agent not working 100% on behalf of the company. Examples include executives taking on pet projects for personal reasons or executives not taking advantage of relevant market opportunities. While this is often described as a “cost of doing business” there are certain situations where this borders on irresponsibility; but whether caused on purpose or caused based on ignorance, the cost is the same.
Let me leave you with an example of the agency cost caused by CMOs. We recently did a study with Lenskold Group and one of the questions was: If a company is using marketing automation with CRM (the backbone of revenue marketing) are they growing faster than their competition? The answer was a resounding yes. Of companies that have marketing automation integrated with CRM, 66% reported faster growth than their competition. Of companies not using marketing automation, only 50% reported faster growth than their competitors.
What is the benefit to your company from growing faster than the competition? Take a moment to calculate this and then ask yourself these two questions 1) What is the real cost of maintaining the status quo? 2) What is marketing’s role in leading change? If you answered honestly, your next steps on the revenue marketing journey will be crystal clear.
Debbie Qaqish is Principal Partner and Chief Strategy Officer for The Pedowitz Group, an award-winning Revenue Marketing™ agency. A nationally recognized thought leader, Qaqish has over 30 years of experience helping organizations connect marketing to revenue. She is working on her Ph.D. and publishing her first book on Revenue Marketing later this year.
Want to be one of the first to receive a copy of Debbie’s book? Send email: Debbie@pedowitzgroup.com or message via LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dqaqish.
