Pitch Perfect: Navigating Brand Spend in the Field of Revenue

In soccer, the jersey players wear matters. While it can’t make them faster, it can be a source of pride and confidence. If your team has a history of winning, that infuses the players with added determination. Conversely, if your team has a history of playing rough, flaunting rules, or acting hurt when you are not, the referees will be on the alert. Your reputation could help you or hurt you accordingly.

It’s the same with B2B brands. Establish a reputation as an industry leader and you’ll not just get into more pitches, you’ll win a higher percentage of them. Unfortunately, not everyone in your organization appreciates this concept, especially when you refer to reputation as “brand.” Ironically, most CMOs agree: “The concept of brand has a branding problem.”

How do we fix it? One Huddler noted, “I keep reminding our exec team that only 5% of our target is in the market every quarter.” This aligns perfectly with The B2B Insitute’s 2030 B2B Trends report, which compares the benefits of long-term brand building versus short-term sales activation, a clear indication that brand matters.

Every soccer match is a chapter in a longer saga. Similarly, brand building is a continuous journey where endurance and vision lead to victory. The aforementioned B2B Trends Report notes that in order to maximize growth, B2B brands should aim for an even balance of 50% long-term brand building and 50% short-term sales activation.

One Huddler summed up the CMO’s role in all of this, “Our job is to educate, especially our CFOs who want to cut everything right now. We still have to get the market excited and show a preference for our brand.”

Just as a team gauges its strengths and weaknesses before a match, brands must establish an awareness and attitudes baseline. While many CMOs might not have real-time stats on their brand maneuvers, a few have deployed relatively low-cost trackers like BrandOps and Blue Ocean. One Huddler shared, “We used Blue Ocean to create a baseline… giving us brand scores on multiple dimensions.”

After every match, teams analyze their previous games, often focusing on where things went wrong. For marketers, superior game plans come from studying your victories and finding the connections between marketing activities and pipeline.

One Huddler shared, “When we help accelerate the pipeline, I look at the journey analysis.” Similarly, another Huddler noted, “We look at high revenue wins across the year and how many touch points they had with our brand, then track that in our CMS.”

In a different huddle, one CMO explained, “We’re now looking at all the won accounts that had marketing engagement and all the wins that had no marketing touchpoints, and then we’re comparing how long it took to close and average deal size. We expect this will reveal the lift marketing provides and our overall business impact.”

Every person, from the player to the coach to the owner, wants to be part of a legendary team like Manchester United or, until their recent loss, the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team. Conversely, being on a team that no one has heard of is far less desirable, if not totally dispiriting.

Knowing this, CMOs can play into the egos of their CEOs when talking about brand recognition or the lack thereof. One Huddler shared this lament from their CEO, “I’m sick of working at a company where no one knows we are in the market” which triggered their question, “How do we get known?” This is a moment every CMO needs to be ready to pounce on! This particular CMO is now pulling together a multi-year plan to grow awareness while maintaining high-profit margins.