Marketing as a Business Driver

Drew: Hey, it’s Drew. You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The marketing leaders of this episode are Shirley Macbeth of Forrester, Dan Lowden of Blackbird.AI, and Ali McCarthy of Amplify Your Voice, who share how they align marketing strategies with overall business objectives to drive their companies forward. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live-streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. CMOs know all too well the pressure of proving marketing’s value. They also know when done right, marketing can be a core driver of business success. So the real question is, how the heck do you get from the promise of marketing to irrefutable impact? Fortunately for you, we are joined today by three marketing leaders ready to share their approach to this age-old challenge. With that, let’s bring on Shirley Macbeth, CMO of Forrester, and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss B2B customer events and driving digital entertainment. Hello, Shirley, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Shirley: Hi Drew. I am in our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Drew: I’ve been there. I know it well, fresh off of your great conference. So it’s funny, I was just thinking about this as we were pre-gaming. I mean, this show is sort of a double thing. It’s how you do it as the CMO for Forrester, but obviously you’re advising companies on how they do it, and CMOs on how they do it. So let’s start at least with you and how you’re ensuring that Forrester’s marketing strategies are aligned with the overall business objectives.

Shirley: Absolutely. Well, as you can imagine, we have a tool for all of this, and we have research. So I’m very lucky to be able to take advantage of having a leg up and using a lot of Forrester’s research that is geared towards B2B CMOs. But how do I – your question was, how do I ensure that our marketing strategies are aligned with the overall business objectives, and we’ve taken a very formal approach to this. We have a tool that I use religiously, called a plan on a page, and it’s as simple and elegant as it sounds. It’s hard to put together because it requires a lot of prioritization and negotiation, but the end result ends up being a map, essentially, of the goals and strategies that you have outlined. So it starts with a column that has the business objectives for your company, and kind of goes from there and looks at the marketing strategy to support that, and then the marketing-specific goals and measurements. And importantly, it also talks about what you’re not going to do, right? And that’s sometimes the hardest thing. So it has some prioritization, and it ripples through to interlocks and other dependencies. And the fabulous thing is that with this, now my fourth year at Forrester using this tool, it’s kind of our North Star. We start using that in October for the year coming up, and it ripples down across all business units. So it’s not just a marketing plan on a page. It’s a business plan on the page with marketing having a version that says, how am I going to meet those objectives?

Drew: Well, I would love to see that sometime, because we back in the Renegade days, and I talked about this in my book, about a plan on a page. And we have a – for anybody watching the show, we do have a version that’s out there that’s public, but I’d love to see yours someday, Shirley, just to compare, even if we can’t show it to everyone, because I’m curious, you know, what the exercise of doing a plan on a page? What’s wonderful about it is it’s one page, right? And so it really does focus everybody’s attention, because if it’s not on the page, in theory, we’re not doing it.

Shirley: Right. And, I mean, you’d sort of at first put like micro font, and you try to get everything on the page right. But the reality is, it’s about trade-offs. It’s about prioritization and then anchoring it back to that goal and objective that is at the left-hand column of this plan on the page. How is each function rippling forward to be able to advance that? So I’d love to see your plan on page. We could compare that, but it basically – I have a marketing my-level version. I have a sales version, and then for each of my sub-units within marketing – my demand gen, my brand, all of the teams – they then even have a version of that that ripples off the master that helps set our goals, and we review it periodically in our team meetings to see how we’re doing. So it’s a great way to stay anchored towards what the business is looking for.

Drew: How long does it take to create one, and what’s the review process like?

Shirley: It takes a few months, honestly. It is the process of making those trade-offs and saying, how much money do we have? What’s our level of awareness in this particular market? So I would say definitely it’s faster now that we’ve done it a couple times, but two to three months, and then we review it with my peers at the executive team, particularly sales, product, and marketing, working together on it.

Drew: And do you have – because I’ve seen this in some cases where you have sort of red, yellow, green, that shows you how you’re doing each quarter against those?

Shirley: Yeah, we use it then for operational reviews with my team, and we do exactly that. We have the column on marketing goals, and some of them are annual goals, some of them are monthly goals. You can really tie your performance and see where maybe we need to adjust. And we’ve done that. Certainly, it’s not set in stone, but it’s then an open negotiation back with our stakeholders.

Drew: Interesting. And I’m wondering at this point in time two things, one is how integrated this document is. I mean, I know you could do it as a Google sheet or Excel sheet, but I’m imagining that an Airtable or some other thing would enable it to be interactive and shared.

Shirley: It could be all those things. Right now we – it’s an Excel tool that then outputs – everybody loves PowerPoint, so it outputs to PowerPoint, but then I literally put it in our WorkDay goals for my teams and cut and paste from different things. So it’s quite integrated in how we do our processes.

Drew: Yeah, it’s so interesting. I could keep going on this one, because I feel like what you’ve done there with that notion is that okay, we got business objectives, we got to get to those, and this is all we’re going to do. Because in reality, it’s kind of all we can do, as budgets are always limited. So talk a little bit about – you say business objectives. I want to understand what that really means, because we use this language like objectives, and people don’t always look at objectives the same as strategies and so forth. So what is a business objective?

Shirley: So the biggest column on the left side of our sheet is our revenue goals. And we’ve got our revenue goals, our margin targets, and what we call bookings, which is bookings for that year that then turn into revenue the following year because we’re a subscription-based business. So it’s literally very specific metrics that we have set for Wall Street and for ourselves and all of that. So it’s very tied to the numbers. And then, you know, as you go down, you have the sales version and the marketing version. It’s how is marketing doing the reverse waterfall to figure out how many leads we need to get to meet those objectives. So that’s the way we do it.

Drew: Got it. Got it. The fundamental question in this show that we’re trying to get at is, okay, we have business objectives and we have marketing, and we’re trying to draw a straight line of actions and output. But as Jon Miller so famously put it, marketing is not a popcorn machine where you can put in a little corner that just pops, or a gumball machine where you press a button and a gumball comes out. That’s the better analogy. So how do you – there’s some gaps here. Because this is not straight-line stuff.

Shirley: It isn’t, and I think that’s one of the most important things about the interlock that we have. So our first column is business objectives. Our second column is Forrester – internally has a set of initiatives every year, and in fact, they cross multiple years, and they are all cross-functional in nature. So one for us happens to be around retention, and one is around growth through different areas. And so that’s the second column because it’s not just straight-line marketing. We’re going to make that sales. You know, there’s this idea of cross-functional initiatives to drive that. So that’s really important to show the dependencies and also how you’re working together.

Drew: So as you’re getting through there’s plan, and then there’s reality. How do you make adjustments and tweaks as you’re going along quarter to quarter to make sure that this plan on a page continues to align, you know, it’s intended to align with business objectives, but that it does?

Shirley: Yeah, I mean, we’ve had to definitely be nimble on occasion. So one example of the prioritization is Forrester serves 11 personas or different types of audiences. So a technology leader, a marketing leader, you know, CX leader, all sorts of different personas. We can’t work it to 11 of those. You know, nobody can. You can’t splinter your impact that way. So we’ve decided to prioritize to three, and then, if all else failed, really one for where we put the most of our money. And sometimes we’ve had to be nimble and adjusting funds given some opportunities or market changes. So, you know, it is a living document.

Drew: Okay, I do want to remember to come back to think about the AI implications of this, because I feel like you could look at your plan on the page, and you could run it through a generative AI, and you could say, “What am I missing?” And it’d be interesting to see how all that goes, but we’re going to go on and bring on Dan Lowden. Dan is the CMO of Blackbird.AI and an industry expert who has graced our stage before to delve into the topic of cybersecurity and FUD-based marketing. Hello, Dan, wonderful to see you again.

Dan: Hello, Drew. Good to see you.

Drew: Where are you this fine day?

Dan: I am at the home office in Summit, New Jersey, just outside of New York City.

Drew: I love it. I love it. Alright. Well, first you heard some of what Shirley had to say. I’m just curious if what in your mind as your planning, what was consistent with the way you think about things, and where do you deviate?

Dan: I mean, I love what Shirley said about the playbook on a page or the marketing on the page. I think senior marketers have learned over time, if you don’t really show what your plans are, what the strategic plan is for marketing to support the business goals, nobody’s going to know it, right? So what I’ve been creating for many, many years is what I call the marketing playbook that I bring to every company that I’ve been involved in, and it’s based off of history and knowledge. It’s based off of new technology, new ways to market, and it’s the best way to help have marketing have a strategic impact on the company’s business success. And to me, that’s industry leadership, brand awareness and brand leadership, but also driving the business. And my goal is always to drive from a marketing-driven lead perspective, as it relates to sales, between 33% and 50% of the overall number for the company. So it shows that marketing is the lead source and engages with customers across the journey to build a successful relationship, and that turns into revenue. So my goal is to show everybody in a strategic playbook: here’s our plan of action, here’s where we need everybody’s help, because it’s a team effort, here’s how we team up with sales to ensure we deliver everything they need, and then that way, it’s very visible what marketing is doing, and the results show it. And that, to me, has been successful at every company that I’ve been a part of.

Drew: It has been because I know because I’ve worked with you at some of these other companies. I know how well they’ve done, but I’m curious maybe you could give us – and so Shirley’s plan on a page was pretty simple. What from a marketing playbook standpoint, what’s in it? How long is it? What’s it look like?

Dan: Yeah, so it’s that playbook on a page, I would say, but it gives more detail behind it, right? So say there’s four or five key marketing initiatives for the company that we’re going to focus on, and then it goes into depth as to what our plan of action is around each one of those strategic initiatives. Right? So when I first joined Blackbird.AI, the first initiative was to create compelling content to educate and drive awareness of the problem of how misinformation, disinformation could impact brand reputation and cancel the brand. There wasn’t that content there, and that was my number one priority – to build very, very compelling content to educate marketers, Chief Communication Officers, even Chief Information Security Officers, on how big the problem is, and give examples of how it’s happening, so that they can be better educated about when these things might happen to them.

Drew: And so making compelling content, which is something you weren’t doing, I’m imagining that you had to sort of staff accordingly too. That had implications for it.

Dan: It did. I mean, I hired – we have a small team, but it’s a mighty team. But it was also leveraging everybody in the company. We had a Narrative Intelligence Team. They were going deep into investigations, and they were publishing reports more for customers. We then turned that into more of a public-like type of report, obviously taking any names or any specific examples out of it, but enough where it was still powerful to the industry, powerful to brands, to understand, hey, these are the things that are happening every day that you need to be aware of, and you don’t want to be blindsided by them. You want to be prepared for them. So we didn’t have to hire a huge team to do that. It was leveraging a lot of the team members that were already within the company, that were actually excited to publish. They wanted to have a voice, and we gave them a voice, and that’s part of a team that we created and we branded as our Raven Narrative Intelligence Team. They’re made up of threat intelligence analysts, data scientists, and really, really smart people who have something to say, and we share reports around specific examples of narrative attacks that are really helpful to companies to say, “Wow, I didn’t know all this was happening, and I didn’t know there was something we could do about it and be proactive about it.”

Drew: Interesting. A lot to unpack there, and I want to go into a couple things first. So a lot of folks want to develop content leadership and thought leadership as a way, particularly when you’re in a category like yours, where you’re sort of bringing new ways, and it’s a different kind of a threat that they hadn’t really thought about necessarily, or didn’t have an understanding. You also sort of went deep on the expertise that was there in the organization and found those people and extracted it. Two different questions then go different ways. One is, how do you make sure that this content, first of all, is high quality, and second of all, gets in front of the right people?

Dan: Yeah, 100%. I mean, especially in the cybersecurity world, or anyone that deals with crisis from a Chief Communication Officer perspective or CMO perspective, you can’t really bullshit them, right? If you do, you’re done. You have to have compelling content that is super helpful to them. You know that you’re being honest with them. You’re creating a relationship with them. You’re creating trust with them by giving them content that’s really valuable to the job that they do today, and help them protect the company. It’ll help them with their own careers. It’ll help protect the company. And when they see that the content is sincere and that it’s real and that it’s in-depth – it’s just not sugar-coated – it’s real data where you can say, “Look, these are how harmful narratives spread up from a single post that can turn really, really harmful to a company. Here’s who’s behind it. Here’s how it’s influenced.” They go, “Wow, this is something new to me, and it’s really, really helpful,” and that’s why you build a strategic relationship with them. And then to your point about getting in front of them, you know, this is where you got to have the right content. You have to have the right story and the right message to the right person based off of what their needs are. And if you have a sense of intent, which a lot of marketing tools give today, you can be very, very targeted in a way that provides incredible value to the people you’re reaching out to, because you know they have a problem. You know they’re searching for something to solve a problem, and if you engage with them in the right way, they’re really going to appreciate it, and that’s how you break through. And then you also have in the background, especially in our world, this is a topic that’s in the news every day, right? We had the World Economic Forum announce this is the number one global risk to the world in 2024 – misinformation, disinformation. So there’s also wins that are back, that are also helping spread this news, that it’s a big, big problem. It’s impacting everyone, and we’re in a good position to help, and that helps too.

Drew: You talked about in-depth and so forth. And, you know, I think that there’s a perception that nobody reads anything, that it’s all got to be TikTok friendly and so forth. But this is kind of scary stuff. This is new stuff. And so talk a little bit about the balance between getting their attention short form and then going into depth, and how you manage that.

Dan: Yeah. I mean, and that’s why right now, it’s pretty much blog-focused, which is light reading, quick reading, but quick understanding with real data, with real infographics that they can understand very easily and see the impact. I mean, they also see things happening in the news, so they’re like, “Wow, we don’t want this to be us,” right? So that, yes, it is a challenge, it is scary, right? But it’s better to be prepared in your role when something like this happens, to get ahead of it than to be surprised by it. And the marketing leaders, the Chief Communication leaders, the cybersecurity leaders, are all realizing that’s where they need to be. Now, like a year ago, it wasn’t like that. This was a whisper. Now everybody is kind of screaming to say, look, you know, we have elections, we have wars, we have brands being canceled. You know, the power of AI is in the hands of these influencers or these cybercriminals or nation-states or hyper agenda-driven communities, and they can do damage really, really quickly and in a massive way. So we as marketers need to be in a strong position where we can be ready for these types of attacks and be able to respond to them to minimize the risk to the brand.

Drew: Got it, alright. Well, Ali has been waiting patiently, so we’re going to bring her on and we’ll come back to you because I do have some more questions. So let’s welcome Ali McCarthy, President & Founder of Amplify Your Voice Studio, who has previously joined us on the show to shed light on the intricacies of SaaS marketing and Account-Based Marketing. Hello, Ali, welcome back.

Ali: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Drew: Where are you this fine day?

Ali: I am in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.

Drew: Downingtown, was that closer to Philly or Pittsburgh?

Ali: Closer to Philly, about 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia.

Drew: I’m grounded now with my Pennsylvania map right there. Okay, so you’ve heard Shirley and Dan talking about the sort of linking of marketing and sort of getting business objectives, designing the marketing, connecting dots to even deliver a certain percentage of revenue. What’s your experience in this case? First of all, any thoughts on what they said?

Ali: So I think that the companies that are really excelling by using marketing strategically are doing two things, and this was said earlier, but it’s worth repeating. They have a focus, and they have a plan, and they understand that they cannot do everything and that if they’re going to win competitive market share, then they need to be understood in the marketplace for just one or two things, and not 10 things that you might want to be known for. So I think that it’s a brilliant exercise to pause as a management team plan, realize that you can only accomplish so many things at any given 12-month rolling period and that you need to have the steps in order to do that. And I think that that was some of the detail that we were talking about. So starting with the plan, but then having those steps that you need to lay forward because I’ve said this everywhere I go, zero to one is the hardest place to get to. Not having a plan is that zero spot, getting the plan is one. Now, one to ten is a beautiful place because you’re iterating, taking a pulse on the market and what competition is doing, and all those spaces. But so many companies that zero to one push for them is really, really cumbersome, and I think the tools that we talked about today are brilliant.

Drew: So we’ve got, you know, plan on a page from Shirley. We’ve got Dan’s marketing playbook. Do you have sort of in your mind when you’re working with clients, or when you in your past role as CMO, you know, what’s your sort of plan look like?

Ali: Absolutely. I mean, you start with really talking about where do you want to be, what is the growth that you need to achieve? And so sitting down with everyone, getting them together, understanding that you want to be known for something particular in the marketplace, what’s the path forward? Because that will drive the strategies and tactics that are employed, the budget, the timeline, all the different underlying activities that need to happen. All start with the North Star. Where do you need to be financially? So what are the revenue numbers we need to hit? And then what do we want to be known for? Competitively? What is the brand? What do we want people to know about our story? And I think that you then can define all the strategies and tactics underneath it. The toolkit is the same. I just think when you activate, it is slightly nuanced to what you’re trying to accomplish, and by when and how much budget you have. So how fast can we go?

Drew: We’ve got revenue goals. And you know, what are we known for? But what you know, and I’ve written about this quite a bit, that last year and early this year, you have a lot of situations where there was, “Hey, our revenue goal is plus 30% by the way, your budget is minus 30%” and the revenue goal was arbitrary and just handed to them by whoever the investor or owner, so forth. So I’m nervous to say, okay, sure, just make revenue the goal. I mean, I know every business wants to get there, but these numbers that are often put out there are like, get there at all costs. And they’re not necessarily based on rational sort of analysis. And so I guess that’s just me ranting a little bit on behalf of CMOs, but also, I don’t know if that sparks any thoughts on your part.

Ali: I would just wrap it up with that by saying, I hear you, and I understand that and have experienced that, but go back to zero to one. So prior to that, you didn’t have the plan in place. So just the act of setting a revenue goal and getting a full business plan with marketing and the leadership team aligned will get – now if you need to readjust things throughout the year, I don’t know a company that hasn’t. So just because that’s where you started, the journey isn’t where you’re going to end, but what you’ve done in the meantime is you’ve really – I always say, one story, many voices – you’ve aligned everyone around a vision, and you will be able to move the company forward. Did it happen at the timeline or the revenue numbers you set forth? Maybe, maybe not, most likely not, because you have a higher goal and lower budget, but remember, you’ve now grown the company from a maturity perspective, and that is tremendous.

Drew: I have a sort of philosophical thought, and I don’t know if the marketplace has the answers to this, but if every company simply says, our growth goal for 2024 is 30% growth, and that’s what everybody’s aligned it – is that company going to succeed? And the reason I ask is increasing revenue is not something that motivates employees necessarily, right? What motivates employees is we take care of our customers better than anybody else in the industry, or, you know, some kind of this is what we’re doing to help save the world or whatever, whether it’s a larger promise or even a very specific promise, we’re just helping people in one way or another, and that’s what makes them feel good. Does this? And I know, I know I’m in a minority, and the show is all about this, but I’m still just wondering, philosophically, if this actually drives businesses.

Ali: I do think people want to align around a common purpose, and I don’t think it’s one or the other. And it wasn’t until I became my own business owner did I really understand the intersection of some of these areas. I think before, I was just an employee, and now I am 100% invested in this company, and it’s a different mentality, it’s a different plan, the way you look at life, the way you consume the business. And I just think that you can take some of that as a leadership team, which is probably more closely aligned to some of those areas, and let the employees in on the growth, be transparent. I think we’ve talked a lot about this in some of our meetings, is that, you know, all employees should be accountable to the bottom line and understand what does that mean. Because that’s how we measure what we’re doing. That’s how we measure all the good work we’re doing has to have some tangible measurement to it. So I think it’s okay to allow employees into the financials a little bit more and let them align the purpose and the numbers and explicitly tie those together.

Drew: Okay, ‘and’ not ‘or’ – I’ll buy that. And I know most of the CMOs don’t have a choice. Which is probably more important is that that is the way business works for the most part. Is there another trend, or anything that we should have talked about already that you think is going to have that or is already having, besides Gen AI, because that we all know is huge. But anything else that you’re seeing with your clients right now?

Ali: I’m seeing three things really, and I’ll go through them quickly. So creativity, I’m seeing AI as a tool for super creativity that will unlock what teams can do. Obviously, it’s a productivity tool, but it’s also allowing good to great, and allowing folks that are phenomenal at what they do to really elevate it. But it’s also, which is my second trend, content is king. So great content is going to matter because the people that were ‘meh’ are kind of going to be good with AI, but great is still going to win. That’s going to help you from a demand gen perspective, branding every single component. So good content will remain king, and will certainly be relevant for growth firms. And then the last I just put is construct, meaning, what is the construction of your team look like? Because firms are still grappling with hybrid remote or on-site. We’re seeing a lot in the financial services industry mandating teams to come back in the office. I do think that’s going to be a trend that impacts marketers and businesses again because we haven’t completely solved it because we have hired some amazing people far away from our home offices, and what are we going to do with them, and we have found work-life balance as working parents, and what are we going to do with that? And we have not answered that as an industry yet.

Drew: Perfect. Those are great, and we can review some of those when we come back, but now we’re going to spend some time bringing everybody back. Let’s talk about CMO Huddles, my favorite topic. 

Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketers who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Now there are a lot of time constraints on CMOs these days, so everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. Shirley, Dan, Ali, you’re all incredibly busy. Any specific examples? I know we’ve done this on the show before, but do you have anything sort of that you’d like to share recently about CMO Huddles that might have been helpful to you?

Shirley: As a CMO, it’s kind of lonely at the top. Who do you talk to at your company? Probably, you know, nobody knows as much as you do on a topic at your specific company. But then to be able to talk to a peer group and hear other tips and tricks, it’s just, you know, it’s gold every time we get on a forum like this to hear what everybody else is doing.

Drew: Love it. Thank you. Dan?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been a part of the group for a long time, and it’s been incredibly helpful to me just to talk to my peers, right? And it’s like we’re all, you know, on this journey together. It is really, really hard and difficult, and if we can learn from each other about what works, what doesn’t, it’s just been incredibly beneficial.

Drew: Thank you for that. Ali, anything?

Ali: It’s a transparent place where you can have these candid, wonderful conversations about where you’re at and where you want to go. And it is a special time that I spend with these folks, and they have become, you know, people in my life that I turn to constantly for resources, support, help, ideas. It is a tremendous value to me, professionally and personally.

Drew: We’re grateful to the three of you for continuing to participate and be Huddlers. If you’re a senior B2B marketer who needs a shortcut to B2B greatness, take a second to sign up for our free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so let’s get back, all of us on the right here. Dan, you mentioned that your goal for marketing was to deliver 33 to 50% of August. Let’s call it pipeline. I thought it’s, in some sense, it’s wonderful that you put that out there. And I know that that’s a conversation every CEO probably wants to hear. Shirley, as you heard that, did you go, “Whoa”?

Shirley: First of all, congratulations. That’s huge. That’s wonderful. It’s great to be able to translate that kind of impact to the business and to be able to quantify it in those terms. I find one of the things that marketers struggle with a lot is that it’s not just, to your point Drew earlier, that it’s not just revenue or the closed-won impact. There’s also other more intangibles around the brand or the customer experience, or other things that we are also responsible for. But having some of those hard metrics, especially Dan, your results are fabulous.

Drew: And that’s where I’m wondering. And with everyone, revenue is over here, revenue is often a lagging indicator of all the things that you did along the way. We know that customers do a lot of research, and they go to your website and they probably, you know, for every sales touch, there’s probably 10 marketing touches. And if you really broke it down, it might get too complicated, so you sort of try to create this very simple cause and effect that doesn’t actually exist. So Dan, you’ve put that number out there, and you commit yourself to doing that. How does that sort of help you? I mean, I know it helps you from an expectation management standpoint, but man, you gotta light the fire.

Dan: Yeah, I mean, it’s 100% right. The brand leadership piece of it, industry leadership, 100% like that, has to be a key part of what we do, right, and that’s where a lot of the content and a lot of the activity that we’re involved in enables it, but it has to drive results, right? We can’t just, you know, there’s some benefits that it’s wonderful, but a lot of times, I’m focusing on what drives results. And to me, the biggest indicator is inbound requests for “Hey, I want to learn more about your product.” They’ve already done the research, and they are requesting us to talk to them, right? And that’s a major step for any prospect to take, right? That’s when they’re committing, they’re giving their time, they’re sharing their information. And to me, that’s the key indicator. Everything else above that, yes, we track all that. We want to make sure that we’re engaging as best we can at the top of the funnel, as successfully as we can. But it’s when they reach out to us and say, “We have a problem. We need help. We want to learn more from you.” And to me, that’s the biggest indicator that I focus on. And then we track that across the customer journey. We engage with them along the way, along with our salespeople in a very collaborative way, which is key, because that doesn’t happen at a lot of organizations, but we work very well together from a sales marketing leadership perspective and sales and marketing team perspective to help them be successful, right? And then at the end, it’s okay, this deal closed. What was the lead source from it, right? And that’s an important thing to go back to because, ah, okay, this is where your opportunities came from. Let’s do more of that, right? And what things didn’t work? Let’s do less of that. And to me, that’s where I spend a lot of my time.

Drew: So, and let’s talk about that because this is meant for everyone. You’re getting inbound, that person at that moment may have read an article, they may have talked to a friend, they may have seen you at a trade show, they may have talked to a competitor already, who knows? And yet what you’re seeing is the form fill because of the LinkedIn ad. You could have this issue of attribution that may or may not be real. I’m curious, Ali or Shirley, as you’re looking at this, it would be wonderful, and every CEO and CFO would love to say, “I’m going to spend 100% of our dollars on things that drive inbound interest.”

Shirley: I’m laughing because I get that conversation quite a lot. Well, can’t you just do the one thing that is going to convert? And we all know as marketers, you know, I think we have the map that Forrester, something like, you know, 17 to 27 touches occur, whether it’s sales, marketing, you know, reading materials. It’s not a linear one thing does one thing, it’s a terrible conversation to be in. It’s the wrong conversation. But I think people outside of marketing struggle with, you know, that it’s almost magic. How does this happen? And it’s hard to explain and hard to show. And one of the things I think about is, I, of course, talk about marketing source and do all those types of things, but I often try to talk in the language of the salespeople. So what I, you know, will go back and say, “Well, how much of their pipeline, or how,” you know, talk in terms that are less marketing speak, and more business speak. That’s more successful than just talking about AQL and MQLs. And people don’t, you know, no matter how many times you talk about it, it’s hard to grasp if you’re not in marketing.

Drew: Right. And then the salesperson’s life is pretty basic. It’s like, did I close the deal and get commission or not, right? And so if you help them get to an opportunity that actually closed, in theory, they might thank you, in theory. And so it is nice because we have this debate a lot about, do we talk about marketing source? Is it really even relevant at this point? We’re all focused on revenue, and if we look at it that way, then we’re in this competition with them, and I don’t know. Ali, where are you right now, in terms of, should marketers actually be providing marketing source as a data point?

Ali: I just think we have to sometimes go back to marketing as in the business and as thinking like a business owner. And if we go back to where we started the conversation, which was a singular plan, well then it isn’t just appropriate to attribute some of these things to marketing, because it should be the entire company moving toward these plans and towards these goals and objectives. So when we think of attribution or correlation or causation, because now we have it, you know, it is so nuanced. I really do believe, if you think as a business owner would, do they care if it was marketing or service or sales or national accounts, or whoever it was, or someone from the board making an introduction, like, does it matter if you’re all getting to that destination? You win. And so I do find sometimes it annoys me to have to say it’s attributed to marketing, because I’m like, no, if we do this right, if we’re going in this particular direction as a team, as we stated we would, then it’s all of us. Yes, we want to have that information to do more of what works, but we would be measuring that across the entire organization anyway. So I just feel like that accountability isn’t just on marketing. That’s on everyone to know what went well, what went well with client service, what went well with onboarding, what went well with your sales sequences, and then what went well with marketing. So we’re all in it together.

Drew: Well, I mean, if you think about it even, let’s just say for a moment that the salesperson went out and found this opportunity. That prospect is still going to go to the website, they’re going to still watch the demo, they’re still going to use the sales enablement, the tools that marketing… So there is no such thing as a deal that happens that marketing doesn’t touch today. I think pretty much categorically, that is true.

Dan: I would agree, Drew, and I think you’re, I mean to what the team here is saying, 100% agree. We track the lead source of everything, whether it’s board related, or whether it’s sales direct, or whether it’s channel, you name it, we have to track it all. I think what I want to do is show the impact that marketing is having directly and it’s having an indirect impact on everything else, right? So if I know what that lead source is, and it’s to us, Salesforce is the source of truth, is when that deal was put in Salesforce, who put it in first, where did it come from, right? That’s kind of how you can best track it today. To me, you’re, I agree, we’re 100% all in this together, but from a marketing perspective, I want to do everything that I can to make everyone successful, but I also want to take credit for the things that we do, so I can go get more budget and do more of that to help the company be really successful.

Drew: And I think that’s the tricky part here. Because if something is working, you want to be able to invest more, and that makes total sense because suddenly you’re going to be able to give a lever to a CFO and say, “Hey, you know what? If we spend another $100,000 here in marketing versus hiring another salesperson, that might lead to 6x versus the salesperson yielding 3x.” So I get that you have to have this information. This conversation is fascinating because really what we started out saying was marketing as a business driver, so fundamentally, what you measure is the conversation, right? Because business driver means we’re driving business. So I get it. I’m struggling with this, and I think every CMO struggles with it right now because you’re walking a fine line between “marketing is killing it” and “sales isn’t delivering, closing enough of the deals.” Or, you know, when everybody is winning, Ali, right? If every deal is closing, who cares?

Dan: Yeah, I mean, I would say I would still very much care, but it’s a great thing when that happens, and we’re high-fiving each other because we work together to bring business success, right? Especially in the startup world, where you have all this pressure to grow and to get your next round of funding and go from there. You’re all in this together, and you need to celebrate wins wherever they come from. But to me, where I have a direct impact, I want to make sure I can demonstrate the impact myself.

Drew: Shirley, I’m going to throw this one at you in terms of challenges you face in the budgeting process, or adjustments and sort of moving the leaders, if you will, to align with strategic priorities. How are you thinking about that? And what are the challenges?

Shirley: Well, I think just one of the things we just talked about where there’s sort of a myopic view of just, “Well, can you do this program and tie it to revenue?” And a lot of the things that we do are enablement and brand and everything that all matter, but it’s easier to track a demand against a closed win versus some of the intangibles. So we’ve covered that. I think that’s one of the challenges. I think the other challenge and the opportunity for marketers, though, is to think about being back to our original discussion around being very planful. Marketing has a lot to bring to the table around two things: one, being the voice of the client. What does the client want? What are they seeking? What are their needs? And how does that inform business prioritization around your product development? How does it inform the target market? So I think being the voice, that person at the table that brings the voice of client, number one is really important for us as marketers. And then number two, having a big seat at the table as far as figuring out that go-to-market around where you want your sellers to focus and where you want them to not focus.

One of the things that we’ve been doing for the last four years since I’ve been at Forrester, and getting better and better at it, is fine-tuning our audience segmentation every year and being accountable to that, to say some may call it ICP, or what have you—we call it our audience segmentation—and saying what countries, what verticals, what sub-industries, which personas, getting very prescriptive. And I just reported out a couple of weeks ago around how we did as a company, not just marketing, but as a company, against those goals. We hit 78% of our bookings within our tier one last year of what we set out to do. Is that good or bad? I think that’s good, and I think we can even do better. We know that those tier ones retain longer, and they convert, and they grow more. And so there is good business and there’s also better business, and we want to get the best one. So those are two additional things I wanted to add.

Drew: No, that’s so helpful and really frames it. As you were talking, it made me wonder about—so you talked about getting to know your personas better, and are we entering the era of personalization at scale? And you know, Ali, I’m wondering if you’re seeing that with any of your clients, because the promise now is, you know, in theory, with an LLM, you could have these very deep understandings of the targets, and you could create these wonderful little tools that personalize it. So when I send an email to Shirley versus one to Dan, I’m giving them very personalized information. Is that where we’re headed?

Ali: Well, we do have the tools available to us, which is exciting, but I also think that one natural function of marketing is setting up processes and workflows and systems and having it multi-threaded throughout the organization. And I think it’s a strength that we already come into the business with. And so as our teams mature and the technology enables us, we’re now able to say, okay, we can take this already good, foundational, well-thought-out processes and workflows and engagement models, and now use LLMs to help us do this at scale and personalize it. It wasn’t as attainable before. It was always, “Well, if I had a bigger budget or a bigger team, I could do those things.” And I think again, the creativity and the enablement that some of the AI tools are able to provide us is going to make small and mighty marketing teams be able to do the things that we had always aspired to be able to do.

So I am very bullish on that and believe that we can help personalize because if we’re truly listening to our clients like Shirley said, the natural payoff there is then delivering the content in a more personalized manner to meet their needs. So I feel like personalization has been a theme throughout our conversation today, but it all started with, if you remember, a singular focus on where the company wanted to be. So if we know where we’re going, we can have this beautiful opportunity and business plan to have a personalized approach to get there. So it really is incumbent upon businesses—smart businesses today that want to grow need to listen to this, take heed, and understand that this is the way to do it, and it will be a surefire way for success.

Drew: Right. You will not succeed in a peanut butter [approach] telling everybody everything. Before we get to the wrap-up—Ali, you used the word creativity. Dan, you talked about at the very beginning sort of this plan that connects content to marketing, source opportunities to revenue. We have had a 40-minute conversation and almost not talked about creativity, and I’m finding that a lot in our calls. We’re processes and we’re systems, and we’re doing—where does creativity, if anything, fit into this? We’ve got objectives, and we’ve got marketing. Where’s it fit? Is there hope for creative people in this business?

Shirley: So much hope. I think what’s anchored—when you’re anchored towards a goal, and then the creativity? How do I get to that goal? And people feel—everybody wants to be on a winning team. And if they know the objectives as marketers within all the different functions within marketing coming together to align towards a goal, it is so powerful. We have great interactive sessions with our people. And I think being anchored in process and reality too, but then like, how do we do it? That’s where our teams come alive. And using the new experimental tools that are out there or coming up with creative stuff—it’s definitely present every day.

Drew: It’s so funny, you immediately sparked—I remember a Creative Director at Ogilvy and Mather who talked about the brilliant tyranny of a well-crafted brief and how they could be more creative if the brief was that tight. We will go to final words of wisdom. We’ll start with Shirley, final words of wisdom to ensure that marketing is a business driver.

Shirley: I think the theme that we’ve been talking about around marketing’s role as being aligned with its peers, being driven and focused, and driving that focus around business outcomes, making prioritization, prioritizing choices of what to do and what not to do—those would be my three key takeaways.

Drew: Yeah. And I love it. And I think the thing that’s so often missing, and it was missing in our plan on a page, is what not to do. I mean, that’s the very definition of strategy, at least according to some. Okay, Ali, final words of wisdom for us other CMOs on how to ensure marketing is a business driver.

Ali: Absolutely. Just ensure that you know that the hardest part is getting from zero to one, but once you get that plan in place, it’s just iterating from there, and then that’s when the joy and the creativity and the fun really enters the room for a marketing team because now we know where we’re going and we’re going to enjoy the journey, and it’s just much healthier.

Drew: I love it. Okay, Dan, final words of wisdom.

Dan: I mean, just from an AI perspective, if it can do a lot of the automation of things for me, it gives me more time to be creative, right? We just launched a whole new website, and every image of it, of a bird there, is created by AI, and the creative team that we worked with leveraged AI themselves, and we came up with a better experience, right? That’s just one fun way to use the technology. And I would tell every CMO to experiment with AI to see how they can create an even better experience when you combine the best of AI and best of human—that would be my key takeaway there.

Drew: Awesome. I’m going to add a couple more on my end. So just the very nature of this title, the goal here is to make marketing a business driver. That’s your mindset. So once you do that, you say, “Okay, well, how much business?” So in Dan’s case, he talked about 30 to 50%, so we’re starting out with that. We then talk next about focus and the strategy and the simplicity that is required to create a good strategic plan. It’s not 100 things, it’s three important ones. And then the wonderful thing that where this conversation evolved, and I didn’t see it coming, but it makes sense, is when you have that really tight definition of what it is that you’re trying to do and what your target is about, then the creativity can flow. And if you’re smart enough to use tools like Gen AI, you may find all sorts of ways of creating a lot of options that you can then, from a human standpoint, process and improve.

Alright. Well, thank you, Shirley, Dan, Ali, you’re all wonderful sports and super smart marketers. Thank you audience for staying with us. 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!