According to Dave Hatch, a Research Director at Aberdeen Group, three of the top four marketers' priorities are to do with justifying their existence inside their own business, not whipping the competition outside in the marketplace. Even those that did recognize 'outperform competition' as a priority, fewer than 30% regarded it as a top business driver.
Dave's article is a guest post here on Sramana Mitra's Strategy blog.
His findings resonate for me.
How could this situation arise? Here's a few reasons I'd cite:
- There is a lot of history involved. Marketing has only recently been held accountable for its budgets. In many organizations it will take some years to build, bed down and inspire trust in new mechanisms that attempt to measure marketing's contribution to revenue. Marketing has some distance to travel before it will overcome this history.
- Too often an individual marketer's personal job role objectives are aligned simply to execution (show my boss the deliverables), to hitting deadlines or to efficient budget management (use it or lose it), as a result it is often easy to lose sight of the key question, "what's the value of this activity or campaign to the business?"
In terms of squaring the circle, and connecting the outcome of marketing programs to sales revenue generated, an area that we are doing a lot of work in, especially in terms of marketing systems and customer reference solutions, we are repeatedly confronted by two things:
- Perhaps not surprisingly many marketers are reticent to be held accountable. Usually, the first steps towards measurement and accountability are imperfect solutions, but there are too many excuses given for not even starting the journey.
- More surprisingly, for me at least, is how jealously the sales function protects its data regarding customers, deals and revenues. If accountability and all the related benefits to an organization are to be achieved, sales has to make space for marketing to share at least some small slice of the credit for revenues generated.
Tags: marketing, Aberdeen Group, measurement