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About Me
Alex - Alexandros Poulos is Covisio's Managing Director and co-founder. He enjoys technology marketing, innovative thinking, and living by the sea.
Alex is the main contributor of the On the Scene marketing blog.
Learn more about me here.
A Seat at the Strategic Table
We marketers like to think that we’ve evolved our function into a finely tuned discipline. We have expertly crafted marketing plans, we relentlessly measure results, and we hold ourselves accountable for sales goals. All well and good, but Anne Holland puts it nicely when she says that while marketers have raised their reputations as tacticians, we are still not seen as mission-critical strategic leaders.
So despite all of our efforts, marketing is still the low hanging fruit when it comes to budget cuts.
I think HBS professor Gail McGovern nails this problem on the head. She calls it the Marketing-CEO disconnect:
- CEO’s don’t perceive the same pressing need to master the marketing discipline as they do, for example, finance to meet compliance issues.
- Unlike other functions that have establish techniques (e.g. inventory management, reengineering), there are no obvious and permanent cost-cutting results to be gained through marketing.
- CEOs expect their CMO’s to drive marketing decision, but no one is singularly accountable for the results. This makes it difficult to track financial impact of marketing investments.
My opinion is marketers get so caught up in details, that we can’t see the strategic big picture. In high tech marketing, we relentlessly measure but fail to correlate our metrics with overall revenue goals. This makes us unaccountable.
Marketing understand customers and their changing needs better than the rest of the organization, yet we can’t translate this into the language of business: ROI, margins, stockholders equity and cash flow. This disconnects us from the power strings.
Finally, we marketers like to showcase our results by highlighting our cool creative campaigns and the leads and brand awareness they generate. However, unless we can also demonstrate systematic processes that provide repeatable results, we will continue to be thought of simply as cost center.