Measuring marketing is a popular topic right now. The tenure of CMO and marketing VPs is much shorter than your typical VP. Why is that? In my experience, it comes down to how they communicate with the other VPs and their board. Board members are ready with tough questions, trying to stump the marketing staff even before they enter the room. Most marketing organizations are viewed as wishy-washy, creative, and not connected to the bottom-line of the company. It’s really unfortunate when this organization is actually responsible for filling your sales pipeline and doing enough advertising and PR that people know what you do and how you’re better at doing it than your competitors.

If engineering delivers a really crappy product, someone will most likely get fired. If a sales staff misses their sales budget, someone will very likely get fired. If a finance department can’t keep a budget, someone will very likely get fired. If a support staff leaves customers consistently angry with service, someone will very likely get fired. If a marketing staff delivers really bad leads to sales so sales must do their own prospecting to fill their pipeline, nothing will happen to the marketing person.

If this organization is so critical in an organization than why is it so difficult to get reliable measurements? My personal experience is where the key players in marketing come from. They have a degree in English, or if you’re lucky, Communications. The marketing executives who have been around long enough to have solid experience come from a time where marketing wasn’t measurable. Now, with CRM and the electronic advertising mediums, a marketing organization is more measurable than ever. Even with that being the case there is still little being measured.

To quote Einstein: Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

The typical marketing staff probably talks to the board about lead counts. “We collected 12,345 this quarter. It was an increase by 12% over the previous quarter.” Now, the board of directors thinks: “… and?”.

Not only is the board waiting for more detail, looking for diagnostic feedback from the marketing organization, but the VP of sales is looking around the room with a funny face trying to convey to the board that “the lead counts are inflated! Don’t listen to the lead counts! My guys aren’t getting any real leads!”

How to avoid this problem?

1. Define a common terminology: Have your marketing and sales people spend time together, not skipping from one topic to another, briefly touching on topics and not delving deeply enough into any to actually fix anything. Have an agenda (maybe this one) about what needs to be defined.
2. Build a process: If you have leads that sit assigned to a salesperson as “Open” just because the salesperson thinks that eventually everyone will buy – get rid of that shit! If a sales department would actually close leads (even if only “Closed, Junk”) than the marketing department will be able understand the sales guy when he says that nobody wants to buy. You’re much better-off letting the data speak for itself than wasting your breath trying to convince someone they’re not doing a good job.
3. Define what sales wants. Sales is not allowed to say “people ready to buy” because last time I checked, nobody actually asked someone registering for a whitepaper “would you like to buy our product now?”. By sales struggling to define what a good lead actually is, you’ve given the sales staff some understanding of how difficult the marketing role actually is.
4. Have marketing and sales come up with a measure on how marketing can successfully meet the needs of sales: Just created a metric, a graph, or a table that represented the core deliverable of a marketing department (from the sales perspective).