A Marketing Head role needs to report into a Business Head role. Any organization where it says Sales & Marketing Head or where Marketing maps into Sales is not worth its name. No two ways about it. And offering fancy titles and finally saying CMO reports to CSO, or Head of Marketing reports to Sales Head, will not cut it.
This brings up two possibilities. One is that the organization simply does not understand the role of Marketing. Two, they understand it but deliberately want it to be subservient to Sales or just function as a support system to Sales. Both ways it is a losing situation. Not just for Marketing, but for the company too.
An ideal scenario for every organization is where there are three distinct pillars: Product Management, Sales, Marketing. These three pillars should have independent leaders, reporting directly to the CEO or Business Head. Any convolution or deviation from this is doing injustice to all the three capabilities.
Secondly, while all three exist for the growth of the company, there needs to be clear KPIs for all the three areas.
Since Marketing is (obviously) closely linked to Sales, there needs to be mutually agreed upon percentage split on the targets. For example, if the business goal is $100 million for 1 year, the predetermined target loading should be either 40:60 or 30:70 between Marketing and Sales. This would mean Marketing contributes 40% of the business target while Sales brings in the remaining 60%.
This brings up another question. Does Marketing really contribute to quarterly targets or is it more at an annual level?The contribution is usually at a “pipeline” level. Quite clearly, in the B2B technology world, pipeline is not built so fast, nor does the sales cycle close so fast. So, it means Marketing really works at a Next Quarter (NQ) and NQ+1 or NQ+2 level.
Going back to the role mapping logic, if a CMO maps to a CSO, how comfortable would each target achievement (or non-achievement) conversation between them be?! When the fault lies at the drawing board level, the resulting outcome cannot be blamed.
Now let’s examine a third scenario. Enter Business Partners. How do they contribute to this $100M target? Or is it that whatever they bring is over and above the target and counted as icing on the cake? Or should they be within the ambit of the business target? In which case, should the target be split 40:40:20 between marketing, sales, and partners? Is it logical? Or they are just an “alliance” for mutual convenience and should not be included in the hard targets? In which case, how justified is partner marketing, partner programs, MDF, etc?
Going back to the CMO’s dilemma. A typical Marketing department would have a Brand & Communications (B&C) head, a Demand Generation head, and a Partner Marketing headreporting into a CMO. Now the uniqueness of these three roles is that “revenue” may not be the #1 target for all of them, at least for B&C, and to an extent Partner Marketing. If you actually get them to list their KPIs, I dare say a B&C head and a Partner Marketing head are not going to list Revenue as their #1 priority. So, a typical $1 of Marketing spend is going to be spent differently by each of these three Marketing areas, justifiably so.
This goes back to the original question. How effective is a “sales & marketing” nomenclature or “CMO reports to CSO” kind of scenario?
#Marketing #Sales #CMO #CSO #KPIs #hiring
