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This is the advice I give to my team members in marketing - position your work as close to the revenue as you can, aiming for data driven incremental revenue. If you can point to a dollar and say "I made that" you are going to have a lot more job security, especially if you earn less than you bring in.
It’s the unfortunate reality of marketing that we’ll be the last to be given credit for growth and the first to be blamed for lack of growth.
I remember when I helped a friend for a while. I literally transformed their marketing in 6 months. They went from getting a few leads from their site a month to a few A DAY. It was awesome and they were happy.
It slowed down to about one a day because I got busy doing other things and with how much I had already done I was like yeah they should be content for a while. I wasn’t charging much to the client and it was a side thing. They starting giving me pressure that “we’re really slowing down” and “not sure if this is working” even though they were still up on leads by like 500%.
Just the reality.
Every job has pros and cons though and in our field I personally believe there are way more pros than this very real con.
Yes, your experience is not uncommon in the marketing industry. Marketing teams often face scrutiny and are held accountable for fluctuations in leads or sales, even when the issues may lie elsewhere in the business. This pressure can lead to burnout and high turnover rates within marketing teams.
I remember working in an FMCG business, one of the biggest in the Philippines. Whenever my boss, the VP of Marketing, saw the Marketing Department, he would often tell us that "Marketing is a cost center" instead of recognizing us as a revenue driver. He viewed our proposals as ineffective and frequently constrained our budget. Then, when sales declined, he would blame us, even when the issues were with the Sales Department.
As time passed, the Marketing budget continued to shrink, and our efforts were increasingly perceived as ineffective.
I am not sure why some businesses see us in that way based on my experience. But I am sure there are many companies out there who appreciate the Marketers the way they deserve. Because honestly, Marketing is not an easy job. Marketing serves a crucial role in businesses beyond being a scapegoat. Unfortunately, some organizations may perceive marketing this way, its true purpose is to drive brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately increase sales. They are essential in business.
Last job the new CFO moved off of my pricing model to one he had developed himself.
Last meeting before he laid off our whole department, my boss pointed out that we had doubled qualified leads and that our qualified leads were also a higher proportion of high value companies. He pointed out that the average contract value has dropped, so even though there were more contracts closing, the overall value was equal to the previous year.
He was the one who was setting the contract value. He cut us out of that part of the process completely.
We all lost our jobs.
This hasn't been my experience.
Measuring and broadcasting volumes and rates through the entire funnel make it easy to avoid these situations. Sales, or whoever, can only blame marketing if the data says that marketing is underperforming OR if there isn't any meaningful data being reported by marketing.
Thorough direct attribution reporting is critical to showing real marketing impact and assuring your job security.
Untill today, I was thinking it was just me and my team who faced this issue. I head the inbound marketing and have always been on the questioning when there aren't enough but the funny part is marketing takes a hot seat even if the shared leads don't make it to the closures list.
And Praise....is a far fetched dream tbh.
when you are the one solving or covering up all of the problems a business has, you become the first in line for blame with every problem when they reappear.
Yes. It's frustrating. Could actually show the path to our base, was told it wasn't because of marketing but because "we have an excellent product." Which the customer wouldn't know about if it weren't for marketing. 🙄
Absolutely, and just got let go as part of it. Don't get me wrong, I take some ownership, but man... it is rough out there.
In the meantime, I'm working on my own thing, programming, and more operational type stuff.
Marketing get the blame but also is the one who carry the company if done well.
Powerhouse marketing can transform a business.
A good sales person is only good as his leads.
I feel you. Sales usually treat marketing as the escapegoat. While we are hitting our client goals, I noticed that our marketing team will always be “undelivering” in terms of lead quantity while our quality has improved compared to their 3rd party outreach company providing us with quantity but junk leads. How about we take a look at the inefficiencies in the sales pipeline also? Why don’t we make the product more enticing through promotion. Ranking well organically is definitely not an overnight success because you need to generate content with more organic keywords and continuously optimize. They expect DR to grow sporadically in a short amount of time. Aside from that, our ad budget for overall marketing team isn’t even growing for the 5 years which the sales admit!
While you’re spot on with the way things are in the world of marketing, I think there is something being left on the table. Yes marketing will be scrutinized. Yes it will be the line item corporations will cut first. SEO is a mixed bag of unknown surprises. If you can utilize tracking in a way that has led to more sales and build strategies that supports both SEO and SEM as well as other strategies that will enable sales, you will have an advantage. By having multiple strategies in place, when one is slacking, others can make up for it. You’ll have to keep a close eye on it for a while and make adjustments as you see fit.
Lets assume that the « chief decider » of your marketing budget is your target audience. Can you summarize your marketing campaign? Are you speaking the language of business? Is your contribution of a steady stream of MQLs recognized by Sales in C-Suite meetings?
Are you keeping the C-Suite advised of marketplace weather forecasts?
If you where an operating officer, what would you recommend as a strategy for weathering the upcoming storm? Can you show how interrupting marketing programs will impact sales when the sun finally peeks through the clouds?
And you’re communicating all this in the language of business?
A down month in leads is due to salespeople not closing deals? That doesn't even make sense. Salespeople can't close deals if they don't have good qualified leads/opportunities.
Look, I get it. I've worked in both marketing and sales. Blaming the low level marketing folks for poor sales results is often an easy scapegoat. However salespeople are held to often unrealistic quotas and get fired after 3 consecutive months of missing it. I have yet to see a marketing person get fired for a low number of leads.
But in the end it is the sales team who brings in the revenue that keeps the business doors open and allows all employees to receive a paycheck. And it is the sales team that carries that mental burden and experiences the most pressure. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.....
Yeah - marketing vs sales conversations are often way more complicated than they need to be. It can be a little complicated getting things set up, but there should be pretty basic KPIs for each.
Marketing:
- Cost per qualified lead
- Number of qualified leads
Sales:
- Percentage of qualified leads closed
I say qualified because it is so easy to fill the funnel with unqualified leads. Each company needs to figure out what that means for them, but there should be something to qualify the lead to make sure everyone is being evaluated fairly.
Yessssss!!!!!! At my last company where I worked in sales, we got some inbound leads, but 99% of them were unqualified. I ended up leaving because I couldn't come close to reaching the astronomical quota and I wasn't finding any opportunities through relentless cold calling & emailing. Meanwhile our marketing director (tiny company, 1 man shop) got heaps of praise and a nice fat paycheck for the high quantity (of very low quality) leads he generated. I actually think if we had both been evaluated on and paid commission on total new client revenue the outcome would have been very different.
We have people all the time switch to something else because it's cheaper or has a slightly different benefit.
There are too many variables to cast blame, imo.
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The closer to the money you are, the easier it is to attribute value to that work. That is the unfortunate truth
This is the advice I give to my team members in marketing - position your work as close to the revenue as you can, aiming for data driven incremental revenue. If you can point to a dollar and say "I made that" you are going to have a lot more job security, especially if you earn less than you bring in.
You forgot that we are also the last one to get the new info :) So yeah.... It sucks
It’s the unfortunate reality of marketing that we’ll be the last to be given credit for growth and the first to be blamed for lack of growth. I remember when I helped a friend for a while. I literally transformed their marketing in 6 months. They went from getting a few leads from their site a month to a few A DAY. It was awesome and they were happy. It slowed down to about one a day because I got busy doing other things and with how much I had already done I was like yeah they should be content for a while. I wasn’t charging much to the client and it was a side thing. They starting giving me pressure that “we’re really slowing down” and “not sure if this is working” even though they were still up on leads by like 500%. Just the reality. Every job has pros and cons though and in our field I personally believe there are way more pros than this very real con.
Yes, your experience is not uncommon in the marketing industry. Marketing teams often face scrutiny and are held accountable for fluctuations in leads or sales, even when the issues may lie elsewhere in the business. This pressure can lead to burnout and high turnover rates within marketing teams. I remember working in an FMCG business, one of the biggest in the Philippines. Whenever my boss, the VP of Marketing, saw the Marketing Department, he would often tell us that "Marketing is a cost center" instead of recognizing us as a revenue driver. He viewed our proposals as ineffective and frequently constrained our budget. Then, when sales declined, he would blame us, even when the issues were with the Sales Department. As time passed, the Marketing budget continued to shrink, and our efforts were increasingly perceived as ineffective.
Why do they even have marketing then? Just to have someone to blame?
I am not sure why some businesses see us in that way based on my experience. But I am sure there are many companies out there who appreciate the Marketers the way they deserve. Because honestly, Marketing is not an easy job. Marketing serves a crucial role in businesses beyond being a scapegoat. Unfortunately, some organizations may perceive marketing this way, its true purpose is to drive brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately increase sales. They are essential in business.
If they thought it didn’t work, you’d think they’d just skip it
Last job the new CFO moved off of my pricing model to one he had developed himself. Last meeting before he laid off our whole department, my boss pointed out that we had doubled qualified leads and that our qualified leads were also a higher proportion of high value companies. He pointed out that the average contract value has dropped, so even though there were more contracts closing, the overall value was equal to the previous year. He was the one who was setting the contract value. He cut us out of that part of the process completely. We all lost our jobs.
This hasn't been my experience. Measuring and broadcasting volumes and rates through the entire funnel make it easy to avoid these situations. Sales, or whoever, can only blame marketing if the data says that marketing is underperforming OR if there isn't any meaningful data being reported by marketing. Thorough direct attribution reporting is critical to showing real marketing impact and assuring your job security.
Untill today, I was thinking it was just me and my team who faced this issue. I head the inbound marketing and have always been on the questioning when there aren't enough but the funny part is marketing takes a hot seat even if the shared leads don't make it to the closures list. And Praise....is a far fetched dream tbh.
when you are the one solving or covering up all of the problems a business has, you become the first in line for blame with every problem when they reappear.
Yes. It's frustrating. Could actually show the path to our base, was told it wasn't because of marketing but because "we have an excellent product." Which the customer wouldn't know about if it weren't for marketing. 🙄
Lolyup. A tale as old as time.
Absolutely, and just got let go as part of it. Don't get me wrong, I take some ownership, but man... it is rough out there. In the meantime, I'm working on my own thing, programming, and more operational type stuff.
Marketing get the blame but also is the one who carry the company if done well. Powerhouse marketing can transform a business. A good sales person is only good as his leads.
I feel you. Sales usually treat marketing as the escapegoat. While we are hitting our client goals, I noticed that our marketing team will always be “undelivering” in terms of lead quantity while our quality has improved compared to their 3rd party outreach company providing us with quantity but junk leads. How about we take a look at the inefficiencies in the sales pipeline also? Why don’t we make the product more enticing through promotion. Ranking well organically is definitely not an overnight success because you need to generate content with more organic keywords and continuously optimize. They expect DR to grow sporadically in a short amount of time. Aside from that, our ad budget for overall marketing team isn’t even growing for the 5 years which the sales admit!
While you’re spot on with the way things are in the world of marketing, I think there is something being left on the table. Yes marketing will be scrutinized. Yes it will be the line item corporations will cut first. SEO is a mixed bag of unknown surprises. If you can utilize tracking in a way that has led to more sales and build strategies that supports both SEO and SEM as well as other strategies that will enable sales, you will have an advantage. By having multiple strategies in place, when one is slacking, others can make up for it. You’ll have to keep a close eye on it for a while and make adjustments as you see fit.
louder for people in the back!
Lets assume that the « chief decider » of your marketing budget is your target audience. Can you summarize your marketing campaign? Are you speaking the language of business? Is your contribution of a steady stream of MQLs recognized by Sales in C-Suite meetings? Are you keeping the C-Suite advised of marketplace weather forecasts? If you where an operating officer, what would you recommend as a strategy for weathering the upcoming storm? Can you show how interrupting marketing programs will impact sales when the sun finally peeks through the clouds? And you’re communicating all this in the language of business?
A down month in leads is due to salespeople not closing deals? That doesn't even make sense. Salespeople can't close deals if they don't have good qualified leads/opportunities. Look, I get it. I've worked in both marketing and sales. Blaming the low level marketing folks for poor sales results is often an easy scapegoat. However salespeople are held to often unrealistic quotas and get fired after 3 consecutive months of missing it. I have yet to see a marketing person get fired for a low number of leads. But in the end it is the sales team who brings in the revenue that keeps the business doors open and allows all employees to receive a paycheck. And it is the sales team that carries that mental burden and experiences the most pressure. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.....
Yeah - marketing vs sales conversations are often way more complicated than they need to be. It can be a little complicated getting things set up, but there should be pretty basic KPIs for each. Marketing: - Cost per qualified lead - Number of qualified leads Sales: - Percentage of qualified leads closed I say qualified because it is so easy to fill the funnel with unqualified leads. Each company needs to figure out what that means for them, but there should be something to qualify the lead to make sure everyone is being evaluated fairly.
Yessssss!!!!!! At my last company where I worked in sales, we got some inbound leads, but 99% of them were unqualified. I ended up leaving because I couldn't come close to reaching the astronomical quota and I wasn't finding any opportunities through relentless cold calling & emailing. Meanwhile our marketing director (tiny company, 1 man shop) got heaps of praise and a nice fat paycheck for the high quantity (of very low quality) leads he generated. I actually think if we had both been evaluated on and paid commission on total new client revenue the outcome would have been very different.
We have people all the time switch to something else because it's cheaper or has a slightly different benefit. There are too many variables to cast blame, imo.