10 Questions Every CEO Must DEMAND of Their Marketing Team
This is a wake-up call for those executives who thought that marketing was about being creative and winning design awards. It’s about making money. Money! Marketing should be a hard science of ratios, revenue, and ROI, not the soft refuge of pretty pictures in brochures that many have allowed it to become. Today’s marketing departments should be able to demonstrate a quantifiable impact on closed sales revenue. Is yours?
As the CEO, you do not need to be a marketing expert, but you do need to have a clear understanding of the role marketing has and of how to measure marketing effectiveness beyond short-term incremental improvements in sales or campaign ROI.
Sure, your marketing team can explain their marketing mix, how they are doing segmentation, database scrubbing, and multichannel print, online, and digital media. They probably can tell you the number of press releases they do year, trade shows attended, but can they answer the following questions?
- What problem(s) can our company solve better than any of our competitors? What target market has that problem(s)? What role within that target market is responsible for solving that problem(s)?
- What messages do we send to these target markets that are designed to move these prospects off their status quo and bring awareness to the latent problem that they have?
- How many of these executives will you find this year? In addition, how long will it take nurture them until they are in a position to solve the problem?
- How many sales qualified leads will be handed to sales this year? Next month, next quarter, and next year?
- How many of those leads will convert into a quality discovery meetings?
- How many of those meetings will convert into a quality opportunity? How long will that take?
- How many of those opportunities will convert into actual sales? How long does it take?
- What revenue and profit comes from those contracts?
- What are you doing to support sales as these executives go through their buying process?
- How are you re-engaging executives who don’t move along the process?
Can the marketing manager in your company answer all these questions? Maybe. Maybe not. Answers to these questions will demonstrate if your marketing team is on the right track. The answers will help establish what metrics best measure marketing’s impact as well as enable everyone on the leadership team to make marketing decisions that positively affect the business.
Want to learn more about how to build a lead generation engine that has answers these questions? Check out this free guide.
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