Everywhere I look I see the mantra "Do More With Less." Budgets are being cut or re-purposed requiring CMOs to substantiate the effectiveness of marketing programs to make a valid case for continued funding for their marketing initiatives.
Last week, I wrote about Scott Santucci's new report, Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Sales Support. A conversation with the CFO was a component of that report and it got a lot of coverage during the webinar on the same subject. Forrester's CFO, Mike Doyle, was on the panel and provided some great insights to how CMOs can have effective conversations with their CFO.
Here are a few of the key points CMOs need to clarify for their CFOs:
- Show linkage between spending and outcomes.
- Explain why and how.
- Discuss how each marketing program drives top line sales results.
- Highlight changes and refinements that create improved results over time.
- Show movement and progress against goals.
- When a program is on the chopping block, be prepared to discuss both the short and long-term ramifications of losing it.
- Delineate cause and effect.
- Tie all your marketing initiatives to strategic priorities defined by the CEO.
Essentially, the conversations that CMOs have with their CFOs need to focus on business priorities with proof points that marketing programs are helping to produce beneficial strategic outcomes.
Marketing needs to focus on measurement as it relates to business progression. It's not enough to say that your new marketing program generated 75% more clicks than your last one. You've got to reach farther than that to demonstrate cause and effect that moves the business closer to defined goals.
This is why every marketing program you create needs to have defined KPIs (key performance indicators) prior to launch. If one goal is to increase reach into prospect companies to create additional access points, then you should be able to show how much depth your campaign produced in the short term and follow that up with the longer-term business impact.
If you began with an average of one contact per prospect account and now have an average of three contacts per prospect account after the initiative, you've increased your reach to purchase influencers. The next step may be to show that marketing can motivate those influencers to help increase the momentum of overall prospect account conversion.
Think creatively about how you can evidence marketing outcomes and tie them to business priorities. Look at sales goals and demonstrate how marketing initiatives support them. An example may be that since marketing has now increased contact depth at prospect companies, salespeople are setting more meetings and demo requests are increasing.
Then tie resulting sales (longer-term goal) back into the short-term incremental results of the marketing program.
Learn from sales what changed / improved from that added depth.
- Shorter time to sale?
- Less objections for sales to overcome?
- Less education needed from sales reps?
- More conversational kudos across social networks producing higher credibility in your market?
For the CFO conversation, show the tie-in to achieving business priorities. And, as you'd expect me to say, marketing automation is a must-have to give marketers the information to generate the insights CFOs need to back up their CMOs.
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