Denial and Acceptance: Marketing Accountability

From someone who is obviously familiar with the challenges of business-to-business marketing, here are the Five Stages of Marketing Accountability from Jon Miller at Marketo (my commentary):

1. Denial (“Marketing is an art, not a science.”) – Yep, this is absolutely the best way to lose friends and alienate people within the organization. While the operational teams fulfilling the promises you are making the market are relentlessly measured on every thing they do, they really, really hate hearing that there is no tangible way to measure the performance of the Marketing team.
2. Fear (“What if my marketing activities don’t impact the bottom line? Will I lose my job?”) Well, a lot of folk out there in our wacky wild world of Capitalism believe that marketing should generate leads through elevated brand recognition and a compelling value/benefit driven message. I tend to agree. There are soft benefits, but if you can’t parlay the reasons behind specific strategies and decisions back to the bottom line, perhaps you should look into another career path.
3. Confusion (“I know I should measure marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”) – It seems like Marketing teams got the backwash from operations driven performance measurement systems that were all the rage, like, last year… Six Sigma, TQM, various other acronyms. Now we have alllllll kinds of systems that slice, dice, measure, manage, blog, clean house, do nails and everything else you want a performance management tool to do. It gets a bit overwhelming when, as stated before, a lot of marketers are just now coming to terms with the fact that they are not corporate communications departments, and they do have a responsibility to the bottom line. ROI for beginners anyone?
4. Self-Promotion (“Hey, come look at all these charts and graphs!”) – See irresponsible use of the systems detailed above.
5. Accountability (“Revenue starts in marketing.”) Snaps. Marketing teams should be constantly listening to and watching their respective markets, adjusting sales messaging and ensuring that operations are aligned with customer demand. It’s a heady job. It’s not picking out the right shade of ecru for the corporate brochure or coming up with a snappy tagline for website widgets. It’s a key component, worthy of a seat at the CEO’s table, to getting business right.

Bringing this back to my event marketing peeps – the face-to-face interaction with customers you are facilitating at meetings, events and trade shows are going to be more important than ever in a marketing-driven company. We need to look at more sophisticated means to collect information – not just rote statistics to feed a spreadsheet, but emotional drivers as well.

This has implications in everything from how a room is set (crescents or classroom?), how an agenda is created and how attendees are encouraged to provide feedback before, during and after a program. It’s not just a challenge, but an opportunity to make your mission critical to the entire company…