Know-How Exchange : Strategy

We lay out objectives in our marketing plan each year, and make sure the CEO is in agreement with them and with measurement. Our bonuses are based on those objectives.

I've had varying objectives at different companies, but at the current one, we focus on branding and getting better positioning amongst analysts and press. We have a number of qualitative and quantitative measurements.

In our environment, tying our metrics directly to net new revenues for b2b products doesn't make as much sense -- very long sales cycles with huge sales, and a small/finite number of customers. In the future we may have more of a tie to revenue with b2c products though.

Interesting question. I work for a B2B Software firm. Historically we've been setting goals and being measured mostly on lead generation. Stuff such as:

- Quarterly lead generation goals
- Annual lead generation goals
- % contribution of marketing leads to sales (meaning, how many leads has marketing contributed to the overall sales pipeline)

And we have some internal measures to keep us on track to deliver on the above high level goals, such as number of leads per show, web visits, webinar registrations, etc.

The problem with these types of goals is that they focus on volume of leads, while the ideal scenario (in my view) would be to focus on the quality and in the direct impact in sales. Afterall, if we don't reach our sales numbers it won't matter that Marketing is delivering 120% on leads goals.

We're in the process of revisiting this goal setting strategy so that we can not only measure our efforts against "leads" but also in the quality and impact on overall deals.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to do that, feel free to picth in! ;)

I’m assuming that you want this from the perspective of a Marketing VP, or in the UK, Marketing Manager or Marketing Director or VP-Marketing if you worked (I did) for an American Company.

I’m afraid that my experience as a salesman through to sales and marketing director has led me to a somewhat sanguine view of the answers to your questions. There are at least two, possibly more answers to each of your questions, even when they are coming from the same person. They include the “Greater Good” answer and the “Self Interest” answer – lets call them GG and SI. Then there are a second set of answers required if you are privately owned or publicly owned, but that is taking sanguinity too far!

Here’s an approximate stab at the two sets of answers, GG and SI. I suppose that if I wanted to really complicate things I’d offer a contra-viewpoint from the salesman, sales manager, sales director and financial director. They usually all end up in on kind of fight or another when it comes to setting these things, especially when it comes to my specialities of forecasting and planning.

“How do you measure success at the end of the year?”

GG says by succeeding against all goals, but not by too much! Too much can indicate weak planning and weak forecasting. The primary goal must be shareholder satisfaction. This is determined by achieving the objectives set out in the marketing plan. Primarily this will be profit, but if market share or turnover has consciously been set as a goal rather than the bottom line (I’ll warrant you that it is rare) then that is acceptable. Then there are the associated goals of group and individual targets, product plans and staffing plans. Achieving your targets at the expense of losing your best sales people in month 11 doesn’t auger well for the future. In short, GG is rather holistic.

SI says that success is judged by whether he/she has his job next year. Or if they are ambitious, the CEO’s job. Make it look too easy and he’s virtually made himself redundant, so he needs some problems to sort out. Too many problems and he’s inept and finished. A decent bottom line however can cover for a multitude of sins. The objectives could have been a bit different, but a whopping profit usually placates the chairman, shareholders and the rest of the board. Especially if it can be shown by skilful use of the metrics that it was all down to his insight and someone else’s cock up at the planning stage.

And so it goes on through the whole list of your questions. There is a selfish answer, which is sadly, often the prevailing direction an individual will take and then there is the risk laden route of doing what’s best for the company.

Which ones are you looking for?

Best wishes


Steve Alker