Let me start with something uncomfortable. Senior leaders who are skeptical of marketing aren’t wrong to be skeptical. Not all of them, anyway.
Marketing is easy to oversimplify. It’s accessible. Everyone has an opinion about it. Smart, confident people who have never run a marketing function will tell you exactly what you should be doing with total conviction. (I’m sure you’ve never experienced this.) And unlike engineering or finance, where inputs and outputs are more tightly controlled, marketing has a lot of moving parts that don’t yield predictable results. That makes people nervous.
Engineering leaders are used to working with variables that are largely within their control. Do X, get Y. Financial leaders need predictability to model growth and allocate resources. Board members want a direct line between investment and return. None of those are unreasonable. The problem is marketing doesn’t always work that way.
Much of marketing’s impact is indirect. Brand building, market presence, PR, analyst relations, product marketing, communications – these things don’t have a direct line to revenue. To a degree, the same is true with demand gen. A webinar might generate leads, but it’s also building awareness, reinforcing credibility, and giving sales something to reference in a conversation three months from now.
Leaders who don’t recognize indirect value will keep pushing for things that are easy to measure. More demand gen. More direct attribution. More pipeline from marketing. And marketing will deliver it, because that’s the path of least resistance.
Here’s what happens next.
Lead volume goes up. But conversion rates are soft. Customer acquisition costs climb. Pipeline is there, but it’s not converting the way it should. Growth is happening, but it keeps hitting a ceiling nobody can explain.
I can explain it.
Brand isn’t giving the demand gen any lift. Market presence isn’t generating the kind of direct inbound that comes from buyers who already trust you before they ever fill out a form. Messaging doesn’t resonate, so sales is doing extra work on every call. Competitive positioning is weak, so deals are getting lost right as you’re about to land them. Sales enablement is thin, so reps are winging it.
These are the force multipliers. They raise the growth ceiling. They make demand gen far more efficient. Without them, you’re running harder to stay in the same place.
When a company over-indexes on demand gen and growth stalls, they blame the marketing leader. And that’s fair.
It is the marketing leader’s job to fight for the right investments. It’s the marketing leader’s job to bring the rest of leadership along. If you let your function get reduced to a lead generation machine because it was easier than the alternative, that’s on you.
I don’t say that to be harsh. I say it because it means you have more control over this situation than it might feel like.
So what do you actually do?
First, stop trying to win this with data alone. KPIs matter. They tell you what’s happening and give you credibility. But a number on a dashboard doesn’t move anyone. You have to make it real.
Don’t tell your CEO or CFO that investing in market presence would improve new ARR by X percent. Yes, I’ve been there and understand that’s what they want to hear. But this role isn’t about telling leaders what they want to hear. And the fact is any number you throw out there is just that – a number you’re throwing out there.
Instead, tell them about the three deals your competitor closed last quarter in accounts you didn’t even know were in play. Tell them about the CISO who told your sales rep they had never heard of you, even though you’ve been in market for years. That’s a market presence problem. No spreadsheet required.
Companies invest in things without a direct line to revenue all the time, when the problem is real and the pain of not solving it is obvious. Are you frequently losing deals to competitors with weaker products? Invest more in competitive positioning, messaging, and sales enablement. No, I can’t give you an exact conversion rate improvement and model how much more revenue it will yield. But if you’ve ever done all the work to catch the fish just for it to throw the hook right as you’re landing it, you know how painful that is. Your job is to make the cost of underinvesting that obvious.
Second, be collaborative with Sales, Product, Customer Success, etc. Take their input, actively listen to concerns, act on the good ideas (yes, there will be some!). The more they see the connections between marketing and their own goals, the more support you’ll get. They don’t need to grasp all the nuances of marketing. But if they can see how what you’re doing maps to something they care about, they’ll put a higher value on it. And when you need budget or buy-in, that’s exactly what you want in the room.
Third, don’t just work around it.
When leaders don’t get marketing, the temptation is to give them what they ask for and quietly do what you think is right under the radar. I understand the instinct. But it doesn’t work. You end up with a fractured strategy, no real support, and a ticking clock on your credibility.
I’m well aware that as a marketing leader you have to pick your battles (it took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit). Make no mistake, this is one of those battles you should pick. It might not land the first time, or the second, or the third. But it is worth the effort to stand in the gap and fight for those indirect marketing investments. It’s the difference between a powerhouse marketing function and one that is perpetually fighting for relevance.