Communicating the commercial value of marketing to the board

Great to drop in to the B2B Ignite Conference in London and participate in the panel on the thorny (!) topic of "Communicating the commercial value of marketing to the board". Wonderful to see such a vibrant event with quality speakers and hundreds of delegates.

And thank you to Joel Harrison for the invite and to Nimmi Bhalla of Virgin Media O2 Business and Graham Wylie of ADP for the great discussion. I really enjoyed and valued all your perspectives.

Here's my takeaways from the conversation:

💡 Size doesn't matter. Whether you're in a multi-national corporate or a high-growth start-up, its essential to position the impact and potential of marketing to any senior business leadership team.

💡 KPI/OKR Alignment. There are many things we can measure in marketing but understand & focus on what the business cares about (typically revenue and margin). Keep the rest "in the family" (e.g. event attendees, ad impressions, MQLs etc). These are important for optimisation, not presentation.

💡 Build a data culture. Once the KPIs are understood, encourage the team to lead every conversation/team meeting with that data. It won't be perfect, but aim for iteration over perfection. This will help to align activities to impact.

💡 Take the emotion out. For once let's take the emotion out of B2B marketing! Centralise data management into an operations team (could be outside of marketing) and stop the debates on whose spreadsheet is correct! Consolidation will result in better tools to support the team in their data journey and ultimately this will drive consistency across the team and in the business.

💡 Promote transparency. Embrace failure and foster a culture of openness and transparency. Recognise both successes (what went right) as well as failures (what we learned).

💡 Share dashboards widely. Make dashboards accessible to all stakeholders (including sales) to encourage open, objective, and constructive discussions. If you can, don't decant results into presentations - share links to live dashboards.

💡 Headlights not rear-view mirror. Finally, in all of this it should be marketing's job to help the business to focus on the right things (brand? product? price?), and being data-driven gives a solid foundation to be the headlights for the business (setting the strategy) not the rear-view mirror (being in service to the business).

In summary - JDI !!! Again, things won't be perfect, and a core skill of any marketing team should be operating on incomplete data. But you need to start. You may not even have targets for some KPIs, in which case set a target to measure and benchmark. From there you can work on improvements as you evolve what good looks like. And of course forums like Propolis can help with understanding industry benchmarks.

Lots more I'm sure I've missed, and we could've gone on for hours!!!

Thanks again to the B2B Marketing team for the invite. It was a blast! 🚀

📷 : Darren Coleman