6 Expert Marketers Share Their Top Secret to Get Executive Buy-In

Getting executive buy-in is a massive challenge for marketers—and it’s just one of several major challenges holding them back.

Recent surveys from organizations including Gartner, Content Marketing Institute and The CMO Council continue to prove that marketing strategy is a massive pain point for marketing professionals.

More intelligent insights and access to smarter marketing technologies have led to a state of complete analysis paralysis. So, how can we bring data, technology and talent full-circle with a performance-driven marketing strategy?

After a bit of research and deliberation with my internal team, it was clear that we needed to bring in the undeniable experts for this conversation. So, we asked top marketing minds how to solve for this problem—zeroing in on team alignment, goal setting, campaign reporting and more.

Top marketers weighed in, and they had a lot to say. So, we’ve created a three-part series to cover all key pieces of a performance-driven strategy.

Read on to see what the experts recommend.

Align Expectations Across Departments—from Marketing to Leadership

Bob Ruffolo (@BobRuffolo), CEO and Founder of IMPACT

My belief is that a performance-based marketing strategy starts with your company's purpose and values—what you stand for. If everyone in your company is truly bought in to helping the people you serve to the best of their ability, then everything else, including your marketing, sales, customer retention, and product development, will fall into place.

This starts with leadership. If leadership has a short-sighted "get me leads and customers" mindset, then everyone that works for that leader will try to hack the numbers, which rarely ever works. However, if leadership takes a long-term, customer-servant stance, then everyone in the company will follow their lead, which means better listening to customers, creation of products that solve for the customer, attractive content that answers customers' specific questions, community, a reputable brand, and a company people want to do business with. Every time I've seen a company do this well, their marketing metrics improve, customer acquisition becomes more predictable, customers are happier and they spend more.

Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille), CMO of Crayon.Co

Start with executive-level alignment. In other words, get on the same page as the leadership team about what matters most and why.

Too often, I see marketers spend extensive time and effort running campaigns and measuring metrics that the rest of the business doesn't care about. In many of the cases, it's because marketing is focused on something that isn't tied to the company's current initiatives. Once you have clarity around the company's priorities, the next natural question is: how will marketing impact those targets?

Put aside all of the typical marketing activities—maintaining the blog, running a webinar, creating a nurture campaign—and imagine you can only do two or three initiatives this month or quarter and each must align with the company's priorities. Focusing your initiatives in this way allows you to stay aligned with the company's priorities and be clear about marketing's impact from the get-go.

Mark Roberge (@markroberge), Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School

I think the biggest wins along these lines are generated when we move away from organization structures that are based on functions (i.e. marketing, sales, customer success) and move toward structures based on buyer personas (i.e. small business versus enterprise or health care versus tech versus financial services).  

Recent trends in buyer empowerment and buyer journeys starting in the domain owned by marketing and ending in a domain owned by sales makes an organizational structure based on buyer persona more favorable, both to align incentives and provide a seamless experience for the customer. By sitting these small, cross-functional pods together, concentrated on a single customer persona, and measured holistically around revenue generation, customer retention, and unit economics, these customer pods self-generate their cross-functional policies to optimize for what is best for the company and what is best for the customer.

Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), CEO of Marketing Insider Group

The biggest challenge to a performance-driven strategy is a culture that views marketing as an order-taker. We need to re-define marketing as the business asset that it is, as the voice of the customer, and the driver of value.

Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer), Founder and CEO of PR 20/20

If marketing doesn’t fully grasp the holistic brand vision, then any strategy is doomed to fail. Before diving in, it’s crucial that all teams—from marketing to sales to the executive team—meet and agree on long-term goals. Ask: What does success look like? This will result in a more comprehensive approach to marketing, and ultimately, a collaborative team that has already bought into your plan.   

Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose), Chief Strategy Officer at The Content Advisory

The biggest challenge to marketing teams that want to create a performance-driven marketing strategy is to de-silo the teams, the processes, and, most prominently, the data that separates the ability to draw meaningful insight.  

The struggle most marketing teams have is that their goal is to only optimize one small aspect of the customer’s journey. Thus, they only have the power and insight into how they are handling that one, discrete piece. It’s why we’re so fascinated with vanity metrics; they show success at our stop on the customer’s journey. Marketing teams should set integrated, and more holistic goals. Then (to borrow the metaphor from the classic Seinfeld episode) do the important work of actually holding to those goals. By de-siloing the technology, data and metrics utilized, businesses would have a much better sense of how marketing is performing.

Next Step: Set Your Goals

A shared team vision and access to performance data positions your team for ultimate success. But, the groundwork doesn’t end there. Quoting The Marketing Performance Blueprint, “As the industry evolves, opportunities are emerging for savvy marketers who can effectively assess their marketing foundation, keep score of what matters, and adapt strategies based on performance.”

>> For more from The Marketing Performance Blueprint, buy the book here. <<

Once marketing is fully aligned with sales, the C-suite and other key players, it’s critical to document your strategy and goals before activating campaigns. In the next post in this series, marketing experts, including Cathy McPhillips, Heidi Cohen, Jeff Julian, John Bonini, Pete Caputa, and more weigh in on the best approach to goal setting. Subscribe to the blog to follow the full series.