From T-shaped marketer to translator of commercial languages.
For almost 30 years, I worked as a marketer and communicator for multinational corporations and organizations. In my ambition to be perceived as relevant, I became what HR professionals refer to as “T-shaped.” I developed a better grasp of various functions and how the firm worked. It’s made a tremendous difference in my career, but I believe it’s making the largest difference now.
About a year ago, a CEO presented me to his team using a Venn diagram. It positioned me in the center of five interconnected rings symbolizing various corporate functions: CEO, CFO, CRO, CMO, and CDO. This image accurately depicts what I’ve always done: translate between various functions, speaking their respective languages to bridge gaps in comprehension.
Speaking languages: a typical disconnect.
I recently joined a roundtable conversation with finance and data science executives. It soon became evident that, while everyone used the term “predictive,” they meant completely different things.
Predictive, in the context of data scientists, refers to pattern-based machine learning forecasts. For finance teams, predictive means causal forecasting, or what is predicted to happen given specified circumstances.
When finance teams use the term, they mean a forecast, ideally a causal computation that informs them what’s likely to happen given a specific set of conditions.
For instance, consider climate change:
- Machine learning prediction: “Given a pattern of monthly temperature increases, next month’s temperature is predicted to rise.”
- Causality projections: “Due to 127 factors contributing to warming over the past three years, we forecast an X% rise per year, factoring in which elements are likely to increase.”
By pointing out the language gap, both parties had a major “lightbulb moment” and altered their conversations.
Moving back and forth between functional perspectives will be a key feature of what I aim to share with the MarTech community. My goal is to leverage my knowledge to spark new conversations between marketing, customer success, and communications — three global professions with many individuals who have taught me so much — and the rest of the organization.
The predicting train is coming. Is B2B marketing ready?
Let’s get down to business and talk about the tunnel that B2B marketing is in, and how the brilliant light at the end is an impending train.
What exactly is the train that is racing toward us? I’m referring to the growing desire for marketers to provide recommendations about their expected influence on the business.
After years of not being real, it is now. Nothing will disclose the reality about marketing as a force for effectiveness like the simple task of anticipating its financial value.
Issuing FY 2025 marketing guidance.
As we begin budget planning for 2025, it’s time to address the age-old issue between “What was your value this year?” replied: “How much should we give you next year?”
If you’ve worked in a public business, you’ll know that many CEOs and CFOs are required to offer yearly guidance to investors, which is simply a set of expectations against which the next four or more quarters can be judged. Companies are beginning to re-energize their usage of budgeted business cases, which are centered on the same yearly projections and quarterly updates that they provide shareholders.
C-suite executives prefer a more transactional connection with all functions, including:
- An annual estimate of their causal impact on the business.
- Analytics that allow them to compare the forecast to the actual performance over time.
This is especially important when there is a significant time lag between the expense and the accompanying value that the organization receives back. It’s time for it to be true in all aspects of your firm.
Nonlinear multipliers: Why marketing’s influence varies
This is especially important for functions that serve as nonlinear multipliers of company performance. Examples include marketing, product development, information technology, data science, and human resources.
These functions do not rely on a pro-rata distribution of a pre-determined performance target across a group of persons or program expenditures. Their value is determined by how much they multiply the performance of other teams.
Sales is an example of a linear function, in which the revenue target is divided across a set number of people, regions, stores, and so on. A linear function is distinguished by the ability to display its performance on a Bell Curve. If you double the revenue target, your CRO will want to talk about expanding the sales team.
Why is this significant to the expected guidance? “Nonlinear multipliers” are functions in which “Q1 spend” does not usually result in any Q1 advantage. Indeed, the accounting of expenses and the recognition of value are sometimes separated by a significant time gap.
These functions lack the normal “linear” relationship between expenses and benefits. Instead, they provide special leverage that cannot be achieved in any other way. It is critical to recognize this in advance because the consequences are significant.
B2B marketing is an excellent example. The marketing budgets you plan to spend in Q4 2024 will have no measurable influence on sales for at least two quarters. That difference is both inherent in how the function operates and heavily driven by external marketplace dynamics.
If you’re up against a headwind, you’ll have to work harder to overcome it, just like an airline pilot who must burn more fuel at a faster pace to stay on schedule. Airlines employ causal analytics to foresee these events and guide their personnel on how to make better, faster, and more effective decisions.
Forecasting: A New Reality in Marketing
Understanding the cause-and-effect relationships in your business will assist you in developing high-quality internal forecasts that improve your external guidance, especially for functions such as marketing, which have a significant impact on sales’ ability to do more deals (revenue impact), bigger deals (margin impact), and faster deals (cash flow impact).
It is important for functions such as marketing to provide forecasted guidance to the C-suite so that executives understand what they can convey to shareholders and investors, as well as internally with other teams.
I’m sure many marketing executives will object to this. But, as someone who has done it for 15 years as a functional leader, once you start projecting your effects on sales success, you’ll wonder why you put it off so long.
Why? Because when you perform the analytics required to give the prediction, you’ll discover that your team is most likely making sales that are eight times more effective and five times more efficient than sales alone. That is the norm.