In a recent piece of research by Fournaise Marketing Group “80% of CEOs Do Not Really Trust Marketers (Except If They Are “ROI Marketers”)” it’s finally been revealed that CEO’s really don’t trust the numbers they’re getting from B2B marketers.
CEO’s are saying that B2B marketers have to transform themselves into true business-driven “ROI Marketers” or forever remain in what they call “Marketing la-la land”
Some great stats from the report:
“69% of CEOs believe Marketers now live too much in their creative and social media bubble and focus too much on parameters such as likes, tweets or followers” (see my last post on Vanity Metrics)
“71% of these CEOs believe that while B2B Marketers are focused on the latest marketing technologies (such as marketing automation, lead management and CRM), they are still failing to deliver the level of incremental customer demand expected of them.”
Another insight is that CEOs feel B2B Marketers have been “so desperate to prove their worth that they’ve started to (wrongly) focus on performance indicators that are actually not theirs, such as prospect conversions and revenue”.
The report says that CEO’s believe these performance metrics should be owned by the sales team and that B2B Marketers should focus instead on the customer demand-related indicators directly linked to their job and for which they have 100% control; ie: lead generation.
This last point is an interesting one as a predominant trend in B2B marketing, driven by various players such as marketing automation vendors, is “sales and marketing alignment” and the growth of revenue-ownership for marketers.
From the report it would seem that CEO’s are not buying into this approach (although, it seems as at odds with the wish of CEO’s for marketers to be more ROI orientated) and prefer a clear separation of responsibilities between marketing and sales.
Key performance metrics that CEO’s favour in B2B companies include:
1) Prospect Volume
2) Prospect Quality Rate
3) Marketing Effectiveness Rate (defined in the report as the percentage of Marketing spend that directly generates prospects)
So, there you have it. CEO’s want no-nonsense reporting that enables right decision-making with “no fluff”.
And they’re definitely not interested in “Marketing la-la land”
