As the pace of Marketing transformation accelerates, marketers are tackling the hardest task of all: creating value that improves organizational results. Business author Eric Jorgenson says value creation is the foundation for business. In fact, Marketing’s fundamental mission is to create customer-centric profitable growth.
A high-performing Marketing function adds tremendous value toward achieving business goals and informing critical, strategic decisions. Best-in-class (BIC) marketers earn high marks for being able to prove their value, impact and contribution.
Since 2001, VisionEdge Marketing has conducted research to learn how BIC Marketing organizations achieve success. Our 2021-2022 study, Marketing Organization Value and Performance Management (MPM) Benchmark Study, surveyed nearly 300 Marketing professionals across various roles, industries and organization sizes. The aim was to discover what separates BIC marketers from the rest. According to the findings, the report identifies what business and Marketing leaders can do to cultivate a BIC Marketing organization, known as the Value Creators.
Three Marketing Organization Personas
As a result of our research, three Marketing personas emerged based on how the C-suite scores their Marketing organization on its ability to prove and communicate its value to the organization and impact on business results:
- Value Creators. These BIC Marketers operate as members of the business team, strategically focused on growth and creating value for customers and their organizations. In addition to their focus on growth and value creation, two primary factors, alignment and accountability, surfaced consistently as statistically significant characteristics of organizations comprised of value creators. They excel at measuring their contribution to business results and linking Marketing measures and metrics to business outcomes.
- Middle-of-the-Pack or Sales Enablers. These organizations see their role as supporting the sales team. Their focus is all things associated with early stages of the pipeline and lead generation, such as setting appointments, delivering qualified leads, etc.
- Laggards or Campaign Producers. These Marketing organizations operate more like internal agencies. Their focus is developing and producing Marketing tactics and activities, related to the website, campaigns and associated elements such as email, advertisements, events, social media, etc.
Why Value Creators Earn the Highest Marks
Value creation involves bringing a new or enhanced product or service improvement to market, the ability to find a solution to a vexing customer problem, or the way a new product or service is sold and delivered.
Value Creators shine in three significant areas:
- Use of data
- Performance management
- Customer-centricity.
Specifically, Value Creators are significantly superior in how they manage and analyze data. As a result of developing analytics proficiency, Value Creators were the only persona whose scores increased for using data to improve business performance.
Source: Cultivating BIC Marketing Orgs: 2021-22 MPM Report, The Jindal School and VEM.
Value Creators convert data into actionable insights that fuel business results. This group knows the C-suite expects them to generate new opportunities, acquire new customers, increase business with existing customers and grow the revenue.
Value Creators outperform their counterparts in producing results in all these areas. On average, Value Creators are nearly 1.6 times better than the other personas on their ability to generate new business.
Value Creators are much better at measuring data and reporting their value to the business. Armed with insights derived from data, Value Creators:
- Demonstrate more business acumen
- Gain more influence over business decisions
- Facilitate better decisions, and
- Are better able to prove relevancy and enhance their credibility.
Source: Cultivating BIC Marketing Orgs: 2021-22 MPM Report, The Jindal School and VEM.
Take Steps to Become a Value Creator
So how can marketers adopt the BIC characteristics of the high-performing group? In four words: become obsessed with value. Ask yourself what are the capabilities, solutions, services, processes, etc. you need to create more value for your customers, your partners and your organization?
Being a Value Creator is not some vague concept. When you focus on creating value, you build muscles that will help you make the right decisions about your products and services and improve the way you connect with your customers. Here are four tips from Value Creators:
- Align Marketing initiatives to business outcomes. Value Creators know what they need to know before they delve into data. Their starting points are the business outcomes for their organization. They ensure their team, and their plan are aligned to the outcomes. Before you develop your plan, before you implement any programs, be sure you and your team understand expected outcomes and how the Marketing organization is expected to impact and contribute to these.
- Focus on long-term success. Value Creators play a strategic role in the organization and understand that effectiveness comes before efficiency. They recognize that while near-term ROI is important, they must focus on the long game. They work from a baseline, look for patterns and build models to support making recommendations, course adjustments or performance improvements. These are key attributes if you want to create a BIC Marketing organization.
- Identify opportunities for growth. To increase satisfaction from the C-suite, all Marketing organizations, including Value Creators, need to improve their ability to track and measure performance, prove overall value, derive insights and make predictions from data. For the C-suite, it isn’t all about campaign and channel performance. The C-suite wants the Marketing organization to identify growth opportunities. Common opportunities include identifying market and customer segments to pursue, defining products/services to offer and improving customer engagement and the customer experience.
- Use data better. Value Creators are considerably better at using data in achieving objectives, making strategic decisions, supporting course adjustments, and improving performance.
It’s All About Data
Market-leading growth and building new business fall squarely in the domain of marketing and require solid, if not stellar, data-insights-action skills. It’s not enough to depend on tools to do the data analysis work. Today every businessperson needs to have basic data and analytics skills. Whether it’s data regarding segmentation, the customer journey, customer acquisition and retention, win/loss figures, website traffic, email marketing, social media or call-to-action (CTA) conversions, there’s no modern marketing role that does not require data in some way.
In the words of Bonnie Hammer, vice chairman of NBCUniversal, “The ground beneath you is shifting, and either you get sucked in by holding on to old ways, or you take a giant step forward by taking some risks and seeing what happens.” There’s no time like now for Marketing leaders to identify the data that matters and expand their data analytics capabilities internally through training or new hires, or by leveraging external experts.
The content in this post is an excerpt from the Marketing Organization Value and Performance Management (MPM) Benchmark Study. Download the complete report and learn additional and important information, including the impact of culture and leadership styles on Marketing success, as your growth engine. For additional information, follow Laura on LinkedIn or at VisionEdge Marketing.
About the Author
Laura Patterson is president of VisionEdge Marketing. Since 2001, her firm has helped more than 250 companies grow by delivering customer-centric, data-driven, outcome-based strategies. In her blogs, speaking engagements and books, she shares best practices for showing business executives how to achieve the success they seek.
