The Accountability Opportunity

“Accountability breeds responsibility.”—Stephen R. Covey, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”

There is a change under way in the world of marketing: the rapidly growing influence of analysis, measurement, and process in what has traditionally been a field dominated by creativity, brand, and buzz. We call this the Demand Generation revolution, and among other things, it is being driven by the need to hold marketers accountable for their impact on business results.

In November 2005, the CMO Council issued a jaw-dropping report on how accountability issues, among other things, significantly limited CMO influence. The report, “Renovate to Innovate: Building Performance-Driven Marketing Organizations,” illustrated a yawning gap between expectation and reality experienced by the vast majority of marketing practitioners in enterprise businesses. According to the study, “only 10% of the respondents say their marketing groups are ‘highly influential and strategic’ within the company, while less than half believe their teams are ‘well regarded and respected.’ This at a time when two-thirds of CEOs polled say their marketing groups are mission-critical for creating top-line company growth.”

The natural result of this gap is greatly diminished CMO influence over company strategy, reduced visibility at the highest echelons of corporate power, and shrinking credibility in the eyes of their CXO peers. In fact, the CMO Council report noted that marketers recognize this state of affairs: “Today’s top marketing executives admit that their group’s performance is not up to par, and that’s causing a lack of influence and credibility within the corporate hierarchy.”

This lack of influence is most striking at the director level. According to a data point from “Corporate Board Member” magazine, just 192 CMOs serve on 5,912 boards surveyed, compared with 1,542 CFOs.

If CMOs want to get into the boardroom, they need to adopt the language of finance, sales, and production. Successful marketers quantify their value in terms familiar to the other corporate executives, such as increased revenue, market share, customer loyalty, and return on investment. This requires marketers to embrace tools that are at the core of the Demand Generation arsenal, from real-time business intelligence to marketing performance analytics to predictive models.

At a personal level, the CMO Council’s findings are not really news. At some point in their career, every marketer has experienced that sinking feeling when it comes time to justifying his marketing decisions and expenditures. Of course, during the Internet boom years, this feeling went into hibernation. Quantifying outbound activity alone sufficed. At worst, the marketing practitioner was occasionally required to produce measurements for Website visitors, ad impressions, or PR buzz.

Today those measurements are no longer sufficient. Marketing’s role has evolved from spending money to producing revenue, from counting clicks to manufacturing sales leads., I am fairly certain that more marketers lay awake at night thinking about budget justification now than did five years ago. And this trend is likely to increase.

But accountability need not be the marketers’ bugaboo so acutely portrayed by the CMO Council. It can be an opportunity to more firmly reestablish marketing’s value at the strategic levels of business. So during your next sleepless night, ask yourself the fundamental questions that may be on your CEO’s mind as well:

1) What value are you getting in return for your marketing expenditures?
2) How do you measure this value?
3) Are you communicating the value of marketing to your peers in terms that they can understand and appreciate?

For many, these questions are the starting point on the road to what many perceive as marketing Nirvana: a highly automated and analytical marketing operation that measures itself by dollars generated, that operates as indispensable and equal partner with sales, that has boardroom visibility; a marketing operation that not only is accountable but also has demonstrated a value proposition so compelling that the issue of accountability is irrelevant.

Where are you on this road? How accountable is your marketing operation? These questions must be asked to take advantage of the accountability opportunity (and to get a good night’s sleep).

Mark Organ is CEO/cofounder of Eloqua Corp. (www.eloqua.com), a Toronto-based provider of integrated demand generation technology.