The CEO Guide to Revenue Marketing

The CEO can be the "make it or break it" of any good company strategy, and how they lead can impact how successful the company is as a whole.  Like American novelist Ken Kesey once said, "You don't lead by pointing and telling people someplace to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case."  

To ensure that Marketing generates revenue, every CEO should lead on revenue marketing. They should establish a revenue-focused strategy company-wide, setting expectations for marketing’s role in revenue generation.  The CEO is instrumental in setting the marketing team up for success as they transition from traditional marketing to Revenue Marketing.

Let's take a look at the three things every CEO can do today to get a better ROI on their Marketing investment. 

The most important first step to achieving anything in business is having proper goals set to guide your strategies and executions.

Company goals, in particular, are the foundation of every other objective throughout the business — marketing, sales, customer service, etc. In fact, setting goals is directly associated with company success.  

This might seem obvious enough, but more than 80% of SMBs don't bother to track their business goals (let alone align them across departments). 

No matter what goal development process (i.e., GOST, OKRs, etc.) you prefer to use, research shows that having an organized plan of action based on goals can make all the difference. When shared goals are established and known, your company is better positioned to perform. 

There are a few common reasons businesses fail to meet their revenue marketing goals:

1. The goals set are unrealistic.
2. Goals aren't backed by research (i.e. goals are not based on historical data, industry data, etc.).
3. Goals aren't clearly and consistently communicated throughout all departments.
4. Sales and Marketing goals set the teams against each other leading them to play a credit and blame game instead of a team game
5. The marketing team is constantly expected to perform activities not aligned with their goals (ie work on sales enablement when they have only lead gen goals, etc.)
6. The marketing leader is not empowered to make decisions about the marketing strategy and tactics to be used, how to use their budget, etc.
7. There's a gap between employee skills and objectives (make sure you have the right people in place to meet those goals).
8. Some of Marketing's contribution to revenue is not attributed properly (ie. some touchpoints happen before someone becomes a lead. This is also known as the "dark funnel")

One of the most important steps to successful revenue marketing is aligning your marketing objectives with the company's goals. It's up to the CEO to know what they need marketing to accomplish in order to support the overall goals. This is where working with your CMO is crucial.

You should work directly with your CMO to identify marketing goals that will allow the company to meet its topline goals. These marketing goals create the foundation of your overall marketing strategy and should inform each decision your marketing team makes.

Every goal set should be measurable and time-bound, as this sets your team up to be able to effectively track and report on progress for each campaign. An understanding of the timeline and definition of success keeps teams motivated to optimize and enhance performance throughout the duration of a campaign in order to achieve the desired outcomes. 

Ready to set goals that convert into revenue? Get our Goal Setting Template here!

Keeping your business goals in mind, your marketing goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. This will keep them on track to be successful, guide the entire marketing team, and keep everyone organized and on the same page. 

Examples of good marketing goals include:

1. Revenue Goal: For example, "Increase ARR by 15% over the next year".
2. Funding Goal: For example, "Raise $1 million within 6 months".
3. Long-term Growth Goal: For example, "Enter new market by sourcing 10 new clients in said market by the end of the fiscal year".

An example of a good objective for goal #1 can be: Increase organic website leads by 25%.

Then a strategy could be: Leverage technical and nontechnical SEO to grow organic website traffic by 25%.

Finally, a tactic could include: Write 10 new blog posts with "XYZ keywords" this quarter to grow organic website traffic.

Each Marketing Goal should be tied to 3 to 5 objectives, each objective should be tied to 3 to 5 strategies, and each strategy should be tied to 1 to 2 tactics.

To successfully align business and marketing strategies, CEOs need to equip their CMOs and the entire C-suite with the necessary tools. A culture of transparency and collaboration set by the CEO allows the CMO to have a comprehensive understanding of how marketing contributes to achieving company objectives.

With the whole C-suite aligned on the company-wide strategy, the CEO must then support the CMO with the team members, tech stack and other tools needed to set a marketing strategy synched with the business strategy.

A company marketing strategy refers to a business's overall plan of action for reaching and resonating with consumers in ways that elicit purchases, repeat purchases, and loyalty. You can think of it as your game plan for increasing sales and revenue. 

To craft an effective marketing strategy efficiently, it is wise to leverage all the levers of revenue marketing beyond “promotion”. Back in 1960, E Jerome McCarthy defined 4 pillars of any efficient marketing strategy, known as the 4 P's of Marketing.

A good marketing strategy aligns with your business goals and your revenue strategy. Here are two examples of good marketing strategies to inspire your own.

If you have a business goal of increasing brand awareness and a revenue strategy to increase web sales, you'll need a marketing strategy that appeals to both. In this case, social media may be beneficial because a regular and consistent presence will accumulate more followers and create meaningful relationships with current ones. Using this connection to potential and current customers, you can craft content that directs followers to your product/service website, bringing more awareness to your brand and encouraging sales.

Likewise, a company with a business goal to improve employee satisfaction and decrease the costs of high employee turnover rates would do well to have a marketing strategy in place that highlights the company's core values and culture. This will ensure that you're only attracting top talent that matches your ideal candidates' skills and personality, improving employee satisfaction in the workplace and reducing the direct impact of high turnover on your revenue and profitability. 

A common mistake marketers make when reporting to their Board is is reporting on unnecessary KPIs (key performance indicators) that don’t help you or your board understand the impact of Marketing on the success of your business.

This includes metrics like bounce rate, time on site, click-through rates, organic rankings, etc. While these metrics are important to your marketing team as it gives them some indication of how people are interacting with their campaigns, they shouldn’t take up the time or attention of the C-Suite. Spending time discussing these metrics with the Board and executive team means spending less time on the things that matter. 

When it comes down to it, top-of-the-funnel metrics don't tell you enough about the impact your marketing program has on the company's bottom line and takes up time you could be spending talking about the metrics that do drive revenue. Instead, you need to make sure you track metrics that will tell you if your company marketing strategy is aligned to your company goals.

Ideal KPIs to track in this case would be: 

• Revenue From New Customers — i.e., number of active customers, average value per new customer, the average number of transactions per new customer, and average value per new customer transaction. 
• Revenue From Returning Customers — i.e., number of returning active customers, average value per returning customer, the average number of transactions per returning customer, and average value per returning customer transaction.  
• Lift in Win Rates — i.e., an increase in the percentage of opportunities that became customers. Perform a cohort analysis to understand the influence each marketing campaign has on win rates for existing deals. 
• Deals Size Growth — i.e., an increase in the total revenue of all deals divided by the number of deals within a certain time period. 
• Decrease in Time to Close — i.e., acceleration between when prospects become open deals and when they convert to customers. 

These are just a couple of examples. The right KPIs for your company marketing strategy depend on your company goals. This means if your company goal is to attract more of your target market, it can be more beneficial to focus your attention on leads: 

• What do they cost? 
• Where do they come from? 
• Do they turn into opportunities? 
• Do they convert? 
• How much revenue do they contribute?