In the late 90s, CIOs started showing up on org charts as reports to CFOs. Too much IT money was being wasted and needed better watching. It is painful to see my client, usually the CIO, report to the bean counters, but c’est la vie. Something similar needs to happen in the vendor world – with marketing reporting to sales, for the mirror reason - start showing tangible results.
Sarah Lacy in a BusinessWeek blog talks about “Sounding the Alarm on PR” . It reinforced my view too many technology Marketing, PR, AR executives and consultants just network with each other and with industry analysts and tech media. This “ecosystem” often seems so removed from the buyer audience – even the analysts (see my blog on Influence v/s Intelligence ). To me, the only metric to measure a PR firm on is how many RELEVANT buyer eyeballs did you bring me? Not how many analyst meetings, not how many press mentions.
It was then refreshing to read some of the views on Renee Blodgett’s blog “What CEOs want from Marketing” I read at least 15 mentions of the words “sales” or “customer”
No, most CFOs still do not understand technology (it is a treat to work with those that do) and many CIOs have earned back the right to report directly to the CEO. Similarly, the VP of Sales is usually a crude, money driven animal. But he/she needs to be the buffer between Marketing and the tech CEO. It will make Marketing much more results focused like CIOs have learned to become.
Comments
Why tech Marketing should report to Sales
In the late 90s, CIOs started showing up on org charts as reports to CFOs. Too much IT money was being wasted and needed better watching. It is painful to see my client, usually the CIO, report to the bean counters, but c’est la vie. Something similar needs to happen in the vendor world – with marketing reporting to sales, for the mirror reason - start showing tangible results.
Sarah Lacy in a BusinessWeek blog talks about “Sounding the Alarm on PR” . It reinforced my view too many technology Marketing, PR, AR executives and consultants just network with each other and with industry analysts and tech media. This “ecosystem” often seems so removed from the buyer audience – even the analysts (see my blog on Influence v/s Intelligence ). To me, the only metric to measure a PR firm on is how many RELEVANT buyer eyeballs did you bring me? Not how many analyst meetings, not how many press mentions.
It was then refreshing to read some of the views on Renee Blodgett’s blog “What CEOs want from Marketing” I read at least 15 mentions of the words “sales” or “customer”
No, most CFOs still do not understand technology (it is a treat to work with those that do) and many CIOs have earned back the right to report directly to the CEO. Similarly, the VP of Sales is usually a crude, money driven animal. But he/she needs to be the buffer between Marketing and the tech CEO. It will make Marketing much more results focused like CIOs have learned to become.
Why tech Marketing should report to Sales
In the late 90s, CIOs started showing up on org charts as reports to CFOs. Too much IT money was being wasted and needed better watching. It is painful to see my client, usually the CIO, report to the bean counters, but c’est la vie. Something similar needs to happen in the vendor world – with marketing reporting to sales, for the mirror reason - start showing tangible results.
Sarah Lacy in a BusinessWeek blog talks about “Sounding the Alarm on PR” . It reinforced my view too many technology Marketing, PR, AR executives and consultants just network with each other and with industry analysts and tech media. This “ecosystem” often seems so removed from the buyer audience – even the analysts (see my blog on Influence v/s Intelligence ). To me, the only metric to measure a PR firm on is how many RELEVANT buyer eyeballs did you bring me? Not how many analyst meetings, not how many press mentions.
It was then refreshing to read some of the views on Renee Blodgett’s blog “What CEOs want from Marketing” I read at least 15 mentions of the words “sales” or “customer”
No, most CFOs still do not understand technology (it is a treat to work with those that do) and many CIOs have earned back the right to report directly to the CEO. Similarly, the VP of Sales is usually a crude, money driven animal. But he/she needs to be the buffer between Marketing and the tech CEO. It will make Marketing much more results focused like CIOs have learned to become.
May 14, 2005 in Industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, AMR, others), Industry Commentary | Permalink