A marketer’s guide to building C-Suite credibility
18 Dec 2024
Key takeaways from Cindi Boudreaux’s latest Coffee & Careers webinar with Scott Berg
Marketing professionals often find themselves in a delicate balancing act with the C-suite, finding ways to prove their value while battling misconceptions. During the latest Coffee & Careers session hosted by the Houston Business Marketing Alliance, Scott Berg, a marketing veteran with a career spanning over three decades, shared his unfiltered advice on building credibility and alignment with senior executives.
1. Understand the challenges
- Perception problems: many executives still view marketing as a tactical function focused on ads and events, rather than a strategic driver of business outcomes.
- Alignment issues: marketing is often left out of early strategic discussions, making alignment with broader business goals an uphill battle.
2. Work with what the C-suite really cares about
- Revenue and pipeline: the ultimate proof of marketing’s value lies in the numbers. Reinforce the ways in which marketing efforts directly contribute to revenue, pipeline growth and customer acquisition.
- Customer insights: the collective knowledge of your marketing function can provide fresh insights into customer lifetime value, segmentation and evolving behaviours – gold for decision-makers.
- Brand performance: speak to executives in their own language: emphasise marketing metrics that showcase your brand’s visibility, competitive position and what sets it apart from competitors.
3. Strategies for building credibility
- Speak the language of metrics: skip the vanity stats (like social media impressions) and focus on business-critical metrics such as ROI, cost per lead and conversion rates.
- Form alliances: work closely with the CFO to ensure your metrics are trusted and to make sure you’re aligned on how to allocate budgets.
- Demonstrate value: develop a dashboard that breaks down marketing’s contribution to every penny spent, linking campaigns to tangible business outcomes the C-suite can relate to.
4. Vet opportunities carefully
- Scott’s advice for marketers in transition: when interviewing, ask key questions about how the organisation perceives marketing. For instance:
- Is marketing viewed tactically or strategically?
- Does the marketing leader have a seat at the executive table?
- How is the marketing budget allocated and prioritised?
5. Accountability is key
- Scott stresses the importance of holding sales teams accountable for actually using the pipeline that marketing provides and ensuring mutual respect between the two departments. Marketing leaders must assert their role as strategic partners rather than subservient support.
Scott’s candid reflections highlight a recurring theme: marketing’s journey to credibility within the C-suite may be long – but it is achievable. By focusing on metrics, aligning with strategic priorities and developing internal alliances, marketers can secure a seat at the decision-making table.
Watch the full webinar here for more actionable insights from Scott Berg.
