Is Your Marketing Investment Activating Growth?
Before asking whether marketing is generating enough leads or delivering enough ROI, leadership should ask whether it is being deployed against the growth strategy the business has chosen.
Zion National Park - photo by KPG
Marketing may be one of the most scrutinized—and least consistently understood—investments on the commercial P&L. Leadership wants evidence that the spend is working, while sales expects stronger leads, better tools and more relevant proof. Business leaders continue to bring new priorities that require marketing support. Meanwhile, the team is managing campaigns, content, agencies, technology, events and an expanding list of requests from across the organization.
There is nothing unreasonable about expecting accountability for that investment. But before asking for the marketing ROI, I believe leadership teams should ask a more fundamental question: What does our growth strategy actually require marketing to help us accomplish?
The answer is not always generating more leads. Sometimes the company needs to establish credibility in a new market, make a complex value proposition easier for customers to understand, penetrate a defined group of strategic accounts or equip sellers to have different conversations with existing customers. Each can contribute to growth, but they require different marketing capabilities, investments and measures of effectiveness.
When leadership skips that step, marketing can become extraordinarily busy while its connection to the growth strategy becomes increasingly difficult to see.
Growth strategy should create choices for marketing.
Most companies have no shortage of marketing activity. There is always another campaign worth considering, an event the company could attend, a sales tool the field needs, a capability that deserves promotion or a new idea that suddenly feels urgent. Individually, many of those investments make sense. Collectively, they can pull marketing in too many directions.
If the business has identified three priority markets but marketing investment is spread evenly across ten, the issue is not simply campaign performance. If the growth strategy depends on expanding existing customers while most marketing resources remain focused on new-logo lead generation, the issue is not necessarily marketing productivity. If sellers lack relevant customer proof while marketing continues producing broad capability content, the problem may not be content volume.
Similarly, if every new business priority produces another marketing request without anything coming off the list, the constraint may not be marketing capacity. It may be strategic focus.
Strategy is valuable partly because of what it tells an organization not to do. Marketing effectiveness requires the same discipline. The goal is not to eliminate good ideas, but to concentrate investment behind the commercial priorities where marketing has the greatest ability to influence the outcome.
Start with the commercial outcome and work backward.
One of the simplest ways to improve marketing effectiveness is to begin somewhere other than the marketing plan. Start with the growth strategy. Where has the company chosen to grow? What has to be true for that growth to happen? What needs to change with the customer, in the market or in the field? Then determine where marketing can materially influence those conditions.
If the company intends to enter a new vertical, marketing may need to establish relevance and credibility with an audience that does not yet know the company. Buyers may need evidence that lowers the perceived risk of choosing an unfamiliar provider, while sellers may need industry-specific insight, proof and language to earn credibility.
If the strategy is to win fewer, larger accounts, broad lead volume may matter less than identifying the right accounts, understanding their needs, engaging the right stakeholders and surrounding sellers with differentiated reasons to engage. If growth depends on expanding existing customers, the company may need to help those customers understand capabilities they do not currently associate with the business.
The same logic applies when an organization is losing primarily on price. Another demand-generation campaign may do little to solve the underlying problem if customers do not understand enough differentiated value to choose the company for reasons other than cost.
In each case, the marketing implications are different. Instead of beginning with What should marketing do?, leadership can begin with a more useful question: What does the growth strategy require, and where can marketing change the probability of success?
Account growth makes the distinction particularly clear.
Account growth is usually viewed as a sales responsibility. The commercial team owns the relationship, identifies opportunities and ultimately carries the revenue responsibility. But a serious account-growth strategy quickly exposes how much has to surround the seller for that strategy to work.
The organization first has to determine which accounts warrant disproportionate attention. Teams need to understand the customer’s business, priorities, stakeholders and changing needs. They need to recognize where the company could create additional value and develop a hypothesis about where the relationship could go next. Then they have to earn the conversation.
Marketing can play an important role in creating the conditions for those conversations. A seller may need a customer story demonstrating a result in an adjacent area. Customer research may reveal a changing priority that creates a relevant reason to engage. A strong customer-experience measure may become proof that lowers the perceived risk of trying something new. A more focused value proposition may help connect an unfamiliar capability to an outcome the customer cares about. Thought leadership may provide a reason to engage an executive who would not respond to a product conversation. Better sales tools may help a relationship manager move from explaining services to discussing business value.
None of those activities replaces the seller or independently creates account growth. Together, however, they can make the growth strategy easier for the commercial team to execute.
This is also where traditional attribution can become limiting. A case study may never appear as the source of an opportunity in CRM, but it may give a seller the proof required to earn credibility with a new decision maker. Customer research may not generate a lead, but it may reveal an unmet need across strategic accounts and change how the company approaches those customers. A sales enablement tool does not produce revenue independently, but it may improve the quality and consistency of customer conversations.
Marketing should not claim credit for every sale. Leadership should, however, understand how different marketing investments are intended to influence the path to revenue.
The measure should match the job.
This distinction matters when leadership evaluates marketing effectiveness. Demand generation should be accountable for more than impressions and clicks. Leadership should be able to see whether marketing is reaching the right audience, creating qualified interest and contributing opportunities that progress. But the same measures should not automatically apply to every marketing investment.
If marketing is helping the company enter a priority market, leadership might look at whether the organization is gaining engagement, access, qualified opportunities and eventually share within the accounts that matter. If marketing is being asked to enable sellers, the number of assets produced is a weak measure; a better assessment includes whether those tools improve customer conversations, stakeholder access, opportunity progression or win rates.
For account growth, the relevant evidence may include engagement across priority accounts, penetration of new stakeholders, expansion opportunities identified and growth pipeline. If marketing is tasked with strengthening differentiation and credibility, leadership can examine whether customers understand the value, whether sellers can articulate it consistently, whether the organization has compelling proof and whether those factors translate into stronger commercial performance.
Some of those measures sit closer to revenue than others. That does not make the others unaccountable. It means the organization should distinguish between the outcomes marketing owns and those it is expected to influence. The measure should reflect the commercial job the investment was designed to perform.
Sales enablement provides another useful test.
Many marketing teams spend significant time developing presentations, case studies, proposals, RFP content, messaging and tools requested by the field. That work can consume substantial capacity while remaining difficult to see in traditional marketing performance measures.
The temptation is to measure productivity: how many tools were created, how quickly marketing responded and whether sellers used them. Those questions matter operationally, but they do not tell leadership whether the investment was effective. A sales tool creates commercial value only if it helps change a behavior or outcome—perhaps by helping a seller explain the value more clearly, provide evidence that earns credibility, gain access to a different stakeholder or move a customer toward a meaningful next step.
That requires sales and marketing to define the need together. Otherwise, marketing can become a production function responding to an endless queue of requests while sales continues to believe it lacks what it needs.
The better starting point is not simply What does sales want marketing to create? It is What does the growth strategy require sellers to do differently, and what will help them do it? That change in perspective can improve both prioritization and effectiveness.
Technology should enable the strategy, not become the strategy.
Marketing technology has made the function more measurable, scalable and sophisticated. It has also made it easier to confuse capability with strategy.
Technology can identify audiences, automate communication, analyze behavior and attribute activity. It cannot decide where the company should win, which customer problems matter most or whether the next dollar should generate more demand, strengthen customer proof or help account teams penetrate relationships the company has already earned.
Technology can make a strong commercial system more scalable. It can also make an unfocused one extraordinarily efficient at producing more activity. The strategic choices still have to come first.
Marketing has responsibility for elevating the conversation.
Leadership needs to give marketing strategic clarity, but marketing also needs to make its commercial contribution easier for leadership to see. That becomes difficult when the function primarily reports campaigns launched, assets developed, events completed, website traffic, impressions and email engagement. Those measures can help manage execution, but they often force leadership to translate marketing activity into business significance.
A stronger conversation starts with the business priority. Instead of reporting that marketing created a new suite of sales tools, explain the commercial problem the tools were intended to solve and what should change as a result. If account teams were struggling to communicate broader value consistently, for example, marketing might focus enablement on the growth plays with the greatest expansion potential and then examine whether those tools create better conversations and opportunities.
The same principle applies to events, campaigns and digital performance. Rather than simply reporting that the company attended seven industry events, ask which ones provided meaningful access to the markets, accounts and decision makers the strategy says matter most—and what happened next.
The difference is more than better reporting. It is the difference between reporting marketing activity and managing commercial investment.
A strategy-activation test for marketing
Before concluding that marketing is too expensive, insufficiently productive or failing to generate enough ROI, I would encourage leadership teams to examine six questions.
Where have we chosen to grow? Can sales, marketing, finance and operations name the same priority markets, customers and growth plays?
What needs to change for that growth to happen? Do we need greater awareness, stronger differentiation, better access, more customer proof, new demand, deeper account penetration or something else?
What role should marketing play in creating that change? Are we clear about what marketing owns, what it influences and what belongs elsewhere in the commercial system?
Does our marketing investment reflect those priorities? Are resources concentrated behind the strategy, or distributed across historical activity, incoming requests and opportunities that all seem important?
Are sales and marketing activating the same strategy? Do they share a definition of the target customer, the value proposition, the growth priorities and what constitutes meaningful commercial progress?
Are we measuring marketing against the job we asked it to do? Can leadership distinguish between the measures appropriate for demand generation, market development, account growth, sales enablement and customer credibility?
If those answers are unclear, a better marketing dashboard alone will not solve the effectiveness question. The organization may first need greater clarity about how marketing fits into the growth strategy.
Marketing as strategy activation
Marketing should be accountable. Budgets should be challenged, programs evaluated, technology expected to earn its place and activities that no longer support the strategy stopped. Marketing leaders should be able to explain where resources are going, why they matter and what evidence will demonstrate progress.
But accountability becomes much more useful when it starts with strategic intent. Sometimes the most valuable marketing investment will generate demand. Sometimes it will establish credibility in a priority market, make differentiated value easier for customers to understand, turn customer experience into commercial proof or help a seller open the next conversation inside an account the company already serves. Sometimes the best marketing decision will be to stop doing something perfectly reasonable so resources can be concentrated behind something more important.
That is not a softer view of marketing effectiveness. It is a more demanding one because it requires leadership to be clear about the growth strategy, marketing to align investment behind it, sales and marketing to share responsibility for activation, and the organization to measure the outcomes each investment was intended to influence.
The question is not whether marketing should contribute to growth. It should. The more important leadership question is whether the company has been deliberate enough about how marketing is expected to influence growth to make that contribution—and its measurement—clear.
When that connection exists, marketing stops looking like a collection of campaigns, tools, technologies and requests competing for budget. It becomes one of the ways the company’s growth strategy gets activated.
Is your marketing investment aligned to your growth strategy?
If you're evaluating marketing effectiveness, rethinking where to invest, or looking for stronger alignment between marketing, sales and your growth priorities, I’d be happy to compare notes.