How Marketing Can Earn the Trust of the C-Suite

Everyone in marketing wants to become a trusted partner of the C-suite. But whats the best way to do that? Thats what well explore in this post we want to help you gain greater respect and job security. In order to earn the trust of the C-Suite, you as marketers need to first truly understand the C-Suite and how they are measured.

Everyone in marketing wants to become a trusted partner of the C-suite.  But what’s the best way to do that? That’s what we’ll explore in this post – we want to help you gain greater respect and job security.

In order to earn the trust of the C-Suite, you as marketers need to first truly understand the C-Suite and how they are measured. The key to earning trust is by helping THEM achieve THEIR objectives.

Activity measures include stuff that’s easy to measure – like website visitors, press mentions and Facebook likes. Problem is that these simple measures don’t tie to business outcomes – how do Facebook likes drive revenue? Others rely on operational measures, like cost per lead, and win rates – those are more useful, because they address efficiency, but they also do not tie to business outcomes either.

That means insights into what is driving results, and data to make decisions.

One of the key problems is that most marketers are reporting on what we are doing, as opposed to helping drive business results.  Your view needs to be future based, not just past.

People often approach metrics expert Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing to ask “What are the top five metrics I should be using?”  However, Laura feels that’s not the right question – because metrics need to work together and connect with each other. Metrics should not work in isolation – independent of each other. As Laura Patterson suggests:

Instead, you need to start building your dashboard by answering these three simple (ok not that simple) questions:

It was found that, for the A’s, the vast majority (7 out of 10) were growing market share, customer satisfaction and loyalty. But the C’s and D’s were the ones without dashboards or metrics tied to business outcomes.

Three areas are needed – alignment, accountability and analytics. Focus on these and you will earn the trust you desire.

alignment Speak the language of the business. Understand the business goals. Start with the business goals that key stakeholders care about. This is the key starting point. Talk to your C-suite leaders. Ask them what’s important to them. Listen to their conversations with others.

Accountability Measure marketing performance and report results though dashboards. The best not only use dashboards, but use the dashboards to communicate with the C-suite.

Analytics Be numbers driven.  Use data as a predictive tool.  Note that the A’s invest in skills and tools, as well as experimenting with models.