In my many years of marketing leadership, I've had every CEO I've reported to tell me that they don't know marketing. This isn't due to a lack of intelligence or capability; rather, it's a consequence of their professional journey. Most CEOs ascend to the top through different management paths, focusing on finance, operations, or sales, and often lack the time or interest to delve into the multifaceted world of marketing.
When it comes to sales, all the CEOs felt they understood the discipline. Sales and marketing are certainly different but why the disconnect?
Let's compare marketing to sales.
Sales, while challenging and vital, is a more direct discipline with a relatively narrow focus. Salespeople need a consistent set of skills, and the direct support roles, like revenue operations or legal contracting, are limited in scope and variety. The sales process is straightforward: identify prospects, engage them, and close deals (yes, a bit over simplified). It’s a linear journey from activity to revenue, which CEOs find easy to track and measure.
Since the revenue is linked to financials and the cost of inputs to derive the revenue is known, it creates a closed loop and renders a sense of control.
Marketing, on the other hand, is a rainbow of diverse programs, activities, and skill sets. It’s a discipline that spans across an entire company, touching almost every aspect of the business. For example, digital advertising alone is a specialized field requiring knowledge of ad platforms, creative, analytics and interconnected marketing and sales platforms. There are creatives who handle layout, design, graphics, and video production. Content marketing requires a deep understanding of social media, distribution platforms, and collaboration with brand and communications teams.
Moreover, marketing is steeped in analytics, requiring expertise in consumer research, market analysis, product positioning, and data interpretation. Marketers also need to be proficient in various software tools, handle public relations, manage community-building initiatives, and even work with social influencers. Events like trade shows require meticulous planning and coordination, while sales support demands an ongoing flow of messaging, email campaigns, presentation decks, and promotional materials.
Given the extensive, diverse, and nuanced nature of these activities, it's no surprise that unless you're a practitioner, marketing can be difficult to grasp. This is compounded by the fact that much of marketing’s impact is "unattributable." Unlike sales, where activities can be directly linked to revenue, marketing's influence is more diffuse, blending science with art.
This disconnect often leads to marketing being perceived as important yet misunderstood—especially when it comes to budgeting. The debate over how much to invest in marketing is a recurring one in many boardrooms, driven by the challenge of quantifying its true value.
Marketing's complexity and the wide array of skills it encompasses make it a discipline that’s hard to fully appreciate unless you've worked in its trenches. While sales offers a clear, direct path from activity to revenue, marketing's rainbow of activities requires a broader, more nuanced understanding—one that many CEOs simply haven't had the opportunity to develop.