Sales owns revenue. Marketing owns nothing.
So marketing spends the year chasing somebody else's number. Hit it and nothing changes. Miss it and the budget does.
Twenty-five years of that, in my case, before I worked out the problem wasn't the proof.
If that sounds familiar, there's one of these a month.
The question you hope nobody asks.
Not whether the campaign worked. You can answer that one. There's a dashboard for it.
The other one. The one that turns up in a budget meeting when the finance director sits back and says, fine, but what did we actually get for it.
You can show activity. You can show pipeline. You can show a chart that goes up. What you can't show is whether the money came back, and you know it, and the only reason it has never become a problem is that nobody has pushed hard enough.
It's two sums. What you paid to get a customer, counted properly, with the salaries and the hours in it. What that customer brought in, after what it cost to serve them.
Neither one is hard. Most businesses have never done them, because nobody's job description includes finding out that something isn't working.
Do them and the budget meeting changes shape. You stop defending activity and start arguing about money, which is the only argument a finance director has ever found interesting.
Nothing was fiddled. One version uses the campaign budget and revenue. The other uses every cost of winning the customer, and the margin they actually carry.
One of those numbers gets a campaign repeated. The other says stop. They describe the same period.
I presented the left-hand column for twenty-five years. Nobody ever asked me for the right one, and I never went looking.
From the specimen report.
Your figures will be your own.
It comes back as one document.
About forty pages. Where you stand, what to do about it, and a goal to be measured against that marketing can actually be held to.
Method and assumptions included, so your finance director can pick holes in it. That's rather the point.
A real one, start to finish, with the figures anonymised. Not gated, no email needed.
Where I stand
I spent twenty-five years running marketing for B2B technology businesses, and I was good at a job I now think was the wrong one.
I reported numbers that made my department look busy. Reach, pipeline, engagement, cost per lead, all of it improving. I couldn't have told a finance director whether the money came back, and for most of that time it didn't occur to me that I should be able to.
I'm not interested in making marketing look better. I'm interested in whether it's worth the money, and I'd rather find out it isn't than carry on not knowing.
Which means some of what comes back from this work will be unwelcome. If you want a document that says everything is fine, there are cheaper ways to get one.
This is in or out.
In means a measure that can say you failed. Out means the ones that never can. Almost everyone stays out, and that's not laziness. Marketing picked measures that only go up, because for thirty years it's been the department that reports, not the one that decides.
You think a negative number ends careers. I've watched the opposite. A bad number with a plan attached gets backed. Another case for more budget gets nodded at and shelved.
Out isn't safe. It's just quiet.
Not ready to do anything about it.
Most people aren't. A decision like this takes longer than an afternoon on a website, and usually involves somebody who isn't in marketing.
So take the letter instead. One a month, same argument, new evidence, and you'll know where to find me.
Already past that? Start a conversation →
Or write to me directly at alan@themarketingblindspot.com.