Suzanne Elshult, http://hrnow.net Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. David Kinard (davidkinard.com) is an award-winning senior marketer and a regular MBA faculty and conference/keynote speaker. He is a past-president of the Puget Sound American Marketing Association.

Today’s marketing leaders are facing tremendous pressure to adjust their organization’s marketing and respond to a rapidly changing and shifting environment. These pressures are altering the marketer’s leadership role in organizations: some are leading in this transformational change while others are just getting by. Where do you fall? In this Marketing Executive Roundtable senior leaders from a variety of industries explored the following four questions:

1. What does it take to establish reasonable expectations of what marketing can (and can’t do)?
2. What has worked well (or not) in on-boarding as a marketing leader?
3. What has worked well (or not) in integrating marketing across the organization?
4. What successes and challenges have you had in aligning marketing functions to the goal of the C-Suite?

This topic is of keen interest to marketing executives for many reasons. But there are common themes that span the breadth of industries, including:
• We need to do a better job of asking the right questions and making sure the C-Suite really gets what it needs
• We continue to be viewed as a cost center that needs to justify its existence.
• The C-Suite controls the budget and its allocation. Marketing if a cost center will get cut, but if a strategic revenue driver then it gets what is needed to grow the company.
• We are challenged by how to best measure and show ROI. For example, how do we justify thought leadership and PR?
• There is a shift from needing more promotional dollars to more people. In this new economy, how do we demonstrate that what we really need is more people (to blog etc.) not a bigger budget.
• We need to break out of our silo and learn how to look beyond to broader solutions and issues than those defined narrowly by our department.

Here are some highlights from the dialogue we had with regard to establishing expectations and getting integrated with the C-Suite:

• We have to first understand the dynamics of the organization and help the C-Suite understand what they really want from marketing – our job here is to educate.
• Make sure we build relationships, ask powerful questions and ask/demand face-time – be assertive. Have face-time that is both informal and formal – but it must be constant, regular opportunities. Share info in small manageable pieces and look for teachable moments.
• Have the C-Suite describe what they want to see and listen very carefully! Package where you are heading in such a way that they – the C-Suite – end up engaged and with ownership for ideas and directions. Use their words, their goals, their lingo – dump marketing jargon!
• Get the C-Suite into one of your marketing strategy planning meetings – make sure you get them talking and a part of what you are doing – this will get you the leverage you need later in the budget process.
• Make sure you articulate metrics in a way that the C-Suite can relate to. For example instead of “rebranding” talked about “client retention.” Fact: we are notorious for our “lingo” and need to change our tone and make sure we are not trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
• Find influencers for marketing – could be our peers – within your company and leverage them with the C-Suite. It could also be our dealers…..how do we get them to see themselves as an extension of marketing?
• Know what you are asking for!

A key issue we have as marketers is that we need to get better at engaging with others and having the conversations we need to have. Can you name any function in your organization that marketing should not influence? Probably not! We need to get the C-Suite to understand that we are not trying build kingdoms, but we are trying to influence at all possible touch-points (the customer experience, employee experience, partner experience and so forth).

One executive stated that she literally is teaching a marketing class internally every day to help others understand how marketing really works. Sad fact: in reality, most people don’t understand marketing.

Some of our favorite quotes from this session:
• “I am compensated based on sales, but 90% of what I do is marketing. And, this is in alignment with what the C-Suite wants – sales. My challenge is to show how marketing is actually a big reason that sales are achieved”
• “Bloggers! They are basically our organizational gossipers…we want to increase the level of gossip about our company in for instance Twitter”
• “They think they are telling us what to do. That is great!”
• “Surveys; give you the semantics that can make you powerful.”
• “We need to give the C-Suite what they want and also what they need.”

Resource Tips:
• “The First 90 Days” by Michael Watkins – excellent read for anybody coming into a new role, how to define your role/agenda and determine what your impact on the organization will be
• “Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEOs Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation” by Nirmalya Kumar – excellent read for helping raise the tone of the conversation with your C-Suite