Author: Kelly Waltrich

As we approach the end of the year (!), I’ve spent a lot of time talking with my team and our clients about what they can do now to hit the ground running in 2025. 

One of the most overlooked but wildly important elements of a firm’s success is determining how leadership is going to be measured – marketing leaders in particular. Often, CMOs are held to hazy objectives or subjected to constantly moving goalposts, making it nearly impossible to point to the impact of marketing on the organization’s broader goals.  

Having worn the CMO hat myself, I know how difficult it is to do the job without knowing exactly what I’m working towards – and how motivating it is when I do. 

If you’re unsure about how to measure your marketing leader’s success, I’ve broken down five ways to do so:

1. Contribution to revenue: The first is probably the most important – and to be very clear, your marketing leader should want to be measured against the impact he or she has on revenue. That’s the sign of someone who understands the role marketing is supposed to be playing, and who has skin in the game when it comes to driving real business results.

Scoring against this goal requires setting up meticulous reporting and analysis (for both the marketing AND the sales team) of critical metrics like pipeline generation, lead response time, customer acquisition cost, and sales cycle length.

2. Lead generation: I don’t recommend this as a measure of success unless you’re selling into a large number of firms and executing pure volume plays to drive growth. If that applies to you, use your revenue goals and average sales close rate to determine how many leads per month you’ll need marketing to bring in.

Be sure the number you give them is realistic – otherwise, you’re setting the team up to fail OR to generate junk leads in pursuit of their goal, which only breeds animosity and mistrust between sales and marketing functions.

3. Opportunities and connections: Volume goes out the window when your firm is focused on selling into a few large enterprises rather than boiling the proverbial ocean. In this case, your marketing leader should be goaled on their team’s ability to create demand within these organizations, gain visibility with top executives, and tee up opportunities for the sales team to take across the finish line.

Sales and marketing alignment is always important, but it becomes especially so when organizations are hunting big enterprise deals. These teams need to work in lockstep to develop pitches, sales enablement resources, and messaging that reflects the conversations sales is having within these key accounts.

4. Audience growth: Your marketing team should be able to not only generate awareness for your firm, but also turn that attention into audience expansion and community-building through a consistent flywheel of educational content, compelling events, thought leadership and a highly active social media presence.

Social media followers and newsletter subscribers are basic barometers of audience growth, but you should also be looking for increases in unique website visits, branded traffic, engagement with emails,  and webinar and event attendance. As your audience grows, you should also see related indicators like shorter sales cycles and lower customer acquisition cost.

5. Growth of wallet share within existing clients: Client success, retention and expansion can’t just fall to your customer support function. Good marketing leaders understand the wealth of opportunities represented by your existing client base, from the ability to tap into case studies and testimonials to upsell and cross-sell promotions that not only add to the bottom line, but also create additional stickiness for the business.

Ideally, your marketing leader will be goaled on all or most of these objectives – and if they are, their compensation should be set accordingly. Define your marketing leader’s goals, communicate them clearly, and work together to set the team up for success.

Need more help? I absolutely love talking about how to maximize the potential of marketing, and I’ll always be an advocate for CMOs in this industry. Grab some time on my calendar here!

 

In my role at intention.ly/, I’ve had the opportunity to help a number of firms build or optimize their in-house marketing teams, many of whom were also orchestrating outsourced work across multiple agencies. And I’ve learned there’s a distinct formula for success when it comes to the timing of who to hire in house and what to outsource. 

The order of hiring, while contingent on budget and resources, has to be prescriptive and directly correlated to the level of sophistication your firm is ready to handle in-house versus leaning on the expertise of an outsourced agency to guide your marketing efforts.

See below for a rough sketch to work from.

 

Phase One

In-House Roles	Agency Roles
Marketing generalist focused on execution: social media, email, potentially light blog posts and landing pages	Marketing strategy Content Design Digital marketing/paid media

 

Ideally, you’ll work with an agency that can expertly handle all of the above. In this stage, marketing strategy could also be managed in house by a marketing-minded business leader, likely the founder.

Perhaps the most important thing you’ll do in this phase is establish the metrics that will guide your ongoing efforts. These KPIs need to be communicated effectively across your in-house and agency teams so everyone can work in sync toward the same goals.

 

Phase Two

In-House Roles	Agency Roles
Marketing generalist + Content  + Design	Marketing strategy Digital marketing/paid media Marketing operations Extra support

 

By this stage, you can begin putting together and publishing assets in house, starting with a content specialist and adding a designer when you’re ready. Your agency can guide your strategy, optimize your digital efforts, and, in this phase, establish a solid foundation for your marketing operations to keep your lists and processes organized.

 

Phase Three

In-House Roles	Agency Roles
Marketing generalist Content Design + VP of Marketing + Marketing operations	Marketing strategy Digital marketing/paid media Extra support

 

Your VP of marketing should be a master manager of people and agencies, coordinating collaboration and campaign execution. He or she should be able to provide light strategy guidance, but at this stage, you’ll still need an agency for overall strategy, digital marketing, and extra support where necessary. 

In this phase, I also recommend bringing marketing operations in house. As your marketing efforts ramp up and lead generation accelerates, keeping your workflows streamlined, your lists clean and organized, and your marketing-to-sales handoff process seamless becomes even more critical. If I could do just one thing differently as I was building an internal team, it would be to hire marketing ops sooner!

 

Phase Four

In-House Roles	Agency Roles
Marketing generalist Content  Design VP of Marketing Marketing operations + Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) + Demand generation	Digital marketing/paid media Extra support

 

It’s time to bring strategy in house under the leadership of a CMO — and strategy is the key here, as a lot of organizations will hire CMOs who are more adept people managers than true strategic visionaries. You’re looking for a complementary partnership between a CMO who can manage up, earning a seat at the leadership table, and a VP of Marketing who can manage down, keeping the day-to-day tactics in motion and optimized.

In this stage, the marketing generalist is either phased out or steps into a more specialized role on the team.

 

Phase Five

In-House Roles	Agency Roles
Content  Design VP of Marketing Marketing operations Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Demand generation + Events	Digital marketing/paid media Specialized strategic consulting Extra support

 

At this stage, your marketing engine is humming; if events are part of your firm’s overall growth strategy, you’ll want to add an events specialist to optimize your presence and maximize that fairly expensive investment. 

You’ll notice we still recommend outsourcing digital marketing, even for the most sophisticated and mature marketing organizations. Here’s why: by this phase, a good digital marketing agency will know the nuances of your business, your target audience, and your competitors’ campaigns inside and out. That means they can effortlessly fine-tune campaigns and critical metrics like cost per lead and client acquisition cost to help you make the most of your budget. Most agencies also have greater visibility into the competitive landscape than your in-house team does, giving you an extra advantage.

At this point, you might also want to consider retaining an agency for specialized support conceptualizing and executing innovative strategies outside of your typical campaigns. Think of this as a consulting partnership to amplify your already high-performing marketing efforts.

Finally, I don’t think there’s a single phase in your growth journey wherein you wouldn’t benefit from extra support. As you hire, build your team, and continue evolving your business, you’re going to need extra hands to fill gaps and keep your engine running smoothly. This is where an agency that’s built to scale up and down with your firm becomes an invaluable extension of your team.

 

Your marketing team – whether in house, outsourced, or some combination thereof – is arguably the single most important tool you have for driving growth at your firm. (I may be slightly biased, but I’m not wrong 😉).

Which makes hiring your marketers a critical decision for the future of your business.

The problem is that “marketing” has become a catch-all term for what actually encompasses a number of different skill sets and competencies, including but surely not limited to:

💪 Execution ninjas, highly skilled at implementing marketing tactics
🖼 Creative specialists like copywriters and designers
📊 Paid digital and demand generation experts
🤸‍♀️ Generalists that dabble in a little of this and a little of that
🦄 The very rare unicorn who can do it all — strategy and execution

There’s also what I like to call the people manager, someone adept at facilitating projects or hiring and working with agencies, but lacking any real strategic and tactical ability.

With all of these important but different proficiencies falling under the umbrella of marketing, it’s dangerously easy to pull the trigger on the wrong person, particularly if you or your hiring team aren’t deeply versed in the nuances of marketing orchestration.

Hiring the wrong marketer for your business’s needs and goals isn’t just costly and frustrating. It can also lead you to believe that marketing doesn’t work and therefore you don’t need it – and you can’t make a bigger business mistake than eliminating marketing.

So before you even think about opening a job rec on LinkedIn, consider these questions:

• What does your business need from this role?
• What are your growth goals for the next one to five years?
• How do you envision this person supporting those goals? Be specific.

Use the answers to these questions to craft your job description. And as you begin evaluating candidates:

1. Look for proven success driving growth for businesses like yours and in the same stage as yours.
2. Don’t be afraid to test candidates as part of the interview process, especially if you’re looking for a creative expert or someone to drive strategy.
3. Ask for referrals and use them. Make sure you’re not getting a people manager masquerading as an execution ninja.
4. Consider using a consultant to help you identify which candidate is which, and what you really need for your business.
5. Dig extra deep on the folks who claim they can do it all.  In my experience that’s 1% of marketers or less and you’re likely being punked.

Don’t let the wrong marketing hire derail your growth efforts. Spend the time up front to understand the skills and expertise you really need, and don’t settle until you find it.

🔔 Contact me if I can help you avoid this business booby trap.

Kelly Waltrich is Co-Founder & CEO of intention.ly/