CEOs: Set your marketing leaders up for success in 2025

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!