Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Take a Page (or Two) from the Sales Playbook

Many marketing teams today are suffering a crisis of credibility, since they’re not considered as essential contributors to the top line. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Marketers can offset these perceptions by framing their spending and results using such hard metrics as return-on-investment, revenue yield, and growth. Marketing budgets need to include revenue forecasts, and marketing plans need business cases that illustrate how they will drive revenue. Only by demonstrating how their efforts directly support revenue will marketers be seen as integral to the revenue process, and not a cost center.

Marketing professionals are usually great at positioning, establishing brand identity, and infusing excitement into their company’s products. Those skills turned outward toward consumers are essential. Unfortunately, many marketers attempt to turn these same skills inward, toward their colleagues and executive managers; they try to hype their contributions to revenue, rather than to calmly measure and account for them. The results often sound hollow to other executives, including the sales leaders who are accountable for hard, visible metrics. Left unchecked, this tendency can marginalize marketing, rather than empower it.

So what can marketers do to ensure that executives see them as part of the machine that drives revenue and profits, instead of as people who create websites and buy tchotchkes? The key is to act more like sales, at ...