First time CRO’s guide to Marketing
Revenue Operations is the strategy of removing silos between marketing, sales and customer success.
Those silos exist not just at the operational level, but also at the executive level when senior leaders don’t have a grasp on what their peer’s role includes.
Regardless of whether you believe Marketing should roll up into the CRO role or not, as a CRO it is your job to understand the full role of the marketing function and be able to explain it to your own teams.
I come from a sales background, so I’m going to lean on a fabulous article and graphics from Emily Kramer and the MKT1 newsletter which provides a good insight into the broad responsibility of a SaaS marketing function.
Marketing is more than demand gen
It is tempting when you spin up your Revenue Operations strategy to take a blunt approach.
“Marketing is all about revenue and generating demand for our sellers, so let’s pop it under the CRO.”
And it is true that marketing is accountable for driving pipeline into the sales teams - but let’s look a typical marketing org structure to see beyond that one responsibility.
On the left you have growth marketing, or what we might call demand gen in the world of revenue and sales.
This includes launching and managing marketing campaigns to generate and nurture prospects through your funnel, passing them on to sales teams to convert into closed deals.
Next you have product marketing - educating your prospects, customers, partners and sales teams on your product’s value, benefits and features.
Think about your quarterly product launch to customers or the slides used in your sales enablement training - this is product marketing.
Now we move into a group of activities that sit under the banner of corporate marketing.
Where growth and product marketing are closely aligned to the revenue team’s metrics, the connection starts to become weaker with the next four.
Content marketing includes all of your blogs, podcasts, videos and any other content that is used to educate and inform your prospects, customers and partners.
Think about your case studies, or the diagnostic tool on your website.
This team will be thinking about the categories that you position your products in, the personas that are searching for that content and the keywords they might use.
The comms and PR function is focused on earned media - that is other sites, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, analysts, partners writing and recording about your company and products.
Your field and event marketing team schedule and organise your events - whether they are big physical events like attending Dreamforce or SaaStr, or your own customer community event or webinars.
All of the previous teams, and the wider company then rely on your brand and creative team to define the brand assets that are used - the slide decks, the logos, the icons, the stock photos, the tone of voice.
This team will own the website look and feel and the videos created with your customers and executives. They will decide what swag gets ordered!
Let’s go one level deeper in the marketing org chart, again sourced from the fantastic MKT1 newsletter.
Here you can see that the typical roles we might directly associate with revenue sit under growth marketing, some under product marketing, and some under content marketing.
Growth marketing - our inbound channel (maybe supported by MDRs to qualify the inbound), our demand gen activities, our Account Based Marketing strategy, our paid ads into target personas, our marketing into existing customers for upsells and expansion.
Product Marketing - specifically the enablement of our sales teams and our partners on our new and current products.
Content Marketing - our customer case studies, our social channels, our buyer enablement tools including diagnostics and calculators.
And whilst these aspects are closely aligned with revenue and might naturally fit under the hierarchy of a CRO, you can also see a number of critical functions that do not:
Editorial
Copywriting
Comms
Analyst relations
Brand positioning
Web design
Video production
Tone of voice
Revenue Leadership Structures
As a CRO you should think through how you structure your leadership team.
If you have 100% ownership of the marketing function then you should consider how you’ll embrace and enable the functions that are not directly linked to your revenue goals.
How will you educate yourself on these aspects of the role such that the teams that work in those areas get the right leadership, motivation and guidance they should expect?
If your leadership structure maintains a separate CMO and CRO hierarchy that both report up to the CEO, then you should also spend time learning about the aspects of the CMOs role that are not directly linked to revenue.
Revenue Operations is about removing silos. Not just siloes of data and processes, but siloes of knowledge.
Educate yourself to a position where you could explain the full extent of the marketing function to others without just defaulting to demand gen.
And finally, if you are a VP Sales or Director of Sales considering your next move into becoming a CRO, then evaluate whether a sideways move into one of the marketing roles would give you relevant experience before you make that step up.
Perhaps a role in growth or product marketing would provide you with insight to how the marketing team functions across all aspects of the role.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue growth.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.