Marketing is responsible for leads. The business is accountable for growth.

Marketing should own the lead numbers. But they can't hold sole accountability for whether the business succeeds or not.

That sounds like a marketer asking to be let off the hook. It's not. It's the arrangement that I've seen work, and almost every tech company I know gets it the wrong way round.

Responsible and accountable are different words

When someone says "you're accountable for X" or "you're responsible for X", the difference matters.

Marketing is responsible for lead and opportunity generation. It should be all over the numbers, publish them to anyone interested, and be judged on them. At a previous employer, every person in the marketing department was expected to know how many MQLs they had influenced, what they did to generate them, and what happened to them in Sales.

But – the leadership team is accountable for the business. Not Marketing, not Sales, not Engineering, not Product. All of them, together. If something isn't working, it's everyone's problem.

Sales can't run marketing

You need a very good relationship with Sales, ideally with daily interaction. You also need to stop Sales running marketing.

That isn't a criticism of salespeople – some of my best friends work in Sales 😊. Their targets are quarterly and their incentives are short term, so they will always pull marketing towards whatever closes this quarter.

But – somebody has to work on the buyers who will close in one or two years' time. That's why marketing owns its own lead and opportunity numbers, rather than borrowing Sales' definitions of success.

When the two teams do sit down in front of the same numbers, it works. At a previous employer, the marketing and sales teams once spent a month agreeing lead definitions, lead types and follow-up together, and the next month's opportunity generation came in 20-30% up year-on-year. Shared numbers, separate jobs.

Most of what marketing does can't be seen

With Sales, you can track almost every interaction that matters. Who called customers, which meetings happened, who said what in the meeting recordings, whether the right documents were presented and so on.

With marketing you just can't. My rough estimate, after 16 years of trying, is that 85-90% of marketing's influence on a buyer never shows up in any system. John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put a structural number on part of the reason: at any given time only about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market, so most of what marketing does lands on people who won't buy for months or years.

When I wrote one previous employer's marketing strategy, I had to admit we couldn't see much of what specifically was working. A customer webinar on one of our products, a big opportunity that started at a community event: both mattered, and neither showed up cleanly in our systems. Accountability between Marketing and Sales was stuck for the same reason. Back in 2014 (!) I had concluded marketing ROI couldn't be proven at the volumes seen in most B2B orgs. As a side note I had seen this proven ROI with an almost-customer, John Lewis, but their customer numbers were three orders of magnitude higher, and not just because of their Christmas ads 🎄.

So, you can't fall back on the machine telling you what to do. You have to understand the strategy and why it is going to work.

Growth goes to Sales, decline goes to Marketing 🙁

Here is the pattern that does the damage.

When the business is growing, Sales gets the reward and the recognition. When it stalls, the question is "why isn't marketing generating the leads?"

That is a misunderstanding of how the money is made. Salespeople close deals that marketing brought in. Not every time: of course Sales generate their own leads through outbound. But that is the exception, not the rule. The short, medium and long-term health of a B2B business is marketing generated, and yet marketing is usually the worst paid, takes the most blame and has the least autonomy.

It's very hard to make that statement without it sounding like "Woe is me". But it is what I have seen over and over, fundamental misunderstanding of how the business generates revenue. At its heart is the misunderstanding of how difficult, complicated and to some extent, unmeasurable is marketing work. This often comes from a techie mindset that is "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it". But that is quite a narrow perspective on what actually happens in the tech firm.

The most important job nobody understands

Sadly the number of CEOs I've worked with who really understand this I can count on the fingers of one finger 🙁.

Think of a company as an inventor in an attic. You can build whatever you like up there, have fun in the workshop building gizmos and experiments. But it makes no difference until someone crosses the gap to the people who might buy it. Marketing is that crossing. It's the most important and the hardest job in the modern B2B company, and right now it's the one being cut. The marketing job market is the worst I have seen at the moment, and not just because of the rise of the machines.

What to do about it

Give marketing its numbers, leads and opportunities, and hold it to them. Then put the accountability for growth where it belongs: on the leadership team as a whole, in good quarters and bad ones.

The test is simple. In your last bad quarter, whose fault was it? If the answer was one department, you have the arrangement the wrong way round.

Related reading

• Five myths about the marketing revenue engine
• How collaboration can grow revenue
• How to build a B2B marketing team