The traditional boardroom table has always been a sea of suits. Finance. Operations. Legal. Sales. Everyone brings their own expertise, opinions and version of reality to the discussion. Marketing hasn't always been part of that crew, and (surprise, surprise) the marketing person thinks it's time to change that.
But maybe not for the reasons you might think.
I'm not arguing that marketing knows more than everyone else, or that marketers have some special claim over strategy. A good sales leader understands customers. A good service delivery leader understands customers. Technical teams, account managers and support teams all hear things that help shape better business decisions.
What I've noticed over the years is that the best leadership teams aren't the ones where everyone sees the problem the same way. They're the ones where different people bring different information into the room, don’t always agree on everything, and expose any blind spots. That's what makes better decisions.
Marketing, we have a perception problem
Despite marketing's role in growth, customer acquisition and market development, a lot of business leaders still don't see it as a strategic function. Research among 150 CEOs and business leaders found that 84% still see marketing as a support function rather than a growth driver.
Ouch.
So yes, despite decades of progress, there's apparently still a bit of the colouring-in department reputation hanging around. Perhaps even more tellingly, 88% said marketers would be more credible if they spoke the language of business. And maybe they have a point.
I've sat through plenty of marketing reports over the years packed with social engagement metrics, email open rates and campaign statistics. Those things have their place. But when you're sitting at the leadership table, the conversation needs to move beyond marketing activity to these kinds of discussion points:
- What generated pipeline?
- What's influencing revenue?
- Where are we seeing growth?
- What's not working?
- Where should we put the next dollar?
Nobody has ever approved next year's growth strategy because an Instagram post got 37 likes.
The marketers who influence strategic discussions tend to be the ones who understand how the business makes money and can connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes. That doesn't mean becoming an accountant. It just means being comfortable talking about the business as well as the marketing.
There's a world beyond your P&L
Put Finance, Sales, Operations and Service Delivery around a table, and you'll have a truckload of business knowledge. But you still won't necessarily know what's happening outside the building in the wider market.
Most leadership discussions naturally focus inwards on revenue targets, profitability, delivery capability and resource allocation, and those things definitely matter. But marketing spends a lot of its time looking outwards – watching competitors, tracking buying behaviour, looking at industry trends, talking to vendors, running campaigns, studying what people are searching for online.
And over time, patterns start to emerge. You might notice buyers researching differently than they were twelve months ago. You might see a particular technology vendor gaining traction in a sector. You might find an approach working across multiple businesses before it becomes widely adopted. While those observations rarely show up in a monthly financial report, they can have a huge impact on where growth comes from next.
The challenge is that much of marketing's contribution happens long before a sale is recorded. Awareness, trust, positioning and buying intent are often built months before an opportunity appears in the CRM. By the time revenue arrives, the influence that helped create it has largely disappeared from view.
That doesn't make it less valuable; it just makes it easier to overlook. And none of this means Marketing knows more than Sales, Finance or Operations, we just know different stuff. That's precisely the point.
Wait. Haven't we tried this before?
Businesses have a fascinating ability to forget their own history. Teams change. Leaders leave. Priorities evolve. A few years pass and suddenly someone is enthusiastically pitching a new idea. Then somebody asks, "Didn't we try something similar before?"
Marketing often ends up holding a surprising amount of organisational memory because so much activity gets measured, reported on and reviewed over time. Things like:
- What happened the last time the business entered that market?
- Which campaigns generated genuine pipeline and which simply created activity?
- How did customers respond when the business changed its positioning?
- What was the outcome of previous vendor-funded initiatives?
Those aren't marketing questions. They're business questions. They're also the sort of questions that are much easier to answer when the people holding that information are involved in the conversation from the start.
A great idea. A tiny market.
I chatted to a client recently who had a hunch that vets were an area of opportunity. On paper, it made a lot of sense; they had a great client in the sector, a fantastic story to tell, and vets sat smack bang in the middle of their target customer profile (TCP).
Excellent.
Let's go get some vets.
Except when we looked at the numbers properly, the opportunity wasn't nearly as attractive as it first appeared. There simply weren't enough suitable veterinary businesses in their local market to justify the investment.
Good idea - wrong market.
That's exactly the sort of thing marketing can bring to a strategic discussion before anyone starts investing budget, resources and energy into the wrong opportunity. A lot of leadership conversations focus on growth targets. Fewer conversations focus on whether the market is actually large enough to support those targets. Before anyone starts allocating budget, it's worth asking:
- How many potential customers exist?
- Is the market growing or shrinking?
- How much market share would you realistically need to achieve your objectives?
Those questions aren't particularly glamorous, but they can save a business from investing heavily in an opportunity that was never really there.
So, does marketing deserve a chair?
Here's the funny thing. After spending all this time arguing that marketing belongs in the boardroom, I don't actually think this debate is about marketing - it's about information.
Finance sees things Marketing doesn't, Operations knows things Sales doesn't, Sales hears things the CFO may never hear.
Marketing spends its time looking at customers, competitors, markets, campaigns, vendor ecosystems and the strange things buyers do before they're anywhere near a sales conversation. All of that combined makes for some useful information.
Too many businesses bring Marketing in after the major decisions have already been made. The message from leadership is “here’s the strategy, here’s the growth target, here’s the market that we’re going after – now go make it look pretty.”
At that point we're not helping shape the decision; we're colouring it in.
Marketing doesn't need a boardroom seat because marketers want to feel important. Most of us already have enough meetings in our diaries. We need to be there because better decisions get made when the people making them have more of the picture.
And if you'd still like us to do some colouring in afterwards, that's fine.
We do have excellent taste.
