What does your CEO really care about?

CMO, VP of Marketing — What does your CEO #really care about? 🤷

Many things.

But what doesn’t she care about?

The amount of leads you’ve created.

Why? 🤔

Because generating leads is not the goal.

Leads are, at most, a tactical — marketing indication that reflects the level of interest in your product and the effectiveness of your Top of the Funnel activities.

That’s all.

Do not be blinded by the amount of leads and better not present the lead data to your CEO.

Leads are not a reliable KPI for businesses, and focusing on them does not contribute to the positioning of the marketing department within the organization.

So what should be done?

The main goal should be to create Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) that will be converted into sales opportunities.

Such a goal indicates the extent of the impact on the demand curve, which is the main mission of the marketing department 🎯

All the other things, important and necessary as they may be (and make no mistake — they are necessary!), are only a means to an end:

➡️ Brand building is not the goal — the goal is to attract new customers (= money) and retain existing customers (= money) through effective branding. Particularly strong brands can reduce advertising expenses (= money).

➡️ Raising awareness is not the goal, and neither is the amount of views, clicks, followers, likes and comments. The goal is to translate all of these into transactions that increase the organization’s revenue.

➡️ Great content, blogs, videos, clever micro-copy, brilliant SEO and ingenious, award-winning promotional content do not suffice unless they deliver the goods. These too are not the target.

And frankly, it is not enough to measure the volume or value of the SQL.

The marketing organization needs to be #bold and confident enough to measure its success based on the rate of conversion from SQL to transactions that bring real money to the organization. Yes, #Wins, I’m talking to you…

Why? 🤔

📌 Focusing on such a goal makes marketing a profit center.

📌 It creates full synchronization between the marketing department and the sales/growth department.

📌 It reduces internal frictions that divert the organization’s energy inward instead of outward.

This is the only way to fulfill the true mission of marketing.

Be brave.