Educating the C-Suite on the Value of Marketing

A Practical Guide Based on Feedback from Over Forty Healthtech Marketing Leaders

It is well-known that the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is around two years. One of the reasons may be that the C-Suite has a poor understanding of the value of marketing.

According to the Healthtech Marketing Network members, educating the C-Suite on the value of marketing was the second most important issue they wanted to learn more about. Only learning about how to implement ABM was seen as more important.


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To help answer this, we gathered over forty health tech marketing leaders to understand how they do this. Each one had ideas and shared experiences on what had worked for them. As none of us is as smart as all of us, the collective feedback provided a source of best practices that any marketing leader would find helpful.

What follows is a practical and actionable guide for any marketing leader. It will help you educate the C-Suite on the value of marketing and build trust in yourself and your department.

These are considered best practices by the executives we spoke with. As the list is long, we have organized these into six categories:

  • Educating on the broader strategic impact

  • Being seen as a thought leader

  • Earning trust through transparency

  • Demonstrating business impact

  • Building credible measurement models

  • Building Alignment

The healthtech marketing leaders we spoke with considered these six core competencies to be those that successful CMOs have mastered.


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Educating on Broader Strategic Impact

1. Emphasize marketing’s strategic role

Position marketing as a strategic partner in driving business growth, not just a cost center or tactical function. Show how marketing insights inform product development, market expansion, and overall business strategy. Demonstrate marketing’s role in building brand value and creating competitive differentiation.

2. Highlight marketing’s role in customer retention

Demonstrate how marketing contributes to upselling, cross-selling, and overall customer lifetime value. Show examples of successful retention or expansion campaigns. Track and report on metrics like net revenue retention and customer satisfaction scores.

3. Educate on the cost of doing nothing

Illustrate the potential lost opportunities or market share if marketing efforts are reduced or eliminated.  Use competitor analysis and market trends to show the risks of underinvesting in marketing. Present scenarios comparing different levels of marketing investment and their likely outcomes.

4. Present competitive benchmarks

Show how your marketing investments and performance compare to industry standards or key competitors. Use data from sources like Gartner or industry-specific reports to provide context. Highlight areas where you’re outperforming and where there’s room for improvement.

Being Seen as a Thought Leader

5. Showcase long-term impact

Given the long sales cycles in health tech, demonstrate how marketing activities today influence deals that may close months or years in the future. Use lead scoring and pipeline velocity metrics to show progress over time. Highlight case studies of long-term nurture campaigns that resulted in significant deals.

6. Implement and showcase Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Demonstrate how ABM strategies lead to higher-quality leads and more efficient use of resources. Show how ABM aligns marketing efforts with high-value target accounts identified by sales. Present case studies or early wins from your ABM initiatives to build support.

Earning Trust Through Transparency

7. Be transparent about budget allocation

Clearly communicate how marketing budgets are spent and the expected returns for each category of spend. Use visual aids like pie charts or treemaps to make budget allocation easy to understand. Be prepared to explain and justify major expenses, especially in areas like martech or events.

8. Adapt reporting to organizational changes

In cases of mergers or acquisitions, quickly align marketing metrics and reporting with new organizational priorities. Be proactive in understanding new leadership’s expectations and preferred reporting styles. Show how marketing can support integration efforts and drive growth in the new organizational structure.

9. Leverage marketing technology effectively

Show how investments in martech improve efficiency and provide better insights into marketing performance. Demonstrate how your tech stack enables personalization, automation, and improved customer experiences. Regularly assess and optimize your martech investments to ensure maximum value.


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Demonstrating Business Impact

10. Develop a reverse waterfall model

Start with revenue goals and work backward to show how marketing activities contribute to pipeline and closed deals. This approach clearly demonstrates the link between marketing efforts and business outcomes. It helps C-suite executives understand the volume of marketing activities needed to achieve revenue targets.

11. Translate marketing activities into financial terms

Present marketing efforts in a language that resonates with the CFO, focusing on investments and returns. Use terms like “customer acquisition cost” and “lifetime value” to frame marketing spend. Provide clear ROI calculations for major marketing initiatives.

12. Focus on pipeline and revenue metrics

Emphasize how marketing activities drive pipeline creation and contribute to closed revenue rather than just vanity metrics. Show the direct correlation between marketing efforts and financial outcomes. Regularly report on metrics like marketing-sourced pipeline, marketing-influenced revenue, and return on marketing investment (ROMI).

13. Provide regular, data-driven updates

Report frequently (weekly or monthly) on key metrics that demonstrate marketing’s impact on business goals. Use dashboards or standardized reports to make these updates easily digestible for busy executives. Include both leading indicators (like MQLs) and lagging indicators (like closed revenue) in your reports.

Building a Credible Measurement Model

14. Develop a balanced scorecard

Create a comprehensive view of marketing performance, including leading and lagging indicators. Include metrics across different categories like financial, customer, internal processes, and learning/growth. Use this to provide a holistic view of marketing’s impact on the business

15. Use multi-touch attribution

Implement a system that tracks marketing influence throughout the entire customer journey, not just the first or last touch. This provides a more accurate picture of marketing’s impact, especially in long sales cycles. Use tools like Salesforce or specialized attribution software to capture and report on this data.

16. Conduct thorough post-event analysis

Perform detailed ROI calculations for major events and trade shows, linking participation to pipeline and revenue. Track both immediate results (like leads generated) and long-term impact (deals closed from event contacts). Use this data to inform future event strategies and justify budget allocations.

Building Alignment

17. Collaborate closely with sales

Foster a strong relationship with the sales team to ensure alignment on lead attribution and the value of marketing activities. Hold regular meetings with sales leadership to discuss lead quality, pipeline progress, and joint initiatives. Develop shared definitions and processes for lead qualification and handoff.

18. Involve C-suite executives in marketing activities

Invite CFOs or other executives to attend trade shows or customer meetings to give them firsthand experience of marketing’s impact. Encourage their participation in content creation, such as thought leadership articles or webinars. Provide opportunities for them to witness customer interactions and gather market intelligence.

 The list is long, and in the interest of brevity, we have summarized the key activities. In future articles, we will provide more in-depth guidelines on many of these best practices.


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And if You Need Help…

  1. Check out more posts like this in the Health Tech MarketingLearning Center. It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and more.

  2. Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and health tech marketing.

  3. Buy Total Customer Growth: Our book on how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX.

  4. Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session, and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.

 

Posted by Adam Turinas
Posted in Leadership and Career Development on July 16, 2024

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About the Author Adam Turinas

Hi, I am Adam Turinas, Health Launchpad's founder. I am passionate about helping healthtech firms succeed through better sales and marketing. I have hard-earned experience in healthcare technolgy as I started two healthcare businesses in the US, the first with zero healthcare experience. We sold the second business to a strategic buyer seven years later. Over 9 years building a healhtech businesses, I have learned how to sell and market effectively to healthcare organizations. Prior to this, I spent two decades in digital marketing across healthcare and other consumer industries where I sold over $100 million in products and services to corporations and healthcare orgs. I would love to talk with you. You can book a call with me on the right hand side. Best Adam (This is page 0 of many)Enter your text here...

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