The clues come before the numbers. Are we connecting them?

(This article was first posted on LinkedIn here)

Only 70% of CEOs now believe Marketing is clearly defined and understood by the C-suite. Three years ago, that figure was 90%. Only half of CMOs say they are involved in strategic planning.

Those findings from McKinsey are uncomfortable when you put them together. There is another: 64% of CEOs say they are comfortable with modern marketing, while only 31% of CMOs think their CEOs are.

I’m less interested in who is right than in why two executives responsible for the same commercial system can see Marketing’s role so differently.

Marketing’s commercial purpose hasn’t changed as much as we sometimes suggest. What has changed is everything around it.

Buyers can discover, research and compare vendors across advertising, search, AI, peers, analysts, review platforms, social and partner ecosystems before they make themselves known. In enterprise B2B, they then enter a highly structured buying process involving multiple stakeholders, procurement, security, legal and finance.

The commercial model matters too. In e-commerce, Marketing can create demand and complete the transaction within minutes. In B2B, the more complex the sale, the longer the distance between first influence and revenue. A mid-market SaaS sale and a multinational enterprise purchase create very different buying journeys, signals and time horizons.

Even within the same company, the answer changes. The Marketing organisation needed to establish a category or enter a market may not be the one needed three years later to scale or defend share.

So when we talk about whether CEOs understand Marketing, or how Marketing should be measured, we’re often not comparing like for like.

Start with the business plan. Where is growth coming from, how much, and when? What assumptions have we made? The CMO should know because they should have been involved in developing it.

Then CEO, CFO and CMO can get specific. Which prospects matter? What problem are we solving for them, and why should they care? How much of the market do we need to reach, through which direct, partner or channel routes, and what will that realistically cost?

Then what is Marketing targeted to contribute — pipeline, conversion, deal value, expansion, revenue or margin — and when? Brand recognition, reputation and preference matter too. If we’re investing to change them, agree how we’ll measure that change, over what period, and what we expect them to contribute commercially.

There’s another part of the investment that’s easily lost in all this talk of measures. Marketing still has to make people notice and care. In B2B that often means taking something technically complex and finding the content, idea or creative expression that makes someone understand why it matters. That needs the right creative capability, enough reach and distribution, consistency and time to work.

You can measure whether it worked. You still need people capable of making it work in the first place.

Those decisions shape the Marketing strategy, investment and organisation. They also make clear where Marketing depends on Sales, Product, partners or Customer Success — and where those functions depend on Marketing.

McKinsey found another interesting disconnect. 70% of CEOs measure Marketing’s impact through year-on-year revenue growth and margin. Only 35% of CMOs track these as top metrics.

I don’t think being accountable for revenue is the problem. The more useful question is what we should expect to see before the revenue arrives.

In complex B2B, Marketing may influence a buyer months before an opportunity exists. Sales may then spend another six or twelve months converting that opportunity into revenue. If revenue takes twelve months to appear, what should we see in three, six or nine months that tells us we’re heading in the right direction?

Say we want to increase awareness and preference among a particular group of buyers. We need enough media, channels and promotion to reach them, for long enough to make a measurable difference — and credible independent measurement to know whether it did. CRM, website and customer data can tell us a lot, but they can’t tell us objectively what the wider market thinks.

Then follow what happens. Does awareness move? Search or consideration? Opportunity creation? Eventually conversion, pipeline or revenue?

If the expected progression doesn’t appear, question the assumption. And if you cut the investment or measurement halfway through, don’t leave the original commercial expectation untouched.

But there is a bigger opportunity here.

None of those signals belongs to one function.

Marketing has access to some of the earliest evidence, including from people who haven’t chosen to engage. Sales sees the people who enter a buying conversation: who’s involved, what they’re asking and where decisions slow. Customer Success sees what happens when promise becomes experience: what customers use, value, struggle with, renew and expand. Product sees usage and unmet needs. Finance sees the economics.

Different populations, different points in the relationship.

Put them together and you start to see something much more useful: how the market is actually behaving.

Marketing should be joining that evidence into a coherent view of the customer and market. The experience promised to the market also has to survive Product, Sales, implementation and Customer Success. Part of the CMO’s job is to connect those views rather than allow each function to interpret its part in isolation.

Without that connection, the evidence stays with whichever function happens to see it. A CMO can arrive at a deal review and discover Sales has been noticing a change for weeks. Perhaps buyers’ CFOs are entering deals earlier. Prospects suddenly want more evidence. Marketing has seen conversion fall or competitor comparison increase.

Together, that might mean something. Separately, they can look like functional problems.

The deal review is the last place to start working out what.

I’ve always liked having business analysis capability within RevOps for precisely this reason. Give the analyst a shared remit across Marketing, Sales and Customer Success data, bringing in Product and Finance where useful. AI now makes it possible to look across those agreed data sources far more frequently and spot patterns that would otherwise be easy to miss.

That gives Marketing and Sales time before the review to ask what might be happening.

Perhaps website conversion has fallen despite stable traffic. Sales is finding that prospects need more explanation of the proposition, while Marketing sees more competitor comparison behaviour. Now there is a pattern worth examining.

If the CMO first offers that theory at the QBR, particularly where confidence in Marketing is already weak, it can sound remarkably like an explanation for poor performance. It’s a different conversation when Sales and Marketing have already looked at the evidence together and arrive with what they’ve observed, what they think might be happening and how they intend to test it.

At the next review, they know more. Did conversion recover? Did deal velocity change? Did the behaviour continue? Did their explanation survive the test?

If it didn’t, change it.

Do that repeatedly and the commercial team gets better at understanding what is changing early enough to act on it.

It builds confidence too.

Marketing spends much of its time giving prospective customers enough evidence to become confident in the company. CEO and CFO confidence in the CMO develops in much the same way: observations are tested, assumptions challenged and commercial consequences become visible over time.

Sometimes Marketing will be wrong. I’d have considerably more confidence in a CMO who could say, “Our explanation didn’t survive the test. Here’s what we’re seeing now,” than one who could find another metric to prove the original strategy was working.

Perhaps that’s the more useful way to think about the CEO/CMO disconnect.

Agree what Marketing is there to contribute, fund it accordingly and agree what you expect to see along the way. Then connect the evidence across the commercial system early enough to do something with it.

By the time the number needs explaining, the opportunity to change it may already have passed.

Source: McKinsey & Company, The CMO’s comeback: Aligning the C-suite to drive customer-centric growth, June 2025.

About the Author: Kaila Yates is an Interim Chief Marketing Officer working with enterprise B2B technology and financial services businesses on marketing transformation and commercial performance. She is also a NED and Chair, bringing board-level perspective to growth, governance and performance. www.twojackscomms.com

Kaila is also the co-host of the FMI podcast - listen to the latest episodes here.