When faced with how best to ensure strong execution of your performance-driven marketing strategy, you might wonder: What comes first—the team or the strategy? It’s the chicken-or-the-egg debate of the business world, and it’s an important question because the best-laid strategy will fail with the wrong execution team.
So, which does come first?
Imagine you build a marketing strategy predominantly based around authority marketing, one where you churn out high-quality written content to establish your brand and leaders as experts in your field. In contrast, imagine that you build a marketing strategy that is predominantly built on trade shows. Content marketing versus event marketing. Would the marketing team you hire differ with each approach?
Certainly. Content marketing and event marketing are two very different games. It takes an entirely different skillset to appeal to an audience with the written word than it does to attract their attention at a large-scale event.
If you were starting from scratch, you’d want to build the strategy and then the team around it. If you already have a marketing team, assess if they hold the precise skills you need for your research-backed marketing strategy, and, if they don’t, either invest in their development, have them collaborate with an agency, or make a change.
Relying on the team you have to develop your strategy without external objectivity is risky; with the best intentions, any team naturally develops the strategy that best aligns with its skills, which may differ from the ideal strategy most likely to scale your company. It’s human nature. Most companies simply benefit from the objectivity that comes from the outside when putting together a results-guaranteed strategy, no matter if that plan is ultimately executed inside or outside your company.
“Any team naturally develops the strategy that best aligns with its skills, which may differ from the ideal strategy most likely to scale your company.”
If you already have an internal team in place with the courage and conviction to stand behind their projections and the specialized skills that your marketing plan requires, then make sure they have real skin in the game. This means you must tie their compensation to plan performance.
The best practice is for half or more of their total earnings to come from variable pay tied to the performance of your marketing strategy. A simple yet effective model rewards them for projected MROI achievement. If they achieve 100 percent of the projected MROI, they earn 100 percent of their variable compensation. If they miss the mark by 10 percent, they earn 90 percent.
Note that if their base salary is too high, they may lose their fire to fight to deliver that MROI— because it is not easy. CEOs will also want to ensure that the most senior marketing leader is wired to win—meaning they have the inherent drive to win, critical-thinking skills, and problem-solving abilities to lead a team that achieves a guaranteed MROI year-over-year.
If you don’t have an internal team, then consider an agency partnership. Ideally, the same agency partner that develops your strategy should also execute it, which helps avoid the blame game if things go sideways. This is not required if expectations of the agency hired to execute your strategy are abundantly clear and documented, however.
Like your internal team, your agency partner must also have skin in the game with their fees tied, ideally, to projected MROI goals. If you have both an internal team and an agency relationship, you want both team’s compensation tied to the same outcomes so that they all win or lose together.
The result? Simple. When you’re paying for performance, your company is far more likely to win.
Paying for performance is one of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 BattlesTM Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started. Just book a call with Jee Vahn Knight, our VP of Strategy.
