here’s so much mystery around this function. Everybody has their own idea of what marketing is, and most of those ideas are wrong. So here’s how I’ve come to explain it, in about ninety seconds, with five fingers on one hand.
I’ve been in a lot of rooms where marketing gets explained badly. Often times by someone in marketing.
And I’ve noticed that most senior executives outside the function carry around one of two ideas about what marketing is, and both of them are wrong.
The first is the MQL pinball machine. Marketing exists to fire leads into the top of a funnel and count them. More leads is better. If revenue misses, marketing didn’t put enough balls in play. This version reduces a strategic function to a volume operation and then measures it on the least meaningful number it produces.
The second is the make-pretty function. “Can you get me a blue shirt with the logo on it?” “We need a football with our monogram for the client dinner.” “Can somebody clean up these slides?” I’ve been asked all of these, more than once. There’s nothing wrong with any of them. But if that’s what an executive team thinks marketing is, then marketing isn’t in the room where the company decides anything.
Neither version is close to what marketing actually is, or what it should be.
Marketing is a strategic, revenue-generating function. Short term and long term. And in a private equity-backed company, it’s one of the few functions that touches both the growth side and the margin side of the equation your sponsor is grading you on.
So over the years I’ve developed a way to explain it in about ninety seconds, and I do it with one hand. Five fingers, five areas. I’ve used it with CEOs, CFOs, boards, operating partners, and more than a few marketing teams who’d never had it framed this way either.
Here it is.
One: Market
What is actually going on out there?
What are the headwinds and the tailwinds? What are competitors doing, and not just the ones on our battlecard? What are the other choices a buyer has, including doing nothing, building it themselves, or solving the problem with something that isn’t a product at all? How are economic forces changing where the opportunity is, and where it’s shrinking?
This is the part most companies do once during a strategy offsite and then never again. But markets move. Buyer priorities move. Budgets move. If your view of the market is eighteen months old, everything downstream of it is built on a stale assumption.
Marketing should own the outside-in view of the world, and should be bringing it to the leadership team and board continuously, not annually.
Two: Brand Reputation
Do people know us? Do they prefer us? Are we getting on shortlists?
I want to be precise here, because “brand” is a word that often makes CFOs cringe and reach for the budget knife. I’m not talking about logos and color palettes. I’m talking about whether your company is present in the buyer’s mind before a deal exists.
Because that’s where deals are actually decided. Kerry Cunningham‘s research at 6sense, based on nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, found that 95 percent of the time the vendor who eventually wins was already on the buyer’s shortlist on day one. Before they contacted anyone. Buyers rank that list before they ever speak to a seller, and the vendor they reach out to first wins about 80 percent of the time.
So brand reputation isn’t a soft metric. It determines how many at-bats you get. It shows up in pricing power, because a company the buyer already trusts doesn’t have to discount its way into consideration. It shows up in win rates, because you’re competing from a position of preference rather than from behind. And it seeds demand long before any campaign runs. And oh by the way, its also an intangible asset on the balance sheet impacting company valuations.
I call this Brand Gravity. It’s the least understood line item in most marketing budgets and one of the most consequential.
Three: Demand
This is the one everybody thinks is the whole job. It’s one finger of five.
And demand isn’t one thing either. It’s three.
Acquiring new customers. Turning prospects into buyers. This is what most people picture when they hear demand generation, and it’s the most expensive of the three. Hint: it’s really demand capture.
Expanding current customers. Upsell and cross-sell into the base you already have. This is growth you don’t have to buy, and in most companies it’s dramatically underfunded relative to its return.
Recapturing customers you’ve lost. Almost nobody does this systematically. Lost accounts are a list of companies who already knew you, already had the problem, and already went through a buying process. Some of them left for reasons that no longer apply. That’s some of the warmest pipeline in the building and it’s usually sitting untouched in a CRM.
All three are demand. If your marketing organization only does the first one, you’re funding the most expensive path to revenue and ignoring the two cheaper ones.
While we’re at it, I LOVE the RBR metric (Repeat Buyer Ratio). If you follow your advocates as they move companies they will likely bring you to their new company…
Four: Customer Experience
How are we creating experiences remarkable enough that customers become advocates?
This is where gross revenue retention and net revenue retention actually get made. And it’s where I’d push hardest on how most companies measure.
Are we polling customers to understand what they love, what they can’t stand, and what they want changed? Are we categorizing that feedback so it drives real operational change cross-functionally? Or are we running a Net Promoter Score survey once a year, putting the number on a slide, and moving on?
I’ve written before that NPS is useless unless it’s NPS 3.0. A score you report is a vanity metric. A score you act on is a management system.
And there’s a better number underneath it. Fred Reichheld, who created Net Promoter Score (NPS), over 20 years ago, then introduced the earned growth rate with Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns in Harvard Business Review. The math is simple:
Earned growth rate = net revenue retention + earned new customers, minus 100 percent
Earned new customers means revenue from people who came to you through a referral or a recommendation rather than through paid acquisition. Reichheld’s test for sorting them is refreshingly blunt: ask every new customer why they came. If it was a referral, that customer was earned. If it was advertising, a promotion, or a persuasive salesperson, that customer was bought.
Bought growth is expensive and it gets more expensive. Earned growth carries a near-zero acquisition cost. Two companies growing at the same rate are not the same asset if one earned its growth and the other bought it. Any investor who understands that will tell you the same.
That’s what customer experience is really about. Not satisfaction scores. Compounding revenue.
Five: Sales and Customer Success Enablement
What tools are we putting in the hands of the people who carry a number?
Are we making sellers more productive? Are we improving their win rate? Are we helping them source and close bigger deals? Are we giving customer success what they need to drive adoption, renewal, and expansion?
This is the finger that’s most often treated as an afterthought, usually because it doesn’t feel strategic. But enablement is where all four of the other areas either get delivered or get lost. Your market insight, your brand positioning, your demand programs, your customer feedback, all of it either reaches the buyer through a seller and your communications or it doesn’t reach the buyer at all.
Marketing that produces beautiful strategy and no usable field material has only done half a job.
The Bottom Line
Here’s what I’ve found over twelve CMO roles, seven full-time and five interim.
When you explain marketing this way, three things happen.
The CFO stops seeing marketing as a cost center, because every one of the five areas connects to a number they already track. Market to opportunity sizing. Brand to win rate and pricing power. Demand to pipeline and acquisition cost. Customer experience to retention and earned growth. Enablement to sales productivity.
The CEO stops asking for the blue shirt, because they can see the function is bigger than that.
And your own marketing team gets clearer about what they’re actually for. That last one surprises people, but I’ve watched it happen repeatedly. A lot of marketers have never had their job described in a way that connects to the P&L, so they default to activity because activity is what gets asked for.
Marketing today has to be strategic and revenue-generating, in the short term and the long term. Not one or the other. The demand programs pay this quarter. The brand reputation and customer experience work pays for the next three years, and it’s what a buyer eventually pays a multiple for.
Five fingers. One hand. Ninety seconds.
If you can’t explain your function that simply to a CFO, you’re going to keep getting asked about the football with the monogram on it.
Outcomes and impacts over activities. Every time.
Sources
Kerry Cunningham and 6sense , 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, approximately 4,000 buyer responses across North America, EMEA, and APAC.
Fred Reichheld , Darci Darnell , and Maureen Burns , “Net Promoter 3.0,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2021.
