Want faster business growth? Stop treating marketing as a support function

Every CEO wants the same thing: sustainable business growth.

 

We invest in sales to win customers, product to stay competitive, technology to improve efficiency and operations to deliver better experiences. But there’s one area of business that contributes just as much to long-term growth but is still viewed as little more than a support function: marketing.

 

Marketing understands customers, identifies market opportunities, shapes positioning, builds reputation and creates demand. Those are fundamental commercial activities that directly contribute to business growth.

 

As a CEO, I’ve spent countless hours talking to B2B marketing leaders about the challenges they face. One frustration comes up again and again: despite the commercial value they create, marketing is still too often seen as a support function rather than a driver of business growth.

 

I wanted to know whether B2B CEOs saw things the same way. So I commissioned a survey of 150 B2B CEOs and senior business leaders to explore how they view marketing’s role in driving growth.

 

The findings genuinely surprised me. Three-quarters (75%) of business leaders said that marketing, while playing an important role in their organisation, doesn’t actually deliver any business growth. Even more significantly, an overwhelming majority (84%) still see marketing as a support function rather than a commercial growth driver.

 

It would be easy to conclude that CEOs simply don’t value marketing, but I don’t believe that’s true. As a CEO myself, I appreciate why these perceptions exist. Every leadership team naturally places the greatest value on the functions whose contribution is easiest to see. Sales closes deals. Finance reports performance. Operations improves efficiency. Their impact is immediate and visible.

 

Marketing rarely works like that, particularly in B2B.

 

 

Three ’blind spots’ holding your business back

Looking across the results of the survey, I found three recurring blind spots in the way business leaders think about marketing’s contribution to growth.

 

I use the phrase ’blind spot’ very carefully. Blind spots aren’t deliberate. They’re simply the consequence of what we can’t easily see. Once you recognise them, you can start making better decisions. Left unchecked, however, they can lead businesses to consistently underestimate one of their most important drivers of long-term growth.

 

 

The first of the three recurring blind spots is what I call ghost revenue.

 

Think about the last major customer your business won. Everyone remembers the signed contract and the salesperson who closed it. Few remember the months of customer insight, positioning, thought leadership and demand generation that made the opportunity possible.

 

This is ghost revenue. Marketing has already created many of the conditions for growth, but by the time revenue is recognised, that contribution has become almost invisible. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that three-quarters (77%) of CEOs in our research believe sales is a bigger growth driver than marketing. Sales deserves enormous credit, but someone has to create the demand that sales ultimately converts.

 

The second blind spot is credibility.

 

When marketing’s commercial contribution isn’t fully visible, it’s much harder for boards to see marketers as strategic business leaders. Instead, marketing becomes associated with campaigns and communications rather than growth, investment and competitive strategy.

 

Every business function develops its own language. Finance talks about financial performance. Technology talks about systems and infrastructure. Marketing talks about brands, audiences and campaigns. None of those perspectives is wrong, but boardroom decisions are ultimately made through a commercial lens.

 

The result is that marketing is often brought into strategic conversations after the biggest decisions have already been made, rather than helping shape them from the outset. That’s a missed opportunity. Few functions spend more time understanding customers, competitors and changing markets, and those insights belong in business strategy just as much as they belong in marketing.

 

The third blind spot is the AI value trap.

 

AI is making marketing more productive, but productivity isn’t the same as value. If businesses see AI primarily as a way to cut costs or reduce headcount, they’ll reinforce the idea that marketing is simply a support function.

 

The real opportunity is the opposite. AI should free marketers to do more of the work that drives growth: developing better customer insight, creating more memorable campaigns, taking bigger creative risks and spending more time on strategy. Used well, AI should make marketing more ambitious, not simply cheaper.

 

 

Closing the gap

The thing about blind spots is that once you know they exist, you can start making better decisions.

 

As business leaders, it’s on us to recognise that some of the most valuable work inside our organisations happens long before revenue appears on a dashboard. If we only reward the activities that are easiest to measure, we’ll continue to underestimate one of the biggest drivers of sustainable growth.

 

So how do we practically do that? Here’s my best advice:

 

1. Bring marketing into strategy earlier

Don’t wait until the strategy is agreed before asking marketing to communicate it. Involve marketing when you’re deciding which markets to enter, which customers to target and where future growth will come from. We used to trust marketing with the ‘Four Ps’ (Product, Place, Price, Promotion). Now we seem to only trust marketers with the fourth one. That has to change.

 

2. Ask for customer insight, not campaign updates

Board discussions about marketing often focus on activity: campaigns, events, content and lead generation. Spend more time asking what marketing is learning about customers, competitors and changing buyer behaviour. Those insights are often far more valuable for the business than the campaign updates themselves.

 

3. Measure marketing like a growth function

If your business has only set goals for marketing based around leads, clicks or campaign performance, don’t be surprised when it acts like a support function. Balance operational measures with commercial ones, looking at how marketing is contributing to market share, demand, customer preference, sales pipeline and long-term growth.

 

4. See marketing as the first half of sales

Marketing and sales aren’t competing functions; they’re consecutive stages of the same commercial process. Marketing creates the conditions for a sale to happen, while sales converts that opportunity into revenue. Treating them as one connected growth function leads to better alignment, better decisions and better results.

 

5. Use AI to create value, not just to lower costs

The biggest opportunity AI presents isn’t reducing the cost of marketing. It’s giving marketers more time to understand customers, develop stronger ideas and build more ambitious campaigns. Treat AI in marketing as a growth investment rather than an efficiency programme.

 

As CEOs, we expect every function to contribute to growth. Marketing should be no different. But we also have a responsibility to recognise where that growth comes from and involve marketing where it can make the biggest difference. Businesses that do will make better strategic decisions, build a stronger understanding of their customers and create better conditions for long-term growth. 

 

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Richard O’Connor is the CEO of the B2B marketing agency Propolis

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Alex Cristi