By Chris Bucholtz

Not so long ago, when I was covering a different technology beat, something bad started to happen to the industry I was covering – so bad, in fact that it cost me my job. What finally did it wasn’t a sudden change in the market; it was a long-standing phenomenon that finally came to the attention of the C-level executives in the industry, seemingly all at once.

The phenomenon was this: marketing people couldn’t quantify their value – nor had they been able to for a long time.

This problem was crystallized for me as I was getting a ride to the Boise airport from a marketing guy from a company based there following a day of trap shooting (quantify the marketing value in that!). His budget was drying up because he had a hard time explaining what revenue could be associated with the company’s marketing efforts. Also, he said, his superiors actually said “We know all of our customers already,” which is both incredibly arrogant and sad at the same time. By the way, that company was acquired by a larger competitor within six months.

In any event, when marketing went away, so did advertising, and when advertising went away so did my magazine – allowing me to make my bold leap into the world of CRM, so there’s a happy ending to this sad story, at least for me.

I was thinking about this today while talking with Phil Fernandez of Marketo, who will be another victim of our “10 Questions…” series shortly. One of Marketo’s features is a marketing ROI analytics tool which enables marketing people to associate numbers with their efforts. CMOs now have the shortest tenure of any C-level execs, Phil said – 23 months, on average, partly because they aren’t able to come to meetings armed with objective numbers like the CFO or sales people. Why not blame the CMO? The poor *** has nothing to defend himself with.

Now, said Phil, a dubious CFO could still suggest cutting marketing’s budget to make the bottom line look sweeter – but the CMO could come back with the exact reduction in revenue such a cut was likely to cause.

The other thing such a function does is to encourage marketing to really get on the same page as sales and to make sure it’s doing its best to pass quality leads. Now that there’s a number that can be identified, there’s skin in the game for marketing to get that number to go up.

I also like the idea that a marketing guy can get Marketo, then use the ROI analytics feature to justify having implemented Marketo in the first place.

Phil’s 10 questions will be on the site sometime in June.