3 Key MBOs for B2B Marketing Excellence

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This week’s article is about key Management Business Objectives for B2B Marketers is part of our Team Excellence series / topic.

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3 Key MBOs for B2B Marketing Excellence

Most heads of marketing measure their team the wrong way. Management Business Objectives (or MBOs) is method to align teams with business goals. B2B marketing team management is no different. What is unique to B2B marketing is understanding how marketing drives the business forward and ensuring team members individual goals are in alignment to that. Here are 3 keys in ensuring that alignment.

Key #1: Measure Outcomes not Tactics

B2B marketing contributes to a business in many ways. Ideally marketing as a whole should be measured based upon outcomes, including: revenue, pipeline creation, improved NPS / cSAT, etc. And MBOs should follow that marketing performance measurement rationale. Below, we see the 5 steps for MBO alignment which connect the dots between business performance to individual team member’s contribution to delivering those outcomes.

To make that successful, as marketing leaders, we need to focus on outcomes not day to day tactics in measuring a team member’s success. All too often I see activity as the proxy for success, but it isn’t. Success is an outcome. Thus we should measure individual success using the same framework.

Key #2: Reward for Collaboration

Marketing is a group effort and so teaming should be an important part of measuring a team member success. This goes for intra and well as inter departmental collaboration. And this goes from the most junior marketing coordinator up to the CMO. Collaboration is key to marketing’s success.

How do you measure this? Ask HR to include a NPS-like teaming question into their 360 degree review process or send a survey out to relevant constituencies. But teamwork is measurable and actionable for performance reviews and should be included in every marketers individual goals.

Key #3: Tree Up MBOs

Alignment is key to successful team performance management. Not only should MBOs be aligned to business objectives, but they also need to align hierarchically. That is, based upon your performance to activity matrix each member of your marketing team will have a set of activities that contribute to a particular business outcome. In aggregate across a team you’ll need to measure what the team contributes to an outcome. And all the way up the line.

This cascading MBO approach forces alignment and collaboration. It is the tactical link that can empower a team for group success. And people managers are responsible for their collective team’s delivering against these outcomes. And managers of managers are responsible for the collective delivery of their team of teams; and so forth. Thus the CMO’s MBOs are the collection of business outcome success the marketing team is contributing to the overall business: revenue, margin, pipeline, etc.

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