It starts with a subtle wince.
You present your campaign results – healthy engagement, uptick in leads, decent webinar turnout – and someone across the table leans in:
“Yeah, but… how is this actually driving revenue?”
There it is. The invisible line, drawn again. Marketing over here, ‘real business impact’ over there.
This week I downloaded Gartner’s latest CMO playbook and it doesn’t mince words: if marketing wants to protect and elevate its role, it has to prove its value in terms the business respects. Not just outputs, but outcomes. Not just activity, but accountability.
The thing is, most marketing teams do drive impact. But too often, we’re left scrambling to retro-fit attribution, justify spend post-event, or twist performance metrics into a shape that looks “commercial enough.”
It’s exhausting. And avoidable.
The truth is, the problem isn’t the work. It’s the framing.
Marketing still shows up to the boardroom trying to earn trust with ‘marketing language’. CTRs. Impressions. Content downloads. Brand lift studies. But those metrics don’t speak the language of the leadership team. They whisper in an echo chamber while the rest of the exec team is tuned into something else entirely: value, risk, growth, return.
It’s time we caught up.
Because what Gartner’s calling out – and what some marketing leaders in professional services already feel – is a widening credibility gap. The work is good. The message is solid. But the proof? Not landing.
And if we don’t own this narrative, someone else will write it for us.
So what does owning it actually look like?
Not just re-skinning a report to show “pipeline influenced.”
Not spinning a new dashboard with slightly shinier graphs.
It looks like choosing clarity over complexity.
- Connecting the dots before the campaign goes live, not justifying it after.
- Partnering with finance early, not defensively.
- Tracking commercial indicators (client growth, win rates, margin lift), not just campaign KPIs.
- Asking “What problem are we solving for the business?” before asking “What platform are we using?”
The most successful CMOs aren’t just creative strategists – they’re internal translators. They know how to bridge marketing’s intuition with the board’s expectation. They don’t just bring metrics; they bring meaning.
And here’s the key for professional services firms specifically:
Your firm isn’t selling widgets. You’re selling trust. Expertise. Relationships. Intangibles that are notoriously hard to quantify – but crucial to growth.
So proving marketing’s value isn’t about reducing it to a sales support function. It’s about elevating it as the lens through which client relationships are built, brand preference is shaped, and future revenue is unlocked.
Marketing is the signal that makes firms memorable before they’re needed. It’s the substance that earns the call when the stakes are high. It’s the experience that keeps clients coming back – even when competitors are cheaper or louder.
That is value. And it’s time we got bolder in naming it.
Because if we keep waiting to be asked to “prove our worth,” we’ve already lost half the battle.
In my next blog I’ll share some of the metrics that I think really matter.