James Dutton, FCIM

The most effective CMOs aren't marketers. They're general managers who happen to run marketing. The difference? They speak three languages fluently. They speak CFO: → Through the P&L lens: presenting real LTV and fully-loaded CAC → Through the Balance Sheet: showing unrealized revenue in existing customers → Through Cash Flow: discussing payback windows for every investment They speak CEO: → This year's growth rate and which levers to lean on → Five-year projections grounded in cohort behavior → How each decision impacts enterprise value They speak Board: → Why the ratio matters less than the components → How margin improvements change the entire model → When to trade efficiency for scale It all starts with LTV and CAC. But not the surface-level numbers. The real ones that actually drive decisions. 1️⃣ LTV isn't just revenue per customer ↳ It's behavior × margin × time × retention curve 2️⃣ CAC isn't just ad spend divided by customers ↳ It's fully-loaded costs including sales, onboarding, and overhead 3️⃣ The ratio isn't the whole story ↳ A 5:1 ratio means nothing if payback takes 24 months Make these metrics the center of your growth team. Make them the foundation of your C-suite relationships. But here's the key: take time to explain them. 🔑 Show how marketing LTV connects to finance's P&L. 🔑 Demonstrate how CAC reduction flows to EBITDA. 🔑 Prove how payback windows impact working capital. That's how you earn your seat at the table. * * * The cheat sheet breaks down exactly how to calculate, present, and defend these metrics. Use it before your next board meeting. Follow for more breakdowns of KPIs that actually matter to c-suite execs. 📈

٩٤٥

١٢٥ تعليق

In Scaling Innovation, we introduce three 'Leadership Failure Archetypes': The Disruptor: Focuses only on customer acquisition, giving away too much, leading to high churn and low margins. The Money Maker: Obsessed with squeezing every dollar from existing customers, which limits new customer appeal and risks alienation. The Community Builder: Prioritizes loyalty at all costs, undercharging and neglecting new markets. The goal isn't to be one of these, but to become a 'Profitable Growth Architect'—a leader who dominates both market share and wallet share. They embrace the best qualities of the Disruptor, the Money Maker and the Community Builder. Which archetype have you encountered most often? Learn how to avoid these traps and become an architect of profitable growth. Pre-order Scaling Innovation today: https://a.co/d/iOaXXxN

١١٥

١٦ تعليق

The reality for many B2B marketing teams¹: Short-term ROI pressure. Undervalued contribution. A death spiral. And attribution makes it worse: - Deals take months, sometimes years  - Multiple internal discussions and back-and-forth before decisions - Buyer journeys aren’t linear. Buyers might read our content, attend an event, see us on LinkedIn, talk to a partner, and only then reach out to sales But in the CRM, all that early influence disappears, and the "credit" goes to whatever the last touch was before the deal. That creates a gap in understanding and undervalues marketing’s role in creating the conditions for a sale. That shows up in compensations, budgets, internal influence. The closer you are to the revenue, the larger your comp. It doesn't matter if a buyer comes ready, educated, and only has a few questions, and needs help in handling procurement. What is the result? - Leadership doubles down on short-term ROI - Marketing budgets and headcount shrink. Training budgets are non-existent  - Marketing is pushed to invest most in demand capture, with ever-increasing CAC - There's no time or budget left for the long-term trust, brand and demand building our market needs to grow - Without a shared view of how pipeline is built (and which signals, content and activities matter along the way) you end up with siloed teams, pulling in different directions - This makes it even harder to influence the complete buyer journey, which requires an orchestrated effort across GTM teams  - All the effort goes into squeezing the last drops of juice from the current quarter  - Year ends with missed targets - There is even more pressure on leadership  - Marketing leaders get replaced  - The new leaders are not given the time to fix the root problems, but are expected to 'drive results' in a quarter or two This is all made worse by the AI expectation gap. C-suite hears 'AI' and assumes instant results/lower costs… In reality, it requires quality data, strategic direction, integration, and human judgment. It requires upfront investment to deliver long-term results. And we're back to square one. --- ¹ The credit for this brilliant analysis goes to Hanna Kvamme. Thank you! Hanna shared it as a response to a research we're running, which we’ll share in our late-Sep webinar "How to survive as a B2B CMO and grow enterprise pipeline in the AI era". Let me know if you’d like to contribute your perspective.

٧٥

٢٧ تعليق

Just read a fascinating breakdown from Ad Age on how Meta’s targeting works post-privacy shake-up. Since 2021, privacy updates (iOS 14.5, GDPR expansions, and Meta removing sensitive targeting options in 2022) have stripped out many of the old audience levers. Now, Meta’s AI is leaning heavily on creative-driven signals. Ad Age summed it up: AI has found a better way to match ads with audiences, and it runs through creative performance signals, not just audience parameters. Here’s how that plays out: - Visual analysis: Meta scans the objects, scenes, and compositions in your creative. These become performance signals — not just your ad copy or declared targeting. - Behavioral matching: If your ad looks like running content, it finds people who engage with running content. Less about interests like “Runner’s World,” more about actual engagement patterns. - Creative diversity matters: If all your ads look the same, they risk being clustered into the same “signal group.” That can lead to audience overlap and wasted spend. - Boundaries remain: Meta’s system isn’t reading minds or inferring income from colors. It’s pattern-matching visual elements against engagement data. Under the hood, Meta’s new retrieval engine (‘Andromeda’) quietly boosted ad quality by ~8% — and it works through creative signals, not manual targeting. The big shift isn’t that targeting disappeared...it’s that creative has become the input Meta uses to decide targeting for you.

٤١

١٥ تعليق

Insignificance is the biggest threat facing marketers today. Not budget cuts. Not technology disruption. Not even economic uncertainty. It's being seen as irrelevant to the core business. I was discussing this recently on the Performance Marketing World podcast with Joseph Arthur, and the conversation kept circling back to a fundamental problem: marketing has lost its way as a business discipline. The numbers don't lie: → Only 50% of marketers have formal training in marketing → Th CMO is one the least trusted board-level roles → Most businesses still see marketing as "just advertising" Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two basic functions: marketing and innovation." Yet we've allowed marketing to become marginalised, fragmented, and misunderstood. Philip Kotler defined marketing as: "the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit." David Ogilvy called it: "the business viewed from the customer's perspective." Both understood what we've forgotten: Marketing isn't a department. It's how business works. The path back to relevance runs through three core principles: 1️⃣ Lead with Empathy → Deep customer understanding drives every strategic decision → Market research becomes competitive intelligence → Customer needs shape business direction, not the other way around 2️⃣ Build on Trust → Authentic relationships over transactional campaigns → Transparent communication that respects customer intelligence → Brand promises that consistently deliver measurable value 3️⃣ Communicate with Clarity → Simple messages that cut through market noise → Clear value propositions that resonate with real needs → Measurable outcomes that prove business impact Marketing's value isn't trendy or temporary. It's the timeless discipline of creating customers profitably - and that makes it the most critical business function of all. Thanks to Joseph for the great conversation (even where I was in a state of Day Nurse and Nurofen-induced incoherence) and Robin Langford for the ongoing support! You can watch the episode here: https://lnkd.in/eJZhKszK ♻️ Repost to help your network unlock their growth potential. 💡 Follow Paul Evans for actionable business and positioning advice.

٦٥

٥١ تعليق

Running campaigns across 150+ brands taught us that most attribution is broken. If your tracking is off by even 20%, you're throwing thousands at channels that don't convert while starving the ones that do. Here's what broken attribution costs you: → Vanity metrics get budget while revenue drivers get ignored → You blame "the market" when it's actually your measurement → Clients lose trust when numbers don't add up What we fixed to stop the bleeding: Multi-touch attribution shows the real journey: People don't see one TikTok ad and buy. They bounce between search, display, and email. Track the whole path, not just the last click. Clean data feeds better AI: Your algorithms are only as good as the signals you give them. Garbage in, garbage out. First-party data beats cookies: With privacy laws tightening, we're stitching together server-side tracking and modeled conversions. The result? Clients see exactly which dollars drive revenue. No more guessing games. If you can't confidently explain what's driving your conversions, you're flying blind with someone else's money. How confident are you that your attribution setup is actually accurate? #mediabuying #marketing #marketingagency #metaads

٣٦

٤ تعليق

✨[𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐝 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭] - 3 ways to create a Subscriber List. 🔎 In this new episode of the 𝐃𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, discover how to list all Unified Individual with at least one Email Address opted in to a given Subscription and Channel. 🧠 This is useful for 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐝 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥 or 𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞𝐬 (or Sending issues), for example. 👀 But this is also a good way to 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬 of Marketing Cloud Next and Data Cloud and how they relate to each other: ➔ Query Editor ➔ DMO relationships ➔ Segments ➔ Calculated Insights 💬 As usual, please share your thoughts by commenting this post. Also if you find this article insightful, please give it one or more clap 👏. #SharingIsLearning #Salesforce #MarketingCloudNext #MarketingCloudGrowth #MarketingCloudAdvanced

٤٢

٣ تعليق

Google search revenue was up 12% YoY for Q2. That’s an increase from their Q1 earnings of 9-10% growth. Are brands shifting toward "safe" investments due to macro and competitive pressures? The data is mixed, but the continued growth in retail media, Meta and search suggests that "performance safe havens" are winning share in this moment. Eric Seufert talks about this "Flight to Safety", where in challenging times, brands divert spend toward channels that can show better attributable, short-term performance. I hope the risk in this strategy is clear to everyone who follows me at this point. You are mortgaging your future to survive today. But some times, it must be done. As much as we all want to be long term focused all the time, cash flow matters and a lot of variables impact that (inventory, category, wholesale, tariffs etc). If you must go down this path to conserve cash and focus on short term profitability, its important to do it the right way. Here is what I would recommend: Specific Tactics: - Focus on attributable, but Incremental - there are a number of highly-proven tactics/channels that, on average, are both incremental and attributable. The most obvious options are: Meta Prospecting, Google PMAX/Shopping, Google Demand Gen. Haus has published a bunch of data on incrementality benchmarks for these channels. You should always test it for yourself, but industry research can provide you with directional confidence to get started. - Be Cautious with attributable, non-incremental - this is your brand search, and retargeting. We frequently see spend in these areas creep up during challenging times, stealing budget from tactics that are 2-5x as incremental (see above). At a minimum, do NOT increase spending here. - Stay strict with exclusions and optimizations - avoid the trap of loosening your customer or visitor exclusions to boost attributable performance in prospecting. Your marginal gain from a change like this is likely quite small, and unprofitable. - Lapsed customer strategies - this is a shallow pool, but for larger or older brands, can help with cash flow and be incremental. What is most important here is to focus on TRUE lapse (i.e. >1 year since purchase or more, depending on your category), or unreachable (i.e. email unsubs, sms unsubs etc). Experiments: - Make everything an experiment - if you are cutting budgets or reallocating dollars across tactics, that is a GREAT experiment to understand incrementality and marginal ROI. Don't just make the changes and hope your profitability improves. Maximize this learning opportunity and plan ahead with real tests that can inform your future media strategy and drive more predictable profit. New Engen #incrementality #meta #google

٦٠

٢ تعليق

#ZeroClick is changing B2B marketing If potential buyers are getting answers without clicking, what does this mean for marketing? The numbers are clear: - Nearly 60% of Google searches end without a click - B2B software CTRs are down 30% since AI Overviews launched - 89% of B2B buyers already use GenAI in their buying journey This shift will only grow in influence. It’s time to address it now. For marketing teams this means: - Visibility now matters more than traffic - Content needs to be structured for AI and snippets - Metrics must shift from clicks to reach, citations and engagement Practical steps: 1. Audit your content and SEO performance 2. Focus on delivering value without gating content 3. Reset your metrics, as YoY performance will not be comparable Clicks are no longer the proof of influence. In a zero-click world, the brands that show up, stand out and earn trust will win. A more in-depth article on this will follow soon. I am curious how you are preparing for zero-click?

٣١

٩ تعليق

20 CRM Tactics to Increase Retention and CLV (Based on analysing 100+ high-growth lifecycle systems) Most brands treat CRM as a messaging tool. Top brands use it as a profit engine, increasing how long users stay and how much they spend. These 20 tactics are ranked by ROI and implementation effort So you know exactly what to prioritise to grow retention and customer lifetime value: HIGH ROI, EASY TO IMPLEMENT: Welcome Flow Optimisation → First impressions that lead to second purchases Abandoned Cart Recovery → Simple nudges that recapture lost revenue Behaviour-Based Winbacks → Smart reactivation at the perfect time Refill or Reorder Nudges → Predictable timing that builds buying habits Post-Purchase Education Series → Increase usage and reduce churn by helping users succeed HIGH ROI, HARD TO IMPLEMENT: Predictive Churn Modelling → Spot drop-off signals before users leave Lifecycle-Based Upsells → Offer higher-value products when trust is highest Dynamic Personalisation → Serve the right message based on intent and behaviour Omnichannel Journey Mapping → Unified customer experience across push, email and in-app Milestone-Based Loyalty Logic → Trigger perks based on behaviour, not just spend LOW ROI, EASY TO IMPLEMENT: Static Discount Campaigns → One-size-fits-all offers with short-term lift Generic Push Notifications → Easily ignored and often irrelevant Broad Newsletter Blasts → Low engagement due to lack of targeting Points-Based Loyalty Without Strategy → No connection to value or real incentives Welcome Emails Without Follow-Up → Forgotten after the first click LOW ROI, HARD TO IMPLEMENT: Manual CSV Imports → High effort with no scalable gain One-Off Campaigns → Burn out your list without long-term growth Rebuilding Journeys From Scratch → Wasted time unless strategy evolves Vanity A/B Tests → Testing headlines while ignoring journey logic Weekly Internal Dashboards → Insightful, but won’t drive retention on their own Retention and CLV are not built through luck They’re built through lifecycle logic, behavioural triggers and timing that feels personal Follow and share if you want to increase retention and CLV ✅

١٥٢

٧ تعليق