Marketing lacks strategic influence despite being held accountable for growth outcomes
It’s common to hear people say marketing needs “a seat at the table.” The reality? Marketing is often in the room but not in the game. Strategic decisions, budgets, target markets, metrics, are typically settled before the marketing team steps in. So you’ve got smart people being held accountable for business results based on strategies they weren’t part of designing. That’s not functional. That’s fragmented.
Let’s make this clear. Marketing is one of the few teams with direct access to customer behavior, sentiment, and demand patterns in real time. Ignoring that perspective in planning isn’t just inefficient, it’s a missed opportunity for smarter execution and stronger returns. If you’re asking marketing to grow a company without giving them input into the growth blueprint, the disconnect becomes systemic. It results in tactical execution with little strategic ownership. That doesn’t scale.
Leadership teams that actively include marketing in early-stage planning perform better. According to a 2023 McKinsey study, CEOs who integrate marketing into their core growth strategy are twice as likely to achieve more than 5% annual revenue growth compared to those who don’t. Meanwhile, nearly 40% of Fortune 500 companies don’t have a single customer- or growth-focused leader on their executive committees. That’s a mismatch between intent and structure.
This isn’t about having more meetings. It’s about understanding that market data, user insight, and campaign performance are fuel for strategic decision-making, not an afterthought. If you want real growth, marketing needs to co-author the strategy, not just execute the tactics.
KPI misalignment undermines marketing efforts and business performance
Most marketing teams don’t have a problem executing. The problem is being asked to deliver on metrics that either don’t reflect how growth actually happens or were set without considering market dynamics. You’ve got teams being told to reduce lead cost by 30%, pump out 1,000 MQLs, or maintain a fixed ROAS. These numbers may look great in a boardroom, but they don’t always translate to real business impact.
You can’t scale a company on vanity metrics. A high ROAS may feel good now, but does it actually lead to high customer lifetime value (LTV)? Are those 1,000 MQLs converting into recurring long-term revenue? When marketing isn’t involved in setting the KPIs, these questions don’t get asked. The focus stays on short-term outputs, which distracts from driving meaningful growth.
Here’s a real scenario: leaders ask marketing to support all products equally. It sounds balanced. But not all products are at the same stage of development. Some don’t have product-market fit yet, or face stiff competition, or haven’t proven strong demand. Still, marketing is forced to split spend across them evenly, which only dilutes performance. That’s just poor resource allocation.
Instead, focus marketing on products that efficiently generate returns. Let them gain momentum. Use that traction to later introduce other offerings through lifecycle campaigns, cross-sell motions, and CRM-driven activations. That’s a smarter, scalable path.
At the end of the day, if you’re assigning KPIs with no input from marketing, you’re building strategy on guesswork, not intelligence. Integrate marketing early, shape better metrics, and align expectations with capabilities. That’s how you grow in reality, not just in spreadsheets.
A strategic-tactical disconnect limits long-term growth
Most companies say they want long-term growth. Few design for it. The gap between strategy and execution is usually where progress breaks down. Marketing is often forced into a short-term feedback loop, optimize campaigns, hit quarterly metrics, repeat. But sustainable growth doesn’t come from reacting. It comes from shaping demand, building equity, and executing against a well-informed plan.
When strategy is set without cross-functional input, marketing ends up executing tactics that don’t contribute to durable outcomes. You’ll see inflated conversion rates that disappear a few weeks later or increases in traffic with no revenue impact. Targets are hit, but nothing actually moves.
The issue is not just where marketing is focused, it’s how disconnected those actions are from core business planning. Campaigns are being built to match spreadsheets rather than real buyer behavior. That’s not how high-growth companies operate. If you want lasting results, you have to enable marketing to participate in setting the strategy from the start.
This requires breaking down silos and aligning efforts across sales, product, finance, and customer success. Each has part of the equation. But marketing sits closest to demand signals, what’s resonating, what isn’t, and where opportunity is heating up. Without that data in the room early, the playbook gets outdated before execution begins.
A good strategy balances demand capture with demand creation. You need both. Optimize the now, but also build for the next phase. Otherwise, your pipeline fills inconsistently, and your revenue curve hits a ceiling early.
Marketers must take initiative to improve strategic integration
This isn’t only a leadership problem. Marketers also have to step up and earn their place in the room. That means getting fluent in metrics that matter to the business, things like revenue, margin, and LTV/CAC, not just engagement rates or impressions. If you can’t connect your work to economic outcomes, you’ll always be seen as a cost center, not a growth lever.
To shift that perception, marketers have to make the business case for the role they play. Explain how brand awareness today reduces acquisition costs tomorrow. Show how an effective paid strategy doesn’t just scale ad performance, it increases volume efficiency across the entire conversion path. When executives hear marketing speak in terms of lifetime economics, they listen.
It also means asking the right questions. If you’re handed a ROAS target, get clarity. What problems are we solving? Are we optimizing short-term channel performance at the cost of long-term retention? Is there room to invest now in higher LTV, even if short-term efficiency drops? These aren’t difficult questions to raise, but they require confidence and context.
Executives don’t expect marketing to have all the answers. But they expect accountability. When marketers proactively challenge misaligned goals, and offer better alternatives, trust is built. That collaboration reshapes strategy in ways dashboards alone can’t achieve.
Marketing needs to be a partner at the planning table, not just a recipient of orders. And that starts with owning the business impact of your work.
Strategic trust is earned through business fluency and collaboration
If marketing wants a real stake in growth strategy, it has to move beyond execution and start contributing at the decision-making level. That’s not about presenting campaign reports. It’s about showing how marketing drives measurable business outcomes, and doing it clearly, without spin. Execution is expected. Influence is earned through clarity and results.
C-suite leaders operate on metrics that reflect the health and direction of the company, profitability, retention, revenue expansion. If marketing can’t tie brand, demand, creative, and channels back to these metrics, it will be viewed as a discretionary function rather than a core lever of growth. That perception limits influence and budget. Changing the narrative requires proof, not opinion.
Marketers need to speak in terms the board understands. Don’t just report ROAS, demonstrate how the entire marketing funnel links to net revenue results. Don’t just optimize conversion rates, explain how those changes increase velocity across the pipeline and reduce customer acquisition cost over time. The more fluent marketing becomes in business context, the more trust it earns to shape priorities.
That also means engaging in strategy conversations early, with intent to collaborate, not argue. This is about alignment, not territory. Ask targeted questions. Offer alternatives when KPIs don’t reflect actual buyer behavior. Translate campaign metrics into predictive revenue models. That adds value. That gets attention.
Leadership is about more than execution. It’s about understanding the big picture, and influencing it with real input. Marketing sits on a massive amount of data. When that data is shared in the language of business, it drives better decisions across functions. That’s how strategic trust is built, and why marketing deserves its role in long-term planning.
Key executive takeaways
- Marketing without input can’t own outcomes: Executive teams that exclude marketing from early strategic planning risk under-leveraging one of their most insight-rich functions. Leaders should embed marketing in strategy development to drive cross-functional growth.
- Misaligned KPIs disrupt performance and ROI: Handing marketing fixed performance metrics without their input often leads to inefficiencies and vanity results. Align KPIs with actual product-performance data and market timing to boost returns on spend and team focus.
- Short-term tactics don’t drive lasting growth: Without visibility into long-term plans, marketing ends up optimizing for immediate results at the expense of future pipeline. Leaders should balance short-term goals with demand creation to strengthen revenue trajectories.
- Marketers must own the business conversation: Marketing leaders must clearly link their work to financial outcomes and challenge misaligned directives. Encourage your team to translate marketing value into LTV, CAC, and revenue growth to gain strategic trust.
- Strategic trust starts with integration and clarity: Marketing builds influence by bringing business fluency and collaborative thinking to the table early. Include marketing in planning cycles to ensure execution aligns with company-wide goals and market reality.
