When Marketing Targets Become Detached From Marketing Reality

One of the easiest mistakes a business can make is to confuse an ambitious target with a marketing strategy. Targets are useful because they create focus and accountability, but they become dangerous when they are detached from historical performance, available resources, market conditions and the mechanics required to achieve them.

I once worked within a marketing team where success was heavily judged by the number of marketing-qualified leads generated. There was nothing unreasonable about measuring MQLs. They were commercially important and marketing should be accountable for contributing towards growth. The problem was that the level of expectation being placed on marketing began to move far beyond anything the organisation had historically achieved, without an equivalent change in budget, audience, proposition, media investment or marketing infrastructure.

Previous performance had established a fairly clear benchmark for what the team had normally been able to produce. Yet the target I was given individually represented a dramatic increase on those established levels. The expectation was essentially that output should multiply simply because the target had multiplied.

That is where the distinction between an objective and a strategy becomes important.

A target does not create the conditions required to achieve it

A business can decide that it wants twice as many leads, three times as many customers or significantly more revenue, but those numbers do not explain how the growth will happen. If an organisation wants to dramatically increase qualified lead volume, something within the marketing system normally has to change.

That change might involve increasing the addressable audience, improving the product or proposition, increasing advertising investment, changing the media mix, strengthening creative effectiveness, increasing brand awareness, improving conversion rates or developing a more effective sales process. In many cases, several of those things have to happen together.

Simply telling a marketing team to produce more leads does not manufacture more demand. A target should therefore be the beginning of a strategic conversation rather than the end of one.

A better question is not simply, "How many leads do we want?" It is, "What would need to be true for us to generate that number of leads sustainably?"

That moves the conversation from pressure to planning.

Marketing is a system, not a lead-producing machine

A qualified lead is the outcome of a much larger chain of events. A potential customer normally needs to encounter the organisation, recognise it, understand its proposition, decide that it may be relevant, engage with the marketing, provide information and eventually meet whatever criteria the business uses to define a qualified lead.

Marketing can influence every stage of that journey, but it cannot endlessly manufacture demand at the bottom of a funnel simply because management wants a larger number.

This becomes particularly important in B2B environments, where buying cycles can be long and only a relatively small proportion of the available market may be actively considering a purchase at any particular moment. Concentrating entirely on people who are ready to speak to sales today risks ignoring the much larger group who may become customers in the future.

That is why improving marketing systems matters. Better processes, stronger campaigns, improved data, clearer positioning and greater brand recognition may not all appear instantly within an MQL report, but they affect the organisation's ability to generate demand over time.

The danger of allowing one metric to define marketing

Businesses naturally optimise towards the things they measure. If marketers are judged entirely on immediate lead volume, marketing activity will gradually become shaped around producing immediate leads.

That can make activity designed to strengthen the brand, increase reach or create future demand increasingly difficult to justify. Short-term lead generation begins to dominate because its contribution is easier to demonstrate on a dashboard.

There is nothing wrong with short-term activation. Businesses need leads and sales. The problem occurs when short-term activation becomes the entirety of marketing.

The work of Les Binet and Peter Field has been particularly influential in demonstrating the importance of balancing activity designed to generate immediate response with activity designed to build brands and future demand. An organisation needs to convert people who are currently ready to buy, but it also needs to increase the likelihood that future buyers think about the brand when their purchasing situation changes.

A business that concentrates only on harvesting existing demand eventually risks having less demand available to harvest.

Working backwards from the number

A more useful way to manage an ambitious marketing target is to reverse engineer it. If the business needs a certain number of qualified leads, the marketing team should understand how many initial enquiries are required to create them. From there, it becomes possible to examine conversion rates, traffic levels, advertising response, reach and market size.

If 10 per cent of enquiries become qualified leads, generating 100 qualified leads requires roughly 1,000 enquiries. If only a small percentage of website visitors enquire, the required traffic can then be calculated. That can be connected to media spend, conversion optimisation, creative effectiveness and the realistic size of the potential audience.

Suddenly, the target is no longer an arbitrary instruction. It becomes part of a marketing model.

The same model may also demonstrate that the target cannot reasonably be achieved under current conditions. That is useful information rather than failure. It allows leadership to decide whether the organisation needs additional investment, a different proposition, a larger market, improved conversion or a longer timeframe.

Accountability needs context

Marketing should absolutely be accountable. Lead generation, conversion, revenue and return on investment are important measures, particularly in organisations where marketing has a direct role in customer acquisition.

However, accountability works best when the business understands the system producing the result. Measuring only the final output while ignoring everything upstream can lead organisations to make poor decisions and place unrealistic expectations on marketing teams.

"Generate more leads" is a perfectly reasonable commercial objective.

What matters is recognising that it is not, by itself, a marketing strategy.