I too believe 2009 will be the year of marketing transparency. With shrinking budgets marketing will be forced to be accountable for its contribution to the organization.

One area of slight disagreement is with this point:”Your number one focus needs to be to fuel what’s working (as in the targets that are converting to real revenue) not just campaign responders.”

While I agree with focusing on what’s working, I disagree with primarily mapping marketing efforts to “real revenue” (i.e. closed deals). This approach may short change marketing’s contribution. Consider a sales funnel of $100 Million. Using this logic, a marketer would try to allocate a portion of that number to specific marketing events and may only end up with 25% when in fact marketing efforts have generated an order of magnitude greater than that amount ($1 Billion or more). It’s a trap that is easy to fall into and should be considered.

Maybe in addition to “real revenue” you could also quantify “potential revenue”. If you can take the real revenue events (and their mapped efforts) and extrapolate them over the entire lead pool the number would be more accurate…and impressive.

Thanks Craig and Suad for a well timed and thoughtful post.

Dale