Five Things High-Performing Portfolio Marketers Do Differently

Portfolio marketing leaders (and their teams) need to have a strategic seat at the table to do their jobs effectively, but they’re not always invited to that table! We repeatedly hear the following comments from many of our clients:

• “It’s difficult for us to show portfolio marketing’s value because we are considered so ‘upstream’ from the activities that get measured.”
• “We aren’t invited to participate in the go-to-market strategy discussions.”
• “Our sales leader defines our target market segments.”
• “Our product leader owns our launch process, not us.”

Do any of these comments sound familiar to you?

Portfolio marketing leaders need to work alongside the leaders of sales, product and the wider marketing organization to align efforts. It’s time for change–  and we are here to help portfolio marketing get their seat at the strategic table!

SiriusDecisions conducted a survey exclusive to portfolio marketers to analyze what successful organizations are doing – and we unveiled the in-depth survey results at the 2019 SiriusDecisions Summit.

Here are some of the results, which show organizations that give portfolio marketing a strategic role to leads the go-to-market efforts outperform their peers significantly. We defined “high-performing organizations” as those where 90 percent or more of their offerings were meeting revenue targets. Survey highlights include:

1. Portfolio marketing drives the creation of defined target market segments. Eighty-six percent of high performers indicate the majority of offerings (76-100 percent) have well-defined target market segments. In comparison, only 14 percent of low-performing organizations have defined target market segments.
2. Portfolio marketers are responsible for market opportunity identification. Fifty-four percent of high performing organizations make portfolio marketing responsible for identifying market opportunities – compared with just 21 percent for the low performers.
3. As the experts on buyers, portfolio marketing owns the creation of buyer personas. Almost two-thirds of high performing organizations (64 percent) indicate the majority of offerings (76-100 percent) have defined target buyer personas. Only 21 percent of low performers have defined buyer personas.
4. Portfolio marketing owns the messaging that informs go-to-market activities. Ninety-three percent of high-performing organizations have portfolio marketing own messaging development and consistently leverage the messaging developed by portfolio marketers.
5. High-performing organizations are two times more likely to have a well-defined process for launching new offerings. Best-in-class organizations have defined activities and deliverables across product, marketing and sales with decision gates to achieve alignment and faster time to market. More than half of high performers have portfolio marketing lead the go-to-market launch process.

These survey results support the idea that portfolio marketing needs to be a strategic function. Portfolio marketers need to own the alignment of product, sales and marketing to build out an aligned go-to-market strategy and achieve successful results. Do this and you’ll be in the category of our high performers, where more than 90 percent of offerings meet revenue targets. Keep doing the “same old, same old,” and you’ll find yourself hanging out with the low performers. The bottom line is that high-performing portfolio marketers don’t distract themselves with tactics and activities that aren’t core to portfolio marketing.