Marketing's Real Job

Ask what marketing does and you'll get answers that cluster around content, brand, campaigns, social. Ask what marketing should be accountable for and the answers get vague. Pipeline, maybe. Supporting sales.

This vagueness isn't accidental. It reflects something true about how the function is designed in most organizations — and it has consequences.

A marketing function accountable for MQLs will optimize for MQL volume. A marketing function accountable for pipeline will optimize for pipeline quality. A marketing function accountable for a defined contribution to revenue will structure itself, its team, and its priorities around the activities that produce that contribution.

I've seen the same marketing team operate under two different accountability structures twelve months apart. In year one, they owned MQLs. They produced a lot of them. Sales ignored most of them. In year two, they owned pipeline sourced from marketing activity. The team restructured their priorities, their content calendar, and their campaign mix within a quarter. Not because the people changed — they didn't — but because the metric changed what they were optimizing for.

The function is capable of more than content and creative. Pricing strategy, sales enablement, product direction — these are areas where a marketing team with genuine market understanding can contribute materially. Whether it operates at that level is almost entirely a function of what the organization has decided to ask of it.

Most organizations haven't decided. They've inherited a marketing function designed around activity that's easy to see and hard to hold accountable, and kept it there because changing the accountability structure is uncomfortable.

The conversation that fixes it is usually about metrics, not org design. What is marketing accountable for, specifically, and how will we know? That question surfaces disagreements worth having. The absence of it is more expensive than the conversation.