Marketers are not always flavour of the month at board meetings. Sometimes there are no marketers present. Sometimes they struggle to influence the strategic direction. Crucially, career metrics for senior marketers at the top are worsening. Yes, that’s right. Marketers need help, especially in business-to-business (B2B) settings. Even if you manage to make it into the room, it may be your only visit. For others, a paid exit sneaks up on them when they believe that things are going great. For aspiring marketers, this is a worrying landscape and makes business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing all the more attractive. After all, it’s all brand-building and reach in B2C, right? So, if you feel frustrated at not influencing direction, feel like you are going backwards or aspiring to get there, read on about marketers speaking the board’s language. This content relates to CIM’s Marketing in the Northern Powerhouse event on 25th September 2025.
Marketers in the boardroom
In most cases, the marketer in the boardroom will be the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), though the titles can vary. Other opportunities may come for the Marketing Director, Senior Vice President (SVP) or Vice President (VP). A recent global study of marketing professionals uncovered that only 5% of senior marketers believe that they influence the direction of strategy. Conversely, around half of the other board members believe that the marketer should be doing so. This incredible gap implies several disconnects between the marketer and the rest of the board.
Add to this is a recent US study that measured the average remuneration of board roles over the last decade. They found that the average marketer’s remuneration on the board decreased by 35% in a decade whilst the other positions mostly increased. Finally, as if the context was not challenging enough, we already know that in the UK, the senior marketer has the shortest tenure on the board. Yes, that’s right, only 3.9 years on average versus 4.9 for the board as a whole. Of course, the average for the senior marketer reduces the average, which may be above 5 years. So, what can we do about it?
Making marketing make sense to boards
There are likely a handful of reasons that a marketer will be present in the boardroom. For this purpose, we will mainly talk about B2B marketers. The two most common will be to obtain some insights, as the subject matter expert (SME), or to discuss performance. The latter will be more focused on that revenue/margin/profit you are generating i.e. what deals have been closed. In the case of the former, it may be a one-time visit to answer a specific question. The latter may also be a one-time gig, which can curtail your career aspirations. After all, why invite someone who could not articulate their impact? What if the numbers didn’t make sense? What if the leads and deals you claimed actually came through Sales?
There may be a handful of reasons why a marketer fails to get a point across to the board:
- Failure to articulate the vision and progress along the journey;
- Failure to acknowledge challenges and misses or to seize opportunities;
- Inability to attribute, measure and articulate financial metrics;
- Inability to surface, explain and strategise from market or customer insights;
- Lack of confidence, training, soft skills or stakeholder management.
This is not exhaustive but you get the idea. Marketers need help in the boardroom. So, how do you go about it?
Marketers speaking the board’s language
In simple terms, you either need to teach the board something or lead them on a journey to a vision that you made. This journey is the realisation of a strategy borne of solid market research and insights to capitalise on growth opportunities. Caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. If you can talk the talk and have identified market gaps, competitor weaknesses, upcoming trends and tighter understanding of what customers want, you have a head start. But, this MUST be backed up with delivery and demonstrable performance metrics. Those metrics must also be credible, reflecting the contribution of marketing to the sales journey. Demonstrating return on investment (ROI) is challenging for marketers for many reasons.
Your relationship with the Sales team is also crucial to your success. In summary, all of your activity should line up the leads for Sales to convert into closed-won deals. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Sales and marketing alignment is often a hot topic in B2B. We have lost count of the number of board and management team meetings at which there is no marketer present. Furthermore, there is a great number of B2B businesses with no marketing function at all. This means that they rely entirely on Sales and their contacts to bring deals in. At the other extreme, brand-building activity in B2B is rarely linked to performance. This may be one of the reasons for declining remuneration and short tenures. Let’s wrap up with the skills you need.
Marketing skills for speaking the board’s language
The final section is to recap on the skills that you need to succeed as marketers speaking the board’s language. Here are our top 3 suggestions:
- Speak the CFO’s language – If you can articulate the financial numbers and KPIs, especially your own, you can earn the trust and support of the finance leader, which in-turn makes it easier to get budget and continue investing in the function.
- Bring the voice of the customer (VOC) – As a qualified marketer with research skills and a plethora of tools at your disposal, who better to explain what is happening in the market, to get closer to what customers are saying, what they want and what they might want in future?
- Tell the story to your vision – In order to communicate your vision, you must master storytelling to articulate your strategy to achieve the vision (the destination), update on progress against your plan (the journey) and to convince them that the effort and investment will bring growth through deals closed and profit earned (the outcomes).
This should be a good starter for ten for any marketer wishing to make an impact at board level.
Wrapping up with the board’s language
Of course, boards talk about more than just sales and profit. They also talk about cash, mergers & acquisitions, governance, risk, remuneration, strategic direction and more. One context we have not mentioned is ownership. A public company may have long-term goals. A private equity backed business may have short-term investment goals. The latter may compress your own time horizons and focus your efforts on short-term returns. The former may be more willing to allow you to build and transform a marketing function to support the Sales effort. Bear this in mind in your urgency, brevity and tactics for success.
Our co-founder is a level 7 strategic Fellow Chartered Marketer with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Mercè has a number of business and international qualifications, as well as experience of working in multiple countries. She specialises in B2B sales and marketing and in researching, opening up and operating in overseas markets. This content was created in relation to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) event, Marketing in the Northern Powerhouse, on 25th September 2025. Mercè Cozens presented on the topic, ‘Speaking the boards language: Building strategic influence through smarter marketing metrics’.
So, if you are interested in marketers speaking the board’s language, please reach out via our online form or contact us to request a short initial introduction.
Alternatively, why not read related articles about keeping market share or expanding your business internationally.
Finally, check out our recent award win for digital transformation.
To check what the event was about and the agenda from 25th September 2025, please check the CIM Marketing in the Northern Powerhouse information.