Make Marketing Make Sense to Your CEO and Board
Abdul Rastagar
Aug 29
9 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
We sat down with 19 healthcare, healthtech and life sciences marketing leaders to discuss how to reframe marketing as a growth driver, not support function.
Participants included VP and C-level marketing leaders from life sciences, healthtech and healthcare-adjacent organizations spanning early-stage startups through growth-stage, PE-backed, and publicly traded companies.
Our sessions were designed as peer conversations (rather than the usual boring presentations) focusing on sharing practical approaches that marketing leaders are employing now.
A pre-session survey framed the discussion. Nearly all respondents rated justifying marketing’s value to the CEO or board as a significant challenge. The two largest gaps identified: alignment between marketing and leadership, and translating the right metrics into language that leadership connects to business outcomes.
Why marketing keeps having to defend itself
“I’ve been in healthcare 25 years, been in marketing 30 years, and I’ve never joined a company where this was not a conversation — where I didn’t have to come in and refine how we’re measuring marketing and how we’re educating an executive team on this very topic.”— Jamie Gier, SVP of Marketing, TruBridge
Communicating (and often justifying) the value of marketing is not a new problem. Marketing leaders have been having some version of this conversation with CEOs, boards, and sales leaders for our entire careers.
But our most recent leadership roundtable highlighted the complexity of the problem. Participants described being held to unrealistic revenue goals that once sat firmly in sales, often with a fraction of the budget and without the same organizational backing. Marketing is expected to produce measurable pipeline and justify every dollar faster, all in a market where deals are getting longer and buyers are harder to reach.
According to the Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue. Healthcare and IT services saw some of the sharpest declines among all industries surveyed.
Despite flat budgets, scrutiny is rising. Many leaders struggle to justify marketing’s value for two main reasons:
A gap in alignment between marketing and leadership, and
Difficulty translating what marketing does into language that connects to business outcomes
Where do marketing leaders go from here?
Are we even measuring the right KPIs?
MQLs and SQLs are losing credibility with marketing leaders while the board is still fixated on what many consider to be long outdated KPIs. In complex B2B healthcare environments averaging 9-to-18-month sales cycles and sophisticated buying committees that can now include upwards of 20 participants, a single-contact metric tied to a single campaign interaction does not reflect the reality of how deals actually close. Attribution marketing in this environment is simply not reflective of the buyer journey.
One leader highlighted the absurdity of their current approach: an SQL was triggered as soon as a meeting with sales was scheduled, regardless of the contact’s role in the buying committee or whether a meaningful conversation occurred. It is not surprising that handing these “qualified leads” to sales created more friction than value.
“Getting a customer through the funnel and across the finish line is usually a cross-pollination of many campaigns. It could be six, seven touchpoints before they finally convert — and those touchpoints are not isolated to any one campaign. That’s what I’m trying to get through to leadership.”— Dixit Gandhi, VP Marketing, Clarivate
The shift to marketing qualified accounts
Some marketing leaders have eliminated the MQL/SQL frameworks entirely, replacing them with MQAs or marketing qualified accounts. This new approach measures engagement across the full buying committee within a specific account. Rather than getting sucked into the MQL vortex, marketing leaders can prioritize long-term bets while still demonstrating pipeline impact.
According to ITSMA, 73% of companies that adopted ABM reported better alignment between sales and marketing, a notoriously hard gap to close. MQAs reframe marketing as a complex series of touchpoints, not a single number. Marketing who trade reporting on MQLs for mapping customer journeys command far more authority with CEOs and the board.
Speaking the language of business (as a marketer)
When communicating with C-suite and board members, marketing leaders must speak their language. The single greatest change leaders can make is framing marketing activities as financial outcomes:
New pipeline added
Progression through deal stages
Influenced revenue by channel
Cost-per-engaged-account
Getting savvy with the language of business makes it possible to have a budget conversation based on math rather than boardroom opinions.
One leader framed it clearly: if you can tell leadership that generating a $100,000 opportunity typically costs $7,000–$10,000 in marketing investment, the conversation can actually move forward in a meaningful manner that is not hung up on MQLs or attribution.
The 80/20 budget framework
Not all marketing leaders are starting with the operational infrastructure to align every marketing tactic to revenue. In these cases, a pre-approve budget allocation can help preserve money for longer-term bets like brand and content marketing that are harder to justify when leadership only cares about lead gen. One leader found that an 80/20 model worked for her: 80% for demand generation, 20% for brand and always-on marketing.
Once agreed, the demand gen allocation can flex with the business. When pipeline targets are being met, brand allocation can move from 20% toward 30–40% — using performance as the justification. Marketing leaders following this model spend far less time defending brand spend quarter to quarter.
Earning the right to defend brand spend
For marketing leaders, brand investment is often the hardest line item to defend. But AI search is quickly changing the rules. Thought leadership and earned authority are impacting discoverability more than ever, and brand is increasingly important to protect. One way to demonstrate the importance of brand investment is to invest in a brand recall study, then repeat it at 12–18 months. While these studies can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 for healthcare and life sciences brands, they help translate the sometimes squishy world of brand into measurable language that CEOs can appreciate.
Making the case for budget and head count
Budget conversations often break down when there is no agreed spending framework in place. Start with ratios, not line items. Establish a model, such as demand generation versus brand, or near-term versus long-term investment, that leadership can align around. Once that model is approved, decisions within each bucket require far less defending. Making the case for headcount requires even more discipline. Requests for industry-experienced FTEs or contractors land better when framed around financial efficiency, not workload alone. Show how adding even one additional resource or part-time agency produces an outsized impact relative to the cost.
Marketing has a marketing problem
Sometimes the toughest audience to reach isn’t the customer at all…it’s the internal stakeholder. Marketing leaders who excel don’t gain credibility by building pretty dashboards. They earn it by building trust, communicating consistently, and making other leaders look great in board meetings.
Building Strong Sales Partnerships
Joining forces with sales is often one of the best ways to resonate with CEOs and boards. Even the most seasoned marketing leaders can’t succeed without a strong sales counterpart.
By sharing a funnel definition and presenting a unified view in leadership meetings, marketing is no longer defending its existence — it’s part of a revenue team reporting shared progress.
Practically, this looks like:
Co-developing funnel definitions with sales ops
Holding regular pipeline reviews with both leaders present
Cataloging deal stories where sales and marketing reference on another’s contributions
Having a deep knowledge of the healthcare or life sciences industry is also helpful to build credibility among sales leadership. A head of sales who knows that marketing leadership truly understands the industry norms, regulations and terminology will be more likely to see marketing as a partner.
Positioning as an owner, not expert
“We don’t have to be experts in every part of this. The board and leadership team are just looking for the color — this is what we learned from this data, and here’s how we’re going to go investigate it.”— Shivani Stadvec, CMO, Clarium Health
Marketing leaders always wear many hats. But positioning yourself as the expert in every function undermines credibility. Being honest about what you don’t know builds more trust than polished certainty.
What CEOs need is a marketing leader who will own the problem, run disciplined experiments, and report back honestly.
Communicating before the board meeting
The dreaded board meeting is actually a valuable opportunity to shape the conversation around marketing’s impact. Sharing monthly metrics packs in advance helps eliminate surprises and gives leaders time to digest the story behind the numbers. What happens after the meeting matters just as much: keep leadership and the board informed about how you applied their input and what actions followed. Over time, this creates a track record of accountability that can meaningfully change how leadership views marketing.
The events ROI problem
In healthcare and life sciences, events are a huge source of ROI. But for marketing leaders, they’re also a persistent source of tension: high visible spend, delayed results, and an ongoing competition with sales over who deserves credit for follow-up meetings.
Leadership wants a clean answer. Marketing rarely has one, because event-driven pipeline doesn’t show up for 9 to 18 months, influenced by dozens of other interactions in the meantime.
For one leader, a post-event deal took 24 months to close…but generated $2 million in revenue. At a 90-day measurement window, this event would have looked like a failure.
9–12 months
average B2B healthcare sales cycle, requiring 12–18 month attribution windows for meaningful event ROI measurement
Source: Martal Group B2B Healthcare Marketing Report 2026
What to measure while you wait
Telling your CEO to wait nine months for an event ROI won’t fly. Instead, track leading indicators that show momentum much earlier. These include:
Quality of conversations and depth of engagement with target accounts at the event
Number of existing pipeline accounts touched
New contacts added from the target account list
Comparing cost per engaged contact across events over time helps reveal which conferences generated meaningful opportunities and which mostly created noise. Before pipeline attribution is available, show leadership which accounts your team engaged and whether those accounts map to active opportunities. Leaders often respond more strongly to recognizable logos than to aggregate lead counts alone. It is a simple framing shift, but it makes the value of the event much easier to see.
Positioning brand as a revenue driver
Brand is not a nice-to-have. As more companies use AI to generate their messaging, more of that messaging starts to sound interchangeable. That makes clear positioning, authentic thought leadership, and a distinct point of view more valuable, not less.
A strong brand also shapes whether buyers find you in the first place. More buyers are now researching products through tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity rather than starting with a company website or branded search. These platforms tend to surface sources with authority, third-party credibility, and visible domain expertise. Original research, customer case studies, earned media, and consistent point-of-view content play a much bigger role in how your company is surfaced and described than do feature lists. For marketing leaders, AI raises the strategic value of brand investment.
How AI changes brand measurement
How can marketing leaders measure brands in this new AI era? Leaders should consider:
Share of voice relative to named competitors tracked through tools like Meltwater
Earned media scoring that measures message pull-through rather than just mention volume
Direct and organic traffic trends adjusted for AI search impact on keyword traffic
Brand recall studies used to establish and track awareness baselines over time.
What Good Looks Like: A Framework to ‘Make Marketing Make Sense’
Reporting to Leadership
Lead with pipeline: new pipeline added, progression by stage, influenced revenue by channel
Show account-level engagement across target accounts — not individual leads
Include cost-per-lead by channel, contextualized against pipeline contribution
Close every report with what you learned and what you are doing next — not just what happened
Send monthly metrics packs; close the books before the board meeting
Metrics Framework
Consider retiring MQL/SQL in favor of account-level scoring and marketing qualified accounts (MQAs)
Define funnel stages in partnership with sales ops; hold both teams to shared definitions
Build 5–10 closed-won deal journey maps as standing assets for board education
Track account health scores and engagement depth by contact role within target accounts
Budget Conversations
Establish a pre-approved allocation ratio (e.g., 20% brand/always-on, 80% demand gen)
Flex the demand gen portion based on pipeline status; use pipeline progress to argue brand allocation upward
Frame headcount and agency requests as cost-per-output comparisons — financial arguments, not staffing arguments
Test new capabilities scrappily before making full investment requests
Building Trust Over Time
Do a brand recall or awareness baseline study early — repeat it at 12–18 months
Follow up on every board meeting commitment in writing, in the same thread, before the next meeting
Bring leadership along when metrics change — explain what you learned, not just what changed
Build the sales partnership before you need it; don’t wait for a contested board meeting to find out where you stand
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