Marketing Isn't a Cost Center, It's a Business Unit

Marketing isn’t “ads and leads” anymore. It’s a company inside your company.

We’re running brand, demand gen, product marketing, CX, digital, analytics, content, sales enablement, marketing operations, and sometimes a side of biz dev. Not to mention wrangling a martech stack the size of the Sears Tower. (There are 15,384 martech tools in 2025. No, we don’t use them all. But the sprawl is real.)

The kicker isn’t the rapidly expanding scope over the last ~5 years. That’s fine, we can do that. It’s that marketing gets treated like a single entity instead of a division, with the bonus expectation that we can neatly trace every move to profit and margin on command.

The operational burden flying under the radar

Finance has an ERP and a P&L. Sales has quotas in Salesforce. Product/Engineering ships against velocity, uptime, releases.

Marketing? We’re duct-taping dashboards across CRM, web analytics, ads, attribution, email automation, A/B testing. You’re starting to see it. There’s no single system of record. Running marketing today is like running operations for a small division, except your “division” balance sheet is half spreadsheet, half vibes. And despite the chaos, that machine fuels awareness, pipeline quality, renewals, and advocacy

Reality check: even tiny teams need 4–5 tools just to deliver (CRM, email, web analytics, ads/social, forms/LPs). Mid-market teams live on 8–15 core systems weekly. Enterprise stacks mushroom into dozens (yes, plural) across regions and lines of business. That’s why a clean “one source of truth” for marketing is mostly myth. (And yes, the martech sprawl is real - over 15,000 tools in 2025.) Chief Marketing Technologist

And this is where the tension kicks in. Marketing isn’t a cost center, we’re not just spending dollars, we’re running a complex operation with moving parts that touch every corner of the business. Yet while we’re juggling dozens of systems and trying to keep the whole machine in motion, we’re also under constant pressure to prove that every input ties neatly to revenue. Over-rotating on proof can overshadow reality: marketing is creating value across brand, demand, CX, and community, not just burning budget.

The measurement paradox (and why CEOs feel let down)

Here's the crux of the conundrum: in 2025, the #1 challenge marketers report is “demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes” (64%).

So leaders and boards want direct, dollar-for-dollar connectivity with clear attribution by channel - even for activities that don’t directly correlate to revenue but do fuel the business (communications, enablement, analyst relations). Yet budgets are flat at ~7.7% of revenue for a second year, even as marketing is asked to deliver brand lift, pipeline, and renewal support. Expectations up ↑, budgets flat ↔ Results and CMO tenure down ↓.

And here’s another kicker: in mid-size SaaS, marketing isn’t even the biggest check. Median spend: R&D 22%, Sales 13%, G&A 14%, Marketing 8% of ARR.

I'm not suggesting that mix is wrong. It’s just odd that the smallest slice often gets the biggest microscope, as if we’re outspending everyone else.

Why the scrutiny?

• Marketing budgets are visible and often one of the first “variable” costs to trim.

• Outcomes are harder to quantify cleanly than Sales (quota) or Finance (P&L).

• CEOs/boards are conditioned to expect ROI proof from marketing, while they’re willing to accept other types of KPIs from R&D or G&A.

The fix isn’t more dashboards; it’s managing marketing like the division that grows demand, strengthens retention, and builds pricing power.

A marketing leader's secret sauce

Sometimes it feels like marketing is impossible - like we’ll never get that Sisyphean success boulder up the hill. The scope keeps expanding, the scrutiny never lets up, and the measurement asks are often unrealistic. That just means the winning playbook looks different.

It means leadership teams need to shift their lens: stop treating marketing like a one-dimensional cost line, and recognize it as a division with its own operating model. And it means companies need to start hiring and building for different skills—the kind that make a marketing leader look less like a campaign planner and more like a general manager running a business unit.

A LinkedIn post insinuated that engineers make better marketing leaders. It's true engineers can rock certain marketing tasks because they’re data- and process-fluent. But for marketing, that's only a portion of the skill set required.

A well-rounded marketing leader is 50/50 right-brain and left-brain. The best ones blend analytics, strategy, communications, and operating cadence - basically a GM skill set applied to growth.

• Operational mindset: prioritize, build process, create linkages (not random acts of marketing).

• Analytical/ROI chops: ICP leads, CAC, funnel calculations, pipeline influence. 

• Strategic alignment: tie plays to company priorities, revenue targets and product roadmap.

• Tech & AI fluency: separate hype from helpful in a 15k martech tool world

• Cross-functional influence: sales, product, finance rowing in one direction.

• Agility & resilience: deliver fast, stop what’s not working, move on.

The CEO playbook: what to recognize, and exactly what to support

If you want marketing to deliver like the business unit it’s become, manage it like one:

Acknowledge the business unit (not a department)

• Treat marketing as a portfolio, not a single lever: brand, demand, CX, content, community, data, enablement (and sometimes biz dev).

• Give the leader decision rights to prioritize - and shut-down - work. (Fund outcomes, not activity.)

Recognize marketing runs a factory with shared parts

• We operate like a full division, but our “supply chain” runs through Product, Sales, and CX.

  • Miss the mark on product -- renewals drop.

  • CX lags -- G2 fills with bad reviews.

  • CRM hygiene goes sideways -- attribution gets noisy.

• Hold Marketing accountable for the portfolio and revenue moments (awareness/leads, first meetings, conversion velocity) while remembering upstream inputs aren’t all ours.

  
  

Run a mini-P&L

• Inputs: budget, headcount, core tools (consolidate where you can).

• Plays/Programs (3–5): map each to a revenue impact or business target (yes, some are internal—hello, enablement).

• Revenue moments (leading): ICP first meetings, stage-to-stage conversion, time-to-first-meeting.

• Unit economics (lagging): pipeline coverage, win rate, CAC/payback.

Recognize you're funding a division, not a function

• You’re not buying “a few campaigns”; you’re underwriting an array of capabilities: strategy and research, brand and narrative, product marketing, content, demand, comms/PR, events and community, partner/field, analytics/insights, and a thin layer of ops to make it all run.

• That mix requires people, tools, and experiment dollars, not just media spend.

• If the brief is basically “act like a business unit,” the budget and expectations should reflect that ask.

Ask for useful proof

• Measurement matters, but value shows up before attribution does. You need enough signal to make better decisions next week.

• Watch the right leading indicators: ICP lead mix, ICP first meetings, stage conversion, time-to-first-meeting. If these move the right way, marketing is helping.

• Evaluate marketing on portfolio health, revenue moments, and payback trend.

Assess the trade-off

• If proving every activity maps to EBITDA is burning ~20% of the team’s time, you’re funding reports, not growth.

• Measure what fuels decisions next week/quarter/year (start, scale, stop), not what just fills dashboards. Find the forest, not the trees.

The bottom line (we know you like that)

Marketing is basically a small division within your business, not a line item. Treat it like one and you’ll get you’ll get fewer decks, better signals and the indicators of the elements fueling real growth.