Case history of building the marketing function at a technology startup. How to show ROI on marketing to justify your budget to the CFO.

1. Selling Marketing to Your CFO
John Elmer, Chief Marketing Officer
Ingrain, Inc.

2. vRock TM

3. vRock TM

4. Ingrain revenue growth

5. “I have just one word for you: Metrics”

6. Barry Stewart, Ingrain CFO
• “The key activity for marketing is value creation –
driving not just revenue, but brand valuation.”
• “As a startup, Ingrain must show outside investors
that our brand value goes beyond revenue.”
• “In my experience, most marketing managers
don’t take the time to show the linkage between
marketing programs, revenue and brand equity.”

7. Ingrain Marketing uses Salesforce.com to manage
the metrics that drive our customer focus.

8. Marketing designed Ingrain’s value-based sales
methodology

9. Marketing tracks KPIs at each stage of
Ingrain’s value-based sales process.

10. Marketing ROI is also reported in Salesforce.com

11. Ingrain website: Google Analytics
Top Companies Visiting Ingrain Website 2009
Unique
Company Pages/Visit
Visitors
Schlumberger 148 5
ExxonMobil 111 6
Saudi Aramco 109 6
Chevron 78 7
Talisman 74 5
Baker Hughes 61 8
CoreLabs 60 7
ConocoPhillips 53 5
Statoil 50 6
Shell 48 5
BP 47 5
Halliburton 41 7
Marathon 39 6
Oxy 33 3
Anadarko 26 4
ENI 24 5
Weatherford 21 3

12. Other resources for Marketing ROI metrics

13. Barry’s Advice on Winning Over Your CFO
• Trust is built up over time. Deliver consistently against your
own plan.
• Keep other C-Level managers updated on your progress
against your plan.
• Make sure that marketing is embedded into sales. Ingrain
marketing did this by developing the sales methodology and
deploying it through Salesforce.com.
• At budget review, your marketing budget will be ranked
against all other budgets for funding. Marketing’s challenge is
demonstrating the linkage between marketing programs ,
revenue and brand value -- a tangible display of ROI. Show
exactly how you will create next year’s revenues.