COOs don’t inherently distrust marketing. They distrust marketing that can’t prove it’s working.
That’s an important distinction. In most B2B companies, the COO isn’t philosophically opposed to investing in marketing. They’re opposed to investing in a function that operates like a black box, produces reports full of metrics nobody asked for, and can’t connect its activity to revenue in any meaningful way.
That’s not a marketing problem. That’s an operational problem. And it’s one that matters to COOs today and marketing budgets in the future.
The COO’s Real Problem With Marketing
Most marketing strategies are built around two things: creative output and vanity metrics: How many people saw the ad, how many clicks the blog got, how many followers the LinkedIn page gained this quarter. As we’ve written about on this blog, those metrics are dated if not obsolete, but they pose a different issue for the COO:
These metrics exist because they’re easy to measure, not because they matter to the business.
COOs live in a different world. They’re managing cost, capacity, risk, and throughput across every function in the company. When Marketing shows up to a leadership meeting with a slide full of impressions and engagement rates, it signals one thing: this team doesn’t speak the same language as the rest of the business. The problem is the operating model and the outcome is predictable:
Marketing gets underfunded, deprioritized, or managed by committee and then leadership wonders why growth is inconsistent.
What “Modern” Actually Means for Operations
When people talk about modern marketing, they usually mean tactics, channels, and (AI) tools. This includes short-form video, thought leadership & all things account-based.
However, that’s not what modern means for a COO.
Where the CFO prioritizes measurement at the performance and channel efficiency levels, the COO cares about structure and predictability that aligns with the overall business goals.
From an operational standpoint, marketing means infrastructure. It means a system with defined inputs, measurable outputs, clear handoffs, and a reporting cadence that maps to business performance.
Think about how a COO evaluates any other function. Sales has a pipeline. Finance has a forecast. Operations has capacity utilization and throughput rates. Every function that earns budget and headcount does so because it can demonstrate how it contributes to the business in terms leadership can evaluate.
Marketing should be no different. A modern marketing strategy isn’t a campaign calendar. It’s a revenue contribution model with the operational rigor to back it up.
Four Things COOs Should Demand From Marketing
If marketing in your organization isn’t delivering these four things, something needs to change.
1. Alignment
Marketing and Sales need to operate from the same definition of a qualified lead and the same ICP. When they don’t, Marketing optimizes for volume and Sales rejects the output. The handoff breaks down, attribution becomes a political argument, and the COO inherits the friction. Alignment isn’t a cultural nice-to-have; it’s an operational requirement.
2. Efficiency
Cost per click is a marketing metric. Cost per opportunity is a business metric. COOs should know what it costs to generate a qualified sales conversation. If nobody in your organization can answer that question, the marketing function isn’t being managed like a business asset.
3. Scalability
A marketing strategy that requires proportional headcount increases every time the business grows is a staffing plan, not a system. Modern marketing should be built to scale through better infrastructure, smarter automation, and sharper targeting, not just more people doing more things.
4. Predictability
Marketing should be able to tell you, with reasonable confidence, how much pipeline it will generate next quarter. Not how many leads. Pipeline. Qualified opportunities that Sales can work.
How to Evaluate Whether Your Marketing Strategy Is Operationally Sound
Before your next planning cycle or budget conversation, ask these questions:
- Can Marketing tell you the cost per qualified opportunity, not just cost per lead?
- Do Sales and Marketing agree on what a qualified lead looks like?
- Does Marketing have a 90-day forecast? If Marketing can’t forecast its output, it’s running on intuition, not a system.
- When a campaign underperforms, does Marketing have a structured process for diagnosing why and adjusting? If the answer is “we try something different next time,” the optimization loop doesn’t exist.
These aren’t trick questions. They’re the same questions you’d ask of any operational function in the business. Marketing shouldn’t get a pass just because the outputs are harder to measure.
The Bottom Line
Marketing run like a business function earns a seat at the ops table. Marketing run like a creative department stays in the budget conversation.
COOs have more influence over which one it becomes than they usually realize. The org structure, the reporting cadence, the alignment with Sales, and the definition of success…those are operational decisions. And operational decisions are your domain.
The companies that win on marketing aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest campaigns. They’re the ones where marketing is treated like the revenue function it’s supposed to be, with the accountability, the infrastructure, and the operational discipline to back it up.
