B2B Marketing Blog

[Interview] How B2B CMOs Manage and Develop Marketing Plans 

By Andrew Nguyen
Oct 12, 2017
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We recently published our first issue of Fast CMO magazine and in doing so learned a great deal about how today’s B2B CMOs approach marketing planning. Fast CMO magazine is a compilation of interview stories featuring marketing executives from B2B companies.

How to plan properly becomes more important as projects get larger, and we had the opportunity to learn from successful marketing executives here in our latest print edition.

Joe Vesey fast cmo magazine spread.jpg

We’re publishing the interviews here on our blog. This week features Joseph (Joe) Vesey, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Xylem. Mr. Vesey is responsible for the Company’s Marketing function, building the Xylem brand by focusing on the unique needs of customers in specific industry verticals, expanding digital marketing capabilities, developing key account management capabilities and integrated commercial IT systems to improve the customer experience. Mr. Vesey also leads the North America Commercial Team, with deliverables for top line revenue growth, operating profit and working capital.

Below is the Q and A with Mr. Vesey.

Tell me about the goals you track that feed into your planning process.

The goal we track first and foremost start with the ability for our company to hit our growth targets, including a revenue number and an order number. That’s our true north star, we can do a lot of great things but if we can’t move that needle we’re doing something wrong. Revenue and order numbers is first and foremost.  

Here’s what else we look at:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This score tells us whether a customer is likely or unlikely to recommend us to a peer. We ask them why they gave us that score. It might be an issue in supply chain, customer service, delivery time, or lack of engagement with their salesperson. The marketing team owns and quarterbacks this and the information feeds into our actions.

Sales Barometer

We ask our sales team if they feel they are winning more, the same, or to a lesser extent. We ask them why they gave us that answer. We may find the feedback is that our order quote turnaround time is too slow. Or they have to spend too much time in the office and don’t spend enough time with the customer. Or that Salesforce setup is too complicated.

This feeds into our marketing actions. So we look at what our customers are saying and what our sales teams are saying. Let’s understand that and then go action those items out.

Market Share Data

We want to know what our relative growth rate is compared to competitors, or compared to market growth rates.


Price is important. A good price number is if you can drive more selling price than the inflation you’re taking on in COGS. This is called the value gap and if that’s a positive number then that is a great business. Price relative to the market place and price relative to the COGS point of view is what we look at.

Brand Metrics

We look at three brand metrics: Unaided awareness, i.e. the percentage of respondents who are aware of your product, brand, or advertising, i.e. your brand is top-of-mind without being assisted. We look at brand choice and ask people if they have considered buying brand A in the past 12 months.

Lastly, we look at brand preference, asking whether they show strong preference. We ask, everything being equal, or even willingness to buy at a higher price, what kind of preference do you have?

We do a lot of brand work because we are a house of brands and a branded house. We have put effort into the Xylem brand to have it stand out in the marketplace as a brand with a unique set of characteristics. While at the same time we have product brands that have been around for 100 years. We do a lot of brand management to understand how well received our brand is in the market. 

Where does being data driven come from?

It goes with a focus on revenue and numbers. Every sales person in our company has a number on their back. For example, you’re a sales leader in a certain territory and your number is $3 million dollars to close this year. You feel that pressure every quarter, every day, every hour, to make the number. We want the same accountability in marketing. So every marketing leader has a lead generation number on their back.

We work together to do the math to understand how many people we need to find to hit our number. Let’s say our company wants to do $10 million in growth, the marketing leader does the math to answer the question of how many people interested in purchasing Xylem do they need to find to support that growth.

The math is essentially average order size and number of people on a deal. Put that through the realization rates. You have to find a lot of people, and that was an eye-opening moment for our teams. This is how I want our marketing teams to be thinking: How many qualified leads do I need to deliver to support our growth targets?

That feeds into planning because now you have to be crisp in your messaging and where you place that messaging. And if you don’t hit your target in January, what’s the corrective action? That’s the kind of accountability we’re trying to drive here in the marketing function. They know the number, they are tracking it and they are actioning accordingly. And it’s the same kind of accountability our friends in sales have been living for a long time.

Managing a complex value chain in a global market must present challenges in planning. How do you address that?

We have vertical owners in each geography. For example, a marketing leader owns the municipal market in India. And every vertical owner has a marketing plan that answers how they will support a certain amount of growth. We are moving towards having vertical portfolio owners. So everything in Xylem’s portfolio that goes into a segment in a geography gets owned by that vertical portfolio owner.

Our marketing leaders have plans, which include information on how the municipal market works in that geography and the market’s size and structure. The plan outlines the actions we are taking to drive that $10 million in growth in that segment. Within these marketing plans we anticipate moves by our competitors. We’re seeing that one of our competitors is forward integrating into one of the channels and buying channel partners.

When we add debate and discussion on moves made by competitors and add that dialogue into our marketing plans, we can anticipate those potential moves by competitors we’ve been able to respond in a faster way.It’s not complete scenario planning, but it’s in that direction. It’s almost like a failure modes and effects analysis.

When you ask a team to drive change you need to ask what the failure modes are. How will you know it failed, what are the failure triggers, and what do you do when it fails? This way you don’t need to think about it. You should immediately do what’s in your corrective action when you see that happen. That’s what we do for all the markets. We will enter that market on a direct basis, selling to the end-user, or indirectly somewhere in the value chain, as well.

It sounds like your marketing teams are very decentralized. Can you talk more to that?

Although we are decentralized, we have a shared set of tools for developing marketing plans. We have a common way of measuring NPS, gathering sales feedback (sales barometer), doing product launches, and doing voice of customer studies. Despite our common tools, the fact is, water is a very local issue.

The challenges and market structures of any of these markets are unique to locality. Issues in India are unique to India, and water issues in China are unique to China. Even in the US local needs vary. California, due to its 5-year drought, makes waste water reuse important to the municipal market on the West Coast. And that’s not a priority issue for the rest of the country.You need to dial into the local needs. It’s watershed to watershed.

How do you source talent in order to ensure you achieve the goals in your plan?

One, we need leadership qualities. Two, we need functional expertise in terms of understanding the marketing choices and the marketing triggers, understanding which levers you will pull for what outcome. So we look for a strategic orientation to marketing and, again the accountability. You better know how to spend your marketing resources to generate leads.

No longer can you be good at one thing. You must be able to drive revenue up and take costs out. You have to be able to do both. You have to understand the strategic elements of marketing, the market you’re serving, the segment of customers, and how we’re doing performance wise, while understanding the tactics to drive new leads.

We need people who can understand and do both (strategy and demand generation). The sales and marketing leaders for a market segment work hand in hand. They share the same single goal to hit a target.

Is it hard to fill that marketing role?

What I just described is the perfect person. If we wait for them we aren’t going have anyone on the team. It’s context and tradeoffs. It comes down to the makeup of the team and the makeup of the leader of the team.

In some cases we over hire for the strategic skill or we over hire for the demand gen skill, or we over hire for the leadership quality. For example, they could be light on functional knowledge but they are a great leader. So we would look at whether other people on the team can fill in those gaps. We look at the team makeup. That team makeup makes the difference.

We have a great plan for hiring but there’s a practicality to it. Everyone has a great plan until they get punched in the face, according to the Mike Tyson theorists out there. And that’s what this is. That’s the practicality of it.

We know on paper what we’re looking for. But finding that one perfect person is really hard to do, so let’s just start playing the game. Within the hypothetical “perfect person,” we look at what are we trading off in order to put together a team.

Tell me about how you approach budgeting

For lead budget, I don’t give money that you had last year because you always had that amount. I give budget to marketing leaders based on: How much growth your team signed up for. How much growth is expected to be covered by marketing. And we usually cover all of it. The results from the lead math  determines how many leads need to be generated to hit that growth target. That’s how we allocate resources.

But this is a learning process. We learn. Maybe in certain spots it works differently and we’ll make the adjustment. But this is the starting rationale for budget.

I love the “Say/Do” ratio you brought up in the pre-interview. Where does that come from?

It comes from climate of accountability that we want to drive in the function. We want the marketing function to drive growth. That’s where the rhythm of reviewing the numbers come from.

You know the saying, “In God we trust and everyone else bring data.” But at the same time we’re not going to get so caught in measuring everything that we end up not taking action.

The measurement system begins with orders and revenue and there’s good repeatability and reproducibility around that. If there wasn’t the SEC would have a problem with that. But in the other businesses or markets the marketing measurement isn’t perfect.

My point to the team is don’t let “perfect” get in the way of moving forward. What does the data tell you, what are you learning, and what are you going to go do? What are you going to go do? That’s what we’re interested in. Of course we add it all up at the end of the year to make sure we hit the revenue numbers.

We look at NPS and sales barometers, and if it moved in the right direction. We review the numbers, but we aren’t going to argue about the numbers. The numbers give you a flavor of what should be done. What matters is whether you are driving action and change.

To read the entire magazine, download the digital version at fastcmo.com.


Topics: Fast CMO

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