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Why Marketing targets are overrated.

Welcome to 2025. 60% of you are still waiting on targets. 30% of you have targets that make zero sense but you had to put together because you know… 2025. 9% of you have targets that you know will change next week. That leaves 1% of teams that have reasonable Marketing targets built on time that they can start to execute on.

I don’t have a theoretical issue against targets. I have a practical one formed by 15+ years of target setting at startups, large corporations, and the government. I have yet to see targets built correctly, measured consistently, or achieved efficiently. There is always an issue.

Below, I’ll explore the various challenges I see with the entire process of Marketing targets but I’ll also share a better way to approach them.

Targets vs Forecasts

What is the difference between a target and a forecast?

To me, a forecast is what we believe will happen given all of the information we know today. A target is what we want to happen given what we set to do at the beginning of the year. It’s a goal.

What we believe will happen and what we want to happen are never the same.

Yet, companies mix the two. The worst is when you take a forecast and add a multiplier to bump it up and call it a target.

At the beginning of the year, forecasts and targets should be the same. If they’re not, then you might as well throw out targets and not use them. But let’s move forward a quarter. You are 10% behind Q1 targets. This means there was some reality that didn’t comply with your assumptions.

You carry forward this underperformance forecasting the rest of the year will be down, but targets stay the same. What number should you look at? It’s nice to say “We’ll make up our targets next quarter”, but how often does that really happen? If you missed targets first quarter, why do you believe you’ll start overperforming? Was this an issue in target setting or business performance?

You then spend the next 3 quarters sharing why forecasts were behind targets. So fun.

A waste of resources

General process to set targets:

You get an email from your manager in early November “Hey Bob, it’s time to start building 2025 targets!”

Every person scrambles to:

1. Put together a budget and Marketing plan

2. Present them in a new document the new CMO put together

3. Redo it because of arbitrary feedback from a committee of peers

4. Redo it again because finance came back and said “We need to find $XM in the budget”

5. Repeat until everyone pretends to be happy

This process takes months. Imagine how much more Marketing you could get done if you actually spent those weeks doing Marketing. Crazy.

Tops down vs bottoms up

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