How Tenable aligned its tactical priorities to its marketing goals

Executive summary

Tenable, a leader in the cybersecurity industry, invested heavily in optimizing its Demandbase platform as a tactical tool. However, the Marketing Operations team needed to bridge the gap between their tactical platform activities and high-level company objectives. Through a strategic partnership with Demandbase Professional Services, Tenable developed a project prioritization framework and a Value Measurement Plan that effectively connected its tactical priorities with its marketing goals. This collaboration also enabled Tenable to track marketing-influenced opportunities with precision, as well as demonstrate the tangible impact of marketing efforts on the sales pipeline and revenue.

About Tenable

Tenable® is the exposure management company, exposing and closing the cybersecurity gaps that erode business value, reputation and trust. Tenable reduces business risk for approximately 44,000 customers around the globe. Learn more at tenable.com.

The problem

Tenable’s Marketing Operations team is central to driving growth and ensuring that the company’s go-to-market strategies are executed flawlessly. Tenable’s Marketing Operations team was putting significant effort into mastering the Demandbase platform. They knew the technology was powerful from a tactical perspective, but faced one critical challenge: ensuring that their daily work directly supported the company’s pre-defined strategic goals. The team needed a way to move beyond tactical execution and connect their platform activities to measurable business outcomes. Without a clear framework aligning tactics and strategic objectives, it was difficult to prioritize tactics/initiatives, connect specific tasks with strategic outcomes, and prove the value of specific marketing investments.

Trying and hoping that specific tactics might move the needle on business objectives simply wasn’t sufficient, either as a way for tracking success or as a way to ensure that specific investments were driving strategic impact.

The solution

Winning requires a clear game plan, including defined ways to measure performance and impact. Tenable partnered with the Demandbase Professional Services {DPS} team to build a clear and winning game plan. This collaboration was not about creating a simple tactical and strategic checklist: instead, it created a strategic foundation for sustainable marketing success that enabled tactics to be connected to measurable business outcomes. Together, Tenable and DPS developed a project prioritization framework that directly linked every platform activity to Tenable’s overarching company goals.

A robust Value Measurement Plan became the cornerstone of this new approach. By implementing monthly benchmarks, Tenable could track progress and measure the success of every initiative against its pre-defined strategic goals. They had both a playbook and a scoreboard to track performance. This wasn’t just about collecting data, it was about gaining actionable insights to make confident, decisive, and game-winning moves that drove relevant KPIs. The partnership gave Tenable the structure needed to focus their efforts where they’d matter most, enabling them to see which tactics were moving the needle on key strategic outcomes (and, of course, which tactics weren’t moving the needle).

The results

By connecting marketing tactics to business strategy, Tenable unlocked new levels of performance and visibility. The results included:

• Complete Strategic Alignment: All marketing initiatives were unified under clear company objectives, eliminating wasted effort/wasted spend and maximizing strategic impact.
• Quantifiable Marketing Influence: The team developed specific metrics to track marketing-influenced opportunities, achieving measurable increases and proving (and improving) marketing’s contribution to Tenable’s pipeline.
• Enhanced Pipeline Visibility: With data-driven insights, Tenable gained a clear view of marketing’s influence across multiple sales stages, confidently demonstrating its value to senior leadership. When you can prove value, you can also improve tactics (and make a stronger, data-driven case for more investment).

Key takeaways

• Alignment matters. Marketing operation teams aren’t just there to support technology and tactics (i.e., as a cost center), but should align what they do to the larger strategic objectives of the overall business (i.e., as a value driver).
• Attribution matters. Once tactics are clearly aligned with key business outcomes, marketing can then track, prove, and improve the business value it drives, increasing its credibility and making it easier to show the clear connection between investments and ROI.
• It helps to bring in expert help. Getting help from outside experts to build a solid framework and approach to aligning marketing tactics with strategic outcomes can boost both the impact and credibility of marketing teams.
• Visibility adds to credibility. The credibility of marketing teams increases when they can show senior leadership the specific business value they drive, making it easier to demonstrate the ROI of specific investments and tactics.

Conclusion

Tenable’s story proves that technology alone is not the solution, but that sustainable success comes from aligning powerful tools with a larger strategic vision. Tools must serve that vision, and be directly connected to it. The collaboration with Demandbase Professional Services provided Tenable’s Marketing Operations team with the framework and confidence to not only execute effectively at a tactical level, but also to lead with purpose. They transformed their function from a tactical support team into a strategic driver of business growth, demonstrating undeniable impact on the bottom line. Marketing operations transitioned from a cost center to a value driver, one that could prove and improve its revenue impact.