When marketers complain about poor alignment with the business or being treated like a support function, their frustration is often that they are excluded from discussions about the future strategic direction of the company—and from the planning process that determines the portfolio of products and services designed to fulfill that strategic vision. It seems a simple truth but one that many businesses still haven’t learned: Portfolio management and strategic marketing groups can provide great business value—but only when they are intimately linked to the selection of the products and services that receive investment dollars.

Building a successful portfolio management process is difficult enough, but building support for and participation in the process in a company as large and diverse as CSC takes years. As CSC has discovered, for the portfolio management function to provide strategic marketing input and take a key role in planning and portfolio management, it needs to establish the senior executive relationships necessary to gain entry into the process, get funding for finding and investing in new ideas, and become change management experts to get skeptical businesspeople to support it.

Key Takeaways

• Portfolio management, business development, and marketing groups should all be involved in the selection of the products and services that they will be asked to market and sell.
• Delivering complex solutions globally requires a tightly managed portfolio process.
• The effectiveness of strategic marketing activity inside the organization grows as it becomes more involved in the portfolio process.
• Building acceptance is the biggest challenge in portfolio management.