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.

Professional services company CSC understands the importance of these linkages. Strategic marketing is integrated into CSC’s portfolio management process from the beginning. Indeed, CSC’s Corporate Portfolio Management Group, known as Global Service Offerings (GSO), which orchestrates the strategic marketing activity across the organization, plays a role in shaping and selecting investment ideas, from inception all the way to rollout.

“Many times, companies put together their portfolios and then, at the end of the process, they throw it over the wall to marketing and say, ‘Here, make a silk purse out of this,’” says Brigid Quinn, the GSO global portfolio director for CSC. “But now we get involved at the front end, and we are working with a matrixed team from across the organization doing strategic marketing—market analysis, client analysis—to put more rational thought and strategic intent into how we will develop our portfolio. Of course, we’re still creating sales collateral and all the things that marketing traditionally does. But it’s no longer our starting position. We are involved at the front end, in the strategic thought and logic, so we can start shaping the messages earlier and we can figure out how the portfolio all fits together. So by the time we get to doing the collateral, we can do it more effectively and easily.”

And with more credibility. Part of businesses’ reluctance about “inviting marketing to the table” is that it’s not clear what they will receive in return for giving up the elbowroom. In CSC’s case, it’s clear: They can evaluate their solutions from a portfolio perspective and have someone to manage the long and difficult process of developing the overall product and service portfolio.

Though GSO doesn’t have the final say in the portfolio choices, it plays an important role. “When we’re determining what to pursue, portfolio management provides marketing input into that decision,” says Lem Lasher, president of Global Business Solutions and the Office of Innovation for CSC. “GSO is involved right up through making the business case. Then they kind of back off as it goes into development, and then when it comes out of development, they take it and run with it in terms of positioning and publicizing it.”

Sounds simple, but the execution is anything but. 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.

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Chris Koch is Director of Research and Thought Leadership for ITSMA. For more information, go to itsma.com.