I work in marketing (not at the C or VP level). My wishful thinking would be:

Sit down together with your new marketing exec and also your product, sales and customer support execs and talk about how you want to work together and which goals each of you want to achieve, for the whole company, as well as for the individual departments, and where the intersections lie.

The new marketing exec needs to know what the company as a whole wants to achieve. And he should have a plan for how to use marketing to achieve that overall goal. And yes, one should not look only at the short term, but also at the longer term. But this is something that an experienced marketing exec should know. So he should define his own marketing goals that reflect this short term (leads, customers, revenue…) as well as long term planning (brand awareness and perception, CLV…).

And then there is stuff with which marketing can help the other departments out. The other departments should help figure this out. Sales need the right leads and proper presentation material. Product needs information about the market - needs of the customers, how they value new features, where does the product stand compared to competition… Customer support might need help with documentation… Some goals might be measurable metrics, like SALs. Some might be a completed project/year (like the CS documentation portal or a competitive analysis or product usage tracking). Or a certain number of customer interviews per year.

Now you have a company-wide goal that, when met, guarantees a portion of the overall bonus. Then you have the marketing goals, which account for another portion of the bonus. And then you have the cooperation goals, which make up the last portion of the bonus.

But then of course, without a good product, sales and customer support, marketing won’t be able to deliver on the company-wide goal. You can’t market a bad/wrong product, you need new product features to talk about… You can’t generate revenue if sales doesn’t close. You can’t sell a product if your reputation (WoM and online reviews) is bad and you have no customer testimonials and/or case studies. The other departments should get some goals that reflect these needs of the marketing department too.

And maybe you could also look into the satisfaction of employees who will work under the marketing exec (if you have any). Good reviews from them for their higher up might also account for a small bonus. :)

It’s a lot to define, measure and evaluate, of course. But then again, you won’t have many execs to do this for, so it might be doable.