Don't Call it "Marketing" if it's Only About New Customers
What we call the job matters
A company I have been working with just lost their marketing leader. “Sam” was brought in with a lot of excitement by the private equity firm that made an investment in our client, “Newco.” Sam got off to a fast start, making some needed adjustments, but about 6 months later the seat opened up and Sam was gone.
What happened?
It’s always one of those Rashomon, everyone-has-a-version situations. I’m sure Sam is telling one story, and there’s another being told in the conference rooms at NewCo. Always is.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter whose decision it was. Sam wasn’t going to work out and most of the team at NewCo knew it within a few weeks and those of us working on the vendor (er “partners”) side, knew it, too.
From my perspective, the simplest answer will be familiar to anyone that runs EOS. It was both a “wrong person” and a “wrong seat” problem. NewCo didn’t spend the time to prioritize the skills needed (to get the right person) and they had a poor role designed, one that was too broad and without clear priorities. That is, they designed the wrong “seat”.
Wrong Seat: Customer Acquisition is different than “Marketing”
Sam was hired into the role as Marketing Leader1.
As the marketing leader, Sam was guiding a portfolio of projects and initiatives that would logically fall under “Marketing” at most companies, including a PR plan, content development work, improving the digital experience, pricing, new promotion development, etc. All these functional areas would be necessary, eventually, for Newco to reach their business objectives.
However, the actual, urgent need for Newco when Sam came aboard was (and is) Customer Acquisition. Specifically, day to day operational excellence on the paid and “owned” (their terminology) channels to drive mid and low-funnel net-new customer acquisition. New Customers was one of the key performance indicators, the one Newco cared about the most, culturally and operationally, even though there are about 10 different KPIs reviewed each month.
By defining the role broadly as “Marketing Leader” instead of narrowly as Customer Acquisition, Newco created a too-broad role and enabled mis-alignment about what the real work was.
Wrong Person: Generalist vs. Specialist
It was inevitable they’d hire the wrong person. Everyone on hiring team was looking for different skills, different leadership experiences, different capabilities. They were “scaling up” and wanted to “compete on brand” and “maintain pricing power”. They hoped to build a “world class marketing team”.
Newco hired Sam because of their long track record as a marketing leader (at the manager or director level) in the industry. Sam has seen a lot, been successful in multiple roles, and had a good resume. Sam had plans for capabilities and resourcing roadmaps, equity and awareness scores, PR impressions, database retention, loyalty programs. But, by the end of the second month in the seat, all anyone cared about was whether Sam was delivering new customers.
Meanwhile, Sam was a decent operator, but had a leadership capability gap: they didn’t have experience wrangling a bunch of peers and bosses to get on the same page about the right priorities andKPI’s. And, critically, Sam didn’t have the ability to persuade, influence and guide the management team via vision, storytelling, data, experience. Without that, they couldn’t get on the same page vis a vis strategies, metrics, priorities, and tradeoffs.
In the end, Sam was especially good at one functional area and it wasn’t Customer Acquisition.
From the outside, it’s hard to say that Sam wasn’t a good hire. I think Newco made the best decision they could in a sub-optimal hiring process. Without full alignment on the role’s priorities and scope definition (including KPIs), it’s almost impossible to know who can do the job the best.
There were a couple weak links in the chain:
Role scope - The role should have been “Customer Acquisition Director”, not “Marketing leader”. The PE firm and the ownership group didn’t have the clarity or confidence to call the job what it was.
Role design - The priorities should have been unambiguous with a clear ranking, putting new customer acquisition at the top. Other KPI’s should have been taken off Sam’s reporting dashboard (or put on page 2 or 3).
Strategic Leadership vs. Functional Management - The hiring team should have aligned on the value of key leadership skills vs. the importance of functional skills.
Onboarding - The Newco team could have constructed a more supportive onboarding experience, giving Sam and the hiring team a chance to identify misalignments, gaps in understanding, and a shared sense of what the job really required.
One seat, two jobs - There are really two jobs at NewCo: 1) A senior leadership role to build a true marketing capability over the next few years and 2) Sr Mgr or Director level role to drive new customer acquisition. It’s not clear why they didn’t go down that path, but I believe NewCo team was trying to get a bargain: A single leader who can do it all. Unicorns are rare.
Newco is a high-potential organization in a fast-growing, high margin business. The leaders there are good, fully committed people and are very good at their jobs. They should be successful at bringing new customers to the their franchise. They can play to win.
But, success will still depend on getting the basics nailed. Defining the right seat, and filling it with the right person.
This was a hedge by NewCo. They said they wanted a CMO, but they didn’t want to pay for the title. So, they brought in a director level hire and called it “Marketing Leader”, probably hoping to get a bargain on the talent.