New Marketing Job? Follow the Money
Where to start when you start your new marketing job
This week, I get to do one of my favorite work-related projects: Helping a new marketing leader onboard into a new role.
New leadership is always a mixed blessing. There will be uncertainty about the team’s current plans, of course; New leadership means, by definition, change. But, the change maybe necessary and welcome, perhaps even liberating for the current team.
I see new leadership as more opportunity than threat. Onboarding creates opportunity for a couple reasons:
Fresh start - This process should give everyone some new energy, a kick in the pants. It’s a chance to embrace a fresh start and, hopefully see the work through new eyes.
Push on old assumptions - A new leader has about 60 days of special dispensation, where they can challenge old assumptions about what, why and how things are done. Good leaders assume there was a reason the assumptions came to be, and will use a series of “why” or “what led to that” questions to get at the core ideas that hold up the assumptions.
Inconvenient Truths - The new marketing leader should take the time to ask everyone, privately and/or in a group setting, what the inconvenient truths are. You know: The stuff everyone sort of knows, but never talks openly about. Whether it’s about the product (i.e “it’s actually not a great product compared to the competitors”), the brand (“We’ve struggled to be consistent in how we talk about the brand”) or the operations (“we say we’re data driven, but our data is shit”), the marketing leader should ask everyone for the straight talk: What are the hard to admit truths that everyone is afraid to address
There’s No Playbook
Everyone comes into a new role in their own way. Unfortunately, I still haven’t seen a great handbook with best practices, methods and tools for onboarding your marketing leader. Unfortunately, most new leaders just get dropped into the current team flow and are forced to “deal with it” as the work comes at them. There might be a week of introductory meetings, 1 on 1s with the team and stakeholders, some sessions with agencies, and probably some deep budget reviews. Then, it’s right into the management.
Why Was There an Opening in the First Place?
There are a lot of stories about the short lifespan of CMOs, but there aren’t as many articles written about the Directors and VPs that have short tenure, too. My hypothesis is that most turnover in the marketing leadership roles is probably related to cultural fit, or a perceived “lack of alignment” with Finance, Sales, Supply Chain or other functions. And, if you really went deep with the other functional leaders on the source of the tension, it would probably boil down to “Marketing doesn’t really understand the business”.
That is, marketing doesn’t really understand how money gets made for the shareholders. I’ve been guilty of it myself, with perhaps too much emphasis on external trends like “Brand Purpose!”, “Digital”, “Digital transformation”, “Digital Innovation” and not enough focus on the nuts and bolts of how the business actually runs.
The real internal job of a marketing leader is to translate all the stuff that’s urgent to the marketing team (see the list above of hand-wavy stuff) into a story of how it leads to actual, on the ground business results that the other leaders can see and track via data.
So, if you want to be a marketing leader that drives growth, to be seen as a company leader vs. a functional leader, you’ll use your onboarding process to prioritize the thing that matters most, in the end: How does the company actually make money.
Yes, it might seem obvious: Companies make money by selling stuff for more than their costs. But, great marketing leaders understand a couple key things that go deep into the actual drivers of profitability in the organization:
Selling advantages - Does the company have some sort of advantage in the way their products/services are sold? Are the sales processes really well defined? Is the sales organization unique somehow that really matters? Is there a partnership with a vendor/product/platform that leads to a sales advantage? I once worked with a professional services organization that had one of the original “Partnerships” with a well known CRM platform, and because they were an early partner, they had stronger relationships with the platform leaders and, as a result, had visibility into the platform roadmap: Hence, a selling advantage.
Cost advantages - How is the company either creating or sustaining cost advantages? Is tight operational control via procurement? Is there some leverage the company has with suppliers (i.e. scale or technology leverage)? Does the company have unique relationships with suppliers?
Customer Process Drivers - Every business has a process where they turn prospects into leads, and then leads into customers, both active and loyal. What is working (or not) drive profitability? Are there three or four key steps? What employees or roles are making the most impact? Where is their opportunity across the customer messaging cycle to make the most impact?
Understanding where the real profitability happens will help the whole team connect their “upstream work” (comms, lead generation, mid-funnel engagement, brand building) to the downstream profit-making. And, if the marketing leader is lucky, they may find that “marketing” has enabled the company to charge higher prices (and thus profitability) because of brand power.
Add it Into the First Interviews
This week, as I am talking with the new marketing leader, I’ll be trying to share what I know about the real job she’s taking on. Not the job description, but the “Job to Be Done” for the marketing leader in the profit-making process for the organization. In this case, there’s a really clear connection to the marketing team’s work and profit at the end of the month.
I’d love to encourage her to get direction from her peers, too, as she’s getting to know them in the first 30 days. There are a couple good, open ended questions that can get at this:
If you were talking to the board of directors, how would you explain how the company unlock more profitability in our business model?
What is our secret sauce, or our hidden advantage when it comes to profitability?
What do you wish the marketing team really understood about marketing’s role in driving profitability?
Aside from marketing, what are the two or three things that drive profitable growth for us?
It’s so easy for new marketing leaders to just drop into the flow of operations: The tools, the tech, the team roles and personalities. It’s hard to take that step back and understand the big picture when the team is fighting through a backlog of opportunities and issues. But it’s worth the time to understand the model and it will help you bridge differences with the rest of the leadership team over time.