Make Way for Marketing
Mark Feldman, CEO of RevenueBase, recently posted this open question to the B2B community:
Is the CMO / VP of Marketing role set up for success? Is it still seen as a strategic role or just a lead generator?
What could the industry, companies or the individuals themselves do better/differently?
I had thoughts. I had too many thoughts to fit appropriately into comments section of his post. But, I have one gripe, one real problem that has gnawed at me for two decades as a professional marketer: New marketing leaders start their tenure at a company by diving head first into siloed, often low-value, unnecessary work; it’s politically savvy, but not in the company’s best interest. They’re “making their mark” without engaging in the slow, backroom negotiation of collaborating with new colleagues to integrate Marketing processes and perspective into the company’s workflow. This slow, understated work is ultimately more valuable to the company, but doesn’t garner any tangible short term wins for the marketing exec, their team, or the company. It doesn’t feel like a win, in the way that a re-brand does, but, it is ultimately, much more valuable.
Companies and their management would do well to make the space for Marketing to integrate fully into the company’s existing workflow, to expedite the meaningful work and negate the need for short-term, flashy, low-value “wins.”
That’s the tl;dr.
The longer version goes into the chicken and egg problem of why Marketing starts and ends siloed, why this is bad for companies, and some thoughts on how we, as an industry, can start to change things.
Just to set the table. I’m a Marketer who hates waste. The “use it or lose it” mentality for budgets has always irked me. I once had to make a serious inquiry to the NY Times for a $250K full page ad, just so my department could use up excess budget, and I was just so appalled at the wastefulness and irrationality.
Anyway, I don’t like doing things for the sake of doing things, and I don’t like doing things for show. I like doing things that have tangible, quantifiable benefits, even if it takes a quarter (or year) or two for them to be realized.
Which is why it’s always puzzled me when a new marketing leader comes in and immediately sets about doing an unnecessary re-brand, updating the company’s logo, shuffling people around in the org chart only to have them fall back into the places they originally were. It’s always seemed to me like a lot of hand-waving for not a lot of benefit, and I didn’t understand it… Until I became a marketing leader myself and very stupidly did not do these things. Only then did I understand why others did.
The Siloed Marketer
Certain activities begin and end in Marketing; branding, brand marketing, PR, some content and communications, the organization of the department itself. These are all areas that a new marketing leader can begin a project, preferably something with some showiness to it, and run with it themselves across the finish line. No need to understand how other departments work, no stepping on toes, no integrating Marketing’s priorities into someone else’s workflow. You can come in, get a quick win, all while building the relationships that will ultimately, hopefully, let you get the more meaningful work done.
The problem is, often times these projects aren’t necessary; they’re a smoke-screen and they burn valuable time and resources that could be better spent integrating Marketing and Marketing perspectives into company workflows.
One notable example from my past was a newly-minted CMO rejigging our PR boilerplate. He didn’t yet understand what the company did or how the product worked, so, his final version made almost no sense. It was word salad. I remember my colleague and I looking at it together and trying to figure out how to tell him as much. It was awkward. It was unnecessary, and it was obvious to me, even way back then, that all this rejigging was a distraction to avoid diving into the hard work (or maybe from asking questions and acknowledging that he needed help understanding our fairly complex product). And that’s not his fault. The company needed to make space for him to come in, ask hard questions, figure out what Marketing was going to contribute, and be open to changing existing processes and priorities to accommodate Marketing. Without that space, he was left to find his own way to make a mark, and, at least at first, it didn’t go great.
Making Way for Marketing
So, if I had to paint my perfect onboarding process, it would not include fun lunches with team leads. It wouldn’t include “dropping into” existing meetings with little-to-no-context, and it definitely wouldn’t include setting Marketing’s agenda in a silo. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what it would include:
A full accounting of the product roadmap, market sizing, audience definition, and positioning work that has been done, how it’s been done, and when. In other words, is the product ready to go-to-market, or do we need to start from square 1?
An open review of product roadmap and launch processes, with an eye to figuring out how to incorporate Marketing intel, and post-launch measurement.
Existing comms, content, lead gen, and PR goals, processes, traction, and budget
For first hire heads of marketing, these tend to be pretty slim and much more open to change than PD&E activities
Sales input on competitive intel, win/loss rates and reasons, sales enablement needs
For the most part, it would be highly cross-functional and require an openness to evolving and changing workflows. It would integrate Marketing immediately, using marketers’ unique skills and perspective to enhance the entire company offering and steer away from short-term, siloed wins.