The Startup CMO’s First 100 Days: Advice on Where to Start (Part 1)

Congratulations! You got the job! You are now officially the first head of marketing in your new company. They may call you a VP or CMO depending on the size and stage of the company but, either way, it’s an exciting time. Your new company is on a fast-growth trajectory; they just raised a new round of funding and the board is ready to put its foot on the gas. And, one of the most logical ways to accomplish that is through hiring a marketing leader to drive these efforts.

That’s where you come in. The organization is buzzing and the CEO already is singing your praises of your likely impact and the magic you will bring. Everyone has worked really hard to get here and now you are going to take them to the next level.

If you are like me, you are experiencing a mixture of excitement and anxiety. So many ideas in your head. So many possibilities. So many expectations. So much work to do.

Do not get overwhelmed by the enormity of what you are about to undertake. The key is to break down the job into the important components and establish a 100-day plan for bringing your vision to life.

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The 100-Day Plan

Why a 100-day plan? With the election season at the front of every news cycle, I cannot help but recognize the similarities to a new U.S. President entering office. For a new President, setting a plan for the first 100 days is the best way to seize this fertile time for putting forth ideas and setting the stage for long-term success.

Much like a new President, how you handle the early days will make or break you. Right now, your power to influence change may never be greater, nor will your ability to get the resources you need. You have a mandate. Your opportunity to think through strategy with this much clarity is a closing window. As a result, you need a plan to take advantage of this fruitful time.

Think of the first 100 days as the springboard from which you develop and execute your long-term vision. Obviously, there is a lot to do: learning the business and industry, weaving yourself into the company’s DNA, building relationships, hiring a team, developing and launching a strategy, and showing quick wins.

Fortunately, the first 100 days are also a honeymoon period — full of optimism — and you are afforded leeway to request resources and coordinate your plan of attack.

So, take advantage and use this time to build the foundation for lasting success. After the first 100 days, business will continue as usual and you and your organization will establish a routine. You will have deadlines, fires to put out, and numbers to hit. You will never again get the breathing room of the first 100 days, so leverage it and, please, develop a plan.

The Framework

Here is a framework for the first 100 days that I have developed over the course of my career. It is a playbook that any new CMO or VP of Marketing can use to get the marketing machine up and running. This framework enables you to set expectations and ensure you are taking the time to thoughtfully craft a plan, rather than diving in and tactically executing.

I’ve divided the framework into the following high-level components. There is a loose chronological order here, but you will find that several of these activities occur simultaneously. Over the next five weeks, I will focus exclusively on one of these components. Today, we will cover “Getting Started.”

• Getting Started
• Developing Relationships
• Building a Team
• Conducting Research & Analysis
• Crafting & Launching a Strategy

Let’s dig into Getting Started…..

The Central Dashboard

The first thing to consider is how you are going to manage your time and thought process. I believe strongly in the philosophy laid out in David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. In the book, he advocates developing a system that allows you to capture the thoughts, tasks, and ideas that come to mind and file them away for future processing. Free your mind from the anxiety stemming from continually processing the amount of work yet to be completed and focus your attention on now.

As I move through each stage of the first 100 days, I like to manage the process from a deck that serves as my central repository of thought that enables the Allen philosophy. It’s a single location to jot down ideas, keep notes, paste research, and consolidate findings. I create placeholder slides for everything I expect to investigate and formalize during the first 100 days, and then shape it into a strategy as time progresses. At first, it’s not pretty but, over time, a narrative is formed and a strategy emerges.

I treat it like an oversized, structured notepad. For example, as I meet people in the organization, I create a slide for each conversation I have and keep my notes there.

During research, I paste useful tidbits that emerge, including competition, new channels, organizational charts, budgets, new best practices, etc., all captured in one place. I like to add slides for each facet of the eventual marketing plan, and start filling it in with notes from conversations, research, and observations.

Using this method frees me from the cognitive dissonance of having so many loose ends. There are so many threads running during the start of your tenure and you cannot close them all. That’s why you need a place to store and return to them. When you are ready to progress to strategy, you can easily start pruning and formalizing the ideas. You already have the outline of a strategy with nearly 100 slides. Granted, it is raw language, notes, screenshots, and tangents, but it is something substantive from where you can start to harness a cohesive narrative. Your strategy presentation emerges from this process.

I use Google Slides because it’s easier than PowerPoint for sharing and working on-the-go, and I can access my deck at home, on the train, or while my kids are in their karate class, capturing everything that comes to mind and thinking about it later.

Start Meeting with Colleagues…Immediately

In the first weeks, it is crucial to spend time with as many people as possible, learning about the business by asking questions and listening to answers. Right now, you need to let others do the talking.

You need to spend time with your team, other executives, the CEO, and other functional leaders. Find out what drives success. Listen for common themes. Check against your assumptions. If you don’t understand something or if something doesn’t add up, don’t assume everything you hear is right. No organization is perfect, especially one that is hiring a marketing leader for the first time. Dig deep.

Most early-stage startup growth is done haphazardly through trial-and-error, which leaves a new marketing leader with a lot to fix to enable growth at scale. In fact, they may be clueless about fundamental marketing principles. That’s OK. That’s why they hired you.

I usually spend the first few weeks meeting with people, approximately four to six meetings a day, ranging from 30 minutes to an hour. Spend as much time as possible with the CEO. Delve into the existing business model. Understand what got them to this point and what is working well. Do as much as you can in person. It can be pretty exhausting, but it’s worth it.

Investigate What’s Been Done Before

Along the way, investigate current and past marketing initiatives, which may include attempts at creating content, awareness, e-mail campaigns, or social media channels, and, possibly, experimenting with paid marketing. Thoroughly research all previous efforts without judgement, and get a firm handle on existing initiatives to understand the underlying goals.

Uncover other areas of the business and determine existing systems (ex. product, order management, management reporting). Understand what works and what needs improvement. There will be trade-offs and compromises to make down the road, and this exercise will help you reveal and prepare for them.

Define Your Strategic Imperatives

If you are doing this right, you will start to hear common themes across your conversations and research, which will become your three to five “strategic imperatives” for marketing success in the company. Document these themes now, expecting they will evolve and become your strategy’s guideposts. As you continue meeting with colleagues, start with the strategic imperatives (presented as a work-in-progress) to help them understand what you think are the big actions.

This exercise is effective when speaking with your board, CEO, and other executives. Not only will they understand you are taking a strategic approach to the job, but they will help you correct your course, if necessary. By the end of the first month, I have found the strategic imperatives are about 75% right. The rest of the time is devoted to laying out the strategy and tactics to get you there. And, along the way, a “eureka” moment happens when a new strategic imperative emerges from your own understanding of the situation.

Here are several examples of strategic imperatives:

• Define the brand strategy
• Establish organization as an industry thought leader
• Build product category awareness
• Open direct customer-acquisition channels
• Establish a mobile presence
• Create experiences for our customers

These six examples listed above are straightforward and high-level, but what you begin to do is frame your activities around them. From there you can map out a strategy and supporting tactics. If the action doesn’t support a strategic imperative, should you really be spending time and resources on it? That is the value of the method. It focuses you and your team.

Grabbing Quick Wins

Along the way, as you are learning and forming a strategy, it is important to get the ball rolling on a few “quick wins.” These are the low-hanging fruit that you already can identify as backwards or lacking because of insufficient marketing strategy or leadership. While everyone understands you need time to build an effective long-term strategy, it helps build confidence when they see activity. Outline one to three actions based on current staff and resources that starts the ball rolling.

For example, when I joined a previous employer, the website allowed visitors to sign up or contact sales, but it had no other way of capturing leads. What about all the traffic that is qualified, but leaving because they didn’t need to buy today? Yes, it turned out the majority of traffic bounced because they weren’t actually ready to buy. Instead, they were just starting their research and we offered nothing for them.

The solution is an obvious playbook move: create an asset that drives registration and begin email marketing. I joined that company in late September and by early November, we had a webinar featuring one of our satisfied customers discussing how he expanded his business and won huge projects through the platform. Although not earth-shattering, it really paid off. We now had a lead-gen funnel that also inspired the organization. Thrillingly, sales started seeing inbound leads and the customer success team was being recognized for their great work by seeing a happy customer gush about the company. We even were generating PR from it. Everyone started rallying behind “marketing,” which is exactly the momentum you want to start building.

Fighting the Urge to Move Too Fast

Having discussed quick wins, I do want to warn against trying to do too much too soon, especially without a plan. Drawing conclusions and making broad recommendations is a rookie mistake made by many first-timers because they want to make a good first impression by showing they are “doers.” However, it’s a misstep because you are not taking the time to collect data and draw your own conclusions. You will be acting either on your previous perspective or the views of the current team; both are mistakes. The freshness you bring with you into this role is important, but you have not absorbed the nuances of the new situation yet. And, those nuances matter.

Your quick wins aren’t sweeping changes. Instead, they are obvious improvements that come from the lack of previous leadership. However, they must be carefully planned and executed alongside your strategic development. Quick wins must be no-brainers that are impossible to argue against.

Where We Go From Here

Having kick-started our first 100 days, the next installments of this series will deep-dive into the other components of a 100-day plan. In further chapters, we will delve into how to conduct research, assess markets, sell your vision, draft your marketing plan, and launch it. We’ll cover how to manage relationships with other key people in the organization and we’ll even cover strategies for building a team. By the end, this framework will provide you with instructions for masterfully launching a marketing program at your new company. Be sure to follow me here on Medium to see the next installments. Soon, you will see the forest through the trees and establish a foundation based on strategic thought. Good luck, new CMO!

Go to Advice on Developing Relationships (Part 2)

Diego Lomanto is the Chief Marketing Officer at Talent Inc., the leading career advice and resume writing service for job seekers. He is also the co-founder of TournamentPokerEdge.com, the world’s most popular tournament poker training site.