Top 5 Tips to Make an Impact as a New Head of Marketing
You got promoted to run your organization’s Marketing department? Congratulations. Well done! Looking for the easiest way to succeed in your new role? Well, there is no shortcut; you need to work hard to earn it, but here are five tricks that you can easily use in your new role, to make an impact.
- Plan in detail — Don’t be a token-operated executive
According to the WSJ, the median CMO tenure for companies of all sizes dropped to 25.5 months from 30, while the medium tenure for CEOs is 50 months, and is even higher for CTOs. The fate of CMOs in startups fares much worse than two years. Why is that happening to good Marketing leaders, while CTOs and CPOs keep their jobs for five+ years?
One main reason for this shortened period is the large extent to which Marketing leaders are responsible for dealing with chaos. In startups, every day comes with a different challenge; one day, one of your key web pages gives a 404 error, the second day your PR rep resigns, the third day you were dinged from your MarkOps platform due to a non-GDPR-compliant email. Sound familiar? These are all part of the job description and should be expected. Unfortunately, most Marketing heads use their energies to extinguish the next fire and respond to their CEO’s wish list. Let me be the first one to tell you that most CEOs don’t know Marketing (exceptions apply, like Gong’s Amit Bendov or Gainsight’s Nick Mehta.) The biggest mistake you can make is to use most of your energy on short-term issues and blindly follow your CEO’s (or in some cases, COO/CRO/BOD’s) orders. If you only work on what’s just pushed in front of you, you’ll fail miserably in developing results in the long term. The best course of action that you can follow is to plan the outcome first and execute all the necessary steps to hit these goals. I know that planning is not as fun as being a speaker at your next event or writing that new pitch deck copy, but detailed planning, followed up by diligent execution, is your best bet to keep your job longer than others. Don’t be just another stat. Be a legendary marketeer!
2. Set stretch goals for your team and yourself — 4x KPIs -> 4x growth
In the early days of Uber, the KPIs for every department and team member were already high. On top of that, Travis Kalanick and the exec team asked for the goals to be quadrupled YoY, that is, PMs deliver 4x more product launches, QA engineers solve 4x more bugs, etc. These arguably extreme expectations created tension, and yet that was one of the main reasons Uber has grown very quickly in a short period of time.
Most likely, you’re not the only company chasing the same buyers in your industry. The best way to not cease among your competitors is to outperform them. And outperforming begins with setting hard targets and gradually increasing them. Is 4x an unrealistic target? This would likely be the case if you’re a Series D company, as it would be challenging to quadruple your website visits from the previous fiscal year. That target might also be low if you are a Series A startup. It is important to set the right target for specific metrics and raise the bar every year, if not every quarter.
3. Focus on Bottom-Line Results — Keep Your Eye on The Greenback
As you know by now, Marketing is responsible for a bunch of things, including communication, awareness, branding, operations, sales enablement, etc. All of these are important, but none is as critical as contributing to revenue. Depending on the organization, you might be asked to generate a certain ARR, pipeline, SQA, or a combination of the three; but no matter what that goal is, prioritize it over all other goals. Make it your north star metric. Your company (therefore, you,) will not succeed if you have a cool-looking website but generate no revenue.
This does not mean ignoring all other goals, but please prioritize it over others, based on the maturity of your organization. As a general rule of thumb, I suggest focusing primarily on pipeline generation and then gradually adding other elements. For instance, as a seed-stage startup, you should spend 100% of your time on pipeline, however, as a Series B company, pipeline generation can take up 70% of your department’s time.
4. Experiment frequently — Every day is an opportunity to find your killer campaign
Ok, you have done experiments before… Great! But now that you’re the Head of Marketing, the situation is quite different than trying a different messaging for your landing page or A/B testing an ad copy. As you now oversee the entire department, you must experiment in a larger context, beginning with programs. Maybe webinars as a whole might work best for you, maybe it’s SEO. It’s best that you first experiment with different campaigns before committing to any big resources. Maybe influencer marketing or customer marketing will help you? You experiment. Maybe your BDRs need to cut the cord and use only LinkedIn? You experiment. As high-level guidance, you should devote 20% of your time to brand-new experiments. Needless to say, you must embrace the fact that some of your very exciting ideas will fail.
No two companies are the same, therefore, there’s no unique marketing formula that can be applied for all companies. You try different alternatives to discover your killer campaign and then you can scale it to grow your company. Netomi is my fifth startup and I can easily say, at none of the startups that I worked at previously, I adhered to the same exact brilliant program — it was five different leading campaigns at five different organizations.
5. Track everything — Know your sh.t
As I mentioned earlier in this article, the job tenure for Marketing leaders is not necessarily reassuring. Smart marketers get fired from their positions very quickly. One of the main reasons for this is that everything you do is highly visible. You can do a fabulous job in getting mentioned in a top analyst report, having a record-breaking conversion optimization or building a rockstar BDR team, but if there’s a single typo in your most recent social media post, people will rightfully blame you. You must make sure that everything is tracked for validity. For instance, I have been working with Netomi for 3 years and I still review every single asset, both internal and external.
Typos and minor mistakes are only one side of the story. The main reason to track everything is to gauge whether you’re on target to reach your KPIs. Are you doing better or worse than other companies of your size in relation to a specific campaign? You need to compare your metrics based on your previous quarters as well as industry benchmarks. By knowing earlier, where you are versus where you were supposed to be, you can make some adjustments. Don’t wait for others, i.e., sales, finance, or your CEO to inform you that your department did not achieve yearly goals. Track all critical metrics monthly, and in some cases weekly, to ensure that you’re ahead of your game.
Marketing is fun, and so is the Head of Marketing role. It’s not as easy as it may seem from the outside, but don’t forget that only a small percentage of marketing leaders succeed. What you can do is apply these five tips and you will be a proud and successful marketing leader.
