Almost every Marketing or Growth leader is struggling with connecting with the rest of the c-suite with the successes of Marketing and Growth activities.
Why? Very often this is down to the understanding of channels, the impact these channels are having and often why certain channels are used.
Frequently this is down to the level of the relationship and how effective the time spent together is.
Relationships Matter At Every Level: If you cannot explain how your department operates, what works and what doesn’t, and provide examples of how you answer the following problems:
- How can a CFO back your business case?
- How will a founder appreciate the time it will take for SEO to kick in to drive more MQLs?
- How will the CPO get behind a workstream they will have to invest their resource into?
- How will a CTO prioritise developers to projects versus tech debt?
- How you will then scale these tactics
Unfortunately, it can feel a little lopsided in Marketing or Growth having to explain everything, however, knowing the game you are in and how to play it effectively will help progress your department and help the business to progress.
Issues: Some of the common issues I have found throughout my career and more recently in my coaching are:
- Not internally marketing the Marketing Department
- Not having a clear Marketing plan for the year or next 18 months with confidence and prioritisation
- Not being able to justify budget increases and headcount requests
- Not being able to justify agency fees when you have a performance “lead”
- Defending the team activities rather than showing examples of campaigns and key learnings
- Not understanding how the business makes money and how your Department contributes to increasing revenues
- Not building relationships with the other leaders within the business, no time spent = no relationships = limit buy-in
- Not being able to explain why top-of-funnel work is essential while everyone else pumps money into performance
- Not being able to go into detail on key decisions, namely prioritising impact
- Not being revenue and business impact-focused
- Not being able to explain why a podcast is a brand-building activity and sponsoring one isn’t as effective
- Not being able to story tell effectively what is hindering most CMOs/CGOs, storytelling and associating to the core metrics is vitally important, especially in today’s macro environment
The Free Marketing C-Suite Cheatsheet
Rather than just supply a list of issues, this cheat sheet for the c-suite will help to explain what you do, why you and the team choose certain activities and educate managers on what the channels are and the impact of these channels.
It doesn’t matter whether you are B2B, B2C, DTC or B2B2C, this will help you to translate what you are doing and why you are doing it and help everyone come together on a discipline everyone thinks they can do.
The trick isn’t to go into every single channel but the most important channels that have an impact and will raise discussions in the next three months.
If there are channels that you are been pushed on ensure you have this high up in the sheet and those channels that are not relevant, ensure you include as many CEO’s, founders etc are shared the same blog posts with the killer channels you should be using but doesn’t apply to your business type.
Get More Help
Want more support get in touch for CMO coaching or if you feel like your CEO or Founder requires external support, get in touch on — coach @ dannydenhard.com
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