#210: Strategy | Building a Marketing Operating System with the Team at Tenon (Ben Person, CEO & Co-Founder, Jessica Skovira, VP Marketing, & Hannak Rankin, Growth Marketing Manager)

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All right, hey, everybody, we're here. Ellen Williams can't hear anything because we didn't start yet, but we're starting now. So can you hear me now? Hey. Hello. Hello. Hello. All right, so I'm here. I just was backstage hanging out with the Tenon team. Got the background on how they named the company, which was great. We talked about naming and we got three of them from the team presenting with me today. It's going to be great. Our whole session is about building a marketing operating system. But before we get into all that, I just want to make sure that you can hear me. Okay. And let me know where you're writing in from, where you're listening in from. Yes, this is going to be recorded. We will always record it. We'll send you the recording after it's all good. So let me know. Like, I'm Dave. I'm going to write. I'm Dave. Burlington, Vermont. So cool. All right, Hannah's in Atlanta. Oh, that's nice. Hannah's in Atlanta. Billy's in Arizona. Eric's in Austin. Colin is in Boston. What's up, Colin? We're doing Boston meetup, March 2025. Put it on your calendar. Anna's in Austin, Texas. That's my friend right there. What's up, Jenna? Kansas city, Palm Beach, Fort Worth. Brittany from Connecticut. Berkeley, California. Detroit. Minneapolis, Minnesota. How do we do 10 and team? Do we have a global audio? Well, I haven't seen. Oh, there we go. Global. There's Amsterdam, Netherlands. Casey from dc, Michigan, Canada. Boston Meetup calling in from Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Mumbai. Yeah, we're global. Okay, we got everybody here. Ben's here. Ben's a CEO of Tenon, former cmo. One of us, he's in the chat also. All right, so we're going to bring on the Tenon team in a minute, but I just want to give you some context. So once a month we do these live sessions and we do them to go a little bit deeper than something that we might do on the podcast or in the Exit 5 community or in our newsletter. But I hope you get all of those resources. We like to bring on a marketer or a group of marketers who have done something that is going to be helpful to you. We've done them about email landing pages, SEO, abm, building a marketing plan. But today we are talking about the topic of the actual work of marketing. Because there is something that happens and I've been a victim of this or I've maybe caused this in teams that I've been responsible for. But a lot of times inside of marketing, there's just so much going on, right? There are so many requests coming in. You got campaigns, you got random ideas from the CEO, you got that event that you're planning for next week. All of a sudden the head of HR wants to know when the recruiting page is going to be up, Right? Can anybody relate to this? So one of the keys, one of the things that I've learned from interviewing hundreds of marketing leaders over the last 10 years in marketing, Eleanor and Matt say yes every day, is that the high performing marketing teams, they're not just creative marketing machines. They don't just have great ideas and go and execute on them. They have a system behind the scenes, an operating system, something that helps them manage and plan their work. And this is something that the team At Tenon believes really strongly in they're building a company around it. But we figured they'd be great to talk about this topic with you to help you manage the work of marketing. So hopefully you get something, one or two new things out of this that are going to help you manage your marketing work, be more efficient, be more productive. And I think this is going to be a great session. So we're going to have a little bit of presentation and conversation. As always, put your questions, be in the chat, helping each other out, adding things to what the speakers say. Put your questions that you have in the Q and A. We're going to have plenty of time for questions at the end, we'll call up the whole team. We'll hang out, we'll help you with all your questions live, but help each other in the chat and without further ado. All right, Danielle, where's my producer at? In my ear. Let's bring up the tenant team. There we go. We got Hannah, we got Jessica, and we got Ben. So this is the crew here today. We got a great crew. We got a lot of marketing experience right here on this video chat. And I'm excited. So I'm going to hand it over to you. I'll do my best. Everybody's favorite webinar. Not a webinar. Moderator. I'll be right here. But you all got it. I'm happy to have you here. Let's have a great session.

Yay.

Thanks, Dave.

Hey, everybody.

I love this Ali. Ali in the chat said this is very timely info. I'm talking marketing strategy with the CEO for final round next Monday. So let's help Ali get that job with the stuff we talk about.

I love it. Dave, let's dive in. Yeah, for sure. For me, it's exciting to be here. And so thanks for having us. By the way, as a former cmo, this was a major challenge for me, you know, and it's tooling agnostic. How do we ultimately understand the marketing strategy? What are we doing, why are we doing it, and how are we performing against the plan? And it's always a challenge. In many cases, marketing organizations kind of work in pockets and you find these silos. I think we were going to do just a marketing island campaign this year, and it's because they. That's the reality many marketing organizations face is they feel like they're on an island. And in many cases, they are operating almost in their own little island. I think you can relate to that, right?

I talk about marketing island way too much. It's a fun place, but it's a little bit chaotic. There's a lot going on there. So yeah, wonderful.

Let's dive in then. And like I said, we'll make this super interactive, non salesy at all. We're not talking product at all today, actually. All the handouts we're going to share with you will all be usable no matter what you use for your marketing, project management. So just a little bit of background. So my name is Ben Pearson, the CEO and co founder of Tennant. I started the company in 2022 as a previous CMO and it's just so refreshing to have such an amazing team of marketers. The power of two here, Jess and Hannah's with me. Jess, maybe a little bit of your background and then Hannah, love to have you both share your background with the audience.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm so passionate about this subject because like so many of you on this call, I'm sure you've worn a lot of hats. My background has been in startups, primarily in B2B SaaS, but I've done marketing ops, I've done demand generation, I've done brand, I've done it all. And it is a little bit of controlled chaos. But I have gotten smarter along the way, I will say that. So I'm really excited to talk to all of you. I've really enjoyed the Exit 5 community because it's so transparent and people are learning how others work. So that's my background and I'm just excited to unpack all of this.

Awesome.

I'm muted like it's my first time.

I'm Hannah.

Hi, everybody. I'm all things growth marketing and I think, man, do I identify with the needing to wear a lot of hats because at the end of the day, you got to try it all to grow. Like that's what a growth marketer is. It's what can we do to move upward, to move the needle. So my deepest area of focus has always been in brand and before Tenon, my career was actually exclusively at agencies. So lots of context. Switching from brand to brand to business to business and trying every tactic to move the needle.

So cool. All right, so we got a background who you are. I think we're itching to get into the facts and the tactics. Let's go.

We're just going to make one little note that all of you have been commenting. That's getting you an entry to win some cool swag. So keep chatting and talk to us because this could come your way. It's a nice little Relaxation kit from us to. To you.

Wonderful. So kind of why are we here and what we want to talk about? Each of you are probably in a planning cycle. You may already be working on your 2025 plan or may have already built that. How are you ultimately making the determination of what are you doing? You know, obviously there's so many channels, there's so many things we can do. We're trying this one out as well. And so, you know, it's a great story here, but where are you spending your money and how are you ultimately aligning your teams to ultimately execute that investment and get a return? It's a lot of trial and error, I think. Jess, Hannah, we've been trialing and erroring a lot of different ways, but as a previous cmo, my biggest challenge was exactly this. I want to build a plan for the year. I want to make sure that we're executing against the plan and how do I measure the results of that. And that was one of my biggest challenges. I think you heard a little bit in the pre video, but where do we ultimately align? And I do believe it's top down now. I'm in the CEO seat, but I wear the cmo. CEO, whatever you want to call it, to me, like, I still need that same level of visibility. I still need to know what is our marketing organization doing, why are we doing it, and what are the results of it. And so every one of your leaders, I think I saw a comment in the chat. There's somebody going up to their CEO to talk about probably their plan for the next year. How do you go with data to have a very effective conversation? Jess, you're constantly coming to me. Ben, I want to try something new and I love that. But just maybe tell a little bit of your story there too on kind of how you structure your approach there.

Yeah, it's absolutely what we saw in the chat of, okay, how do I bring all of this with some sort of logic and reasoning to my leader? And I really do think that this, this marketing work piece, this operating piece, is the missing puzzle piece. Because I'll be honest, we're told all the time in marketing what we should be doing, but not a lot around how. And I just feel that so much because I think I've worked with so many smart marketers, so many awesome companies, and yet I can honestly say I didn't really learn a lot about this till very recently. And so fundamentally, I think it's something that marketers just weren't taught. And we've gotten so Good at juggling everything. It's like our superpower. But also, I just always think, like, we would never ask developers to work this way. We would never ask others to. But inherently we're like, this is just.

That was always my biggest beef. I worked at. I worked at two companies. The engineers and developers were treated like, shh, be quiet. Yeah, don't talk to them. They can come into work at 10 because they need to be up late coding. And I'm like, wait, we're doing knowledge work, too. We're being creative, too. But marketing is supposed to be like, you're just supposed to get all this stuff thrown at you and sort it out. And it's very hard to say no or to be able to plan. The thing I always also struggle with is like, it's great to set an annual plan, but then three months into the year, half the things you thought you were going to do need to be able to change. And how do we do?

Yeah, 1,000%. Which is why. And I'll just say, like, personal anecdote and why I was just so interested in joining 10 and not in a salesy way, but just the idea of even focusing on marketing work was just something that I was like, oh. I was fresh off of working at a company where a VP came in and said, how are you doing everything, Jessica? How do you know what your team's doing? How are you aligning towards goals? And I was like, oh, don't worry. It's just all in my head. It was like that always sunny in Philadelphia. Like, I got it. It's like yarn and there's like, some things on the wall. And I probably, to her horror, she was like, this is not sustainable. So what we're going to share with you all today, honestly, is like a framework that I started back then and we've refined over time. And now at 10 and I feel like Hannah and Ben and all of us, we just, like, live and breathe this every day. But it is this marketing work system where it's everything from. You need to set up a centralized repository, whether that is project management software. We set up even how to just take tasks from other departments. Like, what is the intake process? How do we even. I like to think of it as, like, triage, as things are coming at us. Like, if there's not a way to triage these tasks, there's no way to know what we're doing. There's no way to prioritize things. And then lastly, there's no way to align to goals. So we Built out everything, including templates. I should mention templates were just key and it was like a light switched on in my head and I'm like, this matters. Marketers need to do this. So I would say, like, you can read all these fun stats on. These are like slightly scary stats on the screen. But that's why it's so important, because I could find 100 more of these stats we do every day. It's like pulling back the curtain, hence the curtain graphic. But we go into enterprises and we are like, oh, this is not just me. You're not alone. Lots of people.

All right, show us the stuff. We want the tactics, we get the story, we get it.

So the tactics are. We dropped a link. I think you should be able to download that. It's to a marketing toolkit that we've put together for you. You can also go on tenant HQ.com and see a marketing assessment where you can understand where you are in this journey. Are you like a baby beginner? Do you need to uplevel your processes? And then once you find that. Yeah, up in the right hand corner. Thanks, Danielle. Then we're building out a toolkit so you can ask for a staycation, which is what I like to. This is what I've called, like, I've come up with this marketing island. You're asking basically for time and the time is to stop the presses and give your team a chance to build what's broken. Essentially set a foundation. So literally send up a flare to your leadership. And we've included in the guide a way to even ask for this, just a way to frame it so you're not just saying, hey, we're not working. That's not the case. You're building a foundation and it's an investment for the future. So that's one of our offerings to you. And Hannah's going to get into a little bit more about what that includes because it's not just. It's not just asking, it's hey, can.

I just give an edit? Like, people want to see that. We want to get into the tactics.

A little bit more.

I know you got the links, but like, let's get into the meat. Please help me out.

Let's do it. Honestly, we could even probably skip a few pages and just roll right to it. Here, I'll move for you because effectively everybody knows that right now you're planning. And I think that the thing that people forget and what we have found is that the highest performing teams, they don't just plan, they prepare. Because no one, when they set out a plan, actually goes all the way from A to C with snow sailing. Like that's the best part of marketing. That's the juicy goodness that we love. We love the variety. You have to set up a system that allows you to test and learn to pivot to prove to all of these things. So that in mind, we created this resource and I think hopefully I see everybody in the chat like you feel this too, of the importance. I don't care where you do it, it doesn't matter. We happen to do it in Tenon, but we've created this resource. It's in a Google Doc. If you need to live in a Google Doc, as long as your entire team can be there and you have a way to communicate it, go for it. Take this toolkit and get into it. So what you'll see on the left hand side, this is how to navigate this. Inside of this Google Doc you have all of these resources. I'm going to touch on like the top three here for a second, but this is the one that's in the top right hand. You can download and follow along. So I'll just start here with goals and perfect.

This is what, this is what the people want. Let's explain this and how to, how to put it into play.

Okay. Give them what they want. I got it. So in Goals and Campaign timeline, this is one of my absolute favorite stops and a really, really great thing to do on your marketing station. If these are hard for you to fill out, you're under prepared for how everything is going to come at you for the entire year. Like take the time to fill this out, throw up a flare, take a pause and start at the very, very top. You have to start with the business goals. If your marketing team doesn't know what the goals of the business are, then they are not a revenue generating arm of your business. You have to start at the top. I will say Tenon goes so far that we're measured on business goals not meeting our marketing goals because that's why our marketing goals exist, to meet those business goals. That's one.

By the way. That's the thing that like if I'm looking at this right now and it's like it's great to have this template. If I'm looking at this and I'm asking myself this question like do I have marketing goals that align to business goals? Right. And I think that seems obvious but I've seen a lot of companies, I'm around a lot of companies right now and it's like we have this goal of the business goal is we need to hit $3 million in revenue this year. That means we need to add a million dollars in new revenue, and therefore we need to add this much in pipeline. But then the marketing goals are like, increase blog traffic 30% to X, Y and Z. Get this many people to listen to our podcast. That is how we get in this continuous cycle of doing a lot of marketing work with the team. Burnt out but not hitting our goals. We did this event in Austin a couple weeks ago, and one of the CMOs that we had on our panel, she had this great line and she said, if the company is in the red, marketing can never be in the green.

Yes.

And this is the perfect thing that relates to this, which is like, you have to figure out there is only so much time and so many hours in a day and so many marketing things you can do, you should do less. And let's really focus in on aligning these to the business goals. So I can't drive that home enough.

Yeah, love that, Dave. Just to key in on that. I mean, it's truly the point is marketing should be aligned and measured against the company objectives. It completely changes the way marketing operates. It was funny. I just an anecdote. We had a deal that needed marketing support to mail someone that had a baby a baby blanket. And you know, would that have been something that marketing would have done in the past if they were measured on MQLs and vanity marketing metrics? No, they wouldn't have. And so it's really important that marketing is aligned to company objectives. And I really encourage, if you're not doing that, to challenge your boss or challenge your CMO and to let's get our goals to align back to company. And like you said, if the company's in red, marketing can't be green. And so.

All right, Hannah, back to you. So we got the business goals is step number one.

Yeah.

I think I would even take it one step further. It's like, yes, you have to make sure that they're aligned. But I think that that statement feels like it's reserved to leadership. That would feel like a conversation that Jess and Ben need to have and then Hannah will just go do the things that make that happen. Right. And. And I think that that needs to shift. It has to be democratized that everybody has visibility into it and that your weekly meetings are surrounded by it. So our weekly one on ones between Jess and I, we start here and we try to figure out, like, all right, what are the tactics that are moving the needle so you know about where your puzzle piece fits in this three o' clock sunshine, okay, North Carolina for the wind. But you have to understand where you are and how you're getting to the next piece. So that's the other piece that I want to highlight on this sheet, which is the timeline. Inserting an entire full view snapshot of your year in enough space that it can be on one page is a huge, huge saver because you can see a snapshot of your whole year. You know what you're planning for, you know where you are, you know how things affect each other. So that's on goals and timeline.

The other thing that I would just jump in there with is that when you look on that left hand side within each of those campaigns and we've just given you ideas of things to do, that's just something that we like to do. But obviously your campaigns can be different. But this is a starting point. But under each one, we give suggestions of how you should lay out the tactics so that obviously your campaign is driving to those goals. Because like you said, Dave, like, you could just say, hey, we're going to be doing a lot to drive traffic. And it's like, what is this doing? By getting people to the blog, does your campaign actually drive the goal? And you have to ask yourself some hard questions as marketers, because we spend a lot of time saying, hey, you know, if we're spending all of our time looking at our project management on one thing and that's not even aligned, you know, we're just churning through work. We feel like we're running and we're doing a lot.

But so does everything. Does everything that the marketing team does, should it all fit under campaigns? Like, do you have this kind of campaign level thinking of, like, what are the campaigns we're running in Q1, what are the campaigns we're running in Q2? Does everything have to fit? Because I get it, you have the business goals, you have the marketing goals, and then how do you think about campaigns? And I'm asking, this is something that I wish I had put more structure in because I was very reactive to the creative idea, oh, yeah, let's do this thing, let's do this thing. But how can we align these things better than campaigns? How many campaigns do you have running? Any thoughts on that?

I have a lot of thoughts on that. So I always say less is more. I like to have what I call, and it's in here, an evergreen campaign. That really is something that is Always automated, always on. I like to say it keeps the lights on so that when you're busy and you even want to step away, you have something running. These are things that could be nurtures. These are things that are like, you can change them maybe quarterly or monthly, but it gives you the freedom to take those staycations because your brand can still work for you. But then I like to keep the campaigns aligned again to like the big company objectives. But then we know there's flexibility. We're not saying that everything can be in a campaign because it can't be. And that's why there's another tab in here that has miscellane and just crazy because that's going to happen. We know that's going to happen, but we generally want to be able to say hey.

So there's so Kelsey in the chat said campaign taxonomy and alignment, something we relaunched this year and it's been a game changer for focus and also reporting. Ellen says love that others are emphasizing the evergreen campaign. So I'll just give an example and see if this is kind of what an evergreen campaign could be. So I worked at this company called Drift. Our mission at Drift was to create this category called conversational marketing and be the lead leaders of that. Right. And so every quarter we would have an evergreen campaign that was like established leadership in conversational marketing. And so all the things that we would do would fall under that. So like, oh, we got a speaking opportunity at Saster for our CEO. We have four kind of pillar pieces of website content that were created about like why conversational marketing and how. And then we might have two or three additional campaigns that are not necessarily about making Drift the leader in conversational marketing. But hey, we're going to this like Gartner CMO Summit in February and that's going to be a big part of a more sales driven campaign. Am I kind of speaking the language that you're describing here?

1,000%. And that's why, because again, maybe it's something where like I've seen in the chat, people are saying, you know, you need different segments. Absolutely. Like you need to be segmented. But we had something called like our connected campaign. We need to talk about tenants, connected functionality between marketing work and automation. That's the evergreen campaign. But then divide that as appropriate across events, across everything. So yeah, it's multiple tactics but maybe a centralized theme and you'll see that as you dive down into like the campaign planner. So hopefully that helps people start to think about this.

Yeah, I think that exactly what you just articulated. If you do take the time to set that up and go through like here's my campaign. That's servicing. This is the goal of this campaign and it's attached to this goal and you go all the way up the chain. Then every single day when things come at you from everywhere, all at once, you can facilitate trade off conversations. You might not be able to say no, but you can say hey, if I do this, it's positioning this above it or below it and you are able to have those trade off conversations so much easier. And as a team you can diagnose. Is it helping us meet this goal? No. All right. It goes down in the list. Is it helping us with this business need? Great, then stop the presses for us. If it helps us get a deal done within a certain amount of time, then it immediately goes to the top of the list because that's how we work.

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I think this is the reason that the planning stuff is so important too, because it's very. You need to play as a marketing leader for all you listening this or whether you're a one person marketer or you manage a team or you manage the whole unit, you need to play offense with your marketing plan inside of the company, right? And so you need to say, hey everybody, here are goals, here are the campaigns we're running, here are the key initiatives and themes that come up, right? Because then when you do that, you have a framework for inevitably the VP of sales is going to message you be like, hey, why are we not at this event? All of our competitors at this event, we're like, well, every day, oh, that happens inside your company. Oh really? Like, because then you have a framework to say instead of just being the marketing team that says no to everything and nobody likes working with you, you're like, well, hey, you know, we decided not to go to that event because actually we're focused on these three major campaigns and this one doesn't really fit, right? It also helps that Even in like exit 5 example, it helps the team push back on me as the leader. Because then when I, you know, I come back in from a run and I got this crazy idea, we're going to do this thing. And they're like, yeah, it's a cool idea man, but how does this fit with the three key initiatives that we have? And I'm like, well it doesn't. I'm okay with them saying no to that because then they've showed me the things that we are doing and I just think this is so important to be able to have these conversations inside of the company. Okay, let's keep going. Keep moving it.

Okay. While we're switching to the other side, I'll just add that when you're the low level contributor on the other end of that, when you're thinking about your teams, if they don't understand where a simple one off task fits into the puzzle, after 100 of those and you don't see how your work is really making a difference, it just becomes crippling, it becomes chaotic. Where the alternative is really empowering. See how you fit and you see that it's moving the needle, which is the thing that every marketer wants. Okay, next piece that we'll highlight is the top priority. So we use something like this in Tenon kind of as like our hub or our home screen. We actively start every single week here. So it's right off of our goals. We come here, we're like, what's happening this week? What do we have to get done? And it's for both of us. And so I know what Jess is working on, she knows what I'm working on and knows how it comes together. That's a big piece of this is it's very collaborative and we each know how we're contributing in order to get to those goals. So you might lay up like your upcoming events or your social, what have you. The other thing I'll point out is we included miscellaneous to do's underneath of those top priorities because the inevitable happens and you can't plan for it, but you absolutely can prepare for it and put it there. Another piece on the prepare. Don't just plan templates. My goodness. The least amount that you can stare at a blank page, the better. Like staring at that blinking cursor under a deadline is just horrifying. If you can pull up a template that says, we've done this before, how can we make it better? What do we need to do? Things just feel and go so much better. So we included an entire section here for templates and just use them, abuse them, redo them for everything that are your highest occurring motions.

Yeah, I would say the template thing. Honestly, like before this, I'm a very like creative, maybe crazy marketer. And so this sounds boring. Like templates is like, oh, don't make me put this in a template. And yet I think it's also an incredible training opportunity because if you can do it as a working session, as a group, it's like, then you're free to run you don't need to micromanage. It really helps leveling people up. Like anecdote. I had an SDR come onto the marketing team. She was going to start helping with field events, but she didn't know marketing. And we did this together, and she became like the expert overnight because we built it. So whether you're helping somebody train or then she can revise it herself, she has learnings. She's going to build this and own it. And then every time we get a request for a field event, you're just like, yeah, I know she got it.

So it's so helpful we do this now.

So as an example, like, for one of these webinars, we've done these for two years, and now that we have a team, it's gone from a solo operation to a team of five. Each one we do, we learn more plays, and it's like, oh, this is totally same. That could be a playbook. And just in the past, I've never. I've always been about just do more and more and more. But wait, no. If we can just take a step back and slow down and, like, productize this, then we can scale better and so we can look and we could say, okay, if the webinar is on the 14th, we need to start promoting it by the first. In order to start promoting by the first, that means the landing page needs to be done, then off to design. By this date, we need to send three emails, two reminders. We need to have this banner on the website. This can all be productized. And then as you pass it off to other folks in the team, you can evolve and learn and get smarter. So I love, like, especially as you onboard and grow, you're like, hey, here's how we do webinars at our company. Okay, check, check, check. And I also think this is like a Elon Musk thing, which is like, you should also be able to question all of the requirements in here. And so as you go, just because the thing is 15 steps, if you're going through it and you realize it could be three, let's edit and remove this. Let's have flexibility. But I love the idea of playbooks.

And so does the.

Yeah, it's so funny that you say that, Dave, because literally this week, Hannah and I were talking about, you should not just set these and then forget these. Because if you made this so painful for your marketing team to work that they don't want to adopt this, that's a problem too, because, you know, I don't need to have five steps to tell me how to post something on LinkedIn. Right. Maybe somebody does, but you're like, oh, this is exhausting. So we really also, when we think about it, it needs to be simplified. We can't just like say this is the way or the highway. It needs to be something where you sit down with your team and say, okay, reevaluate, like in an agile methodology. Did you find this helpful? And if not, let's break down the friction points. So yeah, exactly.

Right. A lot of marketers want out there, Jess. I know we originally were a marketer of one. And as you scale to that point, having these playbooks, these plays, Dave, as you call them, is so important to easily scale your team. Or like I said, if you have any turnover, having those plays already built sure helps when the next person comes on board.

So yeah, thousand percent. I think that's like the stat. I don't know if anyone wrote it or read it about the turnover, the churn and marketing teams. It's high and I think it might not be the only reason. Maybe we're all just like looking for that next cool brand to join, but I think sometimes we're looking for this grass is greener, like somebody else has it figured out that their system set up better. So I do think that just honestly doing this is a calming thing as we all like are in the holidays and Q4, to realize, like, the problem might not be your what you're doing, it might be the processes. And your whole team really should collectively, like, be able to relax and feel better and be able to focus their attention on other things if this is cleaned up. So I hope that this, hopefully this guide, this toolkit gets you kind of going for 20, 25 and inspires you to take a little sit down and breather. But I think it's really cathartic. I don't know personally.

All right, we got a bunch of questions. I think we. So this is from Caitlin on the topic of marketing priorities. Is it supposed to be three priorities for the entire team? I'm on a team of 15 marketers.

Yeah. No, I would say it would be on your priorities for your team, how that then aligns to the goals. But yeah, everyone's priorities and campaigns might be a little different if you're on a larger team, for sure.

Cool. All right, put your questions in. By the way, we're going to hang out. We'll hang out and take questions now. So make this, use this as your therapy time. Ask us questions. We're going to help you specifically with your marketing. Okay, this question is from Katherine. How do you balance planning ahead your dream scenario with frequent changes in a startup which is reality.

You want to take this, Hannah? I feel like this is.

Yeah, I would happily what I think that one is. I have embraced the love of that. Like I think that that's what marketing is about. I think that if you are. Unless I'm crazy and I've just never been a part of a team that has it and like please tell me in the chats if I'm alone but I've never been a part of a year where I look back and it went like completely according to plan. Like the whole point is to be able to test and learn and learn, lean into where the business is going or the market or the consumer and listen and change and pivot. Like I think that, I think that it's much better to plan with the preparation that you are going to have to do that and that's where your system comes into play. But setting up these things that you can move on in an agile way, that's still strategic. That in my mind is the operating system. The operating system isn't, here's our plan and everyone knows it and we have a chatbot. That's not what a really, really humming operating system is like. It's the ability to create a team and a hub where everyone can self serve. You have the things at your fingertips. So that like today I thought I was going to make a one pager but actually I need to do this. I still have the resources I need that I can do that and I know it matters.

One thing to add, Hannah, that you're spot on. I think the pauses, the staycation as you call it. Right. Like that's part of it. Our startup world. Jess, you're like when we expanded into marketing automation this year, you're like, we need a pause, we need a vacation, we need a, you know, as we change business priorities or expand into other areas. As a startup, those pauses are your key to getting reset. Now obviously all the evergreen things that are running, they're just going to pivot to potentially those additional areas you're expanding into. But the short answer is use those staycations, use those pauses in a startup or if you're in a scale up to handle those pivots in the business.

I'd also add like the stage of the company matters a lot here too. I've typically worked in early stage companies and so I don't really, I'm not great at this in A in a later stage. But I used to just write monthly marketing plans because everything would change so much. And so it's like, what are we going to do in June? I don't know exactly.

Roughly.

I can come up with some ideas, but one month at a time. Let's sit down and let's come up with, hey, what are the things we want to ship this month? What are the things we can make progress towards? Okay, let's commit to that work. So shrink it down and think about shipping monthly and quarterly if the longer term planning isn't going to work for you.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And if you look in the toolkit, that's why we keep. I think we even made a note, do a placeholder campaign. Like, you might not know that's okay, just put something vaguely in there. But yeah, like things are always changing. But again, another thing that Hannah, we didn't mention in the toolkit, but it really is building out that messaging and content repository that has been so vital as a part of the whole operating system that you have messaging and all these things at your fingertips. So that's something a staycation can also be like, just set yourself up to run faster so you're not losing everything and doing double work. So we built a little bit in there to give you some ideas about what to do. But that can even be on a campaign by campaign basis to all your messaging in one place, everything there, so that when these pivots happen, your team isn't frazzled.

I think the little things matter too. I feel strange even saying this, but name your files, something that makes sense to other people besides yourself. And I think that I've been a part of teams where the leaders will say, we don't have time to get a system in place, everything's moving too fast. And I've been a part of teams where the leader says, like, we don't have time not to do this. You have to get your house in order and we can't operate until you do. The latter is a better place to be. Like, it's not as chaotic. And I think that if you take pride in not only finishing a task, but improving the process, man, if things don't just feel way better, make things able to be repeated every time you do them.

I saw a question in the chat.

Maybe no, take it. I love it. You run with it.

Well, the question was around, how do you make other people who maybe don't see the value of this like it was lost in the chat, but you know, you have to take this to leadership and you have to make them believe that this is important. And I think that's it. You have to start becoming an advocate for this. Be like an advocate for change. And when you go again with your suggestion in hand for a staycation, you have to not just say, we're pausing, but you have to say the why. Like, if it's revenue that's going to resonate, if it's churn metrics, if it's all these different things affect, it's this snowball effect, you need to have buy in from the top, otherwise this doesn't work. And then I would also say you really, as a leader have to lead from above. Like, if you're telling everybody to do the process and then you're not living by the process, I've seen that fail terribly many times because it's like, I want you all to do this, but I'm never going to dig in. It's like you be the person who starts saying, we're going to look every single week at our goals and we're going to look in this centralized repository. And if I name something wrong or I put it in the wrong spot, I want you to. Yeah, I do. And Hannah calls me out and I'm like, you're right, it's in the wrong spot and I'm going to hurt the system. And then as you grow and you add more team members, they come in and they're like, this is how this machine works. I'm not going to mess up the machine. But that, that comes over time. So, yeah, I just think it's really, it's just really important.

All right. You all can see the Q and A, right?

Okay.

Why don't you drive? You drive. I'm doing a lot of talking. You all drive. What questions stand out to you? Let's read them and answer them. Yeah, yeah.

Measuring and reporting metrics.

We'll get the Q and A. Let's give preference to the Q and A tab and then you can sort by upvotes. So let's pick out some of those that stand out.

How might you include employer leadership development or team learning into an operating system like this? Continuous upskilling seems so important in our industry where things are always changing. Yeah, that's amazing. I think that's why when I said templates or when people are onboarded, this is part of it. Training is key with this and, you know, if you build it into the system and even as a leader, that's why I truly believe in, like these Working sessions where you don't just pull somebody in and say, this is what we do and just let it go. You have to nurture it. It takes nurturing. So I just think that that's something that again, fundamentally could change in marketing. I've just joined teams where it's like there's no system, no one's owning it, and then everyone just kind of drowns together. So let's see, what else do we have here?

I think there's a question I like around the sales side. The alignment between marketing and sales, that's always the challenge is. So the question is, would you suggest bringing in sales for event to understand this tactic and goals? Too many chefs in the kitchen, so you know, that's always a challenge. Aligning sales and marketing, having a command center, having this operating system and sharing what is your plan and why are we doing what we're doing for us. Without that, you're sort of becoming this order taker. And that's like the worst thing for marketers to find themselves in is this sort of flood of orders from sales from all parts of the business. And so, yeah, direct alignment. So building a plan using this guide that Hannah and just shared with you as a starting point, and then sitting down with sales and talking through it and making sure you're fully aligned.

Yeah.

Justin, your thoughts on that one or Hannah?

I think I just would also say that don't be afraid of having and sticking to some rules of order. We have a rule with our sales team that if they have a request, they have to ask the team and showcase it inside of a team channel. They can't just say, hey, Hannah, can you do this thing for me really quick in 20 minutes? Like, that's not allowed. We don't work that way sometimes that is true and we have to do it. But we have those conversations as a group because those one off things, they affect the groups. So those requests, like, it can't be one off. We have it of sales because then Ben can see it and say, oh, wow, this is what that is going to move around. And Jess can see it too. And we can have a priority trade off conversation all by implementing the simple rules of order of, hey, you can't just slack us and give us orders. That's not how it works.

I also think you got to bring in, you got to make sales your partner in this. I think if you say, here's the marketing plan for this quarter and you present it to them and front of everybody else for the first time, then that's not what a team does. That is not how you get aligned on something. It's the same thing. Like if the CMO said, all right, marketing team, here's the plan for the year. Everyone's like, wait. People as humans need to be involved in the process to take ownership of it. And so you need to go to sales. You need to say, all right, sales, Our goal is to generate a million dollars in net new ARR this year, right? Yep.

Right.

Okay. That means we need this much in pipeline. That means this much in meetings. Okay, cool. We all in agreement on that? All right, great. Here's how we're going to do that in Q1. The goal is this. It has to be a collaborative effort. And so bring in sales early, bake this thing together, and then I would go out to the rest of the company and present a unified plan together. Present marketing and sales together. Not marketing is going to stand up and present the marketing plan. Sales is going to stand up and present the sales plan. How can we present this together as one unit? Especially for all you on here, this is. This is B2B. It might be different in, you know, if you're selling consumer products, but for everybody here is mostly selling B2B. It's got to be a collaboration.

What tools or software do you use to operationalize your operating system? So I think this is a great question because obviously, I mean, it's going to be a little different for everyone, but for us, obviously, Tenon, we do a lot with Canva. We do a lot with Google Docs. We do a lot that, honestly, it's kind of bootstrapped. We're a startup. We can do a lot to operationalize this. And what I think is amazing is you don't really need that many tools to do this. I mean, you have your marketing automation, but truly, I mean, setting up intake, setting up your project management, setting up your foldering, as silly as it sounds like that is like leaps and bounds sometimes ahead of enterprises that we've seen with 800 marketers. And they're like doing campaigns out of emails. I don't know how they do it, but it's amazing. So I think that's the thing. You can do a lot of this kind of quickly and easily and hopefully with our little toolkit as well.

All right, here's a question in here. This is from Martin. How can you create a budget that is more realistic and reflects your goals? Marketing can be hard to Predict, especially for CEOs. It can vary and there's always a risk. What approach do you recommend for selecting campaigns and predicting whether we will meet our goals? How do you manage discussions throughout the year to decide on adding or removing budget from certain activities?

Great question.

Yeah, we're going through it right now.

We just did it. Yeah. Like it literally is the exact same thing of doing the math backwards. Same thing with campaign planning. Like if your budget doesn't match what the goals are, it doesn't matter. So we went through every line item again really simply like we put it on a on Excel spreadsheet one day maybe we'll share a version of this because I've used it at so many different companies. But again it's like you need to drive it backwards and if there are like line items of like what is the spend? Does this align to anything? No. Do we think that it's going to drive if it's getting more qualified leads? If it's not going to do that, then like it gets cut. And sometimes you keep tooling, you keep all sorts of things around because it's like emotional comfort tooling and things that you just feel like you need. But if it's not doing a thing like you cut it. And so we're pretty brutal with it, especially at startup level where if it is not contributing, it gets cut. And that doesn't mean that we won't experiment and try things, but we have to fail fast. And I think you can get pretty comfortable thinking you need certain things and you don't. You can get by with a lot of different really awesome platforms and solutions that are not going to break the budget.

So and sometimes, I mean simple math that doesn't work enables the best strategic decisions. I mean we had a conversation this week where we were using a tactic and we ran the numbers and the math did not map and we knew immediately we either have to spend more or we have to change our strategy. What do we do? And so when added up and if it doesn't work, you need to have a conversation. And those are some of the. That's the most strategic conversations and it's just because the math.

This is a good one. This is from Alison, just popped in the chat. How would you recommend setting more brand related goals and especially goals for pre revenue company? I find these harder to quantify and measure. My company is currently pre revenue and in some ways I feel like we're shooting the dark trying to figure out what we're working towards next year. Well, I want to hear you all answer the. Let's separate this because I think the. How do you Answer. I want to figure out, like, how would you plan for the brand stuff and setting brand related goals? I'll answer the pre revenue thing first. I think when you're pre revenue, it is shooting in the dark and you need to make up your own goals. Right. You need to say we have a free trial. Like our motion is free trials. Okay, Right now we get three free trials a month. Like our goal for January is to get a hundred free trials a month made up goal. You need to place the stake somewhere. You need to do things to see what the end line. Let's make a concerted effort. We're going to run our first campaign. Everybody across the team. We have these three plays. We're going to run. Boom, we did it. January, we didn't hit 100, but we got 73. Awesome. That's much better than where we were. And then you just need to start doing things to recalibrate. You have to take shots in the dark to find stakes where you can go and give your own benchmarks against. And so I would get super clear on what are the company goals. Is it sales meetings, is it trials? Just zero in on that, ignore everything else and see, say like if we only had five sales meetings this month, that we're going to try to get to 10 next month and here's how we're going to do that. That's my answer to that. Now, how would you recommend setting more brand related goals in this marketing operating system that you.

Yeah, I'll happily take that one. I think that it's very close to what you're saying is that like, figure out where your business goals are and then figure out why. Are you having brand goals based on the business goals? Do you need more awareness? Do you need to have a heavier saturation within a specific, specific audience demographic? Do you want more engagement on a channel? Like, what are those brand goals? And then I'll just pick one. For example, let's say for instance, I worked with a client that had fully saturated. Their audience was male, completely male, and they wanted to grow the business. And we knew that we needed to bring more people from more genders into that pool. So we used Instagram as a tactic because we knew that females, ages call it 35 to 45, used that social media platform the most. And then we increased our penetration and engagement with females on Instagram. Do we know for sure how many dollars that brought into the pool? No. Did we know that they needed to increase their audience in order to sell more things? Absolutely. So you kind of just Pull at the string in order to solve that problem. And then over and over again when your client or your boss says, but does this sell any more water bottles? Or what have you, remind them of how that brand goal is attached to the revenue goal. Even if you can't do a direct attribution, measure it somehow and then show how they relate.

The other thing I would say, I mean, I believe so strongly in brand. I mean, I know you, Dave, like from your background at Drift. I mean, I knew the brand so much and it's. Sometimes you can't just put an actual, like dollar sign to brand, but I think when you realize it helps everything from hiring people who want to join your company. I've had companies where I just felt like the brand was even what kept us going from just people who wanted to keep working on the product. Right. Because that was something that just made people feel a certain way. And truthfully, it can just, it can touch so many different areas that I think sometimes you have to put like a little bit of a slush and say, brand we know is important and we know that it drives revenue and, and so you can't forget about it. I mean, like, we just know that we go back to the same brands because we love the way it makes us feel. And B2B especially.

Yeah, I mean, you could, I would say I did a podcast with a person the other day, CMO of a company called Content Stack. This guy Gurdeep Dylan, who was, he was at Adobe at Marketo, like he ran demand gen at SAP. The last guy in the world that you think would believe in brand. Like hardcore old school demand gen. And he's like, no, he's like, dude, the brand is the only thing that matters. And I couldn't agree with that more. That was true 10 years ago when I was at Drift even more. Look at Scott Brinker's Martech slide or whatever. Pick any industry, any product, there are thousands and thousands. Brand is all that matters. And so when I see that question, I see it as like, how do you measure brand? Now is that asking, how do you measure, like, brand marketing? Like printing up a bunch of T shirts with your logo on it and sending it out to customers. Like, that's brand marketing. How do you measure brand? Meaning, like, do people know you exist? Do people think you're legit? Well, you're going to measure that by knowing more people come to your website and ask about your stuff. And so I would set goals around brand being like, we want more inbound organic traffic than we had last quarter. That is a brand goal. Right. We want to double the number of direct search, direct website visitors. Like, that is a direct impact of brand. And so you can measure that by, if you're everywhere, if you're doing content, if you're at events, you'll be able to measure those things. I think you just got to get tighter on what you mean when it comes to brand. Okay. All right, we're going to wrap. That was great. Thank you. All the comments were awesome about helping people out. It's a good time of year. I think, if anything, we just. We turned up the volume on, like, man, you really got to. You got to think about the marketing work that you're doing. Small company, big company. You got to be able to organize, plan, and prioritize that work to be an effective marketer. Because I came up in an era of marketing where there was, like, a school of marketing called, like, agile marketing that that was not always the way it was. Like, bigger companies would plan in quarters and years. Now things are changing so fast. I mean, my head is exploding trying to keep up with all the AI developments and everything. So you gotta be able to operate this way. Ben, Hannah, Jessica, thank you so much for doing this. Danielle's gonna throw a poll real quick. We try to measure everything so we can get it quick. How would you rate this session on a scale of 1 through 5? The chat was awesome. I know your templates are super valuable for people, so thank you all for coming and hanging out with us. Go and check out the Tenon team. They're all on LinkedIn. You can. You can DM Ben and ask him for the backstory about why they called the company 10. And if you want to do that. And they also hang out in the Exit 5 community. They're good members in there. And we'll see you all later, so good luck. We got, like, two more working weeks, and then everybody's gonna shut down for a little bit, so we'll see y' all later. All right.

Good feedback so far. Thanks.

See y' all later.

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Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real. Teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers and right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you gotta grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com officehours that's paramark.com office hours.