#69: Reporting To The CEO - 5 Things Marketers Should Know

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup and we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive Our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

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Exit all right.

Hey, welcome to this episode of the Exit 5 Podcast. I'm trying something new, something different, something that we're calling the Five, which is taking five insights, lessons, learnings from in and around the Exit 5 community. Because one thing that's so amazing about having Exit 5 now is in the early days of Exit 5 used to be called something different. And it would often be fueled by my lesson or learning personally as a VP of Marketing, cmo, former marketing leader. Even at the time when we initially started, I was in the seat as a CMO and we started this. But now that there's 3,500 members, it's pretty amazing. Every time I go there, there's just discussions happening without me. And that is because there's thousands of people like you and me who work in B2B marketing. And this has become our forum, our water cooler, our place to ask questions, get advice. And I want to lean into that more. And so instead of me always posting, hey, here's my perspective. I'm starting to ask more questions inside of the community so I can get some really good discussions going. And one of those discussions happened. I asked the group about reporting to the CEO because I saw a LinkedIn post from Jason Lemkin from Saster talking about how, excuse me, that's my dog, Mo. Talking about how different it is reporting to the CEO for the first time. And especially if you're leading marketing and this doesn't, you don't have to be CMO or VP of Marketing to do this. You could be manager, marketing manager. Like I was reporting to the CEO for the first time because I'm at a startup and I wasn't like VP of marketing yet, but I was the person doing marketing kind of leading our marketing effort. And the CEO was, he took marketing as part of his purview and I reported to him or all the way up to, you know, you're a first time VP and now you report to the CEO. There's a lot there and it's because CEOs are unique people. And I'm saying this with a smile on my face. It's not an easy job. And so I wouldn't expect the typical Average person to be CEO. But there's lots of different things on the CEO's plate. Marketing is often one of them. They often have strong opinions about marketing. But this CEO is also managing financing, recruiting, hiring, maybe office space and leases and partnerships agreements and legal stuff and co marketing and brand partnerships and accounting and finance and HR and product and engineering. And there's a lot going on. And so you can't just show up to your one on one or have any meeting with the COO and be like, so what's up? You have to manage up and you have to be proactive. So I asked the Exit 5 community.

I said, hey, for those of you.

That either report to the CEO or have in the past, what are some lessons that people should know about reporting to the CEO for the first time? And we got five. I want to recap five of those things and this will be a quick mini episode for you. If you're at home listening to this wherever you are, maybe you report to the CEO for the first time or you're going to one day or you just need a little therapy or refresher reminder. But this is a collection of basically a bunch of comments and I kind of pulled out five of the top lessons. So number one lesson from reporting to CEO for the first time is if you don't have a plan, you'll be given one. What's the saying about a failure to plan? Well, this is definitely true for the CEO. If you're not proactive and you're not managing up and you're not owning the marketing plan, you will definitely be given one. And I can relate to this lesson firsthand. It's almost always better for you to have the plan first. And this could be the plan for overall marketing strategy, for hiring, for going into a new market, a plan for that new idea that came out of that new off site. It's always better for you to bring the plan and then they can react to the plan versus having them give you and hand you the plan. I think that was from Tom Wentworth, who's the CMO of Recorded Future and we just recorded podcasts actually. He was great. I think they're doing 250 million in ARR right now. But he had this nine word answer. Seven, eight, nine word answer. If you don't have a plan, you'll be given one. And I like that. Number two, solutions, not problems. The reason why is it's the CEO's job to manage and react to problems. All day she's dealing with problems across finance, investors, partners, product all the things that I mentioned earlier and she doesn't want to manage more problems, she doesn't have time for more problems. But you can flip this balance a little bit if you bring her ideas for solutions now, even if you don't have there's been many times in my career where I have not had the perfect solution. And in reality I actually need to talk to the CEO because this person is super smart and I want to get their opinion and I want to help create the solution and I want to bring them in and help me get to the help me fix this. But you can't expect this person to just magically react to a problem in a positive way and give you the solution. But I found that and so have many other members in this group. If you bring her ideas for solutions, even if it's not perfect, this allows you to operate then from a proactive position and you're going to then tap the CEO in to get you to help to find the right solution versus blowing up her day, having her react to a problem and just like be given a blank page. You also will get more help and make more progress on basically anything you're working on if you come with solutions and not problems. So think of it like this. Come with a solution, not a problem, even if it's not the perfect one. Then you're saying, hey, here's this problem that we're having and here's three possible solutions I got. This is what we're going to talk about in our one on one next week. I think that's a great way to do that. And coming with a plan also forces action because it gives the CEO something to react to. Number three is optimism. I love this from John Short, who runs Compound Growth Marketing and is a frequent contributor inside the Exit 5 community. A friend of mine, somebody that we tried to work together once, would have loved to hire and work with in a prior life, but he said CEOs look to marketing for optimism and finance for pests. If marketing is pessimistic, it's usually not a good mix. I also really like how Christopher Lockheed talks about marketing as the leadership department. This can be hard, especially right now where there's a lot of bad news or slow growth happening. But the CEO wants to look to marketing for optimism. Marketing is that kind of one department that lets you play offense a little bit and you can you literally own the narrative, you own the story. And so the CEO wants to hear optimism out of marketing and again back to solutions, not problems. That also comes from having solutions. So instead of just saying here's a.

Problem.

You'Re saying, wait, here's a problem. But you know, look, this is going to take some time, but here's three possible paths.

Here's what we're going to get if.

We do X, Y and Z. That's how you want to work with the CEO. Number four is proactive weekly updates. This is a consensus from the group. The CEO should never have to ask for the update from marketing. If the CEO comes in and says, hey, what's going on in marketing? Then you're, there's already five reasons why you're going to be behind the eight ball there. Marketing should be sending her the weekly update covering only the top items that directly impact company revenue. And I think this is important because we know as marketers there's a hundred things going on in marketing. But it's almost like the paradox of choice or me taking my kids to go and pick out one piece of candy. When there's hundreds, it's impossible and you end up looking at every single one. But if you can focus the CEO on the highest impact items and usually that comes down to revenue. For me, I think as a marketing leader it was like revenue and the team. That's what the CEO actually it was revenue, the team and the company story. Those were the three things that the CEO cared about the most. You can be proactive and basically your goal is to not let the CEO get in the weeds. They ideally don't need to know why you chose that color for that landing page or why you're doing this webinar on this day versus this day. You need to not let them get into those type of weeds. And the way you can do that is by being proactive, sending weekly updates that cover the top line revenue stuff. And so this is usually if I were to send a recap, it would be something that has results, wins what the team did last week, what the team is doing this week, where you're at versus the goals that you set. So ideally you have monthly, quarterly, annual goals showing some progress against those goals. Any lessons or learnings, hey, here's one lesson from this thing that we did last week. Here's what's not, you know, here's what we're gonna do instead. And then a call out. Maybe this is an opportunity to ask for help. Like here's an area where we're stuck. And so I always like to send out like a here's what's going on in marketing update this week that would run through those things and it would be a 5 to 10 minute slide deck and video asynchronously was great, like a loom video and slides that can work really well. The hard part about this is it's very easy to creep up around a five minute video. Very quickly becomes 10 minutes, very quickly becomes 15 minutes. And now all of a sudden you're sending the CEO this 20, 30 minute update. You got to just have the quick talking points, pretend that you have a two to five minute segment on TV and you got to deliver the headlines and anything else you can drill into more in your regular meetings and one on ones. The fifth one is share bad news fast. This is a great one. Something I didn't realize until later and a bunch of people brought this up, which is like, look, there's going to be bad news. This is the nature of work, this is the nature of doing business. It is not all going to be going well. There's going to be bad news. But your job is to not wait until the bad news festers and boils overblown. Like, the quicker you can get the bad news to the CEO, the better. And this could mean you lost a key hire. That top performer on your team just told you that she's quitting. Obviously, maybe not immediately. Are you going to text the CEO and tell her that that happened? But the quicker you can do that and digest and come up with a plan and then come back with solutions, not problems, you'll be in a better position. So there's going to be bad news. But when there is, the best path is to be direct and share it fast. And interestingly enough, anytime that I thought the CEO was going to react super negatively, I'm like, oh man, this is the time that I'm going to get smashed over the head. The CEOs that I've worked with in the past almost reacted positively in those situations. Like, that's a bummer. Don't worry, don't sweat, we're going to get through this. Like that's. And I think that happened because I shared things proactively and directly. When you wait, it looks like you're hiding something and so you got to bring the CEO in early. And I'm just a believer in like rip the band aid, right? Have the hard, direct conversation earlier and it's going to make everything else easier, like most things in life. So the quicker you can share bad news, the closer you are to actually working on this problem. And I think that was a good framing from somebody in the community, right? The quicker you share the bad news, the closer you are to working on the solution. And look, given the nature of the job, the CEO is going to be used to bad news. She's dealing with bad news all day. She probably just hung up on her prior zoom call and had more bad news. So you're not the only one doing it. But again, solutions, not problems. Don't just deliver the bad news and drop a bomb and walk away. Also, you can hurt the company or put other things at risk by holding onto this bad news longer than necessary. So take a deep breath, tell her, and move on. The quicker you can do it, the better. And like I said earlier, the reaction is often better than you might expect. So those are five kind of rough guardrails lessons that we have from the Exit 5 community about reporting to the CEO for the first time. Which can definitely be tricky if you've never done it before. But if you're listening to this and you're not in the Exit 5 community, that's like literally why we created this community, is to give you a forum, give you a place to have these type of discussions. And so that's why it's here. Come in. Join us Exit5.com if you're already in there as a member, thank you. Discussions like this make it so great, but I wanted to share this. This is what we're going to call the Five. Each week, roughly or so. We'll see how it goes. Each week we're going to bring you insights. The five from Exit five five insights from the community. They might be a recap of what's going on in there. It might be a specific lesson like this five lessons from reporting to the CEO for the first time. Thanks for all the support with Exit 5. If you haven't joined, go check it out. You can also get on the email list if you're not on there yet. If you're not ready to join, make the plunge. You don't have to. We'll send you free stuff for a bit and then you can decide to join later. So exit5.com I'm Dave. I'm the founder and creator of Exit 5 and host of this podc and I'll see you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have A community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast setting and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch.

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