The 3 Ways To Get A CEO To Green Light High-Risk Marketing Ideas

On today's show, we're breaking down what marketing leaders need to do to be successful in 2024. We're giving you three actionable things and one really hot take that's going to be controversial for many of the marketers out there. Let's get into today's show. Kieran and I were talking. We get a bunch of emails from founders who are like, my marketing isn't good enough. And then we get some emails from marketing leaders who are like, oh, my CEO doesn't understand marketing. And we wanted to do a show today to address that very problem. We're going to break down what you can do to be better aligned with your CEO. Get better results from your marketing strategy. In 2024. We're going to give you three practical tips and one very hot take on what you need to do to make all of that happen. So, Kieran, I know this issue is near and dear to your heart. You've. What's that me a ton about emails you've been getting from founders and from marketers on this topic. So I want to open the floor. I want to let you just rant, give me, give me your rant of what is going wrong in the CEO and marketer relationship today.

Two things I hear time and time again from CEOs and founders that I talk to. Number one, my marketing team isn't being creative enough. They're. They're doing the same as everyone else. Like, everything they do looks the same as everyone else. And then the second is, I don't know how to measure how my marketing team is doing or how all of my marketing team is doing. I don't know if part of the marketing is good. I don't know if the teams are executing well. I don't even know what good looks like. They were actually the same problems, right? If you break marketing out into two core buckets, it is the things that create demand, the things that capture demand. Now, most CEOs and founders who are not from a marketing background want marketing to be focused on capturing demand. Right? It's the thing that is clearly measurable. Paid marketing, search, email marketing, life cycle, all of these things that we can suck in the demand. And I can figure out, like, what is the return on investment in my. What is return on investment in my work there? Like, how much money am I making back on these things? Are the teams doing a good job? I understand the metrics, so I can tell whether they are hitting their goals or not hitting their goals. But the more demand you create, which usually goes underappreciated, the more valuable. All of those capture channels are, right? If we grow awareness for our brand, if we invest more in these kind of social channels that are hard to measure, if we create the podcast, the short form video, if we figure out more creative ways to bring our products to life during launches, if we figure out how to invest in community, or if we get much more consistency and crisp and telling the story of our product, all of those things help to create demand. And marketers love to be creative. This kind of narrative that my marketing team is not innovative or creative. It's usually not because the team itself doesn't want to be creative. They want to focus some of their time on creating demand. The problem is that they struggle to defend that work to the CEO or the founder. Right? The metrics that we have been given as marketers force us to focus on capturing demand because that is where the CEO and the founder feel safe and naturally so because they don't know marketing, they know these metrics. They can say, well, you are either hitting your goal, you're not hitting your goal. This is my cat. This is ltv. I feel cool. I know. Whether you are doing a good job or not doing a good job, it's much easier to tell if the marketing team is performing or not. It's why most B2B marketing looks and feels and pretty much is the same. It's why most marketers are stuck doing the same things. Iterative improvements versus really flexing their creativity. This isn't something for the CEO or founder to solve. I hear this all advice all the time. Go only work for a CEO who gets marketing. Wow. You are going to shrink your total addressable market in terms of companies you work to to a smaller group and for why? Because you can't do your job, you know. But even if they got marketing, let's just say even if they got marketing, they might not get it all. They might only get the capture demand part and they might not even agree with you on what parts are important. It's the job of a marketing leader to solve this problem. You need to articulate the value of all work and why it matters. Both creation and capture. Clear problem statements. Work aligned to those problem statements. Clarity on how that makes the customer happy. Customer centricity how does the work I'm doing show up for my customer? Clear deliverables Just because you do not own a metric doesn't mean you don't own a deliverable. Something that the CEO and founder can see an artifact and look at the progress and understand why that matters to the business. True marketing leaders can shape how the CEO and company see the value of marketing. You should be one of those marketing leaders versus just company jumping to find the perfect CEO who understands marketing in the same way that you do.

Kieran. Here's my breakdown. My breakdown is CMOs are at their best when they're aspiring to be CEOs, right? When they are thinking about the broader business and the broader business strategy more than just getting stuck in a tactical strategy and tactics of marketing itself. Right? Because when you're stuck in the weeds of marketing, nobody understood you just think that the world doesn't understand your problems, don't understand your pain. When you can place your marketing strategies and tactics in the overall context of the business, that is where success is really going to come from. I love Kieran's take about marketers taking accountability for their roles and not complaining about their CEO. Not trying to have some selection bias for a CEO that might really be a more of a marketing minded CEO here. At the root of all of this in marketing is your creativity and your risk tolerance in line with the business's risk tolerance, right? Most businesses want predictability and you cannot get predictability and take a ton of risk. And that's the challenge, that's the friction in all of this. But if you want predictable things, they don't have the same impact as when you take a risk and get a big win, right? So a marketer's job is to have a portfolio of strategies, some of which are extremely predictable, some of which are extremely risky but high return. So the culmination of that is fairly predictable result with some spikes of real over performance that can transform a brand, transform that company forward. And if you're thinking about 2024 and what you can do tactically to make this happen, I want to give you a few things. The first thing that you can, you can do is look at your budget. Where are you spending your money and is it if you are spending your money in all the same ways that you spent it last year, you're going to get the same results as you got last year. And if you need different results this year than last year, the then you're gonna need to spend your money differently. First tip, the second tip is you are going to have to manage with rigor. To take risk means you actually have to minimize that risk by being really close to the details of some of your more risky projects. And so what you need to do is have a very clear monthly priority list that you share with your team. So they know, hey, I'm gonna be working with you a ton on our brand campaign because that's a big risk for us. So you need to expect that we're going to do a weekly review, a daily standup, whatever check in mechanism works for the size and scale of your team and the project you're working on. But that sets the expectation with your team that you're not micromanaging them, that this is so important, that you are spending a lot of your time with them to make sure it goes great and it has the impact that you are planning. The last thing I would suggest everybody out there consider is, is think about getting on the same page with your peers, right? Doesn't matter what your CEO thinks of your marketing strategy, if your peers and sales, product, customer success, those other departments are aligned with you because you're going to be united front and lined up against the overall business strategy. So by default, the CEO is going to be on board, right? But people who are complaining that their CEO is not on board are normally not in tight alignment with their peers to help them really make sure that they're pushing the business forward. If sales is like, yes, I'm so excited for this brand campaign. I think the demand generation plan is great. I like the positioning of this product. Your product leaders like, yes, they're getting the core value props of the products that we're building, right? And taking them to market in a way that resonates not just with us, but our customers. Then your CEO is going to be on board. Like, they are going to be there for it. And those might be three seemingly simple things. They are three incredibly powerful things. And they're. I say they're simple because they're not easy. They take months of work and effort and communication to line those things up well, especially that last one, the alignment piece. Like, you just can't do that overnight. You have to have weekly standups with your peers, strategy reviews, all of those things to make that happen. But if you do them, you're going to have the best marketing strategy you've ever had. Your results are going to be much better than they were last year. And you're not going to have any friction with your CEO or your peers. And so you're going to be able to do the best marketing of your career. If you like today's show, please hit like and subscribe on YouTube. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Hope that everybody has a very happy new year and we'll see you very soon on marketing against the grain.

This data is wrong. Every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa.

I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.