The peace terms between execs and marketing

Edition 132 – OR The six prerequisites for every go-to-market plan

A couple of housekeeping items... I'm back from a brief hiatus from the newsletter in August because August is the worst of all months, and this year it extended well into September. But it bore great fruit that you might want to check out:

• You can now join our free private community where we support leaders who want to see trust recentered in the economy and culture of the world at Trust-Made Guild.
• We're hosting a Revenue Accelerator cohort for solos and small firms with only fifteen slots that starts in just three weeks. Get one of the remaining places at TrustForge.
• If you've read dozens of these newsletters and never considered what we do, It's time. Discover what we do at CultureCraft.

Now let's get to it.

McKinsey says there's been a 20% drop in executive confidence in the ROI of their marketing over the last year. 20%! I actually am surprised it's not lower. Executives and their agencies have been playing a dangerous game using manufactured ROI metrics to calm the tensions between them for a decade now, and the underlying math ain't mathing.

So now, we've got to address the real proverbial pachyderm in the palace: the widening disconnect and disillusionment between leaders and marketing.

Early in CultureCraft's life, I had to figure out how to navigate our role with internal marketing teams or under-contract agencies. When a new outside expert comes in, everybody steels up and a political game sets in. I've been undermined by internal teams, had incredible collaborators, helped people gain promotions, and hired new agencies and team members for our clients.

In some cases, our clients (we always work directly for the CEO/Founder) have their own motivations, spoken or unspoken, about what they want for their marketing team. As we dig deeper, this misalignment between leadership and the marketers (agency, in-house, or contract) is central to the failed growth objectives that got us hired.

CEOs wake up and can't see the path to growing the business they dream of.

Marketers wake up in a Severance-esque trod of repeatable tasks with no apparent connection to outcomes that are apparently "mysterious and important."

This breakage produces bad behavior on all fronts. This is a war with no moral high ground and the blood bath is brutal for business outcomes and marketing careers. So it's time to talk about it.

What Executives Get Wrong about Marketing

The below list represents anonymized real-life case studies, in most cases representing ones we've seen many times. Marketers are complicit in their industry imploding into online confusion. Still, the structural power lies in the C-suite, and we've seen over and over again that CEOs and founders have been led astray for decades about how growth reliably works. These dangerous, misguided behaviors are calcifying under the weight of AI.

1. Make It Pretty - Granted, we don't want ugly slop to go out the door, but leaders too often start thinking about marketing, imagining it's arts and crafts. They fiddle about with words, "make this sound good." Or talk about "sprucing up the website." These are surefire ways to waste money and chase away any marketer worth their strategic salt.
2. Manage to Tactics - "We need to improve the website," or "Our social media isn't that good" or "We're gonna need more ads." All of these and their cousins are much like starting a fitness program by telling your trainer you want to do more shoulder presses. Welcome to unplanned injuries, a lot of misguided effort, and a trainer you've trained to ignore you.
3. Role Play as a Marketer - We all know there's a lot of marketing stuff on the Internet. Some of it is in this newsletter. And you've read a fair bit, so you've been practicing your "ICP" and "GTM" and "CPC." You, madam founder, want to take this marketing bull by the horns and you've done your homework to do it. But here's the thing: almost all publicly produced material you've read without the context of doing the work, is going to lead you astray. You are fimrly in the "know enough to be dangerous" place. And its how organizations spend tens if not hundreds of thousands trying out a novice marketer with a big title (like COO or President or VP of Sales)'s big ideas.
4. Obsess about Short-Term ROI - If you need a demonstrable change in Q4 outcomes, you should have started working on it Q2. That's all there is to it. Are there short-term things you can do to artificially boost sales? Sure. You can hit a number... and then pay the price later.

What Marketers Get Wrong about Leading

As with all Wars of the Roses, this is a two-sided affair. Much of the reason why founders started cosplaying as marketers or focusing on tactics, or thinking messaging is a reasonable replacement for strategy, is because somewhere along the line, they worked with marketers who taught them to be this way. So whether you've got an in-house team, an agency supporting you, or your just on the road to making a bigger investment in marketing, here's the standard pitfalls to watch for.

1. Thinking Dashboards are Outcomes - A lot of marketers spent the 201os being turned into functional sales people for the Hubspots and SEMRushs of the world. The martech platforms convinced them that showing leaders fancy graphs going up and down and inventing little trend lines was going to get the "is it working?" question off their backs... obviously, it doesn't.
2. Skipping Strategy - Not ironically, this is where many founders and marketers align: skipping strategy so they can argue about the efficacy of tactics. Most marketers are not trained nor have they ever been responsible for a true, move the top and bottom lines, raise the value of the firm, and reposition us for growth strategy. Agency work doesn't work like that. And there are so few in-house roles where you get that kind of chance that the experience is sparse. So it gets skipped or faked... a bundle of tactics (this with the website, that with the ads, these landing pages... look! a tagline!) cosplaying a strategy and then probably some DASHBOARDS! (See #1) to evaluate how we're doing.
3. Commit to "Leads" as a Measure of Success - Nothing will burn money, credibility, and trust within your brand and sales/marketing/product teams faster than "Lead Generation." Lists of email addresses with arbitrary scores for "intent" or "funnel scoring" based on digital actions that we know are probably misattributed, but somebody needs the credit. Sales hits the lists and, shockingly, they are bad, pushing marketing to get "better" leads, which—based on the lack of strategy in place—they have no idea how they would even categorize someone as a good lead, much less earn one. OHHHH and then to top it all off, while you are lead-chasing, you've warped all of your messaging, your strategy, your content, and your onboarding experience to be about YOU so you make sure people want to buy from YOU and that YOU are differentiated from the competitive set when... holy of molies... what your best prospects wanted all along was just some sign that you knew who they were and that you were thinking about them. (More on this in next week's Damns Given)
4. Not Understanding the Business - You would be shocked how often I've worked with marketing teams or agencies, deep in their feelings of being misunderstood by the big bosses. I ask them to explain to me
   1. what this company does in two sentences or less,
   2. how the product works,
   3. where the competitive advantages lie,
   4. what clients want that they're not getting,
   5. what drives referrals, and
   6. how marketing impacts the financial model.

I get blank stares. Business illiteracy is the quiet scourge of most marketers' professional lives and the shortage of good roles for them to learn it in only exacerbates the problem.

Marketing makes markets, or it's a game we play with websites, words, and pretty pictures. It's really that simple, but again, marketers and many agencies have been training hard not to think about business outcomes and to continue reinforcing the gap between founders and actual growth outcomes. But it need not be that way.

The Strategic Leadership Required

There are six core strategic pillars that determine the success of a go-to-market motion. Obviously, more questions emerge downstream, but how you address these (or if you've answered them at all) are the prerequisites for any marketing endeavor, and should be the place where marketers and executives co-lead successfully:

1. The Goldilocks Problem for target community: Big enough to grow into, small enough to lead in, and personal enough that you know exactly what they do when they enter a house (Don't confuse this for ICP which is a tactical tool downstream)
2. The Different Kind of Sameness for positioning: Familiar enough to not be a novelty, different enough to not be a commodity, and easily recognized by the target community.
3. A 95/5 Solution for value: A product/service that is efficient and repeatably useful 95% of the time and dramatically memorable 5% of the time.
4. A Stinking Compost Pile for culture: A place where mistakes are made, broken down, and transformed into client-obsessed innovation; a soil so rich people can see it from miles away
5. A Low-Resistance Power Grid for the sales and marketing org: Next best actions across the G2M can move quickly and without confusion because the right people are in the right seats working on the problem
6. The Both Weird and Wonderful Challenge for content: Enough POV to stand against your categories' excesses and self-owns, enough customer obsession so that your people hear you speaking in their voice.

If you haven't made strategic commitments to solve for the above, you are going to flounder in the marketing space, always wondering why things aren't working or in the rare case, why they do.

The absence of these trust-making pillars will poison the well for everything else you want to do, rising advertising costs, doubling the time and halving the efficiency of your web rewrite project, and quietly turning away customers who are seeing your unanswered questions as reasons to go somewhere else.

Firms spent the last fifteen years believing that marketing and tech tactics would be the difference between winners and losers. Today, the difference lies in a proven understanding of these growth fundamentals and aligning them effectively.

If you want a thought partner on how these six factors are working in your venture, my calendar is open to you.