The Most Important Question For Every Marketing Director

There’s one question I ask every marketing director when they join the Advisory Board.

And it’s the most important question you need to think about - and answer.

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkkin. In my coaching group, the advisory board, we have an onboarding process. And as part of that onboarding process, I ask every marketing director a set of questions to understand what their goals are, what their situation is, what their team looks like, what tools they use. There's a lot that we go through to figure out where they are at, where do they want to be, and how can we get them there as fast as possible. And one of those questions, I tell all of them, is the most important question that I ask them. And I want to share it with you today so you can ask yourself this question. Because this is a question that is not just about your marketing, it's about the success that you will achieve and about the future of your career and your role. And the question is this how is your success measured? As a marketing director, we often think about our marketing and KPIs and benchmarks and end-of-year reporting, performance reviews, our one-on-one. But the only thing that really matters at the end of the day is how your success is measured. You can do the best marketing in the world. You can grow the company by 5x. But if people don't see you as the catalyst for that growth, growth, then you will be overlooked. You will be overshadowed. And this is paramount if you want to be regarded and respected in marketing, if you want to be promoted, and if you want to have a future as a strategic marketing leader or a marketing executive. And so I would urge you to take some time to think through this question seriously and contemplate it. How is your success measured? I'll give you some thoughts that may be helpful, but I want to encourage you first that spend some time and draft your thoughts to this. How is my success measured? What does that look like? What does that mean? If there were metrics assigned to that, what would they be? What are the indicators of success, the milestones of progress? Spend some time to draft some thoughts that you have, write some notes on this. But the most valuable thing you can do to answer this question is to ask your boss. And that may be the VP, the president, the CEO, the founder, whoever it is, it's important to ask them how is my success measured? How do you evaluate my success? And what can I do or should I do to not only meet but exceed your expectations and be successful in my role? Surprisingly, more than 50% of the marketing directors that I onboard into the advisory board don't have an answer to this question. They have never considered this question. And many of them tell me that they haven't spoken to their boss around this topic, that they've never been given any guidance on how their success is measured. And again, I think this is the most important question for you to know and to understand because everything you do bubbles up to this question. How is your success measured? I'll give you some categories to think about as you think about this question. Let me preface this by saying there is no right answer to this question. And the answer will change depending on your role, your situation, the structure of the company, the stage of the company. There's a lot of factors here. And so it's hard to give you specific advice, but I'll give you some good frameworks to think about this question. The first is professional development. How are you developing yourself, surrounding yourself with peers to learn new skills, to gain different perspectives, and to become more strategic? You can't do this at the company that you're at internally because they breathe their own exhaust. You do the same things that you've always done, you're around the same people, and the company has its own perspective. So when it comes to professional development and developing your skills as a strategic marketing leader, you need outside help. This is why I created the advisory board, a coaching group specifically for marketing directors, the only coaching group for marketing directors. And it's a group of really smart, kind, generous, helpful people who are all in the same boat, who all want to improve and do better and can share their insights and their experience so we can all learn and grow together. It's a wonderful place. If you're interested, send me a message, I'll give you the details. But you need a way to get outside perspective and help. So professional development is number one, and it will help you in many ways in your existing role and also in future roles as well. It'll help take you to the next level at your current role and in any future opportunities that you pursue. The second is your team. Whether you have a team or not, your team could just be you, but how you manage your team, which includes you, is important. And how your boss and senior leadership see that, perceives that, is key. Do people speak about you in high regard? Do people listen to what you say? Do people come to you and ask for your advice and help and guidance? Is senior leadership asking for your perspective and input on strategic decisions? These are some of the hallmarks, the characteristics of how you can evaluate your success, how your success could and should be measured. It's your team and your involvement with other people. It's involvement cross-collaboration as well with other departments like sales. How do you interface with sales? How do you collaborate with sales? Are they seeing you as a strategic partner or just as a button pusher? And seeing your leadership the same way. Are they involving you and want to hear from you? Are you reaching out to them to share with them insights, observations, recommendations, or are you sitting in a corner and just doing what they say? These are important things to think about in terms of your future and your present of being a strategic marketing leader. So we have professional development and we have your team, which includes you. Another major category, obviously, is results. Do you get results? Can you get results? Now, let me say that in many situations, your hands are tied. If you have a bad product, if you don't have a good position, if the product doesn't have the right features, if the competition has tons of money to spend, there's a lot of situations where results are hampered by factors outside of your control. However, that doesn't mean you still can't move the needle in certain areas. And so can you find those opportunities where you can lean in, where you can move the needle, where you can show progress and performance and results? Because they are there if you look for them. Another part of performance is process, is structure, systems. Marketing, I believe, is largely about having a process, that very little of it is creative, and that most of it is a system. And so what systems have you built? If you were to be fired tomorrow, or if you were to leave of your own volition, what would you leave behind? Would you leave behind a set of processes and systems and frameworks, a machine that can run on its own, that needs little oversight and can be optimized? Or is everything in your head? Is nothing defined? Are there no systems and processes and structure to speak of? And the more you create structure and system, the better for you because it's scalable and it takes less time and effort. It also allows you to grow and build the team. But also it lets you show the strategic leadership team that you are a true marketing leader, that you're not doing marketing, that you're leading marketing, that you're building the marketing team, you're building the marketing machine. And this is why in my coaching group we're very big on systems. And we have many of these systems already built for you that you can literally copy and paste into your marketing because systems will save you time and headaches, but they'll also allow you to get to the next level. And that's key. So think about how is your success measured and spend some time to reflect on this question. And I gave you a couple categories here. We talked about results, but also systems is key. The team, which includes you as well, and many other categories you can think about. But I think the key thing here is to actually take the time to ask yourself: how is my success measured? How does my boss answer that question? How would I answer that question? And then create a plan for yourself, even if it's one thing a month that you can do to move in that direction, to understand and gain more clarity on how your success is measured, and then to do the things that will demonstrate that you're being successful. Most of what we do in marketing is invisible. We do work, we do a lot of marketing stuff, we get results even, but oftentimes people don't see it. And if they don't see it, they don't know what's happening. And if they don't see it, we don't get credit for it. And this is bad news. And the job of the marketing leader of you is to make the invisible visible. Then we need to show up and we need to speak up, we need to be present, and we need to demonstrate that we are leading marketing, that we're doing great work, we're getting great results, we're building the marketing machine and the marketing team, and we have to tell everybody about that. This can be awkward, it can be difficult, it can be uncomfortable, but it's necessary. All of it, though, begins with getting clarity on how is your success measured. So spend some time and think about how is your success measured, jot down some notes, some thoughts, and then go talk to your boss and ask them how is my success measured? How do you evaluate my success? And share with them how you see your success should be measured, how you're thinking about it, and get their feedback. It'll be a productive conversation. It'll be useful for you today and in the future, and it will demonstrate that you care, that you're being proactive, that you're being strategic, and that you want to succeed for yourself, for them, and for the company. This is one of the most valuable things you can do. And it all begins with a simple question how is your success measured?