Here are two common startup marketing leadership scenarios:

1. Early stage – You’re a marketing leader with one full-time generalist and a couple of contractors. But ideas about what marketing should be doing are coming from every direction. The last sales call. The last investor call. That mythical collateral piece that somehow closed every deal at your sales leader’s last company. You have a plan, but you spend every day defending against attempts to steer you away from it.

2. Growth stage – Now you have a bigger team and budget. You have marketing ops. Product marketing. Demand gen. But now pipeline expectations are in the stratosphere. Your team’s doing great stuff, but you have no idea if it’s the right stuff to keep you off the hot seat at the next board meeting.

Both of these situations kind of suck, right?

The only way out of them is to get very good at asking “why”?

That doesn’t mean making your stakeholders jump through hoops to justify every marketing ask.

It means making sure that every investment your team is making has a specific job to do.

And making sure that the jobs they’re doing are the right ones for where your company is.

It may be that the mythical content piece your sales leader is asking for would help her punch more deals into the end zone. But if the top of the funnel is empty, it’s not what your team should be focused on.

-Doug

Here are two common startup marketing leadership scenarios:

1. Early stage – You’re a marketing leader with one full-time generalist and a couple of contractors. But ideas about what marketing should be doing are coming from every direction. The last sales call. The last investor call. That mythical collateral piece that somehow closed every deal at your sales leader’s last company. You have a plan, but you spend every day defending against attempts to steer you away from it.

2. Growth stage – Now you have a bigger team and budget. You have marketing ops. Product marketing. Demand gen. But now pipeline expectations are in the stratosphere. Your team’s doing great stuff, but you have no idea if it’s the right stuff to keep you off the hot seat at the next board meeting.

Both of these situations kind of suck, right?

The only way out of them is to get very good at asking “why”?

That doesn’t mean making your stakeholders jump through hoops to justify every marketing ask.

It means making sure that every investment your team is making has a specific job to do.

And making sure that the jobs they’re doing are the right ones for where your company is.

It may be that the mythical content piece your sales leader is asking for would help her punch more deals into the end zone. But if the top of the funnel is empty, it’s not what your team should be focused on.

-Doug