What the f*ck does a marketing head do?
A brief look at what the job actually is, and what it isn't
A long time ago, I built a crack team that was close to me then and remains close to me now. But the closeness meant that they made fun of me too, a lot. One persistent joke was that they had no idea what I did, they questioned what I was doing at these meetings all day, and also posited that my job was limited to making motivational speeches, writing on whiteboards, and buying jalebis for them when we (rarely) worked Saturdays.
When I left, a couple of them were elevated to leadership roles, and a few weeks later, one of them called me up to say what I knew was coming: Now we know what you were doing.
As Wes Kao put it in a tweet, "Your area of responsibility is 100% of your time, but it might be 10% of your manager’s time—they have other direct reports, they’re producing high-quality output themselves if they’re a player-coach, they’re starting to think about the upcoming quarter, they’re preparing talking points for next week’s all-hands meeting, they’re shielding your team from lame requests, and more."
But from the outside, or even from the inside of a close-knit team, this is very difficult to see, and even more difficult to quantify.
So what does a marketing head do, really? I’ve been thinking about this lately, as I attempt to gauge my own effectiveness as a marketing lead at a startup, and I have a few broad answers.
Translation
In startups, CEOs are the first marketers, they play a huge role in marketing. They are the main storytellers, and sometimes they are the story. The head of marketing in such situations is a conduit, and one of their jobs is to translate executive vision to strategy and tactics. This isn’t easy to do, because simplification isn’t easy to do. But that is what will translate to speed and scale. If as head of marketing I let my team worry about everything my CEO worries about, they will never get anything done.
Prioritisation
Again, startups have a lot to do. There’s just so much ground to cover that you can just keep on going without end. Therefore, a marketing head needs to prioritise. Not what’s important, or what needs to be done. But what’s important now, and what needs to be done now. And anyone who says a CEO can do that has not done marketing. Marketing is never 3 big decisions and done, it’s tens of hundreds of small decisions every week, and that adds up.
Combination
A marketing head will have a few channels working for them at any given time. But never all of them at the same time. And yet, everything has to come together in a way that the value of the product is clear, the story is memorable, and the offer to sign up and consider the product is irresistible. This won’t happen automatically, it has to be thought through and carefully orchestrated. Dave Gerhardt has a phrase I love when he describes this: Editing.
Hiring
A head of marketing can’t go the journey alone. It’s not possible. And most times, the head of marketing is not the best executioner at the table, just the one who’s good at bringing it all together. They have to see the skill gaps, or the knowledge gaps. Then find the stars to fill these roles so business keeps going. They have to figure out which are the creatives, which are the quants, and which are the operations gurus, and manage them accordingly. Everyone should have a clear plan for growth. What is expected of folks should be simple and clear, with no confusion at all.
Side note: One way I think about this is that when my team wakes up in the morning, they should always know what they are working on that day. When they know that, they can innovate on the how, think about new ideas, new approaches. But if they don’t know what they are working on, and are constantly being surprised, they will just be reactive, and there will be no innovation. They will simply stop thinking, and just do, leading to mediocre, tick-off-the-list work. If that happens, I’m to blame.
Deflection
CEOs are by nature impatient. And they are always talking to other CEOs and reading books. They want to go fast, they want you to go fast. This is not possible all the time. The marketing head’s job is to not let them disrupt things too quickly, too haphazardly. This will confuse people, leading to bad, defensive work. Marketing is not like engineering, when something either works or doesn’t. Marketing needs time, patience, and continuous investment. CEOs may or may not understand this. It’s the marketing head’s job sometimes to deflect executive attention, and let people do their jobs.
Finally, and very importantly, marketing heads are there because there needs to be someone in charge, someone whose job it is to take the blame.
There’s nothing wrong in this. When you win, you are allowed to take the glory. So when you fail, you have to take the fall.
It’s only fair.
As part of attempting to solve the gap between folks looking to hire and candidates looking for jobs, I’m organising a hour-long session for content marketers on how to land their first jobs.
Please let me know if you want to join. This will be a free session. The idea is to help early stage content marketers apply and break into startup jobs.
You can email me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com and I’ll add you.
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