The Crucial 12: Powerful Insights for Marketing Leadership

matters

Why?

Why does marketing succeed under some leaders but not others? Most would assume it has to do with how much money is spent or the talent level of the marketing professionals involved. Certainly, these may be factors, but after running an agency for more than a decade and consulting with hundreds of leaders, I came to another conclusion. A leader’s behavior affects marketing outcomes. This nugget of insight is part of what compelled me to write this book.

There is no shortage of books on leadership, but if I search for books specifically about how to lead marketing, the results are disappointing. Instead, I find books that attempt to teach leaders to be marketing experts. I’ve read many of these books, and while most are brilliant, they’re written for scrappy entrepreneur types, marketers, and leaders who are keenly interested in marketing.

The problem is most business leaders don’t share that interest, and they don’t have the time, education, or core competency to become marketing experts. To make matters worse, marketing has never been more complicated. Competitive forces and fast-changing technology platforms have made marketing success a daunting responsibility. It’s no wonder business leaders, especially small business leaders managing many different concerns, don’t have the needed clarity about how to invest their marketing resources effectively. Frankly, most would prefer not to have the responsibility because it’s simply not their thing. Expecting them to become marketing experts is not the solution.

Most leaders don’t want to become marketers. And they shouldn’t. Nor should they feel guilty about their lack of passion in this crucial aspect of business management. But in the end, they may have to live with the outcomes of poor marketing: lost opportunities, competitors moving ahead, and wasted marketing dollars. Ignoring marketing isn’t the answer.

Then what is the solution for leaders today? I’m convinced they must learn to lead marketing efforts from a high level. Marketing leadership is the art and science of directing, managing, and even inspiring great work from marketing employees, subcontractors, and agencies. Leaders must learn how to play that role.

I wrote The Crucial 12 as a guide for business leaders who want to develop their marketing leadership skills. In it, readers will discover and unpack the essential questions they must ask, questions that will create focus around key areas, inform decisions, and direct marketing strategies.

I make no apologies in saying The Crucial 12 is not a marketing book, and marketing experts who read it might be disappointed. It is a leadership book that outlines a vital thought paradigm that even non-marketers can use to direct their marketing stakeholders and inspire them to do their best work.

Years ago, I was asked to serve on the board of directors for a private college. I felt the other members were of higher social or financial standing than I was, so I felt humbled by this appointment and somewhat inadequate. When I asked the college president how I could bring the most value to the school, his answer was immediate and brilliant. Ask good questions, he advised. He knew I had that capability, and that would make me the most valuable to his leadership team.

You will bring more value to your team of marketers as you improve your ability to ask good questions. If you ask the right questions, you’ll draw focus to the right issues. This book is organized to help you do just that.

By the time you finish this book, you will have a framework for how to think about marketing at a higher strategic level and tools for identifying priorities, holding everyone accountable, and developing a culture rooted in marketing improvement. Armed with these questions, you will recognize the significant role you must play to facilitate positive marketing outcomes and how to draw out the best from the talented marketers on your team.

The Epidemic of Bad Leadership

Peter’s Story

Peter was the CEO of a pool and spa company with five locations and 45 full-time employees. He was naturally energetic, a competent leader, and loved coming to work every day, until recently.

Sales were down. They had been on a downward trend for the last two years. Up to this point, he could ignore the sales slump, dismissing it as a slow season that will rebound. But lately, his inner voice was telling him, This isn’t going to turn around on its own. Peter’s company was losing market share to competitors, and he knew he could no longer ignore it.

Frankly, Peter didn’t know what to do. Nothing he had tried had worked. He had done an exemplary job at identifying all the outside factors that had led to this: more competitors offering cheaper products, and the economic downturn he believed might have been hurting pool sales in general. But he felt powerless to fix it.

Peter was waking up at night, thinking about how he might have to lay off some employees in the coming months. How would he be able to face their families? If he didn’t turn this around, it could have unthinkable long-term effects for the employees who had worked for the company their entire lives. The stakes were high. Peter needed to get to the bottom of why his marketing wasn’t working.

He had hired, and subsequently fired, three marketing companies in three years. Each of them had used up significant marketing budgets, but none of them had helped increase sales. Over that same time period, Peter had gone through two different marketing directors internally. Even after 18 months, neither one of them had been able to increase sales numbers or even keep pace with the growth of their competition. To this point, Peter had done a good enough job comforting his employees, family, and colleagues as to why sales were down. He had convinced everyone but himself that this was a normal and temporary decline in sales. But Peter knew his competitors were gaining market share, and he couldn’t figure out why. It was wearing on him.

Peter was finding it increasingly difficult to be excited about going to work, a new emotion to him. It was disorienting, and it was starting to affect his confidence and his ability to concentrate.

Why was this happening? Peter ran a tight ship. Their financials were in order, and he knew how every dollar moved through his organization. Operations were stellar. Peter loved the pool and spa business and knew it better than anyone.

And Peter loved challenges—a difficult customer, a negotiation with a manufacturer, deciding which hot tubs to stock the coming year, hiring and firing—he was a master with those issues. It gave him the energy to tackle challenges that would cripple most leaders.

The fact was, he felt much more comfortable solving more exacting issues, like cash and inventory management, than tackling the complicated issues of marketing and business development. Like many leaders today, Peter felt insecure when working on marketing-related tasks for his businesses, and the internet made his insecurity even worse. He wasn’t as tech-savvy as he wanted to be. Peter blamed the business down-turn on his bad hiring decisions, but inside, Peter felt responsible. When it came to marketing in today’s world, Peter felt inadequate.

Adding to the stress, he knew the success or failure of his business’s marketing would have a huge impact on his family, not to mention the families of his 45 team members. If he didn’t get this business going again, how could he ever look at himself in the mirror?

Most Leaders Prefer Operations Over Marketing

Like Peter, many business leaders sometimes feel they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. That’s especially true when things aren’t going well. And since marketing is not an exact science, many operations-minded leaders find it frustrating. Like Peter, they believe one simple hire of a marketing firm or an internal marketing director will solve their business marketing problems. Most of the time, it doesn’t work that way.

Naive leaders believe marketing is easy and any hired agency or employee can do it. They think marketing is mostly about organizing advertising campaigns. But successful, business-growing marketing is not easy. It requires careful attention to strategy and execution. And business leaders have an ongoing role to play in their company’s marketing, one that few leaders are prepared to do well.

Through my role as CEO of the digital marketing company YDOP (which, by the way, stands for Your Dream, Our Project), years of speaking engagements in front of business leaders, and sitting across the table from entrepreneurs, business founders, and people in charge of running companies, colleges, and nonprofits, I’ve had a front-row seat to how leaders approach marketing, and I’ve observed a clear pattern. Most leaders lack confidence in directing the marketing efforts in their organizations. Worse, they might be blind to their own incompetence, creating chaos, and negatively affecting financial outcomes.

To test my hypothesis, I began asking audiences at my speaking engagements about this topic. At the beginning of my speech, I would say:

I once heard that leading a company involves three categories of activities: Operations, Financial Management, and Marketing/Business Development. I’ve also heard that few leaders are naturally drawn to all three. Which one or two of these three areas do you feel most confident to lead? In other words, when you come into the office, would you feel most ready to solve a problem related to operations, financial management, or marketing?

When I asked for a show of hands, I saw consistent results audience after audience. Most leaders are like Peter. In fact, 85 percent of the leaders I survey prefer to focus on operational or financial management issues over marketing.

I can relate to being strong in some areas and less confident in others. For many years, I was far less confident in managing the financial aspects of my company. When my company was young, I relied on several people to help me: a part-time bookkeeper, a part-time CPA, my business accountant, an employee, and my wife. I was getting nowhere. I left it up to them to figure out how my finances should be put in order. It was a mess. I wanted to implement a profit-sharing program but couldn’t because I didn’t have an efficient way of determining my monthly profit. I wanted to know the ratio between my payroll and my adjusted gross income but I wasn’t able to organize reliable data around that important metric. Out of frustration, I tried to tell them how to do their jobs. But that didn’t help at all.

I remember the day when my wife approached me in frustration. I quit, she said. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not qualified to manage our finances the way you want me to.

You can’t quit, I protested. This is our business! We found humor in the moment, but we were both at our wits’ end. I knew the future of my business would require better financial management and reports each month.

I sought education in this area. Fortunately, I was part of a business network that provided training for leaders. I attended a multi-day workshop and came home a changed man. I didn’t learn how to do my company’s books at that conference; I learned what good management looks like, what good leaders expect, the reports they ask for, and how they put safety checks in place.

I never became a good financial manager, and I didn’t learn how to create a balance sheet or set up an accrual system for my company’s finances. Leading isn’t doing. Instead, I learned which questions good leaders ask their teams. I got greater clarity on what type of team I needed. That education positioned me to make some game-changing leadership decisions. Leaders need vision of what success looks like. Until they have that vision, they will, like me, get nowhere. One cannot lead without vision. Through intentional personal development, I found that needed clarity. Only then could I do what every leader must do well: articulate a vision and get the right people on board.

Just as I struggled with financial management, I’m convinced many leaders struggle with marketing and business development. In the midst of that struggle, many leaders succumb to bad leadership practices like impulsive hiring, abdication, or micromanagement. When leaders recklessly hire others to fill in the gap for their lack of vision and high-level oversight, that’s not delegation. It’s abdication. Successful leaders understand the important role they have in leading marketing success from a higher level, providing clarity, vision, and support. They also understand their own weaknesses and recognize the need to surround themselves with talented people who make up for those weaknesses. That’s Leadership 101.

What Bad Delegation Looks Like

Joan, the president of a local private school, and her team recognized they needed a knowledgeable marketing director to help beef up their lead generation. For far too long, their organization didn’t have the leadership or a guiding vision for marketing or growing the institution. In fact, all four departments were building their own websites on different platforms with different subcontractors from their own department budgets.

As a vendor for this organization, I had an inside view of the chaos that was created when the leaders made their next move. They hired a talented graphic designer with an impressive resume who could create beautiful brochures, advertisements, and publications. They put him in charge of marketing.

Over the next year, it became apparent that the organization had made a big mistake by impulsively hiring a marketing person. What they needed was twofold: a unified marketing effort to support one cohesive plan for each of the four departments and an effective presence online so potential customers could find them easily. They’d gotten neither.

This employee didn’t have expertise in bringing teams together, working with a digital agency, or writing a comprehensive plan. He was a talented artist, not the marketing coordinator the organization needed. That significant detail was overlooked in the leadership’s eagerness to wash their hands of marketing responsibilities. They hired the first person who was a talented marketer and a good cultural fit.

Fast-forward two years, and that same organization was again interviewing for the marketing director’s now-vacated position. But this time, things were different, as a talented COO had meanwhile filled in as the interim marketing director.

I worked personally with that COO. We first built a vision for the direction of the organization, which was extremely clarifying as we considered the job description. Not surprisingly, the next hire for that position turned out to be a home-run for the organization.

Full of desire to have help with marketing, and lacking vision for that area of their businesses, leaders often make poor hiring decisions. This impulsive, overly-eager hiring is the worst type of abdication. Unfortunately, this happens more often than not.

Bad leaders abdicate. Good leaders delegate. On the surface, the two look similar, because the leader has found someone to cover an area of responsibility. The difference lies in the preparation before hiring. While it might seem intimidating, a leader must grasp some basic concepts about how to lead their marketing. In the chapters ahead, this book will discuss the perspectives successful marketing leaders have, so readers can gain the confidence and empowerment needed to be brilliant directors of their company’s marketing concerns.

Get Out of My Kitchen!

Growing up, I can still hear my mother yelling, Get out of my kitchen! We knew exactly what that meant. She had a job to do, and we were getting in her way with our board games and the family dog on the floor under her feet. If we wanted dinner, we needed to give her space and stop frustrating her. That sentiment summarizes otherwise good marketing agencies which end up feeling micromanaged. Like abdication, micromanagement is not good leadership. It’s what insecure leaders do to exert power. Micromanagers get in the way. While they may feel as though they are fighting for their company by auditing every penny and every activity they pay vendors to do, the opposite is true.

As I was writing this book, I had to fire a client who came into my office and asked my staff to outline exactly what they had been doing when they were working on his account. He wanted to assess whether or not my team’s pace of work was satisfactory. What’s sad is he had enjoyed several years of great marketing results from my team. As time went on, his competitors began investing more effort in their online presence while he insisted on scaling back. No matter how hard our team tried to convince him he needed to rebuild his website and engage in some other marketing activities, he pushed back, suspecting we were just trying to get him to spend more.

The fact is, we were. He needed to. His competitive environment had changed. But when traffic to his website started to trend downward (as we predicted), he became a micromanager, thinking the problem might be our productivity, that we didn’t work hard enough during the very little time he paid us to engage with his campaign each month. At the end of the day, I wrote his team a farewell message thanking them for their past patronage. We had no choice but to fire the client. His micromanagement style will continue to hurt his business success.

Talented marketers are in demand. They won’t continue to work for bad leaders, not as employees or in agencies. But good leaders learn how to bring out the best in a talented employee or agency. Micromanagement is a terrible approach that never leads to brilliant marketing results—it only gets in the way.

The Epidemic of Bad Marketing Leadership

In preparation for writing this book, I surveyed 40 marketers from 22 agencies across the United States, asking them to share conversations they had with business leaders, specifically about the questions they were asked. The survey results astounded me. Marketing professionals from all across the country expressed the same frustrations about business leaders who interfere with marketing outcomes. Stories included leaders being clueless about marketing strategy, micro-managing budgets, and treating talented and seasoned marketers like temp workers. When it comes to working with an agency or overseeing in-house teams, bad marketing leadership seems both commonplace and predictable.

The Small Business Association reports that about half of new businesses are unable to survive for more than five years. Of those that survive, many more fail before their 10th anniversary. I’ve often heard this failure rate attributed to a common issue: running out of cash before the business becomes profitable. Regardless of how we describe the plight of the small business, one thing is universal. Businesses need a plan to take a product or service to market. Growth depends on successful marketing leadership, a talent I’m convinced is often lacking