If you’re taking a new Marketing Director/CMO or Head of Marketing role - whether you’re inheriting a team, or the first senior hire, here’s a few things to consider and prioritise for your first 90 days:
Listen a lot - record some too if you can (and that’s not weird):
As much as you will (by the very nature of the role) need to spend time getting to know your team, your company, and your industry, also listen to what behaviour tells you. Do all the audience listening you’d do for the brand, for the business. Know what is a pain point, what politics might you have to navigate, and get a feel for how marketing is viewed within the organisation.
Agree some (realistic) goals with your senior leadership team
Based on what you've learned, set some short-term goals and priorities for yourself and your team. Focus on areas where you can make a quick impact and build momentum.
Get networking internally
Success will come from who you get to collaborate with, get friendly with finance, get to know how the lay of the land works with ops, and get to know your product and sales teams. You’ll be working with these people most often, so starting off on the best possible foot, and make an effort to speak their language, too.
Focus on the quick wins
It might be a more efficient way of doing something, or a tweak to a campaign, logging an early win is a great way to log a tick against your impact, early on.
If they’ve just fundraised to hire you, focus on reining in the splurging
Chances are, they’ll have been building up the internal to do list for a long time. All the stuff that is ‘when we fundraise we will…’ invest in CRM/Team Growth/Martech/Ops tech/Automation/Content/Advertising increases… the laundry list will be long. But spend too much off the bat and you’ll have to go back to fundraising again immediately, before you’ve proved the value and impact of the last round. Prioritise and stress test how long the organisation can ‘go without’ and create a commercially grounded case for the new/now/bigger/better/best to do list.
Manage expectations that you are not a magician
A new leader is not the solution to all problems, and definitely not overnight. If they want a fix to everything on day 1, then big talks need to be had.
And make sure the organisation can clearly define the goals you are going to need to help with.
Lead volumes or revenue targets are great, but what shape do they need to take, is there any sense of how long this will take to realise, what does the cash runway look like, etc - this will avoid the temptation to leap to promotion first.
And above all, connect with people who have been there and done it - a ‘Just keep going’ is probably something you’ll need to stick on a post it on your desk for at least the first 12 months.
Knowing that you have people who are in a similar boat to you can help you feel confident in your abilities, so keep going, you got this (and subscribe to The All Marketer’s Club, too).
