What confidence as a marketing leader means to me: being business savvy, structured, and learning-oriented

Can you believe it? This is the last article in my series on finding confidence as a marketing leader this quarter. In it, we’ve covered topics from marketing team turnover to CRMs to Entrepreneurial Operating System. To round things out, I’d like to pull all these concepts together in something I’ve been developing called the Confidence Framework.

The Confidence Framework exists because there is a crisis of confidence among marketing leaders. Marketing leaders who find themselves in crisis find it difficult to own things, be seen as authorities, and talk to their stakeholders. The result of this crisis is a feeling of constant judgment, after which delivery and performance end up taking a backseat.

In solving this problem, there is little signal and lots of noise. Become a fractional CMO! Double down on martech! Hire a marketing operations specialist! All of these actions can be good choices and the right thing, but they don’t address the underlying problem—that the inner workings of marketing have changed so much in recent decades that many of its leaders have forgotten that their fundamental job is to lead.

The inner workings of marketing have changed so much in recent decades that many of its leaders have forgotten that their fundamental job is to lead.

What does it mean to lead in marketing? To me, it’s three things above all else: being business savvy, structured, and learning-oriented. These are the components of the Confidence Framework, and they all build on each other, as you’ll see below.

Confidence as a marketing leader means being a business person first

The foundation of the Confidence Framework is business savvy. Marketing exists to grow the business, and businesses exist to make money. In everything they do, marketing leaders must not lose sight of this. Remembering this purpose unlocks effective collaboration with marketing’s greatest ally—the sales team. I wrote about this in “The one tool and metric marketers need to harness the power of their sales teams.” Spoiler: the one metric is closed won deals. Understanding that new business is the driving motivation of salespeople (and company leadership) is the key to winning their support and speaking their language.

Remembering that the whole point is to serve the business also helps marketers set and stay their own course, which I cover in “How to navigate opinions on marketing? Remember your job is to grow the business.” Recalling that the universe of different marketing tactics is now far-reaching, it’s not only easy for marketers themselves to get distracted, but also for non-marketing colleagues to chime in based on their own buying experiences. And because these opinions are formed based on being a consumer, not part of the business, they tend to be purely external-facing. If a marketer listens to all of these “easy fixes,” they end up suffering from what I call “marketing whiplash.” Instead, as marketing leaders we must develop strategies that are grounded in revenue growth, reveal the right prioritization, and cut through external noise.

Confident marketing leaders create structure, systems, and processes for their work

The next part of the Confidence Framework is structure. Being structured is critical because it not only lets marketers decide what to work on, but also makes it clear to others. Any systems marketers create should of course begin with the business, for which “The four things marketers can learn from Entrepreneurial Operating System” provides instruction. EOS’ different time horizons for long- and medium-term visioning and goaling provide marketers frameworks for understanding business goals, and its quarterly Rocks system helps turn goals into workstreams.

Whether it be by using EOS, OKRs, Scaling Up, or some other system, having a plan every quarter that’s rooted in overall company goals makes it a whole lot easier to push back on well meaning but distracting suggestions. Even better, creating these plans lets marketers solicit buy-in for them upfront. Even better than getting stakeholders on board is co-creating with them. One instance of how to do that is found in “How to make getting feedback from your sales team sane and marketing-friendly.” This article explains how even extremely simple processes can be huge collaboration enablers because they ask for valuable feedback without becoming overwhelming, and then set expectations around what happens next.

If marketing leaders are managing effectively across teams, their own teams are happy too.

You’ll notice that perhaps counterintuitively, I haven’t mentioned anything about how marketing leaders should be managing their own teams. The reason why is because these first two parts of the Confidence Framework, business savvy and structure, are usually also the keys to effective team leadership. For the majority of marketing leaders I encounter, if they are managing effectively across teams, their own teams are happy too. I’ve rarely seen only one or the other. So, if you’re a marketing leader who wants to be a better manager, first look at how your plans and strategy interact with your business and the rest of the company.

Marketing with confidence means using marketing activities to learn

The last part of the Confidence Framework and my favorite is having the mindset that marketing is about learning. This message was what kicked our series off: “For marketing teams to drive growth, they must be learning organizations: moving beyond the KPI.” Judging marketing performance solely on metrics violates the spirit of business growth and is a case of structure gone too far. Growth that is lasting and sustainable has many levers that can’t be captured linearly. Fixating on narrow outcomes, or worse, reacting to their lack instead of learning from situations holistically creates an environment of missed opportunities and turnover.

In the vein of structure gone too far, we must remember that marketing is an art in addition to a science. And that though science values measurement, it is first and foremost about observation, hypothesis testing, and asking “why”—learning! Respecting these fundamentals is necessary and has appeared over and over again in Augurian’s work, examples of which I share in “What it really means when we say that marketing is an art and a science.” Of course, learning also must be put into daring action, which is the essence of art. Daring action is made easier however, when marketing teams have a generous allowance for trying things out.

Growth that is lasting and sustainable has many levers that can’t be captured linearly.

Hyper performance-based marketing organizations tend to lose marketers more easily than ones that are more realistic about the challenging and experimental nature of modern marketing. Aside from adopting this mode of evaluation, marketing leaders can prevent turnover by learning as well—fostering learning among team members about each other personally and professionally. I share two specific tactics Augurian uses to do this in “Relationship building: the easily forgotten but powerful tool marketing leaders can use to fight turnover.”

This summary article concludes the series I’ve been publishing over the last quarter—eight articles that define and dive into the parts of my framework for confident marketing leadership. Though modern growth marketing is complex and hard to do, marketing leaders can always find solid direction in things that will always be true about marketing leadership: it should be guided by business, provide clear structure for the team and others, and prioritize finding new insights and understanding over metrics alone.

Josh Becerra is President and Founding Partner of Augurian, an award-winning digital marketing agency started in 2015. He also is the host of a podcast series where he interviews SaaS industry leaders on their marketing insights and experiences.