Your Marketing Team Does Not Need Another Priority

Every marketing organization has priorities, and yeah… too many of them, at that.

There are the official priorities, neatly arranged on a slide somewhere. And then the CEO’s priorities, which tend to arrive in Slack after a conversation with another CEO at a conference. Don’t forget the next set, which is Sales’ priorities, which frequently begin with some variation of, “We really need more support around…” Next are Product’s priorities, the board’s priorities, the priorities attached to whatever campaign is currently underperforming, and the priorities that became priorities because someone important asked about them twice.

Then… there are the things Marketing was already doing before all these new priorities arrived. Those are still priorities, too.

This is how a marketing organization can have five strategic priorities, twelve major initiatives and thirty-seven active workstreams while everyone involved maintains, with a straight face, that the team is “focused.”

The team isn’t focused. It might be busy, but it isn’t focused. Because, drumroll, those are very, very different things.

There are obvious answers to the question of what senior marketing leadership is actually supposed to do. Set the strategy and brand build, generate loads of demand while developing the team. Be BFFs with busy Sales while understanding the customer. Manage the budget since finance is always watching you, and then tell the story of all of it really concisely (before they lose interest!) to the executive team.

But increasingly, the most important responsibility of a marketing leader is much less glamorous: Decide what loses.

The organization isn’t suffering from a shortage of ideas. There’s always another audience you could target, for example. AL has made this exercise even more interesting, because the cost of generating ideas has legit collapsed. Give your reasonably capable AI model a little context and it can happily produce fifty campaign concepts before you finish your pumpkin chai (‘tis the season!). It can build messaging frameworks, content calendars, ABM plays, nurture strategies, event activations, be a therapist, optimize your dog walking calendar, and so on.

The constraint is moving from what could we do? to what deserves to be done?

Big blaring headline here: If everything survives, nothing was prioritized

Real prioritization creates casualties.

If you say New Logo growth is the priority, something that doesn’t contribute meaningfully to New Logo growth should probably receive less attention. If you say Enterprise is the priority, every segment cannot simultaneously receive an Enterprise level of investment. If you say you’re building an account-based motion, you probably can’t continue running every broad-based demand program exactly as before. If you say three campaigns matter most this quarter, campaign number four should feel the consequences of finishing fourth.

Someone should be disappointed.

That sounds harsher than it is, because the alternative is usually worse. The alternative is an organization in which everyone is trying to satisfy everyone, which creates enormous amounts of activity and surprisingly little progress. It’s madness.

Marketing teams are especially vulnerable to this, because marketing basically serves almost everybody:

·      Sales needs enablement.

·      Product needs launches.

·      Executives need messaging.

·      HR wants employer branding.

·      Customer Success wants customer communications.

·      Analysts need briefings.

·      Partners want programs.

·      The website needs updating.

·      The brand needs protecting.

·      Pipeline needs generating.

·      Customers need retaining.

·      Events need attending.

Somewhere in there somebody remembers that Marketing is also supposed to understand the market.

Almost every one of those requests is reasonable, too – hey, it’s the job, even. Yet that’s what makes this difficult. Bad ideas are easy to deprioritize.

The ones that hurt the most and are the most dangerous are good ideas that aren't important enough right now.

We don't talk enough about capacity when we talk about strategy. I’ve had marketing plans that contained six strategic priorities, in organizations that had people, money, and time. But not people, money, and time to execute more than three of them with any quality, meaning we didn’t have six priorities. We had three priorities, and three fantasies.

This is where leadership matters. A good leader should understand the actual capacity of the organization and make choices accordingly. Not theoretical capacity, actual sustainable capacity. There are limits. Pretending otherwise doesn't eliminate them.

Not for nothing, but the catch-22 is you can’t simply “say no more.” “No” isn’t strategy, either.  The job isn't to become the executive who sits at the end of the table swatting ideas away, it’s to create enough clarity that people understand why something isn't happening now.

Bandwidth sounds like a failure of resources. Prioritization sounds like a decision.

So the next time a marketing leadership team sits down to discuss priorities, try something different.

Don't begin by asking: What else should we be doing? Ask: What are we doing that no longer deserves to survive?

The goal is to make a small number of consequential things happen.