Building in the long/short term as a small team

Season 6, Issue 6

Oct 11, 2023

Hallå Mehketeers!

In the Season 5 feedback survey I asked what topic Mehketeers wanted me to cover… and of course I got a huge request that then filled me with “but what if I get it wrong/give bad advice and people realise I’m a fraud” thoughts, so even though I’ve thought about it basically every day since, I’ve put off actually writing it.

But now it’s OCTOBER if you can believe it, and there is no better time to do long term planning than right now.

So here’s my best attempt at putting this vast forest of a topic into a newsletter that doesn’t get cut off by your inbox.

It starts with understanding the business

In marketing it can feel like you’re always busy, but not always moving forward. Even moreso in startups and tech, everything can feel like it’s very important, critical, must-get-it-right work.

You put out the work, then you put out more work... and then you realise that first piece of work wasn’t really that important and you question what the point of it all is.

There’s a culture issue within startups there, but there’s also an issue which is marketing teams outside tech will also notice.

Marketing work doesn’t always feel like it’s building to anything bigger

That feeling sucks. My anecdotal observation is that this usually happens when marketing is treated as a cost centre and isn’t really integrated into other business teams. Yeah you’re friends with sales, but there’s not deep work going on there, it’s really hard to get time with the leadership team, or it feels like you’re constantly in a passive aggressive stalemate with finance.

And that’s why your work feels like spinning in circles.

How to fix this?

Identify your key leaders (CEO, CRO, CMO, country manager, general manager, etc.) and stakeholders (sales, customer success or support, product, potentially finance or other teams too).

Go and ask them these questions:

What are our current business-level goals for 6, 12, 18 months (up to 5 years if your org is that organised)?
What are your current team goals (immediate priority and long term ambitions)?
How do you see marketing being able to support that?

An example of a business-level goal could be a fundraise (in which case you need to hit certain growth milestones), expanding into a new region or territory, fixing a churn problem, or your gold standard “revenue/customer growth” goal.

Then ask yourself, “how can marketing contribute to these goals?”

Fundraising and growth are the same goal > your long term goal is now contributing to growth, so go find what’s the biggest obstacle to this (demo bookings, prospects going cold on you, campaigns not bringing in leads, channels not optimised, etc) and these will make up your short term strategies
Churn is a different problem, and might be out of your ability to fix if it’s a product issue, but you can always help the customer success team, I wrote about this for my last column over at Startup Daily!

For team goals, it’s usually something like sales = revenue (but can be broken down into pipeline, improving conversion rates, improving the demo, etc.), customer success = contract renewals and churn (and can be broken down into reducing complaints, increasing customer satisfaction, and more), product = less stock standard but could be either feature releases or feature usage/adoption (these are both easy things to see how marketing driven campaigns can impact results).

The way that marketing can contribute to these goals will depend on what skillsets and resources you have available to you.

Of course, you’ll also be given KPIs, metrics, and targets to hit, but if they’re coming from a leader who isn’t a marketer by trade, it could be very useful to present a plan back to them and take them through it rather than wait for them to tell you what to do.

Refer a friend

Using a goal framework

I’ve written about this a bit before, but I want to provide more tangible examples than I did then.

Goal setting and proving your worth

Kayla Medica

March 8, 2022

Read full story

When I was working full time, I used a Miro board to plan, track, and present my OKRs to leaders to get buy in and sign off. I used the same board every quarter so I could move things over and see how I was tracking from quarter to quarter in terms of my big 12-18 month goals.

To cover business-as-usual stuff like your day-to-day bits and pieces I often included a “become a centre for excellence” objective that basically covered ad hoc work and repetitive tasks, which for me was stuff like reporting and social media.

When you have one of those days that’s just like “what the hell am I doing” or “I don’t know where to start”, I’d come back to my little Miro board, pick a KR off it, and just do that until my mojo came back, so these “centre for excellence” KRs can be really helpful for those kinds of days.

Ok, here’s the example Miro board, not including the “centre for excellence” objective:

We’ve got 3 objectives:

Enable the sales team to better pitch and sell our product
Optimise and review existing marketing efforts
Contribute to growth efforts across other teams

I would probably carry objectives 1 and 3 over into other quarters phrased as they are, but change up the marketing one from review to a different verb depending on the stage. Sometimes you’re going hard on testing new channels, introducing new programs, new tech, and so on, but it’s nice to balance these with slower quarters that are more spring cleaning focused.

Notice here, marketing gets the least focus in the objectives (but all of the KRs are marketing work!) Framing our work in the context of enabling other teams to do their work better highlights the big picture contributions that marketing does.

“DoD” on the second stickies stands for “definition of done” and this is a hard line where you can tick things off as complete. I’ve found it useful since sometimes you have projects that span multiple quarters, or are “a bit here, a bit there”, and you don’t know when to stop.

Each quarter rolls up into your yearly business-level goal

We know that there’s a million ways to get something done. The path to your business-level goal is not singular, so each quarter (or month, or week) needs to be an attempt at getting one step closer.

And one step closer is enough! Slow and steady wins the race, even when it feels like you’re sprinting.

As long as your goals are coherently linking to other teams and the business-level goal, you’re doing great. Around the end of every quarter, check back in with where your company as a whole is tracking against that goal and use that to identify the gaps where you can make the biggest impact, and put those gaps into your plan for the next quarter.

Balancing long and short term planning is more like writing a draft… and then rewriting the draft every couple of months. You can probably predict ~3 quarters of work ahead, but it should be getting fine tuned the closer you get to it.

The hard part

I don’t think the concept of balancing long and short term is what trips us up, it’s how closely we work with (and understand) other teams and business-level targets.

Getting time with your leaders is hard. Convincing them to invite you to things is hard. Convincing them to let you make decisions and trust you is hard. But if you persevere, log everything you do, and present it back to them, your contributions will be undeniable.

If you’ve got tips, advice, or questions, leave them in a comment for others to see!