Goal setting and proving your worth
Goal setting and proving your worth
Quarterly planning is upon us
Last week I started my quarterly planning, and it stimulated a few ideas for an issue. Thinking back to the origin of Mehdeeka, this was always aimed at small teams or solo marketers trying to balance it all, and when I was a generalist marketing manager at Perkbox, I always felt like everything was a priority, and everything needed to be addressed.
And it did all need to be addressed, but I physically as one person could not get it all done in a quarter. That didn’t really stop me from stressing out about it though, and if you are in a similar position and feel overwhelmed by just how many things need to be done, I hope this issue helps you out a little.
Marketing is an enablement function. It helps other business functions run faster, further, for longer. Everything marketing does, contributes to a bigger picture, a bigger goal.
So your first step should be to look to those other goals and then ask “how can marketing contribute to this?”
If you can align your work to other work going on, then your outputs are timely, and overall more effective and more appreciated.
If you’re a generalist doing everything, you’ll start with sales which is easy - it’s a revenue target. How can you help them hit that target, or better yet, exceed that target? Lead generation, yes, but also optimising your conversion rates, improving your email marketing, go and evaluate all your efforts and see what’s the worst performing - it’ll either be so bad you should just cut it and use the time and effort you spend on it somewhere else. Or it’s worth improving and as it’s the worst performing, it should be the easiest to improve and the impact of it will be super magnified compared to the impact of improving something that’s already working well.
Other sales goals can be improving the pitch, the pitch deck, the demo, case studies, ROI, or the other “pointy end” assets.
Next up I’d probably recommend product or customer success - whichever one needs it more. Ask yourself the same question (how can marketing contribute to their goals), and list out your options. You’ll find a lot of overlap with sales (e.g. a more accurate product demo, or website copy update helps both product and sales).
I’ve written a few times about customer success, so if you aren’t sure how you can contribute to that, I’d recommend checking out part one and part two.
If you’re really lost with how marketing can contribute to your other teams, run some interviews with them and ask questions like “what sucks right now”, “what needs improvement”, and generally find their pain points.
Goal frameworks
I’ve tried a lot of goal frameworks, and to be honest I disliked all of them, but with repeated use I find OKRs to be the most useful because of how flexible they are.
If you don’t know about OKRs, start with the wikipedia page. Essentially, you have an objective (the O), and key results (the KRs). An example of one of my objectives that is consistent quarter to quarter is “better equip the sales team to pitch/sell [product]”.
That’s something that you do every day, and all the little things you do roll up into that as a marketer, so it’s a good starting point for anyone doing goal setting. Your key results are then things like “improve conversion rate by 3%” or “produce 3 case studies” - they’re more measurable.
OKRs are supposed to be ambitious, you will almost always have something leftover - the guy who invented them says you should only achieve 70% at the end of the quarter.
If your work follows a different framework, I would actually recommend doing your goals in whatever you personally work better from, and just convert it into the format they want “officially” submitted.
If you need more resources for figuring out what your goals should be, don’t forget my resource spreadsheet!