Your marketing team has too many customers

How to agree what comes first when you’re new and every department needs your help.

When I moved from B2C into my first B2B marketing role, the thing that caught me out was who my customers turned out to be.

The budget was also significantly smaller and the market was far narrower, but that wasn’t it. In my B2C days, I’d relied on agencies, budgets, research and customer psychology. Here, I ended up being an on demand service department for other departments within the company.

HR wanted help organising the annual company offsite, wanted the job profiles on brand, wanted the employer brand getting attention on LinkedIn. Sales came with every pitch deck and every piece of collateral they could dream up. The ops team needed emails urgently, the CRM triggered ones and the last minute updates when a regulation changed or some new security enhancement was rolled out. Product bribed us with coffee and dragged us into early briefings on naming, positioning and how we might take things to market. And the founder would sneak up at any time asking about strategy or how many leads we’d generated this month.

Every one of those is a reasonable request. That’s what makes it hard. When you’re new in a role and you’ve got a very small team, everything is being pulled in 20 different directions, and as a leader your first instinct is to go, okay, I need to hire some more people fast.

The request that pushed me over the edge was someone in sales promising a customer that we’d do their marketing for them. There was no agreement in place and no plan to do it. And of course you’re going to close deals if you’re offering a marketing department on tap to a client.

So I got the whole team to spend a month writing down every task we were working on and every request that came in. An itemised Google sheet list, line by line. I grouped it into categories such as branding, growth, go-to-mrket, employer branding, support, admin and so on with estimated workload for my team rated high, medium or low. Plus the expected priority on each task.

Then I took it to the founder and we went through it together so he could see where the time was actually going, and where I thought it should go. Work that arrives piecemeal is invisible. The founder doesn’t necessarily see how it all adds up. Once you see it all lined out it becomes tangible.

The first thing we agreed was that we wouldn’t be doing the customer’s marketing. After that it was less about cutting and more about order. The founder could see that everything on the list was important in its own right. The time we were giving each task didn’t reflect its priority. So we agreed go-to-market came first. Anything urgent for a customer or required by a regulator went above even that, because it had to. Then the rest of the commercial work. Then branding and general support around the company. We agreed the order, but never wrote it down. Giving go-to-market more time meant accepting that some branding and company support would take longer. The founder needed to agree to that part too.

This isn’t rocket science. What makes it difficult is that when you join a company in a leadership role, everybody is looking to you for support, and to each of them their task is the most important thing in the world. Pushing back when new feels like being unhelpful, and in a new job you just want to keep everyone happy. But by trying to keep everyone happy you make your job impossible.

It’s much better to have that conversation with the founder inside the first month. Once you have, you can go to any department and say, this is what the company wants right now and this is how we’ve agreed to prioritise our work.

People might still disagree. But you can explain what the team needs to do first and why their request will have to wait. You’ve already agreed that order with the founder. They’ll still get support, but it won’t always be immediate.

My first instinct had been to hire. What it needed first was a list, a meeting, and a founder seeing the whole of what the marketing team was doing for everyone else. You might still need to hire. Putting the work in order doesn’t make it disappear. But if you’ve agreed what can wait and the team still can’t deliver the rest, you have a clearer reason to ask for another person.

So before the next hire, one question. Who has the marketing team actually been working for this month, and what have you and the founder or CEO agreed can wait?

P.S. This month’s soundtrack is “The Overload” by Yard Act.