The Hardest Role In A Company Is Marketing.

One could easily argue the CEO’s job is the hardest job in the company. They are the last line of defence; the buck stops with them, and they must answer to the employees, shareholders, and board. However one could also argue that the head of marketing and their team has it even harder.

In the market today the list of mechanisms, platforms and tools to be used to achieve their goals feels almost infinite. There are more than 10,000 tools/platforms in the market today that marketing teams can use to attract customers. Less than 5 years ago that number was 5000.
The ways in which marketing teams can attack a market – the mediums, styles and the ways to leverage each platform – is almost infinite. Knowing which way works best without doing them all is almost impossible.
Quite often marketing is pulled in a number of directions.The CEO needs them to clean up capital raise decks. Product managers and services are constantly changing what they want to say and how they want to say it – perhaps even who they want to say it to.
Marketing is often asked to spend part of their budget on tasks they don’t believe will have the highest impact on lead generation. (for example, going to trade shows because “we just have to”).
In the meantime the expectations stay the same. Marketing must hit the highest opportunity generation targets possible. Everyone in the organization is a critic, nobody cares to hear about the excuses, just bring in the leads. This makes for a very volatile role in the company involving quite a few dance moves.

All the above said, I also believe that a lot of marketers don’t help themselves. They don’t do a good enough job tying the numbers to results by twinning goals to success metrics and achievements/failures. To bring a CEO or CFO onboard, expose the numbers. Nobody can argue with strategies once they become results; they are what they are. Effective goal definitions and proper expectation setting communicated through highly effective dashboards makes expected results clear and certain to everyone. If the head of Marketing isn’t doing this properly then they’re making their job a lot harder.

Below is a link to my video story on the subject I just discussed.