Laying foundations after the house has been built.

Yesterday, I gave my first talk in a while. This one - focusing on the practice of spinning up new teams in well-established businesses - was a beguiling and deceptive feat of 21 slides, each no more than 21 seconds long.?

I rattled through them, probably at an incomprehensible speed, choosing content that was too much for such a structured (and short) format, partnered with a series of slides that often contained little more than gifs. I got laughs, but when it comes to gifs, it’s not my first rodeo.?

*Should you want to see all the gifs in action, here is the presentation.*

But I did enjoy the opportunity to share a few insights that I’ve found over the years and so, here they are in slightly expanded text form. Very much ‘my opinion, man’, but perhaps some interesting thought starters for your own marketing.

The starting premise was around launching FUGA’s B2B Marketing team - essentially, its central marketing function - in 2021, nearly 15 years after the company had formed. Why I asked, rhetorically (obviously, I couldn’t share my 21 seconds with the audience) had FUGA found itself without a central marketing team so many years into its existence??

For some companies, new teams appear late in the process for financial reasons. Sometimes, they form late, because they haven’t quite broken out of their nascent 'we’re still disrupting, we’re not the establishment' stage and still revel in the chaos. Occasionally, the founder can’t let go and everybody is a marketer in their own mind. Of all the areas of business, it’s the one you can guarantee that everyone has an opinion on (to the exasperation and visible grimace of marketers everywhere).

For FUGA, I actually think it was down to their own success.?

Now, I know that sounds like an epic humblebrag, and it really is, but technically it was before my time and so the brag is a little more humble. In many ways, I walked into a goldmine, a series of creative teams, all experts at what they do, pitching in to make things work. We had an artist marketing team moonlighting as FUGA’s social media managers, a client services team that was sending a monthly newsletter, an external press company, an external digital agency, and so on and so on.?

They are all great at what they did.

So if we had experts doing these things, why did they hire me to launch a new team??

Unity.?

Bringing all those pieces together under one roof and raising the flag for others to flock to. A single strategy, proactive and forward-thinking, that showed the path from point A to point B (with a dotted line marking out C, D, E, and a general wave in the right direction of F-Z).

And at its core, marketing and marketers, are the business. They should play a part, big or small, in every part of it.?

Whether they’re supporting HR with ad language, helping finance make intangible spreadsheets make sense to the wider business, or simply helping the executive team speak clearly about a five-year plan, marketing teams often know about things before anyone else in the company, because we’re a sounding board, a storyteller, here to make things make sense and sometimes, not too infrequently, we’re here to make an ugly presentation look pretty.

And here in the presentation is where I took a valuable forty-two seconds to wax philosophical. I think it took me a long time to realise that having a philosophy about the way that I work wasn’t quite as ‘LinkedIn influencer’ as I thought. (So few sentences, so many line breaks…)

Over time I realised that at its core I believe that marketing exists for one singular function.

Translation.

I love the seven P’s of marketing (or 5 or 3) or the 4 M’s or the 5 C's or whichever letter of the alphabet has been chosen to help define a strategy - who doesn’t? - but for me, it always comes back to translation.?

As marketers, I believe, we’re here to translate the needs of a company to its clients and the needs of its clients (or prospective clients) to the company.?

More often than not, We’re here to do that between internal teams.?

We’re native in business development, fluent in product, and on a good day we can even hold a good conversation with the backend tech team.?

We make things make sense.

So what does that even mean as you step into a new role or spin up a new team?

[A caveat to combat my own ego here. Some of these things I do well, some I’m still trying to improve…]

First, you need to know that you’re an agent of change. You’re not the enemy, but you’re not a friend yet. Things worked just fine before you got there and your thirst for immediate change means that the wider team doesn't trust you yet.?

Plus, like it or not, you’re probably going to have to say no. A lot. (much solidarity with Product Managers on this point) You’re going to have to be the one who says we don’t do that anymore, or break norms and often, do everyone’s favourite buzzword - disrupt.?

Change is often hardest when things seem to be going ok.?

So how do you stick the landing and breakthrough? May I suggest an internal survey??

How dull, you say. And you’d be right, but stay with me here. You don’t know what you don’t know and you’re new anyway so use that naivety in your favour.

Keep it relatively light, and keep the questionnaire tight - no one wants interactive Tolstoy to be their first exchange with the team - but poke around…

How does culture play a role in the business??

Does everyone understand what you do??

Are they an advocate??

Does the brand mean anything to them??

Then, dig some more. Go beyond the initial survey and God forbid, speak to people.

You ask and you ask and you ask. Then you sit back and get a crash course in company politics, subjective failures, and occasionally objective truths.

Then dig some more. Develop a deep understanding of those pain points and work out how you can help. Where are the blockers? Can you grease the wheels, and open up a line of communication?

Going back to the earlier philosophy, sometimes that act of translation is simply getting teams to talk to each other, reading through the lines, and helping them see what’s in between.

Just as everyone has an opinion on marketing, everyone has pain points.

But don’t get dragged down into a pity party. Humans have a habit of finding negativity wherever they go. But look for those ‘bright points’ and amplify them. (Read Switch by Dan & Chip Heath, they discuss this really eloquently)

What’s going well??

What’s good about the company or the culture??

What hidden treasures lie in the product that clients aren’t fully utilising yet?

What are some recent wins that everyone can be proud of??

Like a marketing duck on water or a data-driven iceberg [add analogy of choice here], drive the wider team forward and motivate them with positivity while underneath you're doing your best to heal those pain points.

Then what? You’ve asked everything you ask for now and are swimming in anecdotal data, bucketloads of it, chaotically populated on a spreadsheet, waiting to be turned into a presentation deck full of quotations and even a well-placed word cloud (how retro…)

Even in this very new position or team, your gut instinct, your knowledge, and your ideas of how to make things better are now backed up with rows upon rows of information that you can use to build the story going forward whether that’s to senior leaders, to the board or to the wider company.

Here’s the important part. You’re the expert, you know what you want to do and you’re now backed up with a laundry list of anecdotal reasons why you should do them, so get started. But bring the team on the journey with you.

That doesn’t mean decisions by committee - no one wants or needs that - it means educating and explaining what’s going on. Tell the team why you made decisions and what those decisions should mean. Then good or bad, let them know the results.?

You’ll hopefully generate trust, goodwill, and a fair few more advocates along the way.

But you’re new and so the first thing you want to do is make an impact. A big splash to make sure you pass your probation and don’t quickly take you, your ideas, and this brand-new marketing team on a one-way boat trip down the Acheron.?

Instinct is to go big or go home, right? Maybe not. Big change requires team backing, often from multiple stakeholders at various levels, so start racking up those small wins, removing pain points, and helping the team to shift gears upwards.

Then when the time comes to make the big changes, they’ll see what you’ve done already.?

The first thing I did at FUGA was update and organise the internal presentation template. Took me an hour or two, still gets daily use from the team. It’s not ground-breaking, but sometimes those operational or time-saving wins help build up goodwill.

And let’s say it’s working. Hopefully, you’ve racked up some wins of your own and you're fit to burst with all the positivity that's flowing.?But hang tight - no one likes a show-off, especially someone that’s new. So get to work elevating the team. Give them opportunities to present their work and celebrate success.

And make sure you start from the ground up. Senior leaders get ample opportunities to talk about their team’s success - but that junior support manager who saved a contact 2 hours of stress, might have just saved you a client.?

Shout about wins from the rooftops.?

And read the room but whenever you think you’ve said something enough, you are probably 3 or 4 stages away from actually being in that place. Whether that be big wins, big messaging, or big plans, it always bears repeating.

It’s true in any marketing function, but especially so when spinning up a new team, you need unity and a clear message and you need people to hear and understand that message enough for it to feel natural.?

However it enters their mind, it needs to leave their lips free of buzzwords to be authentic.

The next step, for me, is one of the most important parts of any marketing function and especially in late-blooming teams. Build out process.

Process, and putting it in place, will help you gain the trust and support of the wider team. Sometimes it seems like overkill, but more often than not, it will ease the journey further down the line.

It can be something as small as a single spreadsheet to add news to go in the newsletter, an up-to-date organisation chart, or something as complex as a full flow chart of internal and external communications in the event of a crisis. Then, once you’ve put it in place, talk about it. Again and again.

Giving your team the assurance that you have got everything organised, helps them do their job more effectively.?

Furthermore, because they’re based at the heart of any business, the marketing team is perfectly placed to empower the team to make their own decisions. And often that empowerment comes from creating rules, setting up process, and adding accountability.?

By giving the team the tools to succeed you’ll be freed up to make the bigger things happen. Whether that’s branded templates for pitches or guidelines for using logos or posting online if the wider team feels like they know the boundaries to work in they’ll hopefully feel safer doing it and the risk of mistakes or rogue elements is vastly reduced.

And it’s that positioning that makes you a central source of truth and that inquisitive nature at the start of your tenure that will make your marketing team the go-to team for company knowledge. Done right, you’re in a position to direct travel, translate the needs of the teams internally and externally, and fill the gaps when they appear.?

But it’s also important in this position to be open and honest about actions you can and can’t take. As soon as the wider business sees the value of your team, there’s a possibility that you’ll be inundated with requests.?

So, be clear about what your team can achieve, the limits of your reach, and when you’re running at capacity.?

Moreover, as with any change management, be even clearer about the actions you want to take. Be honest and upfront as this will help your team excel in the long run, even if they cause some difficult conversations at the beginning. (Check out 'Harvard Business Review’s: On Change Management' for some great examples here)

And finally, one last thing. Document everything. I tell my team that we might be the first, but we won’t be the last and so always leave your work, your reasoning, and your results documented.?

Not only will you guide your own future success, and provide evidence to the wider team about your actions and their consequences, but you also create a platform for your successors to excel.?

It’s a small world and if you pay it forward, you just might get the same treatment in your next position.