Sharpening Your Axe

This week's 2 cents focuses on the value of marketing operations when Gartner has 7 reasons to let the CMO go.

Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as saying, “if I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 of those hours sharpening my axe”.

Before I launch into this week’s 2 cents, you might be surprised to learn that I do some research for these little rants, and it seems that the attribution of this quote is, well… like a lot of these things…. bollocks, and Abe was first attributed to this quote in a 1960 advertisement for drilling equipment, and so is highly unlikely to be the source of such wisdom.

Apparently (according to Quote Investigator), the chap we should be quoting is Reverend W. H. Alexander, who in 1944 was the pastor of the First Christian Church of Oklahoma City, who told an apocryphal story of a lumberjack:

“who said that if his life depended upon his ability to cut down a tree in five minutes, he would spend three minutes sharpening his axe”.

As I try to segue to the point of my two cents this week, that little bit of research could be described as my axe sharpening.

It involves the work behind the scenes of marketing output, gathering data, conducting research, and doing deep work (OK, deep’ish).

To continue this to a different analogy, I have seen marketing described as an iceberg: the requests for a bigger logo, more videos, presence on Tikface, “more cowbell” and all of that sexy stuff is visible above the waterline, while the work that is actually happening is unseen.

Which, given the podcast conversation I just had last week with my chum Jeff Clark - the 5 reasons why CMOs get fired - is a bit of a problem.

Jeff quoted some Gartner research (shared here on LinkedIn) that listed “seven scenarios that would most likely result in removing your CMO from their role” based on a survey of senior executives.

Jeff picked his top 5, and we discussed failing to deliver promised results, not adapting to significant changes in the business or marketplace, not earning the respect of the leadership team, not communicating a strategic function for marketing, or how marketing metrics relate to business priorities.

Yeah, the hits kept coming.

As Jeff and I discussed, the challenge I see here is broadly one of communication, joint goals and objectives at the outset, the plan, execution, and the business impact of the results.

The failure this Gartner research seems to highlight is in the marketing of the marketing, which is kinda ironic, given that we are communication and marketing professionals.

Following a Slack conversation with someone in sales this week, I described myself as having "CRM OCD". I like to invest a fair amount of time in ensuring that the data is good, the reporting is sound, and the marketing operations machine is, er… operating.

Doing this in a past engagement a few years ago exposed a much-lauded “up and to the right” web traffic report that had impressed the leadership team (above the waterline) but was bullshit as it was built on cheap PPC ads being clicked on in their thousands in third-world territories where this high-end software vendor had no reason to be building an audience.

Not only was the vanity metric bullshit, they were pissing away thousands of dollars to hit that number.

This is a simple example, but it seems that none of the executives in the Gartner survey said they would let their CMO spend more time with their family because they didn’t spend enough time with their sleeves rolled up in the dark of the marketing back office (sharpening the axe) when they wanted more cowbell.

It’s the same conversation happening around the long and short of it in marketing, the long-term investments we need to make in the brand while delivering the short-term demand generation.

If marketing the value of the actual marketing above the waterline seems to be a challenge in your organization, what chance does internal marketing the value of sharpening the axe have?

Oooh…

No wonder we attribute the quote to Abraham Lincoln instead of Rev. Alexander.

We need all the help we can get for this campaign.

Here is the podcast I referred to...

... and the post from Chris Ross, Gartner Analyst and VP: