Brittany Bingham is the VP of Marketing at Guru, a collaborative knowledge management solution where answers find you--everywhere, every time. Previously, Brittany worked as VP of Marketing & Growth at RaiseMe and as Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at SurveyMonkey where she oversaw acquisition, conversion, engagement, and retention.
Mark Fiske is an Operating Partner at H.I.G. Capital, a Private Equity firm with $37 Billion in assets under management. Previously, he served as VP of Marketing for Credit Karma, VP of Global Marketing for Ancestry, and Director of Marketing for the Gap family of brands. From startups to the Fortune 500, Mark has scaled marketing teams across acquisition, lifecycle, monetization, brand, and UX.
Additional insights provided by:
Rick Silvestrini
Head of Marketing @ Reforge, Former Marketing Leader @ Youtube, ROBLOX, Hired
There are many types of marketers and countless marketing career paths. But for marketers in technology companies, one profile increasingly fills the ranks of rising VPs and CMOs: the marketer who starts with a single acquisition or retention channel before broadening scope and responsibility beyond that channel. We've both made that climb and can say without a doubt that the most difficult step was the transition from Senior Channel Manager to Marketing Leader running our first multi-channel marketing teams. And we've also seen countless other careers fail at this point. A couple of weeks ago, Casey Winters and Fareed Mosavat referred to a similar point on the Product Management career path as "Crossing the Canyon" rather than just taking another step. The analogy also applies to marketers making the leap from Senior Channel Manager to Marketing Team Leader.
The Trap Hidden in Plain Sight
The move from optimizing a channel to leading a multi-channel team is difficult because it's basically a totally different job requiring both new abilities and new knowledge of channels you might not have ever run yourself. Being an expert in one channel will earn you ownership of a single channel, but it won't guarantee your success as a team leader. In fact, we've observed that the best single-channel executors often have the most difficult time transitioning to running a multi-channel team. It's not just another step on the ladder; it's a vast canyon to cross with multi-faceted challenges requiring incredible personal growth. And usually, no one explains this to new team leaders, so they don't realize what they're walking into and they are not equipped to succeed.
Going from Coordinator → Channel Manager → Sr Channel Manager, you develop more channel expertise and better execution capabilities. You become great at optimizing KPIs within the constraints of your channel. But focusing on the things that make you great as an individual contributor will actually trip you up as a Team Leader. Psychologically, it's incredibly difficult to get out of the habits that initially made you successful.
You can continue to put wins on the board and still not make the jump. There are four key transitions you need to make:
Being an expert in one channel → Building strategy across all channels
Being good at your job → Guiding others to be good at theirs
Focusing on your area → Collaborating across departments
Playing an instrument → Conducting the orchestra
And the kicker? You often need to do all of this without getting additional training, support, or mentorship... which is why we created the Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy Program Marketing Strategy Program.
Let's explore the marketing career journey more deeply and then dive into each of the transitions.
The Marketing Career Journey
Part of the difficulty in navigating your marketing career is the difference in titles across different companies. A "Head of Marketing" at an early stage start-up could be a Sr Marketing Manager running a channel at Google. An entry-level marketer could be called coordinator, specialist, assistant, associate, etc. And there are further differences across B2C & B2B companies as similar functions are sometimes called different things (e.g. Acquisition vs Demand Gen). While the titles can vary greatly, we believe there are essentially 6 levels to the marketing careers split between Marketing Contributors and Marketing Leaders:
Common Marketing Contributor Titles
Coordinator/ Specialist → Marketing Manager → Sr Marketing Manager
Common Marketing Leader Titles
Team Leader → VP of Marketing → CMO
You travel up the first 3 levels by strengthening a similar set of muscles and skills. You keep getting better and better at executing within your channel. Perhaps you rotate across multiple paid channels (PPC, paid social, TV, etc.), but you're generally focused on a single type of marketing work. But all of a sudden, you reach the first level of Marketing Leadership, which is leading your first multi-channel team. It's here that you encounter a totally new set of problems that require completely different skills and tools and habits. You must make 4 transitions to cross the canyon successfully.
Being an expert at one channel → Building strategy across all channels
Being great at one channel is exceedingly difficult but relatively straightforward. For example, if you're managing a paid channel:
1. Know your channel inside and out technically.
2. Understand how increasing the channel's budget or resourcing will impact your results, whether it be volume, Cost per Acquisition (CPA), or other metrics.
3. Rotate your creative assets effectively and manage your creative asset production.
4. Discuss channel goals with your team leader and advocate effectively for budget when you recognize opportunity.
Running a multi-channel marketing team, on the other hand, requires you to step out of an area where you are the expert in order to build a strategy across channels where you are not an expert. Furthermore, the channels you are now overseeing may have wildly different management strategies, engagement models, and creative needs.
For example, the skills that make you great at Paid Search don't necessarily translate to other forms of paid advertising (like paid social or TV), and they certainly won't help you lead the team's lifecycle strategy. If you try to become an expert at executing in each of the channels, you'll drown.
Since you won't have the time to go deep on everything, you have to quickly transition from an "I" to a "T" shape. In other words, you have to find a way to gain enough knowledge across your gaps to be able to build and run your team's strategy. Simultaneously, you'll have to get out of the weeds of one channel to see how everything fits together. Here are a few factors to consider:
What is the right north star metric for the team and how does that metric ladder up to the company's north star metric?
How does your team's outputs fit into the company's financials?
What is your growth model and where is it constrained?
How does each channel fit into the lifecycle of your customers?
What are the right operational KPIs for each channel?
What are the important qualitative factors surrounding your customer?
You'll use these factors and others to budget resources across existing channels, select new channels, determine your creative and testing approach, and inform assumptions in your attribution model. These are the foundations for building a strong strategy, and being great at executing in a single channel doesn't prepare you for this.
Unless you have had great mentoring, it's likely that the strategic aspects of running a marketing team are wildly outside your experience and comfort zone. Moving from the narrow single channel view to incorporating the full business context is a huge mental shift, and failing to make the transition has substantial consequences. If you don't understand what your company is trying to do and why, your acquisition strategy won't align with the rest of the organization, potentially creating conflict. For example, if the sales team has prioritized a new territory or customer segment and marketing isn't driving leads to support that strategy, it can get ugly quickly.
"Start by answering how your specific OKRs or metrics contribute to business outcomes, and what needs to be true for you to deliver on them? What are the drivers, both qualitatively and quantitatively, what assumptions were made when forecasting targets, and more - you run the risk of optimizing metrics that don't matter. Should you be driving account registrations, or working towards a 7-day retained user that can be monetized? Scrutinize the metrics and build your strategy around meaningful metrics." - Brittany Bingham, VP of Marketing at Guru, former VP at RaiseMe
Being Good at Your Job → Guiding Others to Be Great
As a channel expert, you are rewarded for crushing your KPI targets. The best folks we've seen at this level tend to be grinders who work in campaigns from morning to night optimizing all the details. They are incredibly fast at implementing changes because they have muscle memory and personalized systems for how they operate their channels. Once you become a team leader, you are judged based on your team's overall performance, so your job becomes training and guiding others to be great at their job. You need to raise the output and effectiveness of everyone reporting to you.
But if you are a star channel owner promoted to lead others, team speed and effectiveness can actually decrease after your promotion. Why? Because you were a star player and now you are no longer on the field. Someone else has to fill the spot in your old channel, and you probably have to teach that person. When training someone new, 1+1 will initially only equal 1.5. But when you're used to moving quickly on your own, it can feel like 1+1 = .75, and that can be incredibly frustrating. The up-front investment in training your team will pay dividends in the long run, but you have to be willing to make the effort first. Many channel experts who love to crank out campaigns become incredibly frustrated as team leaders when they have to slow down and explain a technique to someone else. If you are not careful when making the leap to multi-channel team leader, you might suddenly find yourself and the team in a downward spiral.
The Manager Death Spiral
The most common trap here starts when new team leaders step in to execute in order to keep KPIs on track or to help launch new campaigns. Their intent is good. They got to this level by being a great executor, so the natural thought process is: "I'm still better at this channel than the new person, so I'll just put in a few extra hours and do this to keep our KPIs on track." The first part of that statement may be true. But here is what happens when you do this:
Stolen Learning Opportunity - You've taken an opportunity to learn away from someone on your team.
Trap Yourself In The Weeds - If you're doing the work yourself, you'll have to keep doing it until you either train or hire someone new. It is usually sub-optimal and rarely sustainable to manage and execute at the same time.
Holding The "Secrets" - You end up not communicating all the things that you know that will help others be better at their job because when you are the one executing, you aren't forced to.
The hard part is you don't realize this behavior is a trap. Stepping in yourself to keep things on track often works for a short period. Eventually, though, your team's development stalls, their motivation declines, you're late to ask for additional resources, and your personal progression fizzles out. Michael Lopp refers to this as "The New Manager Death Spiral."
Leading When You Are Not the Expert
When you've built your career on being the expert and having all the answers, it can be incredibly uncomfortable to admit you don't know something and that you can't help them beyond a certain point. The risk is to 'fake it' in order to preserve your status as an expert. But that's a path to failure because your team will see right through your bluff. You have to ask good questions and develop a sense of when things don't add up.
“One skillset that becomes really valuable is knowing the right questions to ask to be able to discover and flag potential problems even if you are not familiar with running a particular channel. Knowing how to ask your IC good questions, scrutinize the specific channel strategy, and reverse engineer its potential are all things you need to lean into.”
- Brittany Bingham
Additionally, as a new team leader, you will have to quickly learn how to vary your personal approach and management style for each member of your team. (You can learn more about this by watching our on-demand webinar here.)
“I use this saying that ‘when it comes to feedback some people are a Ferrari and others are a Honda Civic.’ I’ve had team members where I give them a little bit of feedback and the next day I see a night and day difference. Other times, they overcorrect and spin out of the race entirely if you aren’t careful about how you deliver feedback and take their individual personality into consideration. And some people really require continuous reinforcement of the same feedback because their handling might be much softer and it takes them a long time to adjust.” - Mark Fiske, Operating Partner at H.I.G. Capital, former VP Credit Karma, Ancestry
Focusing on Your Area → Collaborating Across Departments
Being a good Channel Expert mostly entails focusing on your channel or owned strategies - how you drive maximum output with the resources under your control. Being a Team Leader puts you at the center of many new relationships with other departments. In addition to building a strategy and driving your team's performance, you now have to maintain relationships with other functions and influence the entire company. Each department presents its own challenges to effective collaboration.
Different languages across Marketing & Finance: Channel owners probably understand that marketing KPIs contribute to the company's broader performance, but they may not be familiar with the specific terminology and frameworks used by the finance team. Finance will evaluate ROI based not just on CAC and LTV, but also on payback period, contribution margin, and net-present value, among others. While you might not be familiar with those terms, the finance team definitely won't have a deep understanding of your channels. To have productive conversations about budgets and OKRs, you'll need to learn their language and be able to communicate important aspects of how different marketing channels work.
Brand has different incentives: Brand teams are typically responsible for maintaining a consistent voice, tone, look, and feel across all points of communication with customers. They are disincentivized from trying new things. Whereas a performance marketing team needs to constantly test new creative and experiment with fresh approaches. Your job is to bridge this disconnect and foster a healthy discussion about what's "on brand".
“Early on in my career when I was a performance marketer, I was working with brand teams to try and get them to partner in developing direct response creative and found that their goals and KPIs were vastly different from mine. I sat down and built a rapport before we broached the topic, which made the conversation of ‘how do we marry our objectives together?’ much easier. If you don’t take the time to understand the other point of view and build a relationship, it’s really tough to drive change.” - Mark Fiske
Product has different investment criteria and time horizons: Product is often the toughest area to influence because marketers tend to focus on hitting their immediate KPIs whereas Product is thinking about compounding effects of their investments over multiple quarters. Marketers often make several mistakes when making requests for the product roadmap.
Not framing requests in terms of ROI for the business. Product and engineering time is often the most sought after resource at a company with countless competing priorities. Therefore, Product is constantly bombarded with requests from every department creating a zero-sum game. To get your request prioritized, you'll have to demonstrate how it impacts the overall business, not just the marketing team. Going in without a business case looks amateur.
Focusing on short-term band-aids. Since Product is focused on the business over the long-term, they hate doing any work that will be thrown away (not that any of us like this!), even if that work will provide a short-term boost to KPIs. But it's common for marketers to make those short-term asks to help hit their numbers. However, asking for "quick fixes" that don't align with the long term strategy can lead to the impression that marketing doesn't understand where the business is going.
Not thinking in terms of systems. Companies scale by creating systems and automated processes that improve efficiency and create compounding effects. Too often, marketing relies on manual processes for too long while also failing to recognize what systems they need to improve their efficiency. Many marketing teams operate without a roadmap of their own.
Walking in with an overbuilt solution. There are often multiple ways to accomplish an objective. So it's critical to frame the problem you're trying to solve and work through the solution collaboratively with the product team. There may be a simple elegant solution that you haven't considered. Yet we often see marketers walk into a Product meeting asking for a very specific un-researched solution that's wildly expensive in terms of time and effort. That approach isn't collaborative and degrades your credibility.
“The relationship between Product and Marketing often suffers a 'death by a thousand cuts'. When Marketing teams ask for incremental, one off, tactical fixes quarter after quarter it makes it really difficult for Product Management to understand the whole picture and batch projects for efficient implementation. Instead, develop a shared roadmap for the next 12 months and create a partnership with Product so you can go on the journey together.” - Rick Silvestrini, Head of Marketing at Reforge, Former Marketing Leader at Youtube, ROBLOX, Hired
Sales paychecks are at stake: Battles between marketing and sales are as legendary as they are unnecessary. Sales have their compensation on the line every day. They depend on the leads from your marketing team to hit their quotas and make their bonuses. So you have to expect that there will be a constant conversation about the volume and quality of leads that your team can deliver. How you navigate this conversation and set shared expectations will determine if this relationship is a battle or a ballet. You need to avoid surprises from either side, flag issues early, and create shared accountability for it to work. We often see first-time Team Leaders get defensive when Sales starts asking difficult questions.
“A lot of the disconnect stems from not selecting a metric that creates shared accountability. Focusing only on MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) won't incentivize the marketing team to collaboratively solve problems deeper in the funnel. Try to goal marketing on metrics after the hand-off to sales, perhaps SQLs, SQOs, or down-funnel sales pipeline. This will incentivize both teams to coordinate across more of the process and focus everyone on shared success. It will expose disconnects and foster more alignment.” - Rick Silvestrini
These are shared relationships
The point is that across all these departments you are now responsible for a high degree of discussion and negotiation. As Brittany likes to tell her teams:
"Don't lead with an ask - no matter how good you think it is. Build a path to it. Share accountability for and understanding of goals, know what they're trying to achieve and how you can support, and provide context early." - Brittany Bingham
If you go into these conversations focused on your needs only, it's unlikely that you will foster healthy relationships and be successful in your role. You'll land at the bottom of the canyon. But if you begin with empathy and discover what's important to the other party, you will increase your chance of safely crossing to the other side to continue on toward the VP and CMO levels.
Playing an Instrument → Conducting the Orchestra
At the Team Leader level, you suddenly step out of the orchestra pit and onto the podium. We've already spoken about why it's critical to put your former instrument (i.e. channel) down. But it's critical to also consider that you are now responsible for the composition of the team and how everyone functions together.
Why there's no standard Marketing Org
In the same way that the composition of an orchestra changes depending on the musical piece to be played, the composition of your Marketing team depends on what marketing strategy you deploy. There are numerous strategies, so there can be countless ways to build a Marketing team. Small companies with simple strategies that need only a few players (more of a string quartet than an orchestra). As organizations grow, the band scales up to dozens or hundreds of marketers.
But regardless of the scale, there is pressure to get your marketing strategy right so you can build the right team. Marketers tend to be specialists rather than generalists, so when you get the strategy wrong, you build the wrong team, and it can be very difficult to reallocate responsibilities among the folks you have. Shifting strategies often means letting people go. As the business evolves and channel performance fluctuates, it's important to regularly revisit your strategy and the players on your team. If you can foresee changes coming one or two quarters ahead of time, you can help your employees add new skills that match the future direction or you can help them transition to a better role with minimal disruption to the individual or the team.
"Building the team and strategy is a loop. Your team's core competencies plus their adaptability and learning mindset can dictate the evolution of your marketing strategy, and your marketing successes can dictate your strategy for building your team.” - Brittany Bingham
Creating Harmony
Even if you get the strategy correct and hire all the right people, you still have to ensure that everyone plays well together. The way to do this is by managing through habits, rituals, and processes. Your job is no longer to optimize the channels; it's to run the budgeting process, the weekly meetings, the team-building exercises, the strategy offsite, and more. The rituals and processes you establish create the operating tempo for the team. They determine when reporting is expected, what updates should look like, how creative is approved, etc. Striking the right balance is difficult, and many new team leaders struggle for a few reasons.
Overly reliant on hard skills: These types of leadership activities require a much stronger focus on 'the soft skills,' whereas your role as a channel owner was focused primarily on hard skills. You might have limited experience in running meetings and organizing effective off-sites. It's natural to avoid the unfamiliar and focus on areas of strength.
Don't want to seem bureaucratic: Putting systems and processes in place can feel overwrought and too 'big company' if done incorrectly. New leaders are sometimes reluctant to use process because they view this as extra work for the team, taking time away from running the channels.
Focused on the details, not the players: It's very common to see new Team Leaders struggle to switch their approach from tactics to strategy, remain too execution-focused, and engage primarily at the campaign level. You job is to conduct the players, not dictate their work.
By not focusing on rituals and processes, you get bogged down as a leader, sucked into all the execution. Your team constantly comes to you for questions and direction because they don't have a set forum for specific topics. A Team Leader's day can become a stream of interruptions limiting your ability to focus and the team's ability to move projects forward without you. Instead of creating freedom for your team, a lack of processes and rituals often drives you toward micromanagement. You wanted to be the cool hands-off leader without a lot of heavy processes, yet you became a micromanager instead.
"Many new team leaders struggle to adapt, as we have a tendency to default to our personal 'standard operating procedure.' The task-based approach to work management will no longer suffice. It's critical to think about developing team culture, alignment surrounding goals, and the 'self reinforcing processes' needed to drive the team forward without micromanaging." - Mark Fiske
Crossing the Canyon Successfully
We have a lot of empathy for Team Leaders making this difficult leap. We hope that by understanding the nature of the canyon and its common traps, you are better prepared to make the necessary changes to successfully adapt, transition, and thrive.
You shift from being a channel expert to building strategy across all channels.
You focus on guiding others rather than doing the work yourself.
You collaborate cross-functionally instead of just focusing on your domain.
You beautifully orchestrate your team rather than micromanaging their work for them.
To go deeper on these concepts while getting guidance from Brittany, Mark, and other leaders, join us in an upcoming cohort of our Marketing Strategy program. This transition point can be the difference-maker in your career, and we'd like to help you accelerate through it.
There’s also an On-demand Webinar for Crossing the Career Canyon in Marketing.