Startups can be an amazing training ground for their employees — but in the early days, they often lack great ‘coaches’; people with deep operational expertise to share. In this new series, Sifted asks department heads what wisdom they wish had been shared with their younger, greener selves.
First up, Jemma Wong, chief marketing officer at renewable energy platform tem, and formerly CMO at coworking space provider Huckletree and design platform PlasticFree.
1/ Go where the money is
The finance and marketing relationship is the most underrated, overlooked and powerful union in any scaling business. Both of you are keepers of risk — and knowing how to play with risk is what will set your brand apart.
In one of my previous mid-level roles I remember going through my calendar history and realising that I had made zero effort with the finance director; I was the only ‘head of’ that had no regular 1:1 time with them. For our first catch-up I was deeply unprepared, spinning data point after data point about how ‘efficient’ we were and giving proof points to unlock new investments. The conversation was a dead-end. I was proving but I wasn’t listening.
By not investing in this relationship I was not only holding back internal buy-in for our marketing projects, but I was stunting my own understanding of how to reorient the business between periods of expansion and periods of contraction, how to make more calculated decisions, manage risk, and drive growth inside a high-growth business. You would think these aren’t part of the marketer’s remit, but if you want to be a truly impactful exec, this is the heart of it all.
If you haven’t already, level up your financial literacy: listen to podcasts, do a short course, or even ask industry friends to send financial model templates to compare notes. Every marketer should be able to speak the language of the board and be well across the financial inputs and outputs of the business so you can be smarter in unlocking the right spend for the right bets. After a few constructive sessions together the finance director and I went from speaking about really hygienic things like CAC [customer acquisition cost] and attribution to more meaty things like pricing power, competition and retention trends. I owe so much of my growth to this relationship and it’s the first piece of advice I give to anyone starting a new gig: go where the money is.
2/ Learn how to make good calls
If I could go back a few years I would tell my younger self to not only trust but invest in her capacity to make good judgements. Out of all the intangible skills, it’s probably the most valuable, and it comes from applying your strengths and sharpening your instincts in new scenarios, not simply copying the decisions of others.
A few years ago the cofounders of the company I worked for asked me to take on the commercial and sales portfolio (I was the marketing director at the time). I had never run a sales team before, but I tried to show up like I was already a decade-deep pro. I cringe now when I think back to this time and how inauthentic I was. Among many things, I tried too hard to create one operating rhythm for both teams (bad idea) and the pendulum swung so far the other way that the marketing team cared more about win-to-loss ratios and less about creating brand magic. I was letting new skills drown out my old ones, my energy levels were all over the place, and my joy in the role halved during that time.
And I also missed the point. My cofounders didn’t give me that portfolio because of my track record, they gave it to me because they valued my judgement to make the right calls in the heat of chaos and create a clearing ahead. They knew that I could read the market like no one else and that I would act on that when the time came.
Not every promotion or role expansion is a test of your capability; sometimes it’s a test of your character as a leader. You won’t finetune your judgement in marketing by sitting in data, you need to actively apply it. Build a network of senior marketers and exchange stories of how each of you make decisions. Follow two to three relevant brands like living case studies and watch how they show up in campaigns, in comms or in product choices. Better yet, sit down with your founding team and do retrospectives on judgements made each quarter to assess the company’s muscle and capacity to make the right calls at the right moments. Trust me, it will boost your EQ and help you grow tenfold as a leader.
3/ Figure out which metrics matter
When I was in a mid-level marketing role I used to help our C-suite prep board packs. If you can volunteer to do this, do it — now. Those packs will tell you everything you need to know about the priorities of the board, the trade-offs in play, and the current operational pace of a business. But more than anything it will teach you the metrics that matter.
Every marketer, myself included, has been guilty of over-doing it in slide decks and presenting up to 10 different metrics that tell a story that only they care about: “How we optimised X channel to drive higher volume of leads at lower CAC, how efficient we’ve been with our spend this quarter, the year on year growth within a segment”. This level of detail might be insightful to you but it’s noisy to them because all that truly matters is whether your brand has a sustainable impact.
In other words: can your brand sustain and rise among pricing, market and product changes, and can your brand be remembered in a sea of competition? Answer that and you’re onto a winner. It’s the measurement I come back to whenever a new campaign or idea is suggested. Will this give us lasting brand power? It will also keep you focused on the long-term view, which is needed if you want to build something of any cultural relevance.
