Industry Magazine Get JACK'D Magazine Winter 2019 | Page 14

FOUR THINGS LEADERS DO ONCE A YEAR
The Four Things
Successful Marketing
Leaders Do
Once A Year
BY: ANDREW DAVIS
EVERY OCTOBER my inbox swells with
emails from marketing leaders asking one
question: “What should I have my team focus
on for the next year?” Here’s the thing: only
you can answer this question. I can’t do it for
you. What I can do is help you find the answer.
The Annual Marketing Get Together
We all do it. We block out our calendar for
a couple of days every year to gather our
team in one room. The goal: plan for next
year. The agenda seems straightforward:
let’s get everyone on the same page and
marching in the same direction. Let’s plan
our year and then let’s work our plan. So why
are some marketing teams more successful
than others coming out of an annual planning
event?
The answer is simple: successful
annual
planning
activities
focus
on team growth, not team tasks.
The Difference Between Doing and
Growing
I’ve had the honor of being involved in
dozens of annual corporate marketing events
over the last five years, and in hindsight, I’ve
noticed a massive gap between events that
result in a successful year and those that
don’t.
Too many of us treat our annual planning
event as if it’s an extended version of our
weekly or monthly marketing meetings.
Sure, we extend the time frame to review
a year’s worth of activities and plan the
next year’s, but aside from the timeframe,
the meeting is essentially the same. I’ve
watched these kinds of events devolve into
a list of to-dos for the following year. What’s
more depressing is the fact that the team
leaves deflated, exhausted, and even more
overwhelmed. These kinds of meetings focus
on what we have done, what we currently do,
and what we should do next year.
On the other hand, the marketing leaders I’ve
watched go on to achieve massive success
focus on where the team grew this year and
where they have an opportunity to grow
next year. That’s it. These marketers treat
the annual planning event as an opportunity
to help their team focus, learn, and grow.
(Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t leave
the meeting with a plan on HOW they plan
on building the business, they do that too,
but the focus is entirely on professional
development in the context of the business’s
goals and objectives.)
The most successful marketing leaders
enhance their annual planning events by
doing four simple things anyone of us can
emulate.
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Consistently reinforce a clear and
straightforward focus
At a recent event for a Fortune 500
consumer packaged goods brand, their
CMO opened their annual marketing event
by boiling down their entire year’s focus
into a clear and straightforward statement.
Instead of a powerpoint presentation with
80 slides and hundreds of marketing activity
details, this CMO spent 30 minutes setting up
a simple statement that captured her vision
for the next year. She created a mantra that
established the tone for the entire two-day
event.
“This is the year of Rigorous ROI [Return on
Investment],” she said. In her half-hour setup,
she acknowledged that even she has an “ROI
blind spot” and she pledged to fill the gap by
learning from (and with) her entire team. “This
year, we will learn all we can about how to
measure the effectiveness of our marketing
activities,” she proclaimed.
Over the 16-hours of meetings and side-
sessions that followed her opening session
the simple, clear, and consistent focus
was repeated by everyone from designers
to product marketers and became the
benchmark for valuable and productive
conversations.
Here’s what’s interesting: instead of only