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- Is the Problem Your People or Strategy?
Do you have the wrong people or do you have the wrong strategy?
This is a question founders have struggled with answering for as long as things haven’t gone according to plan.
If you’ve found yourself asking this question about your startup (whether as a founder, investor, or head of marketing), then I believe this article could help point you in the right direction. I will spoil this a little bit to start:
The answer isn’t always obvious or clear.
When the Results Aren’t What You Want
When you’re not seeing the results you want (leads, traffic, new contracts, revenue), the easy thing to do is to blame somebody. As the marketing guy, I can tell you marketing is oftentimes the easiest to blame.
“The marketing isn’t working.”
Of course it’s marketing, though. Product vision was cast by one founder, sales has been implemented by the other founder, engineering is super talented, the website looks good, a design agency made the branding perfect—it’s just that marketing keeps screwing things up (picking up on my sarcasm?).
Now, OF COURSE I’m going to try to shift the blame here. After all, I’m the marketing guy—why would I take the fall!?
In my experience, however, there’s often a misalignment of priorities, ill-defined and agreed upon metrics of success, and/or poor communication across teams (including up to executive leadership) that can lead to disappointing results. Yes, there’s a longer list of things that could be the culprit like poor sales closers, no PMF, or buggy code, but I’m trying to keep this article brief.
If you believe the problems are, in fact, stemming from the marketing department, then keep reading as we’ll explore how to solve for: “Is the problem my marketing people or strategy?”
Evaluating Your People
Let’s start with the people. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll only focus on internal staff and not agencies at the moment.
Do your people maintain a roadmap of activities (planned, in progress, completed)?
Are projects executed according to plan and against agreed upon business priorities?
Do you get regular reporting of activities and results of said activities?
Is feedback received well and actions adjusted based on feedback?
If you answered yes to all the above, regardless of outcomes, you’ve got some good people on your team and you may want to seriously consider keeping all of your team in place (at least until strategy is reconsidered) if possible.
There are exceptions to the rule here, such as if the person is violating other company policies or cultural norms. That is independent and exclusive of this exercise. In those cases, please do yourself and your company a favor and fire—fast.
Additionally, depending on the seniority of individuals and the expectations provided to them on day one, it’s not likely you should be conducting this evaluation any sooner than 90 days. And if there is any need for corrections, unless the corrections are catastrophic, you may still have some good people here, not requiring them to be dismissed. However, if you find yourself in a financial bind, then you should be going through a slightly different exercise which is exclusive to this one altogether.
Evaluating Your Strategy
After you’ve evaluated the people on your team, it’s time to evaluate the strategy. Evaluating a strategy can be trickier. You’ll need to look at many factors including some or all of the following (and likely other areas of your marketing not listed):
Timing
Framing
Copy
Channels
Targeting
Pricing
Sales pitch, presentations, and demos
Adjusting two or more elements of your strategy at once may increase the difficulties to measuring exactly what’s driving impact. However, if time is of the essence (and I’m guessing it will be if you’re an early-stage startup), you may need to make your best guess and adjust quickly—even if you can’t measure things exactly.
I recommend you start by looking at the bottom of your funnel, then working your way back up. This is how you can begin to spot bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or total disconnects.
Ask questions about your strategy, such as, “Did we do what we said we would do, when we would do it, and how we would do it?” If the strategy is being executed by your team as described, then changing the strategy is likely the right move here.
Adjusting Strategy to the People
This is tricky, and I’ve seen the process of adjusting strategy to fit the people you’ve onboarded go wrong.
Just because you have three people on staff at the moment doesn’t mean you need (or should) expand responsibilities to fill three roles. There are times when downsizing the team or shifting someone to a new area altogether makes more sense than keeping all of the team and assigning busy work.
There’s also the situation where someone has a talent, maybe they’ve built a TikTok following outside of their professional life. And now, you think, “We should have them do that for the company!” Maybe. But if TikTok doesn’t make sense or align well with the rest of the strategy, you’re just giving people busy work to take on.
Be critical of yourself, the stated strategy, and the expected outcomes in this scenario. You may have people you want to keep, but if their skills do not compliment the strategy, they may need to find a new role or may no longer be a fit at your company.
Adjusting People to the Strategy
Sometimes, the strategy shifts. And that can mean you now have more activities left undone, unless someone on the team can absorb those activities.
That can look something like, “We need someone to manage social media day-to-day, but we can’t hire that person right now. Maybe our email marketer, who writes lots of copy and manages automations, could take on some of those responsibilities.”
In this case, you may need to ask your team to deliver more with less. This is possible, but expect to problem solve for bandwidth, bottlenecks, and process difficulties. If you can remove redundant efforts and enable your team to realize that one project supplies necessary materials for a second or third project, then this becomes easier.
On the other side of the coin, if you’re in a position to hire to better execute the new strategy, you’ve got options now. If you’re unsure on the efficacy of the strategy, you may want to consider a contractor or agency to assist before adding to your team right away.
Every single time I’ve ever built a team, took on a contractor, or advised a startup, I’ve always pushed to simplify marketing efforts.
If you’re adjusting strategy and/or people, take this time to simplify your approach. Focus on the execution and measurement so that activities can be measured accurately for future improvements and adjustments.
Making the Necessary Adjustments Quickly
Making the necessary adjustments is an urgent matter. Unless you find yourself at an overfunded, profit-producing startup (call me quickly if that’s you!), please act with urgency. As funding has become harder to secure, founders and operators need to be thinking about how to keep the ship sailing for longer periods of time in between funding rounds. You can not afford to remain stagnant.
This means not burning time with the wrong strategy or the wrong people. Ultimately, this means you may be facing some tough choices.
You may need to let people go. You may need to change the strategy you fell in love with. You may need to change your strategy, which could also force you to let people go.
Be up front and direct with your people about these changes. Honesty will win them over. Explain rationale behind decisions and use this as an opportunity to re-establish the big picture and vision.
This may be a stumbling block, but there’s so much ahead of you and your team. The remaining team must believe the challenge will be worth the reward in the end.
BREAKING NEWS
“CoStar Group, a leading provider of online real estate marketplaces, information and analytics in the property markets, announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of Matterport in a cash and stock transaction valued at $5.50 per share reflecting an estimated $1.6 billion of enterprise value.”
Proptech News
Conference Deal
Weekly Podcast Feature
Advanced Maintenance Data in Property Management with Ray Hespen, Co-founder and CEO of Property Meld
This week, I’m fortunate to be joined by fellow South Dakotan, Ray Hespen. Ray is CEO and co-founder of Property Meld, a maintenance automation software company based in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Let’s start with some performance metrics from Property Meld’s 2023:
$723,997,461 in repairs completed
8,467,099 maintenance phone calls eliminated
378,082 maintenance issues prevented
4.40 average resident satisfaction across all customers
4,786,554 maintenance tasks automated
During our conversation, we discuss some of these metrics and how great communication can play such a critical role in maintenance automation. Ray breaks down the challenges of maintenance coordination and why property management needs to improve despite these challenges. Ray and the team at Property Meld take a holistic approach to tackling challenges in property maintenance, gathering data, and providing automations. You'll hear about that and more.
Lastly, you'll hear me plugging Property Meld’s conference, Maintenance Summit, in here as well. If you’re in property management, either in the field or on the tech side, then a trip to South Dakota this year in September has got to get on your schedule.
Let’s work together. Schedule a time to discuss how I can help your startup as fractional CMO.