Learn this one now
A letter to the marketer who just got the role
Editor’s note: Over the next 4 weeks, I’m writing a letter to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. What follows is the first one of a four-part series.
My dear first-year marketer,
Congratulations. You got the job.
Now let me tell you a few things I had to learn the hard way.
Early in my career I sat in a quarterly business review + watched something that hasn’t left me since.
Sales leadership stood up first. Said they had a tough quarter + missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.
Then marketing leadership stood up. Another strong quarter + surpassed the MQL target yet again.
And here’s the part that stuck out to me - nobody in that room said a single thing. Nobody questioned how both of these things could be true at the same time.
Growing up an athlete, I was wired a certain way. If you do the right input consistently, you’ll get the result. If you’re not getting the result, you’re either not doing enough of the input, or it’s the wrong input relative to driving that result.
What I was watching in that conference room was the second one.
Marketing had picked an input (MQLs) that wasn’t truly connected to the result (revenue) the business needed. But because marketing was only held accountable to the MQL input, they weren’t incentivized to care what happened after those were generated.
This is Goodhart’s Law in action. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. B2B marketing has been breaking this law for years.
So here’s what I want you to know from day one: leads are not the goal. Revenue is the goal. You should have confidence that the work you’re doing will impact pipeline + revenue. If it isn't, it shouldn't be on your list.
The marketers who figure this out early are the ones that sales actually trusts + the ones leadership calls on when the business has a real problem to solve. That’s a different career than the one that ends with you celebrating in a conference room while the company misses its target.
You’re also going to be handed a playbook.
Question it from day one. Don’t do it loudly (yet), but internally. Ask yourself if this reflects how buyers actually behave, or if it’s how “everyone else is doing it.” Common sense and common practice are almost never the same thing in B2B.
The marketers who figure that out early treat the playbook as a starting point, not dogma. Always use the simplest filter available: would a real buyer actually respond to this?
Last thing, and this one isn’t about marketing at all: do the work because your standard demands it.
Not so you can be seen doing it. Not to prove you were worth hiring. Not to show how “busy” you are.
The right people will notice without you having to make them notice. As John Boyd used to tell his proteges, “If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”
You’re going to skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.
Ever faithfully yours,
Sam
P.S. if this would’ve helped you early on, it’ll probably help someone you know who’s just getting started
*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the 3 that will follow in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.
Sponsor: HockeyStack
For the past 2 years I’ve been asking myself the same question over + over again:
“What does an ideal GTM ecosystem journey actually look like for our ICP?”
...but I still don’t have a *clear* answer
I know the answer exists + that it’s hiding in our data. I know that if I could actually see it, I could craft our GTM execution around it instead of guessing. But every time I try to piece it together, I get stuck at the same point:
“Are BDRs more successful if they’ve seen ads first?”
“Do the order of activities impact one another?”
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HockeyStack launched Blueprints recently + it’s the first tool I’ve seen that finally shows which activities + sequences actually happen when we WIN and what is (or isn’t) happening when we LOSE.