Letter to a first-time director
On titles, brand + the weight of being wrong
A quick note from me before we get into this week’s newsletter:
You know the feeling. The one that comes when pipeline is off. You sense it + are mentally preparing yourself for the knee-jerk reaction your leadership team is going to have when they find out. You have your theories about potential causes. Leadership has theories as well, but more urgently, are telling you to fix this now. So while you spend the next week trying to see what happened, what you actually need is someone to just tell you where the funnel is broken + what to fix first.
I’ve felt that frustration my entire career. I’ve been that marketer more times than I can count. But I’ve finally had enough of it, so I’ve been moonlighting to build the tool I always wished I had.
Affect pinpoints exactly where your funnel is broken, explains the root cause of it, and tells you how to fix it. But diagnosing the problem is only step one. Affect is built to take you all the way from knowing what’s broken to making the changes to fix it to seeing exactly when those changes will hit your top of funnel, pipeline, + revenue. For the first time, you can see your fingerprints on the outcome.
The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it.
My dear first-time director,
Congratulations. You just got “the” title.
This one is a big step for you, so it’s going to be longer than the last two letters I sent you.
Here’s the thing about titles: they have a sneaky way of trying to become the thing you work toward instead of the continued pursuit of mastery in your craft.
John Boyd would regularly warn his mentees about this trap. His frame was simple and became known as the “to be or to do” speech. You can spend your career trying to “be” someone who gets the titles + accolades, or you can spend your career doing the actual work + making a real difference in your field.
Director is not an identity. It’s a context in which you’re enabled to do more + better work. But the day you start leading with the weight of the title is the day your work starts suffering for it.
Now, something you’re going to be asked to think deeply about at this level that you probably weren’t before: brand.
I’ll save you the “should we invest in brand or demand gen?” debate you’re going to hear in every budget meeting for the rest of your career because it’s the wrong question. Brand + demand aren’t competing. Brand is the coefficient that sits in front of everything else. The same campaign, the same budget, the same BDRs produce different results depending on whether the market knows who you are + their association with you. A strong brand can make mediocre demand gen work better than it should. A weak brand can prevent even the best demand gen work from driving results.
This is going to frustrate you because you can feel your brand’s strength and can communicate that in a meeting with leadership, but they’re going to ask for data that backs this + there’s no single datapoint that “proves” this feeling for you. Don’t let that discourage you.
When a prospect gets on a call already knowing what you do + why it matters, that’s the brand coefficient at work. When a cold email gets a reply because they’ve seen your company’s name three times in the past month, that’s it. It won’t show up cleanly in any attribution model, which is exactly why most directors never fully account for it. You should.
Another thing about this level that nobody prepares you for. Some of your calls you make at this level are going to be wrong. Budget decisions, strategic bets, people decisions - you’re going to realize later on that you got some of them wrong.
This is now a part of the job. What matters is what you do when it happens.
The instinct most people have is to defend their decision. To double down + find reasons why it still might work. Or the opposite - they let it die and place blame elsewhere for why it didn’t work. I’ve watched talented directors lose the trust of their leaders + teams because they couldn’t accept the responsibility of being wrong.
Here’s a distinction worth understanding early: a bad decision and a bad outcome aren’t the same thing. You can make the right call with the information you had + still have it not work. That’s business. Hell, that’s life. What you owe people in that situation is honesty about what happened + clarity on what changes. Learn to own that + say “but here’s what we’re doing about it.”
The directors people trust the most aren’t always right. They’re just the ones who don’t make their mistakes someone else’s problem.
You’ll 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 helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.
Editor’s note: This is letter 3 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager
*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 others 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?”
So we’re all sitting here with tons of unstructured data that could answer these questions, but don’t have the infrastructure to actually surface the answers we’re after…until now.
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.