Letter to a first-time manager
What got you here won't get you there
Editor’s note: Over the next month, 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 second in this series. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
My dear first-time manager,
Congratulations. You just got handed something new: a budget, a direct report, or both.
This is the moment many marketers get it wrong.
The instincts that made you a good individual contributor start working against you here. You were rewarded for doing, for shipping, + for driving results on the channels you owned. Now you’re responsible for a system, and systems don’t work the same way.
The mistake I made + see most often at this stage is what I call the additive mindset. You have a budget + you want to grow pipeline, so you start asking questions like:
What if we added more ad spend? What if we hired another BDR? What if we added this channel?
Then you map out the anticipated ROI of each in isolation, add it to your expected outcomes, and present your plan.
The problem with this is that nothing in a GTM motion works as independent parts. You win deals because of how channels work together - ads that build familiarity, outbound that hits at the right moment, content that gives the prospect something to trust. Remove any one of those + the others become less effective. That’s how an ecosystem operates: a series of complex interdependent parts. Evaluate it that way, not channel by channel.
The biggest learning for you here is watching channels you used to think of as additive become force multipliers for one another. The same budget, but more output because the channels are working together rather than in isolation.
But you only get there if you’re willing to ask an honest question about everything your budget touches: is the input doing anything to the output?
Not by its own metrics or confined to how it’s doing in its isolated platform. I’m talking relative to pipeline + revenue - the numbers that actually matter. I bet you’ll find that some of your highest-performing inputs by their own local measures are doing very little for the actual global result. I’ve cut keywords we “ranked” for + channels that drove “traffic” because when I asked that question honestly, the answer was no.
You’re now a steward of the business’s resources. That means asking that question even when the answer is uncomfortable.
Now, about the person you’re managing.
Every new manager defaults to giving answers. You know the job + you’ve done the job, so telling someone what to do is faster than walking them through it. The problem is that people own what they conclude themselves - they don’t own what you give them. You can’t argue someone into a belief they didn’t reason themselves into, and the same goes for getting someone to truly understand their work. Ask the questions before you give the answers. Let them arrive at it on their own.
Lastly, your team is the most accurate reflection of your standards. What you tolerate, what you push back on, where you set the bar - all of that is what they’ll calibrate to. You let the standard slip the moment you don’t say something when you should have.
Feel it early. The standard slips faster than you think.
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 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.
*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.
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