Letter to the first-time VP
On accountability, ecosystems, + velocity
There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows.
You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.
Then marketing leadership stands up. Another strong quarter. Surpassed the MQL target yet again.
And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on.
I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.
15 years later, I’ve done something about this. I built Affect - the platform I’ve always wished for as a marketer.
Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue - and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they're confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself.
The marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.
The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏
My dear first-time VP of Marketing,
Congratulations. You own the marketing department now.
But I want to be direct with you about what this actually means.
Everything that happens inside the marketing department is on you now. Missing the pipeline this quarter isn’t your demand gen manager’s fault, it’s yours. The event you hosted that fell flat isn’t your event marketer’s fault, it’s yours. The product launch that didn’t drive as many handraisers as forecasted isn’t your product marketer’s fault, it’s yours. When things work, the individuals on your team get the credit. When things don’t work, you own it, that’s on you for not driving the result.
This is what it means to actually lead a department. The VPs who struggle at this level are the ones who point their finger when things go wrong. The VPs who grow fast + make it past the 18-month mark understand early that the buck stops with them. You know exactly what your job is. Now you need to drop any semblance of an ego + get ready to take a few jabs to the mouth as these are the requirements to long-term success at this level.
The next thing to learn is how to build a departmental strategy that works.
I told you about ecosystems in a previous letter. In your first marketing role, the idea was simple: don’t measure channels in isolation. In your first manager role, it was about evaluating whether inputs were doing anything to the output. At the director level, it was about building a brand coefficient that makes everything else better.
At the VP level, ecosystems goes from being a philosophy to an operating system.
You’re now making decisions that determine how the GTM motion fits together - where to apply budget, how the teams are structured, which big bets get made, and more difficult, where cuts need to be made. Viewing performance through the lens of individual channels doesn’t work at this level. You’re juggling too many balls at once. The question for you is “how is this channel affecting everything else in our GTM ecosystem?”
A BDR team that looks expensive in isolation might actually be the mechanism that drives the majority of your PLG signups to successfully activate + adopt through their follow up. The podcast that is “unattributable” might be why your win rates have been steadily rising. You have to hold the whole system in your head + make decisions at that level.
But most VPs don’t. They optimize locally because local performance is what’s easiest to prove or defend in a board meeting. Don’t fall into this trap early.
One last thing I want to tell you is about velocity.
At this level, the decisions are the most complex they’ve ever been + the information you have will never be complete. There will always be another data point to gather, another stakeholder to align, another scenario to model, etc. And if you are always waiting until you have “that one last thing,” you’ll always be waiting.
A plan without velocity never gets off the ground. The market doesn’t wait for you to have everything you need to be comfortable. Your competitors certainly won’t be waiting for you to feel ready. You need to learn to move with what you have + be prepared to iterate as you go. Success at this level is making a series of good decisions after good decisions in rapid succession, not one perfect decision made too late.
Nobody is going to give you permission to lead + do this. That’s the job you’re expected to do. You’re the one being looked to for permission now.
Remember: 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 4 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
To the first-time director
*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.