Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Effective leadership in marketing organizations About this episode CMO at WorkBoard, David Chase, delves into Effective leadership in marketing organizations. As companies strive to hit their goals every quarter, it has become increasingly important that clear communication flows from the top of the ladder to every department. Today, David discusses how to effectively communicate OKRs within a marketing organization, as well as the relationship/distinction between OKRs and KPIs. Connect With: David Chase: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss some marketing strategy and leadership. Joining us is David Chase, who is the CMO of Workboard, which provides an enterprise standard strategy execution and OKR platform with generative AI embedded throughout, helping the world's largest and most complex organizations execute their strategy more predictably and profitably. Yesterday, David and I talked about the right go-to-market for your company's size and audience, and today we're going to discuss effective leadership in marketing organizations. All right, here's the second part of my conversation with David Chase, the CMO of Workboard. David, welcome back to the Martech Podcast.
1:56 Speaker 05 Hey, good to be back then.
1:57 Speaker 04 Excited to have you back on the show and continue our conversation. Yesterday, we talked about the fundamentals of figuring out your go-to-market, and really that is a lead executive exercise, figuring out what the strategy And getting alignment, not just specific to marketing. I want to go into a little bit more detail into an area that you not only work from a product perspective, but also as an organizational leader, understanding effective leadership in marketing organizations. I said yesterday, our CEO at a large organization dictates the strategy from his iron throne atop the mountaintop and hands it down to all of the VPs who then try to row the boat in the right same direction.
2:39 Speaker 04 In a marketing organization, when you get your OKR, the direction that you're pointing the boat, how do you communicate that effectively to a marketing organization? And how is that different than some of the other teams within your organization?
2:54 Speaker 05 Something sat with me overnight as we had the conversation and from your wrap up yesterday was, it really doesn't matter about the framework and the acronym. We talk about this quite a lot as an organization, which is it doesn't matter if it's OKRs or something else. It really is about that translation of the strategy and getting everybody aligned and being able to focus on the work that needs to be done and being able to connect the dots. So for me as a marketing leader, it sort of starts there really. It starts with the operating rhythm, if you like, that I as a leader will lead my teams by. So there's a couple of distinctive steps to how I think about the operating rhythm that I use. So I'll just spend a couple of minutes just explaining that a little bit. So as you said, you get the direction, we understand where we're headed over the whatever timeframe it might be.
3:38 Speaker 05 First really important thing is to be able to get together with your team and actually localize what that direction is. Whether it's a three-year company strategy, or it's a annual senior leadership team, or quarterly senior leadership team, OKR. It's really important to get together as a team, as a marketing team, look at that and say, okay, what are we going to do to drive the achievement of those strategic priorities? What can we impact this quarter that's going to make an impact on that long-term outcome? I think one of the nuances that gets sometimes misunderstood in marketing organizations, when organizations think about leveraging OKRs as part of their management model is, how does that align with my KPIs? KPIs are an
4:20 Speaker 05 Incredibly important measure for marketing leaders, things like close rate, conversion metrics, any campaign metrics that you have. And again, one of the things that's important to me is making sure that I actually have both of those two things working together. Making sure that we track both which parts of the strategy we're going to execute this quarter, OKRs, and tracking my KPIs. The important thing about having those two things together is when I'm thinking about resource allocation, when I'm thinking about trade offs, I can't think about them in isolation. I can't focus people's attention just on the OKRs for the quarter if it's going to have a really detrimental effect on one of my KPIs. Those two things have to be looked at in the same way, and particularly as you think about resource allocation.
5:06 Speaker 04 Maybe it's just me. I always thought of the transition for lots of enterprises from KPIs being the strategy communication tool de jour to OKRs as a leveling up. It's objectives and key results. Key results are KPIs, in my opinion, right? Like, I have got a metric that I am trying to optimize for, and come hell or high water, I want that performance metric to be better. My head goes to when I worked at eBay, we were optimizing for what we called ACRUs, active confirmed registered users, new users of the platform who bought something. And all of our marketing activities were focused either on that
5:50 Speaker 04 or on bid volume, number of transactions that we're driving. If the company was to change strategy and say, hey, we're focusing not necessarily on the used marketplace, but driving transactions of new product, we want to compete with Amazon, some of those metrics would probably need to change, right? The objectives, the O dictates the KR, key results, right? Here's the direction, align your key results towards that. Am I thinking about what an OKR and the relationship to KPIs are effectively? Like, am I nuts or just making connections that aren't there?
6:28 Speaker 05 I think there's a nuance to it. What we typically see is that KPIs are just activity orientated. They're the lagging measures that exist and there's typically hundreds of them, depending on which part of the organization that you're in.
6:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, improve ad click-through rate is a KPI.
6:44 Speaker 05 A hundred percent. When we think about OKRs and when the large organizations that we work with think about OKRs, and this is why it's important to look at both of these two things together versus it's not an and/or, in my opinion, is the OKRs are typically, what are the few behavior changes that you want to drive? What outcomes do you want to drive this quarter, this time period? And they are often leading measures to a lagging KPI. So if we think about improving click-through rate, okay, one of our objectives might be to expand into a new market, something, something, something.
7:20 Speaker 04 Hey, let's use eBay as an example, a company everybody knows. When I was there, this is years ago, eBay was known as a marketplace for used stuff and also had a wide variety of new products available. People, just as a brand perspective, thought about being the used marketplace. The objective is to improve marketing and awareness that eBay is a place where you can find anything and get a great deal on it. So our OKR, I'm assuming, is improve awareness of new product assortment. How do you translate that into KPIs?
7:56 Speaker 05 I don't think it's translating it into KPIs necessarily. I think it's, you're going to have a set of KPIs that are measures around that part of the organization. We used click-through rate as a second ago, conversion rate, et cetera. Let's do that.
8:09 Speaker 04 Heavily reliant on performance marketing, paid social, Google Ads. That's the lagging indicator. If we are able to better improve our understanding of eBay's assortment, we should see click-through rate increase.
8:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. So now, if we think about this on a quarterly perspective, what tests do we want to run? What behaviors do we want to change? What outcomes do we want to drive that would ultimately improve, or we think would improve those KPIs? It might be something like, okay, we're gonna have five influencers are gonna post about their experience buying something on eBay. Okay, every single week, we can focus on how many towards those five have we got? What work is being done week over week to actually get those five influencers to post on whatever it might be, like Instagram, TikTok. Underneath that, there's a whole body of work, huge cross-functional initiative. We're gonna need
9:06 Speaker 05 some legal stuff because we're talking to influencers. We're gonna need some partnership stuff because we're trying to get connected with them. We're gonna need some content marketing help, et cetera, et cetera. If we achieve those five, what we should see next quarter is we should see the KPI that's associated to that. And it might not be a one-to-one, but it's tangentially related to it. We should see that improve in the future. We would typically have three or four or five bets, if you like, things that we're gonna do this quarter or this time period that would be our key results lined up to an objective that we're gonna test and we're gonna focus on. And that's how I think about it. It's what behaviors are we gonna change and what leading indicators are we gonna focus on that would have an impact on our lagging KPIs in the next quarter or next month, or whatever it might be.
9:51 Speaker 04 So my takeaway here is, from a marketing leadership perspective, the OKRs are focusing on the projects that we're going to execute against to try to achieve a specific goal. And your KPIs are the lagging indicators to tell you the performance of those products. The example is, we want to improve the awareness of eBay's new product assortment. So we're gonna run a brand campaign that's called, whatever it is, you could buy it on eBay. And we're gonna promote that on, at the time I was working at eBay, it was MySpace was the popular social network.
10:27 Speaker 05 I'm certain those profiles still exist somewhere.
10:30 Speaker 04 I think there's a music profile of me doing bad acoustic cover songs on MySpace. They should probably take that down at this point. The lagging indicator, the KPI, is how much are we seeing the, let's use MySpace as the example, conversation on MySpace around new product assortment. Because of our brand campaign. That's the KPI is the lagging indicator. So when we talk about effective leadership and marketing, I think that understanding the connection between your goals, your objectives, your OKRs and your KPIs as your measurement and evaluation tool is important. Are there any other things that marketing leaders need to do to effectively communicate that connection between the executive strategy and their downmarket teams?
11:13 Speaker 05 I think maybe the most important thing is the conversations that you have every week. And I think this is where lots of particularly newer leaders, marketing leaders, no exception, go awry is thinking that there's something more important than those goals, whether they be OKRs, whether they be something else that you've aligned on and said are the most important things that you need to work on as an organization. If you're spending your time in one on ones or in your team meeting, talking about something different, then you're not doing it right. You either got the wrong goals, the wrong OKRs that you're working towards, or you're not making best use of your time and you're not making it clear to your team what's important. So to be crystal clear, think about get aligned early on in the quarter, start of the quarter.
11:58 Speaker 05 My goals are connected to the company's strategy. And then every single week in your team meeting and in your one on ones, dedicate 75, 80% of your time in those conversations to those goals, to the things that you've decided as a team are the highest priority. If you do that and you focus on them, they will improve and you will achieve them and you will have impact on the revenue. And your perspective, your reputation, the impact you're having in the organization will greatly improve. By saying what you're going to do at the start of the quarter, actually working on it every quarter and then actually achieving the results,
12:38 Speaker 05 you become reliable and it doesn't become this game of what's marketing doing and they focused on the right things. And your team understands which direction to row. We used the rowing analogy earlier. They understand which way to row and they also understand that requests that come in, the time for that has been allocated for at the start of the quarter. Think about setting our team OKRs. I'll think about it in relation to, okay, if we look at the last year, what's it typically look like every month and every quarter for the one-off requests that we get in as a team? Okay, let's time box that away because we do have to do some of those things. Things come up. We then choose the big initiatives, the leading indicators, the tests we want to run, and then we allocate time there.
13:21 Speaker 05 And mid-quarter, the team knows that we're going to talk about them every week. And if something comes up that needs shifting, we're going to deep prioritize something and we're going to pick the new thing up. But there's a structure and there's a rhythm to our conversations that everybody can rely on. And that's when you start to achieve great results as a marketing team.
13:39 Speaker 04 I think that's great advice. And as martechers, we often try to be data-driven. And when you're thinking about your leadership strategy and how you communicate with your team, that's not something we can normally be very data-driven about. It feels like a intuitive process, not an analytic process. But David, you said something that really hit home with me, which is you can measure the amount of time you're talking about things related to your OKRs. So if you're looking for a marketing type of way to evaluate your communication with your team, look at the amount of time that you are talking and working on things that are directly related to your short-term or long-term,
14:19 Speaker 04 your OKRs, your objectives, and figure out if you are effectively staying focused on the goal. And that should translate to you being a more effective manager. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with David Chase, the CMO of Workboard. If you'd like to hear more from David, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company's website, which is workboard.com. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or you can even apply to be the next guest speaker on the Martech Podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media.
15:03 Speaker 04 Our handle is @martechpod, M-A-R-T-E-C-H-P-O-D, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or you can Contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
15:56 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the MarTech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.
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