The leader I’m thinking of knew her numbers. Monthly revenues going back years, a clear view of which part of the business she wanted to grow, and a credible commercial plan for doing it. Exactly what you’d hope to walk into.
But where a marketing plan should have been, there was just a junior execution team. Capable of doing things well – social media, email, events, collateral – but insufficiently experienced to decide what things were actually worth doing or why, and with no plan to guide them.
I held back. The team was already in place, with a budget to support it. So I did what I always tell myself not to do: I offered some tactical advice. And I left the meeting feeling cross with myself, because I’d walked straight past the real conversation.
The instinct, when you walk into a situation like that, is to offer help – something useful to take away. Buyer personas, content plans, channel strategy. I did exactly that – and I left kicking myself.
Here’s the thing: it’s that instinct that’s the problem. A GP who listens for a few minutes and reaches for the prescription pad doesn’t necessarily feel like a safe pair of hands. The one who takes time on proper diagnosis – and refers you to a specialist when the situation demands it – earns your trust precisely because they resist the urge to act too quickly.
The next time I sat down with this leader, I held back from more prescribing. I focused on the pain – what the business actually needed from its marketing, and the main things limiting their ability to achieve it. We touched on what the business was doing to address those limitations and the assumptions behind why they were taking this approach. And we explored how confident the leader was that these actions were addressing the real underlying problems.
The answer that emerged wasn’t a content plan. It was a diagnostic: a review of their marketing processes and capability, delivered as a roadmap. That was the right conversation. It just took me two attempts to get there.
It’s entirely natural for a leader who isn’t immersed in a discipline but recognises that improvements need to be made, to focus on activity rather than diagnosis. Adding more ingredients when it’s the recipe that needs rethinking, taking more shots when it’s the camera settings that are wrong, planting more seedlings when it’s the soil that’s wrong. More activity can feel like progress, and a coach can feel like an admission.
Marketing is no different. A junior or middleweight hire feels like action. A new social media calendar feels like momentum. And they might be the right things to do – once it’s clear what the organisation actually needs from its marketing, and why. Without that, they’re just expensive ways of staying busy.
The question isn’t whether you need a diagnosis. It’s whether you’re willing to pause long enough to get one. Not to stop the team doing what they’re doing. Just to understand, clearly and commercially, what your marketing is actually for – and whether it’s doing it.
That’s a different conversation to the one most marketing advisors want to have. It’s also a more useful one.