Is your marketing set up to fail?

Heather Hurd (00:00)
They came forward and said, we serve this particular market, we want to do this really well. and we want to give them bespoke solutions that really help them succeed. And then they had a handful of templates and they were just recycling the templates over and over again because they felt such pressure to move really quickly that they weren’t taking the time to do the work well. So then their performance was completely misaligned to what they were saying their purpose was.

(00:22)
Gosh, it’s a tale as old as time, isn’t it? You can have the best plan in the world, but if you actually can’t deliver that or deliver that in a way that aligns with the brand, well, you might as go and have a spa day,

This is Marketing Careers Uncovered and I’m Dave Heywood. A lot of marketing conversations tend to start in similar places and cover familiar topics.

What should we do more of? What needs switching up? What should we stop doing? But over the years, I’ve found that when things don’t go to plan, it isn’t always because the work is necessarily bad. Sometimes the environments we’re working in are at fault too.

We’ve all experienced this in one way or another. So unclear decisions, conflicting priorities and incentives, a real fuzzy sense of what value actually really means to the market. All the stuff that sits above the work, but does ultimately shape whether it ever really lands or has an impact. My guest today is Heather Hurd.

She works with companies at the point at which they

think they need more formal marketing capability and helps assess whether they’re set up to really get the most out of it. So rather than jumping into tactics and delivery, she spends her time asking some of those really deeper questions first. So we’ll be talking today about how to recognize whether and if marketing has been set up to fail, why culture and organization design keep showing up time after time, and

how her views have built over time too.

Heather Hurd (02:08)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. It’s lovely to get the chance to chat. And yeah, as you said, my name is Heather Heard. And yeah, I have been working in marketing for a really long time, started out in brand, was started out as a copywriter and ⁓ into brand and content strategy. And then from there, have just sort of evolved into, ⁓ as you said, sort of a situation where generally when clients are coming to me with work, certainly sometimes I have one offs where someone shows up and says, can you write me an email?

and I still do that, of course, and enjoy it. But the bigger client projects that I’m working on are really people who are coming to a place where they are maybe ready to hire their first ⁓ internal marketing hire or on the other end of the range kind of really large organizations that have big teams and have been doing this for a while and have sort of started to settle into that, like, this is how it’s done. This is how it’s been done. ⁓

And they’re finding that they’re sort of hitting some roadblocks. They’re hitting growth issues in a way that surprises them or that they’re concerned about. So they’re essentially bringing me in to say, are we ready? Is this the right time? Is this the right place? Are we shaped the way that we need to be shaped? And my goal is always to help these organizations just lead with trust, internal trust, external trust, so that they can start building the kind of growth that really

matters. ⁓ Yeah, so, you know, working with really small organizations, working with really large teams, just kind of give them the shape and the foundations that they need to be able to move forward in a way that’s really sustainable.

(03:42)
Super interesting stuff. So you’ve developed a view over time here of what makes or breaks ⁓ marketing functions and capability. What are the things that you saw time and time again as you were progressing in your own career that sort of made you look at and perhaps question the usual playbooks and approaches that organizations might take?

Heather Hurd (04:06)
Yeah, you know, starting out as a a copywriter, my first marketing job, you know, you come in and you know, feel like you know so little. And then over time, working in corporates and agencies and startups, and then of course, on client work, working on my own as well. ⁓ The same things happen over and over again, there’s so little clarity. People come into a meeting and everyone in the meeting should know what’s going on, but they’re not all on the same page. You start talking to

no sales and they have one expectation of what marketing should be doing or talking about or what its purpose is or how it can work. ⁓ Leadership has a different expectation customer service has a different expectation even within marketing there’s different expectations so there’s just no sort of clear shared understanding of the problem they’re actually trying to solve.

And that can can play out in a lot of ways. So sometimes it’s that, you know, people are marketing, it will say most of the time, you know, they’re constantly being held accountable to things that they can’t actually do. like marketing KPIs that are impossible to measure or aren’t being tracked properly, or they’re working, working blind. I have worked in several organizations where marketing was expected to create content, but had no access to data. And so

how are you doing this now? Granted, that was a while back when people were a little less likely to be data oriented. But and also just like general misalignment on organizational values, know, you know, the organizations coming to the market to say, hey, you know, this is our purpose. This is our intent. This is our goal. You know, we want to serve this particular market and we want to make sure that they have success. But then on the back end, the marketing that they’re actually producing and this this has actually happened.

⁓

They came forward and said, we serve this particular market, we want to do this really well. We care deeply about their success and we want to give them bespoke solutions that really help them succeed. And then on the back end, they had a handful of templates and they were just recycling the templates over and over again because they felt such pressure to move really quickly that they weren’t taking the time to do the work well. So then their performance was completely misaligned to what they were saying their purpose was.

(06:17)
Gosh, it’s a tale as old as time, isn’t it? But interesting that a lot of this, what you mentioned, it’s around that broader context and access to the right information, the right people, the right tools. You can have the best plan in the world, but if you actually can’t deliver that or deliver that in a way that aligns with the brand, well, you might as go and have a spa day,

really.

Heather Hurd (06:41)
Yeah,

exactly.

(06:43)
Brilliant. So, when we first met, you talked me through the six factors that you look at when you assess an organization’s marketing readiness, if we’ll use nice neat term. Can you just talk us briefly through what they are?

Heather Hurd (07:04)
Yeah, of course. So none of these factors are going to sound unfamiliar. This is not reinventing the wheel. But I do think that they all sort of work together in a way that’s really necessary and in a way that organizations are not necessarily thinking about when it comes to marketing. Because for the most part, I find that they feel like they’ve kind of got these covered. And in practice, they do not. ⁓

But so, so the first one is, you know, org design and it’s really about just the internal structure of the business. So the way the organization is designed, it’s not just, you know, who sits in which box on the org chart. It’s, it’s sort of the, the, system of agreements that the organization uses. It’s how authority is allocated. It’s how responsibility is handled. It’s how accountability is shared. So.

This kind of looks like a business with like a really, really good, ⁓ org design is going to not get bogged down in the politics. So it’s going to have systems that work really well and just allow great ideas to happen really freely because everyone clearly understands what they have authority over, what they have responsibility for and what they’re accountable to. then that kind of lead. No, that’s, that’s the right. And really all of these factors are.

(08:13)
And that’s not solely within the marketing function.

Heather Hurd (08:21)
certainly applicable specifically to marketing, but they are really things that I am often looking at with clients across the whole organization because marketing is just a piece of the whole. And so if the whole is broken, then marketing is not going to be well set up. And so there are some of these things, as we’re talking through them, I think it’ll make sense. Some of them can be addressed just with marketing. All of them can be addressed just with marketing, but really at the larger organizational level is where you’re going to find like

deeper success. you know, for smaller organizations where everyone’s wearing 20 hats, usually it’s a discussion with everyone regardless. ⁓ For larger organizations, it is often a discussion I’m having only with the marketing team, but with the understanding that those marketing leaders are having to think about, you know, what does this look like in the bigger picture? How does this fit into the whole?

org design is number one and they’re in no particular order. This is just the way I tend to think of them. So for me, next up comes positioning, which has a very specific marketing meaning. But when I’m talking to organizations about it, it’s a little bit wider because this, me, positioning is very much about the external structure that sort of defines the boundaries of who an organization serves.

It tells us where the product should sit. So an organization with really good positioning is going to find it really easy to pinpoint their differentiators because they’re really clear on what lane they play in and who their competitors are and how they stack up. So it makes differentiating really easy. It sets the boundaries of this is where we live as an organization. So it’s much more than just the typical marketing approach to positioning, which is how do we say what we say? ⁓

So it’s a little bigger. ⁓ And then next up is culture, which again is another one that I think really there are a thousand definitions, right? Everyone sort of has a different feeling about what culture means. So from my perspective, culture is the internal relationships. So it’s how we interact with each other within the organization. And it’s something that can’t, it’s not a trickle down. So, you know, as much as a leader, no matter how charismatic they are, a leader cannot

set the culture on their own and just expect that it trickles down because it’s so much about sort of the interpersonal relationships that are happening between the people doing the work. So good culture is open communication. It’s a real trust between yourself and your coworkers. You know that you’re operating on the same understanding with the organization, that you have the same purpose, the same goals, and that you share the same stories about who and what the business is.

So community is those

external relationships that sort of they define what your business exists to do. ⁓ So this is the community is a really big one because it’s your clients, it’s your customers, it’s your shareholders, ⁓ it’s your prospective customers, it’s all the vendors in your supply chain. So it’s a really big piece. ⁓ But it’s it’s all of those things together. And where community gets complicated is that like a healthy community for an organization happens when they understand

two sides of it. One is that every single piece of that community expects something different. They have different needs, they have different expectations of the organization, they have different stories in their heads about what the organization is there to do and the purpose that it serves, the value that it delivers. So then the other side of that is there is a share, there is an overlap between those communities. There is something that all of them need from the organization.

And defining that overlap is where you start to get healthy community because then you’re focusing as an organization on how you can serve every part of your community in a way that still aligns with your values as an organization and doesn’t stretch you too thin.

So then value creation ⁓ and so value creation, all of these sort of have like an internal external. So value creation is the internal way that you produce value. So this is how you design products, how you deliver value, and it’s really a key part of differentiation. So that’s definitely where it plays heavily into marketing and a business that’s really doing value creation well has a really deep.

really clear understanding of their ideal client, their ICP, and they know exactly how to deliver value to that ideal client. So they have all the structures in place internally to be able to really speak to that client in exactly the way that the client sees as super valuable. And then point of view is how we communicate that value. that is also really heavy on the marketing. It’s what we say. It’s how we say it. It’s how we describe ourselves.

And a coherent public point of view is absolutely vital to establishing the kind of trust that you need to have a really distinct voice and a really distinct standpoint that makes an audience say, this is an organization that I trust. I believe in what they’re saying because it sounds authentic, it sounds real. ⁓ And that strong point of view is really great for marketing growth in particular, because if it clearly aligns to your business identity,

And it sort of ties that to the needs of your audience and then the value becomes so clear. So if you can say, you know, we stand for X and then it really shows through in the way that you talk about it and the value that you deliver, then the audience says, yeah, obviously this makes sense.

(13:41)
Are there any smaller, more subtle signals that you see when you go in that starts to tip you off at, hmm.

Marketing’s gonna struggle here to do what they need to achieve.

Heather Hurd (13:54)
Yeah, I don’t know if this counts as a small sign, but the quickest one for me is that marketing doesn’t have a seat in the leadership table. Like the number of organizations I see where, you know, there’s a chief revenue officer is a really common one that was happening for a while where then marketing and sales roll up together. And while marketing and sales have major overlap, they also have very different ways of coming at the solution. Ideally, they have the same end goal.

But they have very different ways of coming at the solution. So if marketing doesn’t have a voice at the decision making table, marketing is always going to struggle to succeed because they’re spending all of their time then just trying to justify their existence. They’re spending all of their energy saying, no, really, we have a purpose. We’re important. We matter. And also we do not work the way that you think that we work. And so there’s just so much lost time and effort on just trying to say like,

no, let’s remind you again, we can’t actually do this tomorrow, but we do work, we matter.

(14:54)
what’s really interesting here is that just going around and having a lot of those conversations, you don’t need to be super senior and you’re in an organization to do that. You could be the intern, you could be a new marketing.

Heather Hurd (15:02)
No, not at all.

(15:08)
Exactly. doesn’t it doesn’t matter what level you’re at here actually going around and having a view of look how How do we work with you guys? What do you what do you do? How can I how can I help you? What do you think we’re here to do can be really illuminating?

Heather Hurd (15:10)
No.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re,

if you’re like a new super junior marketer, find somebody on the sales team and ask them if you can sit in on a call silent, you’re not going to say anything, no one’s even going to know you’re there, but you’re just going to sit in on a call or you’re going to ask them if there’s a way that you can listen to win loss recordings, anything. And in most cases, you will find at least one person on that sales team that is so jazzed about the idea that you want to know more.

that they’re going to be thrilled. And then you have an ally, you have an ally on sales who thinks that you care because you showed up and said, hey, tell me more about what you do and why you do it and how you do it. And when you start to make those connections, when you start having these conversations, even if you’re super junior, even if you’re not there to solve a problem, even if you’re just there to learn something, people really respond because of course we all want to feel like people understand, people care. We want to feel like our coworkers, like we

touched on earlier, we want to feel like everybody’s here for the same purpose. And so having these conversations is a really fairly low effort way to say, Hey, I’m here for the same purpose. want to, I want to be able to help you. want you to be able to help me.

Yeah, I think the number one thing that any marketer, regardless of your level or your access to leadership can work on that can really sort of catapult some things is to work on your active listening skills. So whether you’re in-house, out-of-house, you’re a consultant, you work at an agency, whatever you do, really take the time to sit down and talk things out with people and make it clear that you really care what they have to say and you’re willing to

to try to understand their side of things, because it starts building relationships that can go so far in sort of winning people over and creating positivity instead of struggle. And for me, if that doesn’t come naturally, which I think it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us, with your personal life. Start talking to your spouse or your roommate or your kid or whoever.

people who are like sort of low stakes, they’re not going to judge you if you mess it up and practice that active listening. So that means that like, when they’re talking, you are not in fact thinking about what you’re going to say next, you’re only listening. And it creates a ⁓ weird pace to the conversation at first, because then there’s going to be a break, they’re going to stop talking, and you’re going to need a minute to process. And so it starts to create what in the beginning feels like

awkward pauses, I think, but very quickly becomes clear because then you’re you’ve listened, you’ve processed and now your answer is going to be different because you took the time to process. And when you start having conversations that are shaped that way, people notice whether they actually actively notice or not varies by person, but people feel the difference in the conversation.

(18:11)
Marvelous. Well, thank you so much for that. There’s quite a bit to take away there, but quite a useful way of looking at how we can read the organizations that we’re working in and start to have a little impact, but actually makes delivering that work a little bit easier. And those six factors that positioning, culture, org design, value, community, points of view, I’ve remembered them all, right?

Heather Hurd (18:29)
Yes.

(18:38)
There we go. It’s a gold star for me. But I think just having those mentally in your head as you’re going around and building your picture is a really nice way of looking at that. So thank you so much.

Heather Hurd (18:38)
Nice work.

Thank you.

(18:53)
Okay, and thank you as well for listening. So if you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe for future episodes, leave a review or share with your friends and colleagues and we will see you next time.