What Makes a Great Marketer?
Introducing my Marketing Competency Scorecard, which outlines the top ten attributes of world-class marketers.
Alright friends, let’s get this Substack party started. This is my first edition so the pressure feels palpable. I went round and round on which topic to kick this off with only to have a mini meltdown, pick myself up, make a pot of strong coffee and ultimately decided to go with a question I get asked all the damn time…
“What makes a great marketer?”
So we’re going to tackle this one, and I mean really tackle it. We’re going to cover things like:
Why this is one of the most asked questions of all time
What the question behind this question really is
The Marketing Competency Scorecard I’ve used to evaluate hundreds, if not thousands of marketers
My best advice for anyone hiring out a marketing team
Okay, let’s get into the goods shall we?
What makes a truly great marketer?
The reason we’re starting here is I genuinely believe a brilliant product is fairly useless if there isn’t a remarkable Marketing team in place to bring it to life for the world. Might feel like an aggressive statement, but I’m standing by it. Great products will only get you so far. At some point you will need a credible brand to differentiate you in the market, customers to find you and convert, and a strong understanding of who you are, what you offer, and why it matters.
And all of this comes down to the Marketing team.
You’d think with something this important there would be a lot of great frameworks out there to help you understand what makes a great marketer and how to evaluate them, but there really isn't. There has been a lot of time spent on how to evaluate people across Product, Engineering, and Growth - and often in exceptional detail. But when it comes to Marketing, there is simply less out there, and most of it is fairly outdated in my opinion.
But really, why is this one of the most asked questions of all time?
Outside of the fact that there are just less frameworks out there I think this really comes down to the fact that every company, every category, every market, every customer, and every product is so unique that it just feels hard to synthesize great marketing skills into a short list that would apply to all of them. But in my experience that’s just not true.
I think companies want to feel like super special snowflakes that “need uniquely shaped marketers and marketing leaders to accomplish their very distinct and ambitious goals”, and I think this gets everyone into a lot of trouble. Not only do companies go looking for magical hires that don’t exist, but remarkable marketers aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve because of misaligned market expectations during the search.
After building Marketing teams for almost 20 years across a wide set of categories, products, business models, and markets, I've synthesized the most important traits that transfer to all environments –irregardless of your company’s nuance. But we’ll get into that in a few.
So, what do I think really is the question behind the question “what makes a great Marketer?”
This is where we get into the goods. I think a lot of Founders and CEOs don’t believe in great marketing. They have heard of or had too many false starts and have never seen what a thriving, over-performing Marketing team can look like.
That’s some real talk, I realize. I remember sitting down with an engineering leader I worked with and I had just shared how remarkable my previous engineering leaders have been, and how I am so thankful for all I’ve learned from my engineering peers over the years. I mean I have worked with some exceptional engineering leaders (shout out to Karen Teng, Don Neufeld, George Goodyer, Matt Hailey, Jake Madden, and the many other supportive engineering partners I’ve worked with. Y’all are the best.).
And then I asked him - so who was your best marketing partner and why were they the best? And he looked me straight in the eye and quickly said, “I don’t believe in great marketers, I’m not sure they exist.”
Uhmmmmmaaawhattttt?
(Quick sidenote : If someone you work with tells you such a disrespectful statement about the trade you’ve spent your life learning, you may need to rethink that partnership, and the company you’re at, but I digress…)
After I un-scrunched my face, and gathered my thoughts - I tried to understand where he was coming from and I think what he was really trying to say was that he had never really seen a healthy marketing organization - one that was high performing, accountable, creative, and category-leading. And honestly, that makes me sad. So I honestly try to remember that is usually what is behind the skepticism in the question “But really…what makes a great marketer?”
It’s usually a few false starts, some poor partners in the past, and a disbelief that any marketing team can be full of remarkable marketers.
Obviously, I’ve seen remarkable Marketing teams. I’ve been on those teams, I’ve built those teams, and I’ve led those teams, so let’s chat about what makes them so great.
The Marketing Competency Scorecard
Years ago now I was going into a performance review cycle at ClassPass, and I started working on evaluating my team. And I didn’t feel the company-wide frameworks for performance rating was enough to capture the many dimensions we expected of our Marketing team at the time, so I set off to create my own. That was almost 6 years ago, and since then I have continued to refine the competencies and the output of that work is what I’m going to share today.
Here she is - my Marketing Competency Scorecard. In it, I’ve outlined the 10 attributes of world-class marketers. You’ll notice some are expected (most companies expect us to exceed targets, and be accountable) but some are less expected (like strong commercial acumen, and pride of channel.
So I want to break these down a bit, and explain them. I’ve pulled together this table view for you that helps explain each competency in a bit more detail. Obviously depending on your business category, model, and stage some of the nuance might change but I’ve tried to capture the essence of each competency that should remain constant.
And if, as you read this, it feels like a lot. That’s because it is. Keep the bar exceptionally high, and people will rise to the occasion. Especially ambitious and mission-driven marketers.
So how do I use this? Basically twice a year I score my entire team against these attributes on a scale of 1-10, and add them up to a total out of 100 score.
I know this is fairly simple and that not all competencies are equally weighted at every company, but because it is so simple it becomes incredibly illuminating. You are mainly trying to evaluate these dimensions:
What is my overall score and individual competency score for each marketer? This helps you think through their best development plan and most accurate performance rating. It also just encourages healthy discussion about their hopes for their career and where they want to take it.
What is my overall score and individual competency score for my entire marketing organization? This helps you think through the biggest gaps of your existing team which enables you to think through both training and augmentation. It also is a great tool to bring to your Founder or CEO to talk through the state of Marketing and set (or reset) expectations.
What are the competency spikes across my team? You also want to see what superpowers you have across the team which may help you think through new and interesting ways to leverage those spikes. This also enables you to speak to the “x-factor” of your organization and really celebrate it more broadly.
I know this may sound harsh, but most Marketers will fall around 6 or 7s against most of these attributes, and because of that your organization’s scores fairly low when you look across these ten traits. I know this because I see it all the time.
Let’s walk through a quick example: if you think of a common marketer profile - “a marketer who hits their targets, spikes analytical, and has a strong full-funnel understanding of your business”, you might think they are an exceptional marketer. But if you score out those three attributes at 9/10, and all of the others at 6/10 (which is probably being generous), the overall score of that marketer is 69/100, or a D+.
Therein lies the problem. All of a sudden you’re realizing what the company expects from your marketers is far more than just those three traits and they are actually underperforming to expectations. Cue really hard 1 on 1s. Challenging calibration debates. Poor review cycles. And inevitably the marketer who had all the potential in the world (and hit their targets! and was analytical! and understood your funnel beautifully!) feels under-appreciated and quits. This is just the saddest.
I think of this scorecard exercise largely as an act of intellectual honesty (which as we all know often defines great companies), where I can get really clear on where we are today and where we need to improve. It’s not bad or good, it just is, and that helps me focus on the support role I play as their leader.
And I bring all of this up for a few important reasons:
This is how misaligned expectations arise. Every company should be clear if they expect Marketers to be 8 or 9s across the entire grid or if there are certain competencies they expect them to spike on in this specific season of the business.
This highlights if marketers are under-supported at your company. If we are expected to score high on all of these, then we need to offer training and development in these areas. A great (and common) example is if you expect your marketers to have high commercial acumen, what does that training look like for them? How can you support them in that journey?
Lastly, the relative importance of these competencies change faster and more often for Marketing teams, because we often lead the business through change seasons. If we launch a new product, a new audience or a new market, it’s very possible that our needs from our marketers shift. Perhaps we need them to be even more analytical as we focus on experimentation, or perhaps they need to be even more revolutionary in their thinking. So as the needs change, the expectations and reward system around those expectations also needs to change.
Okay, we just covered a lot with this Marketing Competency Scorecard, but hopefully it’s given you a framework to take back to your desk and start from.
So as we start to wrap this first Substack party up, let me wrap up by offering some of the best advice I’ve learned over the years standing up, building and scaling marketing teams.
Like everything else, success is all about alignment. When starting to build out a Marketing team, it’s important to get clear with your Founder/CEO and leadership team on which of these competencies are most important, and where they expect the Marketing organization to be against them.
From there you can set realistic expectations around the compensation you’ll need to attract and retain that level of talent, and the training and development you may need to continue to invest in that team.
Over the years, as a Marketing leader I’ve worked with some absolutely exceptional Marketers, across every possible domain (Growth, Brand, Product Marketing, Creative, etc.) and irrelevant of their years of experience, the stage of the company, the outrageousness of the goals that were asked of them – they often spiked across all ten of these competencies. And to be honest, they carried us.
While fires popped up, while crisis comms were navigated, while product value fell behind, while global pandemics devastated our category, while the business strategy thrashed around us – they managed to consistently grow our business, build our brand, and lead the category.
As is always the case, great marketing leaders don’t make great marketers, great marketers make great marketing leaders.
I deeply believe that, and hopefully this deep dive into what that all means in practice was helpful!
Have thoughts, comments, or high fives to share? I’d love to hear them.
Brilliant and spot on, as always. I had a similar experience as a head of marketing at a Series C DTC brand. As the company grew (in people, revenue, venture $, complexity) it became pretty clear that there was a misalignment in expectations and the marketing org wasn't keeping pace. This led to frustrating review cycles / calibrations, 1-1's etc. I started by creating a similar scorecard, first for myself as the department lead. I rated myself and asked the founder/CEO (my boss) to do the same. That exercise alone was illuminating and brought awareness to my key skill gaps and spikes for what the org needed from me AT THAT TIME. Which looked different from a year before, which would look different 6 months later.
Rolling a version of this out to the rest of my team lead to more honest conversations and aligned understanding of expectations. I will bring this with me wherever I go. Thanks for putting it into the world, Joanna!