Our guest this episode is Scott Todaro, the CMO of Plannuh.

Scott is a goal-driven marketing zealot and recently published a series of thoughtful articles on the topic.  You can read Scott’s blog posts here:

• Are you Practicing Goals-Based Marketing?
• Building a Goals Hierarchy to Eliminate Busywork Marketing
• You Have Goals, but Do You Have the Right Strategy to Achieve Them?

A 25+ veteran of marketing in technology, and a popular instructor at University of Massachusetts, you can connect with Scott on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

Full transcript below thanks to our friends at otter.ai

Kelsey Krapf 0:15
Welcome to the official podcast of The Next CMO hosted by Plannuh. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I’m the senior marketing manager here.

Peter Mahoney 0:24
And I’m Peter Mahoney and I’m the former CEO of Plannuh.

Kelsey Krapf 0:29
For this week we have Scott Todaro as our guest Scott his plan his very own co founder and cmo. Before founding Plannuh Scott spent more than 27 years in the sales and marketing leadership roles. He recently wrote a series of articles on goal based marketing and we thought it’d be a great idea to ask him a little bit more about that for today’s show. We are so excited to have you on our podcast Scott

Scott Todaro 0:55
Great, Kelsey, thanks for having me.

Kelsey Krapf 0:57
Great. Well, I wanted to dive into some questions. So, you know, many marketers today they’re really busy and lose sight of their goals really often. Why do you think this is?

Scott Todaro 1:09
Well, you know, unfortunately, I think a lot of planning that happens in marketing starts at the beginning of the year. And you find that marketers will build their plans and present their plans. And I think in the immortal words of Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched. And what ends up happening with a lot of marketers is that over the course of the year, they’ll run programs that won’t work. They’ll get pressure from the sales team if if the numbers aren’t there. And as a result, they end up derailing a lot of the programs and campaigns that they’ve set up that are designed to achieve the goals. And as a result of it, they turn around and find themselves in a position of doing busy work marketing, trying to generate leads in order to satisfy the sales team. So we see a lot of this happen and that’s when a market team goes from very strategic to very tactical very quickly. And it’s concerning, right? Because at the end of the day, if we’re not really laser focused on the goals, then what winds up happening is that we do a lot of work. We don’t really have anything to show for it. And we can’t measure the success rate of what we put together. And so, but there are a lot of other reasons too. I mean, this turnover leadership and that creates a usually a void or new leadership coming in that wants to change the goals slightly based on things they’ve had success with in the past. Sometimes the teams themselves are too tactically focused their junior teams, and they just never really buy into the goals of fully understand what’s trying to get accomplished. And you know, the other thing is that people just don’t have the right tools. You know, if you’re going out there and building all of your goals into a presentation, and the presentation is now put up on some google drive somewhere and it’s not front and center. Then the team starts to forget about that things get busy, they start executing. And the next thing you know, you’re six months into it and you’re not checking back. So you have to develop a goals based culture, the leadership needs to make sure that they are constantly reminded. And you have to create the systems and put them in place to make sure that those goals are front and center and force your team with every single activity that they do, whether it’s a campaign or even sending out an email, that they are always mapping those activities back to the goals so that they can show the return data that they’ve set for them.

Kelsey Krapf 3:35
I know working with you personally, the first thing we do is we define the goals and we figure out how we’re going to achieve them. So completely agree it’s important to set those right at the front and make sure you’re always thinking about it as you’re you’re moving along your projects and your and everything you’re doing on the marketing end.

Peter Mahoney 3:52
And Scott, you know, I’m famous for using metaphors that I know nothing about. So I’m going to use a sailing metaphor. It’s, in my mind, a good way to think about it is at the beginning of your, your sailing venture, whatever you call that a journey a What do you call a sailing trip? I certainly did. I told you I’m getting a voyage. I get into trouble when I use metaphors that I don’t know much about. So when you when you embark on your voyage, you have a destination. And then ideally, that’s your goal, right? And along the way, you get different weather conditions, you have to tack sometimes you don’t go exactly in a straight line to get there. But you have always keep that that goal in mind along the way. And actually, we’re right now dealing with because we’re in the middle of a bunch of, of economic and global turmoil, right? We’re dealing with an environment that is, is probably getting people off of their destination in defocus from their goals, and in understanding what those goals are. Now you may decide you have a different goal. But what you can’t do is just completely abandon your goals. At this point, even when there’s turbulence, you might have to reset them, set the targets or reset the targets a little bit differently. But completely if you completely ignore your overall objectives, you’re just gonna go around in circles and sink the boat.

Unknown Speaker 5:21
Yes, you want to stay afloat. Floating is good. And so yeah, I did. But when you creating the goal, say, I think people can overthink the goals because goals can get fairly complicated quick, especially if you have a fairly large team, right? Because you’re going to want to set top line goals or objection objectives. You may have quantitative and qualitative goals associated with it. And then you have different members of your team that are contributing to those goals, and each one of them may have a part of achieving that goal. So they need to have their own metrics set of metrics and goals that work. Up to the master goals, but it can get fairly complicated quickly. But, you know, it’s interesting when you start talking about goals, because if you really look at it in marketing, all your goals can be boiled down to really three top line objectives, you’re either trying to drive sales, and that includes generating leads, and people want to try to split that out in a different way. You’re either creating awareness for your company or your product or service, or you’re creating a perception about the company. And if you really look at just about every single sub goal that you could create, that would have more detail associated with it. It really fits into those primary three functions. And that’s what we’re at the marketing team should be laser focused on driving sales, creating awareness, and creating certain perception and brand.

Peter Mahoney 6:46
I’ll add a fourth one that I always think of is launching a new initiative. And that might be a new product, a new market entry. Obviously, their objective ultimately is to do one of the three things that you met But I think though they often come up. But But one thing to ask you, Scott is, if you’re starting, if you’re just embarking on this voyage, to continue my metaphor, if you’re just embarking on this goals, beta based approach, where do you start? So how should companies start to enter this journey that they’re about to embark on?

Unknown Speaker 7:24
Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. If you think about marketing, it’s one of the most strategic roles in a company. And I think sometimes we find that marketing organizations, the head of marketing really gets pushed into a lead generation branding or PR role. But when you really define what marketing supposed to be responsible for, you’re talking about the target audience, you’re going after helping with product definition. We’re talking about channels that you should be selling through and identifying partnerships, expansion opportunities. There’s a lot Pricing packaging, these are all strategic elements of the entire business. So, when you think about strategy, you really got to start with what are your company goals? Right? So what are you trying to accomplish as an entire organization and if you really look at the company goals, I bet if you go look at each one of your companies that you work for today, you’ll find that probably if they have 5678 goals for the year, that probably 60% of them marketing can actually impact and so then you start to understand the strategic nature of what marketing should be doing in order to help the company flourish. So you start with those goals and then you figure out what can marketing do to help achieve those goals and then you start working on well what are the what are the qualitative components of this, like you want to get leadership thought leadership or you want to be, you want to gain market share, and then you’ve got to And those quantitative goals associated with how does that shape out? How much do you need to, to accomplish from a numeric standpoint, in order to feel confident you’ve made progress towards those goals, then you need to look at your team, right and break it out by each one of the different functions. You know, a lot of the goals that are put out there may have different functional areas to support to support the achievement of those goals. So, you know, just an example you may have a field marketing team and you may have a digital marketing team. They both probably laser focus on lead generation. So they may share that goal. But they both need their own individual sets of goals, each team member to make sure that they’re doing the right things to bubble up to those top line goals. So that’s where you start. You start with the company, work with it, your top line strategic marketing goals in order to achieve those company goals and then Work through your team.

Kelsey Krapf 10:02
Right now, Scott beam you have over 20 years of experience in the marketing space, is that how you would structure and you recommend people when building out those goals to kind of follow? And that’s where a company is start?

Scott Todaro 10:17
Yeah, I mean, you really need to you get there’s a lot of information you need to pull in. Right. And so, you know, I think if you start thinking about setting realistic goals, when you going through the process on that sheet, there are a lot of things that you need to make sure that you’re avoiding, right. And that’s, we’re setting goals. If you have data gaps, you know that that’s kind of a problem, right? It’s tough to set the goals if you can’t look at historicals and, and really understand where you’re at. This is difficult for companies that are new, or companies that are rolling out new products or going into new industries and NGOs, right. It’s really difficult to define exactly how the goals should, you know should come to fruition when you don’t have the data. The other thing you have to watch out for when you’re creating these goals is getting a lot of executive pressure. And I think a lot of times what will happen with with heads of marketing is they’ll desperately want to help achieve the top line goals. And they’ll set unrealistic goals and that can, that can happen for a lot of reasons. Sometimes the CMO as a hero complex, and it’s just over exuberant, you know, sometimes you just don’t have the right people on your team, right? You just have not set up your organization correctly, or you don’t have the depth of talent, when you don’t have the strategic alignment associated with it. And these all can hurt your ability, really for setting realistic goals. So when you go about doing that, you need to make sure the first thing you do is like I said, you start with a company goals. You look at the historical data, you really make sure that if you’re a team is missing skillsets that you make sure that you bridge those gaps, either with outside consultants or other marketing companies that can’t support you, or maybe even software that can help push you in the right direction for managing your budget or your plan, how you’re going to make sure that you have enough budget. And you know, this is critical to because, you know, if you don’t have the right budget, I can pretty much assure you that you won’t be able to drive the initiatives you want. And you know, there are different industries and with different industries come different expectations on how much of a percentage of the overall revenue you’re going to get in so that you can lock to achieving that revenue. But you got to make sure that you have alignment and the only way to do that is to build out your goals and your plans and then assign the budget, make sure that’s there. You got to take into your goals competition. I mean, if you have really stiff competition, you know, you’re setting market share goals, and you’re not going to be building out product functionality that’s going to help you compete, or services or other things along those lines, depending on what business you’re in, you know, that’s really going to hurt your ability to, to achieve those goals. And you got to and then, you know, what’s really topical now is market conditions, right? So you need to really get a good understanding of, you know, what’s, what the market is, you know, do you have a good economic trend or you have a bad economic trend? Or, you know, is there less investment going into your industry, those have to come into into account so you can’t grow your company 100% you know, for a product that maybe is very mature, you know, you’re just not going to be able to get those numbers. So, these all have to come into into account and then finally, you got to look at your sales function, you know, is it set up correctly in order for you to achieve those goals? Have they hired the right people at the higher the talent level that if you decide to move into, you know, a different market or something along those lines of fate? We have the right talent level to execute on the leads that you’ll generate or the method deliver the messages that you’ve created deserve the messages more complicated, or zoom, or you need to need to communicate for a new set of features or to go into a new market. These all have to come into play. So there’s a lot that goes into creating those goals. And that’s why you have to start with the goals before you do anything else. You’re not right, your strategy and your plan and then try to retrofit your goals into it. Start with the goals. Make sure that you’re you’re you’re confident you can achieve the goals and then you really start to build a strategy and then the plan after it.

Peter Mahoney 14:40
Yeah, I think people miss that part a lot. Scott, they, they maybe pick the goals and just assume that hey, if I say what the goal is, magic will happen. And the reality is that if you don’t have a plan for success, you people don’t know especially all the steps they’re supposed to follow. You can’t especially just assume that Everything is going to be magic and everything just kind of works. And it reminds me of one of the challenges when you’re dealing, especially with slightly larger teams is figuring out what everyone’s role is in helping to achieve those goals. And one of my favorite stories about this that I think probably everyone has heard is the, the story of the janitor at NASA. Right, the janitor at NASA, as as there is I think this is when President Kennedy comes in and visits NASA for the first time. And there’s a janitor there in the corner, and he’s sweeping the floor. And the President says to him says, Hey, what are you doing over there? And the guy says, Well, he’s sweeping. He says, I’m putting a man on the moon. And, and the idea is that he all he knew he had a part in the overall mission right? His part of the goal was he’s trying to keep the place clean, but it’s it’s overall he knew that he was contributing to the mission. But how are How do you do that? How do you make sure that everybody in the organization has an understanding for what their part is in achieving the overall goals?

Scott Todaro 16:10
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, I’d love to sit here and say that, you know, there’s one tried and true way, but what what’s worked for me and what I’ve seen other successful companies do Is that what you need to do is just keep referring to the goals. And so you create those goals and you don’t create those goals in a vacuum, you create them with your team, right? So you sit down at the very beginning of the process, and you get everybody’s input. And I think when people are part of the process of shaping the goals, they understand them better. And they’re more passionate about achieving them. So you get your your whole team, you know, set up and rallying around, you know, making sure that they they have that that full understanding of what needs to get done, then once you’ve created that set of goals, then the next thing you need to do is create your strategy. And I think this is kind of the Delta that I see working with a lot of lot of heads of marketing now is they create their goals. And then in isolation, they’re going and creating a bunch of activities, right? And so this is why if you create your goals, and you start with with with those key elements, and you create your strategy, like now I take each one of these goals, what am I going to do? What is the strategic elements that I need to do in order to achieve that goal? Right? And so, you know, if you let’s say you want thought leadership, right? That’s your goal. And the goal is that you want to have, you want to have the number one blog, on the planet. And, and that’s your metric, right? I want to have more visitors to my blog than any other blog in this industry. Right. So now you have Your top line goal, you have your metric associated with it. Now you got to create your strategy. So what am I? How do I do that? How do I get people to my blog? You know, am I going to write a book? You know, am I going to break up the content of the chapter to drive people back there? Am I going to align with other thought leaders and have them write from my blog, there has to be a strategy associated with it. And once you have that strategy, then you can create your campaigns from it, right. And those are going to be a series of campaigns or very large, you know, thematic, you know, multi quarter campaigns that are global in nature. There’s a lot of complexity that can go into achieving that strategy. But each step of the way, each one of the marketers on your team has to understand how it all fits together. And then what you need to do and what has been successful for me, is it actually having people do weekly status reports and the status I don’t want to hear about what you did over the course of the week. What I want you to know is, is this data here the goals that you’re responsible for, tell me what you did that week to move and accomplish that goal. That’s all I want to know. And if you do that, at the end of the year, you accomplish all your goals, you may still have to do things that are off the reservation from the goals. It’s just kind of what we have to do as marketers from time to time. But if you’re laser focused, and you’re putting at least 30% mean 30 or 40 hours a week into those goals, I can guarantee you that you’ll start to push the needle on it. And that’s creating that structure. The other thing that you need to do is you need to have a centralized location for those goals that people will go back to and see them constantly. So there’s a constant reminder, associated with so you have to create a location where all of your marketing resides. And those goals have front and center. So every time I open up that web page, or I go into a software tool, and I see those goals front and center hitting me in the face constantly reminded that I should be working on those. And then it’s up to the executive to make sure that you know if they have monthly meetings or quarterly meetings with their team, that the meeting start off with, here are the goals. This is how we accomplished them. And and that’s then you have a shot, right you have a shot at accomplishing those goals would be great if you could set up dashboards that we could start to see those goals, put them front and center I, you know, at the last company I was at, we actually had screens that we put up all over the marketing room that had all of our metrics and how we were doing against those goals. And as a result, it was kind of front and center every day as you walked by that that monitor you either felt great pride or great shame. So

Peter Mahoney 20:43
yeah, it’s got one of the things that often happens to when gets speaking of that getting the monitors with all the metrics everywhere. We’re all completely delusional with data and metrics these days. And that’s why I think the context is really important. It’s showing the metrics that are actually related to the measurement of achieving those goals. And that’s that relationship between metrics that are actually related to something you’re trying to achieve is really important. Otherwise, it’s just noise and people just get completely lost. So I think that that makes a huge difference. I

Unknown Speaker 21:22
completely agree, Peter.

Scott Todaro 21:26
Yeah, I needed doing the goals are difficult because it’s, there are going to be so many things in the organization that you pull you away from the goals and you have to, you have to be vigilant, you have got to stick to the plan. And if you do that, at the end of the year, you’re going to feel great satisfaction because everything you did contributed to achieving something and making your company better. And especially if that rolls up to the corporate goals. You know, you’ll find that this is a good one. marketing has the opportunity to really keep the entire organization rolling in the right direction, right? Because a lot of everything that goes out from a public standpoint is coming from the marketing team. Right? So any of those goals and most of them are, you know, our public facing. That’s why you got to make sure that you’re you’re doing the right things.

Peter Mahoney 22:22
Something you just said reminded me of a maybe a last question here to wrap up Scott was, was about everything you do should be related to the goals because that’s actually not the reality. And I know you and I agree with that, that there’s always some portion of what you do that may be unrelated directly to some of these goals. So how should you think about that? How much of your effort is okay to be disassociated with a goal because obviously, people do other stuff that may not have a direct connection to your goal. And that that should be okay. Right. What do you think about that?

Unknown Speaker 23:00
You know, it’s it’s interesting because, you know, it is complex that it’s completely unrealistic to think that people can spend all the time because let’s face it, we, you know, marketing teams will work with sales teams on the b2b side, you know, marketing teams on the beat. I mean, on the b2b side on the on the b2c side, you’ll have marketing teams out there that you know, are kind of running the show and so they have a lot of the, a lot of the goals, but they’ve got to serve different masters too. They’ve got to serve their their partner channels and other things along those lines. So, you know, it’s, it’s, yeah, you got you get, there’s internal politics, you know, they’re going to be very influential people that are going to come and ask for pet projects. You know, you may have the CEO come and say, I got a friend of a friend who, you know, was running a trade show in, in Sydney, Australia in February. Let’s let’s go do it. It’s not in your plan. It’s part of your budget. And I and I think this is this, you have to have some flexibility. I think as you’re doing your planning your budgeting, and I think this comes down to the planning piece where, you know, you can have a two types of strategy have a reading react strategy and an attack strategy. And I think the companies that go full attack, the good news is they have a plan to follow and you know, this is going to achieve those goals. But everything is everything is a trade off, right. So if a new idea comes in, then some of the activities that you planned on doing need to go out because there’s no more budget. And so that that can be disruptive. So I think, you know, you have to budget some of your time and some of your money over the course of the year to be read and react, to take advantage of opportunities to try new ideas and be experimental to try and also for those occasional political appeasement, you know, to make sure that you stay in good graces of the rest of the company. But yeah, it’s tough. I would say that, you know, you should be putting about 80% of your time towards the goals and probably 20% of the time, you should be leaving open for a variety of different other factors that come into directly job day in, day in and day out.

Peter Mahoney 25:21
Yeah. And I think the framework to think about when you’re doing that is that it’s okay to have activities that are outside of those precious few goals that are most important. But whatever you do, should be aligned with your strategy. So that that’s, that’s probably a topic for another podcast or another blog post. But I think it’s an important reminder that, that your top five six goals aren’t going to fully encompass everything that you do, but everything you should, everything you do should be somehow grounded in the overall strategy that you’ve chosen the channel is not everyone is good at defining their strategy. Again, a topic for another time. So I think that’s the time we had for today. Kelsey, why don’t you take us home?

Kelsey Krapf 26:10
Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much, Scott. We really appreciate you having having you on the show. It was such a pleasure talking to you. Make sure you follow the next cmo and plan out on Twitter and LinkedIn and if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them. thenextcmo@plannuh.com

Have a great day, everyone

Transcribed by https://otter.ai