Explore Demos
We have crafted ready demo pages for your next SaaS website. Check them all.
Explore 24+ Framer Templates
Your Marketing Has a Sisyphus Problem
Mar 21, 2024
I spend a lot of my time these days talking to business leaders who are trying to make it work. Many are afraid of investing in the wrong activity and wasting budget and time. Most are working with rather modest budgets - not really enough to even do a solid test or pilot program. But even these amounts feel like a heavy investment to these companies, with market pressures on one side and investor pressure on the other.
I know that fear. It’s kept me up many nights and through weekends trying to navigate the swamp-stank morass that is being a CMO. In a past role, I worked on a crazy amount of output (blogs, whitepapers, PR, lead generation) in a short period to prove to the board that I was the right CMO for the job. All I did was burn myself out cranking out content to fill the well and make myself cross-eyed. After all that, the board still wasn’t convinced. I saw the writing on the wall and we parted ways.
In another position, I spent ungodly amounts of time creating PowerPoint with the Ops team, slicing and dicing the data to roll up to the bigwigs that just bought the company. My team and I were forced to fill in table after table with pipeline, MQLs, SQLs, SALs. This was all we did every single week for a year. We couldn't actually do marketing. We were all just Sisyphus pushing up the boulder week after week after week, trying to justify our existence, with no end in sight.
Multiple people tell me that marketing is the hardest position on the executive team (no, I did not pay them for those opinions). I’ve never been a CPO, COO, CTO, so I have no basis for comparison here. I’m not much for career dick-measuring contests; everyone has their war stories. But yeah, marketing is a tough gig – it’s perpetually overworked, undervalued, and under-resourced (pausing here so you can hear the world’s smallest violin playing). And everyone thinks they can do it just as well as the people actually doing it.
I love what I do. But I see so many of my compatriots burning out because of one word: Fear. Fear that requires justification for every dollar. Fear that one small mistake will ruin a career, lose a job, and throw a family into financial uncertainty. This has made us incredibly risk-averse, recycling the same so-called “best practices” that have lost tread like bad tires. Posting diminishing returns over and over again – because to rock the boat, fail fast and learn, actually push the envelope— all that stuff is bad, bad, bad.
We need to be able to take risks. Like, can we all agree to stop writing blogs for SEO? I hate that SEO blogs exist in their contrived, amateurish keyword-stuffing sound-alikeness. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be speaking honestly to customers, not algorithms. But. sadly, SEO is one of the rare ways we can tie marketing to actual numbers, even if it’s just nudging that keyword ranking up to 100 instead of 101.
As it’s been for time immemorial, marketing budgets are so tight that nobody can afford the experimentation needed to be successful. But it’s simply the ongoing cycle: to justify the bigger spend, show the execs results from this tiny budget that is too small to drive any real impact, and if you don’t, you suck. That’s a convenient offramp since we’re already built into the layoff equation anyway. Meanwhile, other departments hungrily circle our program budgets like vultures who can’t wait for the hyenas to finish their meal.
Is it any wonder we marketers are risk-averse to trying new things even while the tried and tested of the past are no longer working? And, WTF is the logic in execs setting their teams up for failure in the first place?
I spend a lot of my time these days talking to business leaders who are trying to make it work. Many are afraid of investing in the wrong activity and wasting budget and time. Most are working with rather modest budgets - not really enough to even do a solid test or pilot program. But even these amounts feel like a heavy investment to these companies, with market pressures on one side and investor pressure on the other.
I know that fear. It’s kept me up many nights and through weekends trying to navigate the swamp-stank morass that is being a CMO. In a past role, I worked on a crazy amount of output (blogs, whitepapers, PR, lead generation) in a short period to prove to the board that I was the right CMO for the job. All I did was burn myself out cranking out content to fill the well and make myself cross-eyed. After all that, the board still wasn’t convinced. I saw the writing on the wall and we parted ways.
In another position, I spent ungodly amounts of time creating PowerPoint with the Ops team, slicing and dicing the data to roll up to the bigwigs that just bought the company. My team and I were forced to fill in table after table with pipeline, MQLs, SQLs, SALs. This was all we did every single week for a year. We couldn't actually do marketing. We were all just Sisyphus pushing up the boulder week after week after week, trying to justify our existence, with no end in sight.
Multiple people tell me that marketing is the hardest position on the executive team (no, I did not pay them for those opinions). I’ve never been a CPO, COO, CTO, so I have no basis for comparison here. I’m not much for career dick-measuring contests; everyone has their war stories. But yeah, marketing is a tough gig – it’s perpetually overworked, undervalued, and under-resourced (pausing here so you can hear the world’s smallest violin playing). And everyone thinks they can do it just as well as the people actually doing it.
I love what I do. But I see so many of my compatriots burning out because of one word: Fear. Fear that requires justification for every dollar. Fear that one small mistake will ruin a career, lose a job, and throw a family into financial uncertainty. This has made us incredibly risk-averse, recycling the same so-called “best practices” that have lost tread like bad tires. Posting diminishing returns over and over again – because to rock the boat, fail fast and learn, actually push the envelope— all that stuff is bad, bad, bad.
We need to be able to take risks. Like, can we all agree to stop writing blogs for SEO? I hate that SEO blogs exist in their contrived, amateurish keyword-stuffing sound-alikeness. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be speaking honestly to customers, not algorithms. But. sadly, SEO is one of the rare ways we can tie marketing to actual numbers, even if it’s just nudging that keyword ranking up to 100 instead of 101.
As it’s been for time immemorial, marketing budgets are so tight that nobody can afford the experimentation needed to be successful. But it’s simply the ongoing cycle: to justify the bigger spend, show the execs results from this tiny budget that is too small to drive any real impact, and if you don’t, you suck. That’s a convenient offramp since we’re already built into the layoff equation anyway. Meanwhile, other departments hungrily circle our program budgets like vultures who can’t wait for the hyenas to finish their meal.
Is it any wonder we marketers are risk-averse to trying new things even while the tried and tested of the past are no longer working? And, WTF is the logic in execs setting their teams up for failure in the first place?
I spend a lot of my time these days talking to business leaders who are trying to make it work. Many are afraid of investing in the wrong activity and wasting budget and time. Most are working with rather modest budgets - not really enough to even do a solid test or pilot program. But even these amounts feel like a heavy investment to these companies, with market pressures on one side and investor pressure on the other.
I know that fear. It’s kept me up many nights and through weekends trying to navigate the swamp-stank morass that is being a CMO. In a past role, I worked on a crazy amount of output (blogs, whitepapers, PR, lead generation) in a short period to prove to the board that I was the right CMO for the job. All I did was burn myself out cranking out content to fill the well and make myself cross-eyed. After all that, the board still wasn’t convinced. I saw the writing on the wall and we parted ways.
In another position, I spent ungodly amounts of time creating PowerPoint with the Ops team, slicing and dicing the data to roll up to the bigwigs that just bought the company. My team and I were forced to fill in table after table with pipeline, MQLs, SQLs, SALs. This was all we did every single week for a year. We couldn't actually do marketing. We were all just Sisyphus pushing up the boulder week after week after week, trying to justify our existence, with no end in sight.
Multiple people tell me that marketing is the hardest position on the executive team (no, I did not pay them for those opinions). I’ve never been a CPO, COO, CTO, so I have no basis for comparison here. I’m not much for career dick-measuring contests; everyone has their war stories. But yeah, marketing is a tough gig – it’s perpetually overworked, undervalued, and under-resourced (pausing here so you can hear the world’s smallest violin playing). And everyone thinks they can do it just as well as the people actually doing it.
I love what I do. But I see so many of my compatriots burning out because of one word: Fear. Fear that requires justification for every dollar. Fear that one small mistake will ruin a career, lose a job, and throw a family into financial uncertainty. This has made us incredibly risk-averse, recycling the same so-called “best practices” that have lost tread like bad tires. Posting diminishing returns over and over again – because to rock the boat, fail fast and learn, actually push the envelope— all that stuff is bad, bad, bad.
We need to be able to take risks. Like, can we all agree to stop writing blogs for SEO? I hate that SEO blogs exist in their contrived, amateurish keyword-stuffing sound-alikeness. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be speaking honestly to customers, not algorithms. But. sadly, SEO is one of the rare ways we can tie marketing to actual numbers, even if it’s just nudging that keyword ranking up to 100 instead of 101.
As it’s been for time immemorial, marketing budgets are so tight that nobody can afford the experimentation needed to be successful. But it’s simply the ongoing cycle: to justify the bigger spend, show the execs results from this tiny budget that is too small to drive any real impact, and if you don’t, you suck. That’s a convenient offramp since we’re already built into the layoff equation anyway. Meanwhile, other departments hungrily circle our program budgets like vultures who can’t wait for the hyenas to finish their meal.
Is it any wonder we marketers are risk-averse to trying new things even while the tried and tested of the past are no longer working? And, WTF is the logic in execs setting their teams up for failure in the first place?
I spend a lot of my time these days talking to business leaders who are trying to make it work. Many are afraid of investing in the wrong activity and wasting budget and time. Most are working with rather modest budgets - not really enough to even do a solid test or pilot program. But even these amounts feel like a heavy investment to these companies, with market pressures on one side and investor pressure on the other.
I know that fear. It’s kept me up many nights and through weekends trying to navigate the swamp-stank morass that is being a CMO. In a past role, I worked on a crazy amount of output (blogs, whitepapers, PR, lead generation) in a short period to prove to the board that I was the right CMO for the job. All I did was burn myself out cranking out content to fill the well and make myself cross-eyed. After all that, the board still wasn’t convinced. I saw the writing on the wall and we parted ways.
In another position, I spent ungodly amounts of time creating PowerPoint with the Ops team, slicing and dicing the data to roll up to the bigwigs that just bought the company. My team and I were forced to fill in table after table with pipeline, MQLs, SQLs, SALs. This was all we did every single week for a year. We couldn't actually do marketing. We were all just Sisyphus pushing up the boulder week after week after week, trying to justify our existence, with no end in sight.
Multiple people tell me that marketing is the hardest position on the executive team (no, I did not pay them for those opinions). I’ve never been a CPO, COO, CTO, so I have no basis for comparison here. I’m not much for career dick-measuring contests; everyone has their war stories. But yeah, marketing is a tough gig – it’s perpetually overworked, undervalued, and under-resourced (pausing here so you can hear the world’s smallest violin playing). And everyone thinks they can do it just as well as the people actually doing it.
I love what I do. But I see so many of my compatriots burning out because of one word: Fear. Fear that requires justification for every dollar. Fear that one small mistake will ruin a career, lose a job, and throw a family into financial uncertainty. This has made us incredibly risk-averse, recycling the same so-called “best practices” that have lost tread like bad tires. Posting diminishing returns over and over again – because to rock the boat, fail fast and learn, actually push the envelope— all that stuff is bad, bad, bad.
We need to be able to take risks. Like, can we all agree to stop writing blogs for SEO? I hate that SEO blogs exist in their contrived, amateurish keyword-stuffing sound-alikeness. It’s the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be speaking honestly to customers, not algorithms. But. sadly, SEO is one of the rare ways we can tie marketing to actual numbers, even if it’s just nudging that keyword ranking up to 100 instead of 101.
As it’s been for time immemorial, marketing budgets are so tight that nobody can afford the experimentation needed to be successful. But it’s simply the ongoing cycle: to justify the bigger spend, show the execs results from this tiny budget that is too small to drive any real impact, and if you don’t, you suck. That’s a convenient offramp since we’re already built into the layoff equation anyway. Meanwhile, other departments hungrily circle our program budgets like vultures who can’t wait for the hyenas to finish their meal.
Is it any wonder we marketers are risk-averse to trying new things even while the tried and tested of the past are no longer working? And, WTF is the logic in execs setting their teams up for failure in the first place?
