Amplify Recap: You Can't Say That in Marketing
Posted by [email protected] on May. 2, 2023 / Subscribe 0
This was my first time attending Amplify (formerly “Build Business”), and the networking and content motivated me to bring lessons learned back to my firm in a lot more areas than I expected. The conference covered numerous recruitment/retention items that prove we are in a monumental culture shift of the workplace. However, one of my favorite sessions from the conference focused on exactly the types of struggles many of us face every day in overhead - “support” - roles at our firms.
Jen McGovern’s session “You Can’t Say that in Marketing” covered how many marketers, specifically in the AEC Industry can be identified as negative, inflexible, and hard to work with, in their attempt to protect their individual and team’s schedules, encourage work-life balance, and prevent burn out. Often our attempts to create a process-driven proposal machine and give our marketing staff the respect they deserve to decrease department turnover, can be perceived differently by those in your organization with whom you work regularly on marketing-related tasks. Jen spoke of her intention to protect her team and create a place where marketing’s contributions are valued, and in turn the staff that worked with her saw a person that continually said “no,” which caused walls to be built instead of bridges .
When I began managing people in the AEC Industry, I found that my main goal was to decrease burnout and turnover in the marketing department at my firm. I have received feedback in the past similar to what Jen was talking about in this session, so her topic really resonated with me.
Jen spoke about her goals when she initially started managing her group, which aligned with those set by many of us in marketing leadership roles:
- Improve the firm’s hit rate
- Improve ROI of marketing efforts
- Increase use of resources on strategic efforts
- Increase accountability
- Streamline processes
- Reduce overhead costs
- Reduce marketing turnover
That all sounds great in terms of goals for her team, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, in her efforts to achieve these goals, all her leadership heard was “no.” She was eventually able to identify that she was saying no the wrong way, by jumping to no before the person finished making the request and not offering alternatives, resulting in the building of walls instead of bridges with other people in her organization.
We all know that, as marketers with an overwhelming task list we need to complete each day, you do have to say no to some requests. How do you say “no” in a way that will leave the person making the last-minute request, walk away respecting you instead of resenting the conversation you just had?
Jen emphasized putting on your customer service hat and, instead of trying to be a people pleaser, focus more on building positive relationships with the other staff at your firm. As marketers, we do need to avoid burnout because the consequences far outweigh the benefits. Burnout can cause excessive stress, fatigue, insomnia and serious medical conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, etc. However, the marketing team also has a responsibility to the organization when it comes to producing high-quality materials to help win work.
Jen spoke about how we need to find a middle ground between expecting marketing staff (and I’m sure this includes other staff in an overhead role) to say yes to every request and creating a burnout culture to begin with. Firms including details in advertisements to fill an overhead role like marketing, shouldn’t include information like the following:
- Comfortable with adapting to changing priorities in a dynamic work environment and demonstrated ability to work in stressful situations with critical deadlines
- Comfortable working on multiple assignments, with overlapping schedules, and able to multi-task and delegate responsibilities to accomplish these tasks
while also saying…”Here, everyone is respected and included and everyone’s voice is important.”
Phew - as a Marketing professional working in the AEC Industry for the last 8 years, those statements give me flashbacks.
Before placing this type of language in their advertisements for marketers, firms should focus on limiting burnout, but they aren’t making it a priority quite yet. The average tenure of a marketer in the AEC Industry is only 2 years. I felt very sad and defeated when Jen made this statement. The strict focus of AEC firms on the technical staff makes sense, as they make up about 98% of employees in most firms, but marketers need to speak up to the leadership in the organization to show that burnout needs to be a critical focus and limited among its employees. Jen stressed that marketing staff should comprise 3-5% of a firm’s overall staff. The room lit up when she made this statement, and I feel fortunate that our firm falls in line with that percentage, but there are most likely a good number that do not.
In terms of burnout, sometimes it is just in our nature to allow behavior that contributes to it, and we don’t realize we are fostering an environment that encourages it. Marketing staff tends to stay late to clean up someone else’s mess because they always have. As Marketers, we often wear our “busy-ness” as a badge of honor or pride, and we see ourselves as support staff, thus less important. Jen stressed in this session that no one is coming to save us - we need to save ourselves by learning to self-advocate.
How do we self-advocate? Document everything, assign metrics and numbers to your effort to add more staff, streamline the go/no-go process (or whatever is causing your team burnout) as much as possible. Make sure to define your decision-maker, and what motivates them. Is it the cost of the additional employees? Is it the risk of narrowing down the go/no go strategy for a certain department within your organization to keep the proposal load manageable? Know the cost of what you’re proposing and focus on the benefit to your firm, not just to you personally. Have a clear idea of what success looks like, and how the company will know that they made a good investment.
Continue to state your case if you don’t get approval right away, by making the connection for the decision-maker. “I wish we could help with that project. Unfortunately, our existing staff is completely booked this week. Would you like to look at workload and tell us what we can reprioritize to fit this in?” Reframe the conversation, if needed, to continue to state your case. Revisit the request if it continues to be pushed off. You are the biggest advocate for yourself and your team to reduce turnover in the marketing department. Don’t get discouraged; keep beating the drum.
This session really spoke to my experiences in the AEC Industry. I had a good amount of management buy-in to improve some staff turnover issues when I first began managing a department of marketing professionals in this industry. That helped the situation initially, but as we proved our worth, the workload and task items we got pulled into continued to grow. We still needed to add staff a few years later to accommodate the increased number of requests. We outlined task opportunities that the firm was missing out on because our marketing team was understaffed. While it took some time, continuing to reiterate why we needed additional marketing staff and focusing on the benefits to the firm, we successfully added another position to increase the number we had for so long.
To reiterate what Jen discussed during her presentation, keep beating the drum if you or your team is overwhelmed or your turnover is high, help the organization to see the value in your marketing team, but make sure to listen and create an open dialogue with your decision-makers and technical staff. Help them understand your workload and do it in a professional and respectful way, and it will pay off in the long run. This session brought me back to consistently focusing on the fact that working overtime shouldn’t be the norm in our roles as marketing professionals, but rather our focus should be on increasing efficiency and quality. Hopefully your technical staff will see the value in the changes your team is making to the organization.
Courtney Dickerson
Marketing Director
Horner & Shifrin, Inc.
2021-22 St. Louis Chapter - Communications Director
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