Pitching for budget, headcount, raises and promotions

Want more budget and/or headcount? Want to be viewed as strategic and not just tactical? Want to be your CMO’s “go-to” person?

At Covario, I work with a number of Fortune 500/Global 2000 advertisers, and often find search marketers inside these large organizations challenged by similar issues:

• How do I get more budget and headcount?
• How do I make search marketing more strategic?
• How do I get more attention from the CMO (or CEO, CFO, CIO, etc)?

Because interactive marketing and search engine marketing in particular is so new, the field tends to draw much younger, innovative and aggressive individuals who think outside the box and run ahead of the pack. The problem is, the same qualities that make a person a great paid search or SEO expert often prevent them from getting the resources they need, rising up the ranks or sitting at the executive table. I see a lot of digital marketers and search experts in large organizations who want to be unique, special and treated different than the traditional marketers, but who need to learn a little more about upward management and collegial communications inside corporate environments.

On top of those regular challenges, up and coming digital marketers also have the new GenX CMO to deal with. The new GenXecutive is different and more difficult to pitch: they are faster paced, more demanding, online and multi-deviced; they are listening to you while checking email on their Blackberry, updating their Facebook on their Lenovo Thinkpad, and possibly filming a vlog with their Flip. They don’t golf and they work 24/7. They want to know as much about the bits and bytes as the “big idea,” they can speak to clicks and conversions as easily as they can speak to offline creative. The average tenure of a CMO has been declining— currently it’s under 2 years! So the new GenX CMO knows they have very little time to make a difference in order to keep their jobs.

Having been a senior business unit executive and reporting into several CEOs over the past 15 years before becoming one myself, I realized there are three key mistakes up-and-coming managers and functional experts make when communicating with senior execs. Similarly, there are 3 simple solutions how to address these problems.

THE 3 KEY COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS OF NEW MANAGERS:

• THEY DON’T HAVE AN “ASK” or a “SO WHAT?”: Believe it or not, your CMO really wants to know what you need them to do right now. Most executives are incredibly busy answering to and satisfying multiple constituents – the CEO, the CFO, the Board, the customers, the industry, their other colleagues, etc. So, basically, your first comment or your first slide should be a specific “ask,” or a very compelling “so what?” that they can help you with or provide insight on. You should be able to get this across in 3 minutes or less. Executives don’t want updates that tell them how great you are or updates that are simple re-hashes of what happened last week or last quarter. They want to know what you need, why, and whether they can do anything about it. Or they want a simple piece of good news that they can then communicate to their other consitutents. Don’t waste senior exec time with updates or presentations without a point. Have an ASK or a very compelling SO WHAT, and say it quickly!

• THEY DO “DEATH BY DATA” PRESENTATIONS: The next most annoying thing that junior managers do are “death by data” presentations. They present slide after slide of tables of data, or powerpoints with 10 bullets in 10 point font, or meaningless charts. They present too much data, which opens too many cans of worms. They also do the “build-up” presentation, where fact after fact is presented leading up to some great point. Read Presentation Zen or read up on Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule for powerpoints. Just present the facts that support your case, and proactively rebut any facts that might hurt your case, preferably in large, simple charts or with large pictures and as minimal text as possible.

• THEY MAKE DEMANDS INSTEAD OF PROVIDING SOLUTIONS AS OPTIONS: The WORST thing junior managers do when presenting the “ask” is to provide only one solution. When you do that, it comes across as a demand, and sets you up for a binary yes-no decision, in which case the answer is generally “no.” Executives want to make fast decisions, they also want to mitigate risk. Yes, they have egos and they want to think they came up with the answer and made the right choice. Providing only one option makes you look like a “know it all” who is demanding your way.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 1: HAVE AN ASK OR A COMPELLING STORY. Put the ask or the so-what on your first slide, and practice delivering it as a one-liner. A trick I use, even for client or Board presentations, is to write my whole presentation, with all the points I want to cover, with a great summary slide leading to the single, simple conclusion. Invariably, I then move that last slide to the front, then boil down the index to 3-5 supporting bullets and take out the rest. Another method is to have one bullet for the “problem” with 3 key sub-problems or facts, and one bullet for the “solution,” with 3 options.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 2: DON’T PRESENT TOO MUCH DATA. Do less than 10 slides, and use the 3-7 proofpoint rule: use 3 minimum, 7 maximum proofpoints (slides). Each slide should back up one of your main points of the “ask” — 1 slide per sub-bullet. That’s it. Don’t use a lot of text on your slides– preferably use a simple chart or an illustrative graphic with few words. Speak to the slide, don’t read from the slide. Put the focus on the “why,” not the data. Anyone can read charts and numbers — when speaking to the slide, explain the “why” of the data, read between the lines. You can use the rule of 2/3 in your content: 2/3 of it should be historical, explaining what happened and why; 1/3 of your content should be predictive, explaining what you think will happen and why. Another similar rule of thumb is that 2/3 of the content should be intuitive/validating what your audience already knows, so you get them nodding their heads in agreement with you, but then 1/3 of your content should be counterintuitve/intriguing so that you are presenting something new and fresh and you get their attention. Following those guidelines, do no more than a 10 slide deck supporting your “ask”, and put all other detail in the appendix or don’t even show it at all – just have it in your “back pocket.” Finally, however, be ready for the “magic 3” questions. Generally, a good exec will try to ask three probing questions to try and stump you – it’s hard to tell what questions, but they are always tough ones. If you have good answers, or better yet are able to pull a great slide or data point from your appendix/back pocket to answer the magic 3 questions, they will stop asking questions and move to your options.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT 3: PRESENT OPTIONS, NOT DEMANDS. To avoid the immediate “no” and get a “yes,” – provide solutions, not problems and provide options, not demands. I tell my team that at minimum, you should ALWAYS present 3 options minimum, 5 options max. Whenever you present 3 options, there is a simple format: One option is the “Status quo,”—what happens if we don’t change anything. That’s usually the problem scenario, but it can also be the risk averse scenario for your boss. The second option is always the “crazy perfect” option—if you had all the money and time and headcount in the world, how would you do it to make it perfect. Finally there is the third, moderate, in-between solution. It’s not perfect, but it fits into current resources and corporate mandates. Better yet, if in the second and third options you can map out stages and milestones for investment— in “stage 1,” you only deploy 25% of the total “ask”, and if you achieve some xyz% improvement, you get the “stage 2” resources. Always model out the financial implications for at least one quarter and preferably 1-2 years out for each option, so your CEO/CFO/CMO can see the financial implications of the status quo versus your other options. By posing multiple options with financial backup and boiling it down to less than 10 compelling slides, they can see that you’ve really done your homework, and they’ll think—“we can’t let the status quo keep going and that ideal plan is just too expensive, so we’d better do something. And that mid-range conservative plan must be the way to go!” You then need to ask questions of the CMO or boss like, “how do these fit into our current resource allocations, which of these do you think would work better, what risks do you see in any of these options, how could we shift things around to make one of these happen,” and you let the executive feel like they are providing valuable insight, putting their own fingerprints on it, mitigating their risks and ultimately making the proposal their idea and their decision. As noted above, however, don’t present too many options—no more than 5. More than 5 options makes it seem like you don’t know the answer, haven’t done enough research or haven’t thought your plans through.

So, all execs are busy in this tough economy, especially new GenX CMOs and other GenXecutives. Make sure to NEVER waste the limited opportunities you have to get in front of them. Always have a well-thought out “ask” with options, or a few simple bullet points of good news they can remember and repeat, and you will be sure to get more budget and headcount, more promotions and attention, until you are the senior executive and your staffers are pitching you for the budget and the attention.

See you in the corner suite soon!

Bookmark this post: