That’s a misunderstanding of strategy. What they wanted was a marketing plan. (In fact, what they wanted was a spreadsheet saying how many leads we'd deliver to the sales team each month.)

While that was a fairly extreme case, it highlights a real problem in many businesses: there's a disconnect between marketing and business strategy – and that's damaging.

Marketing isn't about delivering leads to your sales team, or footfall to your store.

Marketing is about delivering sustainable growth.

To do that effectively, marketing needs a seat at the top table, helping build and refine a business strategy that will enable growth.

Who’s in the leadership team?

There are lots of articles that quite rightly promote diversity in your senior leadership team (SLT) and the benefits that it brings (check out Eden’s piece at https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-embracing-power-diversity-ai-my-journey-woman-tech).

However, not enough is talked about the importance of diversity of roles.

I’ve seen lots of structures – ones that exclude technology, HR, product or (too often) marketing. And the danger is that your lopsided SLT will create a lopsided strategy.

Different job roles are filled by different personality types who bring different skills, attitudes, knowledge sets and experiences. And they’re all valuable when pushing your business forward.

3 traits marketing can bring to your leadership team

These three traits are common to all good senior marketers.

Emotional intelligence

Marketing requires an ability to understand customers’ emotions and how to be sympathetic to them. Getting into the mindset of the customer is an important part of marketing.

And emotional intelligence will be invaluable in your SLT. It’s not just about understanding the customer, but that emotional intelligence can be crucial when thinking about dealing with investors or communicating with employees.

Customer empathy

Connected to emotional intelligence is the idea of customer empathy. I can’t tell you how many SLT and board meetings I’ve sat through where I’ve had to remind people how we should be talking about customers.

At SLT level, it can be easy to think of customers as lines in budgets and excel sheets. Or we discuss the difficult customers. Or the next big client we want to land.

The job or marketing at this level can be to represent the customer. We have that empathy with them. We can keep the conversation on track.

I once worked with a large organisation (let’s keep them anonymous for now) which internally used a quite disparaging term for customers who were always looking to leave the business for the next best deal. They were seen as the sort of people who were playing us and the whole market, looking to save a few pounds a month.

I felt I had to advocate for that customer. I had to explain to others that these customers were hard-working families, looking to do what they could to stretch their budget. And if they could take the kids to the cinema once a month by saving a few pounds on a utility bill, they would do it.

I made my point quite forcefully – my customer empathy kicked-in and I suddenly felt quite emotional about it. The end result was that the whole business started looking at customers in a different light. The leadership team started to build more customer empathy and – crucially – we dramatically improved retention.

It took more than that one meeting, of course, but it was the start.

Pragmatic commercialism

So if points 1 and 2 above seem a little idealistic, let me reassure you – a decent marketer should be able to temper their customer empathy and emotional intelligence with pragmatic commercialism.

Without it, we’d just be too nice and not actually deliver the accelerated growth we want in our startups.

Your senior marketing person should be good with data. They should innately understand the commercials and margins of the business (that’s how we work our budgets, after all). So at the same time as arguing for the customer, we’re going to do it practically and sensibly.

Marketers are also always looking for a return on investment – having that mindset at the top table can be useful in other discussions too.

Making it happen

Many startups won’t have a marketer they feel is senior enough to join the SLT.

But don’t let that deter you. There are options.

Maybe you can give that junior marketer a chance. Invite them along. But if you do, make this a positive experience for everyone – give them the opportunity to prepare. Tell them what you’re discussing and what’s expected of them. Give them the chance to gather data and thoughts before the meeting. You might be surprised how they step-up, given the right environment.

An alternative is to work with a fractional marketing head. While we typically work with clients for a few days a week, it’s not uncommon for a fractional CMO like me to work with a business just for a day a month. Our job is to be able to get up to speed with your business quickly and to be able to provide the support you really need.

Whichever approach you take, my recommendation is to involve marketing in your leadership structure somehow and capitalise on what they can deliver.