🔥 What I wish I knew…

What I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Led a Marketing Team

When I became a manager for the 1st time, I had no clue what I was doing.

I was figuring it out on the fly. Messed things up. Got some wins. Learned a lot the hard way.

Now, after years of leading teams and working with incredible people, these are the 10 lessons that have stuck with me.

The things I wish someone handed me on day 1.

If you’re stepping into your 1st leadership role, start here.

1️⃣. Understand the business. Get with Finance.

If you don’t know how your company makes money, what are you even doing? Schedule time with someone on the Finance team and ask them to walk you through the latest P&L.

Ask how Marketing shows up on the balance sheet. Ask what metrics they track. Then listen.

You’ll learn fast what actually matters to leadership. Your job isn’t to make beautiful campaigns. Your job is to drive results the CEO cares about. Know the dollars. Make them make sense.

2️⃣. Sync your metrics with your boss’s goals.

Your boss doesn’t care about click-through rate. They care about impact.

Start by asking 1 simple question:
“In six months, how will you know I was successful in this role?”

Then reverse-engineer your KPIs from their answer.

If the team is focused on pipeline, don’t be the person obsessing over social engagement. If retention is the north star, your campaigns better tie back to loyalty and LTV.

Your metrics should ladder up to what the business is actually trying to solve. Otherwise, you’re just busy.

3️⃣. Build real relationships across the org.

You can’t lead in a silo. Marketing touches everything, so start making friends early.

Sales. Product. Customer Success. RevOps. Even IT. These people can either help you win or block your ideas.

Set up 15-minute coffee chats. Ask what they’re working on. Ask how Marketing can support them. Build trust before you need it.

Your influence doesn’t come from your title. It comes from the people who want to work with you.

4️⃣. Stack early wins.

You don’t need to reinvent the brand on day 1. You need to prove you can ship things that work.

Look for quick wins.

Update a broken nurture. Improve a landing page. Kill a campaign that’s wasting budget. Something small but visible.

Early results build trust. Trust gets you budget. Budget gets you leverage.

Start small, deliver fast, and use that momentum to go bigger later.

5️⃣. Learn how to pitch your ideas.

As a Marketing leader, you’ll spend half your time getting buy-in.

Doesn’t matter how good your idea is if you can’t sell it internally.

Your boss. The exec team. Other departments. They all need a reason to care.

Frame it like this:

What’s the goal? Why now? What’s the upside? What happens if we do nothing?

Great Marketers don’t just build campaigns. They sell vision.

6️⃣. Know your audience better than anyone.

You can’t Market to people you don’t understand.

Read support tickets. Listen to sales calls. Dig through customer reviews. Sit in on onboarding. Obsess over the words your customers actually use.

The best Marketers? They talk like their audience, not at them.

If you want your campaigns to hit, get close enough to your customer that you know what keeps them up at night.

 7️⃣. Keep it simple.

Your job is to make things more. clear, not more complicated.

If your strategy needs a 10-slide explainer, it’s too messy. If your copy sounds like ChatGPT wrote it, it’s too bloated.

Great Marketing is easy to understand and hard to ignore.

Say less, but say it better.

If a 5th grader can’t repeat it back to you, simplify it.

8️⃣. Fix something that’s broken.

1 of the fastest ways to earn respect? Spot a problem and solve it.

That abandoned automation flow. That outdated deck. That campaign nobody owns. Jump in, clean it up, and show you can execute.

You don’t need to wait for permission to make things better.

Leaders don’t just ship new stuff. They make the messy stuff work.

9️⃣. Be the reason your team wins.

Your success = their success.

Take time to understand what motivates each person. Where they’re strong. Where they need support. What goals they care about.

Give them clarity, feedback, and the space to own their work.

Then get out of their way.

The best leaders aren’t the smartest in the room. They build rooms full of smart people who feel unstoppable. 

 🔟. Lead like the boss you always wanted.

Think about the best manager you’ve ever had. Or the 1 you wish you had.

Be that for your team.

Support them when they’re struggling. Push them when they’re coasting. Trust them to do great work without breathing down their neck.

Leadership isn’t about having all the answers.

It’s about creating an environment where your team finds them together.

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