Tim Parkin | Marketing Consultant
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What does it take to build a high performing marketing team?
Tim Parkin has built his career around answering that question. His approach centers around the thesis that people times process equals performance. What does that mean? Tim digs into it in this episode.
It starts with documenting what you’re doing as a team. From there, the next step is to evaluate the team and identify who needs training, coaching or support - and what kind of organizational change is required to support the processes that have been documented.
In this conversation, Tim gets into the details of his process, including what a well-documented process looks like, how to train your team to create processes, the tech stack he uses to support process creation, what a good meeting cadence and format looks like, and resources you can turn to to learn more about building high performing marketing teams.
Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.
Resources from this episode:
Check out Tim’s website
Connect with Tim on LinkedIn
Tim and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Tim Parkin, who is a marketing consultant who advises companies large and small. He is an author and a speaker, and we are gonna get into it on how to build high performing marketing teams. But before we do, welcome Tim.
Tim (00:35):
Thank you, Kathleen. I'm excited to be here and really excited to talk about building high performance marketing teams. Something that I think we can all benefit from.
Kathleen (00:42):
Yeah. I love this subject. I am pretty passionate about it because I do think that, you know, people are at the heart. The people on your team are at the heart of basically everything. And so this is key to success. Before we start, I gave you a pretty simple introduction as a marketing consultant, but you do so many things and you've got amazing experience, but I wanted you to be able to tell your own story. I always hate when people read my bio. So why don't we start with that? And can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Tim (01:10):
Absolutely. I'm a consultant, I'm an advisor to marketing executives. I help them improve the performance and accelerate the growth of their teams. And so, as you said, people are core to that. Also processes core to that. And we'll get into that in the conversation here, but I wasn't always a marketer. In fact, I don't really have a marketing background. I grew up as a, a young boy wanting to do magic, wanting to be a professional magician, and I pursued that path. And then really quickly realized to do that. You have to work nights and weekends. I know that's when people have parties at any dinner <laugh> so I didn't wanna do that. So I gave up that dream and went into software development and I had built a lot of products, did web development, lots of things like that. But what I realized is that these companies didn't have a product problem.
Tim (01:51):
They were building things that people stand that people didn't really want. They had a marketing problem. And that's when I realized I could combine my two passions technology, which is synonymous with marketing today and magic, which is about understanding how people think and act, and behave and telling a good story and giving people a great experience. And by combining those, I found that marketing really is the perfect combination and something I can, you know, benefit from both of my passions and my experience. So that's, what's led me here today and, and now I have the privilege and the pleasure of working with all sorts of companies mostly larger companies, you know, 500 million to 2 billion in their marketing teams to accelerate performance and, and growth. So it's really fun.
Kathleen (02:30):
So I, I think I know what you're gonna say and answer to this question, but the, the magician thing is fascinating to me and I wanna know how they slice the sword through the box. <Laugh>,
Tim (02:42):
It's so funny. As a young kid, I was actually in a magic club you know, at seven years old, through 11 years old, and we would put on a community show and I've been in some of those props, some of those boxes where it looks, you know, like it's two inches thick, no one could possibly fit in there, but, but how it's tapered it's actually much deeper and much bigger, but when you're in the audience, you can't tell. And so I've myself crawled up inside of those things and fit, you know, and you can move pretty well in those, but to the audience, it seems like you can't. So yeah, there's so many tricks and and sneaky tactics that they use to make things look and appear differently than they are.
Kathleen (03:15):
I mean, I feel like we could do an entire podcast on this and it's, I would love fascinating <laugh> but I'm, I, I won't put you in that position cause I know there's also that whole, like magician's code where you can't reveal how the tricks are done and so absolutely different topic for a different time. <Laugh> but I'll say though,
Tim (03:33):
It's, it's really fascinating once you understand what goes on behind the scenes, I've tried to show my wife. She said, you know, teaching me a trick, show me what happens. There's so much behind the scenes. There's, you know, the pattern, the words that you say there's responding and reacting to how people interact. There's the actual mechanics of the trick, you know, what you do in memorizing that there's so many similarities to marketing. If you think about, you know, the story you're telling the process, you go through the right words to say, managing the customer interactions and things that happen. So there's, there's so many parallels there.
Kathleen (03:59):
That's awesome. Well I love that. That's your background. I'm always fascinated by people who come to marketing, not from marketing backgrounds. I myself was a political science major. So <laugh>, I, I always think that's so interesting. You know, this, this issue of team building is fascinating to me and there are different dimensions to it. There's obviously who you hire and how you manage. And then there's like structuring the, the pacing of, of your work throughout the week. There's goaling and OKRs. There's how you run meetings, like breakdown for me. When you think about building a high performing team, what are the components that you typically focus on?
Tim (04:41):
I love that you mentioned OKRs. That's a, that's a hot topic for me. So I love that. Yeah, I think first I would define performance. What is performance? What's the goal here? And I like to define it pretty simply that performance really is maximizing the results while minimizing the overhead, because it's not about, you know, more budget or bigger team, you know, small teams can outperform big teams. And when I started working with large companies, I thought they have a big team. They have a big budget, they must know what they're doing. They must have a system. And it couldn't be further from the truth. I hate to say it. If my clients are listening, I'm sorry, but you know, no one knows what they're doing. And more people, more budget means more issues, more challenges. So what is performance? Performance to me is maximizing the results and minimizing the overhead.
Tim (05:21):
How do we be efficient and get the biggest result with what we have and where we're starting from. So when you have that definition, then to me, the formula for performance is people, times process equals performance. And that means you can then map that out on a two by two and say, do we have exceptional people? Do we have exceptional process? If you don't have either one, you know, that's a crisis you're headed for failure. And if you have great people, but no process, your results are gonna be up and down. You know, it's inconsistent, you know, because their people are the ones leading the ship. Conversely, if you have a great process, but you don't have the right people, you're gonna plateau you'll have consistency, but it won't ever be exceptional. It won't ever raise the bar. And it's only if you have exceptional a player, people with, you know, world class best in class process that you can truly achieve high performance.
Kathleen (06:09):
Okay. So people and process. When you start to work with a company, where do you begin?
Tim (06:15):
I get asked this question all the time. And I think that the most fun place to start is with a RACI diagram to map out, you know, who are the people and what are they responsible for, or at least what do you think they're responsible for? Because where you start and where you end up in that process are very different places. And oftentimes, most companies that I work with are lacking on the process side. You know, certainly there's some people issues. There's no doubt about that. But most companies, most marketing teams have really good people. They have smart people who are, you know, developing and learning and have been around the block a couple times, but the process is almost always missing. So the next step is to take an audit of, you know, how do you do what you do? What is the process?
Tim (07:27):
I love the Edward Demming quote that says, if you can't describe what you do as a process, then you don't know what you're doing. And unfortunately that's the reality of most marketing teams is they don't know what they're doing. We have so much internal knowledge that we're not sharing with each other. And we just do things because you know, John or Susan has always been the one who does that. So they're gonna do it and we can trust them to do that. But until, and unless you have a process, you can't scale, you can't improve. You can't, you know, optimize that process. You can't add resources to it. So having a process is really key. And I would say most marketing teams, I work with 99% of them. The biggest gap is in a lack of process.
Kathleen (08:04):
So what does that look like though? Because I think people hear the word process and they interpret it differently. Some people think it's like, we just need a five bullet points on the order in which we do things like <laugh>, you know, what does a best in class process look like? Does it need to be documented? And, and there's also that problem of, we have lots of processes and no one follows them. <Laugh>
Tim (08:31):
There's so many challenges, right? You hit on so many key things there. I say first, you know, it has to be documented. It has to be defined. And that then it has to be documented. A lot of people push back against that and they say, well, we know what to do. We know how to do this. You know, think about this. Pilots have a checklist that go through doctors who do surgeries have a checklist. There's a reason, you know, I hope the pilot knows how to fly the plane, but they still use the checklist, the pre-flight checklist. And I'm thankful that they do as someone who's, you know, afraid of flying despite flying so much. So checklists are important, but you have to document your process. And the reason for that, especially in today's environment is your people are going to leave. It's not a matter of if they're gonna leave, it's when they're gonna leave.
Tim (09:09):
You know, we're seeing so much disruption among people. So you have to extract that knowledge from your people and you have to document your processes. Once you do that, a couple things happen. One is you can start to see what's actually happening because what the process says versus what people actually do is a very different world, right? And we have to hold people accountable to what the process actually is. But second, then we can start to tweak the process and optimize the process by removing things or adding things or parallelizing. It there's a lot of things you can do to improve a process. But first you have to know what the process is. And then third and final is you can put measures or metrics around that process. How long should things take, how much resources should areas take who should be involved and when, and those metrics are extremely important when it comes to processes and optimizing them.
Kathleen (09:58):
So are there things that you can't processize - and I'm making that word up knowing I'm doing that? <Laugh> you know what I mean? Like I think, I, I imagine you've heard this from different people. Like, you know, there's, there shouldn't be a process for that. We have to leave it looser. I don't know. What's your take on that?
Tim (10:16):
I mean, I, I hate to make it as simple as look at McDonald's, you know, I'm sure that in the beginning they said, you know, we're making a burger that's so special and so unique and no one could replicate it. And now look at them, you know, I think everything can be processized. I think there is a process to everything to go back to the demo quote, you know, it's the way that you explain what you do and how you do it. And I think it may take more effort than you're willing to put in, or then you realize that it might take, but everything can be broken down. Nothing is so specialized or so unique. I mean, look at companies like apple and the devices that they create. I mean, when the first iPhone came out, if you remember that it shocked the world.
Tim (10:50):
People said, there's no way this is possible. Yet somehow they had all these people working on this and made this magic happen and they do it time and time again. So I don't think there's anything that can't be outlined, defined, measured, managed as a process. I think it's so essential. And oftentimes the people who say it can't be are the ones who are the most creative because you know, that's how they operate. That's how they think. And that's the real benefit of having someone come in, who can help you have the rigor and the structure to create, define, and document your processes.
Kathleen (11:19):
But where do you draw the line? Cuz I, I have to imagine there are some things like you could easily spend insane amounts of resources, documenting a million processes for everything to the, to the detriment of your productivity. Right? And yes, one way to solve that is bringing somebody in from the outside. But, but I mean, is there a level of detail down to which it's not necessary to go where there, there begin to be diminishing returns?
Tim (11:49):
Absolutely. Yes. You know, success, not perfection and you're not gonna have a process for how the team should check their email and you know, manage their inbox. Right. but big things matter. And so how do we manage our projects? How do we deliver to our clients? How do we, to our customers, how do we measure performance? How do we report? What's our cadence for that? I mean, those are the big blocks, right? The big rocks that we need to have a process for, we need to have alignment on and agreement on that. This is the standard operating procedure. This is how we do things. But certainly there are some aspects of that. Some areas of that, that are subjective, that are creative. You know, there, there is room and necessary space for creative aspects of marketing. It is a creative function. And so not everything can be processized or should be. But the major things absolutely must be. So you can have some level of consistency in what you're doing.
Kathleen (12:38):
Okay. So you come in and everybody gets on the same page that you're gonna be documenting processes. And how do you go about doing that? <Laugh>,
Tim (12:49):
It's a fun and stressful process because I get to talk to the whole team. And when you're the outsider, <laugh> people trust you implicitly for some reason, and they'll tell you what they do and what they don't do and how they do it or how they don't do it. But they'll also tell you about the rest of the team as you can imagine. And so I become the team therapist in the beginning where I hear all the problems and all the troubles and all the struggles, which is really helpful for me. But also it's helpful, you know, for the leadership to hear these things and to understand what are the other issues, because it's not about just process, as we talked about, it's also about the people. And so then we can, from the process standpoint, uncover, you know how they're doing it, what they're doing, what they should be doing, and then start to work on the people side of the equation, take everything I've heard and learned. And now put that back into what do we need to do for the people? Do they need coaching? Do they need support? They need skills. Are there disagreements and disputes that we need to resolve? Is there organizational structure we need to change? So working on the process first really helps because the people just open up and share so much and it's to their benefit, right? They're going to benefit from having things changed that can suit them better. But then we can address the people side.
Kathleen (13:53):
What does a well documented process look like?
Tim (13:56):
That is a really good question. It's a much more specific than most people realize it's not just, you know, five steps. I like to use an SOP format, which outlines many things, you know, what is the purpose of this? Why are we doing it? When will it happen? Who will do it, which should be role based, not people based because people can change, but you know, the roles will always have someone in them. And then the step by step, exactly. Of what happens, you know, even linking to the resources and the documents and the pages, you know, go here, click this, do that. I mean that level of specificity, it's not intended for someone to go through and follow it every time they do it, it's intended to teach someone the process and to hold them accountable that this is how we do it. So it has to be extremely specific. The litmus test is if you hired someone today and you didn't know anything about your organization and you gave them this document, could they walk through it and complete the process successfully? Maybe not a hundred percent, but 85, 90%, if they can, you have a really good SOP.
Kathleen (14:50):
So do you need to, as part of what you do, do you need to teach people how to write a process?
Tim (14:56):
Yes. And I have, you know, all the templates that I bring with me and sometimes those get changed based on the requirements, but I like to keep it simple. You know, this is simple stuff. It's not fancy wizardry or anything like that. It's, it's pretty basic structure that, you know, again, a document that we outline, I personally use Notion with all my clients. And so we have a Notion workspace and we can build everything in there and templatize it and, and replicate it. But yes, there's certainly templates and structure to the madness.
Kathleen (15:22):
So is there, like if somebody's listening and they're thinking, you know, gosh, I'm too small of a company to hire Tim or I need to go this myself. Are there any resources you can recommend for people to look at to learn more about like, what does a good process look like?
Tim (15:37):
Absolutely. You know, the first is E Myth, the book which is a wonderful book that talks about on the small business side, you know, building out a systems and processes and things of that nature. But also online, if you just Google or go to YouTube, there's tons of great content and resources. There's no right way. You know, that's the thing to realize here again, it's about simplicity and effectiveness and getting to the solution as fast as possible. The reality is, as I said, as long as you know what you're doing, then you can communicate what you're doing to someone else. And someone else can interpret that and actually do it themselves. That's success. So don't get hung up on the right system or the right process or the right structure. Just start to document, start to define what you do, how you do it, how you should do things and put metrics around that. And that'll get you halfway there, if not more.
Kathleen (16:22):
And at what stage in a company's evolution, do you typically, would you think ideally processes should be developed cause like I'm a startup marketer. There's never process for anything. When I come into a company <laugh>,
Tim (16:35):
It's true. I think it has to happen a lot sooner than people realize. You know, it's easy to think that when we get big, when we grow, then we'll need process because then things will really matter. And early on, things change a lot, especially in a startup. And so you think I don't wanna waste my time building a process, but the reality is that's the catalyst to growth is that when you have a process in the right areas, again, we're not doing a process for everything, but when you build a process in those areas, now you can hand them off to someone else and get them out of your mind and you know, and can rely and trust that they're gonna happen consistently and predictably. So process needs to happen a lot sooner than you think. And as soon as you have five, a team of five or more, you need process small than that, it's probably okay, but five or more, you definitely need process. And then once you get to, you know, 20 plus, then you need, you know multiple project managers and, and more processes and more systems and councils and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Kathleen (17:26):
And like you mentioned that you build your processes out in Notion and taking the name Notion out of the equation. Like when you think about you're working with different companies and you think about like, where am I gonna house all of this information, what would be, I'm trying to think of how to phrase this question, like what would be your requirements list for okay, whatever platform we choose, whether it's Notion or this or that it needs to have these attributes so that it's gonna be functional and user friendly and useful.
Tim (17:58):
Yeah. That's a really interesting question. I think that shared space is important. So first you, let me say tool is not a solution for anything. It's not a silver bullet. So I think you're absolutely right with that. You know, it could be a Google document. It could be Basecamp, it could be Notion, but a shared space that everyone can access is, you know, number one number two is you have to be able to organize stuff in there, you know, folders or categories or links or sections or whatever you wanna call it. I need to be able to have a structure to my information so I can find things quickly and use the three click rule to say, if I can get to anything in here within three clicks, you know, that's really important. We can access it quickly and easily. The third criteria which I would add is required, but people may disagree here is embedding video.
Tim (18:39):
Oftentimes in the onboarding processes that we build, you know, we use video heavily in showing different things. We use video heavily that doesn't replace the need for written documented process, but it helps enhance it because now I can show you where to go in the interface, where to click, how it looks, you know, et cetera. So video is a huge component. If you can make sure you can embed video and record video, it's a really great way, especially to then have someone transcribe the video and write the process out for you. So your team, you know, spends 10 minutes walking through the process on video, then you have someone else go and transcribe and actually write on and build the process. And now, you know, have someone else validate it. So shared space, being able to organize it embedding video, I think is a requirement. And the other one would be version history and commenting. You need to be able to maintain the versions and go back and also comment on things and, you know, provide feedback if it's static and you can't comment, or if you have to change the actual document itself, that's a problem. So Notion Google docs, you know, you can comment, you can approve comments, et cetera. So very important feature.
Kathleen (19:35):
Okay. You just gave me the perfect segue into my next question, which is around. I think one of the reasons people tend to avoid documenting processes is that, and, and this is very true in marketing. I feel like as soon as you document it, like the process has to change, right? And then it's like, oh my God, we're going back to square one. So I'd love to hear more about how you handle that process of updating. Like, is there a person who owns it? What's the, what does that look like?
Tim (20:04):
Yeah. It's such a common occurrence and it's frustrating, right? You said you build a whole process and it's like, now this whole thing changed. We have to throw it out or maybe we don't need this process anymore. Well, we spent time building it. Well, that's okay. That happens. And we have to realize and accept the reality that marketing changes, you know, and that's the one thing marketing does all the time. You know, there's a new channel, a new platform, you know, whatever. So when a process changes, there's two things that have to take place. The first is you need to reflect on what the change is and why you're making a change before you actually change the process. Because what often happens is we think we need to change the process, but really it's a new process or it's a different process. And so first we need to stop and think before you just go ahead and change the process, why we need to change this, what are the repercussions of changing this and how it'll affect us? The second thing is how you go about actually changing the process. And typically, and you may hate to hear this is you have a process of change a change process. And so that means that you capture what needs to change. Why does need change?
Kathleen (21:01):
It's very meta <laugh>,
Tim (21:02):
It is it's extremely matter. When does it need to change? And so then you can have a person own that and prioritize that, especially in a large team. There's so many things changing all the time. Now we can go back and say, you know what? This is not as critical. We'll get to this later. But this process here is extremely critical and is changing a significant way. Let's make sure we update this first, but that helps the team also become apprised of the changes that are happening in process. So you can communicate those because changing a process is one thing having people's behavior change is a separate thing, and you need to make sure that when the first happens, the ladder also happens.
Kathleen (21:36):
Okay. What does a good process to change a process? Look like? How often, like, are you looking daily, weekly, monthly, and is it one person who owns it all or are there different owners for different processes? And then is there like questions and is there a high level owner that is over all of them? Like, I feel like this is getting complicated.
Tim (21:55):
It does. It does. And in larger teams, you know, when you have 60, 80, a hundred people in the marketing team, it gets, you know, really complex. There's a network effect, but yes, you know, marketing operations is the function that should own all of this. You know, when you get big enough, when you, when you have a company that's big enough but you can certainly have one person in the interim who owns this and says, it's my responsibility to manage all of this. I typically act as that person, when I'm working with my clients, as we build out the marketing operations function, if they don't have it, but having some person to own that is key. And then in terms of the timing and the cadence, again, people's behavior, doesn't change fast. So biweekly, you know, once every two weeks fortnightly, if you're you're in Europe is the right cadence here to look at the process, review it and change it, actually making the changes that may take some time, depending on the complexity of the process, who's involved getting approvals. There's all sorts of hosts of challenges there. But once a month, twice a month is fine to look at this because people's behavior will not catch up to the change in process. And if your process is changing too frequently, that's not,
Kathleen (22:56):
That's a problem. Yeah. That's a different issue. Yeah. That's like if your strategy changes too frequently, cause I feel like then what happens is you train your people to actually not change because they're like, oh, I'll just wait for the next change. This, I don't actually need to do this cuz it's gonna change again really soon.
Tim (23:11):
Exactly. Yes. Yeah. The reality.
Kathleen (23:14):
Okay, so let's talk about people because that's the other half of this equation. So you get all this stuff documented and if I'm hearing you write through the process of creating this stuff, you're gonna identify, let's call it gap areas like where people don't have the skills or the knowledge that they need in order to implement. How do you, how do you suss that out?
Tim (23:38):
Yeah, first it's just analysis. And when I talk to people and I see what they do and how they do it, I'll give you a tangible example here. Looking at someone who's responsible for paid social and seeing how they manage the paid social investment. I can see right away that, you know, they're wasting thousands of dollars every week. Sometimes every day that's a huge issue. And so raising them up then and saying, we need to either, you know, train this person level up their skills, or we need to replace this person because you know, this is a huge problem. So in, in looking at the process, you can identify pretty easily the gaps there and skills, but also the gaps in the process or how people think about the process. Because again, if they can't describe what they do or how they're doing it, they're either not doing it or they're doing it poorly because they haven't spent the time thinking about how they need to do what they need to do. So both of those then become, I know a catalyst for dealing with the people issue. Do they need to be skilled up and do they need support? Do they need coaching or do they need potentially worst case, you know, replacement.
Kathleen (24:34):
Okay. And I'm assuming in your case, like the choice of whether they're gonna be trained or replaced really lies within the management team of the company you're working with.
Tim (24:45):
Absolutely. Yeah. And there's a lot of obviously interdependencies there, you know, it's hard to replace one person depending on their role. And then obviously there's a cost, especially now, you know, <laugh>, the salaries are increasing I'll say at least. So it becomes very difficult. Replacing people is obviously last resort.
Kathleen (25:00):
Yeah. It's very expensive and can be very time consuming. Yeah. this is a totally different question, but selfishly I wanna hear what you have to say about it. Meetings, do you look at team meetings as part of this?
Tim (25:13):
I do. Yeah. Meetings is definitely part of the process of process. And I hate meetings. I think we have to abolish all meetings. I think meetings are a waste of time and my clients know this, you know, one of my clients even ran what they called Meeting Slayer, but had an initiative to, you know, to reduce and eliminate meetings. Meeting people, misunderstand meetings, meetings are not to share information. Meetings are to have a discussion and make a decision. And so if you show up to a meeting, <laugh>, if you don't mind, I'm going soapbox, different meetings do,
Kathleen (25:41):
Please,
Tim (25:42):
If you show up to a meeting you better have an agenda. If you don't have an agenda, everyone should just leave. And so with my clients, I tell team this, that if you're invited to a meeting, there's no agenda decline. And we have to enforce agendas that solves 90% of the problems of meetings. The second problem is we wanna share information or give an update. You know, we live in a remote world in an asynchronous world. There's no need for that. So if you're sharing information or giving updates, you're wasting everyone's time, especially your own, because you can send that out. You can record a video and send it out. You know, it was many ways to do that. Meetings are about coming together and having discussion, which you can't do asynchronously and making a decision, which you need to do, you know, together real time.
Tim (26:22):
The second factor of that is you have to time box meetings and you can't just have an hour long meeting and do nothing. But also you shouldn't hold meetings to a time just arbitrarily. You shouldn't say we're gonna meet for 30 minutes. This is why having agenda is so important. We're gonna meet, we're gonna do X, Y, and Z. And at the end, we'll decide, you know, this, once you do that, you're done and you hang up and you leave. If it takes 15, that's fine. If it takes three minutes, that's even better. But don't just meet for an arbitrary amount of time because there's no point in that meetings are the thing that kills productivity more than anything else. They kill productivity morale. They're a huge time waster. But other than that meetings are great.
Kathleen (26:58):
<Laugh> I love it. I agree with everything you just said. And in fact, it's funny, cuz we're going through an exercise at my company to develop what we're calling a hybrid work operating model. And we are documenting that you have to have an agenda and you know, things along those lines and like somebody needs to own taking notes and recording action items. And you know, there has to be ownership around all that. So. Amen. I totally agree what for, for marketing specifically, because that's what we're talking about here. What should meetings look like for high performing marketing teams? Like I just asked this question in a community I'm in cuz I feel like my meetings are not working right now. I feel like they're way too much of a readout and not enough of a kind of strategic discussion. So like I don't know the best teams that you work with. Do you see them having weekly meetings? Like we do a weekly meeting and a daily standup and you know, I'd love to know what examples of what some really good marketing meeting cadences look like.
Tim (27:57):
Yeah. I think you definitely need a cadence. I'm really glad to hear daily standup. You know, I come from software world and so agile is a big thing and I think daily standups are extremely valuable. If you hold true to the, the nature of what it's supposed to be. So daily standup, absolutely. Typically within the functions of the team, you know, so obviously not an all hands for the marketing team, but you know, within each function having a daily standup is extremely valuable. In addition, I do think a team wide meeting is useful. It depends on the size of the team, but a weekly cadence can be effective. But otherwise, you know, biweekly or fortnightly is a great cadence to have, you know, once a month is not frequent enough, but you know, every week, every two weeks is definitely necessary.
Tim (28:36):
And then the leadership, you know, the management needs to have a meeting as well to, to brainstorm resolve issues, you know, discuss priorities, things of that nature. So what I really like is a weekly cadence for the management team to do what I call a three, two one, which is you share your top three priorities. You know, here's for my function for my team. Here's the top three priorities that we're working on. Two is, you know, here's two wins from the team, two things we accomplished in last week that were successes. It can be really small thing, but it could be a big thing as well. And then the one is one observation. What are we looking forward to? That's potentially a risk potentially a problem, or maybe it's an opportunity we wanna think about and consider, but it really aligns very quickly and you can do this as synchronously too, with the leadership of the marketing team you know, what do we need to be focused on?
Tim (29:20):
How can we collaborate? How can we break down those silos? Because as you get into a bigger team and there's more silos and more functions, it can be very difficult to sync up and align on those things. But a standup is great. And I think you have to have those, those levels where it's leadership meeting, again, that can be asynchronously or weekly and they need to have the functions, have their daily standups and they need to have an all hands with everyone. But again, it's not really about, as you said, reading out or sharing information, you can do that asynchronously. It should be about discussion and resolving those roadblocks, sharing the wins and celebrating the team. I think that's a really important thing to do to show the progress and then to put a spotlight, to put a light on where are the problem areas? Where are things not moving? And that's, you know, the bottlenecks, the blockers, the things that haven't progressed as much, the things that are overspending, things that we're behind our metrics, you know, to resolve those issues.
Kathleen (30:09):
And last question is really, and sort of partially answered this, I think like, what are you looking at daily versus what are you looking at weekly versus monthly versus quarterly?
Tim (30:20):
For the team meetings?
Kathleen (30:20):
Yeah, just for teams. Like what are the things that need to be focused on at those different cadences?
Tim (30:27):
Yeah. So let's start with monthly and work down. I mean, quarterly even you should look at in the next quarter and the past quarter, so, you know, retrospectives or looking back and saying, you know, we made projections, we had some expectations about what to do. How did we do and why didn't we meet it? Why did we meet it? And what can we do better next time? So quarterly, that's big picture on a monthly basis, you should break your quarters down as you plan to say the three months, here's what each month looks like. And here's the next month. Here's what we're gonna focus on. You know, here's our, our key metrics or expectations. And here's the activities we're gonna do. Here's, who's responsible for that, you know, make sure you own these things, et cetera on a fortnightly or weekly basis, looking at each of those monthly, you know, things you outline and this, this all folds really nicely into OKRs, by the way, especially if you look at OKRs on a quarterly basis to then on a weekly basis, say, how are we progressing towards our monthly objective this week?
Tim (31:15):
What are we doing? You know, each other how are we progressing on that? What are the blockers and bottlenecks and how do we resolve that? And then the same thing on a daily level saying, you know, what are the things stopping us? What progress have we made yesterday? What will we do today? I think the daily standup, as I said, is phenomenal as a tool to keep people on track and focused. The biggest challenge I've seen with meetings and the cadence is transparency, expectations accountability, and then the measures and that spells team, if you're paying close attention. And so you need all four of those and the purpose of meetings, the purpose of project management, the purpose of having a shared workspace is to have transparency. We need radical transparency to know what's happening among each other. And individually we need to set really clear expectations for our team of this is what I expect from you.
Tim (31:59):
This is how you'll be measured. We need to hold our team accountable individually and corporately that, you know, these are expectations. We all agreed to these goals and you know, you're gonna hold you personally accountable to this cause that's your area of ownership. And then when you measures, you know how do we measure the performance of our team? And that's both in their actual output and performance and in how they operate, you know how quickly they are responsive, how fast they deliver, how they work with other people. So once you, when you do all four of those things really well meetings are just a tool to, to support those. You can operate without meetings. You can also meet every day. It's not so much about the meetings as it is using it as a tool, as a pillar to help hold up the team and support them in what they really need, which are those four core things.
Kathleen (32:39):
Great. and then I'm curious, are there any companies out there that you can point to, whether they've been your clients or not that that you think really have nailed it as far as how they run their marketing teams?
Tim (32:55):
You know,
Kathleen (32:56):
And maybe like if there are maybe why, like, what is it about them? That's so great.
Tim (33:01):
I think we often see the output, but not the behind the scenes and the more companies I've worked with, you know, especially larger companies. I think there is no company doing it exceptionally well. It's very difficult to do. And one of the most popular questions my clients ask me is, you know, CMO will say, how would you rate our team on a scale of one to 10 <laugh>? And it's a horrible question to get, cause the answer's always lower than you think. Yeah. And so I think that most teams are not doing exceptionally well. And I think the teams that are doing it well, there's so much more to go and that's not to discount their abilities. It's that there's so much opportunity for us in marketing and marketing, as I said, keeps changing the technology, keeps changing customers, keep changing.
Tim (33:43):
The culture keeps changing. And so it becomes increasingly more difficult to do marketing really well and to understand and adapt and follow the changes that are happening. So I think it's always gonna be a struggle. I don't think anybody will really nail it. Personally. I look at companies like apple and Coca-Cola and Nike, you know, they do great marketing. But you don't see the behind scenes. And there's a lot of chaos <laugh> even at those companies of how things happen. And I think whether you're a startup listening to this, or whether you're, you know, a billion dollar company it's the same problems. It's the same struggles. People are people, processes, process, and solving that problem is, is always the same challenge and always the same difficult uphill battle, but it's important and necessary.
Kathleen (34:28):
So that's funny. I feel like it's the parallel to social media in general, right? Like everyone only projects their best self publicly. And so we all think that somehow or another we're a hot mess and everyone else has it together. But the reality is we're not seeing below the surface. So absolutely It is reassuring to hear that everyone collectively is a hot mess <laugh>
Tim (34:49):
They are. Yes. And, and it's crazy because I, you know, I often feel like the expectation that I come in and I can solve this, I can, you know, be the savior that fixes it. And, you know, the reality is I can't I can certainly help, you know, when I start with my clients and when we end the tremendous progress. But it's always a struggle. It's always a problem. And it's the type of thing that you don't put in place. And then you're done, right. Process keeps changes as, as we talked about, people keep changing. This is a continual thing, and this is why you need to build this capability internally you know, get the support that you need, but build it internally and keep it going. It'll always be a challenge and always be an issue it's never solved one and done
Kathleen (35:25):
Well, I let's end on a high note. It it's never gonna end, but it's amazing what you can accomplish when you focus on it, from what I've heard. Absolutely. alright. I wanna make sure we save time for the questions. I always ask my guests. One being we literally just talked about this marketing is constantly changing. It's really hard to keep up with. This is the, probably one of the top things marketers tell me they struggle with. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?
Tim (35:53):
I've been a huge fan of LinkedIn and I follow some really smart people on LinkedIn. So I think a lot of people are sleeping on LinkedIn. If you're not active on LinkedIn, you should be whether or not you're looking for a job. There's a ton of smart people sharing a lot of great content there. And LinkedIn is a platform continues to grow and evolve. And now with LinkedIn live and things like that. So just a tremendous place to network, to learn from others, to connect with peers. And, you know, I've had several people reach out to me just for, you know, advice and feedback and things like that. I love connecting with people on LinkedIn and, and I reach out to others and ask for their opinion advice. So LinkedIn to me is a gold mine of information and people who are really smart. So I would definitely be on LinkedIn.
Kathleen (36:33):
Amen. I totally agree. <Laugh> and just wanna underline that for everybody listening, it's changed a lot. It's not the LinkedIn that it was five years ago at all. Yes. okay. Second question. Similar to what I asked you earlier, but focused on something different, not process. This podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I define just really loosely as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be graded inbound marketing these days?
Tim (37:05):
I have a real answer for you, but first I have to tell you a selfish answer because I, I don't listen to rap music. However I found someone online on YouTube named Harry Mack, H a R R Y M a C K, and Harry Mack is a freestyle rapper. And he just takes people's three words that they throw to him and he makes this freestyle rap. And it sounds silly, but go check it on YouTube. It's phenomenal because he's amazing. He's probably one of the best freestyle rappers in the world. And during the COVID pandemic, he started going on amigo, a site where you can chat with strangers, you know, on video and he would do this. And he's just so good at what he does. And the reason I think this is inbound is because he's such a positive presence. And then he happens to do this rap thing.
Tim (37:51):
You know, that's incredible. And the algorithm, you know, exposed me to him. But he just has drawn this audience in because of the community he's built around positivity, especially during a dark time of COVID and his amazing ability to just stand out and what he does. And, you know, you just watch his videos and you can't help, but smile and be amazed at what he's doing and his positive energy, and to read the comments in the community that's been built, it's just phenomenal. So I think it's just amazing what he's done. And I think it's a, a, a good indicator of what the algorithms are capable of, of multiplying our voices when you produce great work you know, the internet, the algorithms can expose that to more of the right people. And so I think in the, in the past, inbound was more about, you know, how do you control, you know, Google and all these things to draw people to you. And now I think the inverse, the algorithms are helping multiply your reach when you produce great content that attracts the right type of person. So that's my first answer is Harry
Kathleen (38:47):
Mac, wait, tell me and say his name again. So I wanna make sure we get it right.
Tim (38:49):
Yeah. Harry Mack, H a R R Y M A C K on YouTube. Okay. It's up to like 2 million now. I started watching him during the, before the pandemic and he had like 12,000. So, I mean, it's crazy his growth but the second, you know, B2B, I would say is outreach which is a, you know, sales platform. Outreach is amazing outreach.io. The content they put out their social content, especially the workshops that they run their emails, everything they do, if you're in their domain you can't help, but wanna read their content, wanna participate in their workshops. They're just tremendous. And their platform is world class. Their support is world class. I mean, everything they do is just amazing. So can't speak highly enough about outreach and especially the content they're creating.
Kathleen (39:33):
Awesome. All right. Good examples. Lastly, if somebody has a question or wants to learn more about you or what you do, what's the best way for them to connect with you online?
Tim (39:44):
Linkedin is definitely the place to go. You can find me Tim Parkin. That's P as in Paul, A R K I N. And also my website, Timparkin.com, either one, I'm a connector. I would love to talk to anybody, give you my advice, hear your story, share what I can make referrals introductions. My door is always open.
Kathleen (40:03):
Awesome. Well, as always, I will put those links into the show notes, which are available at kathleen-booth.com. And if you know somebody else, who's doing great marketing work, you can feel free to tweet me at @kathleenlbooth. I changed my Twitter handle a few months ago. Tweet me at Kathleen L. Booth. And I would love to have them as my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you for joining me, Tim. This was really interesting,
Tim (40:31):
Kathleen. It was so much fun. Thanks so much.
