My dear first-time manager -

Congratulations. You just got handed something new: a budget, a direct report, or both.

This is the moment many marketers get it wrong.

The instincts that made you a good individual contributor start working against you here. You were rewarded for doing, for shipping, + for driving results on the channels you owned. Now you’re responsible for a system, and systems don’t work the same way.

The mistake I made + see most often at this stage is what I call the additive mindset. You have a budget + you want to grow pipeline, so you start asking questions like:

What if we added more ad spend? What if we hired another BDR? What if we added this channel?

Then you map out the anticipated ROI of each in isolation, add it to your expected outcomes, and present your plan.

The problem with this is that nothing in a GTM motion works as independent parts. You win deals because of how channels work together - ads that build familiarity, outbound that hits at the right moment, content that gives the prospect something to trust. Remove any one of those + the others become less effective. That’s how an ecosystem operates: a series of complex interdependent parts. Evaluate it that way, not channel by channel.

The biggest learning for you here is watching channels you used to think of as additive become force multipliers for one another. The same budget, but more output because the channels are working together rather than in isolation.

But you only get there if you’re willing to ask an honest question about everything your budget touches: is the input doing anything to the output?

Not by its own metrics or confined to how it’s doing in its isolated platform. I’m talking relative to pipeline + revenue - the numbers that actually matter. I bet you’ll find that some of your highest-performing inputs by their own local measures are doing very little for the actual global result. I’ve cut keywords we “ranked” for + channels that drove “traffic” because when I asked that question honestly, the answer was no.

You’re now a steward of the business’s resources. That means asking that question even when the answer is uncomfortable.

Ever faithfully yours,

Sam