Communication | How Internal Communications Can Unlock Marketing Success

Join Tess Dugan on The SCORRCAST to explore the power of internal communications in driving marketing success. Learn how clear, consistent internal messaging can align teams, enhance collaboration, and improve campaign effectiveness. Discover best practices for fostering strong internal communication to build a cohesive brand and unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts.

Transcript

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Hey Everyone this is Alec McChesney, your host of the SCORR cast, and I'm so excited for this episode, as well as a few others see right now I am in the headquarters of SCORR marketing in Kearney Nebraska, and I'm here for a couple of days, and so I've been able to have five or six different episodes with some of the key business leaders at our organization. This episode is going to go into one detail. The next we'll go into another. We're going to talk about branding. We're going to talk about marketing, strategy, business development versus marketing. Talk about what it's like to work at an agency. And I'm just so excited for you to be able to listen to these key leaders at SCORR Marketing. Enjoy the episode. music. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of SCORR cast. I have a familiar voice and face returning today. Test doing it here at SCORR. You've been on a couple of episodes of me and you ranting. We had an episode a couple weeks, maybe a month or two ago now, with Joel White talking about marketing. I think that you are one of the most brilliant marketers I've ever interacted with, and so I'm so excited to be able to have a conversation with you today. And just for people listening to this episode in this SCORR cast, it's going to be a little bit focused. It's going to be 15 minutes. It's going to be jam packed. We're going to talk about internal communications and managing up, managing down, managing across the line. As a marketer, I think it's something that's really difficult. But before we get into all of that, would love tests for those who have not had the pleasure of meeting you yet or have forgotten since the last time that they listened to the episode, like four, maybe five earlier on in the year. Can you just give us your your background, and you who all in SCORR, and then we'll, we'll jump in. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Tess Dugan. I am the director of account management and a senior account strategist. First started with the organization almost a decade ago at this point, which is pretty crazy for me to believe. So I've had a lot of opportunity to grow and learn during my time at SCORR. My role today, I oversee our team of account managers who are really responsible for setting and overseeing the execution of strategy, and also manage my own portfolio with life sciences companies. And I really you have had different roles inside SCORR, but then also different roles in the life of client, right? Yes, you know, serving in kind of our FSP model, and being a director of marketing, head of marketing, and then, you know, SCORR circle, all the different relationships, and really been in that nuance. So how do I communicate what marketing is doing? And I know, you know, kind of that first question that we have is, what does it look like? What does success look like in communications, and before I even let you answer, I'm going to continue to ramble. This is my bad podcast question. I usually wait about 10 minutes to get it in, but I think that it's so overlooked in the industry and in marketing in general, is you don't think about having those communications to sales to operations to product, to finance to leadership. So what does successful communication look like in your mind across all those teams? Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. I think that the first thing is to be intentional about it. And I know that seems obvious, but what I find is that, you know, we all get busy in our day to day, and we're so focused on getting the work out, but as marketers, we should be able to take a step back and understand you have to have a communication strategy internally and externally. So I definitely had a large learning curve when I was kind of in my first FSP scenario and really operating with one client as a director of marketing. So I think that's where I did a lot of things wrong that people can hopefully learn from as a part of this conversation. But I think intentionality is really important, and I do think that you have to have strong relationships with your other stakeholders, and so building those relationships, making that a priority, because you can only customize communication based on how well you know someone else. And I do think that internal communication around marketing should really be communicated differently, and just like we talk to different personas in different ways, your presentation of what the marketing plan is going to look like, should look different to your head of product as it should, to your head of commercial as it should, to leadership as it should, to your team. And I think that sometimes we're so focused on doing the work, but ultimately. As marketers, we're typically not sitting in a decision right function, and so you have to influence other stakeholders to be able to execute on the plan that you believe is going to be the most successful. And so I would argue it's a very essential part of that process, otherwise you may not get what you're hoping for, and there's so much goodness there. And I think especially at the end, kind of talking about, if you don't have the right internal communication, and they don't know what's happening, all of a sudden there's an economic downturn, marketing is going to be a place that they look and I think especially if you don't have that effective communication. But before we jump to that, I want to go back to the being intentional and intentional communication. You and I are big believers in exit five in the Dave Gerhart podcast. And I was listening to one this morning when we're recording this, and it was talking about knowing the what the other person is looking for is a lot different than having a coffee relationship, right? Like I might know what coffee you want, and that's nice, but that doesn't help me in terms of how I should be communicating what marketing is or is not giving and so really making sure that you know, on the operational level, on the commercial level, on the product level, what does this individual, what does this team actually need to know from us? And I think it's so important that you started at the plan perspective. You know what I what I was thinking about this, you instantly jump to reporting and storytelling, and this is what we're doing. You started at, here's the marketing point. So I know I wanted to ask you about, how do you create that alignment? I think it's a good segue, kind of why did you start at that? Communication has to happen the plan. How does that eliminate friction, and what are we striving for in that initial phase? Yeah, I think that your communication, like you have to have information to be able to tailor your communication. And so the first thing that I do when I'm joining a new organization is having those conversations about, what did you like about the way marketing operated before? What did you What do you not like about how it operated before? And to really understand that, and being able to understand how your predecessor ran and shared information is helpful, because if you have someone that's like, hey, they sent me an email every two weeks with these headlines, and I loved it, great. Then you don't have to reinvent the wheel, or if you get the response of, I don't know, I never talked to the marketing leader and I didn't know what they were doing, then you kind of have the blue ocean of how you would like to approach these and how you'd like to build those relationships. And so a big thing that I try and set for myself is, you know, have that communication up front, and then at what frequency with what leaders do you need to continue that conversation? And my opinion, it shouldn't be when you start a job and then you're waiting all the way until, like, annual planning to then have that conversation again. And I think it's just being when we go back to intentionality, when you it's all about to me being curious, like when the sales team comes to me and they say, Hey, we need this new slide for the capabilities presentation. Great. Talk to me about what scenarios are leading you to be able to need to have this conversation. And that can give you so much information that you could have just gone and executed a new slide for the sales team. But if you don't have that conversation, or think about it from a place of curiosity, then you could be missing, like a bunch of other things. You know, maybe that's the first step in seeing that your buyer persona is starting to shift more from one function to another function, or in this particular, you know, economic climate, they seem to care more about this future and this offering. And those are such strong insights for you to continue to adapt and market well that, I would say, set the standard touch points, I would say, at least quarterly with your, you know, head of product or head of service and head of commercial at a minimum. And then also try and approach individual conversations from a learning perspective, which I think is is hard when you get in the day to day, and you know, we're not always going to have the same opinions on things, but I think you have to understand what individuals job functions are, and what that means for their day to day. So if you think about someone in sales, if they're getting asked the same question, and they don't have an ability to speak to that, that is a huge problem in their day to day. And so while I know as marketers, we love to have, you know, content plans and be thinking about things for the future, and that's because we are responsible for generating and creating that demand, we also have to be empathetic and flexible to our counterparts, where it's like, hey, if Alec doesn't have this, it's clearly a. Pain point in his role, and can we support with that so many this podcast supposed to be 15. There's so many talking points. So I already know we're going to come back to this as part of you know, I know you and I can have a lot more conversation, especially on the planning and creating the alignment. And I think one of the areas that I did want to go is that curiosity and, you know, asking why. And I think a lot of times what we hear is you have a plan, and then come up three it's shiny object, and products begging for this, and sales is yelling about this, and finance is cutting that. And it's like, well, three months ago, I thought that you guys all said yes to the eight slides that I presented, and we have this plan, and I think it both gives marketing a bad rap, but I also understand it from the marketing side, and I'm a salesperson who is a marketer. At heart is it's not easy to be in marketing, and fingers are often pointed at marketing, and for whatever reason, when things aren't going well, we often cut budgets. If there aren't enough leads, we go to marketing. If there's not enough, we're not recruiting people enough, we go to marketing. You know, all these different things. So how? How does this consistent communication and this Stay curious allow us to be like flexible, but go back to the plan that we did set, and again, I already asked my one bad podcast question, and here's a second one, how do we handle this as marketing leaders internally? Because I think we might be the only team that has that many different touch points that are so relevant on a day to day basis. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that when you're the receiver of information, sometimes you feel like, I know the level of investment that it takes. But that's not always true, right? Like I, as a naive, non technical person, may be frustrated at some point when it's like, why can't we just put a button on the product in this area, and that would be frustrating to a developer who's like, well, you have no idea what it takes to do that. I think sometimes with marketing, it's a similar scenario where every individual in this consumer world is the receiver of marketing information. So to someone you know writing a blog or doing you know, a webinar. It's like, that's nothing. Just go do it. And so I think a lot of times the conversation comes from a place of frustration, because it's around resources. And I think that sometimes people try to like, they think that people are judging them from the perspective of, like, Why can't marketing get out more like I'm just asking for this one thing. And so I think from that perspective, you have to be just as communicative about what you're not doing as what you are doing, and how that goes back to your strategy and why you are or are not putting resources there. From the curiosity perspective, I think that it's critical, because if you don't understand why something's not working, you're not going to come up with a better way to do it. So like, when you get to the place where people are like, we need to throw out this plan, we're going off the rails. That happens sometimes and sometimes that's valid, and sometimes it's not. So if you can't hold the uncomfortable conversation to understand, like, one, are we changing our business strategy, or are we saying that the marketing strategy that we set up is not working? And both of those have very different solves to them, and so you always have to understand, like, what's happening within the organization and the mindset of the business, and I think that's part of it too, right? Like, if your company's not hitting numbers and your sales reps are getting pressure every single day, I would encourage you to be more flexible in accommodating, because ultimately, one of the most important things with alignment is, are we working together to reach the same goals. Are we being held to the same standards? And if you don't, it's easier for marketing because we're sitting farther away. It's like they have quotas there. They have things to do if you truly want to be seen as a part of the commercial team, like how you show up in those situations when they need support. Matters. Well, it's interesting, because at the end of the day, success is rep, right? Yeah, and when we hit those balls, it's a team game. And I think one of the questions that I wanted to ask is a little bit of a tangent, is, is what success looks like from an internal comm standpoint? And for me, I often go to that word clarity, you know, clarity across all of those teams. But I'm curious, before we wrap up here, what does in your mind, if someone said, what are we striving for? What does success look like 12 months from now with internal communications? Is that a meeting cadence is that? Is that the communications flow? What does that look like? What does success look like in your mind? I. I'm someone that, like always, believes that success is ultimately based on results. And so there are some things that I would look at within an organization to determine that because a communication strategy is going to be different based on the culture of the organization. There are certain organizations that are more meeting heavy and very much value collaboration. There's others that very much value efficiency and speed. And if you can do it in an email, do it in an email. And so I think you have to look at what that output is. I would say the first thing is, can every single person at your organization clearly outline your organization's elevator pitch? If that can't happen, the internal communication is not working. And then I would say, like, the goals that we're working towards, like, not that someone needs to say, okay, marketing's goal is this percentage of pipeline. But when you have other leaders saying okay, for marketing this year, we're really focusing on, you know, positioning ourselves differently to this persona, or we're trying to create this new category, or we're trying to do X, if people understand that, then I think you've done a good job of articulating the plan. And I think in the same way that I would not be able to effectively go present the product roadmap to the leadership team, I don't need the other functions to be able to get to that level, but I need them to trust that we're spending the resources in the places that make the most sense based on our business strategy, and there has to be some collaboration in order for that belief to be held. That 90 seconds is a clip right here of what we can do tomorrow to make it better. And I think, you know, it's a building block. It's a foundation. But I do want to go back to the just the pure like for me, it's, it's a no brainer, but it's also my favorite thing that you've said, which is, go and talk to all of the leaders at your organization. If you're a big organization, talk to the top 12. If you're a small organization, talk to all 24 people and have them give you an elevator pitch, write it all down, and then look at all the discrepancies. And I would guarantee you that if you have any concerns about marketing, internal, comms, positioning, storytelling, it will come out in that process. You will see the differences. And if you're having those differences internally, they're happening externally, and that internal compass is going to believe great to be an external problem as well. Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that I see from marketers perspective, or, I guess I would say, a good intent that I see, that often, sometimes results in not communicating as well as we should, is, I think there's this fear of, okay, if I go sit down with Alec and I ask him what he thinks we should do, what if I don't do it the way that Alec wants to do it right then, like, what he's Alex, gonna think that I hate him, you know? Yeah, and so I think a part of it is like, what is the information gathering process, what is the information share back process and then not being afraid to talk about disconnects. I have never once worked with a client who had the budget to do every single thing they wanted to do. But what matters is how you share that back and how you talk about what you prioritize and what you didn't prioritize. And so you know, if you're working through a acquisition, for example, like name recognition is going to be critical, and so you may have to have the conversation with a product team where you say, like, yes, we do. Also see that these, you know, features and benefits are super important. You will see that the campaigns specific to those don't start until the second quarter. That's because our thought process is that you need to understand who we are as an organization before we understand what we offer to bring people through the organization most effectively. Someone may or may not agree with that, but you're still going to feel heard if I can go have a conversation with you and talk about like I heard you. This is how it's incorporated in the plan. It might not be incorporated in the plan the way you want it to be incorporated in the plan, but that's also where you know, then you everyone has their own set of expertise, and it's like how that's communicated, ultimately, should be a decision by marketing. And so I think it's like, don't not communicate because you're scared to upset people. I feel like that's what happens a lot, where it's like, if I just do this plane in a silo and just execute it myself, then you know, I'm not gonna disappoint anyone. But my view on that is, you'll disappoint everyone. Well, you gotta put yourself out there a little bit. Yeah. And I think one of the things that we see all the time is we don't show the full picture. We just ask for things. Yes. Why are we trying to do that? Especially from like, an SME perspective, just, you know, saying, hey, I need you to do this. I need you to do this. It's not it's not gonna work. And so I think being able to put yourself. Out there and over communicate, even to a degree, or at least proactively communicate, I think, is essential. And I know Tess that I'm at time for what I'm allowed to interview for, which is a shame for me, because we could talk for three hours. So I'm going to ask you just one piece of advice, right? So somebody is, you know, listening to this in November, and they're they're gearing up. They're excited that they're able to do a little bit of planning in November, December, you know, it's probably going to run into January. And next thing you know, it's going to be July. 23 what's one piece of advice that we would offer to to a marketing leader who's really trying to start on this communication journey internally, take small steps. Like, you don't need to go from never collaborating to meeting with everyone weekly and sending reports every Friday. Like, understand where within your organization, take time to be curious and understand where you could bring the most value in a short amount of time, and start there, and then just be open to feedback as you go through and then also know that no marketer ever is going to present their ideas and not have people that don't agree with them and so like, don't, don't let perfection get in the way of progress. Yes, I love small steps. Gotta accept feedback, and it's not gonna be cool things on on day one, it's gonna be a process. Tess, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking time. I know that anybody that listens to you at any point that that we're able to record, they are much smarter, because I know I'm much larger every time we call so thank you so much. You're very kind. Thanks Alec. As always. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The SCORR cast, brought to you by SCORR marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun.