10 Ways Marketing Leaders Earn C-Suite Credibility (and Finally Get That Seat at the Table)

#7: You’re running a high-impact B2B marketing function, delivering real business results—but when it comes to strategic discussions with the C-suite, you’re still on the sidelines. Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Many B2B marketing leaders, even at the VP and SVP level, struggle to be seen as business leaders within their organizations.

In this episode of Growth Activated, I break down how to shift that perception and position yourself as a strategic marketing leader and growth partner—not just a marketer.

We’ll cover:
✅ How to align marketing with top business objectives to gain credibility
✅ Why cross-functional relationships are the key to executive influence
✅ What to do if you’re not invited to key meetings (hint: create your own)
✅ How to communicate strategy, trade-offs, and impact like an executive
✅ The role of executive presence in building trust with the C-suite

If you’re ready to elevate your influence, get a seat at the table, and lead with confidence, this episode is for you.

💡 What’s your biggest challenge in building your brand with the C-Suite? DM me on LinkedIn or drop a comment—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

🎧 Hit play now and start positioning yourself as the executive leader you’re meant to be!

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Don’t forget to subscribe to Growth Activated and share this episode with fellow marketing leaders. Let’s activate growth—together!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Why Building Your Personal Brand with the C-Suite Matters
• 1:56 Mandy Walker's Journey: From Tactical Marketer to Strategic Executive
• 4:19 Tip #1: Tie Business Goals and Challenges to Marketing
• 7:08 Tip #2: Think Beyond Marketing—Become a Business Leader
• 11:10 Tip #3: Build Strong Cross-Functional Relationships
• 16:24 Tip #4: If You Can’t Get Invited to the Meeting, Create the Meeting
• 19:11 Tip #5: Present Strategy with Multiple Investment Options
• 23:57 Tip #6: Communicate Trade-Offs and Drive Decision-Making
• 26:44 Tip #7: Lean on Trusted Stakeholders for Credibility
• 30:25 Tip #8: Own Your Message and Point of View
• 33:15 Tip #9: Be Accountable—Communicate the Good, Bad, and Ugly
• 36:35 Tip #10: Act the Part—Elevate Your Executive Presence
• 38:54 Tip #11 (Bonus!): Build External Recognition and Thought Leadership
• 41:42 Final Takeaways and Next Steps

Transcript

Welcome to Growth Activated

Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact, and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started. 

Introduction: Why Building Your Personal Brand with the C-Suite Matters

Hey everyone, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Walker, and today we're going to be diving into a question I get asked all the time. And that's, how do you build your personal brand with the C-suite and finally get that seat at the table? Have you ever felt like you're leading a world-class marketing function, delivering real results, and yet… somehow you're still not included in key strategic decisions. Maybe you're not invited to revenue and sales planning meetings. Maybe your marketing strategy never makes it to the boardroom. If that sounds familiar, you are honestly not alone. I recently spoke with an SVP of marketing at a multi-billion dollar company who isn't included in revenue planning on an annual basis. And another VP of marketing who doesn't get invited to present her go-to-market strategy to the board. And this topic is honestly incredibly close to my heart because I've been there myself. When I first kicked off my marketing career, I was a field marketing specialist who eventually worked my way up to the marketing executive seat within a 10 year spanned and building my personal brand was something I actively had to work pretty hard at to shift my internal reputation within the company as being seen as a tactical marketer and shift that into being a strategic executive. And while we're not going to solve this big problem that many of us have in one episode, I do want to start by sharing a few key strategies that have worked for me to help you position yourself as a business leader, not just a marketing leader, so that you can elevate how you're viewed by the C-suite and take your seat at the table. So no matter where you are in your career, whether you're a marketing manager, a director, VP or a CMO, these insights will help you start making that shift today. Let's dive in. 

So I want to share 10 top tips today. Actually, I have a bonus number 11 that I'll share at the end, but I've sort of organized them into different stages. And the first stage is really the mindset shift that has to happen, and that's to think like a business leader. So this isn't the first time we've talked about this. As you may remember, we covered why this is critical in our very first episode together, and some quick wins in terms of how to think like a business leader. So please do go back and listen to that one if you haven't yet.

But the net net is that we need to recognize that the C-suite doesn't see marketing in isolation. They see business challenges and revenue opportunities. And frankly, it's our job to connect the dots for them. 

Tip #1: Tie Business Goals and Challenges to Marketing

And so the first tip I'm gonna share to build your personal brand with the C-suite is to tie business goals and challenges to the marketing efforts you're working on. Now, I know this may seem like an obvious one, but this is hands down one of the most important ways to get your C-suite engaged with marketing and have you be a part of higher level business conversations. So in order to tie your marketing efforts to business goals, you have to be looped into what the business goals are. It's amazing if you are included in those strategic planning sessions where the business goals are being created, but if you're listening to this episode, there's a good chance that you're not and you wanna be at the table, and that's okay.

So the first step to be able to take action here is to understand what the business goals are, why they're important, and the key company initiatives that are on the roadmap this year to achieve those goals. From there, the onus is on us to demonstrate exactly how marketing will impact and contribute to those goals. So the most obvious time to address this is in your annual marketing, planning, and roadmap session, which if you need some help on, go check out episode two, we have an entire episode around how to approach annual marketing planning and build company-based goals. But really the key here is to reiterate your marketing efforts and tie them back to the company goals as often as possible. And so some of the ways we can do this is, number one, in company-wide and department-wide updates and meetings. Whether these are annual meetings or quarterly meetings or monthly meetings, whatever it may be, and frankly, it could just be a big email update going out to all leadership about an important update, but I always like to personally engage with these announcements and these updates. So typically I would shoot a follow-up message after of encouragement to the departmental leader and share some ways that marketing is gonna plug in and support their efforts. And hopefully if we've done our work, these efforts are already planned in our annual roadmap, but if they're not, consider how you may work them in. If this is an important initiative to the business, how can marketing impact it? I also use one-on-one meetings with the C-suite as a great time and a place to reiterate how marketing is impacting the business goals and challenges. And so typically when I have a one-on-one with either the CEO or the president or whoever it may be, any C-suite level executive, I'm not using that time to quickly update them on everything marketing is doing. I try not to use those important times and sort of precious meetings together for a full marketing download. What I'd rather use that time for is to hear what's going on with the business, hear what the challenges are, and then tie in directly what marketing is working on that will help push those goals forward or help solve those problems and challenges. And so that's just a little bit more of a natural ongoing way to make sure I'm constantly keeping marketing top of mind for them as a strategic partner and really a solutions provider. And one of the last ways I like to always tie marketing goals back to the business is through quarterly marketing updates and roadmap reviews. So anytime I'm sharing out really an update about marketing to the C-suites, I'm always doing what I can to highlight initiatives that directly correlate to a company goal. I'm sure there are a lot more ways to constantly keep your marketing efforts tied to the business challenges, but really the main message here is just keep it top of mind for your executives. If you haven't already make sure that all of your marketing efforts and initiatives and goals are tied back to the business, but once you feel confident that they are, take every opportunity you can to communicate that clearly back with your C-suite and personalize it to what they care about the most. 

Tip #2: Think Beyond Marketing - Become a Business Leader 

The second tip to build your personal brand with the C-suite is really to think beyond marketing. So I know there was a famous author that said, honestly, it might've been Seth Godin and his linchpin book, but the author talked about how to be the person whose role is hard to define. Be indispensable to your business, right? They can always hire another CMO, but can they hire another Mandy?

And so this is something I am constantly thinking about in my role as a business executive and a marketing leader. And that really shows up in thinking about the company goals at a broader level. Think about it from a marketing perspective. Yes, in terms of how marketing can contribute, but also think about what else the business could be doing in order to achieve those goals, whether marketing is a key player in that or not. And so I'll give you an example here at one of the companies that I've worked for in the past.

I found that there was a huge gap in terms of our data strategy and the way that the tech stack and the tools all integrated together that was going to ultimately deliver the best customer experience and help us make the best business decisions possible. And no one else in the executive team had identified this as a major gap or had taken the initiative to solve for this problem. And so it was something that I took on.

You know, I obviously cared about this challenge and this gap very deeply from the perspective of wanting to have really strong customer data to understand the customer journey, wanting to have the right marketing tools and technologies that were all integrated together in the broader go-to-market technology stack. And so I personally filled this gap. I led the conversations around these ideas and as a result.

I became one of the primary key stakeholders within the company that was associated with driving digital transformation throughout the company. So that trickled down to where anytime someone was talking about digital transformation or data or technology, my name was associated with the initiative as a thought leader in that area and I would get pulled into those conversations. You know, another example I'd love to share here is that when I was at another company and I was leading the charge on the growth team and the growth investment, that's where I uncovered that sales was our most expensive asset by far. And thinking about our go-to-market investments overall and knowing that sales was the most expensive investment we were making really forced me to think about the relationship between sales and marketing differently. And from the point of view of sales and marketing, sales and marketing are two different things business perspective, wanting to prioritize sales time so that they were only working on the highest impact work possible. And so this really altered my previous mindset and some of the friction that typically exists between sales and marketing where, you know, as marketing leaders, we can be really frustrated why sales isn't following up with every lead we give them. And it challenged me to think differently about the entire revenue function as a business leader and say,

You know what, from a marketing perspective, what can we be doing differently to nurture and convert the pipeline so that sales is really only stepping in when they absolutely have to, right? And I never would have thought like this before if I wasn't challenged to think like an overarching revenue leader as opposed to a marketing leader. So just encourage you to think broader than marketing, right? Think about the overall company, think about the gaps and the challenges that your company has and what you can fill and how you can be a linchpin, which will ultimately show your C-suite that you care about the business and you care about the overarching goals as opposed to just your own function. Okay, so as we move into tip number three, we're going to move into some tips that encourage you to get into the right conversations within your business. And so tip number three is to build strong cross-functional relationships.

Tip #3: Build Strong Cross-Functional Relationships 

Now I know most people are always talking about sales and marketing alignment. I know we've actually done an episode on this. I'm a big proponent of the CRO CMO relationship, of course, but sometimes it blows my mind that as marketing executives, we're not talking about our relationships with the other cross-department leaders. So, you know, I think sales and product are usually the most obvious ones that we as marketers should have very close relationships, but there's also a lot of importance around why we should have strong relationships with finance, HR, and technology, and IT security. I can think of dozens of ways that we should be partnering with each of those C-suite leaders and how their success depends on marketing success and vice versa in a lot of ways. And so one of the things I would encourage you to do is learn about the personas of the other execs. Let's think about this from our marketing mindset. Who are the C-suite personas that you need to build relationships with?

What are the goals and metrics that matter to them? What are they responsible for? And what do their roadmaps look like for this next year? Really learn to speak their language. Certainly we have our company language that we all use, but I don't know about you, but sometimes when I talk to other department leaders, I get lost in the nomenclature that they use and some of their key phrases. And so seek to understand that, because if you can incorporate that language,

When you're engaging with them, it will make them feel seen and heard and understood. And one of my favorite questions I like to ask my C-suite partners is what's keeping them up at night? That is such an insightful way to get to the heart of their challenges at that moment with their department and with the business. And so as you start to dive in and learn about these personas and really be empathetic to who they are and deepen your understanding into the role they play to the overarching company success, I would really encourage you to communicate with them regularly. So I love to set up reoccurring one-on-ones with each stakeholder. Certainly the cadence will differ greatly based on the department. Generally speaking, you may only need to meet with finance once a quarter, right? Whereas with product, you may need to meet with them weekly or monthly. Um, so determine the cadence that seems best for both of you, but have a cadence. Make sure that you don't go six months without talking to one of your cross-departmental peers.

Another thing I love to do to communicate with them and pull them into what marketing is working on is I love to include each of my peers in annual planning for marketing. I think I mentioned this on a previous episode, but what's wild to me is that I often find that a lot of departmental executives will build their roadmaps for the year in silos. And yet we, especially marketing, can be impacting, influencing, or contributing to a lot of these roadmaps overall. You know, a great example of this, I was just mentoring a marketing leader and she was sharing with me that she went to her sales kickoff and one of the main challenges that the business is really concerned about right now is sales retention and one of the key initiatives that they're going to work on is sales training. And so I asked her, great, how is marketing going to contribute to that? And she kind of looked at me sideways, like that's not my job. I don't run sales training, said, of course not. And I'm not talking about making the training decks look pretty either by the way, but which trainings are marketing giving? There are so many ways for marketing to get involved in sales training in terms of training on the brand, on sales enablement, on how to be an ambassador for the company pipeline handoffs, right? The opportunities are unlimited. And if sales training is the number one thing that your CRO and your CEO care about at the moment then we should be connecting the dots for them on how we can plug in to push that goal forward. And finally, the other thing I love to do to communicate regularly with my C-suite is when I am sending out regular marketing updates, whether it's a monthly email or a quarterly update, I'll typically try and customize the highlights from that period of time to be specific to the C-suite leader I'm sending it to. And so whether I'm recognizing them for a partnership in front of the entire C-suite team, or I'm calling out certain initiatives we're doing that's going to help push their roadmap forward. I'm always customizing the messaging and helping tie what I'm doing back to their personal goals and how they're contributing to the company. And as you can probably tell me, this is an area I'm incredibly passionate about. And I don't think we talk about enough as marketing executives. And so one of the series I'm going to launch on the cast in the coming weeks is a C-suite series where I bring on different C-suite personas so that we can really dive into learning their persona, learning what a strong CMO and C-suite relationship looks like for their particular role, learning how we can partner and other things because as much as we talk about sales and marketing alignment, I feel like it's a huge miss that as execs, we're not talking about how we should be collaborating with all of the other important departments across the company.

Tip #4: If You Can’t Get Invited to the Meeting, Create the Meeting

Okay, so tip number four is also related to getting into the right conversations. And it's, if you can't get invited to the meeting, create the meeting. This is one of the easiest things all of us could start doing tomorrow, right? Don't wait for an invite to the important conversations that are happening. Lead the conversation yourself. And in my experience, people are usually always open to having the conversation and sharing the information with us from a marketing perspective.

They just oftentimes haven't realized how marketing would be involved or have a vested interest in that topic or could frankly impact the outcome. And so regardless of what the meeting is, I typically position it as I want to make sure marketing is plugged in to help you achieve X goal through Y. And so a great example of this was, as I mentioned earlier, at one of the companies I was at, there was a huge gap in terms of a comprehensive data strategy and a tech and tools strategy that was all integrated. And frankly, marketing wasn't even on the radar for being a part of those conversations. And so I would set up conversations with key execs and frame it as these are the tools I believe we need or the data strategy I believe we need in order to achieve. XYZ business goals that we've all talked about together. And hey, by the way, here are the marketing tools or the marketing data we're already collecting or we already have that I believe could be leveraged by other departments based on the goals you guys have told me you have as well. So let's collaborate. Let's create a comprehensive strategy that incorporates all of us into this equation. You know, another example of this is if you're trying to get out of the MQL lead gen cycle, um, where that's all your department is viewed as.

You know, consider hosting revenue alignment sessions, show interest in the full pipeline and understanding wins and challenges that sales is having and contribute meaningfully to those. And I promise you'll eventually get invited to sales strategy meetings, as long as you're incorporating yourself in a way that feels natural and strategic. And that's what I would say the most important key is here is you have to add value in a meaningful way, if you're going to create these meetings or hope to join these meetings. And don't stress about doing it live in the meeting, by the way, take in everything you've learned during the meeting, ideate on it, and send followups to the leaders afterwards. So show that you're invested and you care, and you can be a strategic partner to them. And tip number four is really one of the easiest ways you can get included where you need to tomorrow. So just make sure to do the work to add value in a meaningful way and connect the dots for your stakeholders. 

Tip # 5: Present Strategy with Multiple Options

So the next two tips that I'm going to cover are centered around the idea of communicating like an executive. So tip number five is creating options for your strategy presentations and roadmaps. And when I say strategy presentation, this could be your annual marketing plan. It could be a new marketing strategy or program you're looking to launch. It could be a big campaign. It could be anything, but really I like to create a few different options within these plans. And so the first one is I always have multiple versions of my presentation. One, that is a high level overview for the executive team and two, a version that is incredibly detailed for the documentation side of things, as well as my team when they're ready to actually start executing against the strategy or the program or the campaign. And frankly, as your executives ask questions and engage, you can always pull up that level of detail and they'll be impressed but don't lead with that because a lot of times executives don't want that level of detail, but when they do dig, they wanna know that you know your stuff. So that's the first thing I do is I always build two versions for two different audiences anytime I'm rolling out a big strategy. The second thing I like to do that really helps with executive buy-in is I'll include multiple investment options and show the downstream impact of those options. And so typically this looks like having a conservative growth option, a moderate growth option, and an aggressive growth option. And so when I think about these options, the growth could be the outcomes that you're gonna see, it could be the investment you have to put in, it could be the head count that you need in order to make that happen, it could be the executive engagement and support that you need to make each of those options happen.

Right? So typically as you go up to your aggressive growth option, you're going to see the biggest, best results, but you're also going to have the most effort and investment going into that. And so I really found that executives love to see this sketched out because typically in my experience, people choose the middle way. Everyone wants aggressive growth, of course, but they don't want to make the aggressive investment a lot of times and conservative growth on the flip side sounds slow, right? But it may be the investment level they're comfortable with. And so the option that I'm most interested in doing is typically my moderate growth option. And then I build around that. And I've really found sort of like the Goldilocks, right? I've really found that executives tend to gravitate towards that moderate growth because the investment might feel a little uncomfortable for them but they wanna make sure they're growing more than a slow rate. And I think this, and not only do these options help them get engaged with the process and feel a part of the decision, but it also helps level set the types of results they're gonna get. So whether we're launching a campaign or investing in a new strategy, or it's our annual roadmap and plan, right, that has a much larger investment tied to it, if you're able to level set on the outcome early on, then you're setting yourself up for success down the road. 

And a quick communication tip that I'll just round out this strategy presentation roadmap options with, but a great communication tip for engaging with executives anytime is always ask yourself, what's the headline? Start with the headline. Then if you need to, back into the facts and reasonings of what you're looking to do. So I don't know about you, but the executives I work with want leaders they're engaging with to be short and as direct and to the point as possible.

So I always approach a conversations with that type of style and then let the executive dig more if they want or need to. So the way this might show up for you in a communication framework is rather than saying I'd like to invest in this program, it costs this much, and I think it will produce this result. Flip the structure of that framework, right? I'd like to drive X result by investing in this program at this cost. hit them with the headline, you want to drive this result. And then the supporting details of how you're gonna do that and how much it's gonna cost comes later. And so that's just a quick tip. I generally find it's very easy to lose executives attention span if we're not communicating properly. So hopefully that's helpful. And along the lines of communication, tip number six is to communicate trade-offs and communicate them often.

Tip #6: Communicate Trade-Offs and Drive Decision-Making

And I think this is really important because I know many of us might be seen as the quote unquote no person when new ideas come our way. In fact, anytime I do executive level interviews, when I'm doing a 360 marketing assessment of their function, one of the things I hear the most from the C-suite is that either marketing is too slow. They don't know what marketing is doing or marketing always says no.

And so if we're going to enhance our personal brand and our reputation within our companies, we don't wanna be known as the person who always says no. That being said, we don't want to get distracted from our roadmap all the time by taking in and doing all of these ideas. And so one of the approaches I have found most successful is to have a dialogue with the person who is bringing in the idea. Ask them some hard hitting questions. Thanks so much CRO for sharing that idea.

Which business goal will that help impact in your mind? Will it help us get to that goal faster than XYZ thing that we already have planned? If so, great, let's swap it out. If not, why would we divert our attention from the things that we've already mutually agreed upon to impact those goals? And so when you make them a part of the decision, I find that it makes them a lot more understanding and empathetic as to why, and frankly, they may even come to the conclusion before you do about whether something is worth doing or not doing, just with a few of those leading questions. And another way I like to communicate trade-offs as a part of this process is I ask what their level of involvement in the idea is going to be if we run with it. Will they lead the charge on it? Will they be an ambassador for it?

If we do run with it from a marketing perspective, how will they stay engaged throughout the execution of the idea? And this tends to be really telling to help split out the people who are incredibly invested in a new idea for the business and really believe in the outcome it could have versus someone who just saw or heard from their sister-in-law or saw the latest LinkedIn post from someone they follow about a new idea. And they think we should try it out.

It really challenges and gets to the bottom of whether or not they really believe in the idea. And so that's something to think about as well. And it ultimately both of these ideas, whether you're having a dialogue and sort of walking them through the decision making process or whether you're asking them how they're going to stay involved, both of these ways help reduce friction so that we aren't always having to say no to things that aren't aligned with our goals and our roadmap.

Tip #7: Lean on Trusted Stakeholders for Credibility 

and it sort of puts it back on the person who's coming to the idea. And they may come to the conclusion faster than you do. Okay, great. So as we talk about tips seven, eight and nine, these are all centered around how to influence through trust and accountability. And so number seven is lean on your trusted stakeholders to build your personal brand. And honestly, this is one of my favorite tricks. So take a moment and think about who your CEO or your president or your CFO trusts on the team and for what. Which areas are they trusted partners on? Who are their go-tos and what are they the go-to for? And those are the people, depending on what you're looking to accomplish, I like to bring in to the process to get their opinion and insights and feedback and buy-in on a project or a program or a campaign before I ever even bring it to the CEO. And so a great example of this at one of my past companies where I was running a team of 25, a big part of managing that team was making sure people were in the right roles, have the right responsibilities, set up for success with the right org chart design, they had the right compensation. 

Um, you know, all, you know, that was a big part of making sure that this large function I had was able to produce at the highest level. And it just so happened that I had an incredibly close and trusted relationship with our CHRO at the time. We partnered together on so much. We were just, whether it was employer branding or talent attraction, or we were both co-leads on our internal DEIB committee and she was an incredibly trusted advisor for the CEO and the president at the time. And so when I was looking to push for compensation raises or bonuses beyond the formal company percentage, or I wanted to launch a new organizational design or promote some key roles or people, I always looked her in and I would share like, here's what I'm thinking, here's why I'm thinking of it, here's the roles and responsibilities that go along with it.

Here's the market pay I'm seeing for it. And one, she'd be a great sparring partner because she'd poke holes through it where she could. And we'd have a really healthy discussion around what she was seeing that I might run up against and how I could address that. And those conversations were not only incredibly helpful to prepare me for when I did bring my plan or my proposal to the CEO, but it also provided the opportunity for me when I went to the CEO to say,

hey, our CHRO has already vetted this, provided me feedback. I've worked her feedback in and she has given her blessing or her sign off on these changes. And so instantly I'm tapping into her credibility and the credibility she brings. I've gotten my plan closer to home. And a lot of times what I found was that the CEO would approve the proposals I was putting in front of her a lot faster. So think about that. I've done that with sales team, I've done that with finance, I've done that with endless amounts of departments depending on what I'm trying to push forward. But think about how you can leverage the trust that has already been built through your peers and bring them in and build that trust with them directly as well. Okay, number eight, own your message and your point of view. This is one of my favorite pieces of advice that I give to new leaders.

Tip #8: Own Your Message and Point of View

But honestly, it's not just for new leaders. It can be leveraged for managing up, managing down, managing across to other departments, um, and really the idea is that you own the message, whether it's a hard message or not with your team, with your peers, with your C-suite about what is happening. So often I see leaders, not just marketing leaders, but several departmental leaders that will lean on their CEO and what their CEO wants to happen. And that's how they communicate down to their team or across to their peers. And they'll say, oh, well, CEO wants this to happen. So we're working through this right now and we need to just be able to run with it, right? That's the opposite of owning the message. And so part of why I see this so often with new leaders is they might be struggling to wrangle broader teams outside of their team that they run. So whether it's the broader marketing team or whether it's other departments, and they want to lean on me to step in and help hold people accountable. Um, and, you know, of course, I'm your leader, I'm here, I'm happy to help. But what I've shared with so many of these leaders is if you're able to own the message about what you want done and why, rather than using my name as the accountability partner that they have to do this for, then you're building respect and trust for yourself. And ultimately you're establishing a baseline that it should be done this way because you want it to be done that way, not because your boss wants it to be done that way or the CEO wants it to be done that way. And so I've just found that such a great way to build trust and respect, whether you're managing up, managing down, or managing across to other departments. You know, and the other side of owning the message is without relying on other people's credibility is owning your own point of view. And so if you have a strong point of view on something, the way something should be done or how to make something better, speak up. Own that point of view. Build yourself as a thought leader in that area and establish some credibility so that your point of view should be considered. And I know it's really hard to own a message that's coming directly from your CEO if your point of view is different and doesn't agree with what's being done.

I've struggled with that myself, but really take some time to think through the best way, whether it's communicating your point of view upwards to try and negotiate the way that something's going to be done or have a conversation about it, or just being incredibly mindful about delivering the message in a way that doesn't lack integrity, but also isn't reliant on just, hey, we're doing this just because the CEO wants to, right? Let's try and stay away from that.

Tip #9: Be Accountable - Communicate the Good, Bad and Ugly

As you're building your personal brand. And so tip number eight is to be accountable. Be accountable to your team, to your C-suite, you know, and I think one of the, one of the easiest ways to do this is to share what's happening within your function and share often and, you know, don't just share the good, but, but share the good, the bad, the ugly and own when something didn't go the way that you plan.

So whether you're being accountable through quarterly updates or monthly updates, just make sure that you are constantly communicating what's happening in your function at a high level, of course, and own when something doesn't go the way that you thought it would. This will build a lot of trust and credibility for you, um, in the department and also establish the fact that we're not going to get it right all the time and that's okay. Marketing isn't supposed to get everything right all the time. Um, we're supposed to push the boundaries and be creative and be innovative. And some things we're gonna try and they aren't gonna work, but just make sure to keep that open communication. Because again, if we go back to the things I hear the most, one of them is, I have no idea what marketing's working on or how they're contributing to the business. And so the more frequently that we can be accountable by showcasing our performance and our results towards our annual plans or the strategies that we're rolling out, the better.

And another thing within the Be Accountable bucket that I would just encourage you to think about is take accountability for your team and what's being produced. Don't throw your team under the bus. If my team isn't performing, that's on me and I need to be addressing it. Um, certainly there are situations where you need to communicate if someone isn't performing on your team, especially if you're putting them on a performance improvement plan or things like that. But when little hiccups happen or something goes wrong,

Um, I always try and avoid throwing my team under the bus, um, to C-suite executives. And I prefer to take the hit for whatever it is. And what I have generally found when I do that is it protects the team, which ultimately builds trust between the two of us, and it allows them to feel more empowered and safe to take risks, which is ultimately what I want them to do. I want them to be pushing boundaries and taking risks. And if they're constantly worried about fear of failing or getting called out from a C-suite executive, they're not going to be performing at their best performance level. And you know, there's something to be said that the more accountability that you agree to take on, the more that you'll actually address the root issue so that it doesn't happen again. So if someone forgot to do something that was an important task, right, we probably need better operational checks and balances. How did that get missed? How do we make sure it doesn't get missed in the future?

If a campaign flops, did we fully think through our plan ahead of time? Are we filling out a comprehensive campaign planning template? Um, that, and, and if we did and we fully thought through it and it still flopped, okay, no harm, no foul, let's move on. It just didn't work. Let's learn from it. Right. But I've personally found that as I'm taking accountability for the things that are happening or going wrong within the department,

Tip #10: Act the Part - Elevate Your Executive Presence

It also increases the ownership on me to make sure we're solving the root cause and the root problem, which can be incredibly helpful for pushing your department forward. Okay, great. So as we're nearing the close here with tip number 10, this is essentially centered around the executive presence that you have and you hold. And so tip number 10 is to act the part. And So, you know, one of the easiest ways to act the part for me, and one of the things I saw as a huge difference maker for me when I was transitioning to vice president was honestly, I elevated the way I was dressing. And I know this is harder today being in a remote setting for a lot of us. We're sitting behind computers. I myself am not always great about following this advice in this remote world. But I do remember a distinct point in my career where I started dressing the part in terms of what I felt like was the part. I started wearing nicer work dresses. That was totally my vibe. I loved a strong work dress and heels. It just gave me a level of confidence in how I carried myself, the meetings that I sat in, the conferences I attended, regardless of where it was. It gave me this boost of confidence that I belonged in the room. And so while I'm not advocating that we all wear dresses and heels, What I am advocating for is, take a moment to consider what makes you feel the best, what makes you feel confident and powerful. Whatever that may be, I would just say show up in a way that gives you that level of confidence. And last but not least in terms of acting the part is stay above the fray. Stay above the workplace drama and gossip that happens everywhere the strategic impact that you are making at the company level. I know many of us could identify the people in our organization that we know to be gossippers and frankly, it's at all levels, right? And stay away from that. It does not help your personal brand to be engaged in those types of conversations. And then last but not least, bonus tip number 11 that I thought about at the last moment is,

Tip #11 (Bonus!): Build External Recognition and Thought Leadership 

industry recognition and thought leadership. And so this is a great way if you can be recognized by leaders in your industry, whether it's through awards or top vendors or thought leadership opportunities, this will inevitably help your internal executives on your C-suite view you differently in an elevated way if the outside industry is viewing you and recognizing you as such. You know, I remember when I was, had just elevated into the VP of marketing role and I ended up winning an industry award. It was a pretty big award. It was a global 150 leadership award, 150 people chosen globally. And frankly, it was one of the only marketers chosen because it wasn't a marketing specific award. It was for executives across this industry. And my C-suite leadership was so proud. You know, that was like a very proud moment for them to have someone from the organization nominated. And so I know that that did wonders for my personal brand internally. Something else I would do was, I was incredibly engaged with all of our vendors and I would give them really meaningful product feedback. I'd have strategic conversations with them. And so anytime they were engaging with the C-suite, whether it was to sign new contracts or to talk about a big new project that we were going to work on within the corporate environment. My name often came up in those conversations. They either referred to me or wanted me involved in the project as a key stakeholder, and that just reiterated to the C-suite that I have an important voice that's valued by others, even outside of the company, not just inside the company. And then the last thing I would do with a lot of those vendors that I built close relationships with, they would feature me as a customer advocate. And so I would do case studies and customer storytelling. And honestly, I did a lot of trainings and webinars for them on how to use their products, which again, was just something that helped the C-suite view, not only me, but the marketing department at our company as a thought leader in the industry. And it made them proud to have the marketing team and the function that they have, right? Cause now it's something that they get to brag about that their marketing team is being featured for being cutting edge or being innovative or whatever it may be. And so if you're struggling internally, I mean, I certainly would start with the first 10 tips that I shared first. Um, but outside industry recognition and thought leadership is an amazing way to also build your personal brand with your C-suites, if you have the time and space to do so. 

Final Takeaways and Next Steps: 

All right, guys, thank you so much for hanging in with me on this. I hope these tips were helpful for you to build your personal brand.

So to quickly recap, you know, number one, tie your business goals and challenges to marketing efforts and do it as frequently as you can. Number two, think beyond marketing, be a linchpin in your company and think about the broader business as much as you can. Right. Number three, build strong cross-functional relationships. Number four, if you can't get invited to the meeting, create the meeting. One of my favorites. Number five. Present options for strategy presentations and roadmaps. Number six, communicate trade-offs with your different stakeholders and communicate often. Number seven, lean on trusted stakeholders for their personal brand and credibility. Number eight, own your own message and point of view, whether you're managing up, down, or sideways. Number nine, be accountable for your team and your performance and communicate it often and number 10, dress and act the part. And of course, bonus tip number 11, capture industry recognition and thought leadership opportunities. All right, friends, thank you so much for your time today. I hope you heard some helpful tips today on how to build your personal brand with your C-suite. And if you did, would you mind leaving a review and sharing which tips were the most helpful? Your feedback is so important to me. And on another note, stay tuned for upcoming C-suite series. I know it will be jam packed with more information on how you can continue to develop a business mindset and elevate your function within your company. And in the meantime, keep activating growth for you and your company. Talk soon.