How to run your marketing team day-to-day
How to create a marketing operating cadence, break your quarterly goals into milestones, set the right schedule & agendas for marketing meetings, and keep other teams updated
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You’ve finished your annual planning process. You’ve aligned with stakeholders, set the right objectives for the year, translated annual objectives into quarterly goals, and got your budget approved by finance. Congrats.
I realize this is kind of a mean thing to tell marketers in mid-January after all that hard work, but now the bad news: Planning isn’t over when it’s over. In fact, it never stops.
Your job in marketing is to execute on your plan and meet the goals you set, while constantly prioritizing ideas and tasks against each other. You need to make sure you spend time on the big bets that will actually move the needle, without falling into the random-acts-of-marketing (RAM) trap.
But, there’s good news: This newsletter will help you connect the goals (you so carefully set) to the work you do all year. It will help you figure out the right schedule of marketing meetings, how to share status of goals, and figure out if work is worth doing. I call this a marketing operating cadence.
No matter how big your marketing team or company, you will benefit from having an operating cadence. You can, of course, dial it up or dial it down to fit your company. But, if you set this up it will make sticking to the plan much easier and will make all that time you spent setting strategy for the year worth it when you hit those goals!
In this newsletter, I’ll cover how to:
Break your quarterly goals down monthly into milestones
Set the right cadence for marketing meetings–and do the right things in those meetings
Use your goals in your day-to-day work: in marketing briefs, project kick-offs, project management tools, and communications with other teams
If you missed my series on annual planning, you can catch up here. And if you’re a paid subscriber (what better way to start spending that 2025 L&D budget?!), here are all the templates you’ll need to set plans, track goals, and even finalize your budget.
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Event on Friday 1/24
I'm hosting 2 marketing leaders from Clay, Bruno Estrella (growth marketing) and Mishti Sharma (product marketing) for a free live chat next Friday at 10 AM PT. We’ll cover how Clay approaches marketing—and how you can use Clay to be a more effective marketer too.
It's hard to not see Clay mentioned when you visit LinkedIn, attend a talk, or chat with GTM leaders. Not only is Clay essential in any GTM tech stack, but Clay is also a force when it comes to their own marketing. I'm lucky enough to be a Clay investor and have gotten an inside look into how Mishti and Bruno approach marketing. So, I'm thrilled to host them and give you an inside look too!
If you follow the guidance in this newsletter, you should end up with an operating cadence that includes weekly team meetings, a set schedule for setting milestones, a standard way to kick off projects, and a clear plan for sharing your annual and quarterly goals with team and providing updates a long the way.
Part 1: Break quarterly goals into monthly milestones
I’ve found that when setting quarterly goals, teams don’t think about hitting them until it’s too late in the quarter. They also have no idea if the workload they’ve planned is appropriate. The best defense for this is to plan what you’ll get done each month of the quarter—I appropriately call these monthly milestones. It’s helpful to lay out rough milestones for each month of the quarter in advance, but each month you’ll need to revisit and adjust. Here are a couple examples:
Goal example 1: Pipeline
Annual Goal: Drive $5M in pipeline that converts to revenue at 30%
Quarterly Goal: Run outbound campaigns for tier 2 and 3 accounts driving $1M in pipeline
Month 1 Milestone: Establish an efficient system with sales for mapping accounts to tiers in Attio (our CRM)
Month 2 Milestone: Fully transition tier 2 and 3 account outbound efforts to marketing, hit $300K in pipeline for quarter to date
Month 3 Milestone: Hit $1M in pipeline
Goal example 2: Testing new verticals
Annual Goal: Drive $1M in revenue from new verticals
Quarterly Goal: Run campaigns for dog vertical and cat vertical, driving $500K in pipeline
Month 1 Milestone: Execute on dog campaigns, plan cat campaign theme & launch cat landing page
Month 2 Milestone: Optimize dog campaigns, launch cat campaigns. $200K pipeline target
Month 3 Milestone: Hit $500K in pipeline, and make a call if dogs and cats are viable verticals
How to operationalize monthly milestones
Each quarterly (and annual goal) needs a DRI (directly responsible individual)
The DRI should establish monthly milestones the week before the quarter starts. Then you should revisit and adjust monthly—add a recurring calendar invite for the entire marketing team to get this done.
Note: I find having set planning meetings for these milestones is overkill, as sometimes it is obvious and other times you need more than 1 meeting to figure out how to break down the goal into monthly pieces. So I like to leave this up to the DRI.
These milestones should be added to a project management tool (or a spreadsheet at the very least).
In the weekly marketing meeting as close to the first of the month as possible, focus on reviewing the milestones for the month to make sure everyone is on board and there are no blockers.
In month 1 of the quarter, you’ll have the heaviest lift here, block off a bit more time on everyone’s calendar for this.
Share async status updates
Just like quarterly goals, monthly milestones are not super valuable unless you look at them regularly, track progress against them, and course correct when needed. To operationalize this, have the DRI (directly responsible individual) give a status update on their monthly milestones each week async. Meaning, not in the marketing weekly meeting.
These updates should have two to three parts:
A simple red, yellow, green status for off track, at risk, and on track.
A 1-3 sentence update that explains the color status.
Links to reports, project docs, or anything else for additional reading.
Do this wherever you track your goals and milestones—if in a spreadsheet, make columns for the status updates. If in Asana or Airtable, set up custom fields and use comments to do this (an Airtable template is available for paid subs at the bottom of this newsletter). And you can also build a workflow to send these into a Slack channel for discussion on them. Put a time on the calendar to get this done before the weekly marketing meeting (I like a deadline of Monday at noon, with a marketing meeting on Tuesday), so the Head of Marketing or DRI can determine if any of the milestones should be discussed during the meeting.
Part 2: Set the right marketing meeting cadence
Here are the recurring meetings I recommend for marketing teams. You may be able to combine some of these if you’re a very small team. As your team scales to include multiple function leaders with direct reports, you’ll likely need to shift what you cover in all-hands meetings vs. dedicated syncs with marketing leads.
Weekly: Marketing team meeting
🥅 Meeting goal: Provide context needed to stay focused on and execute high-impact work.
📅 What happens in these meetings: Focus on things the whole team will benefit from discussing, using async status updates on KPIs and goals/monthly milestones to shape the topics. You can also rotate through marketers discussing projects and work they are doing and make sure updates from the rest of the company are shared with the team (that only leaders may have insight into)
🚫 Avoid: Reading out status updates. Do that async!
👩💻 Attendees: Everyone on the marketing team. As the team scales, you’ll want to do an all-hands marketing team 1-2x per month and have sub-teams meet on the off weeks.
Note: Quarterly and monthly, this meeting should focus on aligning on quarterly goals and/or monthly milestones.
Ad hoc: Project kickoff meetings
🥅 Meeting goal: Align on the GACCS brief for the project (this stands for goals, audience, creative, channels, stakeholders…more on this in a second).
📅 What happens in these meetings: These should feel collaborative and the group should figure out the best way to drive impact from the project. It’s helpful to have basic GACCS brief info filled out, to get input on it as well.
🚫 Avoid: Making these feel scripted and like a read-off.
👩💻 Attendees: Stakeholders in the project (including people from other teams).
Weekly or 2x Monthly: Pipeline & campaign meeting with revops and sales
🥅 Meeting goal: Align on initiatives that will drive short-term pipeline, ensuring clear handoffs and collaboration between marketing and sales.
📅 What happens in these meetings: Have a set of reports you look at (or give async updates on these reports and discuss highlights/lowlights) and have a previously agreed on and clear way to review campaigns.
🚫 Avoid: Finger pointing on pipeline, discussing attribution methodology (save that for an ops discussion).
👩💻 Attendees: Rev Ops, Sales Leaders, Growth Marketing/Demand Gen Leaders, Head of Marketing.
1-2x Monthly: Product & marketing sync
🥅 Meeting goal: Stay connected to the research and information that drives your business (both the product roadmap and GTM strategy).
📅 What happens in these meetings: Align on ICP priorities, market changes, product features, customer feedback, etc.
🚫 Avoid: Just talking about upcoming launches—you can do project kickoffs for those. That’s not the only thing product and marketing need to align on!
👩💻 Attendees: Product leaders & marketing leaders, typically led by product marketing.
Marketing Leaders meetings (as the team scales)
🥅 Meeting goal: The goal is to align on big initiatives, make sure you’re balancing fuel & engine activities, and to unblock your teams.
📅 What happens in these meetings: Leaders of marketing sub-functions should meet separately from the entire team—this saves the entire team from sitting in on too many meetings with too many people. You can have a marketing all-hands monthly or every other week, and the marketing team leaders can meet with each other and have meetings with their teams sub-function on the off weeks. The goal of all of these meetings is to make sure you are doing the right high-impact work to hit your KPIs, and moving as efficiently as you can.
🚫 Avoid: Adding too many meetings with too many separate groups of marketers so the meeting toll gets too high for everyone. Only split off meetings when the larger meetings have become inefficient for most of the people there.
👩💻 Attendees: Marketing sub-function leaders (i.e. Head of Product Marketing, Head of Growth Marketing, Head of Content).
Focus your meetings on the right things
The hardest part of running meetings is actually running the meetings. Meetings are very expensive, but it’s hard to fight the impulse to put 30 minutes on the calendar. Don’t be the one to call a meeting that everyone wishes had been an email, an update in Asana, or a Slack message.
Since so much has been written on general meeting best practices, I’m going to keep this pretty short:
Keep a standing agenda where people can add items
Save status updates for a project management tool asynchronously (that potentially gets sent to Slack for more discussion).
Focus marketing team meetings on 1 to 2 big topics the vast majority of attendees will care about, not 7-12.
Use half the meeting to dig into goal and KPI progress (the interesting stuff you decide should be highlighted from the async red, yellow, green status updates), and the rest of the time for rotating topics—and if you don’t have any, end the meeting early.
Examples: Good marketing team weekly topics
Celebrate hitting a goal or KPI
Very off track goal or milestone
Blocked campaign
Discussion on reports & reasons for trends
New hire intro
Demo for the team of a new tool or process
Research review & discussion
Company strategy or exec team updates from marketing lead
Creative brainstorm
Examples: Not so good marketing team weekly topics
Read out of status updates that could have been done async
Project kickoff discussions (do that with the relevant stakeholders only)
Minor discussion point that’s best done in a smaller group or over Slack
Pet peeve: Marketing meetings shouldn’t be on Monday
If I’m getting really specific, I think the best time for marketing team meetings is on Tuesdays from 10 am to 1045 am PT (assuming a US-based team). But really just don’t have these meetings on Mondays or Fridays.
Another suggestion: Make your standing meetings 20 or 45 mins instead of 30 or 60. This forces the meeting to be tight!
Why? Marketing meetings should focus on the big stuff—the stuff that will move the needle. Status updates, quick questions, and sidebar conversations should be saved for quick check ins or Slack convos. I find the temptation to cover these things is stronger on Mondays, when you haven’t had a chance to check in on these small things yet asynchronously. On Monday, async status updates and marketing agendas should be finalized by mid-day and then the smaller items can get sorted via Slack before the meeting happens on Tuesday.
You can find more suggestions from marketing leaders in this Linkedin post about marketing meetings.
Part 3: Use goals in your day-to-day work
Making your goals a visible and integral part of how daily decisions get made is the secret sauce of the whole planning process. This is where all of the above work starts to pay off, and starts to make coordinating and executing feel easier.
The key here is to build intentional (and obvious) connections between every project, deliverable, and request to the goals your team is driving toward, and make them a clear and nonnegotiable part of getting work done. You need to make it easy for stakeholders to understand how your team is prioritizing! Plus, it helps keep your team focused by building some friction and forcing (valuable) discussion when an idea doesn’t connect directly to a goal.
There are 3 main ways I recommend for connecting the dots between work & goals:
GACCS briefs (the G for Goals comes first for a reason!) for all projects
Shared marketing calendar, with tasks linked to goals
A cadence for sharing goals & progress updates with other teams—while reiterating marketing strategy
Project planning: GACCS marketing briefs & kickoffs
It’s hard for me to write a newsletter and not mention the GACCS brief. To summarize, this is my framework for a quick marketing brief. It stands for Goals, Audience, Content, Channels, Stakeholders. GACCS briefs drive alignment by providing a concise, shared understanding of priorities, helping avoid scope creep, and focusing efforts on what will truly move the needle. They should be maximum 1 page. Any longer and you’ll lose the forest through the trees.
These briefs should be created for every project, campaign, piece of content, etc. (you can even add a short version to your marketing request form for teams to fill out when they need something from marketing). Basically if there’s a doc for it and/or a project in a project management tool, you need a GACCS brief. Starting with a rough GACCS brief and aligning on details in project kickoffs works really well for making sure your goals are connected to your day-to-day work.
Goals
What are we trying to achieve? With clearly defined measurable outcomes (e.g. pipeline generation, retention improvement, brand awareness).
What annual or quarterly goal does this ladder up to?
Audiences
What ICPs are we targeting (e.g. SMB decision-makers, enterprise HR teams)?
Where in the lifecycle (e.g. Top of funnel, existing customers)?
Note: Don’t list all of your audiences! If you have to list multiple, stack rank them (e.g. primary, secondary, tertiary).
Content/Fuel
What message are we delivering?
What perception or company storyline does this support?
Outline the key content themes, formats, or deliverables (e.g., case studies, whitepapers, newsletters).
Channels/Engine
Where will we reach our audience? Where will we distribute this content or campaign? Include specific marketing or distribution channels (e.g., LinkedIn, email, webinars, events, PR).
Stakeholders
Who is the DRI?
Who else is involved? Who needs to be filled in on this project?
Is there a separate approver?
Note: this helps drive who is in the project planning meetings and discussions.
A GACCS template is available the bottom of this newsletter for paid subscribers.
Refer to a “marketing decision dashboard” that summarizes your marketing strategy
Throughout the GACCS brief, you’ll be referencing marketing strategy decisions. In my annual planning newsletter series, I talk about how it’s useful to summarize these decisions on a “Marketing Decision Dashboard.” This dashboard can be a document, slides, in Figjam, a project in Asana…whatever is most useful to your team. You can use this when planning for the year or quarter, but also day-to-day when prioritizing and writing your GACCS briefs. A slide version of this dashboard is available as a template for paid subscribers here.
This “dashboard” is where you lay out the major strategy decisions:
ICPs in order of priority: These are then used in every GACCS brief. Don’t put extensive definitions of each (that no one is going to read) on the dashboard, just put a simple list with very basic definitions. This should be a single line bullet at most for each ICP.
Perceptions or storylines: The high-level messages or stories you are trying to drive with your audience (typically on a year-ish long horizon). A template for the perceptions exercise is available at the bottom of this newsletter for paid subscribers.
Goals: The OKRs or goals for the quarter. I recommend putting these in a project management tool, adding the monthly milestones, and doing async, red yellow green weekly updates for each (as I mentioned above in this newsletter).
Marketing advantages: These are the GTM catalysts for your business. Mapping these in advance helps you determine your big-bet campaigns, the fuel you create, and the distribution engines you use.
Revenue Growth Levers: Ranked in order of the highest areas of leverage right now. This should help you set goals for each project, and also prioritize the right projects.
Quick note on these levers: There are really only 4 ways to grow revenue, and I recommend you know which areas you are focusing on most at any given time. It’s also often helpful to break this down for your major ICPs–especially if you are scaling to new ones. For more on these revenue levers, check out this newsletter.
Marketing calendar: Tie deliverables and requests to quarterly goals
Most marketing teams have some sort of calendar (or several for things like content, campaigns, launches, etc). And your marketing calendar is probably everyone’s favorite reference point (with apologies to your beautiful annual planning doc). It’s the place cross-functional teams go to look for those blog posts they requested, where your CEO checks up on how busy the team is this month, and where your team manages their day to day.
But working off calendars like this often leads to random acts of marketing–and everyone thinking more stuff on the calendar will equal more growth. We know this isn’t true. Quality is more important than quantity.
Does that mean you should not have marketing calendars? No. But it does mean you need to make sure every deliverable—internal or external—on your marketing calendar is linked to the goal it’s supporting. And by linked, I ideally mean literally. If your calendar “task” can link directly to your goals in the same project management tool, you’ll have a much easier time of it! Once you do this, whenever someone looks at the marketing calendar, they’ll see clearly how every deliverable fits into your broader marketing plan.
I like to extend this requirement to marketing requests—unchecked requests are what ruin great marketing plans. Avoid this by setting up a simple form to capture marketing requests and having requesters choose which current goal their request would support (with a dropdown!). This is another highly effective way to reinforce your goals—again, we’re trying to establish some friction so it’s just a little bit hard to add requests without connecting it to the broader marketing plan.
Read more on how I approach handling marketing requests at the end of this newsletter on prioritization and more on internal marketing here.
It’s pretty easy to do all of this in a project management tool, see below how it can work in Airtable: Paid subscribers can access these Airtable Templates here.
Share status updates on goals with other teams, too
In order to make goal sharing easy, I recommend having a Slack channel for marketing to communicate with the rest of the company. This is where people can go to get regular updates from marketing. Don’t also make this a channel used for ad hoc marketing requests; use this primarily as an outgoing channel with threaded comments for any questions on what you share. In addition to sharing the below things in the “marketing to everyone in the company” channel (you might choose a pithier name), it can be helpful to also put these updates in an executive team channel, channel to sales leaders, channel to product leaders, etc…but it really just depends on how your company operates.
Marketing decision dashboard sharing
⏰ When to share: Share the dashboard when you create it (typically during annual planning) and any time major updates are made to it.
💡 Why share: This is a catalog of your biggest marketing strategy decisions, in an easy to digest format. Aligning at this level keeps everyone in the loop, and helps cross-functional teams understand why you are doing what you are doing each day.
📦 What to share: Share everything in the above dashboard. (You can use my slide template, or make this in any format you want–I made the example in Figma, but you can make it in Figjam!)
🧑🚀 Who to share with: Company-wide! Make sure you have buy-in on this from team leaders before you share with everyone. I’d make this available as a pinned message in the “Marketing to everyone in the company” Slack channel.
Annual & quarterly plan sharing:
⏰ When to share: When plans are set, annually and quarterly. (This bullet was probably unnecessary, but for the sake of consistency with the other sections, I’m keeping it!)
💡 Why share: Sharing plans puts everyone at ease that marketing has a method to the madness and can help save you from getting too many questions and requests—it also helps cross-functional teams know where they can help and contribute.
📦 What to share: I recommend a written annual plan (in a doc) with links to related docs, and quarterly I recommend your goals are put in a project management tool or at least a spreadsheet that everyone has access to.
🧑🚀 Who to share with: Company-wide! Similar to the Marketing Decision Dashboard, you can just add this to the Slack channel and pin it, making sure to link to where the goals are tracked specifically. If you do the weekly async updates on monthly milestones and goals, it’s great if people can see this all the time so they know you are doing the work to stay focused and drive impact.
Monthly milestones sharing:
⏰ When to share: Share with the marketing team when they are set, focus one monthly team marketing meeting on walking through these milestones.
💡 Why share: Make sure everyone on the team has a chance to weigh in on these milestones, to make sure their workload is appropriate and to make sure you are doing what’s needed to maximize impact.
📦 What to share: Break down the milestones for each quarter, but do this in the same spot you track your overall goals. Nobody needs something else to look at.
x🧑🚀 Who to share with: I don’t think other teams need to get into the details of your monthly milestones, it’s a bit too granular, but if you give everyone a link to where you track goals and these are nested there, it’s great if people who want to dive deeper can see this. But I wouldn’t actively update the rest of the company on just these.
1-2x Monthly Marketing Update:
⏰ When to share: Find the right cadence that matches how your company operates (if you are the only team doing one of these updates, 2x a month may be overkill. If every team does this weekly, you should probably do it weekly, too).
💡 Why share: Celebrate big wins, loop people in on the need-to-know information, get input on things you need input on, and show good will on communicating about what marketing is doing.
📦 What to share: I’d share an update on goal progress (just highlight 1-2 things and link to your goal tracker) and your marketing calendar (highlight any major changes and link to it). I also would celebrate wins, highlight any lowlights or areas the team is blocked, shout out other teams, etc. Don’t make it too long, don’t make it too demand-y, and make sure you actually reserve time to respond back to comments after you share.
🧑🚀 Who to share with: The entire company in your Slack channel—or if your company has a different system for this kind of thing, follow that!
Takeaways
If you follow this blueprint, your team will have a higher chance of driving impact–and also a better chance of doing that gracefully and efficiently in collaboration with each other and other teams! Here are the main things to remember:
Break your quarterly goals into monthly milestones. Give each goal a DRI and have them score each goal (red/yellow/green) and write async status updates every week.
Set the right meeting cadence to keep your team aligned, and make sure those meetings are useful. Rely on your async updates for status tracking, and focus your time together on important context, roadblocks, and alignment.
Connect your goals to the daily work your team does. Make sure project briefs, managing requests and deliverables, cross-functional comms, etc. list the goal they ladder up to.
More from MKT1
🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Attio, the next-generation CRM with built-in AI; Revenue Hero, meeting scheduling and routing; and Ten Speed, an agency partner for organic growth, full-service SEO & content marketing. All three companies have MKT1 discounts!
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find planning and goal ssetting templates here and at the very bottom of this newsletter—including Airtable & Google Sheets templates for tracking goals & monthly milestones
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free!
📰 Event reminder: I’m hosting Clay’s marketing leaders for a live chat next Friday 1/24. RSVP here, it’s free.
Goals & Milestones Templates
