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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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 along 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.
More from MKT1
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which shares a 3 step process for async updates, how to set the right meeting cadences, and how to use goals in your day-to-day work.
✂️ Templates and discounts for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find planning and goal-setting templates here and at the very bottom of this newsletter—including Airtable & Google Sheets templates for tracking goals & monthly milestones. Active discounts on products we recommend.
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free!
👁️ Related newsletters: The GACCS Marketing brief, Fuel and engine, and Scaling your marketing org