We’ve always said marketing should be the fun part of growing a business. We believe in it strongly enough that it sits within our vision for Outmark. People should want to participate in marketing. A sales leader who has been hearing the same thing from prospects, an account manager who knows what customers keep asking for, or an executive who spots an opportunity can all make marketing better.
That makes meetings a natural part of marketing planning. We want people exchanging ideas, challenging assumptions, and getting excited about what the company could do. But there’s a reason “this meeting could have been an email” memes exist. Some meetings really could have been an email. Others could have been a briefing document, a request for feedback, or an hour of focused work by the person responsible for solving the problem.
Marketing planning is especially vulnerable because collaboration feels productive. Put smart people in a room, ask what we should do next year, fill a whiteboard with ideas, and everybody leaves having participated in something. But participation and progress aren’t the same thing. A planning process has to turn what people know and think into decisions about what the organization will actually do. That’s harder than filling the whiteboard.
Sometimes the meeting starts too early
And we don’t mean before the start time. We mean maybe we’re not ready to come together to discuss this yet. We have an acronym we use internally: FAST. It means focused and strategic, then together.
The first half is critical. Before we ask a group to solve a marketing problem, somebody needs to spend focused time understanding it. If the problem is lead generation, for example, we should know something about where leads are coming from now, which ones become good customers, what sales is hearing, what marketing is already doing, what has been tried, and where the obvious constraints are. Then we have something useful to discuss and a much better chance of making decisions.
Without that preparation, “Let’s get everybody together and talk about how we can generate more leads” can become a way of assigning the thinking to the meeting. Ten people spend an hour starting from scratch when one or two people could have done enough work beforehand to shorten the meeting, make it more valuable, or perhaps make it unnecessary.
This doesn’t mean the person preparing the meeting arrives with the answer and everyone else nods along. Quite the opposite. Good preparation gives people something substantial to question, improve, reject, or build on. It gets the conversation past whatever ideas happen to occur to people first.
Brainstorming and deciding are different jobs
We love brainstorming, and we’re pretty sure most marketers do, too. Coming up with ideas is one of the genuinely enjoyable parts of the work. You get to imagine a better way to do something, build on somebody else’s thinking, make an unexpected connection, or finally find an answer to a problem that has been nagging the team.
We sometimes use white hat and black hat as shorthand for two different parts of that process. White hat is the open part: bring the ideas and don’t worry yet about whether every one of them will work. Black hat comes later, when we start asking harder questions about budget, feasibility, strategy, timing, customer relevance, and everything else that determines whether an idea deserves to become work. Planning gets into trouble when the white hat never comes off.
Someone suggests a campaign. Someone else saw a competitor doing something interesting. Sales wants an event. Leadership has an idea for the website. Everybody is engaged, which feels great. But eventually those ideas have to be evaluated, and that can feel uncomfortably like evaluating the people who suggested them.
Rebecca can have a terrific idea that doesn’t fit the strategy. Jerry can suggest something useful that isn’t important enough to fund now. The CEO’s idea deserves scrutiny, too. A healthy planning process gives good ideas room to emerge without pretending they all deserve a place in the plan.
Participation doesn’t mean everybody gets an equal vote
We once had a client hire a new marketing director just as we were wrapping up our strategic recommendations. The CEO wanted the new director to have a voice in the process, which made perfect sense to us. We welcomed the opportunity to bring them in, share the work, and get their perspective before the plan was completed.
The marketing director wanted to hold a planning session with marketing, sales, leadership, and us. Again, reasonable idea. But the session ran for hours, and much of the discussion covered things people had already shared with us during the planning work.
Near the end, all the ideas were put in front of the group and everyone received points to distribute among them. Participants could spread their points around or put a large share behind one idea. The group would effectively vote on the priorities.
The intentions were good. The process wasn’t. People naturally supported ideas they already liked, including ideas they had introduced. Strategic recommendations competed with isolated tactics and things somebody had seen another company doing. Differences in experience, knowledge, responsibility, and decision authority disappeared inside the scoring system. Even the CEO had the same number of points as the most junior person in the room.
We aren’t suggesting the CEO’s favorite idea should automatically win. That would be a different bad planning process. The problem was treating everybody as if they had the same role in the decision simply because everybody had something worthwhile to contribute.
The resulting list didn’t give the company what it needed, and the CEO asked us to complete the strategic planning as originally scoped. People support what they help create, and we believe strongly in involving people in the process. But strategy is not a popularity contest.
Consensus can postpone the hardest part of planning
Marketing planning decisions have consequences. Choosing three things to focus on means other things will be deferred or dropped. Putting money behind one initiative means that money isn’t available for another. Deciding to pursue one market may mean telling an enthusiastic business-unit leader that their idea has to wait.
More discussion can make those choices better, but sometimes it just postpones them. Another meeting, another feedback round, or another scoring exercise can feel responsible because more people are getting a voice. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. Sometimes the organization already has enough information and is avoiding the uncomfortable part: choosing.
This can be particularly difficult in smaller and mid-sized organizations, where the person managing marketing may carry significant responsibility without having equivalent authority. Marketing might be expected to produce the plan, coordinate the work, support sales, respond to leadership, and keep everything moving, while still needing approval for the choices that would make those responsibilities manageable. That structure makes consensus tempting: it is easier to keep gathering agreement than to make a decision you may not have clear authority to make.
It’s hard to say no when you don’t know who gets to decide
Imagine an executive walks past the marketing manager’s office and says, “I saw what ABC Widget is doing on LinkedIn. We should do something like that.” Maybe they mean, “Interesting idea. Take a look sometime.” Maybe they mean, “I expect us to start doing this.” Those are very different messages, but they don’t always sound different to the person receiving them.
The less authority someone has, the harder it can be to ask the obvious follow-up: Do you want us to add this to the plan, and if so, what should move to make room for it?
Without clear marketing priorities, that question becomes even harder to ask. The new idea simply joins a long list of projects that are supposedly important and urgent, and the marketing team is left to figure out how to fit one more thing into the work. What looks like a planning problem can therefore be a decision-rights problem: responsibility sits in one place while the authority to make meaningful tradeoffs sits somewhere else.
Good marketing planning doesn’t eliminate those conversations. It gives people a much better basis for having them.
A meeting needs more than an agenda
We put real effort into what we call Mindful Meetings at Outmark. We’re not fanatical about every rule, but we do work hard to do it well.
We want people to know why they’re being invited. When the subject is complicated, we’ll often prepare a briefing document so people aren’t encountering the issue for the first time while the clock is running. Sometimes we’ll start silently so everyone has time to read before the discussion begins. We try to start and end on time, capture decisions and feedback, and make sure action items have owners afterward.
All of that is useful meeting hygiene, but none of it can rescue a meeting that doesn’t know what it needs to accomplish. Before a planning meeting begins, we should have a reasonable answer to a few basic questions: What does this group need to understand? What input do we actually need from them? What needs to be decided? Who has the authority to make that decision?
If we can’t answer those questions, we may not be ready for the meeting. Or we may not need one.
Not everyone with an opinion needs to be in every meeting
Marketing touches enough of the organization that the potential invitation list can get long real quick. Sales has a perspective. Customer service has one. Business-unit leaders have one. The CEO certainly has one. So do the people who will eventually have to execute the work.
We want those perspectives, but we don’t need to make all those people take time out of their busy day to sit in every planning meeting. Someone may have valuable information during discovery but no reason to participate in prioritization. Another person may need to approve the resources but doesn’t need to spend two hours brainstorming. A subject-matter expert may be able to brief the group in fifteen minutes and then happily get forty-five minutes of their life back.
The useful question isn’t, “Who might have something to say?” In marketing, that’s nearly everyone. The better question is, “Whose involvement will help us make this decision?”
That sometimes makes meetings smaller. More importantly, it makes roles clearer. Being invited to contribute knowledge is different from being asked to recommend a course of action, and both are different from having final decision authority.
The best marketing meetings take effort before, during, and afterward
A productive planning meeting usually begins before anyone joins the call or walks into the room. Somebody has framed the problem, gathered information, developed possibilities, and thought carefully enough to give the group a useful starting point.
During the meeting, assumptions are challenged. Someone brings customer knowledge we were missing. Sales sees a problem with an idea that looked great on paper. A quieter person in the room asks the question that raises eyebrows and changes the conversation. Something none of us arrived with becomes possible because the right people are working from the same information. Decisions are made, and next steps are determined.
Afterward, someone still has to turn those decisions into work, assign responsibilities, and share the useful insights and notes from the meeting. That’s where marketing planning meetings earn the time they consume. Not because everybody got to put an idea on the board or because the room reached perfect consensus. The meeting took good thinking, made it better, and left the organization able to act.
Marketing meetings should be some of the best meetings a company holds. They should have energy, inspire people, and occasionally produce the idea everybody can’t wait to see in the world.
They should also end with a decision.
