A CMO's Thoughts on Board Meeting Prep
You'll hear many different perspectives when it comes to working with your board -- everything from "Their opinions are only input" to "Think about your performance in the board room as a job interview." Anthony and Mike give their thoughts on how you should approach the board as a CMO.
One thing Mike I was thinking about here is,
we're preparing for our board meeting next week.
This is what the slide's done today.
It's going to be into the weekend, unfortunately.
But I was reflecting on just my own experience as a CMO.
I guess mostly it started as a CMO in the board meetings.
And then now as a founder in the board meetings.
And having had a couple stops at companies
where there are sort of some different dynamics around how
you perceive the board relationship.
Where there are some companies where they're like very
laissez-faire.
Honestly, they're on our side.
They're just here to help.
They're here to just give us advice, take it or don't.
But that's sort of one posture around the board.
And then you've got the complete opposite end that's like,
every time you get in front of the board,
it's like a job interview.
So you have to nail it.
And those are opposite ends of the spectrum, of course.
And I don't know where I sit on that or get your opinion.
If anything, I might be towards the middle,
but maybe one step closer to the job interview.
I do think there's something really--
there's a big opportunity at the board level
that anyone who's presenting is putting themselves
in a good position for.
But I also want to talk about the preparation of a board deck.
Because that's actually the part that I love.
I really like building the board deck.
And I think I thought I posted about it on LinkedIn
and I got ratioed about it.
I don't think anyone else does.
But I want to check in with you and make sure I'm not
like losing my mind.
But there's something really powerful I think about the alignment
and lifting our head up from the day to day
about preparing that deck.
But let me start with the first one.
What's your perspective on how should a CMO think about the board
and board meetings in particular?
Yeah.
I think I'm more on the job interview side of things.
And I also think there's probably a little bit of CMO
baggage on that.
Anyone who's in the seat of a CMO has been force-fed articles
for the last five years about how their job's the most fired
job on their executive team.
So it's like, when you go in front of the board,
you want to make sure that they're like, oh, yeah,
this guy knows what he's talking about.
So you have to show up competent.
You have to show how you're driving value for the business.
And you want to make a good impression, of course.
I think you can over-prepare for them,
and you shouldn't burn days and days' worth of your time
and spin out your ops team for reporting.
And people get their design teams involved to make the deck
look like a keynote president.
I think that's over-people.
But yeah, I think you want to project, here's how things are going.
Here's what's on the docket that's
going to map to our strategic priorities.
Here's why you should have confidence in the plan.
And I think it depends a little bit on the results, too.
If the company's doing good, then it's
a little bit easier to just say, hey, remember, last time
we talked, my plan was x.
The results are y, which are positive.
So my plan was right.
Here's the next phase of my plan.
That's easy.
If the results are bad, then I think
that's where you have to really invest, I think,
a little bit more time.
Because I think you need to have--
you can't have people, whether they're the board
or your other peer execs or anyone in the company,
for that matter.
I think it's like you can't have people asking questions
about the root cause of why results are a particular way,
that you haven't thought about.
Like, if you get caught flat-footed, someone's like,
have you thought about this?
And you're like, actually no.
And it's like, well, how could you not
be thinking about why the results you're directly
responsible for are bad?
And the board doesn't know every little thing
about the business, too.
So if you're getting caught flat-footed at the board level,
then it's like an extra bad thing, right?
Because they're like, I don't even--
I don't even think about this all day long.
So I think it's one of those things,
where there's a lot more downside to how you should--
as a CMO, how you perform at the board meeting,
than there is upside.
But you have to prevent the downside, right?
That can be really, really bad.
And especially want to project confidence
for all of your peers, too, that you kind of have both hands
on the wheel.
That doesn't mean all of the results
have to be perfect every time.
Like, yeah.
You can project confidence and competency,
even when you're reporting bad news.
It's just you have to be prepared for it.
So I'm way more on the job interview side of things.
But yeah, I think it also kind of depends
on what's going on in the company.
If you're skiing downhill at 100 miles an hour,
and it's just like a big party at the board meeting,
then you could probably kind of take it easy.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, for us mere mortals, you got to make sure
that you show up and understand what's next
and how you're going to get to the next phase.
And you want to project confidence with that.
Yeah.
A lot of video projecting confidence.
I love the idea of putting words in your mouth
a little bit here, but anticipating questions
on the deck or in the notes or in your own deck,
whatever, or notes, you don't want to get flat-footed.
And this idea of how do you wear like is more downside risk
than there is upside.
It's almost like--
I remember Nick used to say, hey, how did it go?
He's like, I kept my job.
You just want to get out and be like, cool, they got it.
They're aware of the challenges.
They're working on the right things.
They got out.
I don't think anyone ever gets like a parade after a board
meeting.
It's almost like good.
Keep going.
It's like the best you can get.
So yeah, there's definitely--
and I had a personal experience I think
I told you about where I got just so rattled early
in my career board intersection.
When I was still head of marketing, not quite CMO,
but representing the marketing team in the board meeting,
I had a total meltdown because I felt that pressure.
I knew that going in.
And my voice got lower.
My palms got sweaty.
And every other line from that M&M song--
My spaghetti.
My mom's spaghetti, dude.
And I forgot answers to questions that I knew,
even though I prepared.
I over-prepared.
And because I wanted it so bad because I cared
about that job interview.
Because in that case, I actually knew
it was a job interview for the CMO, which did not--
and I just crashed and burned.
So I think that I give that illustration
because I think it speaks to this idea that these are people
who can invest in your startup next time
and want to break out and start your thing,
or there can be a reference for your next job or something.
And so I think that that's why I'm with you.
I air a little bit on the side of like, hey,
take the board meeting seriously.
Put in the preparation.
And again, I liked your push.
The deck doesn't have to be pixel perfect.
And you're now not running marketing anymore
because you're working on the deck.
But anyway, I found too that it's
just been a helpful internal alignment exercise
to be able to just get back.
I think that's a really important point too.
Everyone's heads down running a million miles an hour.
The board slides are the board slides.
The board meeting's going to happen.
It needs to be done.
You might as well use it as an opportunity to see,
are we delivering on the thing we said we were going to deliver?
Are we-- the story we're telling to the market,
are we on that path still?
Like, you can easily get a couple degrees off.
And then you're like, whoa, what's even going on here?
I think at PostScript, we have a slide
that we do in every single meeting.
We started off-- it's the mission of the company.
Our positioning's on there.
It talks about what's the unique value of Prop at PostScript.
We put it on the screen every single call.
And we ask if it's an internal call,
we'll be like, who wants to read the slide?
We're going to stay it out loud.
And the point is to check in.
Are we delivering this?
And if we're not delivering it, then we should reflect on it.
The board meeting is the highest order opportunity
to reflect on that type of stuff.
And it sounds like crazy to say, are we delivering our mission?
Like, what do you mean?
It's the mission of the company.
How could you not be?
But when you're really just running 1,000 miles an hour,
it's easy to be more than you would expect,
if you ask the question about the thing
that you would consider to be the number one priority
right now today.
How does that ratchet up to our company's mission and values
and what we're trying to achieve for our customers?
More often than you would expect, the answer is unclear.
And the board meeting is an opportunity
to correct the misalignment between where
you're spending your resources and what
the company's really trying to accomplish.
It's like a check-in.
And if you think about it that way,
it's a resource to you and not a performance for your board,
then I think you can start to get a lot of value out of it,
actually.
Because you're more checking in with yourself
than you are trying to convince them
that you deserve to be whatever you are at the company.
That's such a good perspective.
That's how I would, and your permission,
plagiarize you, bring that message internally to the team.
I think that's really, really good.
This is more for us than it is for them, ultimately.
One of the things that I reflect on too-- more so
knows a CMO now that I'm branching out, it's like I
have to know everything about everything at this point.
But what I found--
I really struggled as a CMO in the room
was I'd chime in on all the marketing stuff.
But then we'd go around the room and talk about support,
success.
We'd go even product outside of my core function,
or even immediate adjacencies.
And I feel like there was an expectation
that I'd be more active in those discussions.
And that was something that I had to grow into a little bit.
I don't think I ever, honestly, were really
nailed it at Gainsite or Front, really.
But any words of wisdom there in terms of like--
or maybe even from your own experience,
is marketing expected to talk about marketing sales, for sure?
Or is there any expectation that marketing has a point of view
or voice across the entire business?
I think as a marketing leader, you
should have a working knowledge of what's happening everywhere.
And if it makes sense to weigh in, then you should.
And you should be capable of that.
My hot take, though-- and we do this at PostScript.
So I've seen the other side of this--
is that the board meeting should not be structured by function.
What we do is we do functional updates.
So there's like a marketing one, a sales one,
every leader's responsible for doing their own.
We send that out as a pre-read, and people comment,
and we answer questions in the doc.
When we get to the board meeting,
after we get through highs and lows at the company level,
what we talk about is our strategic initiatives, which
are automatically cross-functional.
We're not talking about how did the marketing campaign go.
We're talking about, OK, two months ago,
we launched a new product in a new category.
And there's a conversation being led by a cross-functional group
from the jump, and that's our strategic initiative.
That results in a much more fruitful discussion that
involves more people than when you're just like, OK, good job,
AK.
Now it's on to the support leaders' time.
And then they jump in and they're reading the news there.
I think if you're in control of how your board meeting works,
I think that switching them to functional pre-reads
and strategic discussions is way more useful to the folks
on the team than going and doing a readout.
Don't make the board meeting a delivery of news.
Yeah.