How to Build an Organization of Top-Performing Marketers

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu.

0:20All right, so we're going to talk about how to build an organization of top marketing performers. But Neil, what do we mean by top marketing performers? People who kick butt and produce results. I'm not talking about just people who are there who are producing reports for you. I'm talking about top performers. These are the people that aren't just driving clicks. They're not just driving followers. they're actually producing revenue. In marketing, your job isn't to optimize a quality score. Your job is to drive revenue. Your job isn't to optimize search engine rankings. Your job is to optimize revenue.

0:55Now, if those efforts drive more revenue, you should do more of those tasks, like improve the quality score or improve your search and rankings. But if they don't, then you should spend your time on something else. Great example of this is my team started optimizing for random terms, we started getting traffic for the term discord on Google. Eric, you want to guess how many visitors we got from that term discord? Many hundreds and hundreds of thousands over a four month period. And how many conversions did you actually get? Zero. So what do we do? We stopped caring about that. And we started squashing some of those pages and reduced our traffic and our rankings.

1:31And on the flip side, we were talking about quality score a few episodes ago, Eric's first job in e-commerce. You were working on Google ads. This is your very, very first job. And what quality score did you get that ad to? 10 out of 10. For a lighting company, how much revenue did it drive? Zero. And what did the owner of the company or your boss say? We got in an argument and he was like, how many conversions did he drive? I was like, it doesn't matter because the quality score was a 10. And Eric and I are laughing because when we were both young, we made a lot of mistakes like this. But that guy who told Eric that it doesn't matter if it's not driving revenue, he's 100 % right.

2:10He was right. Yeah. And we're not saying this to make fun of Eric or making fun of me because we've all made mistakes. We're just trying to prove a point that in marketing, if you want to be a top performer, it's not about metrics like followers and traffic, unless those visitors or followers are driving revenue. Yep. I would just say, I think it's important to define what we look at as a top performing marketer or A player, at least in my opinion, a top marketer or top performer in general, they have to be a rainmaker in a sense. And so for a salesperson or a marketer, you have to be driving something really close to revenue, like directly affecting revenue.

2:44So you have to be a rainmaker. That's the first one. The second one is if you're like top, top, top, I mean, like, you know, we're talking VP plus level, you better be damn good at having a network of people and you better be able to recruit these people in because these people know how to build teams around them because the top, top, the best of the best, they might be good at doing the work, but they're also good at building leverage around them. And the best leverage is one of the highest leverage things is having great people around you. So they know how to hire other top performers under them as well.

3:09And then I would say those two. And then the third thing is they also know how to motivate and drive a team as well. And so that's more kind of VP level. But if we're talking maybe an individual contributor, maybe you're early in your career. I remember when I was 25 or so, I was leading marketing at a startup, and Neil remembers this back in the day, but you have to be someone that will not only point out the problem, you will offer a solution, but not only that, you will offer the solution, but you're going to offer to solve the problem as well. Those are the best people. I find that whether it's for Neil or myself, when those people come and they're just like, hey, can I do this?

3:43Hey, I have this idea. Can I do this for you? They take a big load off your shoulders, and that's what a high-performing marketer is. Now let's talk about how you can actually build an organization of those people. Go ahead, Neil. So the first thing is, is usually most top performers specialize in a specific channel. So have them focus. The second thing is, is once you get one, ask them who else should we work with that you've worked with in the past. That is amazing. Cause top performers usually don't like working with crappy people because it makes their job harder and they're going to have to pick up the sack.

4:15The third thing, and this is actually the first thing that you should look for. The third thing though, is go look who is in your space who has done that job before, not once, not twice, but ideally three times, two at the lowest. And if they've been at competing companies in your space and they've been very successful with that marketing channel and they've continually gotten promotions, the promotions part is the key. The reason I say that is everyone says they did well. Everyone says they were the reason that company drove a lot of revenue or traffic, but you really never know. But the moment a company promotes someone and continually gives them more raises and promotions and different and better job titles, it means the company found them to be valuable.

4:56Forget what their job title is. It means the company found them to be valuable, right? And it doesn't even matter what they say. Yes, that's important in an interview, but if a company is willing to give them tons of promotions, like three or four, and they've been there for a while, and then another competitor did the same thing. That means they're good at what they're doing. They're producing results. They're a top performer because multiple companies in your space keep promoting them and paying them more. Yep. And on the flip side of that, we've had people that we've hired that have been at a job for five plus years or so, but they were not ever promoted.

5:32And what happened when we hired the people and they couldn't figure things out. It was like they were only good at the original role and they couldn't elevate to the next level. And so take it for what it is, but the promotion piece is actually a big factor. The other thing I'll say that's kind of similar to what Neil said about when you, when we're hiring someone new, for example, today we had someone new that just started. It's like we go to them and we say, hey, we looked at your LinkedIn and these are 10 people that we found. Who of these 10 people should we be talking to? In addition to, hey, who else do you know that we should be talking to?

6:01And oftentimes they'll give me a list of like 10 people, 15 people, 20 people or so. and referral marketing or referral hiring always works really well. The other thing I'll say too, is you want to be very clear about what it is that you're trying to accomplish as an organization. And so, Hey, here are the outcomes that we have for this role. And we discussed the outcomes with this person. And also what we do during the interview process is we anti-sell them, meaning that we say here are the five reasons that you shouldn't be joining the company. This is happening. This is happening. This is happening.

6:31And if it's okay, like if you want about right now. That's totally cool. What do you want to do? And that way it actually gets people to one, they buy in more and they appreciate your honesty, but also the other people will self-select themselves out. Yeah. And it's not easy to find these people when you have them, do everything that you can to keep them, incentivize them, give them some options, some stocks, some ownership in the company, talk to them, let them know when they're doing a good job. Sometimes a lot of people just want that attaboy and acknowledgement that they're doing amazing work.

6:59But in essence, the way that Eric and I broke down is how you find top performers in marketing. And to summarize, they need to specialize. Top performers typically know their top performers. Look for people who work for multiple of your competitors, stayed there for a while and continually got promotions because it means that they're not just good based on what they're saying. Other people also felt they were good and saw results. They at least should have. Hence, they kept getting promotions. And when someone goes and works for a competitor, they get one promotion and that's all right. But if they're getting two or three promotions, that means they're doing a really good job.

7:31And then they hop to another competitor, they get two or three promotions. Again, means that they're doing a really good job. Final thing I'll say from my side is I try to check in with my top performers at least once a month and separate from my one-on-one meetings with them. Okay. Or maybe they're not reporting directly to me, but I'll ask them, I'll say, Hey, look, how's your work life going right now? Scale of one to five. They might say three out of five. So I'll be like, okay, well, What's it going to take to make it a four out of five? How is your work life going right now? How is it working with your team right now, one through five?

7:59How is it working with me if that's applicable? What else could I be doing to make your experience better? And then I say, oh, we need to hire. Your goal ultimately is you're trying to unblock your top performers because you want them to play at the highest level. And if they're performing at a high level and you need to hire to help them, that's usually a good sign. That means your company is probably growing for the most part. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and check us out on YouTube. subscribe to us on YouTube and we will see you later.

8:55We'll see you next time.