Marketing Leaders Who Last: How Marketing Role Tenure Relates to When a Marketing Measurement Framework is Established
Marketing tenure across all roles has become increasingly shorter. Why?
Marketers across all seniority levels appear to feel less appreciation from the business and less understanding of why the work they do is important. Why?
The power struggle of brand vs demand makes the headlines again – more often than ever. Why?
→ Working for a Martech company and sitting in on a lot of marketing conversations around the goals, the mandates and how homework gets graded across the business, I have a valuable perspective to share.
My Sales counterpart, Jean, and I have gone through over 200 conversations to understand what is the common trait across marketers who find themselves extremely successful and enjoy a longer tenure in their org across all industries, versus those who leave the company mid-sales cycle.
You understand Jean’s interest here – she wanted to understand what is happening to champions who drive the initiative in the first place but exit out before they see it come to life.
For me, I wanted to understand what my peers fail to recognize early on that gets them inhot water later on which causes the departure – so I avoid that in my professional marketing life.
Before we get to details, let’s start with a mental game:
I want to start with a question, and I want you to answer it honestly, in your head, before you keep reading.
When you took YOUR current marketing or ops role, what did you build first?
Was it a measurement framework of how all marketing efforts will line up against the business North Star (always a number, never anything else)? Or was it a website, a rebrand, a messaging overhaul, a conference calendar – or maybe CRM clean up or a Marketo overhaul???
If you said the second one, you’re not alone. Almost everyone does. But I’ve spent the last few months looking at a pattern across hundreds of conversations with marketing and revenue leaders, and it’s changed how I think about the first ninety days of any marketing job.
By the way, there is an episode on that from Ali Rastielo with a playbook for fixing everything and still staying sane in the first 3 months on the job.
What conversation analysis data actually showed us
I love AI for unstructured data analysis. There is no better way to go through hundreds of hours of video interviews to understand patterns and trends. So, here you go:
Learning no. 1: Leaders who sit down early and ask, “how will I prove this worked, and how will I benchmark it against revenue?” — before they launch a single campaign — tend to stay in their roles longer. Meaningfully longer!
Learning no. 2: Leaders who start with the exciting stuff (by the way, and there’s nothing wrong with the exciting stuff, a rebrand can absolutely be the right call) – but put measurement on the backburner – tend to exit out of their orgs much sooner. The common thinking amongst this group is telling themselves “I’ll figure out the reporting once things are running”? We see a very different trajectory there.
And I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a story about anyone doing their job badly. It’s the opposite. These are often leaders who moved fast, shipped a lot, got the business genuinely excited. The problem usually shows up later – like twelve, eighteen months in – when the business turns around and asks the most natural question in the world: how these great initiatives panned out. “Wow, you and your team have been doing great work, by the sound of it, over the last year. What did it do for revenue?” And if there’s no framework sitting underneath all that activity, there’s no good answer. Even if the work mattered, nobody built the yardstick – and trained the business to use it as time went on – to grow confidence in marketing making progress in the right direction..
The part that surprised even us
Here’s the piece that made me sit up. In our own sales conversations — when a company is evaluating a platform like ours specifically because they’re trying to fix this — we’ve watched a striking number of the marketing leaders who started that evaluation not be there by the time it finished. Why did these people start an initiative and didn’t see it through? Well, the pressure built up faster than the sales process had the time to get through all the stakeholders on cross functional teams. And that is a very short time frame!
That’s a real cost to us, and honestly, it used to just frustrate our sales team. But when we stepped back and looked at why, the same shape kept showing up: it’s disproportionately the leaders who came to measurement late — under pressure, after the board or the CEO started asking questions — who don’t make it to the other side of that evaluation. The urgency that gets someone searching for a solution is often the same pressure that ends their tenure before the solution is in place.
Compare that to leaders who built the framework first. They’re not searching for a rescue. They’re refining something that already exists. And refinement is a much safer place to be sitting when leadership starts asking questions, because you already have the answer half-written.
Same paradox, different angle
If you listened to episode one, this is going to sound familiar, and it should. It’s the same principle, just pointed at a person instead of a model. The simple path — skip the framework (the hard stuff – the stuff that requires definition, education across the business, alignment and number crunching), run the campaigns, deal with proof later — feels faster and more manageable in month one. Well, slow is smooth – and smooth is fast. In month 24, it is lightning fast when you don’t have to round up an army to pull the data to prove a point. It is all right there – in your reports, graphs, and charts.
But if you skip that as your first order of business, like many you might find yourself at a point where the receipts are due but you can’t explain where the budget went when someone finally asks.
The harder path — build the measurement model before you build the momentum — costs you more up front. But it’s the one that holds up under scrutiny, because you designed it to be scrutinized from day one.
Statisticians would call this a hazard rate problem. The risk isn’t evenly spread across a marketing leader’s tenure — it clusters at a very specific, predictable moment: whenever the “prove it” question finally arrives. Leaders who saw that moment coming and built for it early simply have a lower hazard rate. The ones who didn’t are the ones I hear about in these conversations, months and sometimes years later, often no longer at the company.
What to actually do with this
So if you’re stepping into a marketing or ops seat right now, here’s the one thing I’d ask you to do before anything else launches: write down, in one page, how you’ll know if this worked. Not the campaign calendar. The scoreboard. Decide what “worked” means to your CEO before you need it to defend yourself.
It’s the least exciting part of the job. It’s also, based on everything we’re seeing, the part most correlated with still having the job.
