Latest / The Marketing Career Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Jobs, Skills, and Career Growth / Why Your Best Marketers Leave Without Notice
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to start with a number that keeps me up at night, which is the retention rate of high-performing mid-level marketers. It is abysmal. We see it everywhere. People leave not because they found a better paycheck, but because they feel like ghosts in their own organizations. Luna: Exactly. And the funny thing is, those same people are usually crushing their KPIs. So why do they vanish? Lucas: Because they have spent three years building campaigns that drive revenue, but zero minutes building relationships with the people who control the budget. I am talking about the CFO, the head of product, the legal team. The people who do not sit in the marketing org chart but hold the keys to your next promotion. Luna: Right. It is the difference between being a vendor inside your company and being a partner. Most marketers operate as vendors. Lucas: That is the core tension here. A vendor delivers a deliverable. A partner solves a problem before it is articulated. When you approach your finance team as a vendor, you send them a deck on Friday afternoon asking for approval on Monday morning. That is friction. That is how you get labeled expensive and difficult. Luna: So what does the partner move look like? Is it just about showing up to more meetings? Lucas: It is about shifting your calendar from output-focused to input-focused. Instead of sending the creative assets, you send the hypothesis. You ask the finance lead, 'Here is what we think will move the needle, but we need your help stress-testing the assumptions.' Suddenly, you are not asking for permission; you are asking for wisdom. Luna: That changes the power dynamic completely. You are inviting them into the room rather than knocking on the door. Lucas: Precisely. And this brings us to the specific mechanism I want to talk about today. It is called the Pre-Mortem Alignment Loop. It sounds academic, but it is actually a very simple tactical shift in how you prepare for any major initiative. Luna: Pre-mortem? Like, assuming it fails before it starts? Lucas: Yes. Standard project management suggests you do a pre-mortem to identify risks. But most marketers skip this step entirely until the crisis hits. By then, the relationship is already damaged. The loop involves taking your biggest upcoming campaign or product launch and scheduling thirty-minute coffee chats with three key stakeholders two weeks before you even draft the first slide. Luna: Two weeks before? That feels early. Won't things change by then? Lucas: Things will change, yes. But the political landscape rarely shifts that fast. The goal isn't to finalize the plan. The goal is to surface the objections while they are still theoretical. You walk into that meeting and say, 'I am thinking about targeting segment X. What are your fears about that approach?' You let them vent before you defend anything. Luna: That is terrifying. Admitting you don't have the answer yet requires a lot of confidence. Lucas: It requires more confidence than faking certainty. When you admit uncertainty, you trigger the other person's expertise. The CFO stops looking at you as a spend-thief and starts looking at you as a data-asker. You are validating their role in the organization. That is how you build social capital. Luna: So you are essentially buying insurance against future pushback by paying small premiums in empathy now. Lucas: Insurance is a good way to put it. Because when the campaign inevitably hits a snag—and it will—the stakeholder who you aligned with early becomes your defender. They say, 'We knew there was risk here. Lucas handled it well.' Versus the person who sent the Friday afternoon deck. Who defends themselves? Luna: Nobody. They are left holding the bag alone. It is lonely at the top if you haven't built the bridge. Lucas: Let's make this concrete. Imagine you are launching a new subscription tier. You need pricing approval. If you go to the CFO with a finalized price sheet and a request for signature, you are putting them in the position of saying no. No is a default setting for finance. It is low effort. It is safe. Luna: But if you go in with three scenarios and ask them to help you pick the one that protects margin best, you are making them say yes to the process. Lucas: You are making them co-authors of the decision. Humans are biased toward decisions they helped create. This is the psychological lever. It is not manipulation; it is structural alignment. You are removing the friction of ownership from their shoulders and sharing the weight. Luna: I love that. It reframes the whole negotiation from a transaction to a collaboration. But what about the time investment? Marketers are already drowning. Lucas: This is the opportunity cost fallacy. We think the thirty minutes is a cost. But if that thirty minutes saves you four hours of revision cycles later, or prevents a public rejection in a town hall meeting, it is the highest return activity on your calendar. You have to track it. Luna: Track it like billable hours? Or more like relationship equity? Lucas: Equity. Think of it like compound interest. Every time you validate someone's expertise, you deposit a unit of trust. Later, when you need a budget increase, you withdraw. If you have never made deposits, the bank closes the account. Simple as that. Luna: So the metric isn't just clicks or conversions anymore. It's internal satisfaction scores. Lucas: Internal Net Promoter Score. Do your peers recommend you as a collaborator? If the answer is no, your external metrics don't matter. You will be the star player on a benchwarmer team. Nobody promotes benchwarmers to captains. Luna: That is a brutal image. Star player on a benchwarmer team. Lucas: It is accurate though. I see it all the time. Brilliant creatives who cannot explain their strategy to a product manager. They hide behind jargon. Jargon is a shield. It keeps people away. Real influence requires vulnerability. It requires saying, 'I don't know this part of the business well. Can you teach me?' Luna: Teaching you means they feel important. It feeds their ego in a healthy way. Lucas: It feeds their professional identity. Everyone wants to be seen as competent. When you ask for their competence, you are handing them a trophy. You just have to wait for them to pick it up. Luna: Okay, so the tactic is the pre-mortem alignment. But how do you measure if it is working? How do you know you are building influence versus just being annoying? Lucas: You measure it by invitation frequency. Are you invited to the strategy sessions before the brief is written? Are you cc'd on emails regarding resource allocation? If you are only invited after the fact, you are not influencing. You are reacting. Reaction is a junior skill. Strategy is a senior skill. Luna: Invitation frequency. That is a great proxy metric. Much easier to track than abstract vibes. Lucas: And it is binary. Either they call you or they don't. There is no ambiguity. If you aren't getting calls, you need to change your approach. You need to stop sending decks and start sending questions. Luna: Questions that invite dialogue rather than demanding compliance. Lucas: Exactly. Compliance is cheap. Dialogue is expensive. Dialogue is where the value lives. It is where the real business problems get solved. Luna: So, if I am listening to this and I feel stuck, my first step is literally just to book three coffees. Not to pitch. Just to listen. Lucas: Just to listen. Ask them what keeps them up at night. Write it down. Then, six months later, when you have a solution that addresses that specific fear, you present it. You didn't sell a product. You solved a pain point. That is how you get promoted. Luna: Solving a pain point instead of selling a product. I am writing that on a sticky note right now. Lucas: Do it. And then do it again next week. Influence is not a sprint. It is a slow, deliberate accumulation of goodwill. Luna: Slow goodwill. Better than fast applause. Lucas: Always. Fast applause fades. Slow goodwill compounds. Luna: Before we wrap up this thread, I want to pause for a moment. If these conversations about career mechanics have sparked something you've actually used... Lucas: Honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It keeps the lights on and the research going, so thank you for considering it. Back to the influence game. Lucas: Let's zoom out for a second. We talked about the tactical coffee chat. But what happens when you hit resistance? What if the stakeholder says no, or ignores you? Luna: That is the scary part. The silence. You send the thoughtful question, and nothing comes back for three days. Lucas: Silence is data. It tells you where your leverage is low. If you are silent, it might mean they are busy. If you are ignored, it means you are irrelevant. Those are two very different signals. Luna: So you follow up differently? Busy gets a reschedule. Irrelevant gets a pivot. Lucas: Correct. If you are irrelevant, you need to change the language. Stop speaking marketing. Start speaking risk. Start speaking efficiency. Find the word that matters to them. Luna: Translation layer. You are the translator between marketing chaos and business order. Lucas: That is the job. Chaos to order. Noise to signal. If you can't do that translation, you are just noise. And noise gets filtered out. Luna: I hope no one filters us out. We try pretty hard to be signal. Lucas: You are signal. But remember, signal needs an antenna. Your relationships are the antenna. Build them wide, build them deep, and watch what comes through.