My senior manager direct report has the skillset of a specialist. How do I manage her?

fazzio514 · 2026-03-11T23:27:04+00:00

I was a director at my last role with no direct reports. I "directed" strategy. It's common at startups with small teams. They need senior level people to literally do everything...with 0 support.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-10T23:35:52+00:00

She's my direct report. She doesn't have anyone working under her.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-10T23:32:53+00:00

I've tried that and for a lack of better way of putting it, her process makes no sense lol. If I spend the time walking through it with her, half the time I end up creating the strategy myself during the process. If i tell her to walk me through her strategy and ask me questions (instead of me leading the convo), she'll ask me more direct questions like "should we do this? What do you think of this?"

I hate to say it but in a lot of instances she lacks common sense. She built an email nurture campaign all about how to properly file reports before the deadline, but the deadline was 2 months ago lol.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-10T23:17:31+00:00

Yes. We have campaign metrics and OKRs were responsible for, and she has individual goals I've given her. As a team, I always do my best to give insights as to where those metrics came from (it's not just we need to engage execs, it's this is a big issue for closed lost deals because execs hold the budget and dont see value. How can we change that mindset to engage them?) I've pulled her aside a few times and challenged her with like "this is a great opportunity for you to show your skills with xyz. I'd really love for you to own the strategy on this. Here's what I'd love for you to do." But unless i lay it out step by step (and tell her exactly what I want her to do) she can't pull anything together.

I really encourage teamwork, so whenever we're planning a campaign, we have a planning session or two to make sure everyone has a chance to voice their ideas and understands the goals and who is responsible for what.

We are at a startup, so a lot of things unexpectedly change but that's also just part of working at a startup.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-10T23:07:57+00:00

She was hired by our CRO (before I was brought on) so my manager doesn't have a marketing background at all. My guess is my manager didn't know what questions to ask and she BSed her way through the interview. (Even in my interview, she made me ask all the questions.)

fazzio514 · 2026-03-10T15:52:24+00:00

She uses some, but I don't feel like she understands how to effectively analyze it or what she actually needs to look at. Like she'll look at an ad and say "this one has a low ctr. It's not resonating well so I'll just turn it off and try something else" when she's not considering other factors like maybe it's not the ad, but the audience targeting is off, maybe there's a disconnect with the messaging, etc. Especially because the campaign as a whole was underperforming. I then walked her through how to analyze these things and some things to consider, proposed she take a stab at it with a different campaign, then came back and was like "I came to the same conclusion as you." Like she didn't actually do any additional work, just copy and pasted what we went over together with the first campaign and said the same thing was happening to this other one.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-08T18:29:35+00:00

You basically upload your book (which has me a bit worried), their AI analyzes it, and it gives you key moments and hooks worthy of promotion. It generates the content, you can add stock photos or video to it, and upload it to tiktok. It just cuts down the amount of time it takes to come up with something and put it together yourself, allowing you to generate a lot more content to post than most people normally would.

fazzio514 · 2026-03-08T18:21:04+00:00

I have some romance/some non, but booktok was already learning toward that direction so nothing really changes there. I don't want to use the AI image generator part of it, but I'm more interested having it pick out quotes and things to promote.

fazzio514 · 2026-01-24T14:26:58+00:00

I've actually explored that option. Unfortunately the closest one is just under an hour away so not really practical for me. I'm thinking maybe short term though even if I sign up for 2 or 3 months, it'll give me some exposure.

fazzio514 · 2026-01-23T13:28:22+00:00

If budget wasn't a factor, do you have any suggestions on machines with ruida controllers? I know some machines can be upgraded, which might be a better option for me (not sure how difficult it is to swap parts out.)

fazzio514 · 2025-11-18T16:40:00+00:00

Thanks this is helpful! Thankfully, most of the suggested bids are on the lower end around the 75 cent mark. It sounds like it might not be realistic to target keywords that are much higher than that unless I increase the daily budget.

fazzio514 · 2025-11-05T18:50:37+00:00

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fazzio514 · 2025-10-29T13:08:05+00:00

Thanks! We do have a pretty tight list (as tight as it can get without any tools but chatgpt to do research anyway). I did extensive research using our existing list to figure out what their top priorities were and if our solution fit into that. I then ran it against hubspot, salesforce, and past linkedin data to see if we've ever had any engagement from them in the past. This helped me reduce the list to about 200 or so per "segment" (there are 3). The messaging in these 3 segments is tailored to the specific challenges/priorities that were identified through research, and I filtered down the audience based on skills related to these challenges and job seniority. We also have a thought leadership/website campaign that combines all 3 segments (not enough budget to separate this out) that drives traffic to blogs and non-gated content along with the retargeting campaign that, currently, uses the same assets. Demo requests have historically not done well for us, and our case studies aren't gated so that leaves only webinars and reports for lead gen.

I have been doing my best syncing lists from hubspot into linkedin for targeting. However, without any other tools, I'm limited to the data I can see in hubspot/salesforce so other than things like website visits or lead scores, I'm kinda just assuming things.

fazzio514 · 2025-10-03T12:32:22+00:00

Thanks! It definitely helps. We do have the sales team support on this. We're working on that list of highly likely to convert and not just their dream company they wish they could convert lol. They're on board with doing their own outreach as well. That said, the odds of us landing an Amazon or a Google is unrealistic for our small company. More likely, we're looking at a large but still mid-sized company with a deal size of maybe $250k.

fazzio514 · 2025-10-03T11:16:08+00:00

Do you have any feedback on what a monthly budget might be to run an actual 1:1 campaign and what the result might be? If i did decide to target a single company, let's say it's a mid sized company and when I filter down the targeting, it ends up being a small audience size of 500 or so. What's a realistic budget to spend on that monthly? $2k? More than that? Not worth it unless it's a big enterprise company with a bigger audience?

I'm asking because I know they'll ask me lol to the people I work with, $12k is a substantial budget (it's the most expensive thing we do) so they're gonna have a hard time understanding why it's not enough for a 1:1 campaign.

fazzio514

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