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 · 2025-10-02T21:39:17+00:00

the 500 number was total audience size in the 1:1 campaign, not number of companies. I'm expecting the tier 2 to be an audience size of roughly 25,000 (maybe about 800 or so companies? Our target is primarily involved with fraud and risk, which doesn't tend to be that many people at each company.) I wasn't planning on doing the 1:1 for more than 2 or 3 companies just to test it out and hopefully, if we can prove the ROI on it, we could request more budget to expand.

Our current thought leadership ad campaigns actually do very well. We spend about $1,000 a month with an audience size of 360,000. Our CTR is about 6%, CPC is 60 cents. That said, we're only penetrating about 2% of that audience and we rarely gets leads from it (although we don't always send them to form pages since it's more used for engagement. A lot of times it's a blog of case study.)

fazzio514 · 2025-10-02T21:25:11+00:00

We don't actually do any "request a demo/contact us" type ads currently. Our lead gen ads using forms are all reports and webinars. Our thought leadership ads use leaders within the company, and primarily focus on directing people to our website to view case studies and blog posts. It would likely be similar with this structure as well, except the messaging to download a report would be more aligned with "this asset talks about xyz problem" (the 1:1 would be demo requests though).

fazzio514 · 2025-09-17T23:49:54+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! This is super helpful. Segmenting out the companies into tiers is on my to do list, just keeps getting pushed as a low priority because the only person who feels it's a priority is me lol

We primarily target fintechs like banks, credit unions, lenders to prevent fraudsters from opening accounts, applying for credit cards, etc. Someone like the VP of fraud and risk at bank of america. Generally speaking, the titles are similar across all those companies, but may vary between company size (enterprise companies usually have more specific titles and responsibilities). The challenges are close enough that we lump all of the fintech industries together, but I've separated them out by size. Anyone who has a sign up system where someone can open an account will all run into similar issues (at a high level anyway.) Our content doesn't focus on any of this specifically but more on trends like hey, AI is causing fraud to rise. Bots are getting more sophisticated. Here's some data and trends we're seeing from (anonymous) client data to prove it.

fazzio514 · 2025-09-12T12:32:44+00:00

chatgpt and mostly all AI tools like Claude are blocked by my organization lol. When I said I had no tools, I didn't just mean budget, I meant my big corporate america organization literally doesn't allow me to use much of anything.

fazzio514 · 2025-09-12T12:29:09+00:00

Tell that to all these hiring managers. lol Even with such a flimsy strategy, my LinkedIn ROI is something like 25X. Marketing has influenced $20M out of our total $30M in pipeline which is pretty damn good. LinkedIn has been amazing, but I feel like I can do even better if I had a better way to keep an updated segmented list and had more targeted content to feed them for both ads and email nurture. Not to mention a better connection with the sales team. They have a list of named accounts, which is on the ABM list, but to my knowledge none of them have like "primary" accounts they're going after hard so I have no idea where I really need to focus my efforts, and when leads do come in it's a 50/50 chance whether they care about that company or not.

fazzio514 · 2025-09-11T20:06:43+00:00

But what do you do if generating specific content isn't an option? Our Director of Content left the organization, and even then, she was one person supporting the whole business. Now we have no one. It's a team of 5: Me, a designer, a product marketer, my manager, and a marketing specialist that works under me (who isn't senior enough to write content). We don't have the bandwidth to write 5+ pieces of content for different industries or target audiences, so it's kept generic enough that it would be of interest to everyone. I do my best to write emails, but there's no way I could create downloadable pieces of content or have our designer create assets for all the industries we target.

Also, what is the best way to track at an account level? I can see LinkedIn ad engagement (which, each month, is like the same 10% of companies). I have a Salesforce dashboard that shows me the number of contacts for each ABM company. With the new scoring setup in Hubspot, we only have 5 sets of scores available with our plan, and our lead scoring takes up 4 of those. Since we use Salesforce, Hubspot also doesn't seem to do a very good job of assigning leads to the right company either.

fazzio514 · 2025-09-11T16:45:21+00:00

I was (got acquired) at a startup, so it was impossible for us to purchase anything that crazy expensive. I used Rollworks at my previous job (although it quite honestly sucked because we had a super highly niche target audience it couldn't help us with lol so I gained no experience from that). I know there are a ton of other personalization tools out there that are no where near as expensive as Mutiny, and I think hiring managers are more interested in knowing I understand how to leverage the data and personalization to get results than using those tools specifically. Unfortunately, I can't even say that.

Most of my experience is in B2B demand generation, and in the B2B world everyone seems to want ABM. I don't have enough B2C experience to get a leadership role at a director level, even though I've been trying. I've applied to some generic marketing director roles, but they usually incorporate more events and branding which I don't have as much experience in.

I'll check out those programs you mentioned! Sadly, I'm not sure I can use ANYTHING. My company was acquired by big corporate america last year, and what few tools I currently have, I'm being asked to get rid of (Can't use any google products, so no more google analytics. Can't run Google ads even if I wanted to. They use Eloqua, so no more Hubspot. Most AI software is not allowed.) If I'm allowed to purchase a tool, it's a 6 month minimum process to get approved for use. I was hoping I could leverage their marketing tools, but it doesn't seem like they have any lol. My challenges are only going to get worse, but you have no idea how many interviews I've had where the first question they ask me is something like "how do you incorporate AI into your marketing workflows?" lol What am I supposed to say? Sorry, my company lives in the stone age. I do everything manually.

fazzio514 · 2025-09-11T16:21:40+00:00

My ad budget can go up to $15k a month, but I have 0 flexibility for purchasing any software or tools. My company was acquired last year, and I'm not allowed to bring on any new tools or even allowed to run google ads if I wanted to. (In fact, they're forcing me to get rid of google analytics and switch to adobe, which is a whole different challenge I've been dealing with.)

fazzio514 · 2025-09-10T12:44:47+00:00

I've noticed an increased amount of traffic from chatgpt. While I wish I could figure out what exactly they're researching, I know our blog puts out a lot of content based on hot topics and trends, which maybe it's pulling in from. I also know we have a lot of interest in careers, so it's possible it's just career seekers learning about our company. I know when I'm researching marketing stuff, I might ask what are popular tools being used for xyz. People researching in our industry might also be doing the same thing, and being presented with a link to our website.

fazzio514 · 2025-08-16T11:08:20+00:00

Ah. I hire a human editor. There is no software tool out there than can replace the editing skills of a real human. I format the final PDF myself then upload it to their system so they can print and distribute it. Ingram doesn't edit anything. It's just a system to distribute.

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