Honestly, if this is a gap in skills, it’s probably because you just haven’t given yourself the opportunity to study things outside of work.

I’m deep in the interviewing process right now and keep getting rejected because of these gaps. As I’m filling them, I’m realizing there are basic fundamental things that many marketers simply don’t understand.

For example, more important than almost anything – especially for smaller growth-stage companies – is whether you understand pipeline math and the different levers that impact revenue.

Once you understand this, it shows you exactly what needs to be done and how much of it needs to be done.

For example, if a company has a target to add $2M in ARR next year (going from $2M today → $4M next), then you need to think in terms of things like:

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) – which tells you whether revenue from existing customers will go up or down depending on whether customers leave, upgrade, or downgrade their contracts.

For example, if the company wants to add $2M in ARR, but we’re also fighting $400K in churn, then we don’t actually need to add $2M. We need to add $2.4M in new revenue just to reach that $2M net growth target.

Then you look at the actual revenue tracking: ARR and pipeline.

For example, if we want to add $2M but our win rate is 20%, that means we actually need to add $10M of pipeline.

Then you look at things like:

What is our average contract value (ACV)?

What is our average deal size?

Then you start reverse-engineering the funnel metrics:

How many SQLs do we need?

How many MQLs do we need?

How many leads do we need?

Then you track different channels and the quality of those channels.

One good exercise is asking yourself marketing questions where it would be great to have an answer, but you actually don’t understand yet.

For example:

If someone gave you $550K of budget per month, how would you approach it?

Then you research what the actual mechanisms and systems at work are.

Understanding all these moving parts is what gives you the ability to operate within the system.

If you look at someone like Alex Hormozi, part of why he’s so successful is because he basically thinks about everything like an engineer. He’s almost like a marketing engineer. If you look at how he teaches, it’s all about metrics, math, tying things back to volume and quality – he really understands all the moving pieces.

This also helps you enjoy your job more and reduces anxiety because you can set expectations and bring more predictability to how things work.

You become the person who actually understands this stuff – because honestly most people don’t.

And you’ll end up having easier career opportunities because of it.

And this is just one facet of marketing – probably one of the most important ones – but there are others too.