Strategy alone won’t cut it

Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits (and get honest about my misses) as a first-time VP of Marketing. If this was forwarded to you and you like what you saw, you can subscribe here.

Climbing the ladder in B2B marketing is tough when you love doing actual marketing.

I love rolling up my sleeves and getting into the work. Writing. Building campaigns. Coming up with creative ideas.

Like when we photoshopped Ray and I’s faces onto Nirvana last year to announce our Seattle dinner for B2B marketing leaders.

Smells like a stop from our 2024 dinner roadshow.

The traditional VP playbook says you should spend less time on execution and focus on “the big picture”.

But I don’t think that playbook works anymore. At least not at a Series A startup. And even if it did, I’m not sure I’d follow it.

The reality of wearing both hats

Some marketing leaders thrive in high-level strategy roles, focusing on direction while their teams handle execution. That’s not me.

Before I took my role at UserEvidence in July 2023, I worked with a career coach (s/o Karli Williamson). We had some tough conversations about what I actually wanted in my next role.

One exercise had me list out what gave me energy at work vs. what drained it. It was pretty obvious. If I got too far away from doing the work, I’d hate it. Even if I was ready to take on more leadership responsibilities.

When you’re the first marketing hire at a Series A startup, you don’t get the luxury of just thinking big-picture. You have to execute too.

Hiring, budgeting, modeling different scenarios, aligning with leadership. Those aren’t optional.

But neither is launching a paid experiment to test new demand channels, setting up an outbound sequence with Sales to engage target accounts, or writing a case study that actually gets used in the sales process—especially when you’re still a one-person team.

Even though this was exactly the job I wanted, the transition wasn’t easy.

Without guardrails, strategy work filled every open slot in my calendar. Meanwhile, marketing still had to create pipeline. Campaigns had to generate demos. Content had to give Sales a reason to reach out.

And while I got a lot done solo with agency and freelance help, there was only so much I could do.

The necessity of wearing both hats

Eight and a half months in, I made my first full-time marketing hire. 20 months into my time here, we’re a team of four (s/o to our newest hire Austin Furey).

The chaos hasn’t disappeared (let’s be real, it never will). It’s just different.

Instead of juggling everything myself, I’m juggling hiring, onboarding, and making sure the team has what they need to succeed.

Some weeks, it’s 70% strategy, 30% execution. Other weeks, it’s 50/50.

I want my team to know I can still do the work. Not just in theory, but in practice.

Whether it’s setting up a HubSpot workflow, fixing something in WordPress, or jumping Figma to jam on new ideas, I want them to see I can do actual marketing.

Some of that is pride. But it’s mostly trust. I want them to feel confident in my decisions because they know I understand the work firsthand.

Since we’re a small team, it also means that when someone takes time off, we don’t lose momentum. There’s always someone who can keep things moving.

B2B SaaS marketing teams are getting leaner. The best marketing leaders won’t just set strategy, they’ll roll up their sleeves and make things happen.

They’ll chip in where needed, work with contractors without hand-holding, and actually know how to use the tools in their own tech stack.

The ones who thrive will move between strategy and execution, knowing just enough to be dangerous and when to dive in.

My “marketing ingredient” moment

A couple of months back, my team said something that stuck:

You are one of UserEvidence’s marketing ingredients.

The idea comes from something Dave Gerhardt talks about. If marketing is like cooking, your output depends on how well you mix and use the ingredients you have. It’s like a never-ending episode of Chopped.

You work with what’s available—your product, your team, your people—and figure out how to turn it into something effective.

At Drift, they leaned into David Cancel’s reputation in the B2B marketing world. He was one of their main ingredients.

I immediately laughed it off at first, thinking about me as one of our ingredients.

Who wants to call themselves a “marketing ingredient” and end up on r/LinkedInLunatics?

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

If I’m not sharing what we’re doing at UserEvidence, putting our perspective out there, and staying visible, we’re not using all the resources we have. Especially as a small team, all of that matters.

And that’s not just about marketing the product. It’s about keeping the right audience engaged and making sure they actually see what we’re building.

Moral of the story

I’ve stopped trying to find the perfect balance between strategy and execution. I’m convinced it doesn’t exist.

Instead, I'm focusing on what's in my control: effort and self-awareness.

If I’ve been leaning too hard into strategy for too many weeks, I adjust. Same with execution. The balance shifts, but as long as it doesn’t stay lopsided for too long, we’re good.

Some days, I feel guilty about not doing enough actual marketing. Other days, I’m cranking out content and wondering if I should be thinking bigger.

The push and pull will probably get easier with time, experience, and maybe a few more therapy sessions.

Until then, I’ll keep showing up every week and putting my effort where it matters most.

Stuff I’m digging this week

• The Evidence Gap report—Our first shot at original research is the content gift that keeps on giving. This week, we dropped a follow-up worksheet to help you identify your biggest evidence gaps and build a plan to close them. It’s driven an insane amount of valuable content for our GTM team.

• Sam Kuehnle’s LinkedIn post on “who should get credit for this?”—Attribution debates miss the point. Instead of fighting over credit, the real question is: how do we create more of these multi-touch journeys? A well-connected GTM ecosystem drives results, not isolated channels.

• Kyle Norton on the corporate athlete mindset—I love anyone who calls themselves a competitive psycho because 👋 hello, that’s also me. Kyle’s take on discipline, resilience, and habit formation is a masterclass in high-performance leadership. If you’re scaling a team, this episode is a must listen.

Opinions are cheap. Proof is gold.

I had a great convo with Mary Yang, CMO of Syxsense, about what it takes to market in cybersecurity. Lots of challenges. Lots of opportunities. She shared plenty of practical ways to build trust with skeptical buyers, applicable even if you're in a different industry.

My biggest takeaways:

• Marketing is a quasi-science. You won’t always have perfect data before launching a campaign. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test your hypothesis.

• When times are tough, leaders need to advocate for their team more than ever. If you don’t, no one else will.

• Don’t just sell to the C-suite. The people actually executing (middle managers) have just as much, if not more, influence on buying decisions.

Listen on Spotify or Apple, or head over to YouTube.

Hold up—what does UserEvidence do again?

Product marketers, marketing leaders, and customer marketers need more than generic testimonials to prove value.

UserEvidence helps create real customer evidence that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams can use to increase buyer confidence.

We make it easy to collect and share case studies, testimonials, competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data—proof that helps move deals forward.

Need a stat to prove ROI? A competitive insight to handle objections? A case study that closes the gap between interest and decision?

UserEvidence helps you capture and share the proof buyers need.