How to Help Your Head of Marketing Win Early
Set priorities, reduce distractions, and guide them toward fast impact across GTM, content, and AI initiatives.
DEAR STAGE 2: We just brought on a Head of Marketing and it feels like they’re being pulled in too many directions: brand, lead gen, sales enablement, you name it. How do I help them prioritize and show impact early? ~PRIORITIZING IMPACT
PRIORITIZING IMPACT: Bringing on a Head of Marketing is a huge milestone, and also a big shift for the rest of the team. I can guarantee there is a whole host of pent up demands and a backlog of needs across the org. Suddenly you’ve got someone owning one of your most visible functions, and it’s tempting to try and solve everything right away.
To help make sense of this transition, I sat down with Paramita Bhattacharya, a seasoned marketing leader and Stage 2 LP. Her advice? Help your new leader find their footing quickly by aligning on strategy, narrowing focus, and securing a few early wins.
Here’s how:
Set the Guardrails
Before any campaigns get launched or assets are designed, step back and create clarity. Paramita recommends:
CEO alignment: Sit down together and get honest about what outcomes matter most? What does “success” look like in the next 90 days?
Cross-functional discovery: Encourage your Head of Marketing to meet with leaders across sales, product, and customer success. These sessions help surface opportunities, challenges, and dependencies.
Use the data you have: Funnel metrics, conversion data, and campaign results to assess what’s working and what’s not.
Define success: What matters for your business? Is it pipeline? Site traffic? Better qualified leads? Agreeing on KPIs up front reduces later friction.
Define AI’s remit/span of control: this is critical as you enter a new org. You need to get a pulse on where AI fits today within the marketing org and set the roadmap for broader adoption.
Balance Learning and Doing
The first 30-60 days are about balancing exploration with execution. It’s easy to over-index on either:
All action, no context → Risk of misfires and wasted effort.
All listening, no movement → Teams get anxious, wondering what’s getting done.
Paramita suggests developing an onboarding plan that includes both learning goals and deliverables. Critically that plan cannot be private. You want to share it broadly (especially with exec peers!) and use it as a tool to manage expectations. With this plan as the backdrop, schedule regular check-ins with both you (the CEO) and cross-functional leaders to keep information flowing and everyone aligned.
AI adoption is a great place to starter! Run an AI audit to identify existing AI initiatives that are running, and evaluate risk/challenges/success and in parallel, identify a few use cases that can be piloted. Paramita shared a great idea for immediate action: “Invite team members across the org to share prompts and build a prompt library. Mark this as an early win. You can also start to formalize running a prompt hackathon every month or 6 weeks”.
Focus Matters
Your new marketing leader is going to be tempted to touch everything. Don’t let them. Instead, work together to identify the top 2–3 must-dos:
What’s generating pipeline now? Secure and optimize it.
What’s broken in the funnel? Fix that first.
What’s a strategic bet that needs a little momentum? Start scoping it now.
Revisit this list often and be their partner in saying “no” to nice-to-haves. You can empower them to say “no” and more importantly, you should step in to support that decision as new asks arise that can derail focus. “A great Head of Marketing balances short- and long-term priorities. It’s not just about campaigns, it’s about business outcomes,” says Paramita.
Show Early Wins
Great leaders earn the trust of their teams and that’s usually through action, which means the first 45 days are all about showing impact. As the CEO you can help identify a few quick win areas and point your new hire in the right direction. A few ideas from Paramita’s experience:
For enterprise sales…
Sales content audit and quick refresh of high-impact, immediately usable content that addresses a critical pain point in the sales cycle. This could be the sales deck, a competitive cheat sheet, an email sequence, etc…
A new customer reference and/or a mini case study: get a quote and a video/sound bite regarding 1-2 pain points that the solution addressed to add a new logo added to the web page and sales deck.
A dedicated ABM push either refining and prioritizing an ongoing effort, or identify a few high priority accounts and launching a targeted marketing play.
For product-led or a high velocity inbound engine…
Optimize high traffic landing pages with testing around primary CTAs and content offers (blogs, solution pages, pricing, etc.).
Review and fix sign up, demo request and/or free-trial forms by eliminating unnecessary form fields, using progressive profiling, and removing friction in the flow.
Implement a targeted short term email nurture sequence for specific segment, cohort or vertical that is designed to increase conversion (MQL-SQL or Trial-Paid)
Deep dive into 1-2 paid marketing channels, review performance and adjust spend to maximize high performing campaigns.
For AI adoption…and Paramita believes all marketing leaders should be at the forefront of driving AI within a company:
Accelerating content creation: train and use custom GPTs for marketing channel content especially SEO/GEO, landing pages and lifecycle emails as well as sales enablement decks, battlecards, account research, and RFP assistance.
Increasing conversion in the funnel: AI chat with faster qualification & demo scheduling.
Removing friction in the pipeline: AI-assisted propensity scoring + lead routing to speed handoffs and raise SDR hit rate. Could even implement AI-SDR if you run high velocity inbound marketing.
Share these wins! Paramita recommends the new leader send out a weekly update to the leadership team. A brief, consistent, and outcomes focused update builds trust.
Looking Ahead
By the end of the first month, your Head of Marketing should start laying the groundwork for longer-term plays. It’s ok if these plans aren’t fully baked yet, but it’s a red flag if they aren’t bringing forward ideas and hypotheses for long term initiatives.
What bets will drive sustainable pipeline growth?
What brand or content initiatives are worth investing in?
How should the team scale to meet company goals?
The key is to help your new leader build credibility and momentum now, so that when it’s time to make bigger asks (budget, headcount, strategy shifts), the rest of the org is already bought in.
The TL;DR on Paramita’s advice? Don’t try to do it all. Prioritize ruthlessly. Deliver early wins. Build trust.
Until next week!