Defending your honor (and your budget)

defend your honor

How do you build enough confidence in what you are doing…

…with the people who vote on your career and approve your budget…

…when they will never fully understand the value everything you do?

I am getting ready to speak at two events in New York City next week. One is the
CIO Perspectives event to an audience of CIO’s and one is the CMO Club event to an audience of CMO’s.

C-Level Credibility

In preparing for these talks, it got me thinking about how when I work with C-Level executives, one of the things that we inevitably get around to is executive credibility.

How can you prove your impact on the business?

CMO’s and CIO’s specifically share a credibility challenge in this area, which is why I frequently address these audiences. Both marketing and IT are typically seen as very-high-cost, cost centers in a business.  Adding to that is that the business peers don’t understand what they are really getting for all the money.

But all executives have this issue to one degree or another.

The Defense

One of the things I have noticed that C-Levels do when defending upwards with the CEO and the board, (something I have also done and been burned on) is to create lots of data and metrics which prove the value of what you deliver.

You search for firm ground in ROI studies, benchmarks, impact analysis – anything to take the emotion out of the discussion, and demonstrate that you are doing a good job and spending the money in a way that is good for the business.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you don’t do these things, but what I am suggesting, is that you:

Don’t forget to score points on the emotional side too.

This turns out to be far more important for keeping your job – It comes down to your personal credibility as an executive, and your ability to relate what you do to what the business already cares about.

Most of the time they will not understand your charts and metrics anyway.

What the business cares about

Develop a way to present what you do for the business, without talking about what you functionally do.

If you are in marketing, don’t talk about Brand, talk about driving the business strategy, or accelerating the sales cycle. If you are in IT, don’t talk about technology, talk about business improvements, or cost savings.

Some ideas of the level and kind of business initiatives I am talking about:

  • Drive customer engagement
  • Expand business in a geography
  • Increase profits in a legacy product line
  • Attract new customers
  • Increase average deal size
  • Optimize supply chain costs


Use the business initiatives for all your communications about what you do.

The key business initiatives become your headings. What you deliver in your function are things on this list.  Their list, their words.  They already understand and want what is on this list.

Then simply tuck your functional initiatives under these headings.

Present the business initiatives, talk about the headings, and then build confidence by saying something like, I won’t bore you with all the functional mechanics, I’ve got that all under control, I want to focus on how we are supporting these key initiatives.

The trick is to sell them the outcomes

Make them emotionally want the outcomes that you will deliver.

Once you have people understanding that you are driving business outcomes that they want, organize your budget on those terms. i.e., use the same business initiative headings for your budget roll up.

Allocate cost to their list of wants, not your list of activities.

If they want to grow business in a region, your functional activities might be things like: sales training, website development, localization, public relations, brand marketing, lead generation, supply chain sourcing, partner management.

But the people with the money:

  • Don’t want partner management, they want a highly skilled, high capacity sales channel.
  • They don’t want public relations and brand marketing, they want to increase their win rate by being known and preferred when the walk in the door.
  • They don’t want lead generation, they want qualified prospects who are ready to engage.
  • They don’t want website development, they want customer engagement and support.

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When you assign and request budget to do things that the business understands and emotionally wants, you will get more budget and increase your credibility in the process.

Offense vs. Defense

I will also be speaking next week about how we have a tendency to be on the offensive with our teams, doing great things, building confidence… but on the defense with our management, trying to prove our value.

In a later article I will share ideas about how to be on the offensive with management to build even more credibility and confidence in what you do.

Additional Resources:

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You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or Facebook, or read her books RISE and MOVE.


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