How to manage your CEO’s “great ideas”
It’s easier than you think, if you can take your emotions out of it.
It’s Monday. You’ve just started laying out your plans for the week. Then the dreaded email/slack/call/messenger pigeon from the CEO comes.
They just read an article/watched a Ted talk/spoke with their mother-in-law and have a great idea for a campaign you should run. Your heart rate increases. Your body enters fight or flight mode.
It doesn’t need to be this way. If you work in CRM you will certainly get “great ideas” on what campaigns you should run. These ideas can be from anywhere in the organization. We’ll use the CEO in this example, but you can apply this to your boss, peers, or even direct reports.
Here are some things you should not do and what you should do instead:
Immediately agree to or refuse to do it: If you set the precedent that you will prioritize these types of requests, they will keep coming and you will drown. However, if you refuse to do it, you risk damaging your relationship with the CEO. This could make it harder to get support when you need it in the future and could impact your year-end review.
What to do instead: Thank the CEO for the idea and let them know that you will take a look at it. This approach (1) Shows respect to the person who signs your paycheck and (2) buys time to figure out what to do next.
Ask your boss to make it go away: You will need to learn how to handle this to continue advancing in your career. Failing to step up will hurt your reputation with your boss and is a missed opportunity for you to grow your skills.
What to do instead: Give your boss a heads-up about the request. Let them know what was asked and what you plan to do (more on that below). This demonstrates your maturity and allows your boss to step in (don’t hold your breath) or the option to be included in your response.
Pretend it never happened and hope it will go away: It is tempting to hope the CEO will forget about it. CEOs are busy and generally have bigger fish to fry than an email campaign. That said, they might not and will either confront you about it or keep it in mind when it comes time for your review.
What to do instead: Follow up in a reasonable amount of time. Use your best judgment on timing, but 2-4 days is a reasonable benchmark.
Say you don’t have the bandwidth to do it: This is a weak excuse. It also doesn’t address the truth of the matter, which is that the idea is unlikely to succeed.
What to do instead: Put together a concise email explaining either (1) Why it can’t happen right away (only if it is a good idea) or (2) Why you don’t recommend pursuing it. This should be a numbers-based argument. For example, if the CEO wants you to use a specific hero image, provide data from past experiments involving hero images that show these types of success don’t provide a significant lift. It can also help to share some details on other experiments you have coming up. While you can do this in person, email is often a better alternative. It allows you to maintain a digital paper trail and you can easily loop in your boss if they would like to be cc’d.
Fail to follow up with results: Even if you follow the above steps the CEO may still insist that you move forward. In these situations, it is important to use the opportunity to educate them. Ideally, this will lead to fewer ideas in the future.
What to do instead: Once you have implemented the test, put together another concise email that summarizes its results. In it, you should remind the CEO what was done, share visuals if applicable, and provide relevant data. Again, less is more. Most CEO’s barely skim their emails so you should only include the most critical information.
In an ideal world, you would follow these steps, blow the CEO away with your talent, and ride off into the sunset. This is probably not going to happen. Let’s go one step further.
What to do if the CEO’s idea works and/or they don’t bring ideas very often:
Acknowledge the success: There is no benefit to trying to downplay the impact of a good idea. Thank the CEO for the idea and let them know you appreciate their input. Take it as a compliment that they are interested in CRM.
Maintain your boundaries: Do not encourage the CEO (or anyone in the company) to provide more ideas. You don’t want to create the impression that you can’t develop ideas yourself or turn your function into a campaign factory.
Share your success (when appropriate): Demonstrating your success goes a long way to minimizing outside ideas. Follow the norms of your company when it comes to results sharing. The CEO most likely isn’t interested in a long email from you about how you increased open rates on one campaign by 4%. Work with your boss to find opportunities to get a slide or a few minutes in a meeting where results are being shared to showcase your successes. These successes should be linked to things that matter to the CEO (revenue, profit, cost savings, etc.).
What to do if the CEO’s idea doesn’t work and/or they bring ideas very often:
You may have read up to this point and said to yourself “Are you kidding? I get bombarded with ideas every day and I’m drowning!”. There are a couple of ways to go about this depending on your relationship with your manager.
Talk to your boss: If you have a good relationship with/respect your boss, talk to them about what is happening and get their advice. They will have a better understanding of the inner workings of your company and may be able to suggest approaches for fending off requests. They also may be willing to go to bat for you to get the requests to stop.
Build a backlog: If you have a bad relationship/don’t respect your boss, you will need to take matters into your own hands. Your best bet is to maintain a backlog of campaign requests. This practice has been effectively utilized by product, user research, and data teams for many years. It gives people the satisfaction that their idea is being captured without an explicit promise it will be executed.
Record important information about the request (who is asking, date requested, details of the request, etc.). If you can, try to add a rough sizing to it (audience size, expected conversion rate, etc.). The reality is many people will forget what they asked you to do within a week. For those who don’t, having documentation of all the campaigns you are managing and an impact assessment of their idea goes a long way in defending your bandwidth. You won’t win every battle, but you will win a lot more than if you don’t have a backlog and rationale to defend the prioritization of requests.
I have personally made every single mistake listed above during my career. I will probably make some of them again in the future. Every day is a new challenge in the world of CRM. There will always be requests to do things that don’t make sense and have little chance of success. These requests eat away at the time you need to generate real insight from your customers, develop meaningful hypotheses, and execute high-quality experiments that will move the needle for your company.
If you fall off the wagon, don’t despair. Tomorrow is a new day and an opportunity for you to make your role and your work meaningful.
Will following the above steps guarantee that the CEO will stop providing ideas? Probably not. But it will help you keep your sanity and set yourself up for future success.
Big thank you to Jared for contributing this great piece and being Scaling CRM’s first guest author. More guest posts to come!
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