Empathy and collaboration

Lately, I have been thinking about empathy as a sort of system requirement for effective collaboration. As the Founder and President of a marketing consultancy, I spend a lot of time thinking about effective collaboration, systems, and how we build a business that scales well without sacrificing the values that helped us succeed in the first place. For us, I think empathy is one of our strong suits and this blog is mostly a public journal entry reviewing how important I think it is to have an empathetic perspective as a consultant - in any field.   

‍First, we should define our terms in plain language.  ‍

By empathy, we mean considering and even feeling the perspective of the other. For T&M, this is us putting ourselves in the position of our clients mostly.  

By effective collaboration, we mean working together with a client on their business, mostly their marketing, in a way that proves value to them. Not just how they feel about the value of our work but objective results. (These results are the “effective” part) 

‍Tally & Mass is in many ways a traditional agency in the sense that we are assigned specific work to do, report that work to clients, discuss progress, give advice, and spur their next ideas inside the context of marketing, content, SEO, growth, etc. One way we have been able to do this effectively is by speaking well inside our lane, but with a client’s entire business in mind.  ‍

Marketing is a function that needs to be connected to sales, finance, operations, CX, and for smaller companies and startups even executive leadership. As a business, we have seen immense value in at least understanding these other functions and the ways that marketing interacts with them. This to me, feels like a sort of empathy, a corporate emotional intelligence, or something that allows us to give advice that is “all things considered”. 

I think there are too many agencies that preach their angle only. They do something well, know it well, and even execute well - but their expertise falls short of really knowing how their piece contributes to a larger whole. This becomes a weakness when clients need to ask about their thing - but through the lens of a decision that impacts staffing, timing, goal setting, opportunity costs, etc.

As a fractional CMO, I get to partner with founders and business leaders beyond the role of “agency” and that has played a major role in how we think about our services here for smaller, off-the-shelf type engagements. This is true in many ways, but the way that this has impacted how we think about empathy and collaboration is this: Marketing needs to understand, and serve a larger corporate goal - that needs to be distinct from “doing marketing”.  A consultant’s (or agency’s) ability to know how their work contributes to the larger objectives of a company is something I am starting to see as absolutely critical. Without this, marketing is incredibly exposed to not bringing any actual value to an organization… even with MQL counts at goal, CAC in the range, increased traffic, blah blah blah. 

I think it is safe to say that marketing unto itself is a flawed perspective. And in this statement, I am seeing the need for this type of larger corporate empathy.  

Finance as a business function is a good analogy for this…. For me, finance is a mechanism to balance your resources, risk exposure, and means of production in the service of a defined goal. Without a defined goal, “good finance” is only half effective. Maybe you didn’t run out of money, but could you have done more? Could you have gotten there faster? Could you have run things differently for some other gain? Without a defined goal for finance - set at the corporate leadership level - you don’t have a way of knowing why this number is better than another number. I believe that marketing is the same, just doesn’t (as often) get an invitation to the board meetings. ; ) 

I am not sure who this article is for, startups, one-person marketing teams, founders… but I hope that this perspective on empathy and collaboration illustrates the need for your teams, or even your hired guns, to be thinking bigger than just their tasks. For us, even in the realm of our smallest engagements… it has been a game changer.