Hi there 👋
In the TV show The Office, Jim is asked to produce a “rundown” to share with management. Jim has no idea what a rundown is, which leads to this exchange with his coworker Oscar in accounting:
Jim: Hey, do you know what a rundown is?
Oscar: Use it in a sentence.
Jim: Uh... can you get this rundown for me?
Oscar: Try another sentence.
Jim: This rundown better be really good?
Oscar: I don't know but it sounds like the rundown's really important.
(Ironically, it seems like Michael Scott does know what a rundown is … maybe.)
I’ve never asked anyone for a rundown, but I have made equally ambiguous asks for my team to share their goals and strategies.
“Come up with your goals and strategies and share them with the team.”
What?
That could mean so many different things. What am I looking for exactly? Do we all have a common language about goals and strategies? Wouldn’t it be easier if I had asked for a rundown?
Part of me likes the open-ended nature of the ask because it gives great autonomy to the team leaders who get create their own interpretation of goals and strategy. But we lose consistency and clarity if we all do something different.
So this year we used the same framework across all marketing areas to talk about goals and strategies.
We used MSPOTs, a framework popularized by HubSpot.
MSPOT stands for:
Mission
Strategies
Plays
Omissions
Targets
This article by HubSpot’s VP Operations goes into great detail of HubSpot’s process (circa 2017). We’ll be adapting MSPOTs to fit our unique situation at Oyster, but the basics will remain the same. Here’s how it looks:
Mission: We are a mission-first company with a stated desire to “create a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere.” I love that first and foremost our goals and strategies begin with this mission reminder. In future quarters and coming years, I could see our marketing team using the Mission category to also articulate the mission/vision of the team itself. For example, growth marketing aspires to “scale with systems not people, using technology to enhance our growth.” (I’ll leave it to the actual growth marketers at Oyster to give a much more accurate and inspiring vision than that.)
Strategy: For us at Oyster, this Strategy piece is a short paragraph that includes a couple of high-level strategic components:
Where we play — the markets, the industries, the personas
How we differentiate — why people choose us, what we aspire to become
A fair portion of strategy is positioning, especially the differentiation piece. It’s useful to connect your positioning back to the MSPOTs; it’s useful to connect any strategic document to MSPOTs, especially the company strategy. Here’s more about positioning if you’re curious:
Plays: Prior to using MSPOTs, we had a section of our quarterly planning called Strategic Initiatives. We now call these Plays. Think about the five or six things you know you need to do over the coming months in order to be successful. Voila! You have your Plays. From a formatting perspective, this looks like a bullet list of the plays themselves, and then further down in the strategic document you can go into a lot more detail to scope and brief each play.
Omissions: This is HARD MODE. It’s one thing to come up with a pie-in-the-sky view of all the cool and awesome things you want to do in the coming months. It’s another thing entirely to identify the things you won’t be doing.
For me, I’ve found that the best shortcut to get here is starting at the company level by defining what you’re not doing with your go-to-market strategy (for instance, we’re not sales-led or we’re not focused on mid-market) or what you’re not doing with the product roadmap. Then you can hold up some of your favorite ideas for Plays and remove the ones that don’t match up to the company strategy.
Targets: I almost wrote an entire newsletter on Targets. They’re that important (and I often get carried away with numbers). Targets are the way that you will measure the progress and the health of your marketing over the coming months. These are often highly correlated to OKRs, but they will deviate in places — whether it’s a sub-team setting more niche targets (e.g. SEO Share of Voice) or a team-level target for lagging indicators like
Here are the ones we ended up with for Oyster and how I thought about them.
Team health: Targets to ensure that we’re taking good care of each other, focusing on well-being and mission-oriented work.
Marketing team eNPS score
Marketing team geographic split (folks in the US don’t outnumber folks from other countries)
People employed through the Oyster platform (a key number for us making good on our global employment mission)
Growth: These are the handful of metrics that keep us on track for our growth goals
Win rate, overall and vs. competition
Pipeline generation across inbound, outbound, and partnerships
Lead → Meeting → Opportunity rate
PQL volume
Self-serve signups and activation
Organic search and word-of-mouth signups
Brand: We care a lot about brand at Oyster, and I’ve always been one to find some key ways to measure it (inasmuch as you can ever truly measure a brand’s impact)
Web traffic, broken out by paid and organic
Social impressions, broken out by paid and organic
Earned media mentions
Aided and unaided brand awareness
You’ll obviously want to attach specifics to each of them. It’s not a target if there’s nothing to aim for (then it’s just a KPI). But it’s okay to leave them broad at first and focus them once the quarter begins.
Over to you
What do you use to communicate goals and strategies to your teams? Have you used MSPOTs or a similar framework before? Are there any HubSpotters out there who can enlighten me about how / if you use MSPOTs today?
It’d be great to hear from you. Hit reply or send me a note at hello@kevanlee.com anytime.
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Misc.
What is the impact of ephemeral content (like Snapchat) on advertising? People are more likely to remember ads they think will disappear.
ProductHunt’s Golden Kitty Awards are now open for voting.
Three pricing strategies: Grow, Skim, Follow.
An oldie but a goodie …
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.