A few months into my tenure, a restructuring took place in the marketing organization. As a result, an industry analyst without demonstrated leadership and direct experience in managing a revenue/demand generation team became the "VP" of Global Campaign. During her so-called reign, she introduced processes that hindered Marketing from being nimble. Mind you, this is a tech company where reaching and impacting the pipeline fast is crucial. With her overseeing every single marketing activity (because she's also a micromanager), developing a simple marketing campaign from beginning to end would take about about two quarters or longer. Once the Marketing team actually launched a campaign or a program, Integrate team was already a few months behind.
Don't get me wrong; every Marketing team in any industry should have processes. However, if your processes create silos not only within the internal Marketing team but also a disconnect with your Sales org counterparts, you are just creating processes for the sake of having processes. It's almost amazing how she single-handedly decimated the marketing engine that was generating actual pipeline impact before she took over.
Not only does she lack an ounce of clue about being a Demand Gen leader, but she is also a bully who backstabs anyone who doesn't fall in line with her. With the (now former) CMO turning a deaf ear despite multiple complaints about how unprofessional and difficult she is, she was enabled and empowered to be a bully and tyrant. If you dare question any of her "innovative" circa-1990s strategies, she will do anything to make your life difficult to ensure you quit so she can backfill the roles with yes-men.
She's also instrumental in stopping a few promotions underway if she doesn't like those people, creating false narratives about other employees to stain their reputations, and making many unprofessional remarks and microaggressions about other leaders and employees behind their backs. Some of the offhand remarks include: "Let's turn on ESPN so we can distract our CEO (former professional athlete) while we DO THE REAL WORK" and "IF I were the Head of Sales, the sales organization wouldn't be as disorganized." I was perplexed about how she focused a lot of time talking badly about other organizations when the organization she's "leading" was slowly bleeding and creating almost zero pipeline.
If you're not convinced yet, the results illustrate how she decimated the demand gen engine that was already working. Spoiler alert: the marketing organization didn't achieve any of our pipeline goals in 2023 during her reign of terror. Since she cared more about marketers following her processes than launching and moving quickly and making data-driven optimizations, it shouldn't be surprising how we missed the numbers by a lot. It also doesn't help that the Marketing team was perceived by the Sales organization as a "do nothing" organization.
In the end, her backstabbing, bullying, microaggressions, and abuse weren't enough to save her. She was laid off, like most people in the Marketing team. It was comical that she thought she was invisible. Not only did she leave a Marketing team that is decimated and broken, but she also left a lot of people with trauma and emotional scars from working with her.
