In our data-driven industry, end-of-year performance reviews involve numbers. While such can induce anxiety, it also presents opportunities, according to Media+ data guru Mike Ruff. Read Mike’s take, as shared with MarTech here or below.
By Mike Ruff
It’s performance review season again. This is meant to be a time of introspection and improvement, but for many, it’s also a time of high anxiety and stress.
Data-driven marketers can minimize those negative feelings by approaching their reviews the way they approach their campaigns. Here are my top three tips to make this season positive and productive.
Focus on the data
It’s hard to have a productive performance conversation if you feel your performance was one way while your manager feels it was another. Though we shouldn’t discount our own or others’ feelings, how we think we performed can be very different from how we actually did. This subjectivity makes it difficult to draw sound conclusions and align on performance improvements.
To stay objective, we need to bring data to the conversation. That data to present, though, needs to align with the goals — yours, your manager’s and the business’s.
You’re in good shape if you set the groundwork for this during last year’s review. If you haven’t, you may need to make some assumptions. Profitability metrics should always be a win for any for-profit organization, but you may not have a direct line of sight to those. At a minimum, carefully choosing proxy metrics demonstrates your desire to tie your performance to the organization’s success.
For example, you may not manage a P&L, so you can’t speak directly to your financial performance. However, maybe you took on more work this year without having to add headcount. If your team is doing more work for the same amount of money, that’s a sign of an increase in profitability. Another possibility is that your media budget was the same or lower than last year, but your conversion volume or rate increased. That means you’re doing more with less, which typically means increased profitability.
Baselines, not benchmarks
The adage, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” is particularly relevant in performance reviews. While it’s natural to feel tempted to compare yourself to benchmarks — like discovering your 2x ROAS outpaces the organization’s average of 1.5x — it can be a double-edged sword. Being ahead of the pack may feel rewarding, but relying on benchmarks alone doesn’t provide a full picture of your performance or areas for growth.
The purpose of your review is to identify opportunities to increase performance. And it is this focus on benchmarks that proves them to be unhelpful for the purpose of a review.
There are three possible outcomes when using benchmarks:
You’re above the benchmark
- If you’re above the benchmark, is the action for next year to stay where you are? Unlikely.
- Ideally, your colleagues are improving their performance, so the benchmark should be getting closer to your performance. Beyond that, if you could be doing better, shouldn’t you be doing better?
You’re at the benchmark
- If you’re performing at the benchmark, you’re with the pack. You’re not at the back, but there’s room to improve your performance.
You’re below the benchmark
- If you’re below the benchmark, you’re behind and need to catch up.
The action item is the same for all three scenarios: Continue to improve your performance. This is why benchmarks are not very useful for a performance review conversation.
You can also use baselines during performance reviews. Your performance is the baseline and might have been a ROAS of 1x last year. If you’re at 1.2x this year, while you aren’t at the benchmark, you improved. As long as you have a sustained pattern of improvement, it shows that you’re getting better — and that’s what performance reviews are all about.
Set good expectations for next year
This is the most important part to get right. Good planning for the upcoming year will help you maximize your performance and continue the improvement cycle.
The first step is aligning with your manager on the metrics, data sources and calculations used to measure your performance. If we continue the ROAS example, specify what revenue will be attributed to you from which data sources. For example, do you get credit for every digital campaign? Only campaigns that run paid social? And so on.
Once you’ve aligned on these metrics, you need to build your baseline. From those data sources and calculations, how has your performance changed over time? Determine what levers you have at your disposal and forecast how your appropriate use of those levers affects the metrics.
For example, maybe you have no control over budgets (ad spend), but you do have control over where to allocate that spend, which will affect revenue. We know ad spend also affects revenue. To differentiate between your performance and ad spend fluctuations, you need to calculate the relationship.
To prepare for a goals conversation, having seen your performance over time, forecast where your performance should be at the end of this year if all things stay the same. Specifically, call out things out of your control and explain how they affect the metrics. Also, specify the key factors that, if they change, will have big effects on the metrics.
As mentioned above, the key factors in revenue generation may be media mix, platform selection and overall budget. To draw a clear distinction between your performance and insufficient spend, set clear expectations with your manager. Explain that if budgets drop significantly, it might look like your performance has declined, even though it’s not entirely your fault.
Finally, it’s time to compare notes with your manager. They may give you targets for next year, like a 2.5x ROAS. The most important question to ask whenever you’re presented with a number like this is: How did you calculate that number? The answer to that question is critical.
If the number resulted from a deep analysis of expected budgets, market forecasts, anticipated staffing and more, this is great. It means a lot of time was devoted to coming up with a fair expectation of your performance. However, in my experience, this is rare.
Instead, it’s often either your manager thinks you should just do better than this year or that finance says this is the target for the numbers to work out in the finance office. Both are fair ways to run a business, but may not be fair ways to assess your performance. If you’re in this scenario, you need to look at the feasibility of these targets.
For example, a former manager once tasked me with growing my profitable analytics department from 80 analysts to 500 over five years, all while maintaining profitability. During the meeting, I was speechless — I didn’t know how to respond. My mind was going in a million different directions, trying to formulate a coherent response to what was such an outlandish request.
Can the labor market even provide 420 analysts over five years? How would we train them? How would we pay them? Where is all of this revenue going to come from and how could we grow it while focused on growing the team?
In the end, I left the meeting without addressing the task beyond acknowledging it and returned a week later with probably a 40-slide answer to this task. Ultimately, the request wasn’t feasible for anyone in my position — high-performing or otherwise. The question asked in response was, “Well, what would be reasonable?” That’s what you want to get to when aligning with your manager on performance goals.
Performance reviews are tricky to get right, but in the hands of two data-driven professionals, you can set good goals and activate the continuous improvement loop during this key time of year.
[Read the full article at MarTech here.]
