Mandy Hornaday: Hey everyone, welcome to Growth Activated. Today we’re going to be diving into a question I get asked all the time: how do you build your personal brand with the C-suite and finally get that seat at the table?
Mandy Hornaday: Have you ever felt like you’re leading a world-class marketing function, delivering real results, and yet somehow you’re still not included in key strategic decisions? Maybe you’re not invited to revenue and sales planning meetings. Maybe your marketing strategy never makes it to the boardroom. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. I recently spoke with an SVP of marketing at a multi-billion dollar company who isn’t included in revenue planning on an annual basis. And another VP of marketing who doesn’t get invited to present her go-to-market strategy to the board.
Mandy Hornaday: This topic is incredibly close to my heart because I’ve been there myself. When I first kicked off my marketing career, I was a field marketing specialist who eventually worked my way up to the marketing executive seat over a ten-year span. Building my personal brand was something I actively had to work hard at, shifting my internal reputation from being seen as a tactical marketer to being seen as a strategic executive.
Mandy Hornaday: While we’re not going to solve this big problem in one episode, I want to share a few key strategies that have worked for me to help you position yourself as a business leader, not just a marketing leader. No matter where you are in your career, whether you’re a marketing manager, director, VP, or CMO, these insights will help you start making that shift today.
Mandy Hornaday: I’m sharing ten tips today, plus a bonus tip eleven at the end. I’ve organized them into different stages. The first stage is the mindset shift that has to happen: thinking like a business leader.
Mandy Hornaday: The first tip to build your personal brand with the C-suite is to tie business goals and challenges to the marketing efforts you’re working on. This may seem obvious, but it’s hands down one of the most important ways to get your C-suite engaged with marketing and have you included in higher-level business conversations.
Mandy Hornaday: To tie your marketing efforts to business goals, you have to be looped into what those goals are. If you’re listening to this episode, there’s a good chance you’re not included in those strategic planning sessions yet, and that’s okay. The first step is to understand what the business goals are, why they’re important, and the key company initiatives on the roadmap to achieve them. From there, the onus is on us to demonstrate exactly how marketing will impact and contribute to those goals.
Mandy Hornaday: The most obvious time to address this is in your annual marketing planning and roadmap session. But the key is to reiterate your marketing efforts and tie them back to company goals as often as possible. A few ways to do this: in company-wide and department-wide updates, I always personally engage with announcements and shoot a follow-up message to the departmental leader sharing how marketing will plug in and support their efforts. I also use one-on-ones with C-suite executives strategically, not to download everything marketing is doing, but to hear what’s going on with the business, hear the challenges, and tie in what marketing is working on to help push those goals forward. And in quarterly marketing updates and roadmap reviews, I always highlight initiatives that directly correlate to a company goal. Keep it top of mind. Communicate it clearly and personalize it to what each executive cares about most.
Mandy Hornaday: The second tip is to think beyond marketing. There’s a famous idea, I believe it’s from Seth Godin’s Linchpin, about being the person in your organization whose role is hard to define. Be indispensable. They can always hire another CMO, but can they hire another you?
Mandy Hornaday: This shows up in thinking about company goals at a broader level, not just through the lens of how marketing can contribute, but what else the business could be doing to achieve those goals, whether or not marketing is a key player. At one company I worked for, I identified a significant gap in our data strategy and the way our tech stack and tools integrated together. No one else on the executive team had flagged this as a major problem or taken initiative to solve it. I did. I led the conversations, and as a result, I became one of the primary stakeholders associated with driving digital transformation across the company. Anytime someone talked about digital transformation, data, or technology, my name was associated with it.
Mandy Hornaday: At another company, leading the growth team helped me recognize that sales was our most expensive asset by far. That realization completely changed how I thought about the relationship between sales and marketing. From a business perspective, I wanted to prioritize sales time so they were only working on the highest-impact work possible. And that challenged me to think: what can marketing do differently to nurture and convert pipeline so that sales only steps in when they absolutely have to? I never would have thought like that if I hadn’t been challenged to think like an overarching revenue leader. Think broader. Think about the company’s gaps and what you can fill, and your C-suite will see that you care about the business, not just your own function.
Mandy Hornaday: As we move into tips three and four, these are centered around getting into the right conversations within your business. Tip three is to build strong cross-functional relationships.
Mandy Hornaday: Most people talk about sales and marketing alignment. I’m a big proponent of the CRO-CMO relationship. But sometimes it surprises me that as marketing executives, we’re not talking about our relationships with the other cross-departmental leaders. Sales and product are the most obvious, but there’s real importance in building strong relationships with finance, HR, technology, and IT security. There are dozens of ways our success depends on theirs and vice versa.
Mandy Hornaday: Think about it from a marketing mindset: who are the C-suite personas you need to build relationships with? What are their goals and metrics? What are they responsible for? Learn to speak their language. If you can use their terminology when you engage with them, they’ll feel seen and understood. One of my favorite questions to ask C-suite partners is: what’s keeping you up at night? It gets to the heart of their challenges in a way nothing else does.
Mandy Hornaday: I recommend setting up recurring one-on-ones with each stakeholder, the cadence will differ by department. You might only need to meet with finance quarterly, but with product you might need weekly or monthly. Whatever it is, have a cadence. Don’t go six months without connecting. I also love including cross-departmental peers in annual marketing planning. Marketing touches so many roadmaps, make sure those connections are explicit and visible. And when you send out regular marketing updates, customize the highlights to be specific to the leader you’re sending it to. Recognize their partnership, call out how your work will push their roadmap forward.
Mandy Hornaday: Tip four: if you can’t get invited to the meeting, create the meeting. This is one of the easiest things you could start doing tomorrow. Don’t wait for an invite to the important conversations. Lead the conversation yourself. In my experience, people are almost always open to having it, they just haven’t realized how marketing would be involved or could impact the outcome.
Mandy Hornaday: I typically position it as: I want to make sure marketing is plugged in to help you achieve X goal through Y. At one company, marketing wasn’t even on the radar for data strategy conversations. I set up meetings with key executives framed around: here are the tools and data strategy I believe we need to achieve our shared business goals, and here’s the marketing data we’re already collecting that could be leveraged by other departments. Let’s build a comprehensive strategy together.
Mandy Hornaday: Another example: if you’re trying to get out of the MQL lead gen cycle, consider hosting revenue alignment sessions. Show genuine interest in the full pipeline, understand the wins and challenges sales is having, and contribute meaningfully. I promise you’ll eventually get invited to sales strategy meetings, as long as you’re adding value in a way that feels natural and strategic. Take in what you learn in the meeting, ideate afterward, and send thoughtful follow-ups. Show that you’re invested and can be a real strategic partner.
Mandy Hornaday: Tips five and six are centered around communicating like an executive. Tip five: create options for your strategy presentations and roadmaps.
Mandy Hornaday: First, always build two versions of any major presentation, a high-level overview for the executive team, and a detailed version for your team and documentation. Executives don’t always want the detail, but when they dig, you want them to see that you know your stuff.
Mandy Hornaday: Second, include multiple investment options and show the downstream impact of each. I typically frame these as conservative growth, moderate growth, and aggressive growth. Each option has different outcomes, different investment levels, different headcount requirements, different levels of executive engagement needed. Executives almost always choose the middle option. That’s intentional, it’s usually the one I’m most interested in anyway. But by building around it, I let them feel part of the decision and I set expectations on results early. If you level-set the outcome upfront, you set yourself up for success down the road.
Mandy Hornaday: A quick communication tip to go with this: always ask yourself, what’s the headline? Start with it, then back into the facts and reasoning. Instead of “I’d like to invest in this program, it costs this much, and I think it will produce this result”, flip it: “I’d like to drive X result by investing in this program at this cost.” Lead with the outcome. Then the supporting details follow. Executives’ attention spans are limited. Don’t make them wait for the point.
Mandy Hornaday: Tip six: communicate trade-offs, and communicate them often. One of the things I hear most from the C-suite in my executive assessments is that marketing is too slow, they don’t know what marketing is doing, or marketing always says no. We don’t want to be the ‘no’ person. But we also can’t let every new idea derail our roadmap.
Mandy Hornaday: My approach: have a dialogue with whoever is bringing the idea. Ask a few hard-hitting questions. Which business goal will this help impact? Will it get us to that goal faster than what we already have planned? If yes, great, let’s swap it in. If not, why would we divert our attention from the things we’ve already agreed will move those goals? When you make them part of the decision, they become more understanding. They may even reach the conclusion before you do about whether something is worth doing.
Mandy Hornaday: I also ask what their level of involvement will be if we run with the idea. Will they lead the charge? Be an ambassador? Stay engaged through execution? This is very telling. It separates people who are genuinely invested in an idea from people who saw a LinkedIn post and thought we should try it. Both of these approaches reduce friction and put the decision back on the person bringing the idea, without you having to say no.
Mandy Hornaday: Tips seven through eleven are centered around influencing through trust and accountability. Tip seven: lean on your trusted stakeholders to build your personal brand.
Mandy Hornaday: Think about who your CEO or president or CFO trusts on the team, and for what. Those are the people I bring into the process, to get their opinion, feedback, and buy-in on a project before I ever bring it to the CEO. At one company, I had an incredibly close relationship with our CHRO. She was a trusted advisor to the CEO and president. Whenever I was looking to push for compensation changes, launch a new org design, or promote key roles, I looped her in first. She’d poke holes, we’d have a healthy discussion, and I’d refine my thinking. By the time I brought it to the CEO, I could say: our CHRO has already vetted this, provided feedback, and given her sign-off. I was borrowing her credibility. And I found that proposals moved through far faster. Think about how you can build that trust with the right peers, and leverage it strategically.
Mandy Hornaday: Tip eight: own your message and your point of view. This applies whether you’re managing up, down, or sideways. So often I see leaders, not just marketing leaders, who lean on their CEO’s authority to communicate direction. They’ll say to their team: “CEO wants this to happen, so we’re running with it.” That’s the opposite of owning the message. When you do that, you’re outsourcing your accountability and your credibility.
Mandy Hornaday: If you own the message, here’s what I want done, and here’s why, you build respect and trust for yourself. You establish a baseline that things are done a certain way because you believe it’s right, not because your boss told you to. The same applies to owning your point of view. If you have a strong perspective on how something should be done, speak up. Build yourself as a thought leader in that area. I know it’s hard when your point of view conflicts with what’s coming from above, I’ve struggled with that too. But find a way to communicate your perspective upward, or deliver the message with integrity rather than defaulting to “we’re doing this because the CEO wants to.”
Mandy Hornaday: Tip nine: be accountable. Share what’s happening in your function and share often, not just the wins, but the challenges and the misses too. One of the things I hear most frequently from C-suite executives is: I have no idea what marketing is working on or how they’re contributing to the business. Consistent, honest communication solves that.
Mandy Hornaday: Take accountability for your team and what’s being produced. Don’t throw your team under the bus. If something goes wrong, I take the hit. That protects the team, builds trust between us, and creates an environment where they feel safe to take risks, which is exactly what I want. And there’s something else: the more accountability you take on, the more motivated you are to solve the root cause so it doesn’t happen again. If a campaign flopped, did we fully think through the plan ahead of time? Are we using a comprehensive campaign planning template? If we did all of that and it still didn’t work, okay, no harm. Learn from it and move on. But accountability creates the discipline to go back and fix what actually caused the problem.
Mandy Hornaday: Tip ten: act the part. One of the most tangible shifts I made when transitioning to VP was elevating how I showed up. For me, that meant dressing differently, I loved a strong work dress and heels. It gave me a level of confidence in how I carried myself in meetings, at conferences, wherever I was. It gave me that feeling of: I belong in this room. I’m not advocating that everyone wear dresses and heels, I’m advocating for whatever makes you feel confident and powerful. Show up in a way that gives you that energy.
Mandy Hornaday: And last but not least in acting the part: stay above the fray. Stay above the workplace drama and gossip. It’s everywhere, at every level. And engaging in it does not help your personal brand. Stay focused on the strategic impact you’re making at the company level.
Mandy Hornaday: Bonus tip eleven: industry recognition and thought leadership. If you can be recognized by leaders in your industry, through awards, speaking opportunities, vendor partnerships, or thought leadership, it will change how your internal C-suite views you. When the outside world recognizes you, it elevates your standing inside the company.
Mandy Hornaday: I remember early in my VP role, I won a fairly significant industry award, a global top 150 leadership award, one of the only marketers selected across this particular industry. My C-suite was genuinely proud. That did wonders for my internal brand. I was also deeply engaged with our vendors, I gave them meaningful product feedback, had strategic conversations, and was a trusted voice. So whenever they were with our C-suite, my name came up. They wanted me involved. That consistently reinforced to leadership that I had a voice valued even outside our company. And many of those vendors featured me as a customer advocate, case studies, webinars, trainings. That made the C-suite proud to have the marketing function they had.
Mandy Hornaday: If you’re struggling internally, I’d start with the first ten tips. But external recognition is a powerful accelerant when you have the space for it.
Mandy Hornaday: All right, to quickly recap. Tip one: tie your business goals and challenges to marketing efforts, and do it as frequently as you can. Tip two: think beyond marketing, be a linchpin, and think about the broader business. Tip three: build strong cross-functional relationships. Tip four: if you can’t get invited to the meeting, create the meeting. Tip five: present options for strategy presentations and roadmaps. Tip six: communicate trade-offs with your stakeholders and communicate often. Tip seven: lean on trusted stakeholders for credibility. Tip eight: own your message and point of view, whether you’re managing up, down, or sideways. Tip nine: be accountable for your team and your performance and communicate it often. Tip ten: dress and act the part. And bonus tip eleven: capture industry recognition and thought leadership opportunities.
Mandy Hornaday: Thank you so much for your time today. If you heard some helpful tips, would you mind leaving a review and sharing which ones were most useful? Your feedback means a lot. And stay tuned for the upcoming C-Suite Series, I know it will be packed with more on how to develop a business mindset and elevate your function. In the meantime, keep activating growth for you and your company. Talk soon.
