Your next board meeting shouldn’t feel like a firing squad. Nine strategies for B2B marketing leaders.

Do board meetings give you a stomach ache?

The periodic assembly of business leaders known as the board meeting is fraught with anxiety if you’re a B2B marketing leader. Why? Marketing is hard. Expensive. Not always understood. Sometimes not respected. So when board meeting time rolls around and you have to explain yourself to your boss’s bosses, it can feel like stepping in front of a firing squad. Also? Everybody has an opinion (and I’ll just leave that there).

Despite these headwinds, if you’re armed with the right strategies, you can emerge from your next board meeting victorious (or at least less bloodied). Here are nine for making that meeting — and your board relationships overall — successful.

1. Know your board

Know each board member and where they’re coming from. For instance, if they’re an investor, did they get in early and at a lower price, or later and at a higher one? Things like investment timing, how closely your company aligns with their original investment thesis, and even the performance of other companies in their portfolio can weigh heavily on their perspective.

2. Communicate early

Beyond perspective, what are your board members’ hot buttons for this meeting? Are there unresolved issues, simmering disagreements, or interim bad news that could derail an otherwise positive interaction? If so, work with your CEO and fellow executives to address those things before the meeting. Even if you can’t resolve a problem, acknowledging it ahead of time will serve as a relief valve for pressure that may be building up.

3. Right-size your update

After considering perspectives and heading off problems, prepare a right-sized board update. Include three things: 1. a performance summary; 2. a show-and-tell; and 3. a fat back pocket. Keep the summary short (2–3 slides), show progress on key goals like pipeline coverage, and make it consistent, logical, and easy to grok. Add visual indicators and illuminating comments like what portion of the pipeline is late-stage, sample account logos, key assumptions, or risk factors. Be honest about bad news and always include learnings and remediation plans. Every startup has bumps in the road, and your board will judge you on how well you navigate them. Besides performance, take the opportunity for a one-slide show-and-tell such as a visual treatment of a new message, thumbnails from an upcoming campaign, or a few charts from a recent survey. This brings your team’s work to life and makes it more memorable to your board. Of course, the downside of engaging them is they may wake up and start asking questions, so be prepared for a gotcha, like, “How is that campaign doing?” This leads us to the fat back pocket — your virtual space for quick-grab answers for every potential question your board could ask. We’ll cover it in the “Be prepared for any conversation” section, below.

4. Be all about the why

When you give your board update and field questions, be all about the why. Board members rely on executives to make good decisions based on sound thinking, so when they’re listening to you present or asking you a question, they care far less about your particular conclusion than about the quality of your underlying rationale. They will form an opinion of you over time based on this, weighing things like how deliberate, logical, and consistent you are.

Always frame your why against a standard or goal. As a marketer, I find it useful to set goals that map to the customer journey and marketing funnel, such as awareness (e.g., share of voice), consideration (e.g., pipeline coverage), and purchase (e.g., win rate) and use them as guideposts. They allow my team to prioritize and make tradeoffs as well as help me lay out my thinking for my board members.

5. Answer the meta-question

When a board member asks a question, there’s often a meta-question behind it. Learn to recognize this, and always acknowledge it in your answer. For example, you could respond to, “What’s the conversion rate of this program?” with the percentage and move on. Efficiency! Or you could take a moment to consider that the program is unproven and leads could take longer to convert to pipeline, which could be the board member’s concern. You could say, “Last quarter it was…percent. Is your concern that leads may take longer to convert?” [Yes.] “That’s a valid concern. We included this program because we need to run more experiments now to be ready to scale next year. Because of the program’s uncertainty, we assumed a longer conversion duration in our model and launched a companion nurture program to accelerate conversion.” The first response is accurate but tone deaf, but the second kills several birds with one stone: You demonstrate EQ, confidence, rigor, and a forward-thinking approach.

6. Have an ask

Beyond presenting and responding to questions, remember that your board members can (and want to) reciprocate! They have information, ideas, connections, and influence. What do you need? To network with other marketers from their portfolio companies? A warm introduction to prospects they know? This give-and-take shifts the power dynamic of your relationship and puts you on more equal footing with your board, which is always a good thing.

7. Don’t be so quick to agree

One mistake executives make is agreeing too quickly with board members. Whether it’s candidate recommendations, product ideas, or campaign suggestions, your board’s job is to share what they know and give advice. And yours is to make good decisions and execute. Some of their ideas are brilliant. Others, not so much. They are relying on you to consider their suggestions (and as with questions, there’s often a “meta” behind suggestions, so suss that out) and then do what you think is best for the business.

8. Be classy

Board members are people, too. Even though they need you to make tough decisions, they also want to know they’re working with considerate, empathetic, ethical people. You can show this in many ways: Give credit to others, use “we” vs. “I,” be honest, don’t be defensive, admit error readily, follow through on commitments, and acknowledge the human impact of your actions. From now through the end of your career, people will ask your board members for their opinion of you. What will they say? I guarantee it will have far more to do with how you conduct yourself than with the success or failure of the business. Can they trust you? Are you resilient? Do you elevate others? These things matter.

9. Be prepared for any conversation

Every interaction with your board is an opportunity to earn their trust, influence them, and learn from them, so be prepared for any conversation. I call this your “fat back pocket” because it’s all the stuff you wouldn’t put in an update but you need to have at the ready. Marketing is both broad and deep, with a zillion things to keep track of — metrics, programs, launches, messages, competitive intelligence, industry trends, analyst reports, media coverage, and more — and a lot to get wrong or forget. It’s OK to say “I don’t know that offhand. I‘ll have to get back to you,” but you don’t want to say that too many times, especially about stuff you really should know. Think of your fat back pocket as your insurance policy. Fill it with three things: 1. information you’re expected to know, 2. informed opinions on topics related to your function or business, and 3. relevant insights or learnings in case you get caught in an elevator with one of your board members. Here’s a run-down of each:

Information you’re expected to know

Informed opinions on topics related to your business

Relevant insights or learnings