Your First 100 Days as a Climate Tech Marketing Leader
The first 100 days in any leadership role are pivotal, but stepping into marketing leadership in climate tech comes with its own set of high stakes. You’re tasked with marketing solutions to some of the world’s most urgent problems, often in industries that are slow to adapt. Your early efforts set the tone for how you build credibility, connect with customers, and drive progress in bringing critical solutions to market.
This guide is for marketing leaders at fast-growing climate tech startups—whether you’re joining at the Seed, Series A, or Series B stage—who are ready to make an impact. We’ll explore how to quickly understand your company, build strong relationships with your team and stakeholders, and deliver results that align with your mission and growth goals.
Phase 1: Understanding your company and customers
Congrats on joining your new team! Your first priority as a new marketing leader is to fully understand the company you’ve joined and the customers you serve. This phase is about grounding yourself in the business’s core strengths, uncovering gaps, and setting the stage for impactful strategies. To lead effectively, you need to dive deep into the product, market, and team dynamics while also building a clear picture of your customers’ needs and challenges.
This foundational work might not feel like the quickest path to visible wins, but it’s the most critical investment you can make. By thoroughly understanding your organization’s inner workings and the external market landscape, you’ll be positioned to craft strategies that resonate with customers and align with broader company goals. Here’s how to make this first phase as impactful as possible.
Crafting your onboarding plan
Your people operations team will likely provide an onboarding plan to help you meet key team members, access important documents, and familiarize yourself with brand assets. While helpful, these plans are often just a starting point. To truly set yourself up for success, you’ll need to craft your own onboarding plan—one that prioritizes deep learning, builds relationships, and identifies opportunities for early wins.
Here are a few things you’ll want to include:
Key stakeholders: Meet with your marketing team, cross-functional leaders, and customers to gather insights. Ask, “What are the company’s biggest opportunities and challenges?” or “What expectations do you have for this role?”
Quick wins: Identify low-effort, high-impact opportunities that can build early momentum. Are there outdated materials you can refresh or simple process improvements you can make? Don’t do them quite yet – but take note.
Setting the tone: Use your first few weeks to listen, observe, and build trust. Show curiosity and collaboration by asking thoughtful questions and engaging with the team’s challenges.
Alignment and structure: Outline a 30-, 60-, and 90-day framework for your onboarding, focusing on learning, relationship-building, and setting the stage for long-term strategies. (This guide should help!)
By proactively crafting and following this plan, you’ll position yourself as a strategic partner and trusted leader.
Building relationships by listening
Building relationships starts with listening. Meet with your team individually to understand their perspectives, challenges, and priorities. Ask open-ended questions like, “What’s working well?” and “What could be improved?”. Focus on building trust by showing genuine curiosity and empathy without rushing to provide solutions. These conversations not only uncover valuable insights but also set the tone for your leadership and help you navigate how decisions and changes happen within the organization.
Here are some starting points for conversations:
What’s working well? Ask open-ended questions like, “What’s going well?” and “What could we improve?” This helps you understand team dynamics and priorities.
What challenges exist? Listen carefully to pain points. Showing empathy and understanding builds rapport and lays the groundwork for collaboration.
Who holds key knowledge? Identify team members with institutional knowledge or significant influence. Their insights can guide you through potential blockers and opportunities.
What leadership style will resonate? Use these conversations to demonstrate your commitment to collaboration and mutual success.
Developing a deep understanding of customers
To truly connect with your audience, you need to understand your customers’ goals, pain points, and how your product fits into their lives and workflows. Talk directly to customers, observe their interactions through sales demos and support calls, and review personas and market research to fill any knowledge gaps. Use these insights to refine your messaging and align strategies across teams, ensuring your marketing resonates and addresses real customer needs.
Schedule customer interviews: Dive into their goals, pain points, and expectations. Use the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to uncover the underlying outcomes they seek and the challenges they face in achieving them. How does your product fit into their routines and solve these problems?
Join sales and support calls: Observe customer interactions firsthand. What common questions or concerns do they raise, and how can marketing address them? Look for patterns that reveal deeper insights into their needs and expectations.
Review research: Analyze personas, customer profiles, and market data with a JTBD lens. Are there gaps in your understanding of what customers are trying to achieve or the context in which they use your product?
Refine your messaging: Use insights from these activities to ensure your messaging resonates with customers’ desired outcomes and addresses their real-world challenges.
By incorporating the JTBD framework into your approach, you’ll develop more impactful, customer-centric strategies that align your product with their true needs and goals.
Understanding the product
Understanding your product inside and out is essential to effective marketing. Spend time with the product team to learn about its features, benefits, and roadmap, and understand how customer feedback shapes development. Align with product managers on launches to ensure your marketing amplifies their impact. Building strong relationships with product stakeholders and becoming a product expert will help you craft campaigns that clearly communicate its value and differentiation.
Learn the product roadmap: Spend time with the product team. What features or updates are planned? How do they align with customer needs?
Collaborate on launches: Work with product managers to align on messaging and timing. How can marketing amplify product impact?
Leverage customer feedback: Understand how feedback shapes product development. Can you use these insights to strengthen your campaigns?
Understanding the messaging, value propositions, and market landscape
Audit your current messaging to ensure it resonates with customer needs and highlights your product’s key differentiators. Research competitors to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and market gaps you can leverage, and stay on top of industry trends and customer preferences to refine your positioning.
Audit current messaging with customer needs and consistency in mind
Identify differentiators
Analyze competitors
Understand market trends and what’s driving demand
Collaborate with other teams to ensure consistency across all touchpoints
Understanding the business holistically
To make an impact, you need a clear understanding of how your business operates. Dive into the company’s business model, unit economics, and financial constraints to see how marketing fits into the bigger picture. Audit past campaigns to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t, and evaluate your tech stack for gaps or inefficiencies. Finally, understand how decisions are made and align your strategies with broader business goals to ensure your work drives meaningful results.
What drives the business? Study the business model, unit economics, and financial constraints. How does marketing contribute to revenue and growth?
What’s worked before? Audit past campaigns. What performed well, and what didn’t? Use these insights to inform your strategy.
Is the tech stack effective? Evaluate tools for gaps or inefficiencies. Are there opportunities to improve analytics or automation?
How are decisions made? Observe decision-making processes. Understanding how influence flows will help you navigate challenges.
Phase 2: Laying strategic foundations
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is about creating a clear roadmap that drives growth and aligns with company goals. Focus on a 6-12 month strategy that balances quick wins with long-term initiatives using an impact vs. effort framework. Build a content strategy that addresses customer challenges and supports the sales funnel, and set clear KPIs to measure success. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to refine your plan and ensure alignment across the organization.
Build a 6-12 month strategy: Align with company goals and customer insights. What’s critical for the company’s growth, and how can marketing support it?
Prioritize impact: Use an impact vs. effort matrix to identify quick wins and long-term projects. What will deliver the most value?
Content strategy: Create a plan that addresses customer challenges and supports the sales funnel. What themes will resonate most with your audience?
Building cross-functional trust
Building cross-functional trust is key to marketing success. Partner with sales, product, and customer success teams to align on shared goals and use customer insights to inform strategies that benefit everyone. Collaborate on metrics that demonstrate marketing’s impact on broader business objectives, and proactively communicate results to build confidence and buy-in. By fostering strong relationships, you’ll position marketing as a trusted and valuable partner across the organization.
Partner with sales and product: Align on shared goals and dependencies. How can marketing support their objectives?
Share customer insights: Use data and feedback to inform cross-functional strategies. What can marketing bring to the table that benefits other teams?
Define key metrics: Collaborate with stakeholders to set metrics that align with overall business goals.
Educate stakeholders: Showcase how marketing drives revenue and credibility.
By collaborating and demonstrating value across teams, you’ll position marketing as a trusted and integral partner within the organization.
Strengthening your team and processes
Operational efficiency is key to a high-performing marketing team. If you’re leading a team, assess their strengths and identify skill gaps where training or resources can unlock potential. Streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks and improving collaboration. Audit lead nurturing strategies to ensure they effectively guide prospects through the funnel, and create a content calendar focused on high-impact, repurposable assets that align with your marketing goals.
Assess team strengths and needs: Identify skill gaps or areas where additional training and resources could unlock potential. Are there opportunities to help team members grow into new roles or responsibilities?
Optimize workflows: Review current processes to identify inefficiencies. Could automating repetitive tasks free up time for more strategic work? How can collaboration across teams be improved?
Refine lead nurturing strategies: Audit your current lead nurturing processes to ensure they effectively guide prospects through the funnel. Are there touchpoints that could be personalized or streamlined for better conversion rates?
Create a content plan: Develop a quarterly content calendar focused on high-impact assets that can be repurposed across multiple channels. How can your team maximize the ROI of each piece of content?
Marketing ecosystem audit
Auditing your marketing ecosystem helps uncover opportunities to optimize and improve. Evaluate partnerships for co-marketing potential, assess the effectiveness of your digital channels, and review past campaign performance to refine your strategy. Identify inefficiencies in your budget and reallocate resources to what works best. Finally, conduct a mini SWOT analysis to highlight strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that will inform your next steps.
Evaluate partnerships: Are there co-marketing or partnership opportunities that could amplify reach?
Analyze channels: Are your email, social, and paid media efforts effectively reaching your audience?
Review past campaigns: What patterns emerge from successful or underperforming efforts?
Conduct a SWOT analysis: What strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can inform your strategy?
Phase 3: Delivering impact
Leadership opportunities
Leadership is about setting a clear vision and driving impact while bringing out the best in your team. Present a marketing roadmap that aligns with company goals, and define KPIs to measure success. Refine strategies like SEO and paid media to boost engagement, and show how marketing supports the company’s mission. By combining strategic focus with thoughtful team management, you’ll establish yourself as a trusted and effective leader. Align long-term marketing strategy with organizational goals and present the roadmap to your leadership team.
Regularly communicate how your team’s work supports the company’s larger goals and vision.
Share your team’s successes with leadership to build trust and momentum.
Collaborate with other teams to ensure marketing efforts amplify company-wide initiatives.
Identify opportunities for professional development or training to help your team stay ahead in a fast-moving industry.
Lay the groundwork for long-term initiatives that can grow alongside the company’s goals.
Early wins
Early wins are your chance to build trust and momentum in your first 100 days. Focus on low-effort, high-impact projects like refreshing outdated collateral or launching a targeted campaign that aligns with company priorities. These quick successes not only demonstrate your value but also set the stage for tackling more complex initiatives. Share results effectively to establish credibility and gain buy-in for your long-term vision.
Refresh outdated collateral: Are there materials you can update to reflect your current messaging?
Launch a targeted campaign: Could a LinkedIn, TikTok, or email campaign deliver quick results?
Optimize lead capture: Are there quick process improvements to boost conversions?
Scaling your early wins
After celebrating your early wins, it’s time to build on that momentum. Take what’s worked and expand it into broader, multi-channel campaigns, using insights from those initial efforts to fine-tune your approach. Bring in tools and processes that make scaling easier without adding unnecessary complexity. Delegate responsibilities to your team, giving them the support they need to take ownership of bigger initiatives. Let your early successes guide larger investments, but stay focused on your long-term goals to keep everything on track!
Expanding campaigns: What successful initiatives can you grow into larger, multi-channel strategies? How can you ensure scalability without overextending resources?
Implementing tools: Are there marketing automation tools or processes you can adopt to support scaling efforts efficiently?
Delegating responsibilities: Which team members are ready to take on larger roles? How can you provide the right support and resources to empower them?
Informing larger investments: Use insights from early experiments to shape higher-budget campaigns or initiatives. What data can guide these decisions to ensure maximum impact?
Thought leadership
Thought leadership is your chance to elevate your company’s reputation and stand out in the industry. Speak at panels, join conferences, or write articles to share your expertise and highlight your company’s innovation. Share stories and insights that your audience will connect with, and use these opportunities to attract great talent and build valuable partnerships. Keep it all aligned with your company’s bigger goals to make sure your efforts drive real impact.
External representation: Participate in panels, conferences, or author content that highlights your company’s expertise. How can you position yourself as a thought leader in the climate tech space?
Tell success stories: Share insights and achievements that position your company as a leader. Are there case studies or testimonials that can strengthen your credibility?
Strategic engagement: Leverage external activities to attract top talent and build partnerships. How can your efforts align with business goals, such as recruiting or expanding industry connections?
By taking an active role in thought leadership, you’ll elevate both your personal brand and your organization’s reputation in the market.
Keys to success in leading marketing at a climate tech startup
Mission alignment: Ensure all efforts reflect the company’s sustainability goals and broader impact.
Customer-centricity: Make customer insights the foundation of every decision and strategy.
Empathy and listening: Build trust by genuinely engaging with team members and stakeholders.
Strategic focus: Balance short-term wins with a vision for long-term scalability.
Adaptability: Navigate constraints and organizational inertia with thoughtful questioning and data-driven prioritization.
Inspiration: Connect the team’s daily work to the company’s larger mission to foster engagement and motivation.
By focusing on these priorities, you’ll set a solid foundation for success and establish yourself as a trusted, impactful leader within your organization.
If you have any questions or need additional assistance, feel free to reach out. Good luck on your journey!