You own marketing and sales. There is one customer to close. The sales cycle is 30 to 120 days. Everything you know about positioning, segmentation, pipeline and outreach applies. The one thing that changes is that you are usually bad at doing it for yourself.
Six stages, run in roughly the order a real go-to-market runs.
Your window, your constraint, your first-pass direction.
Four actions. Project set up. First standup run.
Gets you employed. Resume current, LinkedIn open, warm conversations booked this week, applications out to roles that fit what you already are.
Gets you employed in the right place. Direction, industry, organization fit, positioning. Makes the cash track sharper every week. Never blocks it.
Pick your weighting now. Write it at the top of your state file. Revisit monthly.
Do each career-track exercise in one sitting. Take what it gives you. Spend the rest of the week on pipeline. A bridge role is not abandoning the plan; it funds it.
Where do I want to be in five to ten years, and what does that mean for the next role?
Not a title. The thing people call you for. If you can't say it yet, write three candidates and pick the one that makes you slightly uncomfortable.
Last three roles. Weeks you were energized, weeks you were drained. Strategy or execution, team-building or IC, zero-to-one or scale. The pattern is data.
A skill gap closed, a category entered, a title step, a network, a leader to learn from. Two or three. This is your filter on every opportunity.
One paragraph: the direction statement. One sentence: "The next role needs to give me ___." Both go at the top of your state file.
Which industries should I target?
Does your experience transfer. Does the problem set interest you. Does it fit the direction statement.
Is it hiring marketers at your level right now. Growing or at least stable. Comp in your range. Check with evidence: an hour in LinkedIn job search filtered to your titles, two people per candidate industry, your AI pulling hiring news.
Where you've worked (highest transfer). Adjacent industries that buy the same way or sell to the same customer. One slot for an industry you're drawn to without a track record.
Two or three target industries, ranked, one line each on why. One should be the industry you just left unless you have a reason to exclude it. You know it, you have a network in it, and your first interviews will probably come from it.
What kind of place do I want to work, and what will I say no to?
Decide what you're optimizing for and be honest about it. Mission versus comp. Stability versus upside. Scale and resources versus autonomy and scope. Remote versus office. Builder versus operator. Whether marketing has a real seat.
Must-haves (five or fewer, or they aren't). Nice-to-haves. Dealbreakers.
Compensation floor and target, as actual numbers. The floor is where you keep looking even with no other offer. Decide it now, not in a negotiation.
Size range, stage, funding, sector, geography, reporting line. This becomes the filter for the target account list.
The lists, the numbers, and a one-line ideal organization profile. "Series B to D B2B SaaS, 100 to 500 people, marketing reports to CEO or CRO, remote-first, mission I can explain to my kids."
When someone looks me up, do they see a clear, consistent story that matches what I'm selling?
Positioning first. One or two sentences: who you're for, what you do, what's different about how you do it. Specific enough that half of hiring managers say "not for us." A positioning statement nobody rules out isn't positioning.
| Asset | Standard |
|---|---|
| Resume | Rewritten against the positioning, not updated. Outcomes and numbers up front. One long master; short targeted variants per role type, built by your AI from the master. |
| Headline is positioning, not title. About is the direction statement for an outside reader. Two or three work samples in Featured. Open-to-work on, recruiter-only is fine. | |
| Work samples | Three to five pieces of evidence. Campaign recap with results, anonymized strategy doc, dashboard, a short problem-solved write-up. Marketers who show their work get hired faster. Folder or one-pager, not a new portfolio site. |
| One-liner | The answer to "so what are you looking for?" Said out loud until it sounds like you. |
| References | Three to five, lined up before you need them, told what you're going for. |
Who am I selling to, where are they in the process, and what's the next action for each?
Companies, not open roles. Roles open and close; companies you want to work for are stable targets, and many good roles fill before or right after posting. Tier A, B, C.
Per A and B account: the person you'd report to, a peer in marketing, anyone in your network with a way in. Plus specialist recruiters. Plus your warm network.
No next action means it's parked. The tracker's job is to tell you what to do next when you open it.
A spreadsheet. Companies tab, contacts tab, activity log. Notion or Airtable if you already live there. No CRM software. Your AI can hold it as a table in the project or you paste status in at standup.
What goes out, to whom, through which channel, at what volume, every week?
| Channel | How it works | Weekly baseline |
|---|---|---|
| Warm network | Short, specific message: what I'm looking for, what kind of company, who do you know. Specificity makes a referral possible. "Open to anything" produces nothing. | Everyone, once; follow-ups monthly |
| Second-degree asks | The 20-minute conversations your network opens. Questions about their world, not a pitch. End every one with "who else should I talk to?" This is the engine. | 3 to 5 held |
| Direct to targets | Hiring manager or peer at A and B accounts, role open or not. About them, with a point of view. Expect 10 to 20 percent response and call that fine. | 15 to 25 messages |
| Recruiters | Specialists in your range and industries. A channel, not a strategy. Don't wait on them. | 5 to 10 total, monthly update |
| Direct application | Every real fit within 48 hours, targeted resume variant, plus a human at the company messaged the same day. No human contact means it's a lottery ticket. | All real fits |
| Visibility | Optional. A LinkedIn post every week or two with a real point of view. Compounds slowly. Never a substitute for outreach. | 0 to 1 post |
Templates written once: network ask, intro request, hiring-manager outreach, no-response follow-up, post-conversation thank-you, "accepted elsewhere, stay in touch." Your AI personalizes the first two lines. You approve and send. Nothing goes out you wouldn't say out loud.
What did I commit to yesterday. What happened. Today's three actions. What's slipping. The AI updates the state file and pipeline. You do the actions.
Pipeline movement by stage. Volume against targets. Response rate by channel and message. One adjustment for next week, not five.
Revisit weighting, direction, target industries. If three months in you have no interviews from a target industry, the market has voted.
Conversations held per week (the leading indicator). Response rate by channel. Pipeline by stage. Days since last contact on every open thread. Interviews per month. Everything else is noise.
A dedicated project with three things in it: this process, your state file, and a system prompt that runs standups and keeps the state current. The state file is what matters. Without it the AI is a motivational speaker. With it, it remembers your commitments, your pipeline, your templates and your direction, and holds you to them.
Track weighting. Direction statement. Target industries. Organization profile. Positioning. Weekly volume targets. Pipeline or link to it. This week's commitments. Running log of what you learned.
Resume variants from the master. Personalized first lines. Company research before conversations. Interview prep against a job description. Post-interview debriefs. Offer comparison. It's your marketing department and your chief of staff; your time goes to conversations.
By end of week two you're running the full rhythm and the pipeline is doing the thinking about what comes next. From there the job is to hit your weekly numbers and change one thing at a time.