Marketing Leader Performance Accelerator

You’re capable. You’re busy. But the system keeps you from operating at the level your role requires.

The Marketing Leader Performance Accelerator is a 6-week small-cohort working lab for marcomms leaders who want to move from reacting to requests to shaping strategy.

You bring real challenges from your work.

Together we work through them.

This is not six useful topics delivered in sequence. It is one problem solved progressively over six weeks. Each week’s output feeds directly into the next. By Week 6, you’re not assembling a plan from scratch. You’ve been building it since Week 1.

By the end of six weeks you’ll have:

• a clearer understanding of the real problem you’re trying to solve
• stronger frameworks for influencing leadership decisions
• systems that protect strategic work
• a strategic roadmap with milestones to move your initiative forward

Why This Program Exists

Marcomms leaders are expected to operate strategically. The reality of the role pushes in the opposite direction.

Requests arrive faster than priorities can be set. Important work gets buried under urgent work. The influence marcomms leaders should have inside their institutions never fully materializes.

Most leaders aren’t stuck because the work is too hard. They’re stuck because the role itself was never designed to be strategic.

Three structural forces drive this. Not bad people. Not weak teams. The structure.

The Internal Agency Trap.

Your institution treats marketing like a vendor. Requests come in, work goes out. The more you execute, the harder it is to be seen as anything other than execution.

The Capacity Illusion.

You’re busy. Leadership reads that as full. But busy isn’t the same as strategic. The time to diagnose, to influence, to shape decisions never makes it onto the calendar.

The Authority Gap.

You have accountability for outcomes. You don’t have authority over the decisions that drive them. Marketing gets measured on enrollment numbers it had no hand in shaping.

None of these are solved by working harder. They require a different operating model.

This program teaches that model.

If you don’t decide what to optimize for, something else will decide for you.

Who This Is For

This lab is designed for aspiring and current marcomms leaders with department oversight, supervisory responsibility, or decision-making authority who want to move from reacting to requests to shaping strategy.

It is the right fit if you:

• feel capable but under-leveraged inside your institution
• are frustrated by constantly choosing between reactive work and strategic work
• want practical tools you can apply immediately, not frameworks to study in the abstract
• are ready to bring a real challenge and work on it during the program

It is not the right fit if you are looking for a lecture series, a conference-style learning experience, or a generic management course. This is applied work. It requires you to show up with something real.

Still not sure if this is for you?

How the Accelerator Works

Six weeks. Ninety minutes live each week on Zoom. Ninety minutes per week applying tools and principles to your real-world work. Weekly applied updates inside the cohort. Direct feedback and 1:1 touchpoints.

Before Week 1 — Self-Assessment Canvas

Before the first session, you’ll complete a short self-assessment covering your influence, constraints, leverage, and team capacity. The facilitator reviews it before you meet. Week 1 doesn’t start with introductions. It starts with a working hypothesis about your specific situation.

Week 1 — Strategic Role Reset

We start by examining how the marcomms leadership role actually functions inside institutions. You’ll map where your time, attention, and influence are currently going and identify where meaningful change can begin. This creates the foundation for the work ahead.

Week 2 — Diagnose the System

Many marcomms pros know something is wrong but not exactly what. This week changes that. You’ll work through a structured excavation process, pushing past symptoms to find the specific operational problem beneath them. You’ll name your Critical Success Factors, build a clear problem statement, and stress-test it before moving forward. This is the hinge of the program. Everything in Weeks 3-6 is built on what you produce here.

Week 3 — Frame Leadership Decisions

Good ideas stall when they aren’t framed in ways leadership teams can act on. You’ll learn practical frameworks that structure strategic conversations and clarify tradeoffs and incentives. This is where influence actually starts.

Week 4 — Build Credibility Through Evidence

Influence grows when recommendations are supported by clear evidence and communicated effectively. You’ll practice translating insights into leadership-ready narratives that build trust and confidence without requiring a PowerPoint deck.

Week 5 — Create Operational Bandwidth

Strategic work requires time and focus that most marcomms leaders don’t currently have. You’ll examine how work flows through your team and install systems that help prioritize the initiatives that matter most.

Week 6 — Execution and Momentum

The final week focuses on turning insights into action. You’ll build a strategic 6-12 month roadmap with milestones that helps move your initiative forward and maintain progress after the program ends.

What You’ll Build

One tangible tool per week. All of them designed for the real environment marcomms leaders operate in.

• Constraints Audit — so you know what’s actually limiting progress, not just what feels urgent
• Leadership Decision Triangle — to frame strategic conversations in language leadership can act on
• Capacity Audit & Impact/Effort Work Map — to stop spreading effort across everything and focus where it moves outcomes
• Request Intake and Triage Framework — to manage incoming work without losing strategic momentum
• Strategic Roadmap with Milestones — your concrete plan for moving the initiative forward after the program ends
• Win Tracker — to document progress in a way that builds internal credibility over time

The Framework

The program is built around a simple leadership operating system.

SEE

Understand what’s really happening.

Strategic leaders begin by diagnosing the environment around them — identifying signals, constraints, and the underlying problems beneath daily requests. Most leaders skip this step and go straight to solutions. This is where that habit breaks.

SHIFT

Frame better leadership decisions.

Once the real challenge is clear, you learn how to structure strategic conversations so leadership teams can move forward.

This includes tools that clarify tradeoffs, incentives, and evidence in language decision-makers can act on.

SUSTAIN

Protect strategic work.

Strategic thinking only matters if it leads to consistent action. This phase focuses on installing systems that help protect time, prioritize work, and maintain momentum when the next round of requests arrives.

Where These Tools Come From

These tools were not built in a classroom. They were developed by a battle-hardened marcomms pro with over 30 years inside real marcomms functions, who built a marketing office from a one-person shop into a full department, and who served as national president of NCMPR.

The problems in this program are problems I lived inside. The tools are the ones that actually worked under real organizational pressure, with real budget constraints, and inside real institutional politics.

They help you:

• Build stronger personal discipline and focused planning
• Build resilient team systems
• Do work that moves the institution forward

Founding Cohort

The first cohort is small by design. You’ll get direct access, real feedback on real work, and participate alongside a very small cohort of like-minded marcomms pros.

Founding cohort members receive:

• Direct access in a small-group setting with real feedback on real work
• All program tools, reusable long after the cohort ends
• Twelve monthly group check-ins for ongoing refinement and accountability
• Quarterly 1:1 coaching sessions over the next year to ensure the learning sticks
• Access to new tools and frameworks as they launch

Founding cohort investment: $995.

Cohort #2: September & October. Dates TBD.

Pricing holds for all 2026 cohorts. As the program matures, so will the investment.

How This Program Pays For Itself

If the program helps you accomplish even one of the following, the investment can quickly justify itself:

• fixes a broken internal process that wastes time or resources
• improves how requests are evaluated, prioritized, and output measured
• gains support for a strategic initiative
• redirects effort toward higher-impact work

Most marcomms leaders already know what needs to change.

What they often lack is the structure and momentum to make those changes happen.

Scroll down for tips on how to have this conversation with your boss.

FAQs

Do I really need to bring a specific challenge?

Yes. You’ll get the most value when you bring real initiatives or challenges you want to move forward. You’ll complete an exercise to identify them.

Is this a lecture-style course?

No. This is a working lab. Sessions focus on understanding tools and frameworks and then applying them to real challenges.

How much time does this require?

Ninety minutes of live session per week. Another ninety applying the tools to your own work. Three hours a week, focused, for six weeks.

Is this just for college marketers?

The tools were built there, but the structural problems this program addresses exist across matrixed organizations of any size. If the three traps above sound familiar, you’re in the right place.

How is this different than attending a conference or another marketing or leadership workshop?

Conferences expose you to ideas, and most workshops provide generic frameworks and examples.

This is applied learning.

Most training teaches execution. This teaches how to think before you execute. And not through case studies, but through applying tools to your own work in real time.

You leave with:

• Active SMART goals based on the challenges you want to tackle
• A decision framework you have practice using
• A weekly discipline that is installed, not just discussed

It is built specifically for marcomms leaders running teams who are accountable for results but without full authority inside decentralized or matrixed organizations.

Can’t I just get this from reading a book?

Books provide insight.

They don’t provide accountability.

They don’t adapt to your institutional politics, workload, or team structure.

The tools in this program were built through 30 years of lived experience.

A book might spark awareness. This lab changes behavior.

I already know how to do some of this stuff. What makes this different?

Most experienced leaders know what they should do. They struggle to do it consistently.

This lab closes the gap between knowing and executing:

• The goals you set but then die a month later
• The boundaries that collapse under pressure
• The priorities that get buried

It compresses the learning curve through:

• Structure
• Accountability
• A cohort of peers operating under similar constraints

I need help convincing my boss. Got any tips?

Yes. Download this Supervisor ROI Guide that details benefits of the accelerator to frame your conversations.

When does this program start?

Fall cohort: September & October. Dates arranged with participant calendars.

The Commitment

This is a working lab. You’ll apply these tools to your real work, not case studies.

If you show up and do the work, you’ll notice a change in how you operate and think. We’ll connect regularly over the next year to help you integrate these frameworks into your workflows. That’s how you will zero in on building the systems and influence to change what’s keeping you from moving forward.

Sign Up for the Accelerator

Questions? Hit me up at jeff@jeffebbing.com