Why You Should Care About Internal Marketing

How to Document, Share and Get Credit For Your Work

There’s a famous philosophical saying that goes like this: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? The crux of the argument is that while the tree failing means that yes, it makes a sound, it doesn’t make a noise. The definition of noise is if someone else hears it, and if there is nobody around, it cannot make a noise.

This philosophical question applies to the work that we all do each and every day at work, and is why internal marketing is important. Said another way: If you work on something amazing at work, and nobody hears about it, did you really do the work?

In this blogpost, we’re going to talk about the importance of internal marketing, and how to make sure that you not only do exceptional work, but make sure that it gets seen by others in your organization. This will help you get credit and exposure, but also connect you to other opportunities and ideas, while helping your colleagues and peers.

Personal Story

When I was working on a project in my second year in consulting, we had just wrapped up a final presentation to a client and we were about to go to the airport to head back home. I was excited and relieved that the project was over, but happy because we got great feedback from the client and I had played a major role in the work that we did. Before I left, my manager pulled me aside and told me to write up a document summarizing what I had done, the lessons I had learned, and a quick summary of our project team’s work. I was exhausted and tired especially after a 10 week sprint to the finish line, but I put together what she had asked and sent it to her over the weekend and didn’t think much of it.

A few weeks later, I got an email from a Senior Partner within the firm.He mentioned that he heard about the work on our project and that my manager had mentioned I had put together a great summary of what we did and what we learned, and he asked if he could see the presentation and summary email. These were fairly common requests, so again, I didn’t think anything of it, and was happy to help.

Later that week, I got another email from another partner, who had told me that he had heard I was the SME (Subject Matter Expert) for this particular type of project ,and he asked me if I could jump on the phone with him because he heard from my manager that I was the expert in this particular field and I had knowledge that I could share. He asked if I could jump on a meeting with him and his client to talk through some of the challenges that we had solved on this project. I think at this point you are getting the point

Later that year in my year end evaluation, one of the pieces of positive feedback was that I did a “good job that year sharing knowledge and making sure others could benefit from my work.” I felt funny because I didn’t actually think to do any of this, but rather, only because my manager asked me to put together the summary did any of this happen.

Without knowing it, my manager was setting me up to make sure that I got credit and attribution for the work I had done. She knew back then what I would learn from this experience: While doing great work is a prerequisite to success– it’s rarely sufficient. To benefit from your good work, you also need to market your output to people whose opinions matter. And that is why we need to do Internal Marketing.

What is it Internal Marketing?

Internal marketing is the act of surfacing and making others aware of your work through documentation so you both can be more collaborative, effective and informed about how you do your jobs. Generally speaking, internal marketing outputs include: 

• Powerpoint decks

• Google Docs

• Memos

• Internal or External blogposts (ex: internal wiki, external blogpost)

• Presentations to groups that are recorded (Ex: Zoom Webinar)

Internal marketing means making sure your boss, leaders and other close teams have visibility into your output. 

Internal marketing, or the act of sharing the work you did with other key stakeholders helps you help others, spreads information sharing, helps you build your own credibility, and ensures you get the appropriate citation for the work that you are doing. This is a critical part of every knowledge worker’s job that goes unnoticed, but can often be a huge difference when it comes to getting ideas surfaced, getting projects off the ground and funded, or getting credit and rewarded for the work that you do.

Ideas, insights, projects, and deliverables are the primary artifacts of knowledge workers. And while knowledge workers produce a lot of content and work on a lot of deliverables, they don’t always get noticed. Here are a few stats:

What Does the Research Say?

• 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company information and news.

• It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion annually.

• 53 percent of C-suite respondents said the knowledge-related costs of losing key employees falls somewhere between $50K-$299K per employee. 

• 45% of HR leaders do not think annual performance reviews are an accurate appraisal for employee’s work. (Source)

Why is it important?

As the statistics show, it's easy, especially in large organizations for knowledge, insights, and learnings to go unseen. There are a number reasons why this happens, and why Making sure others are aware of your work is important:

• People Get Busy - We all get busy at work, and aren’t always aware of what else is going on within the company or the team. How many times have you worked on a project just to find out someone else in your team or in the company was already doing something similar? It happens pretty often, even in small organizations.

• We’re Focused on our goals- Rightly so, most of us at work are focused on our own goals and priorities and are not always thinking about what other people are doing. As such, it can be easy to miss other projects, workstreams or pieces of information that could be related or valuable to what we are doing. 

• Cognitive Load Theory -  Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) was developed in 1988 by John Swelter and states that working short term memory has a limited capacity. Overloading short-term memory can negatively affect the processing of new information and the creation of long-term memories. In other words, distractions or poor communication can increase cognitive load and higher cognitive load interferes with the ability to learn. Each day, we have numerous distractions coming at us while we are at work, whether that’s emails, slack messages, phone calls, and anything else in between. It’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle, and to lose sight of things that come across your plate. Even if everyone on your team is measured on the same goals or metrics, chances are you can’t remember what your colleagues did last quarter, and chances are they probably don’t remember what you did either. Surfacing these insights can be helpful to your colleagues, as they often might benefit in knowing your work, and vice versa.

• We Don’t Work in Isolation - Most people don’t work in isolation. They work in complex organizations defined by interdependencies among people. Making sure that others are aware not just of the projects you are working on but also the individual efforts that you contribute to something ensures you have something to show for the contributions you make to larger projects and tasks that get completed.

To illustrate the point of sharing your work, Patrick McKenzie, writes:

“Telling people you can do great work is easy: any idiot can do it, and many idiots do. Having people tell people you do great work is an improvement. It suffers because measuring individual productivity on a team effort is famously difficult, and people often have no particular reason to trust the representations of the people doing the endorsements.

Work you can show off, though, is prima facie evidence of your skills. After your portfolio includes it, your ability to sell your skills gets markedly better. Given that most people's net worth is almost 100% invested in their personal capital (i.e. if you're a young engineer the net present value of all future salary absolutely swamps everything in your bank account), this is a fairly radical improvement in your present situation for not a very radical change in how you go about things.”

What Do The Critics Say?

• It’s self-promotion - It can be helpful for others to know what you are doing and you can use it as a way to promote your work. Both of those things can be true.

• It feels yucky and personal-brand building like - I acknowledge it may feel unnatural for some, but I would suggest a re-frame: if you thought the work you were doing could benefit others in your organization, would you be willing to proactively tell and share it? 

• It takes up time - Think of it as an investment and something that is related to the outcome of your project or deliverable, and not as a separate distinct task

Why Does Internal Marketing Matter to You?

Shouldn’t you just be focused on doing good work? As I said before, doing good work is necessary but insufficient. Here is why Internal Marketing helps and matters to you:

1) Getting Your Ideas Heard 

Within an organization, innovation, and good ideas can come from anywhere. While you can make some arguments that really good ideas tend to come from those who are experienced, in tune with the customers’ needs, or have deep knowledge or expertise, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas in the company. However, in many organizations, the ideas that get acted upon tend to have themes for why they do - they come from the top, or the highest paid person in the room (HIPPO) they are the shiny object or cool idea, or in some cases, they have real merit.

But there’s nothing to suggest that only a certain group of people has a monopoly on good ideas. If you have a good idea, and want it to be heard and acted upon, others need to hear about it. Internal marketing helps make sure your ideas are heard. This manifests itself in a lot of different ways, such as at Amazon, in the form of written six page docs, or at consulting firms, in the form of powerpoint decks or slides.

2) Performance and Acknowledgement of Performance 

It’s not just about doing the work, it's making sure people know you did it. Here’s the thing: in an organization, there really isn't anything you can work on alone that drives impact. Everything you do at work more or less requires you to work with other people. That makes it really hard to understand and evaluate how people contribute or make an impact especially on cross functional projects. It’s no wonder why most people don’t think their manager or supervisor has an accurate picture of what they do, even if that is supposed to be their job. 

Furthermore, even roles that traditionally you could argue could be done solo (ex: working in sales) are no longer the case.  When you work on things with other people, its clear to you who is working on what, but afterwards, it may not be clear to others about the work you did (collectively) or the work you did (specifically) Making sure others, like your boss, or your team lead, or other peers are aware of what you are doing.

3) Capturing Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge, skills, and abilities an individual gains through experience that is often difficult to put into words or otherwise communicate. For example, if you were to invest in internal marketing, perhaps you want to create a deck that highlights a new product launch you just executed. You might do this by a creating a document that highlights a project you worked on, how you completed the project, the lessons that you learned, as well as sourcing additional documents that are of value is one way of helping codify tacit knowledge in the workplace. This benefits your employer, make no mistake, but it also benefits you. 

4) Codifying Your Learnings - As Career Expert and Editor of The Jungle Gym Nick deWilde notes, “One of the best ways to internalize the knowledge you’ve gained is to share what you’ve learned with others.” Creating a deck that summarizes your learnings, presenting your most recent project to a group of peers in your company with a similar role, or even just summarizing your project to your manager or cross functional teammates in a public setting forces you to write down or codify what you actually learned and did. This helps clarify your thinking and fill in any missing pieces.

What’s The So What?

• If you are doing great work, other people need to know about it

• If you are in an organization that values ideas, sharing them will be valued and appreciated

• Work moves fast and people forget things. You need to remind them to make sure that your work is properly sourced and attributed

• Helping codify knowledge and learning creates benefits for your team and organization such as saving time, reducing duplicative work, etc

• When you codify and keep track of your work, you can collect “artifacts” that you can take with you to your next role or job

Examples of Internal Marketing

Here are a few examples of how various people we spoke to in different industries and roles used internal marketing:

• Management Consulting - After finishing a project with a new client, John’s team decided to put together a presentation summary of the project, what they did, the main challenges they solved, and the lessons that they learned. They held a 30 minute webinar/meeting, and shared the deck with the folks who attended. The materials from the meeting were then used in future proposals for projects of a similar kind, which helped those project teams deliver higher quality work

• Sales Strategy: Each year, the sales strategy team at Jamie’s company has to do forecasting based on the new territory assignments. The first year that Jamie did this, she had to start from scratch, which took her a very long time. She realized that, in the other industries and verticals (Ex: Financial Services & Healthcare) the sales strategy teams over there were also going through the same exercise. She partnered with those teams to share her learnings, and so the next year, all of them were able to save time because they were able to learn from one another

• Product Marketing - David led a cross functional team of product managers, sales people, designers and engineers to complete a refresh of the messaging and positioning on the external-facing website and content for one of his company’s core products. After the project was finished, David created a document which contained a summary of the project, the key insights learned, and how they could improve the next time. He then shared the summary in an email to the general manager of the product, who asked him to present this at the next quarterly all hands meeting. David’s template is now used at the completion of any cross functional project, and he received major kudos from his manager, General Manager, and the broader project team.

Practical Advice on How To Get Started with Internal Marketing

The good news is that everyone can participate in internal marketing and that it not only helps you but it also helps your company. Here are some things you can do right now:

• Go through your most recent projects and find one that you are proud of - Find something that you recently worked on. It could be a project you finished, a set of analysis you completed, or a presentation you delivered, or anything else that embodies exceptional work that you find impactful, and that you think others might benefit from.

• Share it with others  - Your company may have their own knowledge management or internal knowledge solution, whether that’s Sharepoint, an internal wiki, or any other internal platform. That’s a great place to start, but you’ll also want to make sure that others see it

• Schedule time to share what you learned - For example, on one of my teams, each month we do a “Brunch and Learn,” where our whole team gets together and someone presents something they are working on. The goal of this is to share the project, share the learnings, and share content and information (outputs) that could be useful and relevant to the rest of us. At the end, we’ll always ask questions, and see if there’s any way that someone else on the team can integrate the learnings into something they are working on.

• Create a BHD (Best Hits Document) For Your Personal Performance Evaluations - You’ll also want to create a document which has information and links to your work so that you are ready for your performance evaluations. This way, when it comes time to evaluate how you performed over the course of the quarter/year you have documentation that you can share with your manager or your leader so they remember the outcomes and impact of your work. You can use whatever format you’d like (ex: Google Docs, Notion, etc) but the goal here is to put together a document that easily links to any internal marketing that you’ve done for the year so that your manager knows what to talk about when they review you for your performance evaluation. This document also doubles as your own internal resume bank, in case you ever want to include anything on it on your resume, or your LinkedIn profile, or any other area that you have a digital presence.

Conclusion

Organizations are a living and breathing mixture of people, ideas, technology and processes. On any given day, it can be hard to get noticed for the work you do, and the ideas you have. Internal marketing gets your ideas heard, helps you contribute to the organization, connects you with other people, and ensures that you are getting credit and attributed for the outcomes you drive.

Furthermore, if done right, the outputs you create for internal marketing purposes can be used in your own personal and professional development endeavors. Whether that’s on your LinkedIn profile, in your digital portfolio, presenting at a conference or with a future employer, these artifacts help as you evolve and grow throughout your career.

Additional Learning and Reading

• The Learning Loop of Knowledge - Nick deWilde 

• Don’t End The Week with Nothing - Patrick McKenzie