The 10 Tensions Every Strategic Marketing Advisor Must Master
If you’re in the strategic marketing world, you’ve likely experienced a scenario where you felt like you had one foot on the gas, one on the brake, and somehow you needed to steer the car too. At Heights, we've learned that mastering these competing forces isn't just a skill—it's an art form.
Whether you're guiding clients through positioning, demand generation, or aligning their marketing and sales teams, you're constantly managing competing priorities, perspectives, and emotions. The best advisors don't eliminate these tensions—they learn to hold them, work within them, and use them to create clarity and progress.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
Here are 10 core tensions every strategic marketing advisor needs to master—and the skills that make it possible.
1. Quick Wins vs. Long-Term Results: The Marketing Time Machine
Skill: Prioritization
Clients hire you to help them win the long game: to reposition in the market, increase lifetime customer value, or align marketing and sales for sustainable growth. But they also need proof that things are working now. They need early traction and ROI to justify the investment and maintain momentum.
How to Manage It:
Identify quick wins that build confidence early in the engagement.
Balance this with longer-term initiatives that create transformational results.
Frame quick wins as part of a broader strategic narrative, not just isolated tactics.
Real-World Application: When we develop a Marketing Assessment and Roadmap for clients, we deliberately structure it with a 3-phase approach. Phase 1 focuses on 90-day action steps to generate quick wins and immediate results, while simultaneously establishing foundational elements crucial for long-term success. Phase 2 builds on these early victories by strengthening sales and marketing infrastructure. Phase 3 introduces long-term strategies that position clients to thrive over multiple years with a sustainable marketing engine that consistently drives sales. This balanced approach ensures clients see immediate value while building toward transformational outcomes.
2. Patience With the Process vs. Productive Impatience for Results: Finding the Sweet Spot
Skill: Strategic Tempo Management
Great strategy takes time. You need patience to sort through complexity, align stakeholders, and build the right foundation. But you can't let the process drag on. Clients need momentum, clarity, and results.
How to Manage It:
Slow down to get the thinking right, but speed up to test and learn.
Keep the urgency on outcomes, even when you're in exploration mode.
Regularly ask, "What decision can we make today to move this forward?"
Real-World Application: In client meetings, we intentionally create space for deep exploration and alignment before rushing to tactical execution. This often means slowing conversations down to ensure we're addressing root challenges rather than symptoms. However, we never end a session without establishing clear, actionable next steps – maintaining momentum is non-negotiable. Similarly, while we empathize with marketing teams about the effort required to implement strategies, we simultaneously serve as catalysts to prevent analysis paralysis. Our role is to ensure great work doesn't get stuck in endless approval cycles but actually gets published and starts working for the business. It's a delicate balance between honoring the process and driving results.
3. Caring Deeply vs. Not Caring More Than They Do: The Emotional Tightrope
Skill: Emotional Boundaries
You care deeply about your clients' success—that's why they trust you. But you can't care more than they do. If you find yourself pushing harder than they are, you risk over-functioning, burning out, or undermining their ownership of outcomes.
How to Manage It:
Be committed, not attached.
Name the moments when ownership needs to shift back to them.
Protect your emotional energy so you stay clear and effective.
Real-World Application: Trust us, we've learned this one the hard way. As advisors who genuinely invest in our clients' outcomes, it's easy to become overly attached to results. Yet we've learned that while we can care deeply about their success, we don't have to shoulder the daily organizational resistance they face.
Our most effective role is to identify limiting beliefs and counterproductive dynamics, provide coaching and advocacy to help overcome these obstacles, while still requiring clients to own their responsibilities.
We've developed the skill of empathizing with clients' challenges without taking ownership of problems that aren't ours to solve. This balanced approach preserves our energy and ultimately serves clients better by building their capacity rather than dependency.
4. Staying Within Scope vs. Being Generous With Your Time: The Boundary Ballet
Skill: Boundaries and Generosity
Clear boundaries are like the force field in Star Trek—they protect everyone and actually make the mission possible. You want your clients to feel cared for, not nickel-and-dimed. Generosity builds trust. But without clear scope and boundaries, generosity can erode your margins, overwhelm you, and devalue your expertise.
How to Manage It:
Price your work so you can afford to be generous when it matters.
Clearly map out what is in scope and what is not so that everyone is on the same page from the outset.
Ensure your contracts and agreements are clear on the scope. Go over this verbally with clients. Don't assume they are reading them.
Communicate scope clearly and often, and flag when things move beyond it.
Create a framework for generosity, not an open door for scope creep.
Real-World Application: At Heights, we've learned that effective scope management begins with self-awareness and courage. Most clients don't intentionally push boundaries—problems arise when engagements aren't designed with accurate assumptions and clear alignment from the start.
We've relentlessly refined our processes to deliver maximum value while respecting everyone's time and resources. This discipline actually creates space for meaningful generosity.
When clients respect our boundaries, we occasionally share insights that come to us during a weekend bike ride or morning routine—moments of inspiration about their business that weren't "billable hours."
These spontaneous contributions often strengthen relationships and build trust precisely because they're genuine extensions of our partnership rather than obligatory deliverables.
5. Telling the Truth vs. Protecting the Relationship: The Candor Conundrum
Skill: Diplomacy
Spoiler alert: the client can tell when you're faking it. Your job is to tell clients what they need to hear—even when it's uncomfortable. But how you deliver hard truths matters. You want to protect the relationship while holding space for honesty and growth.
How to Manage It:
Deliver truth with empathy and respect.
Time your feedback carefully—some things are better seeded than said directly.
Facilitate self-discovery where possible; let them arrive at their own realizations.
Real-World Application: We once worked with a client whose brand messaging was significantly misaligned with their customer needs. Rather than bluntly criticizing their existing approach, we facilitated customer interviews that revealed the disconnect in their own words. This allowed the client to discover the truth organically, turning what could have been a defensive moment into an empowering realization.
The shift in messaging that followed doubled their conversion rates, and because they owned the discovery process, implementation happened without resistance. The relationship remained intact while still achieving the necessary transformation.
6. Being an Insider vs. Staying an Outsider: The Goldilocks Zone
Skill: Perspective Management
The deeper you go inside an organization, the more relational capital you build—but the harder it is to stay objective. Part of your value is bringing an outside lens. You need to stay close enough to understand, far enough away to see clearly.
How to Manage It:
Maintain healthy distance while building trust.
Continue asking naïve, outsider questions no one else is asking.
Resist being pulled into internal dynamics that cloud your judgment.
Real-World Application: In long-term client relationships, we've developed a practice we call "recalibration sessions." Every few months, we deliberately step back and revisit the client's business as if we were seeing it with fresh eyes. We document assumptions we might be making and challenge ourselves to identify blind spots that familiarity might have created.
This practice recently helped us identify a significant market opportunity that both we and the client had overlooked simply because we'd gotten too comfortable with existing strategies. By intentionally maintaining an outsider's perspective, we delivered insights that led to their most successful product launch to date.
The biggest reason outsourced vendors get fired? Perceived indifference. Don’t be “that guy”. Find rhythms to demonstrate that you’re anything but indifferent to your client’s business. Find ways to prevent any sort of “strategy slump.”
Afterall, if you don’t, some other so-called-strategist could come along with an observation about your clients’ marketing that could put you on the defensive. Let’s avoid that.
7. Customization vs. Frameworks: The Chef's Approach
Skill: Adaptive Consulting
Every client believes they're unique—and they are. But you also have repeatable frameworks that make your work effective. The balance is delivering tailored solutions without reinventing the wheel every time.
How to Manage It:
Customize the application, not the entire process.
Be transparent: "Here's the proven framework. Let's adapt it for your needs."
Allow space for co-creation, so clients feel it's built with them, not for them.
Real-World Application: It's like cooking—first you master the recipe and understand the rules, then you can thoughtfully break them and improvise.
At Heights, we regularly apply proven frameworks like StoryBrand and Endless Customers to our clients' businesses. But we don't apply them as one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, we selectively adapt elements that will work for each client's unique business context and goals.
This approach gives clients confidence that they're benefiting from established best practices while still receiving a solution tailored to their specific challenges. The framework provides the structure, but the implementation is always customized.
8. Strategic Vision vs. Operational Reality: The Dream-to-Do Translation
Skill: Practical Visioning
Clients need big thinking—new strategies, bold positioning, untapped markets. But they also have operational constraints: limited teams, budgets, and systems. You have to inspire possibility without ignoring reality.
How to Manage It:
Anchor visionary ideas in sequenced, actionable plans.
Identify what's now, what's next, and what's later.
Balance imagination and discipline—dream big, but stay executable.
Real-World Application: Being an effective advisor means having the courage to propose transformational ideas a client can't necessarily implement immediately, while being honest when expectations and resources don't align.
We recently worked with a client whose growth goals required a complete overhaul of their customer journey. Rather than scaling back the vision to fit current constraints, we created a phased implementation plan that allowed them to make incremental progress while building capacity.
This approach maintained the ambitious vision while acknowledging operational realities, resulting in sustainable change rather than abandoned initiatives.
9. Strategic Neutrality vs. Having a Point of View: Be Like Ted Lasso
Skill: Confident Advising
Some advisors avoid giving a clear recommendation—they stay neutral. Others push too hard for their view, leaving clients feeling steamrolled. The best advisors balance neutrality with strong, confident guidance.
How to Manage It:
Know when to guide the decision and when to facilitate discussion.
Have a clear point of view, but remain open to new perspectives.
Encourage shared ownership of the decision, even if you lead them to it.
Real-World Application: Be Ted Lasso, not Gordon Ramsay. The best advisors, like Ted, lead with curiosity and bring out the best in their teams while still maintaining a clear vision. They ask insightful questions that guide without dictating, and they're confident enough to stand by their recommendations without becoming rigid.
When clients push back, they listen genuinely rather than defending their position. This approach builds trust and ensures clients feel ownership of the final decision, even when it closely aligns with what you originally proposed.
Side note: Find ways to work in famous characters to provide examples for your clients. This will not only help illuminate your point better, it may make them smile and will bring levity to the situation.
10. Building Capability vs. Creating Dependency: The Liberation Mission
Skill: Empowerment
Your job isn't to make yourself indispensable. It's to build your client's capacity to think and act strategically on their own. But some clients may prefer you to do the thinking for them—or keep you around as a crutch.
How to Manage It:
Teach as you go. Explain your thinking, not just your answers.
Gradually hand back decision-making power.
Structure engagements around building capability, not dependency.
Real-World Application: We believe in being a liberating force, not an occupying one. Several times each year, we help clients identify and hire internal talent that will strengthen their marketing capabilities for the long term.
With one retail client, we collaborated on defining the right marketing role, assisted with the hiring process, and then helped onboard the new team member to ensure continuity. While this approach might seem counterintuitive from a business perspective, it actually deepens client relationships by demonstrating our commitment to their sustainable success rather than our ongoing billable hours.
Our goal is to combine our specialized external perspective with enhanced internal capabilities that serve them long after our engagement ends.
The Craft Is in the Tension
At Heights, we've built our practice around these tensions not because we've mastered them perfectly, but because we recognize they're where the real work happens.
The magic isn't in avoiding them—it's in dancing with them intentionally. And occasionally stepping on toes. (Hey, we're human too.)
These tensions aren't problems to solve—they're dynamics to manage. The best strategic marketing advisors learn to be comfortable here: balancing speed and patience, closeness and objectivity, generosity and boundaries.
Master these, and you'll bring clarity where there's confusion, momentum where there's inertia, and confidence where there's doubt.
For more on the topic of holding tensions in balance, check out The Power of Healthy Tension, by Tim Arnold. He is a friend and client who has influenced our thinking on this.
