Twenty-two years ago, Lee-Ann Johnstone stumbled into affiliate marketing before it even had a name.
She wasn't recruited into it. She wasn't chasing it. It found her, sucked her in, and kept her there for two decades.
Today she runs Konverj, a UK-based affiliate agency serving SaaS, B2B, subscriptions, e-commerce, and gaming clients. She sits in the kind of room where strategy gets decided, not just executed.
I had her on Affiliate Nerd Out recently for a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time. The topic: what does it actually take to go from affiliate manager to CMO?
Not the polished LinkedIn version. The real answer.
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Nobody gave affiliate managers a map. They built it themselves.
When Lee-Ann started, affiliate marketing wasn't even a category. There was no playbook. No certification. No mentor who had done it before at scale.
She was building the plane and flying it at the same time.
That origin shapes everything she believes about what makes a great affiliate manager. Because the people who survived those early years didn't survive because they had the right credentials. They survived because they stayed curious, asked relentless questions, and never assumed they had it figured out.
That mindset is exactly what gets people stuck later, when they think they do have it figured out.
The moment affiliate managers plateau, and what to do about it
Here's what Lee-Ann said happens around year two or three:
You start to feel comfortable.
“When you stop learning every day, that's where you start to actually fall behind on your skill set.”
Comfort is the ceiling. The managers who break through it are the ones who treat discomfort as a signal to lean in, not pull back.
Lee-Ann frames AI the same way. She's been in this industry through four iterations of the internet. And she considers herself the stupidest person in the room when it comes to AI, despite having 20 years of experience behind her. She's learning it like a brand new skill.
That's the posture. That's what separates the people who make it to director level from the ones who stall out as senior managers.
Meet Lee- Ann Johnstone
Lee-Ann Johnstone is the founder of Konverj, a UK-based affiliate marketing agency serving SaaS, B2B, subscription, ecommerce, and gaming clients. She has spent 22 years in affiliate marketing, building her career on commercial negotiation and partner relationship management before founding her own agency.
She is now pushing to become a thought leader in partnerships, staying ahead of the AI shift reshaping the industry, and remains a regular presence at conferences like Affiliate Summit East and ACM.
Affiliate managers are the most skilled digital marketers alive. Nobody tells them that.
“Affiliate managers have to be some of the most skilled digital marketers because affiliate crosses and traverses all channels. You need to understand paid media buying, social media, brand strategy, compliance, relationship management, data and analytics, SEO, and AEO. It's all rolled into this one job.”
That's not a resume flex. That's the actual job description nobody writes down.
Most digital marketers specialize. A paid media buyer knows paid media. A social strategist knows social. An SEO specialist knows SEO. An affiliate manager knows all of it, because their partners operate across all of it. They have to.
That's not a liability. That's a superpower. And if you're in affiliate marketing right now, you're learning multiple skills across digital without pigeonholing yourself into one channel.
The skill most affiliate managers skip, and it costs them later
Strategy.
Not the word on the slide deck. Not the section header in the quarterly review. The actual discipline of planning before doing.
Lee-Ann put it plainly: people focus on the execution and forget about the planning and strategy, which is the thing that should lead the program forward, not the afterthought after execution.
Most affiliate managers I know live in task mode. Recruit a partner. Activate them. Hit a deadline. Move on. The strategy conversation happens at the end of the quarter when someone asks why numbers are flat, and suddenly everyone is reverse-engineering a plan that should have existed months ago.
Flip it. Plan first. Execute second. The managers who make it to director level aren't the ones who do the most. They're the ones who think before they do.
The skills that actually transfer to the C-suite
| SKILL | WHERE IT COMES FROM | WHY IT MATTERS AT EXECUTIVE LEVEL |
| Commercial negotiation | Early affiliate management | Every partnership, vendor, and client deal runs through this |
| Cross-channel fluency | Managing diverse partner types | CMOs can't afford to be single-channel thinkers |
| Planning and strategy | Running programs with real budgets | Execution without strategy burns budget and goodwill |
| Relationship building | Partner recruitment and retention | People buy people. That never changes |
| Inquisitive mindset | Learning a new partner's business every cycle | AI is a fourth iteration of the internet. You have to keep asking questions |
The one that Lee-Ann learned earliest, from a manager in the paid media world, was commercial negotiation. She called it artful negotiation. If you know how to commercially negotiate with your partners for the traffic and customers they're bringing you, that's half the battle won.
How to actually learn across channels when you're not working across channels
Lee-Ann reads. A lot. About six hours a day, looking at other people's content, white papers, and the news, asking herself how all of it affects what she does.
But she doesn't just consume. She filters. Hard.
Her two questions for everything she reads
So what?
Why should I care?
And she added something most people skip: question what you're reading, because just because it's in print doesn't mean it's how things actually work in the real world.
Be the curator of your own education, not a passive consumer of whatever the content algorithm feeds you. Become the thought leader in your niche. The quicker you become a thought leader, the more people want your services and your skills.
For me, that came through podcasting. Affiliate Nerd Out has been my education and my content at the same time. Find your own version of that.
The Affiliate Manager to CMO Career Ladder, Laid Out
If you're an affiliate manager right now and want to be in a CMO seat by 2030, here's the path Lee-Ann described:
- Affiliate Manager: master execution, but start building strategy muscle now
- Director Level: own the program strategy and manage a team or agency underneath you
- Head of Acquisition / VP: cross-channel ownership, big budgets, bigger accountability
- CMO: generalist or performance-specialist, depending on company size and structure
One thing she made clear: if you don't have an opinion, you're not going to be a leader one day. Whatever that opinion is, right or wrong, loud or soft, stand out. Have something to say.
The one thing she'd do differently
She started her business in her mid-40s. She said she would have started earlier. But her actual advice wasn't about timing:
“Start younger because you've got less to lose and you're not afraid of failing forward.”
Every failure is a lesson. That's not a poster quote. That's how you build the tolerance for risk that executive roles require.
What affiliate managers need to do right now
Adopt new tech. Build a point of view. Stop waiting to have an opinion until you're senior enough to have one.
The managers sitting in CMO seats in 2030 aren't going to be the ones who executed the best.
They're going to be the ones who planned the most, stayed curious the longest, built real relationships, and were never too shy to ask the uncomfortable question.
That's the whole blueprint.
Dustin Howes
AFFILIATE MARKETING CONSULTANT
Dustin Howes is an Affiliate Marketing Concierge who equips brands to build high-performing affiliate programs with a personal touch. He is a connector and specializes in network marketing, partner recruitment, program strategy, and simplifying the complexities of affiliate growth. Through his services and resources, Dustin empowers companies to create meaningful, long-term partnerships that drive real results.
