Win at Marketing
A path to a successful B2B marketing career
This is not a blog post about how to find success as a marketing organizations. Medium.com and a gazillion blog posts have that covered, myself included (My top post from 2019). What I want to uncover is different. How do successful marketing professionals rise to the top?
I’ll lay out my observations using real world examples. We’ve been in business for 15 years. That’s long enough to see our earliest agency customers move up the marketing ladder. So, how did they do it?
Get fired
What? Yes, some of the most successful marketers I know got fired early in their careers. These weren’t always cause-related firings. Layoffs, reductions-in-force, or changes in leadership leave a trail of young marketers behind.
Let’s look at Jennifer. She was an intern hired because she knew Photoshop and had a solid foundation in Power Point. Many of you started here. She was a lowly grunt in the trenches picking up odd jobs within the marketing department. Make a slide deck. Find a stock photo. Reserve the conference room. People call this earning your stripes, a reference to military enlistees moving up in the ranks.
In Jennifer’s case the layoff was the best thing that could happen to her. It absolved her of any red flags as she searched for her next job. Hiring companies recognize layoffs as mismanagement in most cases.
Being fired teaches valuable lessons. Getting fired in a layoff or RIF pierces an idealistic view of corporate life. Hard work and merit are not enough to save a marketing pro in a last-in-first-out organization. Those that don’t become cynics will thrive later in their careers. Jennifer did.
Change companies
Ben shared the same fate as Jennifer at a different company. Both he and Jennifer realized shifts in corporate culture lead to layoffs, so they split. Owning this career move is important.
The marketing space is a tight knit community. Do this often and you’re disloyal. It is possible to make this move without leaving your current employer. I’ve seen that work.
Ben and Jennifer brought competitive insights and thicker skins to their new positions. Changing departments or companies keeps you honest. It makes you hungry for knowledge and forces personal and professional growth.
Become an influencer
Our agency usually meets our best customers at this phase in their careers. They are no longer green. They’ve developed political capital and leverage it to bring new ideas to the table. Their managers are heads down, crunching numbers, and bogged down in strategy meetings. Influencers look at trends outside the organization.
New technologies, new strategies, new everything are within their grasps. The good ones take full advantage. Influencers offer something unique and tangible to their colleagues. I won’t sit here and take credit for our customer’s career success. These are the professionals that tend to think outside the box. In marketing, those that think outside the box rise to the top. We, and outside agencies like us, help.
Influencers often suggested the adoption of marketing automation tools. Influencers grab case studies, synthesize them, and share consumable chunks with busy higher-ups. It’s a brilliant time to be in marketing. Innovation without responsibility for expected outcomes.
Be a budget wonk
You have to grow up sometime. In marketing that’s controlling a piece of the budget. Those that understand marketing as a cost center and how to spin it as a revenue engine go off like a rocket.
Upper management loves nothing more than a middle manager, channel or product manager that understands how to pinch pennies and get results. Cumulative experience gained over your career to this point will take you far. Big things happen when you have decision making authority.
We’re in marketing. Marketing isn’t finance. We’re not obsessed with time value of money or regression curves. For crying out loud, I’m a journalism major. But marketing is a numbers game. Pick apart any budget and you’ll understand the correlation between costs and revenue. This is next level stuff.
In marketing you also need a firm grasp of statistics. Those that succeed know the difference between important stats and and throwaway numbers — fluff.
(There are) three sorts of liars, the common or garden liar … the damnable liar who is fortunately rather a rare bird in decent society, and lastly the expert — from The Accountant written in 1886
Define expected outcomes. Hit them — or have a good, quantifiable reason for missing targets. After all, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Pick any software platform used for sales and marketing and you’ll soon find that boolean algebra and statistics are at the heart of your tech stack. Marketers that can find the truth in these numbers come out on top.
Befriend sales
Today’s successful marketers read sales’ self-help books. If you’ve ever stood in a Hudson News at the airport you need only close your eyes, extend your are, and buy whatever book your hand touches. The odds are that’s a book on winning in business. Winning in business is learning how to sell.
Those we’ve seen succeed in the post-ABM world are able to use sales-speak. Sure, you learned AIDA (attention, interest, desire, and action) in college. But, it’s not likely you learned to love hearing the word “No!” That’s what makes successful sales professionals. The good ones love to get to no as fast as possible. It’s second behind getting to “Yes!”
Have you ever worked for a VP, CMO, or COO that never worked in marketing. It happens. It happens because those in marketing don’t understand selling. There are other reasons, but that’s a big one. It’s why we Jennifer (CMO) and Ben (SVP) hit the big time. They speak sales.
We owe our agency’s success to a sales-centric approach to creative. It’s easy for anyone in marketing to get lost in the art. It’s the fun part. Understand the audiences attention span, triggers, needs, and value prop. Talk to sales. Connect the dots, because a rising tide lifts all boats.
Have an awakening
It’s at this point in your marketing career that you’ll look around and realize there is no puppet master. There’s no one pulling the strings and there are no rules. The bold make the rules. The ruthless gut the competition. The disciplined become thought leaders. The rest follow the shiny objects jumping from marketing trend to marketing trend.
The ability to turn a vision into reality is key. The successful marketing professionals we work with speak at conferences. They are the people I call when I want to know what marketing needs. They are woke marketers and you can get there, too.
Conclusion
Not ever path to the top is the same. That’s obvious. Not everyone wants to get to the top. You might find satisfaction and fulfillment among the rank-and-file. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it has its own challenges.
At the very least, become an influencer and befriend sales to stay relevant and productive. This may not get you to the upper echelon, but it will keep you relevant, productive and employed.
For all others, remember you’ll never reach the top using only what you learned about Wanamaker or Ogilvy while in college.
What do you think is important? How did you get to the top? What advice would you give an entry level marketer today? Leave answers to those questions and more in the comments section.
