It's Time We Marketers Stood Up for Ourselves
And a 4-Course Vegan Tasting Menu
Hello Gobbledeers,
A little housekeeping up front:
The Gobbledy editorial staff is going on a week-long offsite starting today, so there will be no newsletter next week. If you’re a new-ish subscriber, you may not have read this older piece about Gartner being patient zero of gobbledy. Save that one for next Wednesday so you don’t miss me.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how I think that B2B marketers have done a pretty not-particularly-great job selling non-marketers on the value of what they do. It’s more than that - I think there’s either a fundamental misunderstanding (or complete lack of understanding) of what modern marketers do. I mean literally - what they spend their time doing.
This is something we marketers complain about all the time.
But we’ve collectively clearly done a terrible job actually marketing what we do, and I wanted to take today to address that.
Recently I saw that a public software company CEO wrote a piece where he made predictions about how the industry will change in 10 years. It included this:
Marketing will be one of the professions that will change the most. Ten years from now, marketing professionals will need an in-depth technical understanding to interpret and use data. With a new level of data access, strategies will be forced to adapt faster — so marketing professionals will need to go beyond just being creative-only or coordinator-like professionals — they will need to be engineering-like professionals: individuals with unlimited domain (sic) and can act in all the steps of their work. Beyond the usual creative and strategy skills, they will need to be well versed in coding, data analytics, and even creating math models to identify issues and opportunities and act rapidly…
If you currently are a marketer, you might be thinking to yourself:
“WTF does that person think we do all day now?????????”
Or maybe I was the only person thinking that.
Is this a common view among non-marketing senior execs in software? That we’re
”coordinator-like professionals?”** That we’ll need the next 10 years to learn how to “interpret and use data?”
** [“coordinator-like????” Not even coordinators. Like them.]
Am I overreacting?
Would anyone every write about HR folks, “In 10 years, Human Resources professionals will need to stop planning office birthday parties and start using data to understand churn?”
(Please don’t stop planning office birthday parties.)
I’m not sure why this struck such a nerve with me, but it shows how far we have to go.
That said, this is marketers’ problem to solve.
I know the software marketing community has been trying to address this misunderstanding. But I think we’ve been going about this wrong.
We’ve been working hard to prove our value - funny enough, by doing a lot of what was mentioned in that quote. We use data to build models to show marketing attribution to closed deals. We’re tracking all of our touchpoints, all of our interactions with prospects. We understand how each marketing tactic contributes to closed-won deals. We know so much more than we ever did about our impact.
That’s missing the point, though.
As we’ve tried to show our value as marketers, we’ve neglected to understand the problem we need to address:
The belief that marketing doesn’t have the skills necessary to drive revenue in a new data-driven environment.
In other words, the issue is not that we aren’t data-driven. It’s worse. It’s that we’re perceived as unqualified.
Good news - this is fixable.
And here’s my proposal on how to fix it:
Set up 1 hour with your CEO, and tell them how you approach marketing. Tell them which parts you believe are art, and which parts you believe are science. (There are parts of marketing that are art - we need to stop pretending there aren’t.). Tell them how you will measure the impact, and tell them where you’ll need more budget if you actually want to measure the impact. Tell them why you hired the people you hired, and how you evaluated them. Tell them how you’re building your relationship with the head of sales.
Re-interview for the job proactively.
Make the CEO want you in that role.
Doing this successfully won’t require marketing skills, it will require sales skills.
A couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker had an article about door-to-door salesmen (yes, they still exist). It’s worth a read because the tactics they discuss in there are exactly the tactics you’ll use when re-selling yourself to the CEO. And they’re tactics you should use in your marketing materials.
Here was my favorite tactic, describing how one salesman used it in his pitch:
He employed a “pullback”—a door-to-door staple, based on the conviction that customers want a product more if they think they might be denied it. Your house may not qualify for solar panels—my engineers will have to check. Fear of loss drives more sales than hope for gain.
Imagine that your product’s positioning was “Marketing automation exclusively for sophisticated marketers” and part of your go-to-market was that a prospect had to spend 30 minutes in a discovery session where they need to be approved to move forward if they’re sophisticated enough in their tactics. And “only 9% of marketers have been approved to move forward to the next conversation.” Fear of loss drives more sales than hope for gain.
Imagine your CEO was actually afraid they wouldn’t be able to work with you anymore. Imagine they were genuinely concerned that you would leave. What would that hour you spend with the CEO look like so that at the end they would fear the impact it would make if you left?
That can only happen if you’re clear about your philosophy. About your team. About how you make decisions. About what your skills are, and what skills you hire for to complement yourself.
Re-interview for your job every 6 months.
There should be absolutely no doubt after 2 of those interviews why marketing matters. And what your team does. And how it’s contributing. And why your CEO should be terrified that you’d consider another job.
A Few Quick Things Before I Go
- You should watch this video from product demo company Walnut. Really, really clever way to show how terrible the enterprise software buying experience is without resorting to gobbledy. Bravo.
- Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe has a really funny LinkedIn profile:
- Finally… There’s an old apocryphal tale that Ernest Hemingway supposedly won a bet that he couldn’t write a 6-word short story (I’ve also heard it told that he won a contest for shortest story…it doesn’t really matter). That story was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
I was thinking of that when I read this Eater review of a new restaurant opening in New York City. There’s a part that made me think - is there a contest where you have to describe what it’s like to live in New York City right now, only you are limited to 8 words? If so, I submit this quote from the restaurant review:
$145 for the four-course vegan tasting menu
Have a great couple of weeks. If you know anyone who loves a $145 pile of vegetables, please share Gobbledy with them.