Summary:
This week on How To Win: Kyle Lacy, Chief Marketing Officer at Jellyfish and former CMO at Lessonly, a sales training and coaching platform. Lessonly was acquired by Seismic in 2021. Kyle also served as the Director of Global Content Marketing at Salesforce after its acquisition of ExactTarget in 2014. Before its acquisition, Lessonly made $24M in revenue and had a team of 230 that migrated over to Seismic. Lessonly was used by 1,200 B2B customers. In this episode, Kyle breaks down six important lessons he’s learned throughout his career. We discuss making the customer the hero, why you should always be willing to experiment and take risks, and why you should encourage your teams to grow their relationships. I give my thoughts on the power of customer feedback, building a strong brand moat, and trusting your team to be creative.

Key Points:

Lesson One - The importance of a meaningful story (01:08)
I explain why your company's story is more than just "marketing fluff" (04:06)
Seismic's Doug Winter explains how they created a category around sales enablement (05:12)
Lesson Two - Make your customers your heroes (07:36)
I dive into why customer feedback is essential for your company with a quote from Red Hat's Claire Delalande (09:17)
Lesson Three - Revenue first, brand second (10:47)
My thoughts on why every marketer also needs to be a brand marketer (12:48)
Lesson Four - When it comes to brand, be experiential and irrational (13:30)
Rory Sutherland explains why some business problems require logic, and some require irrationality (15:04)
I unpack why creative work sometimes requires thinking outside the bounds of a standard operating procedure (17:12)
Lesson Five - Encourage alignment through shared goals (17:32)
I define what product marketing really is, and why it's so important (22:19)
Lesson Six - Invest in your team's careers (22:50)
I talk through why personal relationships are essential to career growth with a quote from Verhaal Brand Design's Philip VanDusen (24:40)
Wrap up (27:07)