Steve Jobs: B2B Marketing Lessons from His Biography by Walter Isaacson with Jotform CMO Steve Hartert

We knew this day would come. The day where we finally talk about the one tech company all others look up to: Apple. 

The truth is that the behemoth has endured ups and downs to become one of the greatest brands of all time, and all under the leadership of Steve Jobs. 

So in this episode, we’re taking marketing lessons from Steve Jobs based on his biography by Walter Isaacson with the help of our guest, Jotform CMO Steve Hartert. 

Together, we talk about being insatiably curious about your customers, daring to fail, and exercising your creativity. 

About our guest, Steve Hartert

Steve Hartert is the chief marketing officer at Jotform. He’s had more than 30 years of B2B and B2C marketing management experience. Prior to Jotform, he was the president of Hartert & Associates, a marketing consultancy that worked with B2B and B2C companies. Steve has been actively involved in marketing internet companies since 1995. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly Pomona and an MBA from Cal State San Bernardino.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Steve Jobs:

• Be insatiably curious about your customers. Use their actions and feedback to inform your marketing. Appeal to what drives them and hook them emotionally. Steve says, “Look at how people use your products, your services… look how people use them. Really have a good, solid understanding of that customer's wants and needs. And sometimes they don't know what they want or need until you show them. 
• Dare to fail. Experiment and strive for greatness despite the possibility of missing the mark. Steve says, “Business people and businesses in general pull back the reins because they're afraid of failure for some reason. But failure teaches you how to succeed.”
• Exercise your creativity. It takes practice stepping outside the bounds of traditional B2B marketing. But creative content makes you stand out from your competitors. Steve says, “How do you get the message out to people to want to now partake in your product or service? You have to be creative to get their attention and keep that attention and then make that product sell and continue to grow.”

Quotes

*”He just did what he thought needed to be done to create the right. work. And like that message to me is something that we so rarely do in marketing. Which is like, ‘What is the amount of work that needs to happen to create something great?’ And so often we say, ‘What is good enough?’ And you have to do that, right? You have to do things that are good enough sometimes. But if you want to make something great, you have to do a great amount of work.” - Ian Faison

*”You need to sit there and look at the problem you're trying to solve from multiple angles. A lot of times what I have seen in marketing and in other disciplines of business is people sometimes get surrounded by ‘yes’ people. They don't want to hear a bad thing. ‘Oh, we're weak in this area,’ or ‘We're not good at that.’ You need to hear it. Because if you don't address the full 360 around your product or service, to be able to defend it when something goes wrong, you're just walking yourself into a trap. And that's just a big blind spot that a lot of people have.” - Steve Hartert

*”[Apple] had about a hundred ideas on this whiteboard. ‘These are great.’ And then [Steve Jobs] said, ‘Okay, pick four of them because that's all we can do.’ So they ended up having to focus on what products they were going to be working on for the next two or three years. And now you've got such clarity in the focus that you can't make a mistake on what you're trying to do. And that's very important. When companies lose that [focus], they get distracted by shiny things, by the latest trend or something that they could pop out there so they can get the stock price up for the next quarter. And so they just kind of bob and weave rather than pushing through on a forward path and saying, ‘We're going to do this and it's going to be tough to get there, but we need to do it.’” - Steve Hartert

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Steve Harter, CMO at Jotform

[3:14] Exploring the Genius of Steve Jobs Through Isaacson's Biography

[5:36] The Art of Perfection: Lessons from Steve Jobs

[9:45] Marketing Insights and the Pursuit of Excellence

[15:07] Crafting Content with Precision: A Marketing Deep Dive

[23:07] Strategic Focus and Innovation: The Apple Way

[26:22] Unlocking Marketing Success: The Power of Focus

[28:43] Steve Jobs' Legacy: A Lesson in Creativity and Control

[31:07] Marketing and Creativity: Connecting the Dots

[36:18] Jotform’s Marketing Strategy

[39:57] Content Creation: Telling Stories That Resonate

[46:34] Advice for Crafting a Winning Content Strategy

Links

Read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn

Learn more about Jotform

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.