How I Made it in Marketing Marketing: It’s not about you, and when you make it about you, you are never going to succeed (episode #53)
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Change does not want to happen. The status quo is tenacious. To quote Isaac Newton, “An object at rest stays at rest…yadda, yadda, yadda…unless acted upon by an unbalancing force.”
In your career, in your company, you are that unbalancing force. You tenaciously swim upstream against the status quo, and make change happen.
And yet…even as hard as that is… we can’t stop there. Not if we want to be good marketers. Not if we want to be good leaders. We need to use our communication and collaboration skills, and bring our internal team, and our customers, along for the ride.
I love how our latest guest put it in one of her lessons – “Change (even good change) is hard, and everyone wants to be able to control, or at least influence, the change in their lives.”
That’s true for your employees. That’s true for your customers.
Our guest on Episode #53 of the How I Made It In Marketing podcast told us the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories – Onaisa Landis, Vice President of Marketing, Octane (https://www.octane.co/).
Octane has grown from $350M in loans on an annual basis to $1.2B in the 2 years Landis has worked there. Landis has built her team from 3 to 10+.
Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing
Some lessons that emerged in our discussion:
- It’s not about you ,and when you make it about you, you're never going to succeed
- Imperfect action today is better than perfect action tomorrow
- To market effectively, you have to think beyond what your product does, you have to understand the role it plays in your customers’ lives
- Being an effective manager is as much about driving business impact as it is about growing your team members
- No matter how important you are, make the people you interact with feel special
- Change (even good change) is hard, and everyone wants to be able to control, or at least influence, the change in their lives
Related content mentioned in this episode
Customer-First Objectives: Discover a 3-part formula for focusing your webpage message https://meclabs.com/course/sessions/customer-first-objectives/
SaaS Marketing: Always bring the customer story forward (episode #42) https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/SaaS-marketing
B2B Marketing: Marketing shouldn't be about driving demand; it's about driving value episode #40) https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/B2B
Content and Communications: Tenacity, keep it simple, authenticity works (episode #33) https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/content
Blog Optimization: Button change leads to 34% increase in comments https://marketingexperiments.com/a-b-testing/blog-comment-test
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