So You Want To Be A Marketer…
(Or Maybe A Founder?)
Louis Camassa, Managing Partner of EMPATH, was recently published by Entrepreneur Magazine. You can find his excellent article on marketing leadership here.
I want to focus on his key takeaways – and what they mean to potential founders as well as marketers:
“If you want to be successful in marketing, it’s essential to acquire a deep understanding of your customers. Beyond personas and reviews. Meet them where they’re at: at work, in their homes, or in the field as they use your products.
If you want to become a successful executive, strive for four things. Be a generalist. Develop a focus on relationships. And become an amazing listener, because it’s never about who shouts the loudest, but who listens the longest. And always keep learning.”
For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll re-arrange the points a bit.
The first bit of advice (know your customers!) holds true for founders of all stripes: technical specialists, generalists, and everyone in between. There is a raft of books, articles, etc. on how to do this better. Read as many as you can. It is a constant struggle not to start making assumptions about our customers over time, often based on: what we expect to be true, what we want to be true, or what used to be true.
Which is a nice segue to Louis’ last point: always keep learning! Keep learning about your customers, for sure, but also about any and everything related to your business (and your life, for that matter). Learning leads to innovation, change, success.
Now the next idea (focus on relationships) comes more naturally to some than others. In particular, highly technical founders often prefer to focus on product, or do not see any value in “networking” when there is “real work” to be done. And I am certainly not an advocate of networking for networking’s sake. Yet, networking and/or building relationships does not have to mean cocktail parties and small talk. Relationships can be built through professional associations, trade shows, etc. – online and offline - and be primarily focused on product, industry trends, etc. But a network of resources will always come in handy.
Now to the most interesting point: be a generalist.
For those who aspire to lead marketing teams, this may be good advice (the article delves into to the rationale in detail). And for those who aspire to lead established companies, it may also be good advice – as CEO’s need a diverse set of skills.
But wait a minute, you may be thinking, aren’t most founders subject matter experts? Isn’t it this very expertise that allows them to craft a unique solution to a real pain point and to successfully guide product development as a company grows and evolves?
Yep!
As a rule, founder expertise is critical to success. But guess what, as companies grow, successful founders must become more and more a generalist (learning to understand employment practices, sales, marketing, etc.). Or – they need to add those skills to their team so they can stay focused on the technical aspects of the business (think CTO founders).
There are millions of variations on this journey – as each of us is unique and every company we create is unique. But there are patterns to success (and failure). The pattern this article really highlights for me is this: we need generalists to grow and lead companies. Building the team is more art than science – but organizations that know their customer, continue to learn, build a network of resources – stand a better chance of success than those that do not.
From one generalist to another,
Joel