I did a keynote talk last week at Communitech’s Tech Leadership Conference. The audience for this talk was a mix of big company marketers and startup marketers. My goal was to show the folks at the larger companies how small, agile, high-growth startups are managing their marketing operations. At the same time, when I think about the startups that I hang out with not all of them are doing everything that I talk about in this deck.
I decided to post this deck over here to get some feedback from you folks. If you are a startup marketer – does your group operate in the way I’m describing in this deck? If you are at a larger company do you see these types of things being adopted? How do you think this will evolve over time?
Interesting presentation and much of it taught by the Institute of Direct/Digital Marketing (IDM) for some time, although sadly most of their graduates have note made it through to leadership or Executive positions yet!
What has struck me, now running a startup myself, is that Sales and Marketing are really one and the same thing, always have been and always should be together under the same leader. The technology and data revolution will hopefully bring the 2 disciplines even closer as the all important customer view (data) is accessible and will hopefully be shared by both.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I think this is part the problem related to the shift that is happening in marketing at the moment. The folks in charge (particularly at more mature companies) are often operating under an old set of rules and assumptions and the newer folks coming on board know that there is a different way to do things but don’t have the clout yet to make it happen.
I totally agree with you about sales and marketing being one and the same. I think we will see more and more of these groups coming together under one leader that is in charge of managing flow across the lifecycle of the customer from the earliest stages through to renewal.
April
A product manager friend of mine used to have a great saying taped to his monitor “done is better than perfect”. What I love most about the agile philosophy is the idea of failing fast. Iterate through many times and let the formula improve organically.
However that is where I’ve also seen the most management friction in terms of philosophy. Because marketing is seen as a cost center rather than a profit center, then everything can sometimes grind to a halt because “everything must be perfect the first time ” 🙁