Uncomplicate – How to be a successful marketer
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Marketing is an ever changing game. Whether you’re a CMO or an entry-level marketer, you need to be on top of your game, always. Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Pendo, has been through the journey and has valuable, evergreen tips to share on what it takes to be a good marketer at each level of the journey. These tips put together can be the bedrock for a great marketing team.
Junior level
According to Joe, a beginner has to assess his/her immediate peer group. This is crucial because you will be learning the ropes along with them. If they aren’t good enough, they might slow you down.
“Look to the left of you, look to the right of you. If one of them can’t do your job as well as you can or better, you may be in the wrong team. The group you are going to learn the most is your peer group,” said Joe.
The next tip for the first timer is—think more about the company than your title. Your title is not that important. If you were to shift to another form down the line, the interviewer will want to know the company you worked for and not just the title you held.
“(If you were in a revered company) you (have) learnt what it took to build a successful company even though it is through osmosis. You saw what good culture looks like and what a good manager looks like. You saw what a thriving company looks like and you kept your job. Thriving companies do not have low performers around,” said Joe. These matter a lot to the hiring personnel at your next company.
First-time manager
Being a first-time manager isn’t easy. You have just been promoted because you are great at what you do. Now, a new responsibility has been thrust upon you, something you have never done before. You have so far only been a great individual contributor.
Usually, being a first-time manager leads to clashes or uncertainty because you might tend to micromanage, because you have been so good at your previous job that you start doing the job and tending to details instead of managing, which is your new role. The idea is to resist that temptation and instead focus on being the guiding light and the bridge to the management for your team.
“What you need to do is reorient yourself. You have a new job. The further up the chain you go, it becomes less critical that you are a great marketer and more critical that you are a great communicator. It is like a see-saw,” said Joe.
Chief Marketing Officer
Being the CMO is really tricky. It is like being a manager, but at an extreme level. It is no longer just about the metrics. You need to think bigger. It is also challenging because you are responsible for a lot of the management work like deciding the direction of the company, hiring, and partnerships, among other things. You need to deliver above and beyond the target metrics but also be a visionary of sorts.
“Look at the bigger picture. You have to deliver the leads…nail your leads, but also expand the perception of the CMO—from the person delivering the leads to being the caretaker of the brand,” said Joe.
This blogpost was co-written by Vignesh Jeyaraman.
