THE INSIGHT

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What’s the one marketing trend that you wholeheartedly disagree with?

Can for the love of God, we please stop trying to measure ROI for every single marketing activity.

I think that’s got to be the number one question if I were looking for a job tomorrow, I would want to know the answer to before I stepped in and started working for a company.

There’s an over reliance and an excessive focus on programmes that can provide a clear ROI when in reality. That’s not always such a simple thing to solve for.

The pandemic sort of exacerbated that too, right? Because budgets were pulled back. Marketers were asked to do more with less.

And so the problem is you could have a programme that’s strategic and the right thing to do. But it won’t get prioritised because it doesn’t directly tied to revenue.

I’ve seen and felt this happen too many times, personally. So leadership teams essentially, are inadvertently letting a metric drive their entire strategy. So I think, really, there are three things to keep in mind.

One, only use ROI for investments that you can confidently tied to revenue.

Two, don’t use ROI with attribution isn’t clear, which is more common than most of us would like to admit.

And three only use ROI as a metric, not your strategy driver.

So the question may be what do you use instead? I think maybe one easy solution could be something like ROO – Return On Objectives and think about things in terms of what am I trying to accomplish from a brand awareness standpoint? Or an experience standpoint?

If I focus on tying that impact directly, and instead of the monetary or revenue impact, coming back to?

If you could talk to all B2B revenue leaders in the world for 1 minute, what would you say?

I would say we need to start treating culture like a product and your people are its customers

You can essentially take 95% of the product mindset and apply it to culture directly.

So just like you would never build a product without talking to your customers, you wouldn’t do that with culture either. Right?

Why would you build culture differently in that aspect?

I think it comes down to three things feedback, which we just mentioned, right?

You would never build something without talking to customers, you wouldn’t try to craft and culture without talking to your people and understanding their needs.

Two, it’s never done, you’re constantly iterating and making changes in updates and product updates to make it better for your people.

And three, measurement analyzation and omissions, being able to say, hey, our culture is doing great here. Not so great here. How did we receive feedback? And what are those feedback loops that we should be looking at and receiving from?

And lastly, how do we omit things purposely omit things from our culture that either aren’t working, or just don’t apply to us or our DNA of what we’re striving to do here as a company.

What’s the most important character trait that helps you succeed in your career? Why?

Think of consistency and curiosity.

Consistency compounds, but curiosity is really the idea of proactively learning, seeking out experiences, adapting to new circumstances.

And it really plays anywhere.

There was a recent Harvard Business Review study that was done and they they looked at some of the leadership competencies.
And what they found was that one trait in particular was the strongest predictor of strength in all of those abilities, and it was curiosity.

So they learned that potential and competence are directly underpinned by curiosity. And so for me, how it’s helped me personally is it’s opened doors for me to new hobbies, your passions, new jobs, new ways of thinking. It’s allowed me to build empathy for co workers and people that I’ve been in communication with. It’s obviously promote promoted learning, which I just mentioned, and I think it just strengthens the relationships I have within the company.

And lastly, I would just say, you know, as a creator, having curiosity gives me the raw materials to innovate, which I think is especially important as we tried to do different things in marketing and have new ideas and explore, you know, territories that haven’t been explored yet.

So I think curiosity leads to learning, learning leads to capability and capability leads to proficiency.