This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual – it’s marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest’s opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.
I’ll be talking with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change – but who feels she is better as a result. Originally from Peru, Giannina Fumagalli has lived in Montreal Canada for the last 18 years and who has been working in digital marketing that whole time, including both agency and client-side roles. She is currently the Growth Marketer at Vircom, a pioneer in B2B Email Security.
There’s a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:
What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what’s needed at higher levels
How to manage both above and below your level
What continuous learning actually looks like
Knowing when a job isn’t panning out and you need to cut your losses
Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand’s cachet, the title, the salary and what you will get out of the experience
Advice when interviewing for marketing roles – what she looks food when hiring
How to cultivate your profile within your organization
When to stay a generalist, or when to gain a specific skill by joining a special project
This episode’s guest is eminently qualified to cover these topics. Marissa Homere is the VP of Marketing at Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets software company. She is a demand generation leader and for the last decade, she has built and scaled marketing teams in a wide range of industries. She also teaches in an online marketing program.
In this episode, Marissa shares her thoughts on the marketing industry as a whole, how young professionals can be best prepared for today’s rapidly changing environment, and what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced marketing role. Most importantly, she talks about how, as a wife and mother, how societal issues have muscled in on her life as a marketer. Like being a working parent, handling old oppressive tendencies in the workplace, struggling to balance career ladder-climbing with family responsibilities.
If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you’ll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you’re so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing.
Today’s guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy.
He doesn’t try to apply the same advice to everyone – his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse.
There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, “Siddhartha…spoke quietly… “Always, oh Govinda, you’ve been my friend, you’ve always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won’t Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself.”
Our guest says there’s only one sales method that works – the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling.
David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show.
David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world’s sweetest retrievers.
How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable.
In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth.
He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let’s go talk to Darrell Amy.
The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I’ve talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that’s exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.
That’s one reason why I hope you listen to today’s talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers. To help your interactions with your creative counterparts.
The other reason is this author’s healthy outlook…on everything. I was first exposed to how zen-like he was when I met him at an event in 2017. Reading LinkedIn updates over the next few years I marveled how he did everything at his design agency, his training business and his college lecturing. When we met again (virtually) in 2020 , he talked about everything he had going on, but in that same calm tone.
So by the time he came out with his second book this last year – “Stop Looking for Zebras”, I seized the chance to let you hear his unique viewpoint for yourself.
Let’s go hear from our guest Robert Smith who will explain the book’s title, and much much more.
This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I’m asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.
This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing’s hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn’t have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect.
It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest
After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation.
While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied. Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling.
After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022.
In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, “The Automatic Marketing Machine” which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.
Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses struggle to get a steady supply of prospects, even though leads are as important to business owners as water. In their frantic bid to fill their funnel, they commit random acts of marketing, looking to Danny just like the villagers that he once watched use up precious energy, spending much of their time on just subsisting.
He is based in Huntersville, NC with his wife, two kids, and a hyperactive German shepherd. Through the Automatic Marketing Agency, Danny now shows businesses how to secure their prospect-supply by building marketing systems that work to help businesses reach their full potential.
The five-step marketing automation email sequence:
Instant response, delivering the resource that the prospect requested. (This is the email we’ve already reviewed earlier in this chapter.)
Send two days after the first email, following up to ensure the prospect got the resource, asking if they have any questions, and providing a link to schedule their appointment or visit your store.
Send three days later, offering another piece of helpful content such as a blog entry or a video. Also include a link to schedule their visit to your location.
Send three days later, sharing testimonials and success stories designed to help the prospect begin to create a vision for how much better life could look once they purchase your products or services. Include a link to schedule their visit.
Send three days later, sharing a blog, infographic, article, or video that will be helpful to the prospect. And include a link to schedule their visit.
As a follow up, add the prospect to your main mailing list.
My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history’s greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That’s right. It’s actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam.
It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing.
He’s not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and led a major international agency’s US operations. He has written numerous books, including “Bad Men” and “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey.”
Nicknamed the “Ad Contrarian,” his writings under that name caused Business Insider to recognize it as one of the world’s leading blogs about marketing. He has been honored as the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club and served as part of the Advertising and Marketing International Network and the California Academy of Sciences. In short, he knows what he’s talking about when he says there is something wrong with advertising.
He and I both agree that there is a war between the privacy-side and the surveillance-side proponents here. And it’s unclear how this dichotomy we’re in is going to be resolved. I will say that his solution for how to fix this – to eliminate all tracking – is harsher than mine. I’d like to end up with some arrangement where buyers receive advertising that gets close to feeling personalized, but that doesn’t track them without their consent.
Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today’s guest didn’t do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.
Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.
That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.
After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn’t the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book. “Masterful Marketing”
I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I’m so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.
Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.
Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several European e-commerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.
Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing what he was learning. Seeing that the domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan to release the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star. Except for when he’s having fun playing in a punk rock cover band.
