Playbooks are helpful, until they aren't. At some point, you'll run into where they're outdated and overplayed. Embrace strategic thinking to evolve further is important not just for your marketing career, but for your competitive advantage.
Join host Leanne Dow-Weimer in an engaging conversation with Nicky Dibben, a seasoned strategy and marketing advisor from Invention Marketing. Nicky's expertise shines as she shares insights on breaking free from marketing autopilot and ditching playbooks that no longer serve. Together, they explore key aspects:
🚀 Transitioning from Playbooks: Nicky highlights the prevalent reliance on playbooks in marketing and why it's crucial to outgrow them for a competitive edge.
💼 Embracing Strategic Thinking: The discussion revolves around the shift towards strategic marketing, emphasizing its essential role in today's landscape.
📊 Building Effective Strategy: Nicky guides us through the steps required to create an effective marketing strategy framework. The conversation also addresses common challenges that marketers encounter when transitioning to a strategic mindset.
Tune in to this episode and elevate your marketing strategies with Markigy, the Science of Marketing Strategy. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just beginning your journey, this episode offers actionable tips and inspiration to help you excel in the ever-evolving marketing arena. Don't miss out on valuable insights that can reshape your marketing approach.
00:00:02:01 - 00:00:12:03
Speaker 1
Hello. This is Leanne Dow Weimer with Markigy. I am joined today by Nicky Dibben. Nicky. Tell me about yourself. What you do. Your background. All of it.
00:00:13:04 - 00:00:34:05
Speaker 2
Wow. Hi, Leanne. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so I'm in the UK. For those of you that don't know or can't pick up from my my accent. So I am a marketer for high tech businesses, primarily or complex businesses in general. I am working for myself for 24 years. I started life way back when as a computer scientist.
00:00:34:18 - 00:00:56:08
Speaker 2
And after I got my computer science degree, I realized that wasn't quite what I wanted to do in technical sales. So I started life in intellectual property management of all things, and I got trained in subjects of copyright and patents and all that good stuff. I then spent some time. My first job was in moving mad inventions from academia into the commercial world.
00:00:56:21 - 00:01:11:21
Speaker 2
And then I moved up to various marketing jobs. And then I started working for myself in 99. And then with inception of three years, big marketing for a small consulting company in New Zealand. I've been marketing for myself ever since. Wow. Right.
00:01:12:17 - 00:01:36:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. I didn't even realize prior to that. So that's amazing to see. You know, some of the things that we talk about on this show, which would include, you know, just because you have this great idea or this patent or this wonderful technical thing doesn't mean that you can get money for it. And getting that translation between the two is amazing.
00:01:36:19 - 00:01:38:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. You.
00:01:38:25 - 00:01:54:19
Speaker 2
00:01:54:28 - 00:02:12:14
Speaker 2
And then the second half of that is that this kind of continual argument about is it idea is an execution, is an idea, is an execution. I feel like sometimes I'm the only person that goes. You kind of need both and you need them both to be good because either without the other is of absolutely no use whatsoever.
00:02:13:18 - 00:02:25:13
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Like, it's if you have all the ideas in the world but you don't do them, doesn't matter. And if you're doing something stupid, you're just doing something stupid, guys.
00:02:26:01 - 00:02:50:23
Speaker 2
You might think it really well. But anyway. But then it's really weird because I do all the all the personality profile tests I absolutely love. I've done way too many and I'm going to have to stop. But they all actually, whichever one I do, they come out with me going to extremes. So one is like with a valve and ten roles, I'm like the creative, dynamic person at one end of the bell curve, but I'm also the implementer who actually get stuff done at the other end of the curve.
00:02:50:25 - 00:03:13:02
Speaker 2
So that lends itself really nicely to what I do for a living, because you've got to be able to diverge, come up with that really great ideas, but the moves are going to converge and make a plan and do stuff. So I never have the technical ideas. That's not my job. But I that from that point on, I have the strategic ideas, the marketing ideas, the business ideas, and then I get to the point where we can actually execute not just, you know, keep talking about it forever.
00:03:14:08 - 00:03:44:03
Speaker 1
But hey, I mean, the world needs more of that. That's how we get stuff done. So that's I love hearing that when when we talked before about what we were going to talk about on this episode. And I think one of the things that really stood out to me was how you took all of your complicated experience. And you really use it to kind of let go of these shoulds in words and and scripts.
00:03:44:21 - 00:04:12:21
Speaker 1
And so where I wanted to go with this was talking about leaving behind playbooks, leaving behind the this is what we're doing because we're B2B or B2C or, you know, we do webinars with Spirit and Teradata and and talk about how you get to a point where you know what to do, what you should do, and some things to keep in mind or along the way once you get to the stage that you can let go of playbooks.
00:04:13:23 - 00:04:14:23
Speaker 1
So I think that's.
00:04:15:00 - 00:04:33:04
Speaker 2
00:04:33:05 - 00:04:52:06
Speaker 2
There are lots of wrong ways, but there's very rarely one right way. And so what I really like to do is, you know, with everything, start with a blank sheet of paper and then you go, all right, we need to better this and a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of that in this paragraph in the sentence are these frameworks, and then you switch them together in a way that is unique to whatever it is you're dealing with at the minute.
00:04:52:15 - 00:05:13:18
Speaker 2
And that doesn't mean there are no rules, but the only the only way you can get to making it up as you go along is because you know all the rules and it's so deeply embedded in in what you do that you just have loads of flexibility and it's the whole, you know, it's a no borders thing. So it's like, so I thought about this, you know, somebody said to me, you know, you need to get great freedom.
00:05:13:18 - 00:05:29:11
Speaker 2
You actually need need borders because then your ideas have got walls to bounce off. Because if you if I think it was a Seth Godin analogy and he was saying, you know, if you guess if you if you take your children out and you go play anywhere, they kind of they don't really go very far because you've given them all the freedom in the world.
00:05:29:16 - 00:05:47:25
Speaker 2
But you actually say, stop at that friend, stop at that wall, stop at that wall. They will explore to the furthest boundaries that are available to them because they've been given rules within which to play to the fullest extent of their freedom. And I think the same is true of what we do. There's there are wrong ways to do things by Western things.
00:05:48:03 - 00:05:52:15
Speaker 2
And the trick is, is to combine all of the, you know, all of the right ways and in a really creative way.
00:05:53:24 - 00:06:14:03
Speaker 1
Yeah. What comes to mind is almost is like vision of you with like a chef's hat and being in the kitchen, being like, look, you can never replace sugar with salt. You just can't. That's a rule. Yeah, but what you can do is put a little bit of this and a little bit of that and come up with an amazing, unique recipe that tastes delicious.
00:06:14:13 - 00:06:29:07
Speaker 1
You know, like there's the Internet full of, like, a gazillion ways to make potatoes. Like, you know, like there's just you can make a potato, but there's not just one, right way. There's definitely wrong ways. Don't eat raw potatoes. That's going to go well.
00:06:29:07 - 00:06:48:12
Speaker 2
But funny enough, I did a whole post and I said, you know, I watch a lot of cooking shows. I kind of I don't judgment there, but yeah, I do. But you know, but the other part of that is exactly that. It's like if any cooking show you watch, what do they always get kicked out for? They get kicked out because I can't poach an egg properly or they can't scramble an egg properly or they can't make an omelet.
00:06:48:18 - 00:07:05:21
Speaker 2
And that's the thing. You can't do all the fancy schmancy stuff until you have nailed the basics. I'm pretty much on every cooking show that get kicked out because it's a bit of basic something that they didn't nail. So the fanciness goes for nothing. If you haven't got the substance and the rules and the foundations. So much to start.
00:07:06:19 - 00:07:39:02
Speaker 1
I that's a beautiful way to describe it. It's like pasta, right? Like if you can't cook your pasta, it doesn't matter if you hand-rolled like Nokia, it doesn't matter what you eat it. And it seem to your point the same as with marketing. If you can't like talk to your customers in a way that matters to them where they're at the is a need, then it doesn't matter how many fonts, colors, videos, channels, any of this that you do, you're just talking.
00:07:39:02 - 00:07:39:15
Speaker 1
You know.
00:07:40:15 - 00:07:58:27
Speaker 2
That doesn't even matter how good your technology is. If you have to explain it to the world, you can have the I mean, the number of technologies that failed even though they were better. You know, it's like take the Betamax VHS argument that went on quite a long time ago. Now I'm really dating myself and I, you know, Betamax, in theory, was the better technology.
00:07:58:27 - 00:08:19:07
Speaker 2
But VHS won out because it just created the created the network around it, created the supply chain, created the routes to market, you know, had better marketing, I would suggest, you know, and that's why why ultimately they succeeded. It's all about, you know, network externalities and, you know, which basically, you know, you just need everything to line up to make your market work.
00:08:19:07 - 00:08:26:00
Speaker 2
And so, yeah, even the best technology, even the best marketing, you know, if you don't apply it right, you know, it won't fix anything.
00:08:27:02 - 00:08:57:23
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if our listeners realize this, but this era of green energy cars is not the first time there has been so many attempts at electric or solar or just non fossil fuel vehicles die. That failed for various reasons. Same with smartwatches. There were smartwatches that failed before Apple was able to really get it to happen.
00:08:58:03 - 00:09:27:07
Speaker 1
And now with the combination of like Apple and Fitbit and Garmin, all these players, I'm sure there's like a Sony in there somewhere. But you it it's all of a sudden, you know, so prevalent that it's almost difficult to get a watch. That is a luxury watch that doesn't have some piece of tech in it. So so we've talked a little bit about leaving behind the playbook and really having to understand the basics.
00:09:27:19 - 00:09:42:14
Speaker 1
What are some some risks associated with with leaving behind a playbook or pre existing structure and kind of creating your own that people that you see people do.
00:09:43:06 - 00:10:03:24
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think you have to you have to reach the point where you're where you're able to do that. And that's the thing. And I think there is nothing there's nothing new in the world of anything like you're saying smartwatches come back around. I mean, I'm not saying, you know, 90, 90 fashion come back around, you know, and the things I threw away in the early 2000, I'm seeing them in the shops and I'm like, Now what?
00:10:04:05 - 00:10:23:22
Speaker 2
So you can only throw away something once you know it inside out and have ingested it. At that point you can throw it away, but you can't kind of go off scramble one. So I know nobody to cookbook. It's only when your cookbook is, you know, dog eared and scribbled on and you've done the same recipes 100 times.
00:10:23:29 - 00:10:37:01
Speaker 2
That's the point at which you can throw away the playbook. And it's no, it's not to be arrogant about it. It's just you reach a point where you go, Well, I did that, and that didn't market at that and that didn't work. This worked because of this. It didn't work because of that. Oh, how about I play with these things?
00:10:37:01 - 00:11:01:28
Speaker 2
So I think the rest is just either going so far outside the playbook that there never was a playbook for that particular thing you're trying to do or where you just try just sometimes try to be too clever is a is a really, really big risk. And I will I will continually say, you know, I mean, I've developed my own sort of eight module framework that I use, which my friend in 63 marketing and seven of those things come before marketing plan.
00:11:02:05 - 00:11:21:06
Speaker 2
So it's all, it's the business foundations, the marketing and all that good stuff. But there's not a single thing in there. I haven't reinvented marketing. I mean, that's that's not a thing that anybody can do. You know, tactics get reinvented. Absolutely. And one of the things I keep saying is that, you know, tactics are literally just your time based manifestation of your strategy.
00:11:21:15 - 00:11:43:12
Speaker 2
You know, people are always going to sell to people, still always need the good foundation and so on. And so I think that the problem with throwing away the playbook is, is if you if you go through them all and then you decide, right, I know the best bits of everything, then that's great. I think if you if you decide you didn't need a playbook in the first place, I think that that's when it starts to get a bit a bit risky.
00:11:43:12 - 00:11:43:24
Speaker 2
Really?
00:11:44:29 - 00:12:15:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. You got to put your ego aside and you have to get those reps. You know, it's really tempting, especially if you're a young marketer, which isn't most of this audience, but let's say that you are if you're a young marketer and you're in your first five years of work, you know, maybe, maybe kind of keep referencing resources and and I can say that throughout our careers, there is no point where we should stop trying to learn.
00:12:17:03 - 00:12:35:00
Speaker 2
And I'm thinking the other day I was this is, you know, delaying impulse. And somebody said, you know, what do you think about the works of so-and-so? And, you know, probably even five or ten years ago, I would go, oh, I should know who this person is. I should be able to reference them. I should have to go and look at what they've done so that I can talk intelligently about them.
00:12:35:18 - 00:12:50:26
Speaker 2
And I actually just reached a point where what I did look them up because I thought, Why don't I look up to you? This is and I realize it was a B2C marketer, which isn't what I do. I purely do B2B and I've actually reached the point where I could actually say, Oh, I haven't heard of this person before.
00:12:50:26 - 00:13:05:08
Speaker 2
I'll go and go and look them up. Now, at first glance I seem to be great to see, which is probably why they're not in my world. Yep. Sounds great. So you're never at a point where you will know everything and I love learning. I love it when somebody says to me, Have you heard of so-and-so or have you read this book?
00:13:05:08 - 00:13:20:06
Speaker 2
Or, you know, what do you think of this approach to that? Because if I know it, then I can go, Yeah, and therefore I've got an opinion on it. If I don't know it, then I you reach a point where you, you know, I think you reach a point where they already say you're happy to admit, you know, nothing.
00:13:20:06 - 00:13:35:05
Speaker 2
And then you go through a stage where you're like, you said, this was semi arrogance where you feel like, you know, everything. I you come out the other side of that and you realize that actually I'm never going to know everything. And so it's actually it's perfectly okay to go. Haven't heard of that person. I'm going to go look them up or.
00:13:35:05 - 00:13:47:21
Speaker 2
Oh, I like that idea. Thank you. You know, and I think it's the bit in the middle. I think it's the most dangerous because you think you know more than you actually know and you think you have nothing left to learn. And that's a really, really dangerous place to be.
00:13:48:21 - 00:14:14:12
Speaker 1
It's it's the Dunning Kruger effect. It's the curve where you think you know the most and you know, at least so yeah. It's, it's it's it exists as a real model that's got evidence to it, which I think is a really great point, is that we have to be self-aware and if you start to get overconfident, that's where there's a line.
00:14:15:00 - 00:14:48:14
Speaker 1
You should be confident what you're doing, what you're confident shouldn't come from you. It shouldn't come from I am Lianne. I'm the best. It should come from. I've seen this or I can reference this or there's these repeated examples of this happening because of that. One thing that I think is kind of like another mistake that I see people do with playbooks is universal application.
00:14:49:06 - 00:15:14:04
Speaker 1
And I think that that just like you how you said about the B to B or B to C like person, that's that's an expert. Is that knowing when to say no is a big part of so even if you are still at the playbook stage can't do it for everything. There is no such thing as a perfect strategy, just the one that fits your unique situation.
00:15:15:18 - 00:15:43:08
Speaker 2
No, I mean, that's the thing. And you have to you have to apply a little bit of common sense and some filter. So if you know friends, if you know what your what your if you look at a company instead of, you know, what your corporate values are, if you know what your corporate objectives are, you know what you're trying to achieve, you know, you walk back from that and that that kind of gives you a filter through which you can put everything even to the point we can kind of go where we want to take our business to here, but you can literally look at everything and go, what list?
00:15:43:08 - 00:16:00:24
Speaker 2
Take us towards that or away from that, or just leave us where we are. And you can actually just start to use it as a as a filter. You can as much of this playbook can go, yeah, that looks like it's going to take us closer to everyone today. That looks like it's probably worth doing for lots of, you know, intrinsically good reasons and it's not going to damage us.
00:16:00:24 - 00:16:20:03
Speaker 2
So we'll, you know, we'll do that because it's a good thing to do. Like, you know, I'm not going to go down the whole carbon offsetting group. I mean, there are things that don't necessarily take you closer to your goals, but they're a good place to operate. And then the things you look at to go actually, no, that's contradicted what we've said or that's, you know, that's that's we've tried that before and it failed or we did that and it took us farther away from where we want to be.
00:16:20:12 - 00:16:24:23
Speaker 2
So you can use that based on a filter for everything, every decision that you make really.
00:16:25:22 - 00:16:51:09
Speaker 1
I think that's a great, great nugget right there is that everyone should should rewind and listen to that again because you should use that as a filter and ask those does is take us closer to the goal or is there some sort of intrinsic value to it and where the most frustration that I have experienced or seen in others is doing things just for the sake of doing it.
00:16:51:09 - 00:17:22:15
Speaker 1
And that is a trap where we fall into because of roadmaps that have evolved in a different direction or sticking too close to a playbook or just the shooting of marketing. And and so that is something I really want people to think about, is where does this take us? Because even if you're an individual contributor or you're a manager or you're CMO, if you are doing things that doesn't take you to your goal, you are wasting time and money and effort.
00:17:23:13 - 00:17:31:22
Speaker 1
And in today's market, yesterday's market, tomorrow's market efficiency matters because it's a business. Yeah.
00:17:32:02 - 00:18:04:06
Speaker 2
And the trick is it comes down to I mean, most of marketing is rules and routines, right. You know, it's not a lot more complicated than that, quite frankly. You know, what are your rules? What are your routines right now? You know, we're building a marketing machine that is that is fit for purpose. And one of those routines should be I mean, even things like, you know, we've got on this this whole content treadmill, which drives me completely insane because I don't do content myself, but I end up sort of influencing and sort of having opinions on it enough and helping sort of strategize it.
00:18:04:06 - 00:18:22:23
Speaker 2
And it's a piece of what the content economy and I'm like, that's not a real thing. Content is a means to an end. Content is a is a tool that you use in your in your arsenal of everything else that you do and then really get stuck on this content treadmill and everything. And every night, again, I'll say, Well, what's up for the year?
00:18:22:23 - 00:18:42:19
Speaker 2
Because it's Tuesday. And I'm like, That's not a good enough reason. Or, you know, because we have to get six things done by next 30. Again, not a good enough reason if you can't draw, you know, can't look at any individual, not even a piece of content, a piece of marketing in general, be at an event we had a press release, be an email blast, be it content, whatever it might be.
00:18:42:19 - 00:19:00:23
Speaker 2
If you can't look at that thing and go, These are our objectives for that. This is why we are doing this, then you have to ask yourself, why are we doing this? And so in your routine you should have that sort of that loop built in. How often are we going to look at what we're doing, why we're doing it?
00:19:00:23 - 00:19:18:05
Speaker 2
Is it contributing? Is it not? And that's not to get hung up on metrics because that's a whole other conversation. But it's to go it's just to go. Let's look at where we're at. Let's look at what's working. Let's look at what's not working. Maybe it's once a month then it's not a quarter. It depends on your organization, but that should be one of your routines.
00:19:18:05 - 00:19:35:21
Speaker 2
And even things like something as simple as like LinkedIn, for instance, you know, if I ever help clients with that, it's like, Well, what is your daily routine? What is your weekly routine? What is your monthly routine? What is reportedly routine? What are your checklists? What are your rules? Because all of marketing is optional and not so much what we seem to forget.
00:19:35:21 - 00:19:52:18
Speaker 2
It's all optional. And so you have to actually then go, what are we choosing to do? So everything that's optional is a choice. And so if you don't stop to reflect on your choices, then you're going to make bad choices. I mean, that's just the life lesson really, isn't it? But anyway.
00:19:52:18 - 00:20:29:09
Speaker 1
What? It's true. Like, it's, it's very true if you are just a and that's not to say that doing things for the sake of doing them doesn't hold merit. You just have to assign it that. That's why you're doing it. If you were posting on LinkedIn to get better writing, to meet people, to just train yourself, to start making small pieces of content, absolutely valid reasons, just doing stuff because you're a zombie and you're just doing stuff and you don't know why and you haven't ever thought about it and you know, or someone just told you and you never was like, Yeah, it's a good art.
00:20:29:10 - 00:20:33:27
Speaker 1
You never like actively agreed. That's where it falls to pieces.
00:20:34:20 - 00:20:50:10
Speaker 2
Yeah. And this is where the hope of doing contact for the sake of it things that it falls apart because you end up it's not so many companies with the first marketer that gets especially tech companies that have a bunch of tech people that know of a product person and then maybe have a sales person, then they'll have it.
00:20:50:11 - 00:21:09:14
Speaker 2
Everything else person. And then they suddenly go, Oh, marketing, that's a real fact. And they quite often just get like a generalist or a content person and then the problem with that is you still end up with with gaps because this content person you can't to, to come from that person, right. Stuff. I mean that stuff's not very good briefing, is it.
00:21:09:14 - 00:21:29:03
Speaker 2
So you still need somebody to join. Join the dots between the sort of top level of the organization you're setting, the vision and the strategy. And this content person who's writing, how do you trickle down from the big vision to the day to day activities? And even when you know, yes, I get the content, people talk about strategy, but that's not true as it pertains to content.
00:21:29:09 - 00:21:50:00
Speaker 2
You know, you still need the input and the engagement from the top level of the organization. And then you also content strategy has to align with, with your PR strategy, with your event strategy, with your branding strategy, with your digital marketing strategy. All the strategies have to line up and that's where you need sort of the whole strategizing, the strategy thing, which I talk about a lot as well.
00:21:50:00 - 00:21:59:13
Speaker 2
So yeah, I mean, it's a whole it's all a minefield. Well, that's kind of what makes it fun, though, and isn't that dodging all of that? But yeah.
00:21:59:13 - 00:22:06:24
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So would you say that it's a mistake for those tech companies to hire that person first?
00:22:08:12 - 00:22:28:29
Speaker 2
I don't think it's a mistake on the grounds that you need you need somebody who could get stuff done. And this comes back to what I talk about a lot, which is kind of the gap, the gaps between strategy and tactics. And normally the world is put into two categories. Strategy is deemed lots of thinking, lots of navel gazing, lots of analysis, lots of money, lots of paperwork produced, but nothing actually gets done.
00:22:28:29 - 00:22:43:29
Speaker 2
You've done a lot of thinking and then you end up not making any decisions at all, or you end up doing tactics, tactics, tactics. Let's do stuff. Let's keep taking stuff off. Unless you've done this, you've done this before, and that's a the gap is this bit in the middle, which is what I call sort of strategic tactics.
00:22:43:29 - 00:23:06:20
Speaker 2
I talk about this a lot, like think do you think, do you think do you do a little bit of strategy and then get stuff done? So so that usually the options for a tech company, they either bring on somebody senior who doesn't really want to get their hands dirty and start writing content, or they bring also a junior person who can do all the doing but can't do the strategy.
00:23:07:01 - 00:23:32:06
Speaker 2
So I think the right answer really in my in my opinion, is to get somebody who's a generalist or a content person, but then have somebody like me who doesn't have to be maybe other, you know, senior advisors and see them as are available. But get somebody, you know, who can do even an hour a week or even 2 hours a week, you know, who can then translate between the you know, between the CEO and this content person.
00:23:32:12 - 00:23:51:07
Speaker 2
So, I mean, one project that I did not that long ago, they have exactly this problem. The CEO was the bottleneck and CEO was pretty much always the bottleneck. And they had a content person. And this content person was very capable, very competent, very all those things where you can't sort of write a 2000 word piece and then put it over to the CEO and expect to get headspace from that.
00:23:51:18 - 00:24:09:02
Speaker 2
So what is the process? So what I did was it my my job was to create a process. So did were how are we going to get this get this? I don't care how much content, but it's partly because one of the most definable and understandable modes of marketing is this. If you kind of like, wait, the example of marketing stuff to use.
00:24:09:12 - 00:24:23:22
Speaker 2
So it was like, Well, okay, what are we going to do? Well, Mr. Content, you're going to have half an hour a week with the CEO and you got to agree what you're going to do that way, and then you're going to go away and you're going to come up with some ideas for content pieces, and he's going to go, Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.
00:24:24:02 - 00:24:41:04
Speaker 2
Then the ones he says yes to, you're going to develop it further, and then the CEO is going to say Yes, no, yes, no, and only. And then instead of going and writing something, you're going to interview the CEO. He could be walking on, make it a cup of coffee, just interview the CEO, then write your piece. Then at that point, the CEO chancellor go.
00:24:41:04 - 00:24:58:08
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. Single this and they will approve it. So the so it's not wrong to get that junior person or that journalist. But what I'm but what is wrong is not being able to interface with them. And then you get this frustration loop where the content person get something done and leaves and the CEO gets annoyed because the content person isn't doing anything.
00:24:58:22 - 00:25:15:00
Speaker 2
So it's about getting that. It's about getting it. But in the middle, I mean, I always say, you know, every problem comes down to, you know, gaps and disconnects and miscommunications. And it's all solvable by systems and by rules and by structure and by routine and by all these good things. So you don't so you need this middle.
00:25:15:00 - 00:25:20:29
Speaker 2
You need this middle person. You know, you need a CMO who could talk to the CEO and control floor of the marketing team as well.
00:25:21:09 - 00:25:52:24
Speaker 1
00:25:53:08 - 00:26:26:25
Speaker 1
I'm I really like the call out of the need for generalists as I like to think of myself as a generalist, right? Like I know enough about the whole team to know when something's right or wrong. You know, I am not the person that is necessarily pressing the button, but I've had enough meetings and I've looked at enough spreadsheets and I've done enough collaborating with those people to know what's up to snuff and what's just just baloney, you know, like where this is just yeah.
00:26:27:00 - 00:26:27:18
Speaker 1
Off the road.
00:26:28:10 - 00:26:42:09
Speaker 2
This is absolutely I mean you can see the book behind me is quite its range by David Epstein. And that's that's about being a generalist basically. And I for a while, I really struggle with the word generalist because that the overall impression seems to be, oh, yeah, you know, a little bit about a lot of things, you know, you're not much use.
00:26:42:16 - 00:27:01:05
Speaker 2
And then I write a lovely definition which is saying, no, you know, the word generalist, it really relates to a broad understanding of how the world at large works. And I thought, Yeah, I can get behind that as a definition. And I'm the same. But I mean, I, you know, mainly because I'm not really old now, but you know, I can talk to PR people and I know their job as well as they do.
00:27:01:05 - 00:27:25:22
Speaker 2
I can talk to branding people and yes, I wouldn't do 100% as good a job, but I'm kind of doing like 80% as good a job. So that's pretty good for the strategizing, the strategy. I think it's really important to know because again, the CEO shouldn't have to brief a branding person and a design person and the contact person and this person, you need somebody who can speak all those languages and translate between them all.
00:27:25:22 - 00:27:50:18
Speaker 2
And much as I talk about translating tech to human all the way across the company, I also talk about translating marketing to human on the way into a company, because so many marketers kind of comes back to the playbooks. They sort of hide behind these these frameworks. And I'm going to write a really interesting shall we say, LinkedIn post by saying about, you know, it's not our job as marketers to teach CEOs to speak marketing.
00:27:50:26 - 00:28:11:00
Speaker 2
That's our job. Our job is to use these marketing frameworks, use these marketing playbooks, use these marketing textbooks to do their job. And then we come up with the recommendations and the actions and the plans and the policies and all that stuff. And that's what we take into the saying, you know, Oh, look, I've just done a five forces, I've just done a personal interest on ourself.
00:28:11:00 - 00:28:28:04
Speaker 2
I mean, know that that has no place in the land, the CEO in the land the CEO is going. These are top ten priorities. And then as a back up, you've got all the why and the reasoning and the decision trees and the frameworks. But you have to talk human to it. To a CEO, I'm often slightly off base now.
00:28:28:04 - 00:28:39:24
Speaker 2
What was your question? But yeah, it's it's really it's as marketers, it's our job to use all of that stuff to do our job and then go and present the results of doing our job, you know, to top management.
00:28:41:02 - 00:29:12:27
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. And I love the the range and definition of being a generalist. So I think that you really hit the nail on the head on exactly why that matters, because let's to your point, let's say that you have someone that only speaks strategy and doesn't speak tactics. You lose the translation in the execution, but also you can't get buy in on the tactics information from someone, the guys, they're like, That's our CEO job.
00:29:13:08 - 00:29:24:09
Speaker 1
It would be nice to have a CEO that understands marketing, but that's just not always the case. And that's where you have to manage up. You have to do occasion.
00:29:25:20 - 00:29:46:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, I'm just explaining stuff in a way that makes sense. And then the other good thing about being a generallist is, yes, you can integrate with those, those layers, but you also know when to stop. So as I'm saying, I could do so just taste, take some of the real nitty gritty stuff up, you know, like managing a CRM, like doing SEO, like doing cold outreach, all that stuff.
00:29:46:15 - 00:30:01:23
Speaker 2
And I don't touch that. I mean, that's just no, because you have to. To me, that's binary. You either really, really do that or you really, really don't do that. You can't dabble in that stuff. It's such deep expertize. And you have to keep you have to keep your expertize current and you have to keep learning and you have to do it all day.
00:30:01:23 - 00:30:26:17
Speaker 2
Every day has to be your job. So so in that case, that the role of the general system to brief that person as to the objectives, give them the inputs they need, manage the outputs, tweak as often as necessary, and know enough that they know when somebody is talking absolute nonsense to them. So, I mean, I can work with the team, the hours, and I can make sure that, you know, on a monday morning they know what messaging they're going out with on a Friday.
00:30:26:17 - 00:30:44:01
Speaker 2
We can regroup on the messaging and I know what worked and what didn't. I can tell whether they've had a good week or a bad week. I can I need to know whether the numbers are going up or down, but I don't have to micromanage them every day. But I have to know enough that they go, Yeah, but then yeah, but that I can spot an excuse for absolute nonsense, you know, coming from them.
00:30:44:01 - 00:31:01:11
Speaker 2
So you have to know enough that you can just hold them accountable, I guess, you know, to, to doing their job, but not so much that you would dare to be presumptuous enough to do their job. You know, I wouldn't if their level of expertize is just like way beyond mine in those areas, as it should be. But my job is to say again, interface.
00:31:01:11 - 00:31:20:21
Speaker 2
I mean, I forgot I wrote a whole again post about marketing being, you know, the invisible API that holds organizations together where the interface between all the different bits of it and should be invisible and a sort of a CMO role should be to manage all those different streams of activity, make sure everything gets done, be invisible, but just, you know, get everything done.
00:31:21:01 - 00:31:25:28
Speaker 2
So complicated. It's complicated, but it's, you know, it falls into the simple, not easy category.
00:31:26:14 - 00:31:49:26
Speaker 1
It falls into the off category, too, because if you're too invisible, you don't get hired. And marketing as a cost center, we have to play up our own marketing for ourselves. And especially in times of economic turmoil, we have to rationalize our cost. We have to be like narrow, like we we do all these things without you seeing how hard it is.
00:31:50:04 - 00:31:54:24
Speaker 1
But you should know, it's like super hard. We're super great at it. It's kind of this paradox.
00:31:56:03 - 00:32:13:24
Speaker 2
But that's where your internal reporting comes in. So, I mean, when I was V.P. marketing, I had a competition, somebody and they were going, Well, I know who the CEO is, I know who the CTO is, but I don't know who the CMO is. So therefore marketing's not important. And I was like, No, therefore marketing is doing a really, really, really good job.
00:32:14:05 - 00:32:32:07
Speaker 2
But to me that's kind of where I think where your internal reporting comes in because in terms of visibility of that, that only matters going upwards. So it doesn't matter if the people at the coalface know how hard you're working. What matters is that management, respect and value the contribution the marketing brings to the organization.
00:32:33:24 - 00:32:57:20
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you've got a lot of really great points there. So in terms of of leaving behind the playbook, you know, there's there's so many out there to so so just choosing one is your first battle if you're still using that, you know, but the second part is, you know, that we talked about when it's a wrong fit, but like what's the future of this?
00:32:57:20 - 00:33:04:06
Speaker 1
What does this look like for someone coming up through the ranks now, in contrast to when you got started.
00:33:04:16 - 00:33:26:05
Speaker 2
Some things do not change, have not changed and will not change, which is what I'm saying about, you know, things like analyzing the market. People will always salespeople. Marketing is everything that comes from your company and your customers that that will that to me will never change. I think what changes are the the tech the martech, the tech stuff changes.
00:33:26:05 - 00:33:50:24
Speaker 2
And to me, the tech stock that's that's that's tactics. People would argue it's strategic, but it's tactics because it's tools and tactics and stuff that enables you to get your job done. And that that to me will change. And then you have to know all the fundamentals. And then I think you have to if you want to be a deep specialist, I think you have to realize that, you know, half of your job is going to be doing that and half of your job is going to be keeping up with that.
00:33:51:07 - 00:34:05:11
Speaker 2
So for instance, if you look now, all the the LinkedIn gurus two years ago, they were teaching everybody how to how to use LinkedIn and they were like the gurus and that was how they made their business. And I'm like, Yeah, but LinkedIn might disappear tomorrow. So now have you noticed a lot of them are even doing well?
00:34:05:11 - 00:34:26:13
Speaker 2
Communities is a new thing. We're now going to teach everybody communities and then after communities. What are they going to teach everybody to do? So that to me is a case of, you know, they've picked one thing and really, really stuck to it. And now they're going, Oh, no, we now know what the next new thing is. So what I do has not changed because it's just I've just continued the sorrow.
00:34:26:13 - 00:34:46:18
Speaker 2
So I think I think what I would say is don't sort of now if you have all of your colors to one mask because you kind of go, you know, even just that if you go, you know, I'm a HubSpot parson, I'm a Salesforce person, well, take it up a level, be a CRM person or be a code outreach person or be more comms person.
00:34:46:24 - 00:35:02:06
Speaker 2
Don't get wedded to the tactical, the tactics and the tools, because you have to remember, they are just a means of getting something done. So I think whatever you specialize and try and check upper level because then as the bits underneath change, you've still got a skillset that you can you can take in either direction.
00:35:03:03 - 00:35:34:23
Speaker 1
Absolutely. I could not agree with this more. I have complained about being like turned down for things because I didn't have x, y, z certification for one specific CRM. But if you understand how CRM work, you can make any CRM do that. Well, I need the you can't make a spreadsheet and you still can make a spreadsheet quite a lot, but there's limitations, right?
00:35:34:23 - 00:35:55:07
Speaker 1
If you understand the promise and the cadence and the point and you can strategically map out something, what tool you use to execute that map is just it's just part of the recipe. Like, does it matter if you're using one brand of sugar or different British sugar? It's still sugar. Yeah.
00:35:56:00 - 00:36:11:22
Speaker 2
What's that mean? Using I had a hand whisk one day and then the next day getting an electric rest. And then the next day realizing that I've got I can employ somebody to bust my ass for me. I mean, it's all so make an omelet, you know, because I've my skills are one level above, you know, just the just the tools that I use.
00:36:11:22 - 00:36:36:08
Speaker 2
And I mean, I don't get me wrong, I'm not anti specialists in the least, but I'm saying so. So for me, you know, the LinkedIn LinkedIn specialists shouldn't be LinkedIn specialists. They should be outreach specialists or communication specialists or, you know, personal branding specialists or whatever. But to me, they specialize in the tool, you know, and now they're having to sort of know that everybody doesn't need to buy into courses anymore.
00:36:37:03 - 00:36:56:15
Speaker 2
They're now moving towards telling everybody why they're not selling and that the way they're going to satisfy the community. And you can see you can sort of you can watch it unfold as you go, as you know, as the days go on and you see trends popping off. But, you know, you got this this particular market slowing, whereas you can look back at stuff I did, you know, five years ago, ten years ago.
00:36:56:15 - 00:37:17:21
Speaker 2
And it's still perfectly valid now because it's again, it's it's well, what's the competition doing? What are we doing? Yes, we can react leaner and quicker and faster and cheaper and all those good things. But, you know, even things like, you know, that's the big thing. And minimum viable products and all that. I mean, technology is brilliant because because on the one hand, it means anybody can have an idea today and a product tomorrow.
00:37:18:06 - 00:37:35:06
Speaker 2
On the other hand, is that because anyone can have an idea? Diana, out of products tomorrow and therefore there's much more scope to kind of, you know, pull the wool over people's eyes. You know, I think we can make quicker decisions, which is really good because we you know, 15 years ago, you know, we were printing we were printing brochures.
00:37:35:06 - 00:37:59:03
Speaker 2
You know, hardly anyone does that now. But, you know, 15 years ago, you had to think about what you said. You had to carefully write what you said because you knew you were pushing the button that on a print run of a thousand brochures that was going to last you six months. And now I think people don't take the time to think because they can change your website in 3 minutes and they can just, you know, oh, up there in the PDF and half an hour.
00:37:59:03 - 00:38:20:10
Speaker 2
And so we have to give things time to work, which we used to have to do because it was really annoying. If then you printed a thousand brochures with the typo in them, but you know, you were stuck with things for some time and now the pace of change is brilliant because we can move and change quickly. But it's bad because we don't give things time to work before we're moving on to the next change on the shiny.
00:38:21:08 - 00:38:46:14
Speaker 1
Absolutely. I, I think that's a really great point is that the you got to give time to collect enough data for it to be statistically significant in order for your judgment calls to be based on fact. And that's what we mean by data driven strategies. We don't mean taking a spreadsheet, seeing some numbers on it, and then twisting that to mean your own personal bias.
00:38:46:15 - 00:39:17:12
Speaker 1
That is not data driven, that is data manipulation. But if you only have it and there's there's some blurry lines, but you have to have the inputs go through the machinations and producing enough outputs for it to be considered something. And sometimes nothing is something. It runs long enough, but 1/2, one minute, one day, typically not long enough.
00:39:18:13 - 00:39:35:00
Speaker 2
It's not anything, you know, even though they can you know, one of the fundamentals of of, you know, of any type of marketing, you know, it takes X number of eyeballs on what you do X time. So it's not that whole. That's why you can repeat yourself and y you can say the same thing in different ways. And why you have messaging that you use again and again and again.
00:39:35:12 - 00:39:57:04
Speaker 2
I mean I'm so like this month threads is I'm just rolling through the top 12 posts I've done this year that I've enjoyed the most and hopefully, hopefully people looking at them have as well. And I'm just taking a month to sort of regroup and going through this post. But I'm not going into consciousness. And so and I'm like, Yeah, I sent this like three weeks ago, but you people don't remember because you're so close to all your own stuff that you think about.
00:39:57:04 - 00:40:13:10
Speaker 2
I want to repeat myself and I've said this before and you know, I'll say the same thing again and I'm deliberately making the point. You're saying these are my top ten posts. So I did this one three months ago, but I see people with the same posts coming up again and again and again. And I don't I don't mind that because I'm going, well, at least you're being consistent.
00:40:14:12 - 00:40:32:12
Speaker 2
So yeah, but I do see a lot of people going, Well, we've tried this and it hasn't worked and I'm. For how. What. We gave it a week. Yeah well you know so you day and I think 90 days is a good is a good metric for for anything really because it's it's long enough to sort of get up to speed and then that's something that's something wrong.
00:40:32:20 - 00:40:48:06
Speaker 2
So I mean, I'm under the workshop at the minute and I've been promoting it for nearly 90 days. If I talk about a product, that's the one that I talk about. So, you know, I could I could have said, oh, well, you know, I posted about it twice and nobody nobody did that. So I'm going to give up and I didn't.
00:40:48:06 - 00:41:05:03
Speaker 2
It's like that is my saying. For 90 days there's me. And then this is just one thing I productize. And the same is true of anything. It's like, you know, we did like them for two weeks and nothing happened. We did a week on Instagram and nothing happened. You know, we went to one, you know, we were on one webinar with something and we didn't get 100 leads.
00:41:05:03 - 00:41:14:04
Speaker 2
You have to give things time to set. I mean, you were even in a fast moving, technology driven world. You have to give things time because otherwise people.
00:41:16:06 - 00:41:35:03
Speaker 1
I mean, that's that's the rules. We don't make them, you know, it would be certainly nice if it only took once. And sometimes you do straight gold. But that is the exception, not the rule on random acts of marketing and just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Not very useful business strategies.
00:41:36:06 - 00:41:49:17
Speaker 2
But a lot of people don't know what to do. And this is this is the other thing. When I was having a chat with something the other day, I said, Well, yeah, on the one hand, you know, we need to get our business objectives sorted out. And then he went and then what content are we going to do?
00:41:49:18 - 00:42:06:15
Speaker 2
And I'm like, Whoa, Nelly, there's like a there's still a gap between those two things, which is, you know, what are we trying to achieve? You know, who, who are our customers? How Do they make decisions? What are the different ways in which we need to reach them? And even simple things like, like, oh, we'll go straight to doing a website.
00:42:06:16 - 00:42:26:14
Speaker 2
I mean, well, it's fundamentally connected if types of websites out there, there's the one where you want to do lots of other stuff that drive people to your website. So at that point they pretty much know who you are and then you have one type marketing engagement, but the other type is that you want people to do all the all the SEO or just look for their problems and then stumble across your website.
00:42:26:21 - 00:42:39:18
Speaker 2
And that's a wholly different website than the website that you have deliberately driven people to. So there's all these gaps in between. We've done some thinking, let's do some doing. You still need to draw lines between those. Those two parts of your world.
00:42:39:20 - 00:43:00:00
Speaker 1
My personal pet peeve along these lines is, is the budget question right? Well, what are our business objectives and how much budget I have? Well, how much budget do you need? Well, all of it. But, you know, like really like how much are you able to get me? You know, don't tell me that if I make a good enough case for it.
00:43:00:00 - 00:43:08:19
Speaker 1
I can ask Mommy and Daddy for an allowance. Like tell me how much investment we have for this. And from there I can make choices.
00:43:09:15 - 00:43:25:24
Speaker 2
You cut your costs accordingly. I mean, when I when I was doing my little marketing gig and I do tell the story, a lot of I am starting before I do, I apologize. But I was looking after 150 countries, nine vertical markets. So much in that spreadsheet. Right? This is why a lot of cells in there and I would literally, you know, have a budget your market.
00:43:25:27 - 00:43:46:04
Speaker 2
So I'd start from about budget we go yeah my marketing budget $2 million. Thank you. And I get laughed out of the room, you know, so you make choices and you literally sitting there and I'm thinking like, this is my part. How am I going to distribute it? My cells and I would have to go is going to a trade show for water utilities in South Africa.
00:43:46:12 - 00:44:05:03
Speaker 2
More or less important than putting on a series of personal events for the electricity industry in the States? I would literally be sitting there picking which which of these two cells am I going to put this five grand in or this ten grand over 20 grand then because you can't spread yourself so thin because you end up doing nothing.
00:44:05:16 - 00:44:21:16
Speaker 2
But nor can you just do. Like in my spreadsheet, I couldn't just do one row or one column either. We literally had these, you know, thousands and something cells in my spreadsheet. And that was what it came down to. It was just comparing to things and going actually based on our corporate objectives. This so is more important than that.
00:44:21:16 - 00:44:28:02
Speaker 2
So you just end up making tough decisions. You pay off according to a budget but available.
00:44:28:19 - 00:44:47:11
Speaker 1
It just has to be based in reality instead of what ifs and conjecture. And while there's always some of that I will see, that point is that there is never no one psychic. We don't always know if this event is going to go better than that event, but we do make informed decisions based on how much capital we have to invest in it.
00:44:47:24 - 00:45:09:09
Speaker 1
And if you're looking at two very similarly needed items, you got to say you've got to have a place to circle back to and know what your limits are. Because if they had just been like, Well, why don't you ask our investors for just a little bit more investment for this? Well, no, that's not a good idea. And that's that comes back to the basic rules.
00:45:09:09 - 00:45:34:29
Speaker 1
If you're constantly heading up your investors every week, every month for more, more and more, more and more, you're telling them that you don't know how to spend the investment they already gave you. You're telling them that you have no foresight or planning. And in you're you're just not establishing a position of expertize in what you're doing.
00:45:35:26 - 00:45:54:09
Speaker 2
Absolutely. And I'll come back to this again and again. So if something is, you know, oh, no, no, we went over our marketing budget. I'm like, well, then whoever's looking after your marketing is not fit for purpose. Next, you know, it's not that complicated. You know, you can't you can't suddenly and unexpectedly spend money. You know, when you're spending money.
00:45:54:27 - 00:45:56:25
Speaker 2
I was surprised to you, you.
00:45:56:25 - 00:46:02:12
Speaker 1
Know, I mean, that Amazon sure gets us. No, I'm kidding. But it's crazy.
00:46:02:12 - 00:46:31:16
Speaker 2
It's like it wasn't me. It was the spreadsheet. And I'm like, what now? You know? And so but also you have to measure things. And, you know, I my main metric, which rightly or wrongly, but it worked for me. I mean, we took the company from 12 million, 24 million in the year by doing all that, you know, clever focusing and prioritizing and structuring and all that good stuff, but admits we came back to the safest events which really occur where a big part of what we did because it was a really good way to get out there, but it would literally come down to nothing.
00:46:31:16 - 00:46:42:28
Speaker 2
Was that common? And if a sales guy didn't give me any feedback after an event, then the next time he asked if he could go to one, I said No. Well, now I'm like, I got zero feedback from the last month, so I didn't know whether it was any good or not because I couldn't go to them all.
00:46:42:28 - 00:47:00:06
Speaker 2
We would and 50 something events a year and but it was it was it wasn't very confident. I was like, you can ring me up. Sent me an email, you can fill out the form that my department prepared, but I need feedback because provides me however you want because I, I sandwiched the sales guys is a real person.
00:47:00:07 - 00:47:18:28
Speaker 2
I'm going about this a while ago and it got completely ignored, but I still stand by it, which I'm quite happy to put sales at the center of an organization and then I wrap marketing around it. So you have corporate best practice on the one hand, which is you will do what the best practice is because that's what the rules are and then the freedom of flexibility to do what they wanted in that region.
00:47:19:05 - 00:47:37:18
Speaker 2
So what the US South managed to do was very different from Spanish sales and so they got support for their own regions and then in the front and back of sales, front end is the marketing is responsible for the lead generation. All the marketing materials, all the stuff like that. At the other end we're responsible for the case studies, the customer advocacy, the referrals and so on.
00:47:37:24 - 00:47:54:18
Speaker 2
00:47:54:18 - 00:48:08:02
Speaker 2
That's literally that's literally their job. So again, somebody was complaining about, well, my sales guys end up doing this and doing that and doing their own PowerPoints and doing this. And I'm like, Well, again, your marketing is therefore not fit for purpose. I don't understand why this is complicated.
00:48:08:02 - 00:48:48:03
Speaker 1
It's I and it comes to culture. Comes to culture. If your sales team is taking marketing PowerPoint as they're apt to do and they leak Frankenstein into something that just shouldn't see the light of day, who was approving that? Where was the operational procedure? Where was the support? Where they felt like they could hand this off and trust that it was going to end up great and that was that was something that really stuck out to me from, gosh, like five years ago, because I want to make that very clear.
00:48:48:03 - 00:49:11:12
Speaker 1
This is a five year old example. But what what is the fastest way to get under my skin and get one of these soapbox tirades for me is to show me an ugly PowerPoint that is jam packed. Just jam packed. Doesn't matter. Does it matter what you do impact it with if you jam packed it, it is wrong.
00:49:12:01 - 00:49:23:21
Speaker 1
Full stop. Yeah, I will. Please just be handed over to me. I would love to help you with that. Well, the nightmares. So back to your point about they don't speak in the middle.
00:49:24:24 - 00:49:43:22
Speaker 2
Yeah, you know, things should be fit for purpose and your sales guys, your sales I should sell like that is literally all they should do. And the problem is, is that this ends up with, you know, marketing having a sort of a reputation for being interested in the superficial. What do you let's mess about with the slides and you trying to explain, I'm not messing about with your sides.
00:49:43:29 - 00:50:01:27
Speaker 2
I am representing our company in the best way possible. I'm not just talking about the slides for the sake of it. There are rules and there are procedures and there are ways to tell stories. And there are ways to do that in your technology. And there are ways to structure slides. And, you know, all this is here for a reason.
00:50:02:02 - 00:50:12:28
Speaker 2
The PowerPoint slides are just the manifestation of that. So don't lose all of the good structure of stuff that we've done by making it look ugly, because actually that detracts from what you're actually trying to do in the first place.
00:50:13:27 - 00:50:46:18
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's best practices, you know, like just like calling someone for cold outrage and cutting them out is not good practice. That will not get you what you're after. You are is essentially doing that with an ugly PowerPoint. You know, you might as well just be called an F and this or that or, you know, you might as well like, you know, it's just the amount of disrespect by by making an ugly PowerPoint and then trying to use that as a vehicle to earn their trust in business.
00:50:46:18 - 00:51:24:09
Speaker 2
It's just it's like to me, the attention to detail is really, really important because people don't understand. But I'm saying, look, okay, so we were selling again a long time ago, like mission critical radio equipment, right? Like let's go off the oil rigs that was going to black hole public safety radio. And it was like really stuff you know, I'm not saying that necessarily everybody's lives depend on it, but it was you know, it was it was a lot of it was public safety deployment or it was, you know, reaching remote islands and nothing else could reach it was kind of it was effectively mission critical if it went down your communications and might not.
00:51:24:09 - 00:51:51:08
Speaker 2
It was you know, if I can't trust you to spell things correctly and to put your semicolon or your apostrophes in the right place. And I can't trust you to have, you know, nice looking collaterals that reach the market. I don't want you to put that screw in the right place in that radio, you know, and that's an input to me or my you know, even if we look to our user manuals, what look looks really good all our customers look really good on the content and look pretty good.
00:51:51:08 - 00:52:16:04
Speaker 2
00:52:16:12 - 00:52:29:05
Speaker 2
So this stuff does matter. And that's what really frustrates me when people say marketing is just the fluffy. I mean, I know the marketing sparkle. It's the little bits of fluffy around the substance that does not make marketing fluffy.
00:52:30:15 - 00:53:05:18
Speaker 1
Oh, that's my love language. What you just said, the sparkle instead of the fluff. Oh, so drew the summation of our conversation to this point, you can leave behind the playbook once you have sturdy enough marketing that it establishes the sparkle and not the fluff. When you can get to that point where it is sturdy, standalone is a manifestation of everything your company stands for and you can make this powerful piece of strategy come to life.
00:53:06:11 - 00:53:37:10
Speaker 1
That is when you can start to add a pinch of, you know, job, spit it out, a pinch of, you know, all of these different emotions. And that's when you can start to be the maestro in and out in whatever it is. And and that's really the gist of it. Like that is what it comes down to, is that if you can't get the basic stuff done, well, then you need to keep doing it until you can.
00:53:37:21 - 00:53:38:18
Speaker 1
And then you go.
00:53:39:01 - 00:53:55:00
Speaker 2
At sparkle to absolute nonsense because the sparkle will just dissolve, get something, absolutely. Get the substance right. And only then do you get your polish out and out. A little bit of fairy dust and sparkle around it. But don't come in at fairy dust level because, you know, you've got, I think, just nothing to sprinkle on.
00:53:56:00 - 00:54:19:22
Speaker 1
If you're coming in at fairy dust level and you have nothing to put underneath it. People will know. People absolutely do know it. There will not that illusion will not last long. We you know, if it turns into Fyre Festival, like you can have stuff and then it will blow up in your face and all you will be known for is the fluff, not the facts.
00:54:20:14 - 00:54:38:25
Speaker 2
It is up to the whole post about about fluffy marketing. And I did an analogy about it being cotton candy. You call on your side of the world telling you the call of candyfloss over here, and I said, it really quickly dissolves to nothing and it just leaves you with a, you know, a slightly sugary, slightly sugary mouth, but nothing else, nothing else to actually show for it because it just dissolves.
00:54:39:13 - 00:54:47:01
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. All right. We're kind of getting towards the end. So I want to make sure I ask you the big question.
00:54:47:01 - 00:54:49:06
Speaker 2
Oh, okay. Well, it's not going to be all right.
00:54:49:09 - 00:55:22:01
Speaker 1
What is a question that someone should ask but don't? And the way to take this is two ways. I've seen people take it, really go wherever you want with it. But it is meant to find out what is something that Nikki does that people just doesn't don't realize that you are exceptional at or what is a question where people come to you for X, Y and Z when really they need to understand and see first or anywhere in between.
00:55:22:01 - 00:55:44:12
Speaker 2
00:55:44:12 - 00:56:01:25
Speaker 2
And the answer is yes, because you reach a point where you go, I will either on the spot solve your problem, go away and solve your problem. Tell you who else can solve your problem if I'm not the right person or tell you why that's not the problem you should actually be trying to solve. Pick the right problem that you actually should be trying to solve.
00:56:02:12 - 00:56:26:21
Speaker 2
So, yes, it is possible to answer any any question. Absolutely. And I think it's about you come back to this this generalist thing, you know, enough about enough to be able to answer any question and also to be strong enough and brave enough to go. Nope, can't answer that well, but I know someone who can. So, so yeah, I think well what I find really interesting is one of my superpowers is this don't ask me anything thing.
00:56:26:21 - 00:56:46:04
Speaker 2
That's where I kind of come alive. And that's because of being a generalist with a lot of years experience. So that's really hard to demonstrate. And that's how I actually do my magic life, you know, so, so I don't know what question I should be asked, but possibly, yeah. Can you always answer any marketing question? And the answer is always yes, but not necessarily the one you've asked and not necessarily straight away.
00:56:46:15 - 00:56:47:16
Speaker 2
And honestly, buy me.
00:56:48:18 - 00:57:14:09
Speaker 1
That's perfect. I love it. That is that's cool. And I think that really sums up the theme of this whole episode is just there's different ways to take things and sometimes you just need to ask someone else or rephrase the question or ask, why is this question even being asked? And in how to go from there? And so it's okay to be at all stages of life.
00:57:14:15 - 00:57:19:08
Speaker 1
There is no role on stage to be accurate. Yeah, but you I.
00:57:19:23 - 00:57:45:00
Speaker 2
Never learned I what what I find one of the saddest things of all is people who screw up because they were either too arrogant or too scared to ask. And I. I will take all the time in the world to mentor people and to help people answer as long as they want to learn and want to grow, want to succeed.
00:57:45:00 - 00:58:01:14
Speaker 2
I have all the time in the world for those people because we were all there. But what I can't cope with is the people that are too arrogant to ask for help. I will not to the people that you too scared to help by taking a step back and go. And don't be scared to ask because actually we were all that once.
00:58:01:23 - 00:58:17:06
Speaker 2
But people are just too arrogant. I just move on from somebody. If you don't actually, if you're not willing to take help, then I'm not willing to offer it. And I think that that to me is one of the biggest things. Well, I mean, I, I learn new things every single day. And I love learning. I'm a passionate I'm a passionate learner.
00:58:17:06 - 00:58:38:23
Speaker 2
I mean, if academia paid well enough, I'd be in academia. And I think that's what every whether it's an aspiring marketer or a learner marketer, read voraciously, listen voraciously, ask questions voraciously, try things out voraciously, you know, and that's what will that's what will help you grow as a marketer.
00:58:39:27 - 00:59:10:20
Speaker 1
Absolutely. And if you're not in a place like I'm surrounded by people that you can ask, go find some people. It will have. Yeah, that's a red flag. You know, there should be some certain level of safety for questions to be asked. And that is one of those benchmarks, benchmarks, things where it's it exists or you go find it and that's not to say that if you need a job to pay your rent, that you quit today.
00:59:10:22 - 00:59:34:22
Speaker 1
That's not what we're saying. We're saying find some resources to support you in your career growth. And that's where, you know, LinkedIn is a wonderful place. There's so many people and I would say that honestly, if you send me a job and you're like, Hey, I have this thing and I just don't know what to do, ten out of ten, I would I would respond and I would at least do my best to help you or put you in the right direction.
00:59:34:22 - 00:59:40:18
Speaker 1
And I'm pretty confident that Nikki would probably do the same unless you're able to stop, you know.
00:59:41:16 - 00:59:58:22
Speaker 2
Unless you reach a point where you take advantage of me, at which point, you know, I'd say no. But, you know, generally building conversations with people, even I even like, you know, somebody the other day I was like, Can I just pick your brains with 15 minutes? Yeah, of course you can. But I know that's been like, you know, for days, somebody, you know.
00:59:58:24 - 01:00:14:06
Speaker 2
But at the same time, I will. Yeah, I don't think I you know. Yeah, I've always answered the ends. I would always point people in the right direction. Lazy people. I want somebody goes, can you help me with this? And I'm like, I've just put a link to it if you can't be bothered to go down to that doctor, but I'm not emailing you that document, you know.
01:00:14:06 - 01:00:29:27
Speaker 2
But in general, if it's like, what do you think of this and what's your opinion on that? And do you know anyone can you know do you know anybody can do this? Yeah, absolutely. Just I I'm fortunate enough touch which I sort of reached a point where I was like, give back to me. And I'm like really complete, like, weird.
01:00:29:27 - 01:00:47:17
Speaker 2
But no, it's I mean, you, I had a lot of people looking out for me when I was, you know, starting out in my career. I had some really good mentors. Yes, I did a lot of self studying and I did drag myself up as well. I kept the reading, but I had people like it asked and I think you you have to keep you have to keep giving an idea.
01:00:47:17 - 01:01:07:24
Speaker 2
A lot of the the you know Julia as well. You know, I've done some of the you know, the hypothesis. Yeah. Which is now Hartsfield Exchange. I've done quite a lot of those sessions because it's lovely like talking to salespeople really, really, really want to learn and having those really engaging conversations and those sparks and seeing that, seeing them when they go, oh, and learning things.
01:01:07:24 - 01:01:14:05
Speaker 2
And to me you can't do that as part of your career, then you know you've got no place being in marketing. It should be about giving.
01:01:14:05 - 01:01:41:18
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So the right way to ask for help or support outside of or inside of your work organization is to come prepared, know what it is you're asking, know that it and have a reasonable expectation of of. Is that something that you ask for, for support, or is this where you need to pay for a consultation session because that that exists too.
01:01:41:18 - 01:02:09:16
Speaker 1
I most of us do some sort of fractional work and sometimes that's underneath our fractional work. So respectfully understanding what you're asking, what the time involvement is in what you're hoping for an outcome is, and being able to communicate that will help your your search for asking the right questions or at least being open to the feedback. When you do ask questions that it might go in some of those directions, it might be like, yeah, here's the to set summary.
01:02:09:16 - 01:02:34:25
Speaker 1
But really it's this one thing that I provide assistance. So if you do want to get a hold of either of us, we've referenced LinkedIn a gazillion times. Please find either of us there. Otherwise, you can email me. Leanne Dow-Weimer I am info @ m a r k ig y dot com. Nicky, how do people find you?
01:02:36:06 - 01:02:54:12
Speaker 2
Well, yeah, I am on LinkedIn a lot, as you know, and that's my main sort of was not only, you know, social media platform and then I am Nicky just N I c k y at invention dash marketing dot dot uk so I've email of all as well, but I think I'm the only Nicky Dibben on LinkedIn, so I'm quite easy to find that way.
01:02:54:27 - 01:03:03:26
Speaker 2
Click the three dots to connect. You just have to hit follow. You know, I'm always happy to connect with people as well. And yeah, it's always fun chatting with other marketers.
01:03:04:27 - 01:03:18:24
Speaker 1
Thank you so much and thank you for being a guest on my on gas. I always love any of our conversation and I walk away feeling like I've learned or my brain has been open. And so I. I am so appreciative of that. So thank you again.
01:03:19:24 - 03:12:36:22
Speaker 2
I will. Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute blast. Really enjoy that.