How I Transformed My Marketing Teams with Smart Technology Choices

As a marketing leader, I have had the privilege of working with some of the most exciting, growth focused minds and businesses in the world. Each time I took on a new CMO role, my mission was clear: hire and develop the best team, build the brand, grow the business, and *don’t piss off the CFO (*more details on that soon). ??

But how do you achieve these goals in a fast-changing and competitive environment? How do you foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and growth among your team? How do you leverage technology to enable rather than hinder your marketing efforts?

In my experience, the answer lies in making smart technology decisions that can transform the way your team works and thinks. Technology is not just a tool, it is a catalyst for a growth focused cultural evolution. ??

In my first few days as a new marketing leader on a new mission, I would spend my time trying to understand the explicit and implicit dynamics of how the team works together, the challenges that they face, and their ideas and aspirations for the kind of team and business we could be. I also found that teams react to change in one of two ways: either they embrace it or they fight it.

The best marketers I have ever worked with understood that “change should be the only constant” (to coin the phrase from Ronaldo Mouchawar ). Growth is a philosophical change before physical. You can’t just be “growth focused”, you need to increase your appetite for failure, increase your rate of trying new ways of working, reduce the friction that slows everything down.

So how do you drive philosophical change as a new leader facing a team filled with mixed enthusiasm for their new leader? You change the playing field by introducing a full technology and process deconstruction, you can achieve multiple benefits:

• Remove slow incumbent tools that hamper productivity and creativity ??
• Consolidate technologies that overlap or duplicate functions ??
• Reduce stack costs by eliminating unnecessary or redundant subscriptions ??
• Increase collaboration by adopting platforms that facilitate communication and feedback ??
• Improve first party data strategy by enabling your own data flywheels and connecting data sources and systems that empower you ??
• Increase your rate of experimentation by using tools that enable rapid testing and learning ??
• Set up your experiment guardrails and allow your people to test new ideas without the risk of breaking literally everything ???
• Introduce new monetisation models by using tools that generate new revenue streams or optimise existing ones ??
• Empower marketers to bring concept to reality without burdening an engineering function by using tools that allow self-service and customisation ???
• Move at lightning speed compared to the days before you walked in the door by using tools that automate workflows and processes ?

By making these technology decisions, you can create a culture of innovation, collaboration, and growth among your team. You can inspire them to embrace change rather than resist it. You can unleash their potential and unleash your business. Better tools should introduce better ways of working - your multipliers in your team will become even better and your change fighters will have to adapt.

If you need help with implementing philosophical, process, or technology change in your business, I’m happy to chat with you. Just send me a message or reach out via Fuse.cx ??