Marketers: Grow Your Influence and Get a Seat at the Table

How marketers can grow their influence

I recently hosted a LinkedIn Live panel discussion with business leaders to discuss how marketers can become more influential and grow their influence within their organization. Our panel included the lead trainer of IMPROVMINDSET and certified A.I. trainer, Andrew McMasters, the CEO of Distributor Wire & Cable (DWC), Travis Williams, the CMO of Business Solution Partners, Craig Cook, and my partner and the CMO at Paige Black, Marilyn Heywood Paige. In case you missed it, here are the five most important takeaways.

Communicate the Whole Story

Being able to communicate effectively is an essential life skill. It is also critical in the world of marketing. Effective business communication requires us to identify what is important to leaders and clients and relay that information in a straightforward way that is devoid of jargon. As a marketer, you are a communications professional, and your job is to take the complicated and explain it in a simple story. If you’re not doing that internally and externally, you’re letting your company down. 

Craig succinctly described the perils of poor constructive storytelling. 

“If you can’t effectively tell the story of not just your brand, but also your customers, and be the voice of your customer to the C-suite and the rest of the organization, you’re not going to be an effective marketing executive.”

When telling stories, don’t strictly share past successes. Recall challenges that you’ve encountered and explain how you created solutions to overcome them. For example, some of your achievements likely entailed research to gain deeper insights into your customers’ needs. Once equipped with this knowledge or data, you were able to conquer objections and acquire a new client. Ultimately, we all learn from struggles and these are equally important as our successes. 

Craig also mentioned that he’d like to “see a marketing shift from telling the brand story to telling the customers’ story.”

“I think that’s a really important aspect of our future in this business. I spent the last four or five years building the brand for my company, and now it’s time to take this shift and start talking not about our success, but our customers’ success. So, I think it’s really important that we are closing the feedback route between what we are doing as a company to what the results are in the marketplace.” 

Own the Customer Journey

We all love acquiring a new client and we can receive worthwhile feedback by charting their journey to a path to purchase. Similarly, we can attain useful information when offboarding a customer. Ask a soon-to-be-former client, “What went wrong?” “Why did they choose to leave?” “How can you improve?” You may be amazed by what you hear and discover and this may prompt dramatic changes for the better. 

With that noted, let’s use this as a segway to dissect the critical nature of being proactive, rather than reactive. Always recognize that, for marketing to be fruitful, you need to plan a minimum of three months ahead. Being proactive can help address issues before they arise, combat seasonal sales slumps, and establish a distinct blueprint to increase your sales. Andrew said that he knows marketing efforts are failing the moment he notices it’s based on a reactive approach. 

“(Bad) marketing always feels like it’s reactive, as opposed to being in the forefront and telling the story about what you want the narrative to be. It’s reactive to the narrative, rather than controlling the narrative. Imagine if you were doing great work cleaning up the environment, but weren’t telling anyone about it. So, (from a marketing standpoint) why bother doing it? Be proactive and tell people your story.” 

Continuous Improvement Is Critical to Your success

To flourish as a marketer, you must understand the psychology of sales marketing, know how to use and evaluate marketing APIs, and deftly implement a data-driven narrative to tell a story. Marilyn offered a brilliant overview of the relationship between psychology and sales marketing and how she employs it.  

“Marketing is psychological. As a marketer, what I’m trying to do is change hearts and minds. It's to understand your decision-making and influence and persuade that decision-making. That’s what I’m doing as a marketer, and that’s squishy. Now, we’re trying to put analytics to it. We have all these measurements, but at the root of what we’re trying to do is persuade hearts and minds. It’s to get our ideas of our brand into their minds and have them have certain thoughts about it. Then, make certain mental connections to it and build trust. That’s the root of all of it.”

Marilyn also broached one thing worth remembering: We all have unique personalities. 

“When you get into psychology, people learn differently, people process differently, people react differently and that’s squishy. So, you need to understand each one of your respective clients and their particular needs.” 

Shortly thereafter, Marilyn delved into the topic of using a data-driven narrative to craft an engaging, and meaningful, story. 

“There is a lot of data that we have access to, but I feel strongly that you have to filter that data and take that data in through the strategy and the overall goals of the company. Data means nothing if you can’t extract what is most important and the only way you’re going to do that is to understand the goals of the company and the marketing strategy. What is the strategy? What do you need to know? Once you know what you need to know, then you can tell the right stories.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I completely agree with Marilyn. Where marketers can undercut themselves is by sending out irrelevant data that is not tied to the business goal. Some people say, ‘We can get more clicks.’ I’ve been in meetings when people were talking about clicks. Who cares about the number of clicks to your website? Are they the right companies? Are they the right people? Are they converting? All of that data, how does that tie back to your business goal? You need to be careful about what you’re presenting as data and don’t take data that’s not serious, seriously. Also, because these areas can and will change, build a learning plan that considers both the future of the industry and your company. This can allow you to remain proactive and prepared to handle transitions and developments as they emerge. 

Leverage Technology to Individualize at Scale

I’m constantly being spammed with outreach that isn’t personalized. It’s a tiring, annoying practice that I’ve found to be completely unproductive. To connect with prospects, you need to personalize your email outreach initiatives. Beyond possibly escaping the spam folder, you’ll also differentiate yourself from competitors who are sending cold, blanket emails. Travis shares my experiences and elaborated on the importance of having an individualized, scalable message. 

“If it’s not an individualized message, it gets lost. The hard part is doing it individualized while keeping it scalable and under cost. Be aware of the goals of the company that you are prospecting. Also, be aware of the client situation and personalize, as much as you can, at scale.”

As a marketer, you must determine how to leverage technology to personalize communication at scale, and this isn’t a small challenge. One potential solution to overcome this challenge is to strengthen collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. Sales and marketing alignment is pivotal for an organization’s success and their joint efforts can increase revenue growth.

It Is Your Job

If there is one thing I urge everyone to do, it is to become more involved with as many aspects of your company as possible. That doesn’t mean becoming a micromanager or overstepping your bounds. Essentially, if your organization is facing a challenge, offer to be a part of the solution. The preeminent way to expand your influence within a company is to offer help to any department that may require it. If you can lighten your colleagues’ workload and inspire teamwork, your deeds will be noticed and, more importantly, benefit the overall company. Craig feels the same way and said that he’d like to see more cooperation between all departments, particularly the sales and customer service teams.  

“It’s now time to start establishing a deeper connection between sales and customer service. Closing that feedback route from the customers and the outreach to reflect the product teams, as well. If we aren’t touching all aspects of the buyers’ journey, from prospecting through closing that customer and then continuing to delight them year after year by adding value into the relationship, then we are missing out on the big picture. My advice is, get out of the bubble and get more collaborative, both within your organization and exterior with the customers that your organization services.” 

Travis wholeheartedly agreed with Craig and expounded on how his employees can impress him.

“I am looking for a holistic application of the tools that a marketer has. If you are looking to be more important, to me as a CEO, it’s about applying those skills and tools to not only external, but internal, and understanding the goals of the business. Certainly, you’re helping sales and, certainly, you have to understand your customer. But there is so much more to a company than just an external message. How do we achieve our goals if only our sales team is aligned with what we are putting out there? So, it’s very much applying these things and not just in a traditional sense.”

In Closing

I strongly encourage all of you to avoid the dangers of overpromising. When it comes to marketing, I think one of the reasons that we struggle as an industry is that we overpromise on the idea of what can be measured. Like, ‘You’re going to know exactly what is going on.’ Well, you are going to know if 25 percent of your business comes through your website. You’re going to understand that 25 percent. The other 75 percent that came from your outbound sales efforts, yeah, you are going to have some insight. However, that’s a pretty big challenge for a medium-sized company. I think we sometimes overpromise, and then people are disappointed.