Marketers Are Ordinary People Not Super Heroes

Ian Truscott 's piece about “Frontline B2B Marketing: Hype or Reality? ” in CMSwire caught my eye recently, and in it I saw an opportunity to promote the benefits of agile marketing.

Ian said:

“Being skeptical about this sort of thing isn’t unusual for me. For example, I am not a huge fan of?agile marketing ; I think a good B2B marketing team are naturally agile, as is the whole practice of marketing. We didn’t need to learn this from the more structured world of software development (a world I am very familiar with as a former developer and product manager).”

?

I’m wondering how Ian defines agile. Does it mean?

?

1.???? able to move quickly and easily.

"Ruth was remarkably agile and light on her feet"

2.

relating to or denoting a method of project management, used especially for software development, that is characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent?reassessment ?and adaptation of plans.

"agile methods replace high-level design with frequent redesign"

?

As a professional marketer who has been a Director and VP of Marketing, I’ve lived through the experiences of having management ask marketing to do more, and as a result, I do less. Agile marketing to me gives marketers the rhetorical tools to take the conversation from the personal to the practical and reality of the world of marketers.

Social media marketing, Account based marketing, or Frontline B2B Marketing these are all strategies for how to do marketing, there isn’t any real difference when you get down to it than the original marketing concept. Rather they are fresh perspectives on the original concept.

ABM to me is something I knew already; it’s just taking traditional complex sales strategies to a higher degree. ABM helps the marketer and sales teams focus their efforts. But I think every shiny fresh marketing idea is a play on the original marketing concept, it’s just packaging the concept with new clothes, and convincing you that marketing is the greatest thing, something to be excited about, giving you a new agenda to consider, but a new set of clothes around the original model. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, especially if it produces results. Though I could accept criticism of ABM that people will not execute it well. As I’ve seen many instances of that happening.

?Agile marketing to me is something different, its concepts do support how marketing functions as ABM does, in that testing plays a big part, but the biggest benefit of agile marketing is that it gives the marketer tools to have a conversation with themselves, marketing teams, and importantly the VP of sales, CEO and CFO about the nature of work.

Here, my interview with Amy Luethmers about her work as a CMO in Higher Education came to mind, I did an interview with Amy a few years ago, and to me it was one of the best arguments for the use of agile marketing. Essentially, the college where Amy worked, had treated marketing like a creative agency, every design and print piece the management team wanted was to be produced by the marketing department, without consideration of the benefits of producing one piece of work over another.

Marketers have limited time and resources, and it’s our fiduciary responsibility to use the marketing concept to argue with the corporate team that focusing our efforts on work that will produce the best results is not only the best path to profitability but also the most motivating strategy for a happy marketing team. ?

Amy Luethmers was able to get more work done by stopping the constant demands from the corporate team, giving marketers the time to produce work at a reasonable pace. Once she turned around the perception that marketing wasn’t working, she focused efforts on shifting more of the marketing team’s time to projects that would produce more return. Again, startling the corporate team, they began to understand there was more to marketing than being able to make pretty pictures.

Agile marketing and its concepts helped with this focus, and in part because by focusing on the methodology it enabled the marketing team to talk with the corporate team about how they were the reason marketing wasn’t working. The biggest influence was by showing how marketers organized themselves to help increase useful production, the penny then dropped by itself for the corporate team.

This I think is the biggest benefit of agile marketing, a tool for an open and honest conversation with ourselves, and with the VP of sales, CEO and CFO.

Agile might have come from software development, but it’s a flexible methodology, one that can be adapted to suit the needs of any profession.

Marketers across the world use a hybrid approach.

See my series of interviews on the state of global agile marketing at globalagilemarketing.com to understand that.

Marketers’ issues are different from developers, but they have taken the agile methodology and adopted it for their own purposes.

We have the agile marketing manifesto ; we even have our own agile framework with the agile marketing navigator .

To me agile marketing’s biggest contribution is helping to organize how marketers work, not just how we execute a strategy, the biggest support for the marketing concept with agile is that concept of testing and adapting. But that’s not really the real benefit of agile marketing.

Rather agile marketing is a way to develop an open and transparent conversation with ourselves as marketers about being open to admit we cannot do it all and as a result the best way to highest profitability is to admit we are not super heroes, but ordinary people, who can get more done, not by doing more work but by doing work that will produce the most results.