Product Quality: Marketing's job is to help the product win (podcast episode #97)

How I Made it in Marketing

I’ve been watching the new Steve Martin documentary, and it includes a clip of him accepting the Mark Twain Prize.

He calls it “The only significant American award for comedy…except for money.”

It reminded me of our own industry, but in a different way. We have many awards for creativity, and I am a creative person so I love them, but ultimately this art we do is a business art. And the ultimate measure of success is often monetary.

So when I saw this lesson in a podcast guest application – ‘make people money’ – I wanted to dive deeper.

To hear the story behind that lesson – why he left another job function to join the marketing department – along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Brad Gillespie, GM of Cvent Consulting, Cvent (https://www.cvent.com/).

Cvent was a public company, until it was acquired by Blackstone for $4.6 billion last year.

Gillespie estimates that over his 20 years in marketing his campaigns have influenced $1 billion in revenue.

Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Gillespie that emerged in our discussion.

• Top-down vs. bottoms-up
• Marketing's number is the sales' number
• Marketing's job is to help the product win
• Make people money
• Be the cause
• Get it done. Do it right.

Discussed in this episode

Marketing Research Chart: What information do marketers ask for on list registration forms? (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/information-list-registration-forms)

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy) (https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/marketing-career)
Get even more ideas by pasting the URL for this episode into the Analysts – Video Transcript expert assistant in MeclabsAI (https://meclabsai.com/). It’s totally FREE to use (for now). (Meclabs is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa).

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

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