A conversation with a teammate last week made me think about things that I’ve seen drive career growth. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are 11 attributes and behaviors that I’ve seen drive career growth consistently over the course of my ~20-year professional career:
1. Business Knowledge: Understands the business and levers that are available to drive revenue, share, customer satisfaction, and other important business goals.
2. Initiative/Ownership: Identifies and pursues opportunities relentlessly until we realize business impact. Does not give up in the face of adversity. Follows through every single time.
3. Positivity/Energy: Has a ‘can-do’ spirit that helps with #2 above. This spirit also rubs off on the team in getting buy-off and getting things done.
4. Structured/Detailed: Is structured in thinking, how she manages her own time, and addresses opportunities. Has the ability to deal with ambiguity and addresses it through structure. Follows the 80–20 Pareto principle in structuring work.
5. Scientific/Analytical: Follows the scientific method of conjecture -> criticism -> testing to structure and address opportunities. Uses data to make decisions. Follows the model of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustible (MECE) in forming conjectures.
6. Subject-matter Expertise: Has a good understanding of the product, prospects, customers, and industry dynamics.
7. Relationships: Can build and manage relationships with key stakeholders in Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product, and the Engineering teams.
8. Communication Skills: Has excellent written and verbal communication skills. Contributes thoughtful opinions to drive the conversation forward in meetings.
9. Change Agent: Understands that progress requires change, and that the velocity of change matters, especially in a startup. …
“ Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” — Seth Godin
Content marketing works. No, it’s not just the flavor of the month. It’s also what I’ve experienced first hand at Apptio. Content marketing has driven an ever-increasing percentage of leads, pipeline, and wins for us over the last two years.
We’re now taking the next step in scaling our content marketing investments: Building out a Global Demand Center.
In this post I look at why and how we’re making this happen.
What is a Global Demand Center?
The Global Demand Center is a marketing team that’s responsible for campaign strategy, program architecture, digital marketing, paid media, and marketing automation strategies. It’s an organization is based on the center-of-excellence model that helps convert marketing concepts to campaigns in a repeatable, scalable, and measurable fashion. …
What I enjoyed reading last week
- When Marketing is Strategy: This article from the Harvard Business Review Magazine theorizes that the center of gravity for competitive differentiation has shifted from means of production (upstream) to marketing (downstream). A fascinating and provocative read.
- Digital Marketing and Analytics: Two Ladders for Magnificent Success: A great blog post from Avinash Kaushik about the importance of evolutionary growth in both digital marketing and analytics, and how they relate to each other. Must read.
- 5 Lessons in Effective Copywriting for Nurturing Emails from Ogilvy & Bird: Lessons in writing great nurture emails from the master, David Ogilvy.
Some years ago when I was on the Microsoft Visio team, the General Manager there once started a team meeting by presenting his operating principles. These principles gave an insightful glimpse into this leader’s values and also how he had come to rise so quickly through the ranks at Microsoft.
As I build a content marketing team at Apptio, I’ve been thinking about my own operating principles. The 7 principles listed below are what I shared with my team a few weeks ago, and I figured I’d share them with you as well:
- Get things done. Practice the art of the possible with a clear bias for action. Without this attitude the following principles matter a lot less. …
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