I need fighters, and I tell you why
Hi there and thank you for reading this short post. I will jump directly into the topic: I need fighters because I FAILED (personally) but will apply the American spirit I learned, so I don’t feel bad about it.
It’s said, I failed as a person, as a manager and more importantly, as an evangelist. My name is Jonathan Wuurman. I’m 36, live in Belgium, have the most exceptional wife on earth and an 8-year-old boy. They provide me total completeness on private life.
In my professional life, I auto-proclaimed myself Evangelist in marketing automation, nearly a decade ago. I was looking for something that gave sense to my daily job. When people ask me what I do, and then, I answer “I’m A Marketing Automation Evangelist, I preach the agility in marketing,” I got that lovely smile on their face. This is key for me; you notice something between curiosity and doubtfulness in the eye of the people, I love it!
In the business world, it’s vital for most people to “cluster” you, put you in some groups or boxes, but I wanted to get out of these canvases. With my unusual title (at least for Europe), I manage to change perceptions and open some insightful discussions.
When meeting marketers, they will define me as a product marketing sales kind of geeky guy, and this is probably an excellent way to describe me. Although I’m still part of a vast amount of groups and it’s probably fair to put so many hats on me. The most important is that I grab my energy out of those groups; I’m spending much time with all kind of people engineers, designers, PM, accounts, founding partners … this is opening the field of possibilities and allows me to bring market feedbacks to the owners to enrich them with real client insights.
It’s essential to have multidisciplinary profiles in a mid-size company like ACTITO because the speed of the changes requests more agility than ever before. We tagged ACTITO with “Agile Marketing Automation” for the same reason; the key word there being, of course, agile.
I could write a full essay on why “agile” but I will skip it for this post. Keep in mind that agile is a way to survive in a fast-changing environment. It’s like when Darwin talked about evolution but with much more velocity. In the marketing world, it’s about testing, learning and iterating, starting fast, learning even faster and keeping the customer in the center of the game.
Our company mission
At ACTITO, we are on a mission: we wanted to help and provide marketers with the best Marketing Automation thaught and built for marketers. Although the world we live in is highly technological, we are convinced that making it accessible, more user-friendly, more focus on testing and learning is the path to follow.
This is the journey our founders started in 2001, and since then, we are focused on that mission. Right now, we enter a new era, the time for ACTITO has come to become one of the leading European players. The one that truly understands and provides what marketers want and need. You could consider that as a quest, because we are not SalesForce, IBM, SAP or any other fortune 500 company but we are also not a young startup, with nearly 100 people working daily for ACTITO and 250+ clients. We are a mid-size player with huge ambitions.
We are the David among the Goliaths, and the newcomers challenge us.
For me, this is a sweet spot but also a tough place. When you are in the middle of the game, it’s always a complicated position: you want to beat the big guys, but you have to keep an eye on the challengers.
It’s hard but also so exciting and rewarding. You cannot have the same emotions, vibes when closing a deal or getting a new feature out to the market when you work for a big one. You can also directly tap into clients’ feedbacks because you have those 250+ clients that startups are still hunting.
You are probably wondering, after reading 500 words, why I started talking about FAILING. First and honestly, I use that word to grab attention. Second, because I’m looking for fighters, people with a specific mindset and who can identify themselves in this introduction.
YES, this is a request for applications.
Why did I talk about failing?
A couple of weeks ago, I hired somebody: a brilliant mind, trilingual, with a couple of years of experience in marketing and willing to give an extra kick to his career. All in all, what you could call a high potential. The recruitment process is not the shortest at ACTITO and can for sure be improved: We have a personality test, IQ, EQ … more importantly, we count on our gut feeling. Mine was very good with this candidate. I identified a bit of biting spirit, someone who thinks outside the box, who would challenge the company and help us grow.
However, with all the tests, the hours spent on Skype explaining what the job was, putting the person in contact with his peers, being transparent about the challenges of the company and about where we want to go and so on, I didn’t avoid the horror that was about to happen. The candidate left after a few days, and THIS is for sure my biggest failure.
I know we are not perfect, and we need to work on some better processes, but I also know that people need to know how many efforts they are ready to make. I try to be crystal transparent (maybe too much?): Working in the customer success team is hard, tiresome, complex because you are juggling between technology, strategies, tactics, human relation with clients, analytics and many other skills. That is the reason that makes this job so exceptional: you are at the center of the company.
You act as the contact person of our clients, you guide them, listen to them, challenge them but more importantly help them succeed in their job. When they succeed, you succeed, when they fail, well sometimes you fail with them, some other times, you will be able to make them avoid failing by being that buddy in marketing automation. Although we sale technology,
we believe in technology WITH people.
I will not write a job description in this post, I will share it on several networks, being as blunt as possible and open to having a chat with anybody willing to take a real challenge, integrate a team of very high potential people and willing to increase our and his skills in a full team spirit.
My failure in that last hiring pushed me to write this text because I firmly believe that recruitment is one of the most complex tasks in an organization and by failing, my team is now pushing harder to get our s*** done. So, I want to say thank you to them, and I’m really looking for people with that fighter spirit and who will help ACTITO become that number one European Player.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to share a coffee with some of you soon.
PS: I published this first on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-need-fighters-tell-you-why-jonathan-wuurman/ But was hoping for even more feedbacks on Meidum
