What Do You Do Again? with a Growth Marketing Manager
What Do You Do Again is a blog series focused on sharing job functions that aren’t always at top of mind, yet are viable options for successful careers. In each interview, we focus on what lead each person to their current role and how they could’ve gotten there sooner. The hope is to create more guidance around such big decisions that young adults have to make early in their lives.
This interview is with Peter Zawistowicz, a Growth Marketing Manager in NYC. I’ve met Peter through the tech industry here. It was great to catch up with him and hear more about his role in marketing, as marketing roles continue to grow and specialize.
What is your job title?
Growth Marketing Manager
What does that mean?
I am responsible for everything to do with getting new leads so that we can get new customers, grow existing accounts and overall grow as a business. For those who don’t know, a lead, in the very basic sense, a new name of someone who could potentially be a customer of ours.
What does your day to day look like?
Since I’m at a smaller company, my role encompasses things that in a larger company would be multiple different people. What’s really fun about this role is that I get to bounce around from different disciplines.
I work remotely on the East coast for a West Coast company, so much of my morning is doing heads-down work. In the morning, I do a lot of paid ad optimization, look at reports and data from salesforce or website analytics tools and then make adjustments to improve the overall optimization for those programs.
Once the West Coast team comes online, most of my meetings are with other members of the marketing team about campaign initiatives, what are we going to market with, what do we want to focus on, who do we want to focus on speaking to, what events are we doing, how can we make the investment in those in-person events are positive and then also interfacing with other members of the company. If we have a new feature coming up, we want to talk about how we will tell our users about that, how we can use that new feature to land new business that we have not been able to.
Then, there’s a big part of my role that is operations and keeping the lights on. Administrating all the different systems that we use. A critical part of my role is lead handoff, which is when we have the name of a person who may be interested in buying our product and we’ve decided that they’ve done sufficient enough activity to put some real human time behind this person and see if they can become a customer. That’s when we hand it off to the sales team. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of really complex pieces of that like making sure the person who gets that lead understands the history up until that point so that they can have an informed conversation. There’s a lot of time is spent making sure that happens correctly so that it can happen more often because that’s a supercritical point of the funnel.
There are not many roles that so regularly ask me to pull on my technical and analytical skills and also my creative skills.
When did you realize this type of job existed?
I applied for an entry-level marketing role and the title was Demand Generation Coordinator. Until that point, I had never heard of demand generation at all. In fact, I texted my friend who is not in marketing in all and she asked “Are we the demand generation?” as if it were another way of saying Millennials. And I told her, no I think it’s something to do with marketing.
I ended up getting the job based on the virtue that I had been in recruiting. A lot of recruiting is sending cold emails to people trying to convince them to do something. As it turns out, demand generation is very similar, it’s sending a lot of emails and writing a lot of ads to convince people to try and do something. You have to understand who your audience is, what motivates them and do the whole right message, right time, right person thing. There was a high-level overlap between those skill sets. From that job, I rose through the ranks and learned more about the discipline and now demand generation is one piece of my job and I’ve expanded to be a little broader.
What is the divide between Demand Generation and Growth Marketing?
Many demand generation people are rebranding themselves as growth marketing because it’s the “hip” thing. Demand generation comes from a slower-paced, sales-type model whereas growth is more associated with Saas, high growth and fast-paced.
In practice, I think demand generation is more focused on the middle and bottom end of the sales funnel, while there are demand generation experts who are thinking about SEO and brand awareness, they tend to be more focused on acquisition, taking users on your website into a lead, nurturing the lead, then taking that lead to fill out a form to get them ready for a sales conversation.
Growth marketing is more closely associated with Saas. There are some pieces where a demand generation person would see that someone is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and say it’s a sales person’s job now. Then, when they are a customer, we’ll send them an email every once in a while, but they really aren’t their focus anymore. With growth, there’s more to do with helping them through a sales cycle and upselling, but also product stuff because then the product becomes a part of your marketing funnel in a way that it may not in an enterprise technology space.
What did you study in college?
I majored in Physics and I got a minor in Ergonomics and Human Factors Design. Two super unrelated disciplines that I somehow convinced my advisor to approve. Going into college, I started out in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. In my mind, I was going to be graduating with a degree in engineering so that I could go and pursue a career in air space. I’ve always been super into aviation and planes and I always thought that’s where I wanted to land, no pun intended. After a year of the engineering curriculum, I thought “I don’t know if I can do this”, not so much because the engineering classes were difficult, but it was more that I missed and craved all the other stuff outside of engineering. Four out of five classes a semester were in math and science and one of the classes would be liberal arts. The class that I looked forward to the most would be that one elective. When I decided to change majors, I still had this sense that I needed to have a science degree, which probably came from my parents.
The Physics program was really cool at Cornell because it was in the College of Arts and Sciences, so there was a strong core curriculum requirement there, where one or two of my classes would be Physics and three or four of them would be something else. It afforded me a way to get a lot of breadth, in a time where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It also allowed me to do things like study abroad and have a job on campus, a better decision for work-life balance. It also wasn’t bad coming out with a degree in Physics, there’s a lot of clout in having a science degree, even though I had zero intentions of ever using Physics in my life.
[Switching majors] afforded me a way to get a lot of breadth, in a time where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It also allowed me to do things like study abroad and have a job on campus, a better decision for work-life balance.
What are courses that prepared you for what you do now?
Certainly none of my Physics courses, in terms of content. I think education prepares you in time management, planning and dealing with stress, working with other people and all of those things. Maybe one of my math or computer science courses. Every once in a while, I’ll pick up python and do some scripting.
Something that’s interesting is my minor, Ergonomics and Human Factors Design. That was a discipline that grew up in the industrial revolution when suddenly people were working in different work environments than they had before. It started with people like Henry Ford saying “if I move someone 6 inches closer to their work station, I can gain x amount of efficiency over the course of the year”. It was not about health and wellbeing as it is now, it was actually about workflow optimization. Now, it’s more about the machines we interface with currently, like digital interfaces and human-computer interaction. While my company is a software company, we fall the discipline of Site Reliability Engineering, where there are these people who are responsible for keeping the internet running. When that goes wrong or something happens, there’s a lot of ergonomic factors that come into play. People in human-computer interaction study how to people make decisions in stressful environments, what is the toll that it takes on a human, what can we do to enable that decision making in those types of scenarios. That’s something I thought about in my courses five years ago and now its funny that it’s coming back up.
What crossroads of majors would your job fall under?
For marketing in 2019, you’re using many software tools that understanding how those things work together, how data works and how data flows is becoming really important. Recently, I found that understanding those things allows you to be independent for a long time without bringing in a dedicated technical resource to help you out. Something I’ve noticed with older people in the marketing industry is that they used to express the ability to formerly being able to everything on their own, but now every update needs to get a web developer or engineer involved. There’s this sense of loss of power because everything is digital.
Computer Science x Math x Statistics x Creative Writing x Anthropology
What did you want to be when you grew up?
The most consistent was becoming a pilot. At every age, I wanted to be that. At various points, I wanted to be an animator for Disney, the person who built sets for movies or who built architectural models.
It seems like all of those have something with creativity in it. Where do you find creativity in your role now?
There are not many roles that so regularly ask me to pull on my technical and analytical skills and also my creative skills. On any given day I could be looking at a spreadsheet doing modeling and analysis on those and then an hour later, I’ll be doing writing. It’s a crazy shift to be doing, but I don’t know of any roles that are like that so regularly. I think that’s what keeps me in marketing because I can have one foot in each of those camps all the time.
Where will do you think Growth Marketing will grow?
I think growth marketing right now is a byproduct of these siloed sales, marketing, and product organizations. It still does cut it for a lot of go-to-market models, but if you are a Saas business, your leads, customers, and prospects are in the same camp, your website is a part of your product, just as much as your product is part of your website. I think growth marketing is a response in needing to unify that a little more.
As far as how that will evolve, I think we will see marketing roles with a product flavor and vice versa, product roles with a marketing flavor, so maybe it’s a product manager for growth or a product manager for revenue who is more focused on marketing KPIs but in the context of engineering and product. At my past company, we were hiring a PM for the website because it got to a point where it was a product and people have feature requests of it the same way as a product, you need to do the prioritization and the engineering sprint planning and third-party dependencies with all the tools we use.
Where do you hope to grow next?
My career aspirations have never been anything specific, but ultimately I’d like to be running my own company, whether that’s something I started or something that I find a great, passionate founder who wants someone to help run the business side of it. That doesn’t just mean to run the marketing side of it either. I continue, as I was in college, to be broad. Obviously, marketing is my specialization, and growth marketing even more so. Whenever possible I try and learn from the people outside marketing around me and really get stuck into the sales, business side, business development, product, and engineering, just so I continue to build that breadth of experience.
What Do You Do Again?
I help my company make more money by telling as many people about what we do.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Peter Zawistowicz is a New York-based marketer, focusing on enterprise software. When he’s not helping early-stage companies scale, he enjoys travelling and reading about the transportation industry. He is an aspiring pilot and French Bulldog owner. Find him here: LinkedIn
Originally published at http://chelsealeenyc.wordpress.com on July 19, 2019.
