Creating Successful Marketing Teams

About the Guest

Jared is the VP of Growth at Human Interest, a FinTech company that offers an affordable, full-service 401(k) provider focused on small businesses. Before Human Interest, he held growth and demand generation roles at other high-growth software companies including Qualtrics, ServiceTitan, and Sprinklr.  

Connect with Jared Gardner

Key Takeaways

• There is so much technology out there in the marketing space. The potential for creating systems at scale for competitive advantage with MarTech is only scratching the surface
• technology is only one part of the puzzle when it comes to marketing teams’ success, and that tactics, messaging, and content must be tailored to the market segment being served. 
• CRM data needs to be kept clean to influence direct sales and growth motions properly. Focus on incremental changes and refining your data instead of stacking bad data on top of each other.  
• You’re not gonna see ROI on your marketing tools if you don’t have the right people in place to manage them.
• The key to building teams and an integral part of being a successful leader is finding the right people, setting them up for success, and building trust with them to solve future problems. 

Quote

“Being able to find growth loops that are nontraditional, I find is a really good source that a lot of people don’t think about.”  – Jared Gardner  

Highlights from the Episode

As a career B2B marketer, we’d love to tap into your experience and insights in the industry. What are you most passionate about? What keeps you excited to come to work? 

Being able to leverage technology to make experiences better. As someone who cares a lot about marketing technology, Jared is energized by the potential and growth of the MarTech industry and how many options, suites, platforms, and point solutions are available right now. According to Jared, the industry is just scratching the surface with that kind of a full uptake in the utilization of those platforms. 

With so many marketing technologies nowadays, and you having the experience of working with small, middle, and enterprise-sized businesses leading growth teams, how do you figure out what’s the right technology at the right time that will help you scale?

Tactics, channels, messaging, content, etc. change based on the market segment, however, technology stays the same regardless of which segment you’re targeting. What changes across the market segments is the type of tactics that you utilize. Build the channels you need to accomplish what you want to do.

How important is your CRM for what you want to accomplish? 

CRM is important, but don’t overextend it. Technology is important, but it’s not the only factor in choosing a CRM. Tactics, channels, and processes need to be considered as well. CRMs are necessary for direct sales and growth motions but can become overused if not kept clean.

What are the three most important MarTech/RevTech types of software that you can’t live without? 

CRM is the number one type of software that is necessary for a successful MarTech operation, followed by marketing automation platforms. Thirdly, your web personalization stack, which you use to plug your first-party data collection and third-party data sources into an AV-possessing platform or a personalization platform. 

What are three things that are key in your consideration to purchase a point solution?

Personalization and testing are key components of a successful web experience, and data must be aligned across all channels to be effective. It’s important to have a hierarchy of data sources that can be used to improve account performance. Every technology has overlap with another, so it’s important to make sure that all team resources are aligned with the software being brought in

What are some false expectations the businesses make out of what they can get out of their technology? What are realistic expectations?

It’s easy to overspend on tools and expect them to do too much, which can lead to frustration and lack of success. It’s important to have a strategy in place before bringing in new technology and to have the right people in place to manage it.

You have a lot of experience building and growing teams. What does it take to build and grow a successful marketing team? What kind of people do you look for?

There are three main functions in a marketing team: growth, demand generation, and product marketing. Marketing teams need to have a leader who can forecast and manage metrics across different departments. It is also important to trust team members and give them the freedom to solve problems on their own.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

• Podcast: How I Built This by NPR
• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink 

Shout-Outs

Bryan Olshock – Vice President Of Pipeline Generation at ServiceTitan

Rick Galán – VP of Growth Marketing at Divvy (Acquired by Bill.com)