Marketing and advertising have changed. Ads are blocked, Google is removing third-party cookies, and iOS is restricting email. But those aren't the biggest challenges faced by marketing, because they need something that only the sales team can provide: a real understanding of customer problems.
They do make strange companions. One is seasoned by thousands of customer conversations, while the other is focused on the latest digital communication tools. Alignment pairs the marketer who is just now mastering the details of the product or service, and the salesperson who knows every way to slice the product and solve a long list of customer challenges. The idea that they need to be aligned in the same workplace when they have different goals, different levels of experience, a language unique to each group, and even distinct pipelines can raise some eyebrows or lead to lip-service alignment.
The honeymoon period is an important initial period for new growth managers, marketing directors, chief marketing officers, RevOps leaders, and nonprofit executive directors, along with all the others who step into a new role to lead growth for their organizations. It’s an important first phase of work, because team members are more forgiving, expect that you’ll need to be brought up to speed, and no milestones have yet come due. It’s a time in which you can understand the context and the challenges that you now own.
Like hungry soldiers at Valley Forge, they are all tugging on our attention -more than 8,000 different marketing software systems, plus a small army of one-person bands that decided one day to keep working from home and use some of that software. Is that the army that you need?
The rapid pace of change since 2020 has thrust many leaders into the role of growth leader for their organization. For some it is recovery, and for others it is a response to big new opportunities. Growth leaders can be found in almost every industry and with a variety of job titles. Some have a growth title like "growth manager, while others are working in RevOps. Most don't have a special title at all because they've added the growth leader job to their existing position. Whether they are an owner, a partner, a C-suite leader, or a department head, a growth leader's job has a single central characteristic: their desk is where the buck stops for company growth.
There are lots of choices about how and where websites are built and hosted. Normally, that's less a management decision and more something for marketing and IT to work out.
But a number of big factors are moving decisions about whether to use WordPress or HubSpot, or Apple or Microsoft onto the manager's list of concerns. One is security, and the other is the central role that websites now play in sustainable growth.
We rely on our websites, now more than ever. Whether you are recruiting employees, nurturing donors or looking for more customers, the digital journey is a must-have, but hacking can stop all of that.
When Godaddy announced that it had allowed 1.2 million WordPress users to be compromised, it added fuel to the already significant fire of security concerns around this much-loved open-source website software.
Guess what the websites for a local coffee shop, a digital communications company, and a national training company have in common? They all thought that hackers would have little interest in their websites.
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