When I started in B2B, my mentor told me, “We call this business to business, but make no mistake, people buy products, not businesses. It’s people who make decisions for these businesses.”

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you’re only focused on businesses as accounts, you’re overlooking opportunities.

For example, as our latest guest shared in his podcast guest application, “Track when your customer champions change jobs.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I spoke with Matthew Bowman, VP of Strategy, GTM, and Growth Marketing, ACT [https://www.acttoday.com/]. 

ACT is a 100% employee-owned company with 12,000 employees and 23 offices around the world.

In Bowman’s previous role, he oversaw a team of 32 direct and indirect reports and a budget of $3 million. He is currently in a startup role where he is scaling up the marketing teams.

While seemingly simple, Bowman says these lessons served as part of the foundation for his creating an international department that generated $1.6 billion in revenue over 11 years’ time:

• Message trumps channel
• Track when your customer champions change jobs
• Interview your customers
• Watch for unintended consequences of strategic initiatives
• Prioritize with the RACE (Return, Amplitude, Conviction, Energy) Method of decision making
• Generate buzz with guerrilla marketing
• Foster a positive and productive atmosphere to optimize team performance

Discussed in this episode

Build an Artificial Intelligence strategy that helps you produce more revenue in an AI Quick Win Intensive [https://intensives.meclabsai.com/] (from MarketingSherpa's parent organization).

Career Adaptability: Marketing can lead to many other things (podcast episode #103) [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/career-adaptability]

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy) [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/marketing-career]

Marketing Strategy: 5 successful (and 1 failed) strategic approaches to everyday marketing challenges [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/marketing-strategy-5-successful-and-1-failed-strategic-approaches]

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

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If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

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Daniel Burstein Podcaster

Daniel Burstein is the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MarketingSherpa and the host of the ‘How I Made It In Marketing’ podcast, where he talks to marketing leaders about the lessons learned through their careers.

He also reports on successful marketing campaigns and industry data in MarketingSherpa articles, and helps facilitate the AI Guild from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute.

Daniel has 23 years of experience in copywriting, content writing, interviewing, speaking, business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.