marketing

Your best hire is an entrepreneur—how this unique candidate creates value

Illustration: 2 bright light bulbs swinging on the left. 3 regular bulbs hanging straight down

Illustration: 2 bright light bulbs swinging on the left. 3 regular bulbs hanging straight down

Can entrepreneurs make great employees? Randy Skattum, Global Marketing Communications Director for Celanese – a Dallas-based, Fortune 500 diversified materials company – thinks so.

I sought Randy’s advice about integrating my entrepreneurial skills into a big company. Here’s what Randy had to say about my career pivot.

Eisaiah: Great to meet you, Randy. What has been your experience with entrepreneurship?

I started my career in strategic consulting. In that business, you have to be an entrepreneur. You are selling yourself as a solution to colleagues and clients.

Your intellectual capital is your product – your skills, your network, and your experience. You put that capital to work – and if successful – you continue to grow in your capabilities across projects and leverage your investments in yourself with new opportunities.

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0 Bad Reviews: Imitating Alcoa’s transformation in the information age

Picture of Paul O'Neill from Alcoa
Paul O’Neill transformed Alcoa by changing one keystone habit, safety. Credit: CNN.

Here is how Paul O’Neill introduced himself to a crowd of Wall Street investors when he became the CEO & Chairman of Alcoa in 1987:1 

“Today, I want to talk to you about worker safety… I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for 0 injuries,” he told the Manhattan ballroom.

– The Power of Habit

The investors were dumbfounded because he did not talk about profitability – only safety. A year later, Alcoa’s profits hit a record high. When O’Neill retired in 2000, Alcoa’s market capitalization had increased by $27B. Someone who invested $1M in Alcoa would have earned $1M in dividends, and the value of the shares would have been $5M when O’Neill left.2

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Habit is tech

Golden hamster running in a wheel, depicting the concept of habit
“Hamster Wheel” by sualk61 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In 2010, I started a company that forever impacted how I approach product marketing. The company sold data, specifically sales prospecting lists for B2B marketing technology companies. Instead of simply delivering CSV files, our data was packaged in a web app that customers could use to interact with the data. The interface was original. Early feedback from customers indicated they were eager to use it. But, the heat was about to rise.

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GIF in Udemy email—got my attention

GIF with popsicle melting over Udemy Logo
Animated image from a Udemy email “Last chance to treat yourself to a new skill at 30% off.” Message to Eisaiah Engel on June 17, 2016.

Email is 43 years old. GIF is 29. As much as these two get around and despite the age difference, you’d think they would have found each other… fallen in love… and made animated email babies a lot sooner. At least what’s what I thought when I opened the above email on June 17, 2016.

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Thought experiment: What is marketing?

Cow pasture with sunlight pouring over the mountains like in a dream
Credit: “dream” by Luigi Alesi is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flikr.

Poof! The internet, TV, radio, cellphones, print and all other marketing tools have vanished in a flash. No modern media exists. How then does a company get the word out about its products?

I suppose that in our imaginary world a company would have to get people to share its products–at least verbally through conversation with another. The more target customers who receive word about a company’s products, the more sales a company receives.

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“The most important competitive differentiator in b-to-b is the customer experience,” –Megan Heuer, Vice President, Research of SiriusDecisions.

Filipino rock icon, Rico Blanco, during his album launch last November 9 at Teatrino, Greenhills.
“Galactik Fiestamatik” by Miguel Santiago is licensed under CC BY 2.0

{Drop the mic. Exit stage left.} Megan Heuer’s quote says it all.

Yesterday, on May 26, 2016, SiriusDecisions presented a research report, “2016 B-to-B Customer Experience Study,” during its 2016 B2B Marketing Conference / Summit shared some areas for improvement for B2B Marketers. The finding I especially relate to is:

Aleksander Nowak and I experienced the need to provide post-sale support on the front lines of our reputation management company that we started in 2012. Alek and I had daily involvement in the sales, marketing, operations and support roles of the company. I personally responded to 200 to 400 support tickets per day for two years; the customers must be satisfied!

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What do successful marketing campaigns have in common? 

Massive library
Great marketing taps into human universals.

“There has to be a way to ensure the success of a marketing campaign,” I thought in the summer of 2015. While many effective marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns were created by people just winging it, I suspected there was a known set of footholds in the human psyche which marketers could target to increase their response rates. What were they?

The question led down on a path of intellectual inquiry that began on Penny Lane and wound half way across the globe to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1991 when the book Human Universals was published by Dr. Donald Brown. The book presents a big idea that flew in the face of the prevailing assumption in anthropology that humans were different.

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