Happy New Year! — Benjamin Shapiro // MarTech Podcast

Quotes

• “I like to talk about setting the right tone for the year not only for marketing, or business but also how to be successful in your career and in your life. To me, when you start thinking about the year, it’s about understanding and setting your goals.” - Ben “A couple of things I urge you to think about as you are recovering from that inevitable hangover. So, a couple of things that I think will make you a better marketer this year. Marketing is a business function and it’s also an art and a science. A lot of marketing is about understanding the connection between people.” - Ben “Let’s start with knowing yourself. Understanding who you are, what you are inherently talented at and what you could do the best way that you could add value to your organization into your career is by leveraging things that you do inherently well.” - Ben“I spent a lot of time as a marketer trying to run the marketing departments at early-stage startups and I had some success and I had some failures. I really didn’t feel like my career took off until I left my last startup and I had to focus on being independent and doing the things that I was inherently good at.” - Ben“The more I was able to focus on the things that were my inherent talent, the more people were attracted to working with me, the more credibility I felt I had, the more confidence I had, and the more success came following.” - Ben “Second thing is to try to build systems around things that make you successful. For me, I was a good talker. I was pretty good at interviewing people and understanding and getting something useful out of a conversation with them. So I was able to convert that into a podcast.” - Ben “Having inherent talent is not all that matters. You have to be able to understand and replicate what you’re doing so you could start to think about scale. Marketing is all about efficiency. We talk about marketing automation all the time, we talk about using technologies and building Martech stacks. All of those things are meant for you to take the talents that you have and to help share them.” - Ben “Moral of the story is we’re able to build out a full-fledged marketing stack here to publish this content but it all started off by understanding what you do and then figuring out how you can replicate that at scale.” - Ben “The other piece of advice, the journey is the destination in your career. Maybe your goal is to become the CMO, maybe it’s to become a professional podcast host, maybe it’s to become a professional wrestler. The point is, when you get to that mountain top when somebody says here’s your business card, you’re officially a CMO,’ what you’re going to look at is all the effort that it took to get to that point. Then you’re going to think about how to stay there.” - Ben “The last thing is appreciating the people around you. If there’s anything on this podcast that I am going to be preachy about and god knows, I have done enough of, is the relationship in marketing matter the most. The relationships in business and in life are what will last when we are all gone.” - Ben “If 2020 taught us anything, nothing is guaranteed. You need to appreciate and build strong, valuable relationships with the people around you. That is what is going to help you be successful in business, in life.” - Ben