The newbies are teaching us

I’m at a content marketing conference today.  Not a new topic, but its role and influence in effective marketing strategy is increasingly rapidly, especially where companies are tying and measuring the impact content has on increasing revenue, acceleration sales cycles, and making acquisition efforts far more cost-effective.

The most innovative, successful people here haven’t necessarily been doing marketing for decades.  They’re innovating because they don’t know better.  Their lack of experience is helping them tackle this problem from an entirely new perspective. 

The same is happening in all facets of sales & marketing right now.  Just because you learned sales from IBM 30 years ago, or have been doing PR forever, that doesn’t mean you know how to do it better than anybody else today.  Our buyers are changing, the channels are changing, the very nature of how we create and communicate messages to our targets is changing.

Veteran marketers are changing with it, for sure.  But smart people with little to no experience are doing just as much to teach us what’s driving influence, behavior and sales.

Find the people around you who are making it work, growing their business, successfully engaging and converting customers.  Learn from their mistakes, and from what they’re stumbling upon that can help your own business grow.