Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 5Go‐to‐Market (GTM) Cross‐Training Drills—Crowd Favorites

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose … only then will you learn the game.

—Winston Churchill

We've run some compelling snap polls on LinkedIn about which skills sellers and marketers would like to have. One of the big winners is Data Science. When you watch enough sellers and marketers switch roles and lives, you realize that marketing and sales are essentially the same thing.

Marketing is no longer innovating; the ultimate goal of marketing and the core of the function is to find innovation and disruption and tie it to revenue, which is more entrepreneurial. The emergence of the product role has substituted that initial intent. Marketing should do the R&D and try to understand how to disrupt markets, then do it repeatedly vs. just generating leads and copycatting competitors. There's more to performance marketing than just finding the next growth hack.

If marketing gets implemented this way, it becomes the same as sales as you deliver the message 1:many instead of 1:1. The core of the sales function is to find a pathway into the consideration process to convert users. Marketing is sales at scale, how to deliver your pitch to convert customers en masse. Modern marketing is most effective when it embraces many hidden marketing methods, of which the main lever is growth hacking. By AB testing ever‐catchier ...