My life with Ru Paul, Pokemon, and Poached Eggs
Hello Firstname.
I use a newsletter service called Tinyletter that doesn't actually allow field merging. So, no matter what your name actually may be, to me, on this channel, you are reduced to "Firstname."
(If your parents actually named you Firstname, then for the first time in your life I hope you feel very proud of that distinction.)
I digress. In this edition:
Avoid “writing that sounds like writing”
The waterfall is dead! Long live the waterfall!
How I Work (AKA my life with Ru Paul, Pokemon, and poached eggs)
Quote of the Week
Congratulations on getting acquired by Microsoft!
Announcing my new column at B2BMarketing.net
The psychological tricks of sales
1. Avoid “writing that sounds like writing”
said friend, confidant, advisor, sage, Ann Handley as she shared this hilarious and brutal dissection of a cringeworthy NYT wedding announcement. As someone planning their own wedding while fully aware of the $70B wedding industrial complex (#woke), I first felt a tinge of empathy for this poor couple. Who can truly judge the bond between two lovers? Who among us… oh wait, the amount of hipster bullshit contained within is hilarious. My favorite line:
“She wore Warby Parker eyeglasses that were almost identical to his. She appreciated both liturgical music and Ella Fitzgerald, as he did.”
Ah, what do we call that? Trying too hard. Read it, it’s hilarious.
(No, I haven’t written ours yet. Anyone know how to get me into the NYT?)
2. The waterfall is dead! Long live the waterfall!
Ok, if you’ve been in the B2B marketing world for five minutes, or like me for much of your career, you have once or twice been slapped in the face with a shiny, wet thing known as the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall®©™℠. Symptoms include acronyms like MQL, SQL, SAL, INQ, TQL, WTF shimmying their way into real human conversations and a general sense of disdain creeping in.
It can seem that everybody is using the waterfall and this is the only way companies can and should manage leads. But in his recent post, which BTW is very honest and refreshingly real, Terry Flaherty provides a reality check to companies seeking to benchmark themselves against “best-in-class conversion rates.”
3. How I Work (AKA my life with Ru Paul, Pokemon, and Poached Eggs)
My friend Matt Heinz runs a really fun recurring series on his blog called “How I Work” which doubles as a who’s who of the B2B marketing world. I finally agreed to be interviewed (I ran out of excuses) and you can read very intimate details of my day to day life in the resulting post, in which yes I talk about Pokemon, Ru Paul, and my affinity and mastery of the poached egg.
4. Quote of the Week
this week actually came from me frantically reading other “How I Work” posts so I could gauge how smart/silly/inspired to sound. I gave up and landed somewhere between all three, likely with a dash of “insane.”
Anyway, the CMO of Brainshark, Robin Saitz was interviewed the week before me, and is a total boss. My quote of the week is from this piece, in which she shares advice from Malcolm Gladwell on what characteristics need to be embraced for transformation:
“Be disagreeable and be willing to tackle something unpopular; be imaginative and reframe the problem; and be in a hurry and act with a sense of urgency.”
Yeah, girl, this is good stuff.
5. Congrats on getting acquired by Microsoft!
Such a smart post by my friend Steve Gershik, a smartypants marketer in the Bay Area who has made serious waves in our space for quite some time. In his post he reacts to Microsoft purchasing LinkedIn. The best gem from the piece:
“It’s all now the proud new asset of the Microsoft Corporation. And boy, are they happy to have bought you. The old saying goes that if you’re using a service for free on the Internet, you’re the product being sold.”
6. Announcing my new column at B2BMarketing.net (just call me Carrie Bradshaw)
How on earth did Carrie Bradshaw afford that rent, writing one column a week on Sex in the City? No time to do the math, because I have news! A brand spanking shiny new column on B2BMarketing.net that I have convinced the editors to call… wait for it…. oh it’s a doozy…. “Perspectives of a Millennial CMO.”
Yes, really. I’m just drunk with power coming off that last job, and I’m gonna milk it for all it’s worth.
Read my first post, “4 Weird Things We Do in Marketing - and Their History” and gaze with relish at my power blazer headshot photo.
7. The psychological tricks of sales
I take for granted the always-on perspective of being a marketer. I see most things in our world as marketing. I appreciate the good marketing, I mock the bad, we all do.
In our first-world capitalistic reality, marketing is one of the most effective governing bodies of our day to day lives. We’re all susceptible to it, and if we aren’t aware (#woke) to the methods in the madness, we don’t ever really recognize it.
From false comparisons to illusions of demand, this BBC article had me reading through to the end. It’s a fascinating look at subtle tricks deployed to get buyers to do what they do best - buy.
As a consumer, it’s a good reminder of what’s at play when we make decisions. As a marketer, it’s a powerful reminder of what we can do to motivate our own buyers to act. And with sentences like that, some days I feel like Jekyll and Hyde.
Best,
Katie