Today we shared the news that I joined Mindtickle as its new Chief Marketing Officer. There are several reasons why it’s an honor to join this company. First, Mindtickle has a strong culture that values its employees as its most vital asset. Second, it provides a compelling product that thousands of companies need to compete. And finally, it has an amazing marketing team that I’m excited to work with!
From an intellectual standpoint, Mindtickle’s value proposition resonated most with me because I’ve lived the challenge of helping enable and train large organizations, particularly at companies with complex and frequently evolving product portfolios. While I’ve led B2B marketing teams that take a content-heavy approach to marketing, we learned content can only carry a company so far if you don’t instill the actual knowledge necessary to carry those messages to market. As marketing and enablement teams applaud completion rates and content downloads, the hard reality is many sellers don’t translate that into revenue growth. Even on the blowout quarters where you “hit the number,” a small portion of the team closes the majority of the revenue. What’s worse, companies just accept this reality and plan around it. CFOs actually bake these low productivity rates into their math.
Then I saw the problem from the customer’s end of things. During the past couple of years, as a practitioner in consumer marketing, where I lived the grind of planning campaigns to a daily sales number, I sat through dozens of pitches for products and services. While almost every rep I interacted with could get through a pitch deck or demo, if I asked a next level down question, many either leaned on a sales engineer or said they’d get back to me. They had been taught to recite and memorize messaging, but not actually gain mastery of the topics.
Mindtickle is addressing that challenge head on, and the ways in which it can help may well extend beyond the sales function.
I truly believe the readiness gap of many 21st century workers will become a crisis across all functions and industries if we don’t address it. While AI and machine learning are being viewed as a panacea across many digital transformation projects, the reality is people still need to provide the insight and strategic approaches to carry our world forward (I mean, just look at your consulting bill on your last digital transformation project!).
I’m very excited to be joining this team as I believe it has, and will continue, to create a positive effect on the business world, and I’m honored to be a part of it.
