Marketing Strategy and Team Building - Takeaways From Our Discussion With Patrick Edmonds

Patrick Edmonds is an experienced digital marketer, with over 10 years of hands-on and leadership experience in the field. Currently, Patrick is the Chief Marketing Officer of Finexio, an AP payments-as-a-service firm that eliminates manual payment processes for finance teams. Before his time at Finexio, he spent several years as the CMO of Proposify, where he built the marketing team, and helped the firm grow from 2,000 to 10,000 customers and increased revenue ten fold.

Patrick has dealt with the questions of who to hire, and how to hire to build a solid team. His experience has made him a true expert in his field, and he was kind enough to return to speak to our cohort about his learnings from being a CMO. Here are some of our key takeaways:

1. Understand Your “Revenue Engine”

The “revenue engine” of a firm encompasses all of the go-to-market functions responsible for revenue growth. Sales, product, and marketing all work hand-in-hand to generate revenue, so it is critical that you know who your peers around you are. The interdependent nature of the revenue engine means you can’t just stay in your own lane, you need to be able to understand your peer’s priorities and communicate your role to others. This mutual understanding will allow you to play on each other's strengths to grow strategically.

2. Explore New Channels

The channel you use to reach new customers needs to match your product. In addition, the types of channels that work for each product is entirely circumstantial. For example, AirBnB found a way to hack Craigslist to enable growth, but Craigslist may not be suitable for a financial services firm. It’s important to brainstorm what would work best for your organization.

Keep in mind that some channels have caps, you can only buy so many ads in a newspaper. Therefore, you should always be experimenting on other channels that could be your next growth avenue. If you’re stuck on where to start, you could explore if you can find a niche in the same channel as your competitors. Just make sure that you put enough effort into testing a new channel before you move on to the next.

3. Building a Team

No one is good at everything. When building your team, look at your staff as a  “T-shaped marketer”. Hire someone who has expertise in one column of marketing, but with a broad enough skill set elsewhere to be an effective peer communicator. Ideally, you should look at your own T-shape, and hire around that to build a team that compliments your skills. Hire to support what you may be lacking, and together you will excel.

At an early stage, you won’t be able to fill all the gaps, but consider the goals of your organization and hire to compliment the talent you already have.

Another area of consideration is knowing the time to hire. Plan your hiring around stages of growth, and be strategic with your hires. You may feel swamped doing administrative work, and then hire someone to take that load away from you. However, when hiring space is limited, it is more advantageous to hire someone who challenges your team to create better work.

4. Becoming a Leader

As you move to a leadership position, work on moving your T-shape to an I-shape. Don’t aim to be a jack of all trades, because unicorns do not exist. Grow some skills for your professional development, but own your pillar of expertise, and be broad enough in the rest of marketing to keep the ball rolling. You can be an excellent leader as an I-shape, possessing a great depth of knowledge in some fields but with enough breadth to coach other marketers.

Thank you again Patrick for sharing your valuable insight in this discussion!