Presentation by Marketing Book Podcast host Douglas Burdett to the American Marketing Association – Birmingham, Alabama chapter on October 18, 2019.

1. Marketers, would you like to be the kind of marketer that every CEO wants to hire
and can’t afford to lose? You can do it.
In the next few minutes I want to share with you 3 big ideas that I have gleaned from
over 250 marketing and sales books I’ve read for my Marketing Book Podcast that can
help point toward that goal of becoming the kind of marketer every CEO wants to
hire and can’t afford to lose. You can do it.
I’m not going to talk about the latest tips, tricks, tactics that I’ve learned from reading
every book. Instead I want to provide you with 3 big ideas that will be helpful today
and in 5 or 25 years regardless of all the change that is going to happen in marketing
The first idea is very specific to marketers and the other two apply to anyone in
business (management, sales, customer service, etc.)
1

2. But first, you may ask yourself, well How did I get here?
Quick backstory about the 2 books that had the biggest impact on my career:
After I got out of the Army and was getting my MBA I was considering several
different lines of work for after I finished that degree. One of the things I’d do is read
a book about a different field and then determine if I wanted to learn more about it.
One day one of my army buddies working on Wall Street in New York City asked me if
I’d ever thought about working in advertising. I didn’t know anything about it so I
asked one of my business school professors to recommend a book about advertising
so that I could determine if that might be of interest.
2

3. She gave me a copy of Ogilvy on Advertising. I devoured it! I loved it! I set the book
down and said “that’s what I want to do!” I found it!
Looking back, that one book had an enormous impact on my career and life’s
trajectory. The right book at the right time can do that.
3

4. So in 1988 I went to work in New York City on Madison Avenue at ad industry giants J.
Walter Thompson and Grey Advertising.
Most of my career was in advertising. When I started my own firm, it was an
advertising agency.
I loved it. When I was an ad man (and long before) there was a captive audience and
when clients bought advertising, your target audience would see it. It was hard to
escape the power of advertising. It was the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
And then a few years ago I started to notice some tectonic changes occurring in that
world. Media commissions were starting to go away. With technology, people could
increasingly avoid unwanted marketing and sales messages.
I was having to go to meetings with website designers. And I had no idea what they
were talking about. Who were these Google guys and why am I getting all these
questions about this ”fad” called… social media?
The ad industry carnage from the growth of the internet had begun.
4

5. I was becoming a dinosaur. I was beginning to feel increasingly irrelevant. I began to
worry that dinosaur scales would start to show. I hated that. Extinction was near! My
gig was up. It was terrifying.
So I started to cast about figuring out what the next chapter was going to be. My
company still had advertising clients but I could see the writing on the wall and was
searching for where things were going.
So just like when I was in grad school, I turned to books to get started figuring out
what to do next.
5

6. One of the books I read was David Meerman Scott’s first edition of The New Rules of
Marketing and PR which lead to a eureka moment. That’s where things were going. I
learned about digital marketing and social media - I started a blog and my company
and I were off in a new direction.
But I didn’t stop there. I kept reading marketing and sales books because the more I
read, the more the dinosaur scales could be avoideed.
6

7. Then, when I went to a marketing conference, if I knew an author whose book I had
read on a Kindle, was going to be there I would purchase the hard copy of the book,
put it in my suitcase, fly to the conference, meet the authors and get them to sign
their book.
Hey, some people collect autographed sports memorabilia. I collect autographed
marketing and sales book.
7

8. So almost five years ago I launched The Marketing Book Podcast where each week I
publish an interview with the author of a new marketing or sales book. As of the time
of this presentation, I’ve recorded over 250 interviews. The podcast has listeners in
150 countries, has over 1 million downloads and has been named by LinkedIn and
Forbes as one of the top marketing and sales podcasts.
8

9. But before we get to the “3 big ideas from 250 Marketing and Sales Books Every
Modern Marketer Needs To Know,” let me answer a question I often get from
listeners which is which book has been your favorite?
Has it been perhaps a book by bestsellers like Seth Godin or David Meerman Scott, or
perhaps Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing?
I’ll tell you which book it is. It’s by Sarah Cooper.
9

10. The book is 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How To Get By Without Even
Trying.
Let’s look at a couple of the tricks, so you can appreciate the power of this book.
10

11. One is to translate percentages into fractions. So, if someone says, “about 25% of all
users click on this button,” quickly chime in with, “So about one in four,” and make a
note of it. Your math skills will be the envy of everyone in the room.
11

12. Another is ask the presenter to go back a slide. It doesn’t matter where in the
presentation you shout this out, it’ll immediately make you look like you’re paying
closer attention than everyone else is. Then you can go back to what you were doing
– checking Instagram.
12

13. Now, to become the kind of marketer every CEO wants to hire and can’t afford to
lose, there’s an an obstacle to your success as a marketer that will never be
completely vanquished.
Beware – some of you might be upset at what I’m about to say
13

14. 1 - Marketers have an image problem
Not too long ago there was a study by the Fournaise Group about perceptions of
marketers by CEOs.
14

15. Who can guess what percent of CEOs in that study trust marketers. (20%)
And why do you think they don’t trust marketers?
15

16. Because CEOs believe marketers are too disconnected from the financial realities of
companies.
16

17. There’s a perception BY SOME that marketers are arts-and-crafts party planners who
work in the make it pretty department.
17

18. In “The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How To Succeed by Building Customer and
Company Value,” by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise, the authors fielded one of the
largest studies of marketers and the people who work with them which revealed
insights like this…
18

19. Early in our study, we spoke with international CMOS about their work, asking “what
do you do?” It was interesting how different people answered. Some said things like,
“I manage the brand” or “I run our marketing.”
Words like these don't go down well with company leaders. In the words of marketing
professor and columnist Mark Ritson, “Too many marketers go into a room full of
executives from their company and warble on about the need to build brand
awareness and brand equity. No one gives a f***, except you – and presumably you
are already on board. Good marketers work out how to link what they do with what
other stakeholders within the organization want – employee retention, improved
profits, clearer leadership.”
19

20. In the 4A’s of Marketing by Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia, they also talk about
this negative perception of marketers.
… CEOs and corporate boards are growing increasingly skeptical of the marketing
function’s ability to deliver reasonable returns on resources invested. Scholars have
suggested that marketing has lost its seat at the table when it comes to making
strategic decisions at many companies, because of its failure to perform.
20

21. In his hilariously brutal book “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New
Jersey” Bob Hoffman proclaims “there’s no bullshit like brand bullshit.”
21

22. So what’s a marketer to do?
Barta and Barwise offer this simple recommendation:
22

23. Get in the revenue camp.
That’s what the most successful marketing leaders do – in the minds of company
leaders and also in reality.
23

24. In my Marketing Book Podcast interview with Debbie Qaqish, author of “Rise of the
Revenue Marketer” she said several times...
24

25. Get in the revenue camp.
That’s what the most successful marketing leaders do – in the minds of company
leaders and also in reality.
25

26. As a marketer, one of the most helpful things to do to align what you do with revenue
is to ask questions like…
What are our company financial goals?
What are our company sales goals?
Who is our most profitable customer?
What is the average lifetime value of a customer?
As a marketer seeking admission to the revenue camp, answers to these types of
questions can help tremendously.
26

27. In the ”Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement A Winning Strategy Driven by
Customer Lifetime Value” the authors recommend that marketers calculate each
customers lifetime value in order to prioritize marketing efforts and budgets.
27

28. In Eddie Yoon’s “Super Consumers: A Simple, Speedy and Sustainable Path to Superior
Growth” he lays out a framework to find those super consumers representing 10% of
total consumers, but who can drive between 30% to 70% of sales, and they’re usually
willing to spend considerably more than the average consumer. Who are your super
consumers?
28

29. In Engelina Jaspers’ “Marketing Flexology: How To Outsmart Change and Future-proof
Your Career” she describes a trait that the most successful marketers have – she
writes, “I call it a business first mindset, and cultivating this trait is by far the most
important thing a dynamic marketing leader can do. It goes like this: when faced with
any business decision, place your company and customers first–before your team and
before yourself. It may feel counterintuitive, but it works.”
Additionally, when talking about developing an executive dashboard she says, “it
needs to focus on business outcomes and include metrics that use the standard
language of business… accounting. The Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania asserts “The story of any company, no matter the size, the industry, or
the country of origin, is told through its financial records and reports. Income, debt,
revenue versus expenses, compensation, and cost of retaining customers can all be
found on financial statements.” Financial data is understood by any individual in the
business world–from investors to employees. Using existing financial data as the basis
for your marketing metrics will ensure it is widely understood across the organization
and respected for its accuracy.”
29

30. So back to the first book I talked about, “The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader.” I
talked about the disconnect many marketers have with their companies.
But here is what the successful marketers are doing…
Our interviews with the most successful marketers have one thing in common: a top
management viewpoint. Rather than talking about marketing, they spoke of the
business as a whole. They didn't talk a lot about advertising, branding, or customer
insights. They spoke about revenue, costs, and profit – and how they could serve the
customer better. The real marketing leaders were concerned with one thing: how
marketing helps the company achieve its biggest priorities.
Additionally, that same book talks, as do so many about the skills gaps when the
authors said...
21st century marketing is suffering from a skills crisis.
It’s for this reason that the marketing salaries of marketers with the right skills are
predicted to double in the next five years.
30

31. Let’s talk about how to change the perception of marketing plan presentations as dog
and pony shows, where marketers dazzle everyone with a list of hot new digital
tactics, golf sponsorships and promotional tactics and can sometimes be a bit lean on
the business strategy.
Again, I’m talking about the perception, not necessarily the reality.
31

32. According to Malcolm McDonald in his 2nd edition of “Malcolm McDonald on
Marketing Planning,” (his 46th book) there are only two questions that need to be
answered in a marketing plan.
And if you as a marketer start with the answers to these two questions in a marketing
plan, you will more likely find yourself in that 20% of marketers trusted by your CEO.
Here are the two questions that a marketing plan need answer.
32

33. Professor McDonald emphatically recommends that anyone on a company’s board of
directors that cannot answer those 2 question be sacked immediately. He’s been the
chairman of 6 companies.
When a marketer asks for this information, their stature tends to rise. Don’t have this
information from your company? His book will show you how to derive the answers
to those 2 questions.
33

34. As a first step toward connecting marketing activity with revenue, Tracy Eiler and
Andrea Austin the authors of “Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and
Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth” recommend focusing on pipeline.
Pipeline refers to the opportunities the sales team believes could convert into
revenue. This is different from leads, people who have expressed very early interest,
because pipeline holds actual opportunities that are qualified through both the
marketing and sales process.
34

35. 35

36. In Seth Godin’s latest book “This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to
See,” he writes…
… marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview
and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re
gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers,
not victims.
36

37. There are three types of companies. Think about which type of company you’re in.
Companies that are focused primarily on themselves, their own products and
operations.
Companies that are focused primarily on their competitors.
Companies that are focused primarily on their customers.
Which kind of company do you think Amazon is?
37

38. Legend has it that when Jeff Bezos attends an internal meeting he insists on there
being at least one empty chair in the room. That empty chair represents the
customer. Invariably during meetings he’ll point at the chair to remind people what
their primary focus needs to be.
Bezos has said ”Our number one conviction and idea and philosophy and principle… is
customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession.”
And the last time I checked, Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world
In this era of the customer, companies who are focused on and have a deep
understanding of their customers are the most successful.
So how can you help your company to develop a deeper understanding of your
customers in order to give you a competitive edge?
38

39. Has anyone here introduced the concept of buyer personas at your company?
As defined in Adele Revella’s bestselling book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight
into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More
Business:
In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that
allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people
who might buy them.
The backbone of her book is the 5 insights that about your customers that will give
you a big competitive understanding of your customers and an unfair advantage.
The most important aspect of developing your buyer persona is that you must
actually speak with customers.
I encourage you to visit buyerpersona.com and learn about the 5 insights of buying
that are outlined in her book. She has some e-books about the buying insights and
there’s no registration required.
39

40. In “The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Your Customers
by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser” Tara-Nicholle Nelson explains
how every purchase a customer makes is associated with SOME kind of
transformation in their lives that they are seeking. Some are more obvious
transformations that others but if you can infer what the larger transformation is that
a customer is seeking in which your product plays a role, your customers are much
more likely to buy from you.
40

41. In Kristin Zhivago’s book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers
Want to Buy, she outlines what successful companies do to increase revenue and do
you know what the linchpin of her entire book and process is? INTERVIEW YOUR
CUSTOMERS!
Of course, you need to do it the way she prescribes in the book because many
companies don’t know how to properly glean the right insights from their customers.
41

42. Similarly in Martin Lindstrom’s book Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge
Trends, he writes about a very successful company that now requires all employees
to have an annual visit in a customer home to help them to gain meaningful insights
into their customers.
42

43. As David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt underscore in their book “Conversational
Marketing: How The World’s Fastest Growign Companies Use Chatbots to Generate
Leads 24/7/365 (And How You Can Too)… “Remember: whoever gets closest to the
customer wins.”
43

44. In The Invisible Brand: Marketing in the Age Of Automation, Big Data, and Machine
Learning, the author William Ammerman explains…
“The power goes to those who know the customer best.”
44

45. Let’s talk about content, which as Rebecca Lieb calls it in her content marketing
strategy book “Content – - The Atomic Particle of Marketing”
A few years ago SiriusDecisions stated that 60 percent to 70 percent of content
produced by b-to-b marketing organizations goes unused, sitting on sales portals and
Web site shelves.
What do they attribute that to?
45

46. A lack of buyer insights!
46

47. What’s one of the best ways to get customer insights? Answer their questions!
Marcus Sheridan started a fiberglass pool company in Virginia with two friends in
2001. They did pretty well and before long they were spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars in advertising in their primary markets of Richmond Virginia and
Washington DC.
When the real estate crash of 2008 happened the number of people interested in
investing in a fiberglass pool plummeted. Business almost completely stopped. They
were out of money. Their financial advisors advised them to declare bankruptcy.
At the end of his rope, Marcus began posting answers to every question they
regularly got from customers like “how much does a pool cost?” What are the pros
and cons of a fiberglass pool? Hundreds of questions like this.
Within one year it was the highest trafficked pool website in the world. The fear that
his prospective customers had in doing business plummeted and their trust soared.
47

48. In Tiffani Bova’s book “Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or
Break Your Business” she outlines the 10 ways that companies grow. And the success
of any of the approaches is most correlated with how well a company understands
their customers. And the first of the 10 approaches to growth is improving the
experience your customers have with your company, which leads us to the final big
idea.
48

49. 49

50. A powerful quote from Maya Angelou comes to mind as it relates to customer
experience
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but
people will never forget how you made them feel.
-Maya Angelou
Why is this more important now than in the past?
The internet. Social media. Ratings and review sites. Everyone has a megaphone with
which they can tell the world about being treated badly by a company (even if they
weren’t).
50

51. In X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, Brian Solis cites a Bain &
Company study of 362 companies. 80% of those companies thought that they were
delivering a “superior experience.”
In truth, according to their customers, only 8% were.
And how did that 8% do it?
They purposefully designed their customers’ experience.
51

52. This is why there is are a growing number of excellent books about engineering a
better customer experience that I have interviewed for The Marketing Book Podcast.
So why do companies really want to engineer a better customer experience? Is it
because they don’t like being yelled at?
The reason for this interest in customer experience is that’s also where the money is.
52

53. And this is also why we’re seeing a resurgence of word of mouth marketing via books
like “Fizz” by Ted Wright and “Talk Triggers” by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin. One of the
most important things to remember about WOMM is that for it to work effectively it
has to be engineered into the experience your customer has with your company. It’s
not something you can easily stroke a check for to a vendor and get word of mouth
marketing.
53

54. In Nicholas Webb’s book What Customers Crave he explains that...
70% of Americans are willing to spend more with companies they believe provide an
excellent customer experience.
Plus, keeping your customers is where the really big money is:
The probability of selling to a new prospect is less than 20%, while the probability of
selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent.
On average, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.
The experience you engineer for your customers is your most powerful marketing.
54

55. Need more proof for your CEO and CFO that customer experience is where the
money is?
In “Marketing To The Entitled Consumer: How to Turn Unreasonable Expectations
into Lasting Relationships by Nick Worth, Dave Frankland and Josh Bernoff, they write
about the The Forrester Research Customer Experience Index correlates strongly with
customers willingness to consider additional purchases from a company and their
likelihood to recommend a company to friends and colleagues.
When Watermark Consulting analyzed the 8-year stock performance of companies
evaluated by Forrester in 2015, customer experience leader showed a cumulative
return of 108%, compared to a return of 28% for customer experience laggards (and
72% for the S&P 500).
55

56. In Roger Dooley’s book “Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most
Powerful Advantage” he explains that the number one way to create or grow a
business by providing the best experience is to don “friction googles” and endlessly
look for the friction in your customer’s lives. Doing so will make you rich.
56

57. Besides differentiating your product or service, and in this age of product parity that’s
less and less of an option, do you know the best way to differentiate your company,
sell more and provide a great customer experience? It’s in the way that you sell. The
way you sell plays an enormous role in your customer’s experience? What is your
customer’s buying experience like? Hint: it’s not the same as your sales process.
57

58. 58

59. Who can guess what percent of CEOs in that study trust marketers. (20%)
And why do you think they don’t trust marketers?
59

60. I hope you found this presentation helpful.
If you’re interested in keeping up with the latest ideas to help you succeed in the
quickly-changing world of modern marketing and sales, go to your favorite podcast
app on your smartphone like Apple Podcasts and subscribe for free to The Marketing
Book Podcast.
And if I can recommend any marketing or sales books or other resources for whatever
situation you find yourself in, just connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat
and I’ll try to get you pointed in the right direction.
60