Marketers. Love them or hate them, they serve a purpose and often are the backbone of growth within your organization. They have an innate ability to get down and dirty in understanding how and why people purchase products and services. By asking the right questions at the right time and providing the right tone and candor, they can take a relational conversational to transactional with ease. Marketers are creative problem solvers but often have a big problem – they struggle with communicating their value add and the impact on the pipeline.
In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Ken Pratt, a former educator turned Vice President of Marketing for Frontline Education. He takes us through how he and his team learned how to deliver their value, while generating a marketing pipeline that actually aided in the closing of about 38% of their closed/won business. As an organization he got really comfortable with knowing what the company needed and the problems they were solving. This lead to their three solid elements that helped his department communicate overall value.
Transcript:
Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking with Ken Pratt. Ken, welcome to the show.
Ken: Hey, Glenn, nice being here, thanks for having me.
Glenn: Ken, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Ken: So, I’m the Vice President of Marketing for an educational technology company called Frontline Education. I manage a pretty substantial team that focuses on digital marketing, content marketing, product marketing, event marketing, creative and design. And we are storming the education world.
Glenn: I always like to ask people who are in senior marketing positions, did you kind of grow up in a certain discipline within marketing or have you done the whole kit and caboodle?
Ken: I have a strange path into this world. So, I was a teacher, I studied history and then I taught English. And I will later say that I think my history degree was probably the greatest impact on my marketing interest because I had to think globally and historically about things. And it’s actually what I do in the marketplace. I think in that same way. I sort of chunk things the way I chunk history. There are bits and pieces and there’s the big picture and then there are the smaller pieces that make up the bigger picture. And I think my proclivity to marketing strategy probably follows that trajectory.
Glenn: Now, I know one of the things you and I talk about just before the podcast was a challenge that I certainly seen through my career and I think others have seen it is, sometimes that companies themselves, or at least marketing departments themselves, don’t always know how to describe the value-add that they’re providing to the company? Have you experienced that and how have you approached that?
Ken: Yeah, you bet. In many companies that I’ve worked with I was always often asking the question, you know, what is our value to the company? And how do we show that? And I think mostly that came from the fact that I was pretty sure that leadership didn’t value us or they certainly didn’t value my piece of the pie at the time. And yet, I started recognizing, in the early 2000s, as digital tools came along, that empowered marketers to do way more and to get way more personal with their prospects and their clients. That there started to sort of form this notion that there is an actual value proposition that companies recognize.
And so, I’ve been toying with that thought for years now. And I don’t think until this position that I’m in now, have I been able to actually crystalize it quite to the degree. I think at one point I crystalized as the value proposition as content...
