#26 Building your expertise ft. Adam New-Waterson

Pierce is joined by Adam New-Waterson, who was once his Marketo mentor. Today, Adam is a fractional CMO and has launched his own lifestyle brand, Frank & Fan. During this episode, Adam and Pierce talk about what it meant to launch a new brand on his own, the transition from B2B to B2C, and the path that he took to get into marketing ops.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1) Tips on how to transition from being a technical expert to a strategic executive

2) Some B2C learnings that apply to B2B 

3) How to improve the relationship between marketing ops and sales

Show Notes

Adam New-Waterson has had a fascinating career. From studying photography, he somehow transitioned into a marketing role that introduced him to marketing automation. As an early Marketo customer, he quickly became a marketing ops expert, leveraging the Marketo community and learning as much as he could from everyone he met.

Since then, he’s done work in demand gen and has led marketing teams as a CMO and fractional executive – and now he’s even launched his own lifestyle brand, Frank & Fan. (You’re going to want to hear the story behind the name in the first few minutes of this episode.) This seemingly unusual career path has given Adam vast opportunities to learn from his experience, and he shares many of those learnings with us on the podcast.

First off, if you’re a technical person that wants to take on a more executive role, you need to reframe how you think and talk about things. Listen to your CMO and learn about what the company’s executives are looking to accomplish for the business as a whole. Then, bring that lens to your own work product, and frame your thinking with those end goals in mind.

Another important learning is around the relationship with Sales. So many marketers have complicated (at best) relationships with their Sales counterparts – but that’s counterproductive when you’re all working towards building revenue. Instead, it’s worth building a strong partnership with sales reps, giving them clear insight into how the work you’re doing benefits them, and how they can help you get there.

With exposure to both B2C and B2B brands, Adam also feels like one can learn from the other. For example, B2B marketers could do more to engage people from a visual perspective, focusing more on being concise and interactive than extensively informative.

With all of these learnings in his pocket, Adam now takes his expertise to different brands as a fractional CMO. It’s this approach to his role that allowed him the flexibility to keep doing the work he loves while also building his brand new retail brand.

Listen to this episode for more insights from Adam, and stay till the end to hear what he does for fun. Trust us, it’s a great story.

Follow Adam on LinkedIn