I love football.
I’m a proud Indianapolis Colts season ticket holder.
I’ve been blessed with great quarterbacks for a majority of my life.
Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck.
Not bad, huh?
I admire the quarterback position.
Yes, it’s the most important position on the field, but that’s not why I love it.
It presents an opportunity that no other position offers.
The opportunity to lead teams to incredible heights.
Great quarterbacks are great leaders.
The greats don’t just focus on leading their offense to the end zone.
The greats lead their teams across the different functions that help their team win.
This is almost sacrilegious in Indianapolis, but I have to give Tom Brady a ton of credit.
I spent so many years of my life despising TB12 and now I have shifted that to appreciation.
He’s friends with Peyton so he’s got to be alright in my book.
I bring up Brady not because he just won his 7th Lombardi trophy and not because it’s hard to argue against him as the GOAT. 🐐
I bring up Brady because he has an uncanny ability to impact every facet of the football teams that he has been a part of because he’s:
Overly prepared.
A great communicator.
A cross-functional savant
I take off my football fan cap and put on my marketing cap and draw a lot of parallels for inspiration when looking at what Brady has done to be considered truly great.
Quarterbacks like Brady lead their team down the field and score touchdowns to win games.
Marketers create content that inspires their audience with the hope that it will eventually win their company contracts.
Both of these examples are straightforward, but it’s the preparation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration that typically leads to winning outcomes.
I had a moment last week that caused me to pull my head out of my work and quite frankly was a wake up call for me.
I interviewed our CTO and Co-founder Eric Sendelbach on the 3C podcast.
Before the call Eric said to me, “I think this is the first time we’ve met 1:1 outside of team meetings.”
When his comment sunk in I realized that I wasn’t operating like a TB12 version of a marketer at a company in pre-launch mode.
It was a wake up call to me that I needed to reach across the aisle and do a better job of offering feedback to the work that he and the team were doing.
I AM THE IDEAL CUSTOMER OF OUR PRODUCT!
I am doing our company a disservice by operating in a silo and doing marketing things from laptop open to shut every day.
The best marketers that I’ve ever worked with are all great internal marketers.
They over communicate.
The over share.
They solicit feedback in their work.
They offer feedback when the work is outside of their scope.
This is the how companies go from $0-$10M in a short period of time.
The marketer has the opportunity to be the quarterback of this process.
Find opportunities to get not just the marketing team, but your organization in winning positions.
Prepare.
Communicate.
Work cross-functionally
Peyton Manning is my favorite athlete of all time and can’t wait to watch him go in the Hall of Fame this year.
He’ll always be a great example of this for me.
It’s impossible to deny greatness and not give credit where credit is due.
There’s a lot we can all learn from Tom Brady as marketers in software companies.
Whenever in doubt error on the side of collaboration.
It will help your company win…..a lot. 💯
If you enjoy what we are doing we’d love for you to do a couple things:
