Walton encourages her clients to evaluate their strategy from the customer perspective.
Jennifer Walton is the Chief Brand Officer for SkyNow Consulting - a marketing and brand strategy organization with a special focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Her work centers on helping mid-to-large size organizations develop effective marketing strategies. She joined Negotiate Anything to discuss the difficult conversations that can arise in the marketing profession, and how she overcomes them to secure more clients and better business.
Selling Marketing as a Revenue Generator
Walton began by sharing how for many organizations, marketing is simply viewed as an expense. She likes to begin her conversations by reiterating the value a solid marketing strategy can have to increasing revenue and achieving top of the line growth. From there, she emphasizes her expertise.
"A lot of people think of marketing as the everyday things that they do or experience,” Walton shared. “To me it’s just overcoming the fact that I’m an expert in my space and I can honestly lead you to where you’re trying to go.”
These can be difficult conversations for marketers - as many leaders also consider themselves experts on marketing. That said, Walton’s strategy relies on asking the right questions up front.
Typically, she begins by clarifying what success looks like for the prospective client. From there she devises a customized marketing plan that will help them deliver on those specific objectives.
“The first thing is going back to those questions,” she continued. “Let me ask those questions so I can understand how you go to the place you are in.”
Leveraging Expertise from a Fact-Based Place
Next, Walton encourages her clients to evaluate their strategy from the customer perspective.
“When you think of the best brands that you have engaged with, what has set them apart is that they are outside-in thinkers that are focused on the customer or client,” she explained.
She advises companies to conduct research that unearths insights about the target customer’s experience with the brand. In doing so, she is helping to support her strategy with facts and research that the client themselves has collected and verified. With this information, she can develop a strategy that bridges the gap between where they are and where they want to be.
This can be an incredibly powerful persuasive strategy - as it takes the pressure off of the marketing professional’s qualifications and places it on what the data supports. This can reduce the adversarial (me vs. you) undertones in the conversation.
Successfully Check Your Ego
As Walton points out, many of these strategies rely on the marketing expert’s ability to check their own ego. This can be difficult to do, especially when you are trying to simultaneously assert yourself as an expert. This can be particularly challenging for professionals who belong to marginalized identities.
“As a Black woman, I’m going to have a much more difficult time convincing the white male decision-makers to check that ego or trust my expertise,” she shared.
Walton’s primary strategy involves using the client responses as a guiding force. After hearing their answers, she will pose ideas back to them as questions. As they make suggestions, she validates them.
Essentially, she convinces them that her ideas are actually their original thoughts.
“This is similar to allowing somebody to win the battle compared to the larger war,” Walton remarked.
Rather than letting ego prevent her from securing a client, with a little bit of humility, she is able to not only land the deal but implement her targeted marketing strategy in a way that makes decision-makers feel confident and secure.
Equally important, according to Walton, is embracing the cycle of continuous learning. The landscape of marketing evolves frequently. Remaining open to new ways of thinking can not only help marketing professionals remain humble, but also maintain their sharpness, as well as a high-level of expertise.
In general, Walton maintains that trust and respect will be critical to any difficult conversation. She encourages all professionals to prioritize collaboration.
“I want to leave a legacy that says, ‘I worked with you to build frameworks and foundational operations that can live and be successful when I walk away.’”
Follow Jennifer Walton on LinkedIn to learn more about her work. To listen to the full episode, click here.
