Clever Jay Blog

There are three things about marketing: Sometimes, marketing works. Marketing is like flocking birds. There are more than three things about marketing. I've been in marketing for a big chunk of my life, and often when I work with small or scaling companies, I'm approached for marketing help because a company thinks they have a marketing problem. But often, they don't. Marketing is like flocking birds. You wave your arms in the air and yell, to grab the attention of birds flyi

"Sometimes, marketing works." I say this a lot, but I don't say it as a coin-flip of a promise ("eh, who knows?"). I say it as an operational sanity check: what if this works? Because sometimes, marketing works. Are we ready for it if it does? Sometimes a marketer will be asked to launch a lead gen campaign -- to promote a special offer, or attract customers through a new partner, or maybe drive downloads -- by putting up a link somewhere and driving traffic to a landing page

Let's hear it for builders! They're the pioneers who join a startup in its early days, who rally around the vision, the promise, and the founders, and who want to do the work of building something new. They're that breed of curious, problem solving Swiss army knives that founders rely on to keep the plane in the air while they're still building it. In a startup, everyone is doing everything for the very first time, at exactly the same time. Maybe some on the team will have mo

I was about two years into my marketing leadership role at my last company, when my perspective took a sudden mental shift. Up to that point, I had the perspective that I was working for a software company that sold safety solutions to trucking companies. From Edmonton, Canada. And then suddenly, everything shifted, and I realized that actually, I was In trucking, not In a software company, or From Edmonton. That mental shift made me realize a few really important things: Tr

Scaling a business means constantly assembling the right team for the right time, to support your next step up. Over and over again. This doesn't always mean hiring new people onto your team, though you will need to do plenty of that. Assembling the right team for what's next should mean helping team members develop the skills they're going to need in order to excel in new or more specialized roles going forward. It should also mean inviting team members from other business u

When you're setting up your first customer pilots, and establishing your success measures, try thinking like a seller. "If I could prove to you that this product could do XY and Z," (slaps hood) "would you drive this baby away?" (please, don't ever talk like this) An early-stage customer pilot can help a start-up test UI, features, and validate or challenge assumptions on product / market fit. But it’s also when you should start getting into a seller's mindset -- because that

There's Marketing and marketing, and both are the responsibility of Marketing(TM). A lot of people think of capital M Marketing, when they think about marketing, and mostly that means they think about advertising or paid demand gen. Digital, social, display, print, broadcast, syndicated ads. The M here actually stands for Money. But lower case m marketing, as practiced by Good Marketers(TM) is more than a monthly ad commitment. It's about going to market, one way or the other