One thing I learned very early on in my career – you can’t do a marketing job without almost constant interaction with the rest of the business. Whether that’s the sales team, the product team, HR or anyone else, you need constant input and feedback from both inside and outside the building.

One very specific case of this – how do you get help with those difficult but crucial decisions that could make a long term impact on the business? one of the issues with being in a role for a long time is that you “Don’t know what you don’t know”. The only way that I’ve ever seen this problem successfully addressed is with external help. And by this I mean “Find somebody who knows more about this problem than I do”. A few days of insight from a guru in your field can save you months off time looking into something where you don’t know where to start. I’ve done this many times in my career, whether it’s “How does B2B marketing work in France!?” through to “What does world class product marketing look like?”

As I say, I’ve worked with lots of these gurus over the years, but i just wanted to pick out three in particular who have made a significant impact on my development and understanding. If you want to make a significant step change in one of these areas I would strongly recommend following these people and subscribing to their feeds – I’ve been very lucky to have worked with all of these people directly.

Gareth Marlow – leadership

Gareth runs eqsystems.io and is the most knowledgeable person I know on senior leadership. Most of the problems I’ve ever seen with the impact of work done by teams, comes down to leadership. Why aren’t we getting more leads? Poor leadership. Why isn’t the product fit for purpose? Poor leadership. Why does it take us six months to do something that our competitors do in six weeks? Poor leadership. These problems are almost never caused by employees not knowing what they’re doing. It’s far more likely to be lack of direction and a poor culture.

So if you have a problem with, say, lead generation then before you start looking at your Marketo implementation, look at how you’re leading the team. And if you need help with this then Gareth Marlow is the first person I would talk to. You can’t do everything yourself, you need your team to work In sync with you, aligned to the strategy. This is difficult, very difficult and I’ve found Gareth one of the few people who can help you navigate through the actions that you need to take.

April Dunford – positioning

As April puts it herself “Positioning has a positioning problem”. I would agree sadly. It’s a term that is thrown around a lot in marketing departments with very little understanding of what it means. The best way to get started with understanding this problem is to just buy this book!

Additionally, if you can go and see April talk at an event or similar then I would very strongly recommend it.

Richard Rumelt – strategy

Another term that is heavily misunderstood – “Strategy”. If you’ve ever sat in a room and heard the phrase “Our strategy is to be the best in the market and to win” – then you need this book. True strategy (i.e. making choices based on diagnosis) is rare and again, an afternoon or two with this book will give you a step change in your understanding. What’s also great about the proper understanding of strategy is that of course it’s not just restricted to marketing. This book has helped me understand how decisions get made, how to make a proper argument for something and why some projects work and others don’t. Again, highly recommended.

For any further help or if you just want to tell me what you thought of these recommendations, please get in touch or subscribe to the newsletter.