Agree on who you’re marketing to, who you’re selling to, and who you’re building the product for. Whether you’re a solo founder, coordinating freelancers to help you make this happen, or leading a growing team of marketers, sales, customer success, and product people, you will only make it happen if you write down who it’s for.

I read Cameron Herald's Vivid Vision this week. (And I highly recommend it, especially if you’re a CEO or you work closely with your CEO.) It turns out that not everyone has a clear vision. Even if you’ve built something from the ground up.

As far as sales is concerned, though, marketing’s job is to grow the volume, velocity, and value of the pipeline.

When marketing hands leads off to sales too early or too late, it looks (to sales) like all three of those things are broken. Not enough volume of qualified leads, slow velocity from lead to closed/won deal, and even the value of closed deals might be too low.

Get the marketing -> sales hand-off right, and everything changes. Deals close faster. Sales even has to hire more people to keep up with all the high-value leads showing up on their dashboards or meetings on their calendars. (Then, of course, you need your handoff from sales to customer success to go well. But let’s tackle one thing at a time.)

Our registration numbers are often 5x and even 10x+ what they used to be. With attendance rates above 45%. Add in replays, and the numbers are even higher. Pile on metrics proving out the volume and value of marketing-generated and marketing-influenced new business, plus boosts in customer engagement, and you’ve got a clear case: webinars still work.

So, yes, webinars will still work. Here’s what makes them work for my team.

Repeat after me: I cannot do all the things all the time all on my own.

Maybe say it five times, fast.

Lately, I’ve been fielding inquiries about where to find the right marketing help. Things like … Which agency can I trust? (Or, more accurately, is there one?) Who can fix the #$&(@#$&( mess that is my HubSpot installation?

It’s up to each of us to decide if we define success purely in terms of net dollars gained or lost, or also in terms of net gains or losses to the people parting with those dollars.

To move people, you have to meet them where they are. And to meet them where they are, you have to hear them. And to hear them, you have to accept and convey that you might not be right, and that we are all irrational, you and me included.

Whether you’re wading into the public square, or trying to find more ways to hear your customers or your coworkers or your favorite people better, it’s all about the same things.

As people’s narratives became so wildly polarized, and so intensely based in opinions rather than facts, I’ve questioned the role marketing has played in what sometimes feels like a race to nowhere.