Why You Need to Become a Human Swiss Army Knife of a Marketer

As part of the CMO Reboot Playbook: The Elevated Role of Marketing, Lara Balazs, EVP, CMO & GM of Intuit's Strategic Partner Group shares her play on stepping into an elevated role during a crisis by falling in love with your customer problems and delivering on brand purpose. Check out more plays from top CMOs and brand leaders here. This transcript has been edited by Adweek and may not reflect the video-recording exactly. THE CHALLENGE At the end of the day, I walked into the CMO position at Intuit, but my role was expanded to include being general manager of our strategic partner group, which includes a pro-tax business, the P&L, our corporate responsibility work. and all the strategic partner work we do with companies like Google and Facebook, as well as the financial institutions of the world. What was able to happen for me I think can happen for you. Some of the rules of the road on how you apply yourself to an elevated role can be good learnings. THE APPROACH We all know that the opportunity is out there. We must be able to show up in a way where we have our strengths seen so that we are contributing at that C-Suite level. Maybe you have a seat at the table, but you don't feel listened to or you don't have that seat and you feel like you should. What is keeping you from it? This elevated role has become more important than ever with the onset of COVID-19. First off, make sure you're in a good place. It was on all of us to try to make sure that our employees were safe and we're keeping them as healthy as possible. The world got really complex and none of us had playbooks. The civil unrest and the reality that all of us have not been paying attention to the issue of racial injustice was a wakeup call. We all realized, especially as corporations, we needed to address this challenge with systemic and durable change. The world needs marketers, because we're the people who can tackle these things. When there isn't a playbook, when we don't know what to do, what is the case in all of these situations? The Rise of the Human Swiss Army Knife Marketer The role has become the craft of marketing and communications. We've been asked to become human Swiss Army knives and work in the gray. We have to be able to take a challenge, break it down, and offer up a solution to do it in a way where you can be at the CEO staff table. We're often really good at the creative, at thinking about the number of impressions, engagement, and art direction that went into something. I would argue that is table stakes. What we need to get better at as a craft is connecting that constantly to the business. What I try to tell every marketer, no matter what level you're at, is to get to know your profit and loss statement, whether it's for the company, for the business you're in. What is driving your revenue? What is driving top line? What's striving bottom line? Get in there, get your hands dirty, get your finance partner and really try to understand that. It doesn't mean you have to lose your superpower. If your superpower is creativity, it's just going to help you be smarter when you have those conversations. Underneath that, when you're looking at the business, you want to try to understand what the drivers of the business are. What levers do I pull to drive revenue? Where may I take a loss knowing that it might lead to growth in the long-term, especially with business models that are on the table today? For example, when it comes to premium business models, think about all of the ways you could get customers first and then monetize them later. A major reason our jobs got harder is that technology changed the entire game. Every single company today is a technology company. Every company is using tech to further your message, connect with your customer, or build great products. It's the backbone and oxygen of every organization. Get to know it, understand it, and learn where you can get more efficient with your buyers. Start to think about the marketing technology living within your product. Do you have what you need to make sure you can leverage that? THE IMPACT How are you always tapped into macro trends and how are you always aware of what is going on with your customer? Knowing them deeply inside and out is key. At Intuit, we try not to fall in love with the solutions. We fall in love with our customer problems and then work from the customer back to solve them. I encourage you all to always ask yourself when you're walking into the room, are you representing the customer? The other key piece of this is what are you doing to constantly test and learn? What is that agile development approach that you're bringing to the table to say at the end of the day? The world isn't precious with perfect bows on it all the time. How do you test and learn, take the learnings and go back again? The reality of that is that you're going to optimize as you do it and you're going to ultimately have better business results at the end of it. Finish Your CEO, CFO, and CTO’s Sentences You must be able to talk the language of your CTO or they're just going to see you as a cost line item and not as an investment tool where you're driving revenue. Deeply understand P&L to really speak like the CFO in his or her language. Be a catalyst for business growth by supporting your customers. That's where the CEO will absolutely acknowledge you and understand the impact that you're bringing to the table. Link what you're doing to the business and revenue. We talk a lot about ad recall and awareness, but how does that link to revenue? Try to find those equations because you want to show how you're having an impact in everything you're doing. Work Horizontally, Not Vertically You can't work vertically in this. This is all about working horizontally with your C-Suite team. How are you constantly connecting dots no matter where you are in the organization, especially if you're at a platform company like Intuit? Consider Yourself Chief Reputation Officer Your brand purpose and brand mission matters more than ever. What we found through the pandemic in terms of the macro conditions and all the crises is those companies that didn't have their mission nailed down are experiencing footfalls. The consumer can see through it and in the case of Intuit, where our mission is to power prosperity around the world, we mean that. We mean it in a very visceral way. We think everyone should have the opportunity to prosper. How do you know that your goal is to drive the reputation of the company at the end of the day? That mission is central to everything you do. KEY TAKEAWAYS Fall in love with your customer problems.Deliver brand purpose: Our brand belief is everyone has the opportunity to prosper, so what we make sure we do is not only just serve our core customer, but serve the underserved too.Build your brand, but in service to the customers. Define the Need You Serve