The Common Sense Marketer Podcast is back!
Do you want better marketing results for your business? We have rebooted the Common Sense Marketer to help Microsoft partners and customers answer all the pressing questions they have today about building relationships with the digital-first buyer.
Welcome to the show, Jennifer Harris.
On this week’s episode of the Common Sense Marketer, we are joined by Jennifer Harris. Jennifer is the president and founder of Technology Management Concepts, an exclusively Microsoft partner based out of Los Angeles, California.
Jennifer moved to Los Angeles shortly after college, where she started implementing ways to make financial management more efficient within the company she was working for. Soon after, Jennifer branched out and founded Technology Management Concepts in 1987. Technology Management Concepts specializes in the implementation of financial and business management systems, to help their customers streamline the process of digital transformation.
Using in Common Sense
For Jennifer, there are three pieces of common sense that greatly impact the way she approaches marketing in her business:
- Having trust and patience in your marketing
- Investing in marketing
- Bridging the gap between marketing and sales.
Trusting The Process
Having trust and patience in your marketing strategy is one of the most important pieces to finding success in marketing today. Jennifer discusses that for her, and many entrepreneurs like her, shaking the rapid results oriented mindset is a difficult challenge.
“Most entrepreneurs and business owners are very results oriented. It's very difficult for us to do anything with a long-game. We want to see an immediate return on our investment. I think the most difficult thing for me was that I had to start early, in order to see results 2-3 years later.”
As Jennifer was able to overcome this obstacle, she continued to see sustainable growth in her business because she trusted the marketing process, and invested in it.
Investing in The Process
For a long time, businesses were led to believe that in the world of digital marketing, there was a quick fix to achieve marketing success. The cold hard truth of the matter is this: marketing is hard work. There is no silver bullet, but rather there is a process that must occur which involves investing the appropriate time, money, and resources to achieve results.
In today’s market, you need a website in order to conduct business. Often, your website is doing a lot of the selling for your company. So, if your website is essentially a sales person, should it not be allocated an appropriate level of investment?
“It is a very big trust between the business owner, the VP in sales and marketing, and the marketing manager, because they are coming to you with bigger asks than any other department in terms of money and time. It is a long game and it requires trust that this is going to eventually pay off. But we all know, we only need to make a couple sales for it to pay for itself.”
Managing the Process
There is a long-standing disconnect between sales and marketing, one that every salesperson or marketer has come across throughout their career. There is a sense that the two teams are exclusive from one another, they have a difficult time working together, they fail to produce results for one another, and the list goes on. Jennifer speaks to how she has successfully mitigated the sales/marketing discourse within her own business:
“The sales team values marketing because I do. It has to come down from the top that we value our marketing team. Our marketing team is great at understanding that they are in support of the business and the sales people are their business [...] there’s a mutual respect between sales and marketing. I look at them as one team, they have one manager, and they work together.”
For Jennifer, when sales succeeds, or when marketing succeeds, the business as a whole succeeds. This is the kind of discourse she promotes in her business practises, leaving no room for a gap between the two departments that are so often polarized.
The digital-first world
Jennifer works to help her clients navigate the changing world of digital transformation. With 30 years of experience in the industry, she is no stranger to the ways the digital-first world has been shaped and created.
“The biggest challenge early on when the internet became more popular in the early 2000s and up through the recession, was that you had people who were easily able to find other partners. Prior to that it was sort of a closed community; customers had less choice and therefore partners were more stable. Through the past 18 months we’ve seen this at warp speed.”
To learn more about how to navigate this world and effectively engage the digital-first buyer, Read our free e-book.
Keep up with Jennifer through:
Technology Management Concepts
