Will Crowley

How did you get into marketing?

My path into marketing has been a bit unconventional. I became very interested in startups and entrepreneurship while living in Chicago and was able to explore that on my own through resources like Startup Weekend and 1871. Eventually, I started learning more about digital marketing and began turning those learnings into various side projects like building websites for friends and family, or starting a blog / podcast highlighting entrepreneurs and their stories.

Professionally, I was able to maneuver into the digital marketing arm of the consulting firm I was working for, which gave me direct experience in building and implementing marketing strategies for major brands. The combination of this personal and professional experience enabled me to make a career pivot into a full-time marketing role at an early-stage, high-growth company and I’ve been in that world ever since.

We often hear tactics from marketers, but not the personal side. Can you tell us something about you that people might not expect?

I’m a huge fan of improv comedy! I got hooked on it while living in Chicago and have been performing on teams and at festivals for the past 10 years. It’s such a fun art form with personal and professional applications and I’ve met some amazing people through it. Additionally, it led me to serve on the board of The Unscripted Project, a fantastic nonprofit based in Philadelphia that teaches life skills to students through an improv education (and also offers corporate workshops).

A common question we get from more junior marketers - what should I be doing to advance?

While it’s good to be aware of in-demand marketing skills, I think it really depends on your current role and desired career path.

• Asking your manager what skills they think you should learn or brush up on is always a good idea, or maybe there’s an adjacent skillset that will help you be more impactful. For example, you can learn SQL if you're often asking data teams to run reports, or HTML if there’s some website tweaks you want to make without a developer.
• If there’s a role you'd like to have in the future or are looking to transition into, take a peek at job postings for those titles, look at the skills/qualifications section, identify some potential gaps in your current skillset and come up with a plan to fill them via courses & trainings.

What if they're making a career transition into marketing? 

This was something I’ve always enjoyed chatting about with other marketers, and a common theme in those conversations was the importance of reflecting on your current role and career goals in order to tell your story effectively.

While this is just one part of the career search or transition process, I think it’s the most critical. I recently put together a blog post (featuring helpful career resources) to help marketers identify their professional persona and increase their chances of landing a role they love.

Based on your lived experience, what makes a marketing team go from average to great?

Wow, there’s a lot that comes to mind. A few key elements that jump out to me include:

1. Shared goals and a vision on how to achieve them. Team members must understand the larger business goals and how their respective marketing efforts roll up to them. Moreover, knowing where you are and where you are going as a team is key to measuring success and adjusting accordingly. An excellent team can and should combine those points of reference with their skillsets to drive the “how” around putting your strategy into place. 
2. Creating an environment that balances psychological safety with accountability. This is really hard to do, but so important as it allows teams to feel both empowered and responsible.  
3. A desire to collaborate both inside and outside of the marketing function is key. This graphic from the incredibly helpful team at MKT1 does a nice job of laying out how effective campaigns require a team to work together. Moreover, marketing teams must find ways to effectively partner with sales, product, and CS to understand their goals and where marketing can appropriately support them.  
4. Marketing leaders should make it clear that they are invested in the career growth of their team members. Developing career paths to inform growth and promotion cycles or setting up a professional development budget are just some ways that teams can thoughtfully invest in their development and create a culture of self-improvement. 
5. Teams must find ways to combine the quantitative with the qualitative. While some aspects of marketing (brand, product marketing) are tougher - but not impossible - to measure, building the proper tech stack and reports to measure KPIs (especially ones related to revenue) and progress to goals helps to ensure marketing has a seat at the strategic table AND helps to identify areas to use that creativity needed for truly great marketing.
6. A healthy culture of feedback is key for any team. Team members should embrace best practices around how to both give and receive feedback. Creating a norm of thoughtful, specific, and growth-focused feedback helps make good teams great.

Intriguing thing you've learned or read about recently? 

1. There’s no shortage of brilliant marketers sharing their words of wisdom. After bookmarking and collecting a few of my favorites, I decided to put a bit of structure behind it and create a publicly available page sharing some of my favorite marketing resources. The collection spans everything from one-off blog posts, newsletters to subscribe to, books to read, and much much more (note that the scope is primarily B2B/SaaS). It is meant to be a living and breathing document, so if I’m missing anything please feel free to reach out with suggestions.  I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention that I got a ton from attending the recent Beloved Tech Brands Conference. The one-day event was a great way to connect with other marketers and hear from some of the top voices in marketing (some of whom are listed in the resource above) including Emily Kramer, Carilu Dietrich, and Elena Verna share their thoughts and insights on a variety of topics including attribution, PR & Comms, product led growth, and so much more!

What about mentors? Any that standout from your career?

I’ve been fortunate to have many wonderful mentors throughout my career including but not limited to talented, caring professors (Wendy Angst, Elea Feit, Isaac Dinner), some fantastic past managers (Brie Tascione, James Coates, James Kanka), incredibly accomplished, wise marketing leaders (Fraser Marlow, Kathleen Estreich, Julia Rieger) and of course my parents (Jack Crowley and Paula Crowley). 

For more you can follow Will via LinkedIn and/or on his website.