What specific skill sets make for the strongest marketing teams? In part two of our conversation with Allison Tivnon, we take a closer look at developed skills and natural talents that make a great team, redefining mentorship, and what to look for when recruiting new team members.
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Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and today we're chatting with Allison Tivnon.
On episode two, we were talking with Allison about the recipe for successful teams, and there was so much to cover, we ended up breaking it up into two parts.
If you haven't listened to episode two yet, you might wanna jump back to that one and listen to it first.
Let's pick up here as Allison and I start discussing the specific skill sets of your marketing team and when it's time to add more resources and how to build a balanced team.
So AEC marketing, very unique beast here.
Allison, what would you say are the skill sets needed to effectively market a firm within our industry?
I think that it is extremely layered.
And as you go deeper into your career, and by deeper, I mean both in terms of time into the subject matter of your firm, into the different types of roles and responsibilities that you could have as part of your marketing team.
It all starts with being able to write, to edit, really enjoying the creative process of critical thinking and loving stories and narratives.
You have to be curious to do this kind of work.
You have to really want to know, why does your firm do the work it does?
Why does society need the types of services that your firm does?
And get into the heart of why this work matters.
Otherwise, it's always going to just be a job.
From there, of course, there's some technical skill sets that you need.
A lot of folks, when they come into this industry, they come in either as a marketing assistant or as an entry level marketing coordinator, proposal coordinator.
You're going to have to understand data entry, efficiencies and file organization.
You're going to have to understand different types of technology, whether it be CRM software, Adobe InDesign, the Microsoft create, the Microsoft suite of tools.
How the heck did you say that?
Microsoft Creative Club?
Oh, sorry.
Adobe creative club.
That's Adobe.
You're going to have to know Adobe.
You're going to have to know Microsoft.
You're going to have to be able to work in Word and PowerPoint and Excel and InDesign and maybe Illustrator and maybe Photoshop.
These are skills that it's not like you learn this stuff overnight.
A lot of us learn on the job, but those are typically the entry level is you have to show that you have chops when it comes to writing and editing.
You have to be able to stay organized and really on top of time management.
You have to be able to show that you can learn new things and go with it and run with it.
Yeah, you make mistakes, but you learn from them and you get better.
And then it's almost like watching a flower bloom.
There's other aspects that are going to come to you, both in terms of like, well, how does digital marketing work and the tactile and like hard structure type of marketing things.
But then there's also, you're going to start to learn the names of other firms.
You're going to start to understand what your competition looks like.
The names of the different references that are used on the proposals and who they are in the cities and service areas that you work in.
You start to understand the dynamics at play.
It's like the whole world starts to break open in terms of your understanding of your industry.
That's when you see a lot of marketers either say, yeah, I like doing proposals.
I'm going to stay in-house, or it brings out that networker in you and you start to veer off into the business development side of things, which can take you off into a whole new track in your career.
Yeah, starting out as a marketing coordinator is a great place to begin because you are probably going to be exposed to so many different facets of AEC marketing.
And you may learn through that, that you have a real talent for the event planning and coordination.
You know, it's no small task to keep track of all of the sponsorships and golf tournaments and swag that needs to be brought out and who's doing what and which clients are you inviting.
And, you know, that can definitely be a full-time job.
And it's best done by someone who enjoys making those connections and likes hauling tubs of swag down to a golf course at 8 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock in the morning or whatever it might be, right?
So you need...
Some people get a thrill out of that.
I mean, it is some people's favorite job.
They're like, I get paid to do this.
Thank you so much.
You know, so we want to...
I mean, I'd love to marry up the person who feels that way with that kind of role.
Obviously, that's a seasonal piece, but it could also translate to recruiting and job fairs and other types of, you know, industry associations, you know, being part of that.
So I'd recommend, you know, as a coordinator, dipping your toe into lots of different areas, you know, then you could also try supporting digital marketing and the social media for your company.
Again, another big piece of work could take half time, full time, depending on the size of your organization.
And you could really dig into, you know, knowing that inside and out and making recommendations and looking at analytics.
So there's an opportunity.
Well, there's also infographics and these types of skills that it's like, there are some things that we now are asked to do in our firms that you have to have a talent for it.
It's not just a skill set.
Sometimes you have to hire for those.
Sometimes it's awakened within you.
Like we're just talking about, like, oh my gosh, I love juggling.
I love the dynamics of pulling together an event.
Another thing everyone, I think, has to be able to be good at, it is a skill set from the beginning to the end of your career, is communication.
And I used to say this to my staff all the time.
You have to know when to send the email, when to pick up the phone, and when to walk down the hall.
And obviously, we're not walking down a lot of halls these days, but you know what I mean.
Picking up the phone is an amazing thing for people to remember.
And I've definitely had plenty of conversations where I said, well, have you tried calling them?
And they're like, no.
I'm like, yeah, well, I'm pretty sure their email is overflowing, so maybe it's time for a phone call.
And for entry-level staff, that can be very intimidating, especially for younger generations that are so used to email and texting and written word.
It's passive, it's one-sided.
Sometimes just hearing the tone of someone's voice tells you a lot about where they're at and how to flex yourself to their place, so that you can get what you need from them for the betterment of the proposal or the project that you have going on.
If you're missing that connection with people, you are really tying one hand behind your back.
Not only the success of whatever you're working on, but also just plain efficiency of time and management of resources.
Right.
And that's something that you have to grow into.
It doesn't really come naturally to just start calling people up and telling them what to do.
And that's partly, it's a conversation and it's a skill to get people to do what you need them to do.
And I think any good marketer knows that a lot of what we do is in the social capital that we're building up with our coworkers and colleagues.
Yeah, there is such a thing as over-communicating or also just making it more challenging for our internal teams.
And I've coached this quite a bit where I think part of our role is, whether you're in-house or as a consultant, is to make it easy on the project team.
We ask clarifying questions instead of, for example, what projects were you on for your resume or whatever it might be.
Instead, how about, these are the five projects I think should be listed.
Does this look right?
And they can answer with a yes, a no, they could delete, they could type one in.
I mean, that makes it so much easier than them pausing, thinking, let me go through my memory and write all this down.
So anything that we can do to communicate clearly and make it simple, which might mean breaking it up or making it very digestible creates that social equity.
You mentioned Allison, where they are excited, happy.
It's not a dread when they see the email from you because they've got this long list to do in the evening after their kids go to bed, you know, that they have to catch up and send all this stuff to marketing.
You know, it's a developed skill set.
And you know, if you can start with being willing to communicate openly and be proactive about it, then you can dial it in and get very, you know, expert level in how you get the information you need in a timely manner.
And Wendy, you make a point that is so critical, and it might not seem on topic to talk about, like the right type of team to have internally, but just simply by getting really good at communication.
And like you said, making it as easy for them as possible to get you what you need, asking clarifying questions, getting to the yes, you're demonstrating to them that they can count on you, and that builds trust, it builds respect, and what that translates into is that when you get into those situations where you're like, ooh, we really shouldn't be going after this proposal, or I don't think this approach is right, or this understanding needs a lot of work, it's a heck of a lot easier to have those conversations and be a real true partner in those conversations if the ultimate decision maker on the other end sees you as a partner in it.
So you have your team and things are generally good, but you need to add resources.
So how do you ensure you're hiring for the right mix of skill sets as you're looking to add team members?
I am a huge fan of data.
I love hard and fast facts.
One of the things that works very differently in most marketing departments than for almost anyone else in the firm is the way we fill out our time sheets.
A lot of the technical staff of utilization targets, they have sub tasks underneath their projects.
They have to build their time to.
In marketing departments, you've got proposals.
And then what?
A lot of firms will just have one billing code.
It's like marketing overhead or some generic term like that.
You got to get way more intentional than that and really list out what are the other types of marketing that you do, whether it's social media, graphic design, marketing administration, event planning.
And you create that list with your team.
You get the buy off on actually getting it into your accounting software and you really use them.
Once you start doing that, if you can pull up pie charts of everyone on your team after say six months or a year and look at it and really analyze where your time is going and also compare it to what their marketing title is.
Like if they're a graphic designer and 45% of their time went to proposal work in the last year, something's broken.
Something's just wrong.
If you can look at all of those things in concert together, you can start to manipulate them.
You can draw on paper new pie charts.
And what is your perfect mix of work?
And each person gets a say in that.
That is so magical and dynamic to do that together.
One, oh my gosh, it will hyperbond you together because you are in real time trying to figure out how to help each other do your jobs best.
But it also can reveal to you, we can't do all of this.
We're gonna need help.
And from there, it becomes a conversation of, do we have to hire for this?
Is this something that we can outsource?
Do we need a temporary external contractor?
Is this intern work?
It can lead you down a path to decide what the right solution is, but at least once you have it in front of you, and you can visualize where your time is going, you can start to make concrete steps, actually truly address it.
That not only right sizes the workload of your staff, it gives them the opportunity to work on things that they're really good at, that they want to be working on, and that are most beneficial for both the team and the firm as a whole.
Right.
So you're able to see with the data, not only what you're doing, but what you're not doing.
And I think it's a pretty common experience that marketing teams set their goals for the year, have these wonderful ideas of how to advance their company's brand awareness and support initiatives.
And some amount of that does not happen.
And year after year of those ideas not coming to the top of the list is a little discouraging for a creative goal-oriented team, like marketing would be.
So realizing if the proposal load is taking 80 or 90% of your team's time, what's your hit rate?
What do you need to look at to decide?
Are you chasing the right stuff?
Are the pursuits just taking all of that time, but for the right reason?
What could you be doing and improving your company's position if you were able to dedicate marketing time outside of the pursuit process?
So I like that idea that seeing it in a pie chart would be very clear, and maybe it is balanced, and that would be also really encouraging, and you could feel like you could move forward confidently.
Today's listener question is, what role does mentorship play in developing a strong and thriving marketing team?
Allison, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, I think that the first thing you have to tackle when you're thinking about what a mentor is is breaking away from the stereotype.
A lot of times you think of someone who's closing in on the tail end of their career, someone who's seen it all and done it all, and that is absolutely not true.
Anyone who has ever experienced anything becomes a mentor.
You see kids on the playground that are mentoring each other on how to go across the monkey bars, all the way up to friends that are sitting next to someone who just went through a really hard breakup.
In the workplace, I think we don't feel empowered to be mentors unless we have a certain title or a certain number of years under our belt.
But if you're really trying to cultivate a team that is going to act like a team, you have to let everybody know that they have a voice, they have an opinion, they have skills that are valuable, and give them the opportunity to communicate that.
And that can be through having lunch and learns where people share their information.
It can be pairing people in one-on-one.
And I'm not saying that it's not important to have those really seasoned professionals take someone who's at the beginning of their career out for lunch on several different occasions to talk through kind of a meandering assortment of things that they should be looking out for, tactics for how to ask for raises, what to do with work-life balance and stuff like that.
But we can all be mentors to each other.
It's just a matter of knowing that what you do is of value and the ways in which you think about it are of value and helping people learn how to transmit that to other people.
When you do that, you give people more skin in the game.
You make them feel more committed because they are a part of it.
They are not just a receiver of it.
And when you do that, the team that you create becomes way more dynamic to where all of a sudden, you might end up flipping the thing on its head.
And that person that's at the end of their career ends being taken out to lunch by the person at the beginning of their career.
And they're in the mentorship role teaching what they know to someone who doesn't happen to have the same skill set.
So, I think we need to kind of tear down the paradigms of what we think of when we think of people that are in a position to tell you what to think and feel about your job, how to go about it and make it way more broad and just about us as human beings sharing our experiences for the greater good of everybody.
Yeah.
And I would just add here about thinking about mentorship in a different way is that it definitely doesn't need to be within the marketing team or even marketing related.
I can speak personally to an experience.
I was Director of Marketing in a company and they paired me up with my mentor on my first day, which actually is maybe not always the best practice because a mentorship can maybe have more of a real organic natural occurrence.
But in this way, it was part of their onboarding and I appreciated it.
My mentor was on the operations side and I spent time getting to know his role, his projects, his concerns and having lunch and having deeper conversations and it was not related to marketing.
But it gave me a better connection with a leader in the firm where I could get to just really understand what they were dealing with and have a connection that I could go and ask questions when I was having challenges and not marketing related at all.
So that was a very positive type of mentorship that was set up within the onboarding system.
And I think that's a great way to potentially bring on mentor mentee relationships in your marketing team is to match them up with someone potentially in the field, get them out there talking to the people who are doing the day to day work, and they can build those relationships that will influence their marketing perspective.
Really, really good points.
Yeah, and SNPS has mentorship programs, and that's a great way to connect with people outside of your own firm, but within the industry, so that you can develop those relationships in a safe place with folks that really understand where you're coming from.
Allison, you are on the mentorship committee with the SNPS Oregon chapter.
Is there anything that you can share about having that experience?
Oh, I love it.
I actually just met with my mentee for the first time in person.
We've met like six times, I think.
Three of them have been private one-on-ones, and three of them have been with the larger group, which all told is like 40 individuals that are mentors and mentees that have been paired up.
And that's really awesome because in the group meetings, we'll pick a subject and just run with it, and all the mentors will share their experiences, and all the mentees will come ready with questions, stuff that they're in the middle of facing.
But I've noticed that the great part about the mentor-mentee relationship is that the longer it goes on, the topics that you cover in the meetings shifts into really gritty, real territory because you've built trust and it feels like a safe space.
And you're not afraid of being vulnerable and asking questions that maybe you think are dumb, or I should already know the answer to this.
And when you get into that space, this really magical thing happens where the mentee and the mentor start growing from it.
You learn a lot together.
And those connections also translate into networking later on because now you have two people in the industry, typically at different firms, that know each other really, really well.
And using your constellation of connections, you grow each other's networks.
And it's just another little piece of meaningful relationship that develops outside of the office that feeds that part of you that's like, this isn't just about my day job.
It's also about this industry.
And yeah, SMPS has just been an incredible organization for me from day one.
But to be far enough along in my career to be considered a quote unquote mentor, one, it constantly reminds me, I don't know everything, but that's not the point.
You know, it's just getting to a place where you feel confident enough to share your story, and you have someone on the other end who needs to hear what you have to say.
Yeah, that's great.
Really special relationship building.
And I think that gets us to the answer of this question, which is, you know, what does the role of mentorship play in developing a strong, thriving marketing team is that you want your team who is constantly under pressure and it's, you know, super competitive and they're stretching their skills and their time and all of that to feel supported.
And sometimes even within your own marketing team, everyone will be focused on a deadline or it just is not a moment where you can actually have that support internally, right?
So the mentor is separate from that chaos and conversation and they can just provide a different perspective.
And I think that you will just have individually stronger team members if everyone does have some sort of mentorship or multiple mentorships in their career.
Absolutely.
This has been a great conversation about the recipe for a successful marketing team.
Lots of tangents we can go off on and we're going to actually start exploring more of those.
For example, departments of one and how you hire and assessing skills.
So we'll dig into that some more.
But Allison, for today, I think we are good.
Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your expertise and looking forward to more and more conversations with you.
Oh, yes.
Thank you, Wendy.
I love talking with you as well.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
Kyle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Allison Rose.
If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.
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Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
See you next time.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.