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Marketing is often described as both an art and a science—which creates an ongoing tension because attribution is hard.

My husband goes to the Gartner IT conference every year. Most recently, he brought me back a book on creative thinking by speaker Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

As I read The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, I felt as if the current marketing and sales enablement quandary I've been writing about in this series for MarketingProfs was unfolding before me.

I started this series pondering the question "Sales Enablement: Good or Bad" as an oblique reference to the "Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad" episode from Community.


Bad Equals Good?

More than ever, I feel like the bad in this equation may be just as useful as the good in learning how to improve.

The Rise is beautiful and you should add it to your winter reading list. (Not least because as you read about Ben Saunders's expedition to the North Pole, you can more easily empathize while bundling up against the cold outside.)

In the meantime, I'll gift you with an explanation of why bad sales enablement can also be good: "It is the creative process—what drives invention, discovery, and culture—that reminds us of how to nimbly convert so-called failure into an irreplaceable advantage." (Sarah Lewis, The Rise)

A 2% return on investment sounds, out of context, not necessarily great. In the context of marketing, however, it's often hailed as a phenomenal success if the math works out well.

In complex B2B services marketing that means we often have a high tolerance for failure. Because one closed won deal might be more than an entire quarter's budget—and, more and more, in many cases an entire annual budget.

SaaS marketers typically have lower margins, a volume approach, and therefore faster feedback loops.

Both types of B2B marketers can benefit from a more flexible growth mindset.

Failures can do a few things:

  1. Harden your resolve to keep trying (but without any changes)
  2. Thicken your skin so the next failure doesn't hurt as much (which can also make the failure easier to ignore)
  3. Provide a wakeup call that the tactic doesn't work (and it's time to try something else)

Considering how rapidly things are changing, including the way reach is fracturing across a myriad of channels and platforms, we all know that there's a lot out there that is not in Marketing's control.

But what you can control is how you react to failure. That third way of processing failure can provide an unlock to improvement over time.

The Rise is all about a continual effort: "Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn't one." (Sarah Lewis)

If someone tells you they have figured out marketing, they are lying their face off.

via GIPHY

Attaining mastery is always "in the permanent future."

Searching for Ways to Improve

The creative process is not about getting to a level of mastery. It's about the search for it.

And that means trying things as you search: "We make discoveries, breakthroughs, and inventions in part because we are free enough to take risks, and fail if necessary." (Sarah Lewis)

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How to Be a Gritty Marketer: Leverage Failure in the Search for Mastery

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Cathy Colliver

Cathy Colliver is the marketing director at Test Double, a software consulting agency. She loves simplifying challenges, and her marketing career spans five industries. Cathy volunteers in arts and education.

LinkedIn: Cathy Colliver

Twitter: @CathyColliver

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