so just who the hell do i think i am?

I was supposed to be a theology professor.

Somehow, as life does, I ended up ditching grad school and beginning a career in sales, with some freelance writing on the side. The more I worked my way up in the sales world, the more I realized that I was not an ideal  sales employee in a lot of sales environments. Why? Because I don't believe in the short con. I don't believe in saying what I need to in order to hit my sales quota, whether or not it was true. I believe in sales the way sales should be if it's to be sustainable: long-term relationship building. Truth-telling. Understanding best interests and doing the right thing, even if it means you don't get the sale right away.

Tired of "coffee is for closers" attitudes, I dove headlong into marketing, with a desire to build those relationships and begin a foundation of trust well before someone gets in front of a salesperson.

I fell in love.

For me, marketing was this perfect intersection of what I loved about theology (why do you believe or think or feel what you do?) and what I loved about writing (Peggy Olson ad copy for days) and what I loved about sales (building relationships with people and establishing a lifelong client base) and it was perfect for me. 

Until I looked around at all the really crappy marketing in the world.

It wasn't just, like, bad, egregious, terrible marketing (although I have plenty of war stories in those areas.) It was marketing and content that existed largely because, well, someone told that department that it had to produce...something? Anything? It was marketing and content that was barely scraping by. That was relying on flash and trend over substance, that employed too many tired gimmicks, that was misleading or annoying or inaccurate or tone-deaf or worse.

But most of all, I saw marketing that was just...tired.

It was tired because our people are tired. Our marketing teams are tired. Our professionals are also, themselves, inundated by bad marketing and subpar information every day: which platforms to jump on next, how to hit a list of completely unrealistic KPIs, how to bother your customers over and over again, here are forty-three types of content you should be churning out right tf now, and also be all things to all people on all available platforms with, often, a strapped budget or small team.

When our job is to do, well, everything, very little gets done well.

It's time for an insurgency. It's time to cast off the bad gimmicks and the desperation to keep up with the constantly changing digital page and the benchmarks that aren't rooted in reality and the homogeneity and the trendy new packages for old practices and the buzz words and the half-assed content for the sake of content and the fear, OHMYGODTHEFEAR, of losing our customers that is so thick they can smell it on us. It's time for quality over quantity, it's time for specialized focus instead of spray and pray, it's time for sustainable activity that produces consistent, reliable, long-term results, it's time for well-thought out strategy over reactionary tactics, it's time for action items over theories. It's time for action.

And I think I'm just the BROAD to lead the charge. Join me?