Marketing & Sales Team Interviews, Analysis, & Proposals
Role: Individual initiative to inform and empower my impact as Digital Content, Sr. Writer / Storyteller for Content Marketing
Problem: As a new hire and solo video scriptwriter in a late-stage startup marketing department, I found myself inexplicably lacking feedback and assignments. I sought to anticipate and prepare a roadmap for marketing leadership, sharpen script development, understand our business and organizational dynamics, and identify opportunities and barriers to content strategy.
Approach: After voicing my concerns to the director, I met with each of our six marketing leaders to inquire about their plans for the year and asked to connect with their high-performing sales team members to capture their approach to customers and understand their pain points. I iteratively shared feedback from sales with the marketing leaders to drill down along the way.
Outcomes: After more than twenty-four interviews across our six verticals, I gained insights into customer needs, gaps between marketing and sales, challenges facing sales teams, and the state of our products. Sales and product marketing teams provided artifacts for crafting persona-focused messaging, their mantra of leading with outcomes, and the list of personas and outcomes specific to each vertical.
I also developed ideas and gathered their perspectives for possible solutions and new approaches to site strategy, discovery, incentivizing agreements for customer case studies, disseminating content, and reaching target personas. I also connected with our director of analyst relations, who is critical for shaping content and reaching our customers' C-suite executives.
Throughout my interviews, I became especially focused on uncovering the root causes of organizational disconnects and resource shortages. I gathered data with our sales analyst and highlighted potential solutions.
I shared findings with marketing and sales leadership, including our VP, who applauded my efforts and shared feedback about how he was working to address some of the problems identified in my report. The director also recognized my efforts, noting our need for content strategy.
Shortly afterward, I shared my report with our newly hired content strategist and the SEO expert. The content strategist was surprised at the scope of my report because he had met such resistance to his attempts at gathering information across teams, and he inquired how I had managed to connect.
My resulting relationships across sales and product marketing teams for all six verticals forged a valuable foundation for my short but action-packed year at Honeywell.
Before the proliferation of ChatGPT, I introduced a trial version of Jasper.ai to our team for content development. I proposed using Grammarly for Business to standardize and update all written communications around our brand voice and style guide. I also collaborated with our SEO expert to lobby for better tools, including AHREFs and Surfer.
I proposed an AI use case to our VP and General Counsel for optimizing sales contracts and automating notifications to maintain compliance and awareness of changes in various regional terms and conditions. Another of my proposals included training AI to query our proprietary bank of marketing documents and data rather than relying on search.
I also discovered and delved into NEOM, Saudi Arabia's trillion-dollar effort to develop a bleeding edge, sustainable smart city, industrial complex, and logistics hub. Such an account would represent an unfathomable budget to advance and showcase HCE's capability. When I asked around Honeywell about the possibility of involvement, few knew about NEOM or were skeptical that we would get involved. When the CEO of Honeywell visited Atlanta, I inquired and he confirmed with excitement that NEOM "couldn't get enough of Honeywell." I had previously discussed NEOM with our VP, so I was satisfied and excited by the confirmation of my interest, and he later agreed to support my suggestion of possibly traveling to Saudi Arabia to gather case studies.