The Most Valuable Marketing Skills Right Now (Per Greg Isenberg)

Eric Siu (0:00)

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The most valuable marketing skills on the planet right now. Okay, so Neil, we can kind of go back and forth here. So I think number one in my mind is if you have the ability to build community, and when I say build community, that means hosting small dinners, hosting happy hours, hosting small events. If you know how to build these communities, these are going to become more and more valuable over time. I mean, I remember even Sam Altman talking about this, I think it's maybe three years ago or so, saying communities events are going to become more and more valuable. And I truly believe that because we talk about all this AI stuff right now, but what ends up mattering is we start to realize that it's the human connection that matters more. So if you know how to build that stuff, you can start small first. I've always mentioned this.

Start small with a small dinner with like-minded people. You don't have to have a big network, right? You might be thinking, oh, it's easy for you to say, I literally started with a bag of chips and I didn't even have any money and I was like 26 years old and I just connected a group of marketers together and we just talked about our biggest problems and then we talked about the biggest hack that's working well for us right now. And then eventually that transitioned into doing happy hours. Then that transitioned into doing smaller events and then larger events, right? And then you can even, then all those skills, by the way, those skills compound. And so let's say you get invited to speak at a conference. Well, then you can throw a side event that's tied to that, right? And so I think there's a lot of different ways to play it. And I think doing these events is a lot better than sponsoring a booth, for example.

Neil Patel (1:47)

Yep.

Dude, I totally agree. I think another skill set that's super important in marketing that people take for granted is storytelling.

I look at marketing as building relationships with people. I know Eric talked about doing in-person events and building a community, but people tend to buy from people that they can relate to, that they like, that they can connect with. And to do that at mass scale, you really need to leverage storytelling. Yes, there's a social web and getting your message out there on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever channel you choose. But if you're not good at storytelling, you're not going to just be able to bring people in as much, and build that relationship and be able to close them. I think it's a very underutilized skill. Everyone talks about storytelling and how it's powerful in marketing, but very few companies actually leverage storytelling from what I see.

Eric Siu (2:40)

Yeah. I think another one's going to be, I've talked about the rise of the Ford deployed marketer. So Palantir has this Ford deployed engineer, and people have different definitions of this now. But Palantir's model is they insert basically a full-time engineer in your company, and they learn how your business works, and they help you deploy on their foundry system, which is what Palantir has.

So I think you can also have versions of this where it's a full-time marketer on your staff, where they go into a company, they implement agents, so they will set up the agents properly, they'll customize them, and they'll continue to maintain them for the business. They might have an engineer helping from time to time. So at least that's what we're doing with my company.

So now, even when I had a good chat with somebody yesterday, even when I had a chat with him, I'm like, look, man, we're not hiring you to join traditional agency. That model is dead, right? You're coming to be a Ford-deployed marketer. I'm here to break the model, right? And he's like, that's exactly what I want to do. You get him excited. But then he has to be able to speak the game. He has to talk about what he's actually deployed before.

Because my belief now is that the human can say, okay, the human starts at the beginning. They find what they want to do. The agents should be able to handle the bulk of the work. I'm not saying all the work, but a lot of the work. And then you have the human at the end for judgment and taste, right? And then you should be able to compound out a lot more. But all that stuff, like your clients want this, right? They want you to figure out how to manage it for them. They want you to figure out the right connectors. They want you to figure out the right workflows. They want you to even figure out token routing as well, token optimization. I mean, I'm in this one AI chat right now where there's like 23, 24 execs and a lot of them are operators of businesses doing, they have like thousands of employees. I'm talking like some are 5, 8,000 employees or so. And they're all talking about the AI challenges. But I can see this. I'm telling you, a lot of people want this done for them and they want some form of 4 deployed happening for their business.