Why Company Strategy Drives Your Marketing Strategy

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

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Exit Exit Foreign.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Exit 5 podcast. I am Dave, I do the podcasting here at Exit 5 and today just had a quick one of these little short episodes that people seem to like in addition to the guest interviews. And the short episode today is on company strategy. I think that one of the most important ingredients so, so if you're a marketing leader, future marketing leader, think about your job in marketing. I think so much of it's so hard to give marketing advice on LinkedIn in the Facebook community and obviously we do and just, you know, sometimes it's for show or whatever and people just post things. But at the end of the day it's so hard to give really tactical marketing advice because so much of the advice, at least in my opinion, would be based on what I actually knew about your company. And so there's many things there. It's like how is the company financed? Is it bootstrapped or venture capital like that. That's just one scenario where that path that would impact like probably the go to market strategy that you're going to take or what industry are you in? Are you first in a new market? Are you entering a crowded market? Are there certain regulations or rules? Are you limited by who you can hire and what you can do? What are the other companies in your space doing all that stuff. And so I think I wanted to do this episode because I think one area that I think marketing teams or marketing leaders can push more on is it's impossible, I think, to create a marketing strategy for a company that has no strategy or an unclear strategy. So Think about that for a second. It's hard to do marketing for a company that has no clear company strategy. I think that ultimately marketing is a function that's necessary inside of a business. But marketing doesn't just exist on its own. You bring in marketing to help grow a company, to help grow the sales of a company. And so in order to develop the marketing strategy, you have to know what the company strategy is. And so I see a lot of people talk about freemium or product led growth or ABM or this way or that way. And I think those decisions, those can't just be marketing decisions, they have to be company strategic decisions. This is how we're going to go to market. And so if those decisions are made in a vacuum, I think that's where people start to get not on the same page about stuff, but a couple companies that I've been a part of. The whole company needs to know the marketing strategy because you can't develop the sales strategy if you don't know the marketing strategy and vice versa. And so it's so important to really understand what is the company strategy and what is as a result of the company strategy. What is the go to market model going to be? For example, Drift decides to go after mid market to enterprise B2B SaaS companies to sell them this thing called conversational marketing. Well, that statement on its own can give you some guardrails for the type of strategy. So could we just have some free product, high volume product and try to get people in? Probably not. We probably had to do some outbound ABM enterprise type things versus a business model like Dropbox.

Right?

We're going to sell to consumers, we're going to give this thing away for free or really low cost. That's going to be a completely different strategy. And so I'm recording this short episode today to push you to push the rest of the company, the CEO, the founder, to really be able to articulate what is your company strategy. And I think the best and simplest definition for company strategy that I've seen. I guess this is like a hybrid from. There's a great book called Playing to Win which you should read. You can look it up. It's got a green cover with yellow text Playing to Win. And it's a really great primer in company strategy at a very kind of MBA ish level. But it's a very helpful stuff and a helpful framework to go through. The book is called Playing to Win, but they kind of roughly define company strategy as these two things. Number one, where you'll play and number two, how you'll win. So where you're gonna play is which customers are gonna go after which part of the market, who is the target customer? Icp, right. And then how you'll win is how are you gonna win in that market? What context do you have about other companies and what's going on in that market? What's your approach gonna be? Is your approach gonna be to undercut everybody and go free? Is your approach gonna be to go leverage founder enterprise? Are you going to create some type of new innovative feature product or whatever? I think how you'll win is the company internal bets for how you're going to build a successful company that can win in this space. So this week the assignment is go and push your CEO, push the founders. If there's not has not been a clear discussion about company strategy, why wait six months to do it versus, hey, let's, let's schedule an off site in the next month or a zoom or whatever and let's start talking through this. So company strategy is where you'll play, how you'll win. Impossible to develop the marketing strategy without knowing that. And I think the mark of a healthy leadership team and healthy management team at a company is one where the marketing leader, the product leader, the sales leader, the customer success leader, the founders, whoever, this is what they're working on at an off site to drive alignment and then go back to the company and say, hey, here's what our strategy is. Because, man, I'm sure if you're listening, you've been out there, you've seen a company, but it is so clear when a company does not have a strategy and when people are not aligned on that. And so I think it has to be done at that level. And so maybe you're not super close to the executive team. Could you just even ask the question, like, hey, how do we articulate our strategy? And is there a document? Is it one slide? Is it a wiki page? But like, how do we articulate what our company strategy is right now? Because that makes everything. I think there are multiple approaches that you can take to be successful with marketing today. There are multiple marketing strategies that companies can use to win, but you have to pick the right one in the right context. And so it has to match the company strategy. So I hope you can take this back with you, push on company strategy. Leave me a quick review if this was helpful. And keep listening to this show. It means a lot when you share it with others, other B2B marketing people. Tell them to check out the Exit 5 podcast and I'll be back with another episode.

See ya.

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