Finance Marketing Summit: Silicon Valley taught us to ‘get comfortable with boring’, Grapple’s Jarrod Baker
Being “comfortable with boring” – or by doing the simple stuff really flawlessly – was one of the things Grapple chief customer officer Jarrod Baker learned from his time working for Silicon Valley tech giants.
Speaking at the Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit, Baker said “better basics” lead to better work, and can open doors for marketers to do big brand activations or execute any ideas they have in their back pocket.
Grapple chief customer officer Jarrod Baker
Baker worked as a communications and marketing professional at Paypal and Meta over a span of eight years, before joining the Sydney-based Grapple in 2021 as its chief marketing officer, and then chief customer officer earlier this year.
Grapple is a financing and B2B payments provider aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises.
Baker shared his experience working for the tech giants and distilled his learnings down to seven points, including the ‘get comfortable with boring’ tip.
The other six were: Data is everything; the journey is just as important as the results; love your product before you love your brand; appreciate your internal customer as much as you appreciate the external; go to the coal face and get in the trenches with your customers; and ‘get the coffees’.
“Finding the right data, understanding your path forward will be the customers’ actions and reactions within your dataset should give you a clear path forward in your next marketing plan,” Baker said.
He also noted the importance of the journey should be at the same level as the results, where he would coach his team and cross-functional stakeholders on their work. “It is imperative that you do that to improve your standing in the business, because that ultimately leads to bigger opportunities plus less inertia,” he said. “If you’ve got a clearly defined plan and everyone understands it and the role of your team, you’re halfway there.”
Marketers should also learn to love their companies’ products before loving their brand, with Baker saying those who intrinsically understand and love the products would help from a branding and marketing perspective.
Existing customers are also a good source of information and feedback. “You can learn so much from your existing customers’ use of your products and services – they will teach you more than you’ll learn from anything that you do in outbound marketing,” he said. “Everyone as marketers and comms professionals needs to take the time to listen to them.”
Baker said it was also important to “get in the trenches” with your customers, so marketers can learn from other staff like frontline customer service staff about the company’s customers’ use of the brand, as well as what they love about it and any problems they might have.
And finally ‘get the coffees’, or offering to buy coffees to get into meetings that you otherwise would be invited to. “Offer to get the coffee to get yourself into meetings even if it’s just to listen,” he said. “At Facebook, I learned so much from just sitting in on some of the development and product development meetings.”
Have your say