Crawford McCarty’s Post

Daily reminder: Celebrate Your Wins! We often get so caught up in the rat race of optimizing everything that it's easy to forget to celebrate. If you're constantly chasing the next big thing, you'll wear yourselves out before you cross the finish line. Acknowledge your team's achievements, no matter the size. It prevents burnout. It motivates. It stands as a reminder that the work they're doing has meaningful impact. Frankly, it feels good. Let's remind ourselves that we're doing cool shit even when it doesn't feel like it. #Teamwork #Wins #Leadership

Marketing Myth: The biggest budget wins Great marketing means understanding your audience and hyper targeting them, not backing a brinks truck up to your ads budget. Huge ad budgets are fun, but not required to win. #marketing #leadership #growth

Float ideas in the 'hallway' first, not in the board room. As a leader, one of the core aspects of your role is to bring innovative change to the company. But you shouldn't be catching your peers by surprise with a plan that includes potential landmines you wouldn't catch due to your specific scope and focus. As you're fleshing out your plans, get the advice and buy-in from your peers on the side first. This allows you to bring a more complete vision to the greater team, makes the discussion in the meeting more strategic and prevents the team from diving into a rabbit hole that could have been avoided. #leadership #strategy #landmines

I love when someone else does the heavy lifting and writes the post for me. Intent marketing is all the rage, but have you thought about finding intent in non-traditional ways? It's not just about the keywords or topics your prospects are showing activity on. You can find intent in other places if you stop with the tactical marketing long enough to be strategic. #b2b #intentdata #accountbasedmarketing #roi

A change is coming to the HubSpot pricing model, affecting how seats are priced. While I can't tell you if this update will cost your business money or not in the near future (they state migration plans for current customers shouldn't move the price more than 5%, due at renewal), what I can tell you is they addressed one of my biggest pain points: Adding free, view-only seats for sales and service hubs. I can finally go in and look at sequences without wasting a seat or having to "look over a shoulder". And I know my start up friends are excited they dropped the Sales Hub 5 seat minimum. #hubspot #marketingautomation #payasyougrow

If you follow me, you'll know I recently unseated HoneyBaked Ham with my own version as the go-to Christmas dinner in my house. The glaze and process were critical in why that ham turned out perfectly, but the biggest shift in good cooking came when I started using an instant-read thermometer rather than relying on the 'cook for (minutes) at (temperature)' formula every recipe uses. Marketing is no different. If you're building and executing campaigns but not actively tracking attribution and ROI, you're simply guessing at successes and failures. You might be successful, but it's probably luck. Do yourself a favor and start asking yourself three questions with every marketing activity you champion: ❓ What's the conversion rate for my impressions, clicks, landing pages, leads, etc? ❓How does brand awareness and social buzz impact the volume, velocity and value of my pipeline? ❓What percent of my Total Addressable Market (TAM) is currently in my database and being actively worked? There's more to it than just the above, but if you start here, you'll give yourself a 2% edge over your competition and 2% is often all it takes to significantly impact your bottom line. If you aren't doing the above? That's no different than cooking your Ham for 45 minutes and you won't know you've ruined it until you take that first bite. #marketingroi #dataanalytics #growthmarketing #marketingattribution #honeybakedhero

As far as LinkedIn analogies go, this one is going to be a bit of a stretch, but here is how I used my ABM playbook to land my toughest account: a 10/10 from my wife on my Christmas Dinner. This Christmas, I set my sights on the notoriously difficult challenge of toppling HoneyBaked Ham. You see, in my house, HoneyBaked Ham is THE gold standard. But when I called the day before (I forgot 😫) and they were sold out, I pivoted to a David vs. Goliath challenge. They have all the resources in the world to create and optimize their recipe. They have commercial kitchens. They have history. They have budget. They have a full supply chain logistical powerhouse. You know what they don't have? An intimate understanding of exactly why Nicole McCarty loves a ham. This is my opportunity. Digital Ads follow the same logic. Paid Ads are a VOLUME play. You build out a playbook hitting your top personas with your best messaging and then you a/b test as you collect the data. Programmatic ABM ads are basically the opposite. ABM is a VALUE play. It's not about hitting 100,000 people with your message. It's about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time and then capitalizing. It's about targeting a much smaller audience with a truly personal message to get insane ROI on your spend. So I did what any good marketer does: I studied my wife's past ham-related comments, I crafted the perfect recipe, optimized for her taste buds. The result? A juicy, flavorful masterpiece that stole the show (and garnered accolades as the new family favorite). If you REALLY squint, you can see how this is a lesson in listening to your audience, understanding their behavior, empathizing with their needs, and delivering tailored content that hits the mark. #accountbasedmarketing #digitaladvertising #personalization #NicoleLikesIt

We've all been there. That nagging feeling that we're somehow not good enough, that our accomplishments are flukes, and that everyone's just waiting for the big reveal: the moment they discover we're actually imposters. It's called imposter syndrome, and it's surprisingly common, though many try not to bring it up for fear of outing themselves. The good news? Just about everyone can relate. The bad news? It (probably) won't go away. The challenge with imposter syndrome is the goal post tends to move (along with your career) and while you'll feel confident in what you've done in your past, you'll also start comparing yourself to more successful peers. When my team comes to me with challenges related to imposter syndrome, I like to tell them a story about the imposter-filled ledger of Noble Prize winners. When a Nobel Prize winner receives their award, their name is signed into a special ledger. It's a prestigious tradition dating back to the early days of the award when the only way to prove someone had collected their prize money was for them to sign that they'd received it. The result? An incredible book full of autographs from the most accomplished minds in our history. In 1997, Stephen Chu won the Nobel Prize and went to sign his name - he scanned up the list and saw Erwin Schrodinger (you have probably heard of schrodinger's cat), Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. He immediately felt that his name didn't belong - how could it? These are some of the most famous scientists of all time. As ridiculous as it sounds, this Nobel Laurette felt like an imposter. But if you take it a step further and do a little digging, you'll find that Einstein felt the same way when he won and comparisons to Isaac Newton started to appear. The challenge with imposter syndrome is you often end up comparing your incomplete story with someone else's life work. So, the next time you feel like a fraud, remember: You're not alone. Even Nobel Prize winners experience imposter syndrome. Your feelings are valid. Don't try to suppress them; acknowledge them and move on. Focus on your journey, not the destination. Celebrate your accomplishments, big and small. Now go out there and conquer the world, or at a minimum, share your own ridiculous imposter syndrome story. #impostersyndrome #nobelprize #einstein #success #motivation #inspiration

If you ask 10 marketers what ABM (account-based marketing) is, you'll get 10 different answers. It's probably the most confusing term used in the industry today because most don't use it correctly. Fun Fact: ABM is not a platform. It's not 6sense or Demandbase (though those are both top notch platforms to enable your ABM motion). ABM is a style of marketing that takes personalization to the next level across your campaigns. And that brings me to my second point. ABM isn't a single campaign. It's not listening for a set of intent keywords and then running programmatic display against those accounts. Sure - you should definitely be doing that, but that's literally chapter 2 in a novel longer than Lord of the Rings. Put another way, your ABM platform may be Frodo, but you still need a Samwise, a Gandolf and that guy that got mad and kicked the helmet. The best marketers are building out customized and targeted digital campaigns that touch every stage in their buyer's journey, while also sprinkling in touches across their other channels that tell the same story, fully enveloping their prospects in their own brand story. #ABM #accountbasedmarketing #intentdata #funfactfriday #helmetkicker