I am not a numbers guy. And I’ve been in my fair share of meetings with decks filled with endless charts and data and my eyes glazed over. I’m sure you have as well.

So were we the problem? Were we just not captivated enough by the correlation coefficient?

I think not. And I think the reason why can be best summed up by this lesson I read in a How I Made It In Marketing podcast guest application – Even the most rigorous analysis fails without the right story.

Numbers, even very impressive numbers, still need that marketer’s touch.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with a numbers guy who also has some deep marketing and business insights to share with us –  Jiaxi Zhu, head of analytics, SMB division, Google [https://www.google.com/].

Google’s SMB division works with five million customers. Zhu leads the analysis for how to manage and prioritize the division’s several-hundred-million-dollar budget.

Lessons from the things he made

• Even the most rigorous analysis fails without the right story
• Landing solutions requires going deep and doing the hard work
• Define your data with your business partners
• Real influence means accepting the world is not fair or rational by default
• True empathy is active work
• Intellectual curiosity means always asking “why” behind the observations

Turn your knowledge assets into a new revenue stream

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $7,500 each to eligible companies. Apply for your $7,500 AI Engineering Voucher [https://meclabs.com/research/ai-engineering-voucher]

Discussed in this episode

Transparent Marketing: How to make your product claims credible … not incredible [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/transparent-credible-product-claims]

Customer-First Marketing: How The Global Leadership Summit grew attendance by 16% to 400,000 [https://meclabs.com/gls]

B2B Marketing Leadership: The higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to know (podcast episode #115) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/B2B-marketing-leadership]

Marketing and Brand: Embrace healthy friction (podcast episode #48) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-and-brand]

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

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