Modern B2B Marcom: The Era of "We"

I just attended the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas last week.  While the show was overwhelming and exhausting, the comprehension and implementation of these technologies and products was even more so!

A total of five Indium Corporation executives attended the event, along with 150,000 other people. We witnessed many new products, services, and concepts that ranged widely, from furniture, to kitchen electronics, to microprocessors, to monitors, to iPad covers.

When we regrouped to review what we had all learned, there were five different stories, experiences, and opinions. Each was valuable, as well as wildly incomplete and non comprehensive, and filtered through a unique lens - reflecting the person's personal background and perspective. After we all testified to our experiences, integrated each other's observations and conclusions, and synthesized the whole thing into one big story, were we able to get a good handle on what had occurred.
 

To me, what it all boiled down to is that:
 

1. unlike in "the old days" none of us will ever be an "expert" in any one field. I define "expert" to mean a person who is THE resource for info on a topic. These days, no matter how much a person knows about anything, another person can simply turn to the internet and gain much more information on any topic.
2. so many things are changing on so many fronts that, in order to maintain a respectable level of awareness and competence, a person can NEVER stop learning at a furious pace. Even WITH such an investment, a person can never become an "expert".

This felt quite a bit like the last several years in B2B Marcom. There is so much to become aware of, to experiment with and understand. To integrate. To measure. To evaluate. To change.

As B2B marketers, we need to become ultramarathoners – capable of a long, grueling, seemingly never-ending, experience. And we must be SMART! Our journey is doomed if we aren’t always learning, growing, well informed, making excellent decisions, and aren’t capable of making critical decisions on the fly.

Most importantly, no one person is capable of knowing it all, being able to take it all in, and become "the expert".  These days, it takes a team - it is the era of "we".  We need to learn together, we need to observe and experience things, we need to make decisions, and we need to review the feedback so that we make the best decisions.

CONCLUSION: Hand-select an incredibly bright and capable team, keep everyone in constant learning mode, and always work as one unit. If you don't, then expect another B2B Marcom team to beat you.