The year is 2018. The way businesses function has changed drastically. Employees are no longer just employees. Employees too are customers today. Leveraging this insight, Slack entered the foray in 2014. Today, this same ‘start-up’ is worth $5 billion. Revolutionary, no doubt, Slack has made the big-time organizations rethink what employee communication is all about.
Kelly Watkins, the VP of Global Marketing for Slack gives his insight on how marketing should always be treated as a craft, in a very well-structured interview.
According to him, marketing in an organization today occupies a more strategic role. He believes that marketing can be used successfully to assist the growth of an organization and to adopt this holistic approach towards marketing, one has to focus on marketing activities that provide value to customers.
When questioned upon the role that Slack has played on shifting the focus on employee experience, Kelly believes that Slack helps organizations by bringing about a degree of transparency in the way employees carry out their tasks. It helps with the induction process and also gives the employees a clearer, more definite idea about the organization’s goals, vision, and objectives. Furthermore, he believes that Slack enables organizations to become more customer-oriented in their offerings.
Lastly, in his interview, Kelly focuses on the importance of emotional intelligence in connecting with the customer base. His opinion is that, in order to stay connected with one’s customer base, one needs to mobilize their team to go outdoors and collect real-practical information, straight from the sources.
The curse of knowledge is that new knowledge blocks out the basic concepts that one has learned beforehand. Kelly believes that in order to be a great marketer, one needs to obliterate this curse of knowledge and treat every day as the first day on the job.