At my home office one morning in November 2015, I propped by coffee on my desk, donned my Bluetooth headset and connected to a Skype call, ready to present a proposal for a major consulting project to a technology firm called “Trefis”. Five minutes and no more than three slides into my pitch the CEO Manish Jhunjhunwala cut me off. “David,” he said over Skype, “I’d like to talk to you about coming to work for us to run our marketing.”
Your customer should feel as though he or she is your most important, if not only, client. I learned over many years as a marketing and sales consultant to enterprise software companies, first at Leap the Pond, then at The Levy Group as well as a dozen years or more at digital agencies (such as here and here). “Although I’m only partially allocated to your business,” I often told my clients, “I will wake up each day believing and behaving as though I am your full-time chief marketing officer.”
I worked with Larry Gorkin, one of the company’s managing directors, on the Trefis pitch. “We are trying to determine if we should outsource our marketing or hire someone internally,” he said. “Would you ever consider working for us?”
What I said to Larry was a stock answer : “I will consider any opportunity that helps my family and I achieve our goals.”
What I thought was: “No way. I have my own business with my name on it. Why would I give that up?”
But things changed.
- I’ve evaluated opportunities in my career. None as compelling as the one presented by Trefis.
- I’ve seen hundreds of software demos. None as electric as the Trefis Interactive Experience.
- I’ve advised dozens of executives and met thousands more. None as unique as the Trefis team.
So when Manish said “David, I’d like to talk to you about coming to work for us to run our marketing” I took him up on it. I joined as CMO a month later.
Welcome to the Trefis blog.
The job of this blog will be to re-create for you the excitement I felt—and still feel—the moment I joined Trefis. In the blog my colleagues and I will share our ideas around human latency; we’ll engage you in a dialogue about how decisions are made; we’ll interview customers and industry leaders. We’ll use this blog to demonstrate the Trefis Interactive Experience and we’ll present the myriad ways leaders use it to make decisions of consequence.
If you have any ideas you’d like share you can always reach us here.