This is the second installment of the digitalCMO Digital Leader Project. The objective: to hear perspectives on leadership and management directly from some of the most senior digital marketers. (The first installment is here, where we heard from the CMO of The Vitamin Shoppe Lou Weiss.)
In this installment we hear from Brent Turner. Brent is EVP of Call Products at Marchex. Before that, Brent held executive roles in digital advertising product management at Microsoft Advertising and aQuantive, where he founded and ran several divisions.
A Pensive Brent Turner
Since Brent is not only a friend and former colleague, but a Facebook friend, I took my pick of photos from his Facebook albums.
digitalCMO: You are writing a book on leadership. What are the most important three chapters?
Brent: Chapter One: Get the best possible people into roles that excite them, and then challenge them to be better than they think they are. They will.
Chapter Two: Feed your teams a steady diet of the three basic food groups: focus, alignment, and accountability. They will grow.
Chapter Three: If you find yourself weighing principle versus pragmatism in almost any decision, choose principle. It is the doorway to respect.
digitalCMO: When you interview for roles in your company, what is the #1 quality you look for?
Brent: An understanding of servant leadership. People generally take leadership roles either to serve teams or to have teams serve them. While the former is hard to find, I’ve learned over the years that the negative impact of the latter is hard to overcome. If you hire a servant, you get a ton of depth of understanding of what true leadership looks like as well.
digitalCMO: What is the #1 inhibitor you watch out for?
Brent: Any evidence of professional character issues. Team members can’t focus if they feel unsafe, and it only takes one person to kill the safety. I look for any reason to believe that a candidate will behave badly once in the door.
digitalCMO: What has been the most formative experience in your professional career, and why?
Brent: Working on the manufacturing floor at Porter-Cable during my first years as an engineer. I learned that, above all, if you don’t truly care about people, you will never get their best work, and they will never fully trust you.
digitalCMO: What is the part of your company that most reflects who Brent is?
Brent: The culture. I like to say that I want people playing, “loose, aggressive, and under control.” It’s my way of saying that people should be able to have fun in their jobs while taking them very seriously, expecting the most out of themselves and each other, and taking care of one another. Over the years I’ve had a chance to take over or turn around a number of teams, and it always makes my heart sing when we reach the point in the evolution of the team that I feel that loose, aggressive, under control rhythm starting again. It never gets old.
digitalCMO: What is the biggest marketing challenge you face today?
Brent: Trying to create the “Pay For Call” category in earnest. Phone calls haven’t been taken very seriously as a part of the digital marketing mix in the past few years, largely because of lack of supply. That’s changing now, and we have created a business that is right on the front edge of the re-evolution of the phone call. So we constantly debate what messages to go to market with, and how. What positioning, for example, will most effectively communicate the value of the product? How much should we reveal, so that we incite interest without inviting competitive response? And how do we manage the headwinds that category creators inevitably face. These challenges call enormously on my judgment and make my job a lot of fun.
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