Welcome to The 9 To 5, our new series where we highlight and interview creative professionals doing great things. Today we’re profiling Nolin LeChasseur, Partner & CMO of Brainrider, a B2B marketing agency in Toronto.
You do B2B marketing – How did you end up working in B2B? Had you always wanted to be on the B2B side?
I just wanted a job in marketing. I moved to Toronto after graduating from WLU with a BBA degree before I had a job. After spending the summer bartending back home, I was sick of trying and failing to get a job in Toronto when I wasn’t living in the city. I ended up working for a company that developed video casino games. It was 1998, and they had just come back from a trade show where they told everyone to visit them on the web, but didn’t actually have a website up yet. They needed an internet-savvy 20-something to get a site up on their domain before too many people noticed they didn’t have one.
I think a lot of people believe that B2B is dull and less sexy than its B2C cousin. What would you say to them?
It was for a long time. Before marketing automation and digital marketing were cost-effective, B2B marketing was pretty stagnant and old school. Trade shows, events, direct mail, telemarketing, and eventually some very simple, painful, unsophisticated outbound email.
For the past 6-7 years it has been a very different story. The #martech (marketing technology) universe for B2B marketing has exploded, and the web has made finding information as easy as typing your question into a search box. These two factors led to a fundamentally new approach to engaging with B2B buyers who are now in control of how they research and purchase. Now, B2B marketers are technologists, publishers, inventors, innovators, and scientists as much as they are writers, designers, and event planners. It sounds dramatic, but it really is a whole new world out here.
Now you own your own boutique agency, Brainrider, in Toronto, what does an average day look like for you?
We have a team of 18 smart people working on all sorts of different client projects, and my role has become one focused on helping and supporting them succeed. I also manage strategic partner relationships, recruit new team members, empty the dishwasher, and take out the garbage.
What do you do to continue learning and developing your skills in your field and also as a leader?
I don’t have a great attention span for reading long-form content like books anymore, so I read a lot of short articles from various RSS and social feeds, and I listen to a lot of people. Thankfully, I get to work on the front lines with B2B marketers and salespeople everyday, and there is no better or faster way to learn than by listening and doing. One of the biggest differences for me working agency-side for the past 6 years has been how aggressive the pace of learning is. Because we’re working concurrently on digital marketing programs for 20-30 companies, our test-and-learn cycles are much faster than is possible when you work inside a company. It’s a unique learning environment that I value very much.
We’ve written blogs here on the new roles of marketing with the evolution of technology, social media and how we use those tools as buyers. What roles do you have in your agency?
We’ve structured Brainrider the way I would build my marketing team inside a B2B company, based on the different “legs of the stool” that power B2B marketing these days. We have a web design and development team, a pipeline marketing programs team, and a content and storytelling team. Other than our senior management roles, pretty much everyone in the company aligns primarily with one of those practice areas.
B2B marketers are technologists, publishers, inventors, innovators, and scientists as much as they are writers, designers, and event planners. It sounds dramatic, but it really is a whole new world out here.
When you’re hiring for these roles, what education, experience and skills are you looking for in candidates?
We look at a candidate’s values as much as their skills. Every member of our team shares some core values:
We want and seek to understand why
We enjoy solving problems together as a team
We break through barriers to get the right result
We love taking full accountability
We live life with joie de vivre!
From a skills perspective, we make sure that a candidate can do what they say they can do as it pertains to their role. We use role-specific skills tests very early in the recruitment process to weed out people who can’t walk the talk, and then take those who demonstrate proficiency forward into more in-depth interviews to ensure they’ll mesh well with the rest of the team.
What can a candidate who wants to work with Brainrider do to standout?
When you’re applying for a role in a company that sells smart thinking and creativity, you need to think about how you can demonstrate that you think and work that way naturally. If you submit a vanilla resume and cover letter, or don’t offer examples of work that you’re proud of, you’re not even going to get a screening interview. As you get deeper into the process, we’re going to be listening for consistency, authenticity, and we want to know that you’re evaluating us as much as we’re evaluating you.
Know any cool creative professionals doing great things? Think they should appear in our 9 to 5 series? Drop us a line or leave us a note in the comments below!