We will periodically feature a new B2B marketer answering questions about their job, their best tips, their B2B skill set, and showcase their marketing and career advice.
This month we are excited to feature Anne Renehan, a Sr. Product Marketing Manager with Adobe Creative Cloud, who has experienced much personal and company growth in her 5 years at Adobe. She recently worked on the Adobe Stock service which has very quickly become heavyweight in the industry. As someone who’s always looking to add new skills and experiences to her repertoire, she recently transitioned to a new role to support the video market.
In her downtime, she makes a mean sangria which she enjoys sipping on her balcony in the heart of Boston.
Your Job
- How would you explain to your grandmother what your company does?
We make software for creative professionals so that they can create audio projects, video projects, graphic design projects, and all sorts of other projects. We make their lives much easier so that they can create more in less time.
- How would you explain to your grandmother what you do for work?
I work with enterprise-sized companies to figure out how they can best use our solutions.
- How has your job changed over the last five years?
I’ve moved from product to product; when I began, I was working with partners to help them get started with Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise. Then I moved on to Adobe Stock Enterprise, and now I’ll be moving back to support our video customers.
Best Tips
- Which element of your marketing tech stack would you recommend to others? Why?
I would recommend Adobe Connect. I know…I’m biased. But hear me out! I develop a lot of sales enablement content using Adobe Connect. I find that instead of doing a conference call, I can share slides and videos, and there is also a chat room where I can be getting live feedback while I’m presenting.
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What’s the best piece of content that you or your team produced recently? What makes it so good?
We recently produced a piece of content on how creative teams could work with their IT departments to get them to use Adobe creative cloud services. It goes through the benefits of being on these services and talks about what you need to communicate to IT departments and what they need to be doing.
- What’s your best tip for establishing a productive relationship with your sales team?
I try to be ultra-responsive to my sales team. I think one of the things that people like about me is that unless you get an out of office message, I try to answer my emails as quickly as possible. Even if I don’t know the answer, I always try to say I don’t know but ask this person. I feel like if they email you or call you, and you don’t get back to them, they kind of wonder what you’re doing…
- What daily or weekly habit is the most important thing you do to help you be productive and successful at work?
I never get lunch, which is a terrible habit, and that’s my least productive thing, but I do try to go for a 20-minute walk three times a week just to take a break and clear my head. I think this has helped me be more productive by allowing me to sort of recharge and restart.
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If you manage a team of marketers, please share a tip that has served you well in getting the most out of your team?
I don’t have my own team that I manage, but I do work with a lot of contractors. I feel like I always work better with people if I get to meet them in person and establish a personal relationship with them, which most people get to do all the time, but since I work remotely with a lot of remote contractors, that can be a little difficult. However, I find that once you do that, everything just gets easier.
Career Advice
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What did you study in college? How has it helped you in your career?
I studied English and Communications for my undergrad, and I have a master’s in Broadcast Journalism. I think that learning how to be a concise writer will help you in any career. There is no career where writing skills are not valued, well at least no career that you would want to have.
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What’s the best interview question to evaluate a B2B marketer?
I usually ask candidates to give me an example of a big challenge they faced and then how they solved the challenge. It doesn’t have to be a big achievement, but I’m trying to understand how creativity fits into their problem-solving approach.
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What advice would you give to your 25 year-old self?
Not to be afraid to try new things. My career has jumped around a lot, and that has kept it interesting for me. I bring a lot of different skills to the table, and I think that’s an advantage.
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What’s the biggest intangible that you look for in a job candidate?
If I feel like someone’s going to be a team player and is going be able to consider what’s best for our team rather than what’s best for them. A me-first person will be too difficult to manage and will bring down the team.
Marketing Advice
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How will marketing for your business or industry evolve over the next three years?
Marketing for our business will change dramatically over the next few years, but that’s still a work in progress. I came across this great quote recently, “What got us here won’t get us there.” – What earned our success up to this point has been great, but we do need to start changing so that we can reach out to additional customers.
- What underrated skills should every marketer have to succeed today? In three years?
I don’t know if it’s underrated, but I think the ability to write concisely and creatively is something you need to have. I don’t think that will change in three years. I am always surprised by this – I’ll get press releases from people, and I’ll be like “wow, I thought English was your first language.”
- What are some of the challenges that you see marketers having over the next couple of years?
I just think that we’re all pressured to create more with fewer resources. It’s not a new problem, but I think it will be a continuing problem. In the past, you just had to do maybe a press release and maybe a brochure to launch a product, but now there are more available channels at our disposal which creates more work for marketers. We now have to think about videos, and landing pages and social media and blogs.. I think you can find yourself stretched a little bit too thin.
B2B Skillset
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How do you keep your B2B skillset up-to-date?
I always try to take on at least one stretch project a year or do something that’s a little bit outside of my comfort zone. Adobe’s a really big company which gives me the opportunity to find a project on a different team. For example, I’m currently working with the deal desk to learn how to structure deals. – This is something that’s outside of my comfort zone, but it definitely helps me. Once I know how a good deal is structured, it helps me to think about how do I want to market this product so that customers conclude that this is the kind of deal that they want?
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Which conference is a can’t-miss for you? Why?
I would say The NAB Show or IBC. It’s such a great way to meet hundreds and hundreds of my customers all at the same time to learn what their pain points are, what they’re excited about in our products and what they’re creating with our product. Also, I get to see what my competitors are doing and to talk to thousands of fascinating people. It can feel draining, but I also think that it’s really exciting to talk to so many people in such a condensed period of time.
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Which blogs or newsletters are a must-read for you? Why?
I read so many of them, but I don’t have any “one” that I would say is a must read for me. My inbox is always clogged with links to things for me to read.
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How do you stay up-to-date on your industry? What do you recommend for others?
Reading lots of online industry and trade magazines. I also see a lot of articles on social media that I might not have found on my own. I’m very active on Facebook and LinkedIn, and I get a lot of links or usually find something good to look at from there… It’s not just cat videos
Last Question
- If you weren’t a B2B marketer, what would you choose as a career?
If I weren’t a B2B marketer, I’d be either training or teaching. I love teaching technology, so I’d probably be doing that.
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