Back in the day I learned about sawubona from Chris Brogan. Sawubona is a traditional Zulu greeting, which translates, “I see you,” but goes much deeper. It came to mind recently when I was asked about building marketing teams for early-stage startups.

I have built and led marketing teams at a range of scale from a team of over a dozen direct and indirect reports for a multi-hundred-million-dollar business at McAfee/Network Associates to a team of one as the first marketing person and 4th employee for a seed-stage startup at Bluefire Security Technologies. I have built and led marketing teams at different stages of growth, as well.

• Early Stage, where it’s all about “We need to demonstrate traction or die,” such as, at QuantumXchange, and Oakley Networks;

• Scaling Stage, where it’s a focus on “If we can leverage early-adopter customers well, we can ramp revenues and cross the chasm,” such as, at GeoTrust and FortiusOne;

• Expansion Stage where it’s priorities, such as, “Let’s investigate opportunities in new geographies, adjacent markets, or complementary technologies to hit the growth inflection point earlier,” such as, at ChosenSecurity and GeoTrust.

Along the way, I have built marketing teams with a range of approaches, from organically with insourced talent and hiring, to highly outsourced and distributed. As the Marketing Technology (MarTech) stack and collaboration tools have improved, I have found increasing opportunities to build high-performance marketing teams drawing from the global talent pool to match needs at various stages of growth.

Over time, marketing team structures have had to change, as well. In addition to improvements in MarTech and Collaboration tools, the market and media landscapes have evolved and power has shifted from sellers to buyers. All of this changed customer behaviors and the buyer’s journey. It’s not surprising then, that marketing team structures had to change to accommodate evolving strategies, objectives, and tactics.

Through it all though, I believe a guiding principle has applied. Back in the day, Drucker said, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Today, even in this era of multi-channel content, account-based marketing, and MarTech automation, Godin says, "This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See."

To succeed, we need to learn to see – to know and understand the customer. When we can do this, and if we can innovate, we can create must-have solutions for must-solve problems, learn how to engage with customers who have those problems, and build new businesses.

Both then, and now, learning to see, and acting accordingly, is my guiding principle for Marketing, and indeed for the entire company, to be successful.

Sawubona!