Jennifer Rouse
Principal Analyst, Emerging Growth Marketing
Author Insights
Blog
Lessons From A Cold Texan: How Marketers Can Prepare For A Crisis
Audience planning is a fundamental crisis mitigation strategy — is your company prepared for the unexpected? In her latest blog post for Forrester, analyst Jennifer Rouse serves up a lesson from recent emergencies to help emerging companies mitigate risk.
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Blog
If You Build It, They Will Come … Well, Not Really
- Product marketing and audience-centric marketing are not mutually exclusive
- Hypergrowth depends on identifying the best path to revenue with the least amount of resistance
- Audience-centric marketing attracts an organization’s current audience and those who have yet to associate their needs with its solution
Blog
Responding to Coronavirus: What to Do When the Rules No Longer Apply
- Surviving a crisis requires a shift in both marketing and sales strategies
- To survive the immediate crisis, companies must focus on their customers first
- To continue to thrive following a crisis, marketing must think short term and sales must think long term
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Making the Case for Your Ideal Technology Stack
- New marketing, sales and operations leaders must evaluate their entire inherited technology ecosystem to determine its ability to support team goals
- Proposals for new technology investments often fall flat because of an inability to present a clear business case that addresses business leaders’ concerns
- Drawing a clear connection between business objectives, technology dependencies and the solution is the way to create a winning plotline for your tech proposal
Blog
Leading the “Strong Ones” – Why Successful Managers Are Leaders First
- The strong ones on your team need attention, too
- Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers
- To create a strong team, you need to encourage growth and training
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“SQUIRREL!” – Or, How to Avoid the Disease of Distraction
- Shifting priorities too often can kill the momentum and motivation in your company
- Every new opportunity is not necessarily the right opportunity
- Know your audience, create a plan and stay focused
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Confessions of a Pinterest Recipe Addict: How Marketers Can Share Recipes for Success
- Seventy percent of leads will get disqualified or discarded at some point, but 80 percent of those leads will buy from you or a competitor within 24 months, so marketing cannot focus only on lead generation but must also add nurture to the recipe for success
- The primary ingredient for sales and marketing alignment is a strong service-level agreement
- When possible, create a new marketing “dish” from scratch – use a recipe that is already proven and amend as needed
Blog
Sales Is NOT Your Customer
- Marketing and sales are partners – one function does not work for the other
- Your customer should be your focus, not an internal team
- Conducting an audience framework exercise aligns all teams’ focus on customer needs
Blog
To Gate or Not to Gate – Is That Really the Question?
- Too often, gating content is the fallback of an emerging company’s marketing team under pressure to deliver leads
- Instead, the goal must be to focus on creating a compelling buyer’s journey
- Organizations need to know the difference between a contact and a lead – and educate your executives and sales team accordingly
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Build Instead of Buy: Investing in Training Helps Teams at Emerging Companies to Grow
- At emerging growth companies, expanding your team’s skill set is often more advantageous than hiring new talent
- According to the SiriusDecisions 2018 Global CMO Study, investing in training substantially increases the growth potential of an emerging company
- A culture of learning and growth will drive efficiencies to help emerging companies scale for hyper-growth