029 Kevin Hartman on The Symbiosis Between Professor and Evangelist

Chief Evangelist with Ethan Beute

Today’s guest is Kevin Hartman, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, author of “Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory & Practice,” and former Chief Analytics Evangelist at Google. Kevin joins Ethan Beute to share how to find success while balancing an abundance amount of opportunities and responsibilities.

Among the insights you’ll get from Kevin on how his team collaborated with prominent clients, providing invaluable assistance in overcoming their most formidable obstacles.

Takeaways:

• The most important role of an evangelist is thought leadership – bringing an expert voice, expert opinion, and expert presence to help people make better decisions, make sense of complexity, and use tools more effectively.

• In Kevin’s experience as Chief Analytics Evangelist, the evangelist roles at Google were relevant and successful because they created so much value. As complexity grows in markets, problems, solutions, products, and services, the value of an evangelist increases. They play a unique and complementary role alongside salespeople, account managers, and CSMs.

• Taking on an evangelist role is inherently risky because it’s taking a step away from direct revenue attribution and direct customer relationship. Kevin shares the ways he and his team worked to capture and measure value and impact – and why it turned out not to be enough.

• Leveraging your expertise may include serving as an adjunct professor and textbook author. The relationship between evangelist and professor is symbiotic – the work in each role makes you better in the other. One theme is teaching in a way that’s approachable without being patronizing. Another is an unwavering commitment to stand and deliver.

• The job of an evangelist “is not to be right and to convince you of what’s right. It’s to get you to understand your problem in a different way so you can solve it.”

Quote of the Show:

• “Proving that we were having an impact was the most important and still the most elusive thing we were trying to do.”

Links Related to This Episode:

• Kevin Hartman’s on LinkedIn
• Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business
• Nore Analytics
• Kevin Hartman on Twitter
• Digital Marketing Analytics: In Theory and Practice Book

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