University programs are fantastic way to get ahead, but they aren’t the only option. Dan Moyle, a HubSpot Advisor for Impulse Creative, joins Seth Resler on the Bad Marketing Advice podcast to talk about why aspiring marketers shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that an BMA degree is the only way to launch a marketing career.
In fact, an MBA is just one option. You may have the skills you need already and not even realize it. The reality is that it’s possible to succeed in marketing with hard work and dedication, no matter what your educational background may be.
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Seth Resler: Hello, and welcome to the Bad Marketing Advice Podcast. This is the show where we invite marketing professionals on and ask them to tell us about the worst piece of marketing advice that they have ever received. I’m your host. My name is Seth Resler. I am the founder of community marketing revolution.
We produce branded podcasts and virtual events for companies and organizations. So if your companies listening to this podcast never said to itself, you know, we should really think about doing a podcast and you’ve probably even been telling yourself that for about two years now, it’s time to pull the trigger.
Give me a call, go to communitymarketingrevolution.com. We would love to connect with you and help you get that up and off the ground. Our guest today is a HubSpot advisor for Impulse Creative. Impulse Creative helps companies dedicated to growth, achieve their goals, do this with scalability and velocity through marketing sales, branding, rev, op, and development. Wanna welcome Dan Moyle. Hi Dan!
[00:01:02] Dan Moyle: Seth. Good to be here are people still asking that? Should I start a podcast or are they finally going? I need to cuz man, this is like, I love podcasting. I love that. I’m so lucky.
[00:01:10] Seth Resler: Yeah. You’re a podcaster yourself, right? I see you’ve got all the equipment there.
[00:01:14] Dan Moyle: Yeah and it’s not fancy equipment necessarily. This is not, doesn’t have to be expensive. Right. But yeah, I’ve been podcasting for a while now, love this medium as a way to connect with folks and just, you know, tell our stories.
[00:01:24] Seth Resler: Yeah. I think it’s a great medium. I mean, I come out of radio and so I’ve always loved audio content and now I’m doing podcast and you can just do so many interesting things and I think it’s such a great channel for companies.
[00:01:35] Dan Moyle: Yeah, for sure.
[00:01:36] Seth Resler: It’s great to have a fan of podcasts here. Tell me what Impulse Creative does?
[00:01:42] Dan Moyle: Yeah. We help companies grow smart. It’s so funny, cuz like you try to put yourself in this category that is easy for people to understand and the category is marketing agency, but that comes with some baggage that comes with some questions and so at the end of the day, what we do is we help companies grow smarter and we are a [00:02:00] HubSpot partner. So we use that as our main focus for the software that helps people grow. So CRM managements, content marketing, branding, all that kind of stuff plus we have developers in house to help people build really cool stuff and HubSpot.
So a lot of the HubSpot ecosystem, but at the end of the day, we’re helping companies grow.
[00:02:18] Seth Resler: Got it. So when people hire your company, because I know that this happens a lot with HubSpot, I’ve seen this happen where people get the software, they think that the software’s gonna do everything it needs to do just kind of by itself and it really doesn’t work like that. It’s really complicated. You have to have somebody, you know, like any big enterprise software is like salesforce and everything. You need to have people who know what they’re doing. You usually brought into the process when somebody’s already got HubSpot and is struggling with it, or are you usually brought into the process before and you say to them, Hey, you should consider HubSpot.
[00:02:51] Dan Moyle: Yes. it really kind of depends. It’s funny too, because I don’t wanna make a defend HubSpot podcast. I will say this. What you said about it being complex. It [00:03:00] is, it can be complex. It is powerful. But when I found the difference between like a sales force and a HubSpot is that Salesforce is amazing and it was built by really, really smart PhD level engineers for other PhD level engineers to use.
It’s very complicated and complex to me, HubSpot was built by those same kinds of people for everyday people like me, right? I’m not a developer, I’m not a coder, I’m not an architect of any kind, but I can use it very easily and I have been for the last 12 years to just build. Really cool stuff, right.
Drag and drop super easy stuff. It just kind of works. So the UX to me is very friendly while still being very powerful. So we are brought in depending on their journey. Sometimes companies come to us and say, Hey I need a website. What do I do? We go, oh yeah, cool and we talk to them about things like content management systems helps about being one of them.
We’ve worked with WordPress and other systems as well. Got some really cool people in our team. Almost 40 people now but anyway, so we’re brought in then sometimes, or other times, HubSpot might come to us and say, Hey, we got this new client and they need some extra help because [00:04:00] while they have an internal person, they need a whole team and they can’t hire five people to run their marketing and sales.
Can you help them set all this up? Because yeah. Sometimes people will buy this software and say, where’s the easy button that makes it just all work and I don’t have to ever touch it. Like, no, there’s some actual work, you know, I used to be that single marketer at a company that had to use HubSpot and build the blog, write the content, create the offers, like there’s work that has to happen.
So we’re often brought in as that partner to the client that says we’re almost like their marketing department, so.
[00:04:28] Seth Resler: Right, right, right. So, you know, I’m sure a lot of marketers are familiar with HubSpot. I’m sure there may be a lot of marketers out there that have always heard of HubSpot and are not entirely sure what it does.
Explain what problem HubSpot solves and I’m gonna ask you this a little bit differently, who shouldn’t be using HubSpot, who is HubSpot? Not right for and who is it right for?
[00:04:49] Dan Moyle: Yeah. Great question. So I think a couple of who it’s not right for scenarios might be a very, very small company with no budget or very little budget that is able to [00:05:00] be scrappy and build stuff in multiple systems like, oh, we can use MailChimp and we can put our website on Squarespace and we can use a spreadsheet.
Cause we only have one salesperson who only does all their stuff and it’s just all disconnected. If you’re happy with that. Fine. No problem and you have zero budget. That’s all like mostly free stuff you can do, right? Or very, very cheap. That’s fine. Also, I think what, who is not good for is the super enterprise complex companies where HubSpot maybe had some limitations.
It is not as robust and super and I look I’m a huge HubSpot fan by the way. It had been for a long time, since 2010, but they are not. As complex and complicated as Salesforce or other systems quite that big. So there are some limitations like parent child companies now that works together and other like nerdy stuff but I think the sweet spot is those companies in between, right? Any business that wants to grow that wants to have a dedicated customer or contact relationship management system CRM.
That is connected to their content that is connected to their offers and landing pages, their [00:06:00] social media, when everything you wanna work together, or if you want everything on one system, HubSpot’s really good at integrations and so it’s not difficult to grab an integration out of the HubSpot app marketplace or to build one with a, an agency partner like impulse, whatever. So it’s really good for those companies who want to, as HubSpot as grow smarter and they’re willing to invest and then there’s all different levels of like, Starter pro enterprise, you know, I’m not here to sales pitch for HubSpot.
They don’t pay me for that but yeah, I mean, there’s all different levels depending on what your company looks like, but I think that’s who it’s for.
[00:06:30] Seth Resler: Got it. So when you’ve sort of reached a certain level of growth and now you’re taking it to the next level, you’re kind of at that level of company where like, you know, you’ve been able to muddle through with Google docs and whatever, but now it’s all right.
We gotta, we gotta get the big boy software is.
[00:06:45] Dan Moyle: Yep. We gotta, we gotta grow up a little bit. Yep.
[00:06:47] Seth Resler: I understand. All right, Dan, let’s get into your. Worst marketing advice and I like this because it’s about marketing careers. Tell me what the worst piece of marketing advice you’ve ever received is.
[00:06:59] Dan Moyle: First of all, Seth, [00:07:00] I love the idea of the worst marketing advice and offer that to people that go first of all, laugh and go.
Yeah, that was silly, but also learn from it. Right, man. What allowed incredibly busy space. It is in the marketing world where everybody has advice and while it might seem good at first, it might not be for you, whatever. So I love this idea now, the worst marketing advice, I don’t know that I necessarily received this, but I hear it a lot and I see it in practice a lot and to me, the worst piece of a marketing advice is that there’s one route to get there and that route is always college and university and degrees. Nothing against university, nothing against higher education. It’s a great place to grow, to expand your network, to learn stuff all that is true.
It’s just not the only way. Right and I find myself battling this almost like a tyranny of, or it’s this, or it’s that you either go to university in college or you muddle through life and you’re not worth our time kind of a thing. Right and when I first saw this [00:08:00] was back several years ago, I was working in TV news.
I was a producer of a morning show in a top 40 market. So a decent size market and by the way, top 40 out of like 250, so a pretty good size market and I wanted out, I wanted to do something different and I discovered how powerful back in 2008, Twitter could be. So I knew social media was this thing that was growing this web 2.0 content telling stories.
I saw enough bad news releases and press releases. I was like, I can do better than that. Right. So I thought, Hey, with my experience of almost 10 years, I had 9 years in news at that point, plus being a writer, I think a relatively decent writer being able to distill complex things into simple ideas. I knew that I had value.
The problem was I had barely an associate’s degree and had this non-traditional path, this non-linear path to where I was. So I began to reach out and I’m in Southwest Michigan. So I’ve got companies around me like Kellogg, I’ve got companies like [00:09:00] striker, medical, and instruments and some other relatively, you know, decent sized companies, Pfizer at the time it was, I think pharmacy Orgen or whatever, but some big companies, and I thought I’m gonna reach out to them cuz they’ve got budget for marketers or PR type people and the more I looked, the more, they all required at minimum a bachelor’s degree, sometimes master’s 10 years experience, et cetera, cetera and I was like, man, come on, there’s gotta be a better way and so there was this tyranny of, or you either are exactly all these things you went to university or we don’t want.
Fortunately for me, I had this new world was beginning and it goes back to HubSpot. This is why I’m such a huge fan. The co-founders of HubSpot had written a book called inbound marketing and Brian, and Amesh talked about this world of content and inbound and all this great future and said, if you want this, you wanna create content online and bring in leads and educate them and convert them and do all this really cool stuff.
Then what you need is not a traditional marketer, but you need somebody like a [00:10:00] TV news. Who can create this content? like, that’s what I was doing. Literally what I was doing this mortgage company had the co-founder of that company had read that book, went to his leadership team and one of them knew me and knew what I did and knew that I was interested in doing something different and so it just, it worked out really well. So this non-traditional path worked out for me and the fact that the leaders of that company recognized. That you don’t have to have this specific path. Right? That’s the advice. Now I’m gonna take a breath here cause this has been my Ted talk. My monologue I’ve got an idea to share about the difference between the two of ’em. But that’s my advice though.
I will say though, having come from radio, which is. You know, similar background to yours, I come out of radio broadcasting, and when people would ask me, I would actually tell them exactly what you’re saying, which is I would tell them, don’t go to broadcasting school. I don’t know anybody in the business who came through broadcasting school.
I would tell, ’em just show up at a company, you know, a radio station, knock on the door, work in the street team, do whatever and wait for somebody to get [00:11:00] sick or get fired, you know, and if you’ve learned everybody’s job, you can step right in having said that I then moved to Michigan and here in Michigan, we had a fantastic broadcasting school called specs Howard here and this is the first time I’ve ever lived in a place where everybody in broadcasting came from a broadcasting school because there was such a great, so I think you’re right. It could work either way.
You could go the school route, but you don’t have to, you can just kind of get in there and start doing and learn the skills and eventually somebody will recognize and a school like specs Howard is not a college or university. Right. So it’s funny that you mention them cuz that’s where I went. I went to specs, Howard got into radio and TV. Part-time ended up in TV. Full-time like, that’s the Genesis of where I am today at the time it was a one year certificate program.
Not that expensive and it was very hands on like the first day of a class, we were touching equipment and talking about what to do, and then they helped us get internships. I had an internship in Detroit radio. I got to work alongside some radio greats [00:12:00] just to learn the business.
[00:12:01] Seth Resler: Where where’d you work? Who were you working with?
[00:12:03] Dan Moyle: I was working with greater Detroit radio. So the wrif W R I F yep. So big daddy, Arthur Pennhollow. In fact, I’ve got a bobble head right over here next to me, that Arthur signed for me. So spec was great and it, again, it was non-linear right. That certificate plus my eventual, I was on the 12 year, two year program for an associate’s degree.
[00:12:23] Seth Resler: Okay.
[00:12:23] Dan Moyle: Like, I didn’t have one for the longest time. Right and finally, I got my credit and just got it and was like, all right, I have a college degree, I guess now but yeah, those nonlinear paths were, are great for so many reasons.
[00:12:33] Seth Resler: Yeah. So, no, I think that’s great advice. The one thing though, is that these days in order to get past the screeners, you know, the software that HR uses to screen things because often they are looking for certain qualifications.
You have to understand how that works and you have to kind of learn how the screen works or else you’ve gotta get. A job through a relationship the way you did somebody who goes, oh, okay. I know that his resume, doesn’t say this, [00:13:00] but I know that he knows how to do this because of what he’s done.
So, yeah, absolutely and that’s my problem with everything right now is that there’s these screeners that while they can help us with efficiency, they miss so much, right. Like there’s this nonlinear path. So, so yeah, relationships networking and that’s what I learned from my path was that the more I helped others. The bigger my network became.
[00:13:22] Dan Moyle: Which became beneficial to me, but also it’s just good to help people. Right. Just good karma, man. Right.
[00:13:27] Seth Resler: So can we approach this from the other end? Can we, you have advice for people who are looking to hire marketers?
[00:13:32] Dan Moyle: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest piece of advice is to look at the, not so traditional aspects, right?
Like I’m not an HR person, I’ve done some hiring and so I like, and again, I did it all through relationships, which by the way, I just wanna recognize, can also be dangerous. My network probably looks and sounds like me. I am a cisgender male, straight white guy, middle aged. I probably don’t have a lot of network that isn’t that.
So I have to be very purposeful [00:14:00] about serving other communities so that I can be there with them. Right. So relationships can be great, but also can be very limiting. So just a word of caution there, I think anyway. So I think that, you know, if you’re trying to create content is an MBA. The only way to go.
No, it’s not a bad way, but it’s not the only way. Look at people like journalists, look at people like photographers, artists, graphic designers don’t have to come from a graphic design school. They could come from people who do art or who create their own websites. I had a friend who wanted to get into HubSpot and this was way back in the early days of HubSpot and it was harder to get a job at HubSpot than I was to get into Harvard. Is what the myth was and I’m sure it’s true. Like, I’m not saying it’s a myth like it’s fake, but that was the folklore on HubSpot. It was harder to get in there than Harvard and so what he did is he created a website, hire me hubspot.com.
He did a targeted ad campaign on Facebook to reach people with HubSpot emails. He created an [00:15:00] offer. They could download and within, I think it was like within four hours, he had an interview. Wow. So for those people hiring, isn’t that amazing? So for those people hiring, look at those weird ways.
[00:15:10] Seth Resler: That’s inbound hiring is what that is
[00:15:11] Dan Moyle: Yeah.
Right, right. So yeah, I mean, I think just looking at those not so traditional paths is really important. Last thing I’ll say about this. A piece of advice I got from somebody who owned an agency that I used to volunteer with and Blaine would say, if two people are in the running for the job and they’re both qualified, they both look great.
I go back in their history and see who was a server or a cook who worked in restaurants because that food service teaches you so much about tenacity. Service thinking on your feet being creative, being innovative. Right? So again, hirers hiring managers think about that kind of thing. Right? Right. What kinds of jobs can look back in their history and say, oh, they came out of food service or retail or manual labor or whatever it is that speaks to you and what you’re looking for.
Look at those nontraditional routes, not just the screeners of bachelor’s degrees [00:16:00] or whatever so, well .
[00:16:01] Seth Resler: And it’s funny that you say that, cause I feel like those are the jobs that so often that people after they’ve been in the workforce for a while drop off of their resume and yet yeah, yeah, you’re right.
They can offer clues and say you so much. Well, look, this has been great advice and bad advice, but great advice. Dan Moyle, HubSpot advisor at Impulse Creative. Thank you so much for joining.
[00:16:20] Dan Moyle: You bet, Seth, thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it. Y’all take care.
[00:16:24] Seth Resler: All right. I am Seth Resler of community marketing revolution. Again, we produce branded podcasts and virtual events for companies and organizations. So if you’ve been thinking about launching a podcast, please go to communitymarketingrevolution.com. We’d love to help you out until next time. Thanks for listening.
Seth has produced and hosted eight of his own podcast series, including CES for Radio, The Worldwide Radio Summit podcast, and Bad Marketing Advice. Seth is the Vice Chair of the Michigan Association of Broadcasters Foundation.
Seth regularly speaks about podcasting and industry conferences around the country. He has spoken at The NAB Show, Podcast Movement, Podfest, The Radio Show, The Worldwide Radio Summit, The Nielsen Audio Client Conference, Morning Show Boot Camp, Talk Show Boot Camp, and numerous state broadcaster association conferences.
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