How to find a 10x Marketer, Part 1: Introduction

As the Digital Marketing and Data Driven PR environments become more competitive, your goal should be staying one step ahead of your competition. You have all the latest tools, read all the industry publications, and know all the big players. Now you need a team to work harder, better, faster, and stronger. You need a 10x Marketer.

You’ve heard the Silicon coined term “10x Engineer.” A 10x Marketer is similar in nature and equally as rare. Some might argue that such a thing is not possible and thus does not exist. What exactly is a 10x Marketer? According to Moz, “there’s a long-running meme in the tech & startup ecosystems that goes something like this: The top 10% in any given professional field are the only ones good enough to work at a startup. And even among these, the 90th-99th percentile only contribute 1/10th as much as the amazing, top-tier 1%. A great team can only be built by recruiting that 1%, often called the “10X” engineer/marketer/bizdev/designer/etc. You’re not recruiting professionals to work at a company, you’re recruiting superheros to build the next Justice League.”  Easy, right?

In my career, I’ve had the benefit of trying out a little bit of everything. I’ve worked in areas such as public health research, IT, sales, marketing, and software engineering. What this taught me was that I didn’t want to be a specialist, I wanted to be a generalist and be able to talk to all those disciplines. So, I became a “10x” resource.  This meant that I didn’t need to limit what I learned, tools I tried, and teams I collaborated with.

A 10x resource is considered a T-Shaped person. T-Shaped people are also referred to as Versatilists, Generalizing Specialists, Technical Craftspeople, Renaissance Developers, and Master Generalists. Why the T-Shape? According to Rand Fishkin from Moz, The T-Shape is a metaphor. The vertical bar on the “T” represents the depth of knowledge and expertise in a single field, while the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines and apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

In high school I was told by one of my favorite teachers that I was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. It devastated me because at that time I wasn’t able to see what a valuable skill that would turn out to be. Rather than considering a jack-of-all-trades to be a master of none, I can see where I am flexible, adaptable, and continually learning.

Rather than aspiring to find a mythical 10x Marketer, think about the skills that are the most important to you and put your focus there. In this series, you’ll learn about key skills that a 10x Marketer should have, how it is one of the most coveted and transferrable skill sets, and why it is so critical to bring discipline to an emerging field.

Katie Lioy

Account Manager, Marketing Technology

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