https://youtu.be/iBIAIO4lUj0
Eric Dickmann is the CEO of the Five Echelon Group, a virtual CMO and strategic marketing advisory service provider for SMBs looking for growth and profitability. We talk about digital transformation, marketing automation, and how to remove friction in the buyer's journey.
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Digitize your Business with Eric Dickmann
Our guest is Eric Dickmann, who is the CEO of the Five Echelon Group. He's a seasoned marketing strategist and fractional CMO. He is an expert in digital transformation and marketing automation. He is the former senior director of marketing with Oracle for 18 years. And he's also the host of the virtual CMO podcast. Welcome to the show, Eric. Steve, thank you for having me on the show.
I'm really excited to be here today. It's great to have you here today.
So, Eric, tell me, I mean, we don't have too many Fortune500 experienced entrepreneurs here on this podcast. So after 18 years at Oracle, why do you decide to become an entrepreneur? Oh, that's a great question.
You know, Oracle was a tremendous experience for me. I actually started out working at this company called Siebel Systems and about seven years into that journey, they were acquired by Oracle. So all told it was about 18 years, but it was a fantastic experience. Got to travel the world, got to do some incredible things with marketing because, you know, they're a big company, big budgets. But I will tell you that one of the challenges working in a large enterprise company, it's a bit like being on a hamster wheel. Everything is very repetitive. It just keeps going around and around. Budget cycles happen. You tend to do similar things every year.
You know, we're going to cut back just a little bit, but do just as much. And, you know, there's the usual cutting of resources and staff. And after a while, I just got to thinking that there's got to be something else. There's got to be some challenges that are more exciting, more fulfilling. And, you know, Steve, I'm a big believer that small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of this economy. They are really what are keeping the lights on for so many people. And those are the businesses that I really wanted to help. And so I thought, what better way to do that than to branch off on my own, take the skills and experience that I had and put that to work helping some of these small and mid-sized businesses.
That's great to hear. You know, I teach a lot about this idea of these management concepts. I talk about several management concepts in my book that they have all been implemented by the MBAs of fortune companies. And it's time for small to medium-sized companies to also implement these things. So what are some of the things that you have seen work for Oracle that could be somehow maybe simplified for small to medium-sized enterprises, and they could also apply those concepts or frameworks?
You know, when you are a big company, a big enterprise company, they have spent so much money over time developing their brand that they become fairly militant about it, about maintaining their brand profile, their brand image. And that's a positive and a negative, but what it has shown me is that there is real value in consistency. Some people may think it's a little bit picky if you specify to every designer that the red that you use in your logo is hex number, you know, F3, whatever it may be. But there is consistency because there are brands that are out there that you can literally look at the font that they use in their advertisement or the color of something and recognize that it's that brand without even seeing their name listed.
And so I think for a lot of small and mid-sized companies, one of the things that they can learn from these larger enterprise competitors is that there is value in being consistent, in putting your message out there in a consistent way so that people begin to recognize you. Look, you have a lot less dollars to spend usually,