You Can't Teach Smart

Are your smartest people working on your hardest problem?

The best marketer I ever hired had zero marketing experience.

He studied physics at Cambridge and cracked a $100M churn problem that had stumped us for 17 years.

We kept trying the usual stuff – retention campaigns, win-back offers, incentives – all to no avail.

Instead of reaching for another tactic, he reached for a pen and paper and studied the problem.

Who exactly was churning? When? Why?

He excluded tiny merchants, seasonality, and fraud until he narrowed down tens of thousands of accounts to 100 cases that accounted for most of the lost revenue.

Then he wrote a query to flag more at-risk merchants, and sent the list to customer service, who called them at the first sign of trouble. Tens of millions saved.

No fancy tech. No playbooks. Just first-principles thinking.

I can teach marketing, but I can’t teach smart.

Most companies spend 40% of their revenue on marketing. Yet CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. We keep hiring confidence and experience. But sometimes experience blinds us to novel solutions.

Do marketers need to be smart?

It depends. Marketing is either your easiest or hardest challenge.

If you have product/market fit and brand loyalty, you're running proven playbooks. Hire someone who's run them before.

If you don't, marketing is the hardest puzzle in your business – and the most important.

Don’t give it to people who think they already know the answer. If it were easy, you would’ve done it.

Every company eventually has a product, money, and employees. Very few unlock serious growth.

Which raises an important question: Are your smartest people working on your hardest problem?

Literally – if you lined up your whole team from smartest to least, Math Olympian at one end, office pet schnauzer at the other – who's working on what?

What is your hardest problem right now? Are your best people solving it, or are they doing work that's being replaced by Claude Code?

You can teach marketing. You can't teach smart.