A Word From Alumni: Scott Varner

Describe your current work/position:

I currently work as a Senior Consultant at Clozd, where our mission is to help enterprise B2B companies improve win rates, build better products, and strengthen competitive advantage. I work directly with senior leaders at companies like Qualtrics, Vmware, FranklinCovey, and RingCentral to run ongoing win-loss programs that help them understand the key decision drivers from the perspective of buyers.

Clozd offers the exact role and environment I hoped for when I left the Marketing Lab. Our team is building something truly special, and it offers the opportunity to strategize with wickedly intelligent people, both internally and externally, using a combination of technology and an adaptive methodology to get the answers to important questions that expose the strengths and weaknesses of business across a variety of industries.

What is something you love about your job or the company you work for?

I absolutely love that I get to be in an investigative mode all day, every day. The core of my job is conducting interviews with people from all over the world, where I'm essentially trying to solve the mystery of why that person decided to buy or not buy from a company. In a single day, I once spoke to buyers in Ireland, the Netherlands, Bermuda, and New Zealand. Sometimes B2B deals are very straightforward and in others, they become very complicated, but the insights I uncover almost always provide invaluable competitive intelligence that clients consider invaluable to their strategic initiatives.

What is one lesson or skill you learned/developed in the Marketing Lab that has helped you in your first year of work post-graduation?

There are many, but first and foremost was learning to always develop a very clear research objective and align it with your client. A successful Marketing Lab project always started with a deep understanding of the problems and objectives our client is experiencing so that our research and deliverables are on target.

I was also lucky enough to lead a project that involved developing a marketing strategy for an industry I previously knew nothing about, all using deep qualitative interviews, which is now a very core part of my job.

What advice do you have for students heading into their first jobs after graduation?

The only way to be a successful student is to never graduate. The real value of Marketing Lab is taking on the same challenges that you'll face in the "real world" with the mentality of a student: someone who doesn't have all the answers but is scrappy and hungry enough to learn until they figure it out. Don't ever do yourself the disservice of forgetting that you've always faced down challenges.

Do you have a favorite marketing or business book you'd recommend to aspiring marketers?

You can catch not one, but 10 books I think every marketer should read on a pretty aptly title blog post I wrote for the Marketing Lab just before I graduated. But an all-time favorite that I've revisited many times pre, during, and post-grad school is Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way. No single book has probably had a bigger impact on my paradigms, which in turn has made better at a lot more than just marketing.