Savviness: The Underrated Skill That Builds Better Marketers

There are many skills people expect to see in a marketer: creativity, communication, strategy, project management, writing, data analysis, campaign execution, and brand awareness.

There’s one skill I believe deserves more attention: Savviness.

Savviness isn’t the same as knowing everything. It often shows up in the moments when you don’t know everything… yet.

The ability to step into an unfamiliar industry, product category, audience, or business challenge and quickly figure out what matters. It’s knowing how to listen, who to learn from, what questions to ask, how to identify patterns, and how to turn complexity into clarity.

For me, savviness has been the through-line of my career.

Straight out of college with a focus in Hospitality/Food & Beverage Management, I started as the GM of a sushi and hibachi restaurant; the owner saw talent and an opportunity to get it at a discount. I had never eaten raw fish in my 21 years of life, nor had I sat at a grill where a chef made a “smoking volcano” out of onions; but there I was managing a Front of House staff of 12 and Back Of House staff of 10 individuals, over half of which didn’t speak English as their first language.
Through networking with my frequent customers, one owned a small marketing agency and saw potential through my customer service interactions. He offered me a role as an Exectuive Assistant; this is where I got bit by the Marketing Bug, hard. I learned the nuances of graphic design form and function, how to do web design and maintenance, sat in on discovery meetings about brand development, all while managing an office and keeping the coffee pot full.
From there, I became a media sales account executive for a newspaper, no less. Did I have a newspaper subscription? No. Did I even belong to the target audience market of a newspaper? Also, no. However, I found success in sales with a foundation of understanding marketing and knowing what questions to ask. I learned I didn’t have to be the target audience to understand how to reach the right people with the right message.
After a couple of years, I stepped back into marketing for the radio broadcast equipment industry. Have you ever met someone who loves event marketing and trade shows? Well, now you have; and PRO TIP, the cushion underneath your booth’s carpet IS 100% worth the expense. The C-level executives affectionately referred to me as the “Chaos Coordinator” while navigating the world of event marketing, technical buyers, and global sales support.
Blessed (again) by my professional network, I received a call about a marketing manager position for a local casino and the gaming industry, an environment shaped by regulation, customer experience, entertainment, operations, finance, and loyalty. Before which, I’d never so much as sat at a slot machine. If you’ve never worked in the gaming industry, it’s a BEAST of a different nature. This industry moves faster than you can imagine, constantly planning quarters ahead, your life will fly by in a blink.
The Universe has a way of leading you to where you belong; at a time when I needed to slow down, I was led to join a major global industrial manufacturer in a demand generation role. There’s a whole world built by air compressors, power displacement blowers, applications with use cases I’d never heard of and the needs of highly technical buyers formerly I didn’t understand. (Me prior to 2019: “An air compressor is the thing I use to inflate my tire, right?”)
Within the same company, I was promoted into customer experience. As Americas Customer Satisfaction Leader, I learned the sensitive and strategic nature of business channel relationships, including partners, resellers, OEMs, service teams, sales teams, and go-to-market stakeholders. I quickly fell in love with CX, hungry for data, developed a passion for the Customer Journey and Voice of Customer projects, and completely obsessed with how we use data to improve operations.
Later, I moved into a senior customer reference role for a SaaS company who’d acquired legacy software, and needed someone to tell the compelling stories of their solutions. Before this, I could only confidently name two software companies: Microsoft and IBM. Once again, I entered a complex environment with technical products, long customer histories, and a need to turn customer outcomes into credible, strategic content.

On paper, those industries may look unrelated.

The skill required to succeed in each one was the same: learn quickly, build trust, understand the customer, respect subject-matter experts, and translate what you learn into marketing to support the business.

That’s savviness, and it’s especially important in marketing leadership.

Marketing leaders are often asked to make sense of complexity. We work across sales, product, customer success, client advocacy, enablement, operations, HR, and executive teams. We’re expected to understand the voice of the customer, the needs of the business, the strengths of the brand, and the realities of the market.

No one walks into every role already knowing all of that, but savvy marketers know how to get there.

It’s knowing how to ask the question behind the question. Sitting with technical experts and pull out the story customers actually care about. Listening to sales teams and identifying what content is missing. Extract customer feedback and find patterns pointing to larger business opportunities. An ability to enter a new space without ego and still bring leadership, structure, curiosity, and momentum.

Savviness is what allows a marketer to become useful before they become fully fluent, turns unfamiliarity into strategy.

It’s what makes someone adaptable without being scattered, curious without being passive, and confident without pretending to know everything.

At Be The Good Marketing, this matters because good marketing isn’t built from assumptions. It’s built from understanding. Understanding takes curiosity, humility, research, collaboration, and the willingness to learn the language of the customer and the business.

So when you’re looking at experience, don’t let change of industry deter you from considering if someone is right for your business.

Because industries change. Tools change. Platforms change. Buyer behaviors change.

But the ability to walk into complexity, learn fast, connect the dots, and create something useful?

That will always matter.