Any Marketer, Any Industry

We often think that the best talent comes with experience in our industry. I disagree. The best Marketing leaders build strong skill sets, but then are able to apply those strategies to new industries. The channels, the tactics, the strategies, those travel role-to-role, but what doesn't travel automatically is the industry knowledge: who actually buys, what they care about, how prices get set, and what rules govern the whole game.

I've made that jump three times: I started in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), then moved into Power & Energy, and then into Medtech. Each time, the learning curve looked different on the surface, but the underlying discipline was the same. Here's what I've learned about how the best marketers do it.

It's a Marketer's Job to Learn Their Industry

The biggest thing I look for, in myself and in people I hire, is whether a marketer treats industry knowledge as a priority. It shows up as the difference between a marketer who leans entirely on messaging frameworks and campaign templates without ever asking why the customer buys, and one who digs in and does the work. Deferring every technical or market question to sales and product because "that's not my lane" is a warning sign, not a division of labor.

Marketers who understand the industry can do more than produce content, they can produce judgment. They can tell you which claims will land and which will get laughed out of the room. They can push back on a bad campaign brief because they know enough to know it's bad.

In each of my three industry transitions, AEC, Power & Energy, and Medtech, I treated deep learning as priority number one, before any campaign work. If I couldn't explain how a utility recovers costs through rate cases, or how a hospital's value analysis committee evaluates a new product, I wasn't ready to market anything in that space yet.

How Marketers Can Learn Their Industry

Once you've committed to learning the industry, the next question is: learn what, exactly? Industries are enormous, and you can't absorb all of it. Over three transitions, I've narrowed it down to five things that matter most:

1. Who buys. Every industry has its own cast of characters: the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the end user, the channel partner who sits in between. Knowing who's in the room, and who actually signs, changes everything about how you position. Go listen to your customers, either in the field or in channels that they meet.

2. What value looks like through the customer's eyes. Not your eyes, theirs. Depending on whether you're selling to a consumer or a channel partner, the answer will differ, but it almost always comes down to some combination of saving money, saving time, or avoiding pain, often fear of a bad outcome. Your job is to figure out which of those is the real driver for this buyer, in this moment.

3. How prices get determined. Every industry has its own pricing logic: regulated rate structures, value-based pricing, cost-plus, reimbursement schedules, competitive bid dynamics. Until you understand how price actually gets set, you can't credibly talk about value.

4. How buying decisions get made. Is it a single decision-maker or a committee? Is there a formal RFP process, a value analysis review, a long relationship-driven sales cycle? The buying process shapes everything from your content strategy to your sales enablement.

5. What regulations shape the market. Almost every industry I've worked in, power and energy, medtech, and to a real extent AEC, operates inside a regulatory framework that constrains what you can claim, how you can sell, or how the product itself has to be designed. Ignore this and you'll build a beautiful campaign that legal kills in week one.

Put those five together and you understand the bridge you're building: the connection between what your company makes and what the market actually needs from it.

Where to Start When You Start in a New Industry

You don't learn this from a single onboarding deck. In my experience, it takes a mix of internal and external sources:

• Start internal. Sales engineers, product managers, technical experts, and long-tenured colleagues are usually sitting on more industry knowledge than any external resource. Ask them to walk you through a deal, a spec sheet, or a customer objection.

• Then go external. Industry webinars, trade organizations and associations, voice-of-customer interviews, third-party market research, and, where relevant, sitting in on regulatory meetings or public comment periods. Regulatory bodies in particular will tell you, in plain language, what the market is worried about right now.

The combination matters. Internal experts give you the "how it works here" view; external sources give you the broader market context that keeps you from mistaking your own company's quirks for industry norms.

The Test: Can You Explain It Simply?

Here's the standard I hold myself to, and it's the same one I ask of any marketer I'm coaching: if you can't explain those five things, customer, value, price, buying process, regulation, simply, you don't understand the industry well enough yet.

One good test: try explaining all five to someone completely outside the industry, a 12-year-old, someone off the street, an in-law at a holiday dinner. If you can make them understand who buys, why they buy, and what constraints shape the whole market, you understand it well enough. If you can't, you've still got work to do.

This isn't about dumbing things down. It's the opposite. Simple, clear explanations are what real understanding looks like on the outside. If your explanation of how your industry's customers buy still needs ten qualifiers and a glossary, you haven't finished the work. Keep digging until you can say it in two sentences a smart outsider would understand. It's the same bar I held myself to in every one of my industry transitions: could I teach it back, clearly, to someone who'd never heard of it before?

If you want a model for what that looks like taken to the extreme, pick up Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer, which describes complex machines and systems using only the thousand most common English words. It was gifted to me by a colleague, is a fun read, and a genuinely useful exercise. If you can explain your industry's pricing model or buying process using only simple, everyday words, you know the core of what actually matters.

That's the whole discipline, really: invest the energy to actually learn the industry, learn the right five things, and don't stop until you can explain it simply. Do that, and you can walk into AEC, power and energy, medtech, or just about any industry after that, and be genuinely useful on day one.