37. How to compete against Amazon by playing a different game with CMO Steffen Daleng from Booktopia

CMO Leadership | How top Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) build high-performing marketing teams with Ty Hayes

Steffen Daleng, CMO of Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookstore joins us on this episode to talk about the changing role of marketing. Steffen was also named the #15 Top People in Ecommerce in 2021 by Inside Retail.

Steffen has had a fascinating career starting out in the army, working his way through starting, acquiring and selling several companies in different countries whereby he honed his Ecommerce and digital marketing skills, all the way until his current role as CMO of Booktopia where he’s helped their IPO, and helped them grow at quite a rapid rate.

In this episode we discover:

• The changing role of marketing as it pertains to data, contextualisation and personalisation; the rise of influencer marketing and why trust is so important;
• How Booktopia competes against Amazon by playing a different game;
• How Steffen has restructured and scaled his team based on an ambitious vision of becoming a 500 million in revenue company, and the importance of CEO buy-in and support; and
• Some of Steffen’s leadership lessons he learned from his early career in the army, as well as some of his biggest leadership regrets, and his biggest investments in his career.

As always, we have detailed notes available for this episode. To access these, head to our website, look out for this episode and download the PDF summary notes of our conversation with Steffen, with all the tips and strategies laid out in an easy-to-read format.

Enjoy the show!

References

• Josh Kaufman - The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business.
• Seth Godin - Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.
• Simon Sinek - Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't.

Contact Steffen Daleng

• Find Steffen on LinkedIn and mention you heard him on the podcast. Find out more about Booktopia.

Contact Growth Generators

• Find out how Ty and Growth Generators can help you design and build a modern marketing team that drives growth using our 3-stage framework for marketing transformation. Follow or connect with Ty on LinkedIn.

If you enjoy this episode please remember to subscribe so you get each new episode as it drops each week to get more tips and insights to build a high-performance marketing team, tell someone about the podcast who you think may benefit, or leave us a rating or review.

This episode was produced by Dylan Todd and edited by Lewis Hallam.