The American Super Bowl is over. World Cup is right around the corner, as is baseball’s spring training. All over the world, sports teams are in pre-season preparation mode, and face a familiar dilemma: do they build their team to fulfill a very specific need, or do they acquire the best talent available and “make it work”?

Marketing executives increasingly face a similar issue, due to the fact that even the simplest products have technology built-in. For example, startup company Sonte just announced it would sell a smart home window that goes from transparent to tinted on command, controlled by a smartphone.

This environment creates a dilemma for execs looking to find brand and product managers who can generate new insights and then create, communicate and capture value in a technological world: do they hire experienced but non-technical marketers (the “specific need” choice) or an individual who has a technical background and might be able to learn marketing (the “best talent available” choice)?

Increasingly, managers are choosing technical people with marketing potential. We call these inexperienced new marketers “Accidental Marketers.”

Hiring Accidental Marketers is a significant trend. An IDC survey of CMO’s projected that 50% of new marketing hires in marketing in 2013 had a technical background. Is this good for business?

We can’t say for sure. In our work, we see lots of brilliant strategists who have been in marketing for their entire careers. However, we can also say that we see an increasing number of Accidental Marketers having a huge impact on their firm’s growth. In this 3 part series, we’ll show you some of the secrets to their success. These tips may be helpful in building your own championship team in the coming year.

Fresh Eyes Often Generate New Insights

Shelley Stanford is a veterinarian by training who has succeeded in prominent marketing roles at the largest animal health company, Zoetis. Far from believing her medical-technical background is an impediment, she has found her natural inquisitiveness to be invaluable in gaining new areas of understanding about Zoetis’ key customers – meat producers and veterinarians.

“I believe the advantage that people with a technical background like myself have in uncovering new customer insights is that most of us have had ‘boots on the ground’ in some capacity. Customer contact is built-in to the job when you are a veterinarian or in sales or support functions. And in industrial type companies like ours, the marketing managers have often been previous customers” she said.

Far too often, marketers succumb to time pressures and spend little to no time with customers.

Unfortunately, time with customers is not built-in to many marketing roles. In many companies, it’s considered unusual if marketers get anytime at all in the field — though the best performers find a way to make this happen. “You get pulled in so many different directions as a marketer, it’s a challenge to carve out time to talk to customers – but you have to do it” Shelley told us.

Far too often, marketers succumb to time pressures and spend little to no time with customers. And if a company has limited budget for research, an experienced marketer may be at a disadvantage to an inexperienced newcomer when it comes to understanding customers.

Even new marketers without previous customer contact experience may have an inherent advantage in generating new insights, due to the discipline that came with their past training. As Shelley says “Technical people with systems-type training naturally think step-by-step, through a customers’ process, which helps them to see key issues or opportunities to help the customer.”

Fresh insights about changing customer needs are the fountain from which great marketing flows. Without them, all competitors in an industry simply try to outshout the others and claim superiority in delivering the same-old benefits. Customers tune out and look for the lowest price or most familiar option.

Insights are so important that we would put our money on the success of an inexperienced marketer with an actionable new customer understanding over an experienced marketer without one. And we often see that these Accidental Marketers, when they do make the time for direct customer contact, ask just the sort of simple questions that career marketers won’t ask. These inquiries often lead to significant new learnings.

But insights don’t turn themselves into a winning marketing plan. Shelley Stanford says new marketers “need to obtain the marketing skills that will help them turn the customer ‘sore points’ they uncover into potential business solutions.” How can a novice marketer be up-skilled fast enough to turn insights into action?

Stay Tuned for Part 2: Is Marketing a Discipline That Can Be Learned? We’ll discuss the biggest secret for accelerating the time it takes for inexperienced marketers to perform like veterans.