Business Empathy: The Skill Every New Marketer Needs

Author: Caroline Petersen and David LaCombe | Editors: Steve Korver & Rebecca Churchill | Imagery: Anastasiia Hriaznova

Reading time: 6 min

Caroline Petersen founded Gallery Design Studio in 2015 and has since had a front-row seat to many companies’ creative operations. David LaCombe is a fractional CMO, and a GDS client, who interviewed more than 130 business leaders for his new book, Marketing2aT: Become the Marketer Every Team Wants.

On Episode 13 of Growth by Creativity, Caroline Petersen asks David LaCombe what two years and more than 130 interviews with the people who hire marketers reveal.

David opens every interview the same way, “Tell me about a time a marketer failed your expectations or delighted you.” The first was an entrepreneur with a PhD in the health sciences who “just went into the stream of obscenities about how upset and pissed he was at marketing.”

The entrepreneur's underlying complaint became a recurring theme in subsequent interviews with leaders hiring marketing pros, “You’re burning through my cash with this confidence that you’re right.”

Instead of fast action, those leaders wanted “people who diagnose before they prescribe.” Long before David became a marketer, he was a paramedic, so he could relate. “I wouldn’t administer medications to people before assessing them.”

If you’re starting out in marketing, you will be judged on your ability to understand the full context of the business and its goals. Ironically, job postings ask for tools and years instead. What young marketing professionals need is critical thinking as well as deliverables and comms.

Key takeaways

• The people who hire aren’t asking for more creativity. They’re asking for someone who diagnoses before they prescribe.
• Business empathy means understanding your customer and what other teams are judged on. Start with the CFO, who decides whether your work gets funded at all.
• You’re not short on skill. You’re short on experience asking someone for marketing dollars and then having to prove your campaign before you execute.
• Junior marketers tend to stop asking questions the moment a client pushes back. The people guarding the budget respect questions most.
• Publish what you think about real problems. It’s the only proof of judgment an employer can check before hiring you. A credential isn’t, because everyone has one.

What raised the marketing bar: AI, COVID, and the cost of borrowing

That entrepreneur’s complaint, burning someone’s cash while certain you’re right, didn’t become common by accident.

“This isn’t only an AI issue,” David said. “It’s not only a COVID issue, and it’s not only a finance issue. It’s the combination.” Borrowing got more expensive, tolerance for being wrong went with it, and employers started hiring for proof rather than potential.

At a dinner with about 50 agency and design-company owners, he asked who was hiring new grads. “To a T, all of them said no.” Not because new grads can’t do the work. Because they don’t have time to train them, and everyone is wondering how much work an AI tool could absorb instead.

The payroll data agrees. In the August 2026 revision of Canaries in the Coal Mine?, Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations sits 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers. Experienced workers show no such gap. However, it should be noted that the authors call these descriptive indicators, not causal estimates.

“These aren’t total walls,” David said. “But you’re going to have to go into it thinking differently.”

Business empathy starts with the CFO

Developing business empathy and perspective is a good place to start. It may sound like customer empathy, but that’s only half of it. The other half, David said, is “understanding what other functions are thinking and responsible and being measured for” – starting with the person holding the money.

Before a company commits to a go-to-market investment, the CFO has one question. “Do you understand how you’re going to take this capital that I’m going to lend to you and translate it into something of business value? And if you can’t prove it to me, I’m not going to give up the money.”

Almost nobody breaking into marketing has been on the receiving end of that question. David thinks that’s the real barrier to entry.

“Because they (new marketers) haven’t experienced that, they don’t know what it’s like to earn the trust of somebody who’s holding the cash. They want to see that you really do have a plan that’s going to work, as opposed to, ‘Hey, we’ve got a campaign, and we like this because this other company that’s just like us did it and they won.’ That’s never going to get funded.”

So the gap isn’t craft. It’s translation. David’s phrase for the trap is “focusing too much on their technical superpower” – design, social media, data analytics, whatever got you the interview – when “the expectation is that we’re able to translate what we know across the organization towards a business outcome.”

David describes the value of the T-shaped marketer throughout his book. The vertical stroke is the craft you’re deeply immersed in. The horizontal line is knowing enough about a few other crafts, as well as sales, finance, and the customer, to connect your work to what they’re judged on.

Caroline’s rule for meeting the client where they live is about order. Macro, then micro: the roadmap and what’s in it for the person across the table first, detail when they ask. Being right in the wrong order reads as being wrong. Or, in the words of her previous boss, “Don’t tell me the sausage making. Just tell me what is it that I’m getting.”

Ask more than you tell

All of that is prescription. The diagnosis happens earlier, in what you ask before you present anything.

“We’re too busy telling, because we want to be seen as having the facts,” David said. “We should be seen as professionals who are really curious.”

The questions he puts to a client before any work starts:

“Why is this goal important? What will this enable for your company? What will this enable for your customers? What have you tried before? Where are you stuck? What needs to be true for this to work?”

Clients don’t always welcome them. “They might say things like, ‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m paying you.’ And this is where a lot of junior professionals will back down and go, ‘I can’t speak to authority.’”

David has a stock answer for such clients. “I get that, and we’re absolutely going to deliver on your expectations, but we want to understand your thinking so that we can match you where you are.”

The people most likely to reward the question are the ones watching the money. “Teams that are really very cautious about how they invest capital will respect the heck out of that.”

Employers are guessing. Give them something to go on

That all assumes you’re already in the room. Getting in is a different problem, and David is willing to shout the answer from a rooftop.

Think out loud. You’re reviewing case studies all the time. Dive into it. Go farther than your professor ever takes you. Develop an opinion,” David said.

The reason sits on the other side of the desk. “Employers get to see how you think. That’s really the big mystery and the risk that keeps them from wanting to hire juniors. Because it’s just a black box.

Economists have a name for that black box. In “Job Market Signaling”, his 1973 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Michael Spence observed that an employer cannot see what a candidate will produce. “To hire someone, then, is frequently to purchase a lottery.” A signal only shortens those odds if it’s cheaper to acquire people genuinely better at the job. A credential anyone can buy fails that test. A real opinion about a real problem passes. A tool will hand them the polish for free. The judgment underneath is the part that has to be yours.

Just do it

As a paramedic, David assessed before he treated because guessing was dangerous. You can assess before anyone hires you because nobody can stop you.

Pick something you have real context for. Diagnose a company you’ve only read about, and you’re the marketer that entrepreneur was swearing about – certain you’re right, with nothing underneath it.
Listen to the full episode of Growth by Creativity. David’s Marketing2aT: Become the Marketer Every Team Wants, built on two years of interviews with more than 130 business leaders, is out now.

If you’re the one doing the hiring, we also wrote the version from your side of the desk. We'll be sharing that in a future edition.

Gallery Design Studio is also hiring, sometimes.