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CMO Confessions Ep. 8, Simple’s Sara Gonzalez

APAC

Hi everyone and welcome to yet another edition of CMO Confessions. Last week I promised you a double-whammy and I’m here to finally deliver. This week, we have someone truly special — Sara Gonzalez, CMO of Simple.

Sara took the time out of her busy schedule to speak to a few key items that I think us marketers here in the Americas need to keep in mind. First, things in the Americas aren’t all that different from things in APAC — and that’s largely due to their scrappy, agile nature to service a truly massive region. Second, that the ideas of B2B and B2C markets are largely a misnomer — people tend to buy things the same way. Finally, and this is something I could not agree with anymore, that marketing needs refocus its energies on strategy — and not to confuse it with tactics.

A few housekeeping items to take care of before we dive into it. First, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean. Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes  and Google Play  stores.

Second, Sara has helped pen an excellent eBook entitled, “10 Things I Hate About Marketing ,” which you can find here . She and her colleague, Rob Brown also hosted a webinar on the subject, which you can listen to here . I highly recommend it.

Third, well, there’s not much for third. It’s time to get into it. Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat.

Transcript

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO confessions a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast where we explore what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland CMO here at ON24 and joining me this week all the way from Sydney is Sara Gonzales CMO of Simple. Sarah, you doing?

Sara Gonzales:

Good morning, how are you?

Joe Hyland:

Good afternoon. All right, so just a little bit about you from my perspective Sarah and feel free to jump in and then we can dive into what we’re going to talk about today.

Sarah, you help marketers removed the complexity and becoming more efficient through the reinvention of marketing resource management software. That rolls right off the tongue. Give us a little more from your take on what that means.

Sara Gonzales:

You did pretty well. So, thank you. Similar to yourself — marketing to marketers — and one of the things that we see here at Simple, and we see it globally as well as its massive issue of complexity when it comes to marketers. So, we’ve got so many channels to market. We’ve got so many, you know, abundance of tools that we need to use as well and, you know, MarTech space is getting bigger and it’s getting more complex.

So, Simple provides software to actually manage all those tools and connect the brand the customer experience. So, think of it as your strategic up-planning tool to manage execution tools below.

Joe Hyland:

That’s fantastic and you’re doing some really cool things — I can’t wait to talk about it. One thing I’ve been asked by my team to point out was below in the description we’ll have a link to your ebook, “10 Things I Hate About Marketing,” where you discuss everyday modern marketing drags and how you combat that, fight against it and bring the joy back to your job.

So, with that do you want to start off? I’m a pretty optimistic person but I’ll start off on a pessimistic topic — let’s start with what you don’t like about marketing. What are some of the drags of marketing?

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, the big pain points I think that grind us every day. I think one thing I don’t like, especially about B2B marketing, is that we call it B2B marketing still. I find, that marketing in general we talk about it being around the customer experience, but we tend to treat customers different; their buying behaviors,  the customer journey — based on whether we’re selling B2B or B2C — and I feel like every single person buys the same way. If you’re the CEO of a company or, Joe, you’re the CMO, you know when you actually go and buy something personally or B2B it’s a very similar journey.

So, I feel like sometimes we get really bogged down in there and I think that’s impacting especially B2B marketing and the way that we go out there and the way that we market. I don’t know what your thoughts on that are, but I just feel like if we want to own the customer experience, maybe we should understand the customer a little bit more.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, these are people, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. Funny story, I won’t name the company but I worked for an electronic payments company — I was in product marketing so I did not own the brand at the time — and we came out with a new corporate template and it was pictures of buildings.

And they said, “Oh, our CEO loves this because we sell the big banks.” And I said, “Yeah, but there’s those are people we sell to, like we don’t sell to  skyscrapers.” Yeah, so this is people that people marketing, right? It’s not business-to-business marketing.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, and I think just on that and I know the customer experience thing is massive and we’ve actually just done some research into our later study. We’ve done some research into the customer experience and how people, as marketers, actually manage or try to manage it. And one of the stats that came out of it is 59 percent of marketers actually said that their CMO or their marketing team was responsible for managing that customer experience and 87 percent said the brand consistency is really important, but it’s you know, very, very rare that they have any control over their messaging or their visual appearance or their personalities.

So, it’s sort of like we own it and we want to but we’re not really doing anything about it. So, I feel like there’s a bit of confusion for marketers which sort of gets my grind a bit. And, you know, the rest of the company has to sort of own that as well.

You need to be able to have control over those points if you want to own the customer experience in a true way. So, I think that’s something um that know I struggle with on a daily basis.

Joe Hyland:

I think that’s a fantastic point. Not that I’ve been doing this forever, but the coming up on a couple decades now — I got my haircut yesterday and there was a shocking amount of white hair on the on the ground— I saw in the last ten years, I’ve seen a real rise in the strategic nature of marketing, which is exciting. I see more and more marketers earning pipeline, which I think is really cool. But I think you were right that the next big movement, in my opinion, among marketers and marketing is going to be owning the customer experience. Because, you and I aren’t just doing our job if we get the message out and we help companies or people come and buy from us, right? Like what’s that experience? Like the entire life cycle? I think we should own that.

Sara Gonzales:

And, you know, at my previous company we had a lot of people come into our office to actually run events and a few other things and one of the things we made sure of is that we also in we also met with the customer support team on a regular basis — the frontline people. So, you could do everything as a marketer and you could create this brand and you create this, you know, there’s personality behind what you’re doing and then someone answers the phone for someone who calls the support line and they really piss someone off — there you go, that’s shut down. But you know, we started to work with our actual physical company, if you like, when people came in and our close ratio, when sales people brought people into the office actually increased because people came in and they felt this, “Oh, actually I get what your culture is like and I get them people and I want to be part of that journey.”

So, I think if you can start to own that or find ways that you can impact that then, you know, it’s a quick win almost and it’s something that’s just going to tie everything together.

Joe Hyland:

That’s a good point. That’s a more manageable way to start owning the experience, right? And then perhaps the real North Star, or utopia, is owning the digital experience. So you’re right that you got to start somewhere, right? So why not have it be the experience of when someone comes into the office?

Sara Gonzales:

Yes, absolutely.

Joe Hyland:

Okay. So, Sarah and I were in Sydney — was that four weeks ago, Sarah? It was about a month ago.

Sara Gonzales:

It’s gone really quick, yeah.

Joe Hyland:

So Sara spoke at our conference, Webinar World Sydney. I had to travel a little further than you did. We talked about some cool things. One of the things we talked about was the perception of marketers in Asia-Pacific.

First I love that, I like that those of us in the U.S. think that Asia-Pacific’s a really small region. It’s kinda big. Like a little big. No, but seriously, what is it about your market — the market, at least your region because your global — but where you live, where marketers tend to discount the sophistication of your marketing. That seems absurd to me.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, I feel like it maybe has stemmed back before my time.

Joe Hyland:

There we go.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, just the fact that Australians especially have been behind, or, you know, everything can come a little bit later than Americans, especially. But I feel like that now, we’re seen as being part of the APAC region now — you even got Japan in there as well. There is so many amazing things happening over here, but I don’t know if it’s the time delay or the accent or the weather.

Joe Hyland:

I think it’s the accent.

Sara Gonzales:

It has to be something…

Joe Hyland:

Here’s what’s absurd about it to me. So, you and I are both fortunate enough to run marketing for pretty cool companies. So, that’s fantastic. But we have the same challenges.

So, I don’t necessarily view that my challenges any different from yours, suddenly. They’re different companies. So, first, the challenges are the same. When I was down there — and I came down twice now in the last year — I saw really sophisticated digital marketing from you and your peers. So, I guess I don’t really see how this is grounded in reality.

Sara Gonzales:

I think, and you know what, I think it is changing now, slowly. And I think one of the reasons why people are actually looking to this region and saying, “You know what, you guys are actually getting shit done and you actually know what you’re doing,” is the fact that we are a lot smaller and we’re actually starting to take advantage of that. Because, now that we are smaller, we’ve taken a step back and said, “You know what, we can be a little bit more agile and we’re more nimble.”

That means we can increase our velocity and we can also get stuff done and we can be sort of trailblazers in certain key areas. And yeah, we don’t have the capacity a lot of companies, especially a lot of startup companies, down here. We’ve sort of you know, we’re the second round of Silicon Valley if you like. And we look to you guys over there and we’re like, “Oh.” You know, and start ups are massive over here. And we’ve got massive hubs that are invested in startups down here as well.

So, I think there’s a lot of learnings that we’ve taken from you guys over there and I brought them down here. But we’ve just sort of adapted them and we made them our own. So I think now, you know, Simple, as well, our company, we’re doing the opposite of most companies where we’re a start-up Down Under and we’re taking that to the U.S.

Obviously, there are some challenges there. But I think a lot of companies over in the U.S, —and you would know this at ON24, Joe, starting up in Australia — there are a few little differences. But, like you said, a lot of it is the same challenges, and it comes down to that fact that we’re all people. And we all you know, wake up. We all go to bed. We all do the same thing. I think the perception has to change — not necessarily around a location or what we’re doing — but the fact that it’s person-to-person marketing if you like.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no. No, that’s right. Every individual at a company has a goal, a challenge, whether it’s personal or professional and great marketing is still mapping how you can solve those challenges, right? So, for me, that’s why it’s just a little silly. I think, joking aside, a lot of it is the time difference. I think that you’re in the middle of some pretty big oceans and it’s very far away from from the U.S.

I even see — I do this as well. I set up a call for us on Friday for the team and our team in Sydney said, “Is it okay if we don’t call in? It’s Saturday at 2:00 in the morning.” I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. So I think it’s just because it’s so far away. Very front of mind — a huge focus. But yeah, you can call in on Saturday at 2 a.m., right? That’s okay.

I have one question that I feel like Australians are quite proud of and they would in no way think that they’re behind America in which is coffee. So, the only complaint we got from our conference was “Conference was great, loved the content, speakers were phenomenal, the venue was first-class — you had absolute shit coffee.” So, talk to me about how Australians view their coffee.

Sara Gonzales:

You know, I did notice that at the conference — and I was looking for proper coffee because you guys have just the copy that you pour. Just like basic coffee…

Joe Hyland:

…You see? Just like classic Americans, right?

Sara Gonzales:

…Kettle coffee, we call it. When I was over there I remember sitting down one morning and I had a bit coffee and they came up — I was in San Jose — and she’s like, “Refill?” And I was like, “No no, no, it’s fine. Keep that away from me.” Yeah, it actually all started in Melbourne.

So, Melbourne is like the hipster place of Sydney, if you like. Marketing genius as well. Like, I couldn’t live in Melbourne because I’m not cool enough to live in Melbourne — that’s just a fact. I’d have to judge myself, what I wear every day,  “Is cool enough? Is this a few weeks ago?” You know, the trend.

Yeah, they’re very trendy and it’s all about the beards — and if your Barista who’s making your coffee doesn’t have a beard or a man bun, I think.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s a non-starter. Yeah, you got to have a man bun.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, exactly. So, let’s come over here and Sydney’s trying to be a bit like that. But, yeah, coffee is massive over here.

Joe Hyland:

Are they are they are they good marketers in Melbourne or is this just more hipster coffee scene?

Sara Gonzales:

I think just Baristas and coffee and, you know, the whole — even the coffee cups that you got us — there’s is outrage over here now because… So, I don’t know if you know this at ON24. So, simple one of our pieces of swag was a keep cup.

Joe Hyland:

I didn’t.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, the cups where you keep and you walk around and you put your coffee in them because the actual coffee cups over here — a lot of marketers actually use them in terms of branding. So, if I was, you know, in selling something that was related to coffee I could go and give the coffee shop cups and say, “Hey can use my cups?” And, you know, people walk around with them. It’s great exposure. However, those cups are not really recyclable. And they don’t actually break down. So, now they’re actually proposing that they — over here on cigarettes, they have those warning labels with disgusting images — and proposing they do that on coffee cups now.

So, the coffee is great, but the amount of controversy that’s coming around coffee right now is whole other level.

Joe Hyland:

That would not fly over here. Do not tell Americans what to do. Do not regulate a thing. Yeah, that wouldn’t. That well, actually, it’s not true — in San Francisco that would be very popular.

Okay, we’ll get back into things. So, one of the things I love most about my job is, like, this. Like, how cool is it that part of my job is having a discussion with a peer? Like having a marketing discussion. Your role is cool and what you guys do at Simple as cool because I think at least, you’re helping marketers with their strategy.

I’ll talk to a lot of marketers and they’ll do one of two things. I’ll say, you know, “What’s your strategy, what are you trying to accomplish?” They’ll either list a whole bunch of tactics — I’m gonna do a white paper, I’m gonna do a webinar, I’m gonna do a blog — It’s like, okay, well, let’s not confuse a tactic with it a strategy. Or, and this is particularly bad here in Silicon Valley, we’ll just list a whole bunch of types of technology. “Oh well, I’m doing ABM, right? I know, I’m redoing my website.” And they list all this tech that they’re using — which is cool, but again, I don’t know if it’s grounded in a foundation of how to solve their business problem. So, you get to help marketers with their strategy, right? Like, I feel like that would be empowering and really cool.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, so, obviously managing, having a place to manage all those channels is important. And, in essence, that’s part of what our software does, but the other part of it is taking a step back.

One of the things we’re looking to do is getting markers to remember why they even fell in love with marketing in the first place. And I think a lot of that is, you know, there’s so much data around now and you know, it started off with creativity. And one of the things people are saying to us, you know, originally why they fell in love and why they still come back to marketing is that perfect blend of art and science together.

So, we’re no longer the crayon department and we’re no longer just about pretty pictures. We’ve got data or we’ve got science and we can actually use that — not to only justify what we’re doing and prove what we’re doing — but we can also start to make that impact. When it comes to revenue, and like you said, on the sales side, managing pipelines, but one of the things that we find is the tool that we don’t have actually piece this all together is — hate to plug ourselves but something like this — so, you know briefing, right? You know, you’ve got to write a brief. You’ve got to get a campaign out and for someone like myself, and even a lot of marketers we speak to, the brief seems to be the other forgotten child almost. Let’s do a brief, a few bullet points let’s put it together. Let’s suddenly run a campaign and then, you know what, suddenly the campaign doesn’t work.

So, you look to the tool that you use, or you look to your budget, or your look to the people who ran it and you look at all these tactics and you don’t actually look back to the brief and actually align that with the goal that you had in the first place. So, we find that’s a massive disconnect over here. So, what we’re trying to do is bring intelligence into this and say, “Okay, how can we use the brief and get marketers a place where they can actually keep going back to the brief and use it as their anchor point, almost. So, then they can actually fully understand how their tools are performing, what’s actually happening, how everything comes together.”

Because otherwise, I feel like we’re just blaming it on, you know, because we’ve got MarTec there and that, so we’re going to blame it on the piece of technology or, you know, we’ve got a sales team. So they’re going to turn around and blame it on that, but we’re not actually looking at the full picture and we’ve got way too much data.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, we have too much data I could talk about all day long. I think the problem is even worse than what you just described. I think so many marketers — and there’s so much — it’s a good problem to have, marketing isn’t just the pretty colors anymore so there’s pressure on marketers to grow and there’s so much pressure that we just want to do more, and more, and more and do it quicker, and quicker, and quicker and it’s like don’t worry about analyzing it — we’ll just figure it out. We don’t have time to analyze.

I think a lot of marketers — when you talked about a poor man’s or a light brief — I question how many marketers are even putting together a brief before a program.

And are they doing a proper post-mortem? I would criticize ourselves.  A couple years ago — so I’ve been running our marketing for three years — a couple years ago we ran a campaign, we had a brief. Like, I think we put a lot of thought into it, ran a campaign; it didn’t work. That’s okay, not everything will work — and there were people on our team that didn’t want to do a post-mortem. It was like, “We don’t have time to analyze why it didn’t work. We need to move on to the next thing.” It’s like well, “Don’t you think we’re at risk of just repeating the same mistakes if we don’t actually go back and analyze it?” So, I think that is more and more common than many people realize.

Sara Gonzales:

 And you know, there’s this some look it up, if you don’t know about it, there’s this famous campaign over here in Australia called, “Dumb ways to Die,” and it’s pretty much it’s hilarious, the creative is amazing and it’s about cartoon characters showing. The whole idea was to — a lot of people actually die on train tracks over here. So, a lot of young kids so cross the train tracks, I’ll get hit by a train or they’ll be graffiti on train tracks. So, it’s actually a really big problem.

But there they actually put a spin on it and it was literally the little cartoon characters with their bodies getting chopped off. And they had this really catchy song and it was great. And the amount of views and the amount of virality it got ‚ it just went everywhere. It was really shareable, social media went off. But actually — everyone spoke about that and they won all these awards — but when they actually go back to it, and this is something they didn’t actually advertise, obviously, more people actually died on trains that year.

So, that’s an example of, you know, you’ve got something out there and we’re like we want to be more than just a creative department and we want to be more than just pretty pictures. But you’re actually measuring your success by something creative if you’re not actually measuring results.

So, to me, that’s like, well, you know we want this but do we really? Is it just easier to sort of just tick something off the box and win an award for it? So I feel like yeah massive disconnect once again.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think that’s a super good point. I agree that great marketing is the mix of Art and Science — it’s what’s fun about marketing for me. I love the intersection of these two things.

I found a couple of things interesting here. One, I think a lot of marketers didn’t go into marketing because they’re data-driven if you will, though I don’t really love that phrase, but so I think sometimes it’s a challenge. I think, you know, it’s not necessarily a first love. And then the second point I would make is —our observation — is that there’s so much data today. Like, I find in — we use Marketo — so, if you open up a lead record in Marketo and you look under the activity history or their interesting moments — there might be hundreds of interesting moments. What am I supposed to do with that?

I find it’s hard to make sense or see trends in these seas of data.

Sara Gonzales:

And it’s funny because I feel since automation has come about — and I’m a massive Marketo fan as well — but automation has come about and we’ve got all these data but I feel like you sort of manually need to go through it. And you need to actually have this Instinct. So, there’s the instinct that comes into marketing because you’ll go through it — and there are certain things that you can’t have a robot pick up, right? — so If you do go through those hundred records, you’re going to need an inside sales person or someone to go, “Oh actually that’s interesting” and in their head tie it back to something.

So yeah, I find it really interesting as well and I think you know — on that point — the whole impact of AI and how it’s going to impact marketing and all the machine learning and everything like that. You’re still going to need people there because you’ve still got — marketers have that instinct about certain things and I think it’s probably maybe 25 percent of what I do. That feeling, it’s like, “Oh I know this is right and I’m looking at data there and I can see the patterns.” So yeah, I think that’s an interesting point.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, and the art doesn’t go away like I don’t I um, I don’t yeah, the Geeks are kind of coming into to marketing. I mean, I think that influx has occurred. But one of my one of my first bosses — I was a year out of college — and I said, “Well actually doesn’t matter what the email copy is and what the subject line is, we’ll test everything, we’ll A/B test it.” And he said, “Well, you know, any idiot or a monkey can just throw a dart board and just keep adjusting but like great marketing is knowing your audience.” And like right like there is some gut feel and there is really knowing your personas inside and out so you don’t have to A/B test everything. So, yeah, people aren’t going anywhere. Marketing departments when they get more money, they’re still hiring people, right? Like, I don’t see everything being outsourced or everything being automated.

Sara Gonzales:

Yea absolutely.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, what are your views on AI in marketing? Are you guys using any? Are you anti-AI? Do you think it’s the wave of the future? What are your thoughts?

Sara Gonzales:

Well, our new platform has been built on Microsoft. So, we’ve got massive potential to bring the intelligence into it. And we will. But I feel like for us it’s so big. And over here there’s so many conferences and every now and then — you have these run of conferences every year, Joe,  and you go to them — and there’s something really shiny people love, you know. Two months ago it was all about blockchain. It’s all about machine learning and it’s all spoken — up here.

So, as a marketer you go there and you get really excited and you go back to your desk and it’s like, “Oh, you know, this is what I learned and it’s like, well, how does it actually apply to me as a matter? How am I going to use that?”

So I think that the potential is massive and I think, like you said, I’m not scared of it — I think if anything it’s going to increase jobs within marketing because you still need that human element. But what I do think is that there’s very few organizations, especially software companies, out there telling us how it’s going to impact what we do every day, how it’s going to help us tie everything back to that customer experience. And you can have great technology, but it’s not going to solve all of our problems. And I think, as marketers, who are selling technology out there, you need to if you could go out and say, “Here’s how this is going to impact what you do every day and here’s how you’re going to be able to tie that back to your goals.” If you do that, you’re going to go into a winner.

So, I think, as a company, that’s our next challenge and how we do that. Because, like I said, we’ve got so much potential with so much technology, but not everyone needs it all.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no, totally. Great marketing is about the “why” not the “what,” right? Like, I think if I could give advice to myself 15 or 20 years ago, it would be always focus on the strategy and the foundation first and don’t rush the tactics. I think we all sprint to the deliverables — they are tactics and they’re critical to executing on the strategy, but it, in fact, starts with the strategy.

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. So, I have a question, which I don’t think you’ll see coming. So, when we were over in Sydney, I was…

Sara Gonzales:

It’s early for that

Joe Hyland:

It is early there, right? Yes, but I won’t stop you. This is actually easy for you. But I don’t think you think I’m gonna ask it. When I was over there, I was incredibly impressed with how sophisticated you are with your digital and webinar marketing — and we’re not going to be able to show that over a podcast, right? But, I think our listeners would benefit from hearing you talk for a minute or two on your views on digital marketing how you’re doing content and webinars,  how you look at your strategy to drive attendance, keep engagement during a live event, actually have an on-demand strategy. Like, you’re doing some really cool things and I was pretty impressed and I think people would love to hear it for 90 or 120 seconds.

Sara Gonzales:

Firstly thank you. It’s nice to hear that.  Secondly, I think and I mentioned this to you while you over here that webinars are pretty dirty over here —and they’ve got a bit of a bad reputation.

I think, for us, webinars are not just something that we have to do as a tactic. So, going back to your point, they’re part of the bigger picture. So our content — we create a lot of content because marketers love content, right? And part of our content strategy you know webinars come into that. So like I said, they’re an extension of the content that we create. So, any given month we have a key theme, and like I said, too, we’ve released its research report and this is probably a good example because I was really impressed with how this worked out two days ago.

We created this research report. We went and interviewed 300 marketers and we came up with these amazing results. So we’ve got the results, we’ve got some nice pretty graphs, but how do we actually disseminate that information actually start a conversation around it?

So ,firstly we partnered with the Australian Marketing Institute over here. As the peak body and to also give them credibility and then we did a co-webcast with them. On the webcast, though, and our webinars — I call it a webcast but this sort of interchangeable, arrive? I don’t want to get caught up in semantics.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, same yes,

Sara Gonzales:

And this is great, having a webcam, but in terms of engaging marketers and I think even, you know, understanding that webinars are an extension of your brand we have panel discussions. So, it’s almost like TV on the internet, if you like.

So, everyone who downloads the report gets invited to a discussion, but the people on this discussion is myself, who’s interviewing one of our key customers in the financial services — and she’s really big on compliance and she’s passionate about probably three key areas that we were speaking about — another one of our prospects and then also our chief product officer.

So we started having this conversation around the results. First of all, within the platform we started, people — before we went into the results, for example — one of the questions might have been what’s your biggest struggle with briefing? We actually use polls to actually ask the audience what their struggles were and then we actually showed them the results so they can actually feel like they’re part of the study.

Joe Hyland:

So you make it interactive, right? Rather than just like a talking PowerPoint for an hour, like you’re literally asking people for their feedback and then the dialogue changes based off what they say.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, and then compare it to the actual study and then have the people talkin about the studies. So it’s much more of a conversation. Utilize the resource folder to actually then upload the report and other pieces of content that we have relating to the report. Because once people are actually on that event the more you can engage and the more sort of content you can give them is obviously going to benefit you and also the data you’re collecting. But now that we’ve got that we’re actually going to break down that panel discussion into — I think we know that down into eight different short videos that we can use and repurpose for marketing content.

So, one of the things that I said to you as well afterwards is not everyone wants to sit down and watch a 45-minute recording. And we only had 40 percent attendance on that event. But those are the 60 percent of people, they can choose to watch the 45 minutes or they can choose to watch maybe a five-minute segment or something they’re interested in. So, it’s really…

Joe Hyland:

I think that’s an important point and I’ll interrupt for one second because… So,you’re right so you got four out of 10 people who registered to show up. It’s easy to focus is easy to just say, “Okay, well, that’s my new audience. That’s all I care about.” You keep them really engaged with these polling strategies right and making it interactive but then afterwards you have a different strategy for the 60 percent.

Sara Gonzales:

Yep. Yeah, right. So I love that. Yeah, and that way we’re engaging people, you know, not just within that one day and you know our investments for that one hour then turns into a six to 12-month investment as well.

Joe Hyland:

Ah, yeah, that’s smart. Have you measured — speaking of Art and Science ‚ the impact of sending follow-up emails to the those who registered but didn’t attend —with the shorter content versus the full 45-minute discussion panel webinar — did you see different results?

Sara Gonzales:

Well, one of the things we do with our webinar marketing before during and after we’ve got sales development reps and we get those guys involved. So, first of all their text-based emails and their conversations with people, as opposed to an HTML email going out from marketing. So, it’s from a person her name’s Jenna she’s had contact with them for a while, and we actually see in terms — even the quick ratio that we get for people watching the on-demand content — it’s probably around 30 percent of the people afterwards actually go to watch those shorter videos.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, that’s great.

Sara Gonzales:

Yeah, it’s something we’ve only started this year and it is a little bit more difficult with the editing process afterwards. But,  even looking back like you said to their profile in Marketo and saying, “Okay, this person has actually downloaded a lot of content that revolves around compliance. So let’s make sure that they receive the compliance video.” And in the flow, we make sure that they’re receiving using keywords to actually send them content that they’re probably more interested in as opposed to something like reporting.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. Um, yeah. No, that’s fantastic. And I think it’s also really smart that you guys have your SDRs involved throughout the process. I mean, if it’s a demand generation use case, which it sounds like this is, I think having pre-sales involved from the start is smart, right?

That way doesn’t feel like a jolting experience and afterwards someone is reaching out to them.

Sara Gonzales:

Definitely.

Joe Hyland:

Okay cool. Well, we are at the top of the half hour. You and I could do this probably for the next 45 minutes and I feel like time would fly by, but I want to wrap things up.

Sarah, this was this was fantastic. I’m gonna look up Dumb Ways to Die. I was not familiar with this campaign. So I’m excited. It sounds like you guys are on a mission over at Simple to make marketers great again. That is a phrase that is …

Sara Gonzales:

You always have to throw that in, right?

Joe Hyland:

I said very similar…

Sara Gonzales:

 I’m not making that a thing, Joe. I’m not going to use it — stop trying to…

Joe Hyland:

Sorry, once I say it for the third time it sticks. You said webinars are dirty over here, so we’re gonna have to dig into that next time. But it seems like you’re cleaning things up and you’re doing a great job with it. So that…

Sara Gonzales:

I’ll take one for the team.

Joe Hyland:

You’ll take one for the team, thank you. With that, let’s wrap up Sarah. Thanks again. This was this was fantastic.

Sara Gonzales:

Thanks, Joe.

Joe Hyland:

All right by everyone.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 8, Simple’s Sara Gonzalez appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep. 7, Sam MeInick

Allocadia

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of CMO Confessions. It’s been a busy few weeks, but we have a double-whammy for you to tune into to make up for it.

First, we have Sam Melnick, VP of marketing at Allocadia. Sam is a seasoned marketing pro who approaches his field with an eye on statistics, a la sabermetrics, and a deep understanding of how to measure ROI. Sam’s insights into how marketers measure success are remarkable — not the least of which is because we both hail from Boston.

You can find Sam and his latest insights on his Twitter feed, @SamMelnick .

Finally, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean. Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes and Google Play stores.

Later this week, we’ll have Sara Gonzalez of Simple on to discuss how she approaches marketing in Australia and APAC in general. It’s another great episode and I highly recommend you tune in.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat.

Transcript:

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO confessions, a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO here at ON24, and this week I am psyched to have a fellow Bostonian, Sam Melnick, VP of marketing at Allocadia, on. Sam, how’s it going?

Sam Melnick:

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me. It’s always great to reconnect with the East Coast. Allocadia is a West Coast company, we’re based out of Vancouver, and I’ve got a Slack channel that’s called East Coast, Beast Coast. So, you’d be a member if you if you’re ever on our Slack channel, all right?

Joe Hyland:

I like it, thank you. Yeah, no people. Some friends of mine, rightly so, give me shit that the only Boston thing about me now is my six-one-seven area code and otherwise I’ve converted so. But at heart, I’m still a Boston dude.

Sam Melnick:

Well, there you go. As long as you got the six-one-seven will keep you.

Joe Hyland:

I will literally have that for the rest of my life until Verizon forces a regional area code.

Well, listen, I’m as I said, I’m psyched and thankful that you’re taking the time to be with me and our audience today. You’ve got some cool experience. I love you’ve been doing this stuff for well over a decade. I’d love to get your take on how you got to where you are today because I think — and I’ll start there — because I think it’s interesting that there’s not a one-size-fits-all path or approach to leading marketing and I think your approach and your path is actually pretty cool. So, you want to give us a couple minutes on that?

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. I wouldn’t quite call myself an accidental head of marketing, but I certainly didn’t start off my career being like, “I’m gonna be a VP of marketing or CMO.” I actually went to school, at UMass Amherst for sport management and I was supposed to be the next Theo Epstein. I actually started my career off running a small baseball team and working for a sport marketing agency.

I eventually found my way into tech, where I worked in marketing at a start-up — a 30-person start up in Boston. But then I pivoted over to an analyst role at IDC in a group called the CMO advisory service. So, we worked with large marketing organizations or large companies at large tech companies. So, like IBM, Dell, Cisco — all those types of companies were customers of ours. And we covered the marketing operation space and worked with CMOs on how they design their organization and where they spend their dollars and their resources.

And that was, you know, — analyst was an amazing experience because you get to talk with all of these people who have so much more experience than you and different experiences — I’ve seen so much scale — but you get to learn from 20, 30, 40 people on how they’re taking on marketing. And that kind of that’s slung-shot me into the MarTech space, because I started hearing about all these cool Technologies — you know, the ON24s the allocate of the world and I started creating a list of different interesting MarTech SaaS companies because I saw this growing. Like, I would, tweet back and forth with Scott Brinker before anyone knows who Scott Brinker was. Like, I saw this Market growing and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. I was a believer that SaaS technologies were going to be the differentiator and so I ended up at lattice engines and a customer-facing world.

So, Lattice is a predictive marketing organization — it’s customer-facing which, again, was amazing to learn from all these great marketers. But I missed marketing. I was kind of moonlighting as a product marketer and an analyst. I had written some content. I was doing sales enablement. I was kind of doing like a bunch of marketing stuff.

So, I decided I want to get back into marketing. Went to Allocadia. I got this opportunity to we called IT Director of Customer Marketing Insights. So, it was kind of part marketer, part analyst, part customer-facing kind of SME, subject matter expert.

Joe Hyland:

That’s cool. That’s a nice bridge, too.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, and then they I guess I did a good enough job and they offered me an opportunity to run the marketing team, and I said, “Yeah, let’s try that out.” And now I’ve been in that role for almost 18 months now and it’s been a lot of fun building out a team and learning something new here as well.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you’ve given up the dream of running a baseball team one day or is that maybe act two after the B2B marketing world?

Sam Melnick:

Maybe act two. You know, the baseball team stuff was fun, but, I mean, I don’t know — as weird as it sounds the tech industry and marketing is almost as interesting to me now. I guess I’m a full-fledged marketing nerd.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you got to be a geek to love this stuff. Well, I think it’s interesting that — and we’ll talk about that — because maybe you don’t have to be a geek to love this stuff.

I think there’s an interesting comparison and, perhaps it’s somewhat analogous, on what’s happened in — and I say past tense, but it’s still happening in in baseball and other sports — with the Money Ball movement and really looking at the right metrics. And I think for literally decades or upwards of a century the wrong analytics was being applied to the wrong areas, or   the wrong metrics.

I think that’s happened in the B2B marketing space. And I think the Geeks are coming and, maybe, the Geeks are here. But what kind of points of comparison did you see from your time on the baseball side to what’s happening in marketing with attribution and analytics and kind of you name it?

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, no, I think it’s a really good comparison. I think it started off in a niche, to a certain extent. And not just B2B Tech, in particular, but in general, in B2B, you saw that early days, with the adopters of the Eloquas or the Marketos, they knew they needed to automate, they need knew they needed in different sorts of data. That’s when you really saw these in-depth funnel and funnel metrics and then it’s just grown. I mean, there’s been an industry that’s been almost built around, you know, Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua — to a lesser extent, the Pardots of the world and it’s created this opportunity for a bunch of cool companies. But, more importantly, technologies that help marketers’ jobs better and serve their customers better and get the data to answer those questions.

Joe Hyland:

I think it’s interesting — one, I mean a lot of these metrics, I’ll pick on MQLs for a moment, a lot of these metrics are pretty easy to manipulate, right? Like, I think, for the longest time, marketers have been measured on something that doesn’t necessarily correlate to the end goal that you should have in mind, at least if it’s a Demand Gen use-case. An MQL would be a good example of that, right? If your marketing team is solely incented upon MQLs, there are pretty easy ways to artificially jack up the number of MQLs coming in the door. And I think that’s a little bit of a poor man’s approach to having true marketing attribution driven approach.

I’d love to hear your perspective on companies focusing on the wrong thing because I think the waterfall metrics and some of the companies you just referenced helped move the ball forward, but I also think it allowed people to focus on some of the wrong areas.

Sam Melnick:

For sure, and I think it’s you know, you asked about the comparison against sabermetrics, and I think in a similar sense you saw better Baseball analytic metrics come out, but they still weren’t like…

Joe Hyland:

Let’s geek out, like you go there…

Sam Melnick:

You want me to geek out? Okay, OPS, for baseball, was a very, basically, it’s on-base percentage, plus batting average, plus slugging percentage was one of the earlier days, kind of sabermetrics, but it really didn’t answer all the questions. And then later you started seeing stuff like wins above replacement come out. Which was more all-inclusive of how strong was that player. Whereas, in B2B marketing, you start with an MQL. An MQL is a hell of a lot better than how many website visitors ya get or, even worse — how many advertisements or how many PR press releases we want out — but it still isn’t closing that loop which, is more pipeline, revenue. That’s a I think that’s a pretty great comparison there — progress but not perfection.

Joe Hyland:

Do you think do you think the war for B2B marketing is pipeline? I mean, what is the wins above replacement metric for us?

Sam Melnick:

I think that’s a tough one because people want to focus in on revenue and pipeline and you have to be there. I’d say that’s the table stakes at this point — being able to measure at the very least pipeline and B2B marketing and marketing’s contribution and influence to that — it’s table stakes. But to say that’s the end-all be-all kinda of sells ourselves, as marketers, short. Because there’s so much more that goes into marketing and, unfortunately, you can’t tie a one-to-one comparison against it. Sometimes it’s because sales reps do a mediocre — I’m being kind — job of filling out contact roles in Salesforce and other times it’s a brand campaign that you’re not able to tie directly. So…

Joe Hyland:

Yeah

Sam Melnick:

…it’s a tough question to say, what is the war for B2B marketing, but it’s not pipeline and revenue.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I think you raise an incredibly valid point is — I’m trying to think of a good sports analogy since around the baseball topic and one is not coming to mind — it is incredibly important metric. But, I think, an area of the business and, for us, we’re laser-focused on growth, so if my CEO, who has an office right next to me, were sitting in the room he probably would correct this statement — but yeah, it’s not just pipeline. Should marketing own customer experience? It’s very, we just we had a team meeting this morning and we were presenting out results for the quarter, and a major effort is underway to increase our brand and improve our brand. And there are ways to measure that, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of them are more qualitative, right?

So, there are important components outside of demand gen, for sure, what we did here and — for what it’s worth — is, when I got here — so I’ve been here for three years — there was a whole bunch of bullshit on marketing pointing at sales. Like, they’re not following up in the leads or not properly same thing back to marketing like, it’s not high enough quality. There were lots of excuses on both sides. And so, the head of sales and I got together, and I said, “How about I, slash marketing, we just own all just, so it will get the garbage out.” I don’t care where it’s coming from — we obviously care in terms of optimizing spend very much — but, you know, I’ll present it in the board and that way we’re aligned. I don’t know maybe that’s stupid of me, but that that’s how we do it here.

Sam Melnick:

No, I mean, we’ve had a couple of sales leaders through my time across different companies, for sure. And, right now, we’ve got probably the strongest sales and marketing alignment that I’ve seen, and it makes a difference. Because you’re focusing. We did a presentation at SiriusDecisions Summit with box and their mark one of their marketing operations leads. And what he said — Tim West is name — and what he said was for them, it was about — instead of arguing over the pieces of the pie — it was about growing the pie. And that’s where we want to get to with sales. How do you grow it? And give them credit?  Like, fine, it’s your credit, but as long as it’s growing, we’re all good, you know? Growing at the right rate.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, all boats can rise. That was the situation when I got here — we weren’t where we needed to be and instead of the discussion focused on how to solve that, I had my head of demand gen fighting with our North America head of sales on who should get credit for a deal that just came in. And it was like, “Who gives a shit? We’re not where we need to be — isn’t that the bigger challenge?” Okay, what you want to dive into —I think it’s great, there’s nothing more important than making sure we’re measuring the right things — but I would say, maybe two or three steps before that, is putting in place the proper foundation and in-fact having a rock-solid planning process. How do you how do you view that world? And how to you how do you either keep yourself or help keep other marketers out of the world of just having a whole bunch of tactics listed and they say, “Well there’s my strategy, I’m good, right?”

Sam Melnick:

I think it’s important because like they actually feed into each other. We’ve been talking at Allocadia a lot about planning. Part of it is where our product helps marketers, but it’s also that it’s that time of the year for large B2B companies — if you’re on a fiscal year calendar — you’re just coming into planning season. Because, typically, those multi-million, certainly billion-dollar companies they start their strategic planning and setting those plans in place six months in advance. And 60 to 70 percent of companies are on a fiscal year calendar or calendar fiscal.

And how I like to say it, and how we’re saying it, is, “It all starts with the plan.” You know? Your metrics starts with the plan because you’re setting up your data, you’re setting up what you’re going to achieve, you’re setting up how you’re going to measure it. If you just say, “All right, if we execute, execute, execute.” And say alright, “We want to measure these things.”

There’s no guarantee that your data has been set up correctly. There’s no guarantee that you’ve been putting your resources and efforts and your plan towards it. So, everything from metrics to data to certainly strategy and where you’re putting your activities, it starts with the plan and getting that down wherever it is and getting it bought in and online up, down, across.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. I’m curious to know your thoughts on the — I haven’t heard this said this way — but the death of the brief. Are you seeing companies being as diligent in their planning process and ensuring that they’re doing proper campaign briefs at the start? And then, on the on the other side, actually going through and having a post mortem.

Sam Melnick:

No, I mean, have you ever seen companies be really diligent on that? Do you have examples of that? They all say they do.

Joe Hyland:

I know, that’s right — I feel like in this world, where so much of marketing is coming down to pipeline and results — I’m seeing a we got to get shit done mindset, which is great. But to quote-unquote “get shit done,” they’re just cutting out the planning process. So, is that really a good idea? Yeah, no — it’s a problem.

Sam Melnick:

I agree and my team — and certainly we’re not the, you know, we’re not some of these huge companies that I used to work with that IDC and all those — but, like, we’re not perfect by any means. But we have, you talked about briefed — you kind of just tweaked me — my demand gen lead has put in a great process where she actually goes through each of the programs, shows the metrics, shows what was the positive and negative — and then we as a team, at least, pull out a few of them and do kind of a verbal brief, “This is what work this is what this is what we do different.”

It’s certainly not like a formal brief — you know, in this perfect world — but we’ve been doing that for the last few quarters and it’s really helpful because it helps us optimize and adjust and that’s really what you want. It’s like, “How do I do better next time?”

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I’m a big believer that many things in life are spectrum and it’s easy to it’s easy to treat things in a binary fashion, right? Like it’s a one or a zero and so often life is lived in the in the gray not the black and white.

It’s interesting on this concept if you applied that to what it’s like for a two-person shop should they be doing a brief? Like, should they be doing a post-mortem? Do they have the luxury of doing that? Although, on the other side of the spectrum is — IBM or SAP or Microsoft, right— where literally nothing gets out the door if it doesn’t have a brief — and probably takes months and months and months.

Are there happy mediums along the way for companies of different sizes? Because when I was back East at Kronos, and we weren’t necessarily a huge company, but we had I don’t know 150, 175 people in marketing — literally nothing got out the door without going through a proper briefing process.

Our planning was rock-tight or airtight, excuse me, and we did many post-mortems after the fact. But, you’re right a multi-month brief process, I mean, that wouldn’t that wouldn’t fly here at ON24. I would be shocked if it would for you, but something’s got to be done.

Sam Melnick:

I think it does depend and I think it’s the right balance, like we. We say run it, well, we say there’s two sides of marketing: there’s running marketing and doing marking — doing is the execution and running is like the strategy and the planning behind the scenes — and there’s a certain point where you do need to put the efforts into the running of marketing. So, that’s the briefs, that’s the planning, that’s the measurement.

But the reality is that there is this kind of focus of execution and the fewer resources you have, probably the more nimble you can be and spend more of your time on the doing. Partially because of necessity and partially just because it’s easier to walk up to somebody who’s right next to you in the cube or office. Whereas, at a 150 to 200-person marketing team, you don’t want to be spending quarter million bucks, half a million dollars on a campaign without some checks and balances. And then making sure that you’ve actually put in the right, I guess, effort into the running part.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no, you’re right. At Kronos, like at an enormous company. We were split across multiple buildings in in Chelmsford, never mind our International presence, right? So yeah, sending a slack to the dude sitting right next to you — it wasn’t that simple.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, it’s also like you’re talking about multiple regions, product lines, and it’s like, there has to be some way — whether it’s a brief there’s technology — like that’s kind of, you know, an Allocadia or different marketing performance management software systems. Or, you know, EPM-type solutions that are coming out — I think was an Adaptive Insights that just got bought by workday?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah,1.5 billion-dollar price tag.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, not bad. So obviously there’s some sort of interest in planning at the enterprise level. You know, there’s got to be ways to make sure an organization documents, and is making decisions, in a smart way. So, I don’t know I don’t have the perfect answer for it for sure.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no, I don’t think there is a perfect answer — what I find what I find interesting is — I think it’s particularly worse out here in the Bay Area. So, I think five or 10 years ago, a slippery slope for marketers would be confusing tactics with strategy — or doing with running as you would say, right? So, you’d say just ask them about their marketing strategy and they would list off “Like, I’m going to this event, I’m going to this conference we’re doing this, email drop.” You name it.

And it was a whole bunch of tactics and lacked like a clear cohesive strategy. What I’m seeing now more of — and I will admit this as a technologist —is marketers just listing a whole bunch of technology. So, it’s like if one more person tells me that their strategy is account-based marketing, because they’ve turned on — you name it — DemandBase or one of the host of other ABM platforms, which is great, that’s not a strategy.

And I would say the same thing for webinars. Your strategy shouldn’t be webinars — it’s like, well, how are you planning on segmenting your database? What’s the real goal in mind? You know, what’s the best form to communicate with folks? Like how are you measuring it? I think it’s a problem for marketers.

Sam Melnick:

I totally agree. There’s someone I know in a marketing team and they said, “We’re gonna buy XYZ technology that’s ABM — it’s gonna change the way our business runs.” No, that’s not — I mean, it could help — but the technology… And you know, again, we’re a marketing technology company. I’ve worked for a couple of them and I’m a huge believer. I want MarTech and Technology can do for marketing organizations— but if the right foundation and thought process and kind of surround — the people, process, technology. If you can’t just do it with technology have to do it with process.

Joe Hyland:

Yes.

Sam Melnick:

…People as well.

Joe Hyland:

Yes. That’s right. And we are believers in personalization here at ON24 — which, for me, ABM is just a subset of that. But yeah, that requires a commitment. That requires a lot of content, for example. It requires a pretty sophisticated view on segmentation. Buying any technology and just assuming it will it will solve your woes — that’s a Fool’s errand, right? Like, it’s not going to go well, which is why I think you go back to having a fantastic foundation a real process and strategy in place. And then, from there, I think that you plug in the tactics and the appropriate technologies and you can be off to the Races.

But yeah, having this get-shit-done mindset with just tactics and a plug-in a whole bunch of tech solutions — I think just leads marketers to be more and more frustrated.

Sam Melnick:

Great, yeah. No, I agree.

Joe Hyland: Great. Yeah, exactly. I think we beat that that horse dead.

I actually just had a conversation with a CMO that I’m friends with down and Sydney, Sara Gonzales, at Simple.

Sam Melnick:

Okay

Joe Hyland:

I don’t know if you know Sarah and Simple, but an interesting discussion happened when I was down in Sydney. All these marketers kept asking me — we had a conference down there about a month ago, “I know we’re not as sophisticated, Down Under, and I know we’re not using technology and advanced ways,” which I found really interesting because I didn’t think it was true. I think, for the longest time, U.S. marketers have kind of assumed that APAC is very much behind the United States in terms of marketing maturity. I do that long setup because I think the same thing happens — it’s not just for marketers, it’s technology in general — with the West Coast to East Coast. Like, there’s a lot of East Coast bias with media and kind of a host of other things where the East Coast is the center of gravity. But for tech companies you would be amazed at how snobby we are.

We look at the East Coast, and in particular, Boston, as if there’s HubSpot and maybe two other tech companies. And I know you guys are, in fact, headquartered on the West Coast, but you started MarTech in The Hub, right? I’d love to get your take on what it’s like being a technologist in Boston.

Sam Melnick:

Yeah, MarTech in the Hub kind of started off the marketing, MarTech conference that Scott Brinker ran. A few of us, we get a bunch of marketing and marketing technology folks together about once a quarter. So, you know, I’ve worked for companies in the valley and it’s certainly a bigger ecosystem. But Boston, I’d say Boston has a very strong — like it’s there. Talent-wise and maturity-wise, would I put The Valley leaps and bounds ahead of Boston? Probably not. There’s just a lot more people and that kind of gets the flywheel rolling. I’d say Boston, what it has, is it’s kind of got a longer — I mean — it’s almost got a longer role for things. Like, people are not — they’re more conservative — they go back to their Puritan roots, you know? A little bit more conservative. But like really strong, community — particularly in B2B tech. Particularly, deep tech. Like, you think about like an EMC or think about what it was like 30-40 years ago. You’ve got digital equipment. You’ve got —

Joe Hyland:

You name it, like Stratus Technologies. There’s a there’s a lot a lot of good tech companies in Boston.

Sam Melnick:

And to a fault, there’s probably also a bit too much of Academia. Because you’ve got Harvard and MIT and you got, you know, Babson has Olin College down there — which is engineering only. And Boston’s a small city, you go up to the valley: you’ve got San Francisco and then you’ve got San Jose and then there’s everything in between — and it’s just a lot more spread out. Whereas in Boston it’s all in one place and everybody’s around there and it’s — yeah.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think your comments on. I think it’s full of shit, a lot of it is — not your comments, but [laughter] you’re full of shit —

Sam Melnick:

It’s alright, you can call me out.

Joe Hyland:

I think there’s a notion that there’s more talent out here — and maybe I’m showing my six-one-seven area code bias here — I don’t know, it’s silly. When I got out here, some of my peers were like, “I don’t know any of the stuff you’re doing.” This was at Talia, my last company. “It’s really bold, it’s really loud. Like, I think, maybe, it’s too much.” And I was like, “I don’t know, I mean just where I’m from, the East Coast, we’re a little louder.” I don’t know there’s more people out here — I mean, San Francisco, people think it’s bigger than it is, there’s only six or seven hundred thousand people — San Jose three million, right? So, I mean there’s yeah there’s a lot of people in between you know.

Sam Melnick:

I think that it’s there’s a lot of people in Tech. There’s just so many — like, you drive up the one-oh-one and you’re just like, “Oh, tech company, tech company. Boston has a lot of tech, but like, there’s biotech there’s pharma there’s — I think Harvard is the largest employer in Cambridge, which is the biggest city next to Boston.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you’re right. There’re literally thousands of tech companies. It’d be interesting — you were referencing Scott Brinkner before — MarTech 5,000, which I think is now over 6,000. I don’t know he’s not doing it anymore, right? I don’t know it’d be interesting to see how many of those companies are out here. And a lot of those companies will fail. A lot. I mean, the market isn’t large enough to support five to six thousand companies for B2B marketing. I don’t know what the right number is. Actually, that’s a good point. I’m curious to — after I shit on the area that I live in now — I’m curious to get your take as to who this “Survivors” will be — not by company name, of course. Are there certain qualities or characteristics that will determine who will survive in this kind of Darwinian ecosystem that we live in?

Sam Melnick:

Well, the two companies that come to mind that’ll survive are ON24 and Allocadia, so I’ll start there.

Joe Hyland:

Obviously, that’s tip of the pyramid.

Sam Melnick:

Actually, that’s a really good question and I’ve got this blog post that I need to write about it.  My comment is just two kinds of — when I think about particularly data in MarTech — there are two kinds of marketing SaaS companies. There are those that are creating data — basically a new data source that can be utilized whether you know different ways that you can’t elsewhere — then there’s those that are kind of manipulating data and using data from external sources, and you talked about attribution, building models or predictive, you know. And those companies are not — I don’t think — are going to ever live as stand-alone because, essentially, they’re a part of an ecosystem. They’re using data from elsewhere. They’re tying into other Technologies. But if you didn’t have those other touch-points, they don’t exist, you know?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Sam Melnick:

So, if you have a technology that can sit on its own, create its own data — it might be much less valuable without the connections — but it still can provide value. So, that’s something that I look for in terms of that ability of what’s going to come out.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. I’d add to it that I think — and it’s like great marketing, you need to know your audience inside and out and understand how you solve their problems and if you’re doing anything but that you’re probably missing the mark — great marketing is about finding ways to help marketers engage. I mean, it is all about engagement. And I think in this new world order that we that we live and play in, it’s about providing insights into what works and how you can be smarter, and smarter, and smarter, and smarter.

So, my sense is, and all jokes aside, companies that focus on those two areas when — let’s say something happens in the economy and dollars are squeezed — if you’re helping marketers be more engaging and you’re helping provide insights, I think you’ll stay in the market Tech stack. So, that’s my perspective. So yeah, maybe Allocadia and ON24 will be okay.

Sam Melnick:

Okay. There you go. Let’s hope so. Knock on wood, at least.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, with that, I think our half hour is up. Sam, I want to thank you so much. This was fantastic, and I will talk to everyone on our next episode of CMO confessions. Thanks so much, man.

Sam Melnick:

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me it was a blast.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 7, Sam MeInick appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep. 6 David Lewis

CMMA Blog

Hi, and, once again, welcome to another episode of CMO Confessions, our bi-weekly podcast covering all things marketing. This week we have a special treat:  David Lewis, the CEO and founder of DemandGen.

If you’ve worked in the digital world in any capacity, you’ve likely seen, or even used, some of David’s handiwork. David’s rather diverse background ranges from pioneering early VoIP technology (his motivation here was to play videogames unimpeded with his brother-in-law in the 90s) to proactively guiding organizations through the — at times, dizzying — MarTech landscape.

We, of course, go over all of this in this episode of CMO Confessions, but we also take a few detours into what the marketing landscape is set to look like over the coming years. All I can say is, if you’re interested in what it takes to make data work for your marketing program, give this episode a listen.

You can find David and his latest insights — and do check them out, they’re great — on his Twitter feed, @ demandgendave .

Finally, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean . Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes  and Google Play  stores.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat .

Transcript:

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO Confessions a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO here at ON24 and joining me this week is David Lewis CEO of DemandGen. David, how’s it going?

David Lewis:

Good, Joe. Thank you very much for having me on your program.

Joe Hyland:

Yes, psyched you’re here. So, at the start, and I preface this by saying our show is not about pitching things, but I am always fascinated when someone takes the initiative and starts something. Whether it’s writing a book, starting an aggressive program. And when I get to talk to a Founder who started a company, for me, I’m fascinated to know — why’d you start DemandGen? I think the audience would love to hear that.

David Lewis:

Oh, well, why did I start DemandGen? [There’s] one primary reason that I started DemandGen and that was the success that I was having with marketing technology systems.

So, I was running marketing at a company called Ellie Mae, a very successful mortgage software and banking platform. I joined them in 2002 and from 2002 to 2007, I was implementing marketing automation, brought in Salesforce CRM, online sales and marketing and we just had tremendous success.

And my pause when you said, “Why did I start the company?” I’ve been an entrepreneur before — did another startup we could talk about if you want — but I was at a conference and Tony Robbins was on stage and just prior to him, he was talking with the founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies. And he said “So, what was her recipe for success?” And everyone was like, “the cookies the cookies!” He goes, “No, that was a trap!” And the recipe was how to build a franchise business.

And he said, “everybody write down on a piece of paper, come on, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you’ve been an entrepreneur,” you know, very Tony style. I can’t be Tony. He said, “write down on a piece of paper a recipe that you have for success that, if you shared it with other people, it would help them and help their lives transform their lives.” And I know the challenges — which we’ll probably get to — on being a CMO and been in marketing leadership my whole career, and I wrote down on a little piece of paper, Joe, “how to use marketing automation.”

And that was my recipe. Because, in 2007 and before, we didn’t have MarTech — at most we had marketing automation. So, about six months after that, I resigned to start DemandGen and take the recipes that we had done at Eillie Mae, and other digital marketing experiences, that I had and bring that to other marketers with the sole goal of making them heroes. And that’s the mission of the companies making marketing heroes and technology is just a way to enable doing that. So, there you go.

Joe Hyland:

That’s cool. I find a lot interesting about that. I was thinking, as you were as you were talking, so much has changed. So, I started marketing in 2001. I remember rolling out Eloqua in, I don’t know, 2002-2003. My company, we were a pretty early convert to the cloud, even though it wasn’t necessarily the most innovative company. It was a server company in Boston called Stratus Technologies, and so we had Salesforce and Eloqua. And marketing automation, I mean literally, changed everything we were doing.

So, on one hand, the marketing landscape has wildly changed. On the other hand, here we are, 15 years later, and a lot of shit’s still the same. A lot of the challenges of different tactics are used to solve them, but a lot of the challenges from 15 years ago, we’re still saddled with today. So how has it changed for you? You said you started in 2000, 2007, right?

David Lewis:

Yeah, the company started almost 11 years ago.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. So, walk through what a consultation looked like then versus what it’s like now.

David Lewis:

Everything has changed and then the more that has changed the more that has actually stayed the same. So, there’s been huge amounts of change and yet huge amounts of the same. That’ll make more sense in a minute.

So, truth is, back then, the work that we were doing all of our clients had Eloqua. There was no Marketo in 2007. There actually was, but it was in a lab getting coded, and wasn’t yet a product in-market. So, as you know, and, like you, I was in early Eloqua customer. I think, probably, we were posterchilds for what to do with these tools, right?

So, what has changed is that, when we first started the company, we were helping people with the use and adoption of marketing automation. We were almost, in many ways, like an Eloqua Professional Services team.

I wish I could tell you that I was brilliant or had some kind of time machine and knew that all of this was going to happen, and all of this is eight thousand marketing tools and technologies. I did not see this coming. It’s no surprise now when you think about everything that we’re doing in digital marketing and digital sales and how much it changes become a digital economy, but it really was all about marketing automation.

Fast forward 10 years, and we don’t look like ourselves from 10 years ago. We are helping people become full stack marketers and our clients, on average, have over a dozen different marketing technologies that were helping them select, implement and leverage to drive growth and to drive revenue. So, you need a whole tool chest and we help our clients with that tool chest.

So, that’s what’s changed: is the toolset what’s not changed is all the same challenges. It’s still hard to align sales and marketing. ABM is a is a three-letter acronym that, to so many folks, feels like a Holy Grail, but there’s a recipe — set of recipes that you need to do to do an effective ABM, account-based marketing and sales team. Marketing still is paid less than sales. One day, hopefully, equality there or even maybe more. That’s a B-HAG of mine is to see equality in compensation between sales and marketing because of how much marketing is doing to drive growth. That’s not changed. The shiny new toy syndrome is still alive and well, unfortunately, in that marketing isn’t really providing the same level of diligence for how to select and adopt tools and being a little bit more, Halloween candy issue, “That looks good. I’ll put that in my stack and then, “Oh that that actually is not something that’s useful.”

So, we’ve got to become a lot more process-oriented in marketing. What hasn’t changed the data challenge — that’s still alive and well. Most marketers’ databases look like an episode of Hoarders and not some pristine analytics-ready database. I could go on, but you know, the challenges are still there and yet we’ve got more tools to help us solve these problems, so the question is, “are they solving problems?”

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you mentioned data I could talk about I could talk about data for the entire discussion. I had a conversation with Laura Ramos from Forrester on this, which is, I think, data has become quite sexy in marketing circles. I don’t know if it’ll ever change, truthfully. I mean that is the foundation of — well the more targeted you want to get, the more precise your data needs to be.

Databases are a disaster. I would say. I have friends over at LinkedIn, a company who you would think has, you know, the most accurate data on employees in the world and they were complaining and bitching about how — they were Salesforce shop — how messy their data is, and they don’t know if someone’s at a company. And, meanwhile, all they had to do is check their own technology to see if they are, but obviously those two things aren’t speaking, right? So, they aren’t syncing. So, if LinkedIn is having a problem with data, everyone is.

David Lewis:

Yeah, I know these experiences firsthand. Like, we did LinkedIn’s deployment of Eloqua. We did a ton of work for those guys. We did — get it ready for this — Salesforce’s deployment of Eloqua, which they used until about six months ago. Pretty much every high-tech company DemandGen has worked with, whether it’s Eloqua or Marketo, and you’re right, the problems are the same large or small, experienced or not, these are challenges. And, let’s look at another factor — there’s a lot of turnover in marketing, a lot of turnover in sales. So, even if you had the best team in the world building out these initial systems, do you still have that same team? Or, if you didn’t have the best team do you now have it? And, so, these systems are not set it and forget it in any way. So, the challenges will always be there.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. This is — 20 years from now, they’ll be talking about clean data. So, adjacent topic, the rise of the data-driven marketer. I think, so if data is sexy, and the Nerds are, perhaps, taking over marketing — which I would somewhat question — do you see a lot of organizations — they’re struggling with data and cleanliness of data – but how are marketers doing with gleaning insights and making decisions with that data? Because I know a few people who have a data problem. I mean, most marketers have too much data — they’re drowning in it. How are marketers doing with the data? Are they making smarter decisions? Is that full of shit? What do you say?

David Lewis:

Let me back up to the data is sexy comment that you made, because I think Laura might think — I know Laura, smart, talented data-driven — I don’t think data is sexy. In fact, from the companies that I’m advising and partners that we have in data, one of their biggest challenges is getting marketing appeal for their data orchestration platform. Which, by the way, is a domain that I registered and never used —data orchestration platform — because I think that is. I think it’s important, and I think data could get maybe sexy — JT who’s in town, Justin Timberlake, he gets to say, you know, maybe data will be sexy back, but it’s just not sexy because you can’t see it you can’t show it.

There’s no data on a black board that goes “look how wicked cool this data looks like.”

You know, unless you’re Tank in The Matrix, data doesn’t really look very cool to you. However, data is essential for success. So, if you get the right data person on your marketing team, you will be the best marketing team in the world because you can make data-driven decisions and you can segment better than ever.

So, look at Amazon. How many data scientists do you think that they have empowering the Predictive Analytics engines that they have on their site? How do they know that when Johnny down the street is buying a snow shovel because it’s snowing — data, data, data — in your town, that I’m gonna serve up ads for snow shovels on your site because you’re in the same geographic area, right? If you can become data-driven and have the right people on your team, the sky is a limit in terms of your promise and marketing of what you can do. But, I don’t think we’re there yet.

So, I’m going to challenge that thought that most marketers would rather work on a campaign or a program — the art of marketing and the science is still levels up from that data level. But it’s coming and it’s going to be incredibly important.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, and I would further your challenge, which is I think. There are a lot of marketers that it’s not necessarily their core skill set. So, bringing in a few or a team of data scientists, that’s different. I mean, they literally I have friends who are data scientists. It can be some weird people — they live for combing through data. I don’t know if most marketers would describe themselves that way. So, I think I think there’s a bit of a skills gap here.

David Lewis:

I’ve produced a couple things for the web some professional, some personal level — a lot, lot for the web. You want to factoid, interesting one: I did a mannequin challenge video with my drone and a bunch of us at a 10-million-dollar home in Cabo that had 20,000 views. People like drones, mannequin challenge. I’ve done — lots of written about lead scoring, lead nurturing, ABM — all kinds of stuff. Hundreds, if not, maybe, thousands of views. I did an article called “the rise of the data scientist” went through the roof as a blog post. I don’t even know how people found it because they’re searching for it.

So yes, these people are worth their weight in gold when you find really good ones. And ask yourself everyone listening to this podcast. Do you have a data operations manager on your team? Have you ever even heard of that title yet? Depending on when you listen to this podcast either didn’t exist or it’s now everywhere. So, it will happen, just like there wasn’t a marketing automation manager back in the day, there wasn’t a marketing operations manager, or leader, and today there’s really not a data operations manager title across a lot of different companies. But there will be.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. I think you’re right. You’re not going to see some, you know, a standard profile from you know, marketing programs manager, who’s just going to turn into that that person. So, I think this this push for marketers become more data-driven, obviously, I think few people would argue against that. I just think there’s many marketers that that’s not their core skill set.

David Lewis:

Yeah, we even marketing technology wasn’t marketing’s core skill set. It was the four Ps, right? Unfortunately, marketing’s always been seen as kind of an arts and crafts department that throws really good parties and events.

And, so marketing is getting rebranded — certainly in the roles and what we’re doing today — but for most, I think there’s a chasm, Joe. In that, you’ve got the digital natives who have been born and raised with technology — and they used it when I was driving here to the office today when I turned the corner and so the kids waiting for the light at school every single one of them had their head down looking at their phone everyone none of them were talking to each other and they’re standing right there on the corner — so the digital natives are addicted to devices and using technology and know far more pieces of software at their age than we ever knew up until our careers. But they don’t know how to connect technology to driving growth in revenue — yet.

Then you’ve got the CMOS who have been around for a long time because they’re CMOs — so they’ve been doing this for years. They’ve been doing this for a while back before there was marketing automation — and many of them are not wired for marketing technology. Some are, but many of them are not. And, in fact, I only think the reason that I’m so passionate and started this company is because I graduated with a degree in computer science and marketing and now I’m in The Perfect Storm to feed both of my passions. But once this Chasm gets crossed, where digital natives have more experience in leadership and growth and driving, marketing is going to be a breadwinner in the revenue family. I hope so.

Joe Hyland:

I’ve heard you talk about salaries by the way and compensation and how compensation should be structured and how it is today and how they’re speaking of chasms that one exists. I think part of bridging that is tying oneself to revenue, and perhaps the upstream indicator for that is pipeline.

When I started, my first task in marketing when I graduated school, was drafting letters which we then, printed — I signed for my sales rep — and I mailed out a thousand of them. And I had no other skills. That’s I mean, I literally folded a thousand folded or printed a thousand letters signed a thousand folding them put them in envelopes mailed them.

And so that was my first, you know, revenue-related task. But we were the tchotchkes department — we very much were in support of sales. Being blunt, we were sale’s bitches. We did just what they wanted — now because we were revenue focused marketing department back then. That meant doing what sales asked of us.

Now, I’m in, I mean, obviously, my roles changed a little bit, but we’re looked at as a strategic driver. I mean, I don’t know whether it’s a blessing or a curse. When there’s a pipeline challenge, our CEO or, my boss, is calling me over. And he calls over my counterpart, the head of sales, but he wants to know from me why we’re missing pipeline.

So again, I said that can be a blessing and a curse, but that’s where marketers are headed. I’m biased. But I think that’s where marketers need to get to.

So, we do plenty of other things that are screwed up in our department, but that’s one thing that I think works quite well, which is we own pipeline. We own pipeline by segment for the company.

David Lewis:

Yeah, 50% of our is — actually 60 percent of our revenue last year — 50% right now, tracking of our revenue comes from marketing and, you know, and demand gen. And if we’re not the best at tracking this stuff, you know, shame on us. So, we know exactly where everything is coming from we’ve got these systems all dialed in and I I like you I I didn’t.

Like the Kinkos mindset, you know, meaning that marketing was Kinkos to the rest of the organization — make me another data sheet, make me a brochure, print me out this. But no, we’re revenue drivers — and I mentioned I did another startup, right?

So, my very first startup was in 1999. Came home one night and I was a big video gamer my whole life — that’s how I got into computers and stayed with me — and I loved playing Shooters, Counter-Strike, Unreal, Quake all these first-person shooters. So, 1999 I came home, my wife said, “Are you going to tap the phone line all night?”

So, why did she ask that? So, this is 1999 — 9600 baud modem. You still have a landline. There’s no iPhone. You know, there’s no mobile phone — unless if you did you were like the elite or you worked in sales — and I said, “Yeah,” and she goes “I got to call my mom,” and I said, “Well, I’m playing Counter-Strike with your brother, so, can you call her later?”

“Well, how long you gonna play till two o’clock in the morning again?”

I’m like, “All right, how long you gonna be?” So, she goes “Why don’t you figure out a way to talk over the computer?”

So, my first startup was actually a product called Roger Wilco, precursor to Skype and what you and I are doing right now — painkiller.

I mean, it’s like, “let’s figure out a way.” I was, like, the Alexander Graham Bell of the internet. Why do I bring this up? It’s a neat story about Dave. But all I ever printed was a business card. All we ever had was a website and we built this company up and sold it a year later during the dot com era was pretty exciting. It was all marketing driven. There wasn’t a salesperson the company. We had an SDK, every game developer was incorporating our audio system into their games, and boom: never salesperson never even a printed piece of collateral.

So, if you’re a digital company, you’re very marketing driven and not sales driven. And if you’re a B2B company, so many companies, especially those of our clients have been around forever, they’re such a sales-driven organization. Revenue or sales people. Let’s grow more revenue. Well, who’s gonna feed all those sales people believe marketing?

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that was that happened with us when I when I got here. We had the ratio of marketing both bodies and dollars to sales was out of whack because we did exactly what you just described it.

We wanted to grow revenue. And so, we said well, what’s the next closest thing to revenue sales reps? And, you know, we used data to say well how many how many leads does each rep need and how do we generate leads and how much does each lead cost? And before we knew it we had a justification model for increasing marketing spend — not because I wanted to fiefdom — but because we showed shit that seems to be working we should do more of it.

David Lewis:

By the way trivia question: guess who did your Eloqua deployment for ON24? You’re talkin to him. We did, and you guys no longer use Eloqua — we didn’t do your migration. But, I would say the marketing team that you have today, Joe, thanks to your leadership, and the organization is nothing like the marketing team that you had back then. The pendulum has swung to put a lot more horsepower and talent and focus into marketing because of the power that can come from having a killer team there.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate it. And I did not know that actually that’s pretty cool. I am honest to a fault always. Do you know the story behind why we no longer have Eloqua — which was before my time that predates me.

David Lewis:

No, no I do not.

Joe Hyland:

It was a CYA situation. I think it’s actually interesting story for any vendor technology. So, we had um a nurture stream through Eloqua — this, again, before my time — things went wrong and there were sequences, right? Things went wrong after the first email and you know, people were pissed and went all the way up to our CEO and they said, “You know, don’t let this happen again.”

 

David Lewis:

Sender “unknown” was it? Or the wrong language in the wrong country? And we don’t have to share keep going.

Joe Hyland:

They just screwed everything up it was it was a disaster. But it was a sequence and so, supposedly, which I actually don’t even believe — I will get the answer from you right now — there was no kill switch on this sequence and we had no ability to stop these future emails that were going to go out. I do not believe this.

David Lewis:

Yeah, that’s not true.

Joe Hyland:

So, over the course of the next like week or two all these people who are pissed off received more emails from us and that head of demand gen at the time got pulled into the CEOs office and said, “what the hell is happening?” And they explained it’s not me but the technology we’re using just isn’t working. And he said, what any CEO would say in that time, then change the technology.

And it was too late. So, they had to hire someone to come in through the migration and, you know, ended up purchasing Marketo. We’re very happy with by the way, um probably cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a lot of time because, truthfully, someone was covering their ass.

David Lewis:

Yeah, not the first time I’ve heard a story like that and I want to say for everyone listening and I’m going to talk to the vendors as well, because maybe some Marketo people and Oracle people are listening as well, in most cases it’s not the tool, it’s the team. Someone used to say, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” And there are very good reasons to switch marketing automation system. So, what I want to say is, in short, if you don’t have a marketing automation system get one because you’re going to be better off. There are best-of-breed applications and you should know your needs, but no one should hear this call, this podcast and say, “I need to switch marketing automation systems.” The chances are that you probably can get more from the technology that you have for it.

And we have migrated a lot of people from Eloqua to Marketo and made them more successful. We have also migrated some people from Marketo to Eloqua, less, less common more the other direction and Marketo certainly as a company than a lot in terms of innovation on their platform and continues to do Innovation because they came to the market later and had to compete more fiercely and it’s more focused and driven because this is all they do, that’s all Marketo does, is marketing technology. So, Kudos to them, but you know, not a surprising story – the one that you shared — and you guys are doing the right things, though, in terms of really taking the game to the next level there at ON24.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. So, I’ve never done a migration — I was part of the team that put Eloqua in, I had no idea what I was doing, so, I wasn’t that helpful, but I was in the room. I think listen there’s a right — there are certain features and there are differences in the Technologies — but you’re right if you have an existing marketing Automation and things aren’t perfect. It’s you, it’s not the technology, right? And we’re doing a lot right and ON24 and we screw up a ton of things. I mean, there’s so many ways we can improve.

So, I would I would echo your words: I would encourage you to look at your strategy and ensure that you’re executing on the right strategy before I’d say switch marketing automation. But, I thought it was a funny story.

David Lewis:

Something to think about, Joe, and marketing, because you said about failing — we’ve got to fail in marketing and we’ve got to take risk, all the time, every day. There’s the 80/20 rule and that applies to sales which is interesting that 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the sales force.

So, sales organizations are failing every day at an individual level as well as a team level. And marketing, in most cases, doesn’t fail, but we are very good at taking risk, but we do create campaigns that don’t hit, you know, this kind of success metrics that we had hoped for, but we got to do that and never be discouraged. And sometimes, it’s as much as an image or color change or a subject line change or a whole scale different call to action or a different channel you could run ads on LinkedIn and not succeed. You could run the same ads on another channel and succeed wildly.

And so, it’s a fascinating discipline where sales is very one-to-one and transactional and engagement with a group environment they fail. That’s at an individual level. I mean, most cases, fields are lost because the individual. Very rarely is marketing failing on a program because of one person — although this email stream sounds like someone didn’t code something, right.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, definitely. Well, I’d say a couple of things to that one. If you’re not failing, like, you’re not trying or you’re just totally full of shit. A friend of mine is the CFO of a pretty big company and he said to me that he’s lost faith in marketing and I said “why?” And he said, “all they do is report their successes and they are unwilling to admit failure and I just know that’s not practical. I don’t believe them. So, when I get presented with every program was a success — an ROI was you know hundreds of percent on each investment — I know they’re not being truthful.” I mean I you got to take chances, we do things that fail all the time.

I just did a little email drop for a sales rep who I’m friends with. And said, “let me help you out, I’ll send an email to like 30 of your prospects will get a great response rate.” Zero responses, right? Okay, we tried. And the question is being you learning from them? Right? So, I think that’s what we’re marketers should focus versus trying to spin everything as a win. No one believes you, anyway.

David Lewis:

When I launched my podcast, demand generated radio, you know in the episodes 50s now because depends when you’re listening to this, you know, I keep trying to master my craft and make sure that the content, the guests, the format, just keeps getting better and better. And you know, what? The chart shows that — so the listens from where we were like the first several months have really hockey sticked in year two.

And one of the things that made a tremendous difference, Joe, was the frequency of the podcast. I mean the content continues to get better and better — I’ll let people be the judge of that. I think the guests and the way that I’m interviewing them, and talking with them, as we are as getting better, but there was just a frequency change that got a lot more listening ship.

We launched marketoassessment.com . We just launched this, which is a free assessment, and it’s version 1 — I think it’s pretty amazing. But version 2 is going to be better than version 1 and version 3 is going to be even more amazing. But you gotta pilot and perfect in marketing, and I think coming back to your, you know, if I can give everybody a piece of advice is no one good is good enough and just keep building upon it if you try to just boil the ocean and get everything perfect — what if your campaign doesn’t succeed and you wasted all that extra time? Get it out iterate and make it better.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah, I we adhere to the lean the lean philosophy which is just let’s get something out. It’s not even network, necessarily, testing it per-se it’s we just speed to markets really important to me. And you’re right, you could you could spend six months perfecting something and then you realize you were off and you just wasted all that time, right?

David Lewis:

You know, Elon had to blow up a lot of rockets before he figured out how to land one back on the ground.

Joe Hyland:

That’s right, that’s right. I would — and this might be a five-minute close — but I would love to know, don’t name any names or don’t feel the need to — do you have a lot of clients that you work with? So, you you’re like having a best friend who’s a physician and when you get together with them drinks over drinks, you say? Okay, tell me the good stories which of course are not supposed to do. So, I’m sure they wouldn’t.

But let’s do that here. What are think of an example or two of just brilliant things some of your clients are doing or a particular client. And, in the back of your mind, think of the opposite end of the spectrum just something that you’re shocked by — you’re disgusted with horror that you can’t believe that a client is still making the same mistake on. So, I’ll let you start with the good side first.

David Lewis:

Great question. I’m working on a book that has a working title for me called Agents of Change. So, I’ve been taking all of the lessons of our top performing clients and putting those into this book. Maybe, it’s called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective CMOs. I don’t know what the actual title of the book will be.

But I’ve been taking all of the lessons which by the way some of them fail miserably in certain projects and become exceptional through the learnings of those failures and distilling it down. So, here’s what I find of some of the things — look maybe preview of the book. So, number one, and kudos to Sarah Kennedy and the Marketo team, for Fearless, the word Fearless.

These are people, you know, that’s the theme of Marketo — the Fearless Marketer. One of the things that all of our clients are doing is — the successful ones — they are fearless, they are willing to take risk. They took the risk going to another company and it never stopped there. They retool their teams. They retool their technology. Yes, marketers come in, and sometimes do brand refreshes. I’m smiling because sometimes we go, “Oh look, it’s a new marketer in town, we got a new logo. You have to change everything, you know?

Joe Hyland:

A new website.

David Lewis:

Subway’s just did that right? I don’t know if I like the retro look or whatever look that is, but you know, we bring new and the ones that are doing it really well don’t wait a year to start bringing about change. They trust their gut, they trust their instincts and they land and make a difference.

That’s number one. Number two is they hire top talent around them. They are master conductors. They are they are the orchestra leader and they don’t try to be the sharpest tool in the shed. They will surround themselves with absolutely the top talent —the best data operations manager, the best marketing operations manager, the best analytics people, the most creative. They also work with agencies — and that’s not just a selfish plug — it is a selfish plug but it’s not just a selfish plug because they are bringing in agencies to help them get there faster and to leverage what these agencies are have been doing for hundreds of clients.

I don’t know about your resume Joe, but I don’t think I have more than seven companies on my resume, but DemandGen works with over 400. So, if you work with my team, you’ve got what to do and what not to do. The other thing that they’re doing, which is not — maybe as obvious and certainly not easy —they align like crazy. With not just sales, but with every C-executive the CFO can be your friend if you show up as an analytics driven marketer, right? You want budget? Show what you’re doing, show it isn’t working and show them that you actually know what is working. CFO can be. They’re your venture capitalist in marketing, so make sure you have a great relationship with them, same thing with the head of operations, the same thing with sales. So, they’re aligning those are a few things that that they’re working.

As I said, I wish I could tell you the stack matters. Most of it does not. I’ve seen people be successful with mediocre tools doing things really, really well. And people fail with the best tools because they’re not being very process-oriented.

I said the four Ps earlier, there’s a couple other PS, and that’s process and programming. So, one of things I said in my book Manufacturing Demand is don’t forget about these two other PS because you got to set processes and marketing. Live processes more than you ever have, and you got to learn programming. I don’t mean code I mean using technology to drive growth.

Joe Hyland:

Sure. Okay. Now, what just drives you crazy, like what do you get pulled into from your clients and you’re shocked that they still have that problem because you see the good and the bad.

David Lewis:

I think that one’s harder for me and that you hear me think about because we really try to educate our sales team on what our ICP looks like. And we will DQ, underperforming teams and cultures because we can’t fix broken and it’s harder to pour for me to find examples where we’re trying to have an All-Star cast of clients and the brands that we work within the companies that we work with are all their best in class. 60-some-odd percent of the SiriusDecisions Award winners have been our clients and think we won over our clients combined at one over 70 Marquis and Revies and Stacky awards just this past week.

So, we’re pretty selective on who we work with. But if I see a gap it’s when the leader doesn’t realize that their strength is either on the art or the science and doesn’t get that complement to their team to address their gap. I know of someone I’m thinking of right now, not a client yet, that just took a CMO role. And this person is very marketing operations and technology oriented. Well, now, they’ve got product marketing and branding and messaging and PR and if they don’t get some people that are exceptionally strong there, unless they’ve also have those skills, which is not often the case, they might not succeed in this this first-time CMO role. So, surround yourself with talent when you don’t it shows up.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. And that Echo something you said earlier on about 10 minutes ago was as a head of an organization, you don’t have to be all things — surround yourself with experts. If I was in charge of our operations, like I’m not operationally strong, it’s just not what I’m interested in is not my skill set if you had me poking around Marketo or Salesforce — we would be screwed. It’s just not my strength. We have a great marketing Ops Team, right? So, smart people know where they’re not smart and where they need where they help.

David Lewis:

So, this is Marketo assessment that we built that I told you, it’s wicked cool. At one point we needed to create an autoresponder email and need to be highly responsive. One of the guys on the team was trying to get the HTML to work. He couldn’t. He gave it to one of the other guys on the team. They got turned around in four minutes and made it exceptional.

And just, you know, having someone that you can throw something to and get back four minutes later and it’s amazing is a great just tactical example of like, “Give the ball to the person that can throw it through the hoop or get it down the court.”

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, no. No, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. All right. Well, let’s end with that. Dave, I want to thank you again, this has been fantastic. And that concludes this week’s episode. Thanks so much.

David Lewis:

All right, thank you.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 6 David Lewis appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep. 3, Megan Heuer of SiriusDecisions

ABM

Hi, and welcome once again to CMO Confessions, our bi-weekly podcast at ON24 exploring what it really means to be a leader in today’s business world. I hope you all are enjoying the series and are drawing some inspiration from our guests’ wealth of experiences.

In this episode, we have SirusDecisions’ Vice President of Research, Megan Heuer . Megan was kind enough to shares with us her insights on what goes into a successful customer lifecycle, how organizations ought to approach account-based marketing and her secret cooking Twitter account . Coincidentally — and it is an actual coincidence — we’re “officially” releasing this episode during SiriusDecisions Summit 2018, the organization’s annual B2B marketing bash in the middle of the desert in Las Vegas. If you’re not at SiriusDecisions Summit (which is going on now), I highly recommend giving this episode a listen, as it provides a good deal of insight into why SiriusDecisions is modifying its demand waterfall and its anticipating marketing trends. (I also recommend checking out this Q&A with Sirus’ Senior Research Analyst, Cheri Keith .)

If you’re at SiriusDecisions Summit, be sure to stop by booth #109 and say hi to the ON24 crew. A number of us (including me) will be out and about at the conference, taking in the sights, sounds and lessons.

Finally, if you’d like to our first batch of episodes back-to-back (and why wouldn’t you?) I’d suggest you head on over to our podbean site here. You can also check us out on both iTunes and Google Play as well.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat .

Transcript:

Joe Hyland: 

Hello, and welcome to CMO confessions, a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO here at ON24, and this week joining me is Megan Heuer who leads the SiriusDecisions research and advisory organization. Megan, how you doing today?

Megan Heuer: 

I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me as a guest.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, this is fantastic, thanks for giving us the time. Well, you’re doing some pretty cool things over there — you lead a team of exceptional analysts. I can say, in a truly genuine way, because we work really closely with you guys. And I think your mission is to help clients apply data-driven insights and best practices to the real world priorities, so they can deliver exceptional growth and customer experiences. So that’s the boilerplate and I would love to hear from you [on] what it really means to run this practice and what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis to help your clients.

Megan Heuer: 

Absolutely well, thanks for asking because I’m really excited about what we’re doing. I’ve been doing — and I say that, I’ve been doing this for, going on, 10 years — and the thing that I think is really exciting about where we are now as a company is in the way that we want to help leaders within B2B organizations is to help them understand exactly what “good” looks like. When you really think about it, there’s so many things that you can know about the behaviors of companies that outperform others — the ones that really get to the higher gross, get to the higher profitability.

There are behaviors that you can measure that say, “What do they do? How much do they invest? How do they do things? Who do they hire?” And we really want to get to a place where we have the data underlying every one of our recommendations — and we’re well on our way to it — to be able to say, “When companies outperform here are the things they do. And increasingly, what we’re building are playbooks, that tell organizations what it takes to grow faster and smarter than everybody else.”

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I love that. How do you — and this is going to be a weird question, because I think you’re right in what you just said: more and more companies, particularly given the market opportunities, are trying to fine-tune both sales and marketing, really understand the demand waterfall, which we can talk about at some point in the discussion, and really supercharge growth — what do you recommend to your clients in terms of balancing the day-to-day pressures of growth — which I have to tell you we very much feel here at ON24 — with building something, that’s built to last and really working on the brand and bringing value to clients versus just focusing on, you know, how many MQLs and pipelines did you build that day?

Megan Heuer: 

Well, here’s the interesting thing about that, and it’s a really good question because we get that a lot from our clients, like, “Hey, man. I just need to execute, like, don’t tell me to do all the strategy nonsense.” And I get that, but here’s the thing: when we look at the data, at the fastest growing companies, one of the areas that they invest in is planning. They actually have a longer-term technology roadmap than their peers. They actually do more in terms of thinking about where they should invest in why they should invest there. They’re actually thinking earlier about supporting a great post-sale customer experience than their lower-growth peers.

So, all of those things — having a great brand that’s driven by a great customer experience that is supported by employees that are inspired and engaged and have great messaging —all of those things come together in a growth business that’s really successful. It’s actually not either/or, it’s that some of the things we think slow us down are actually, when done right, and not too heavily, are the things that help us get there faster.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I love that answer. One of the reasons I went into marketing was [because] I was a psychology minor —  the art of persuasion, which is always fascinating to me — and I think you’re right. While we can use data, while we can harness data, while we can run a lean organization that makes smarter and smarter decisions to drive growth — at the at the end of the day, it’s the story that we’re telling, it’s the value we’re bringing to market that’s going to lead to those results. And I think smart marketers understand that balance.

Megan Heuer: 

Yeah, amen to that. I mean, if it was me running the show in a marketing organization, one of the biggest investments I would make is finding, cultivating, harvesting and amplifying the stories my customers were telling about their experience and the value they were getting. And, really, just the things that whatever it is I sold was helping them to do. That is why people buy. You know, our data set, hands down, 80 percent of the reason B2B buyers — and this is over many years with thousands of buyers — say they make their choice, is based on their own direct experience with the company or the experience they hear about from other people.

80 percent! Price wasn’t even close. Even value of the offering or kind of fit of the offering for their needs — not even close. It’s all about experience, and I think that is a game changer on B2B, we just have to do a much better job of harnessing it.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I was talking to Jeff Rohrs, who is the CMO over at Yext, recently and he had an interesting comment, which was most people think B2C, it’s more of an emotional decision, right? You’re pulling at someone’s heart string to make a consumer decision or consumer-related decision, because it’s their personal life. But he argued that it’s the opposite. In a B2B purchase it’s more of an emotional decision because someone is ultimately voting with their role, their job. They’re putting their, perhaps, career on the line, and that might sound extreme, but I think it’s a fair point. And you have to have real conviction for a purchase, so whether that’s experience you’ve had with a company, or through a peer — these are not just, you know, transactional decisions — these are decisions that that ultimately deal with someone’s livelihood, their own career.

Megan Heuer: 

You know you’re so right and the minute we forget about that, you know, when somebody chooses to make, particularly a big investment, in a solution for B2B, whether it’s services, whether its technology, they are really putting a lot on the line. You know, they’ve had to go to bat for you and you’ve got to make that so easy for them and so not scary for them to say, “I really trust that this is going to be the solution that does the right thing and I’m not going to end up — six months, nine months from now — really worried about whether or not my boss trust me anymore.” And that’s a big deal. That’s a big responsibility, right? For providers.

Joe Hyland: 

I love that you just said “trust.” I couldn’t agree with you more. There needs to be trust, there needs to be a relationship there. I want to I’d love to hear your thoughts on marketers, whether they’re owning the whole thing, or they’re partnering with the customer service team, on owning the customer life cycle. Because, in a SaaS world — where it’s nice to acquire a customer, but the goal is to retain them over a long period of time, hopefully for their entire lifetime — how do you see marketing shifting from owning acquisition and messaging and brand through the entire life cycle and owning a relationship post-signature?

Megan Heuer: 

Oh, my favorite topic. I actually think this is pretty much the biggest opportunity marketing organizations have right now, especially in SaaS and recurring-revenue companies of any kind. But you could kind of argue any business really needs to make its business to hold on to the customers they have — so that you’ve got this efficient lower cost and all those good things, but that’s the different soap box. Marketing’s role in post-sales — so, I can tell you what it should be and I can tell you what it is based on the data that we’ve seen.=

Joe Hyland: 

Perfect.

Megan Heuer: 

Based on a study that we did of about 600 B2B customers — we interviewed them about “What do you want in the post-sale environment versus what do you get?” Right? So, what are they seeing today? And the really interesting thing about that is those buyers basically pointed to things like online content, events, webcasts, customer stories; many of the same things that marketing produces really, really well for presale were exactly what customers wanted, albeit with different content to help them at different stages after they buy.

But they wanted the things that marketing does really well, right? And what were the things they weren’t getting? All of the things marketing does really well. In particular, content was a big miss, and those online interactions that marketing has been expert at for a really long time — really big miss. And that’s where marketing really needs to become part of the revenue engine both pre and post-sale. And just as our data shows us that, in the pre-sale, it’s basically a 50-50 split at every stage of buying — early, middle and late — in terms of buyers saying whether they want, essentially, marketing-led activities versus sales-led activities. It’s a partnership, according to the buyer, right? Now, what we actually do in sales and marketing is not necessarily that balanced at all stages, but the buyer saying they want that 50/50 split.

Turns out, in terms of sales content — and actually sales content is even in there in the post-sale — but in terms of marketing-led interactions versus access to service environments or relying on the products, they really want that same kind of balance with the things that marketing brings to the table. The trouble is very few B2B marketing organizations have invested appropriately in customer engagement resources, content, people who know how to do that — messaging that supports it. It’s really all about cross-sell and upsell after people buy — it’s not about helping them get value from what they have. And when marketing organizations do say “Hey, I need to team up with my customer success folks. I need to team up with my account managers. I need to make sure that I’m anticipating the things that my service team is going to get before they get them so that people can get self-serve and don’t have to pick up a phone, or go click to chat, whatever.” All of those things marketing can do for an incredible value make the post-sale life-cycle more profitable, but they’re just not doing it now. And it’s a big miss, but also an incredible opportunity.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I am beyond passionate about what you just talked about for a lot of the same reasons that you described. We do — so I will compliment us here, and then, I will eviscerate us at the same time — we do a great job creating content for — I’ll be really honest here — for prospective customers. We create incredibly compelling content on the role of webinars. I can get these great results, we highlight our customers to show the use cases, how they’re using webinars and creative ways make etc., etc. I think we do a phenomenal job there. And we very much care about our customers. We would we would be nowhere without them, but on the marketing side, I think we’ve kind of abused that relationship. And, so, we’ve highlighted our customers really to bring on new customers versus doing what you just said. And we found that out, somewhat the hard way, because we have a whole bunch of customers who come to webcast that we have or road-shows that we have, which are really targeted at prospective customers — and so many of our customers said, “Oh, that was the most amazing content. You guys had such creative ideas you highlighted so many unique use cases examples. You name it. I really wish I had that on a day-to-day basis because I have all these challenges coming up with creative webcasting formats, etc.”

And in that moment, I realized, boy, we’ve done a really shitty job of continuing to tell these powerful stories to our customers. So, we think we’re customer-centric, but are we in marketing? So, we’re creating a whole new division which is going to be on customer life cycle, which is meant purely to make sure our customers are successful because — I mean, you’re right the economics are simple, of course — ultimately, if our customers don’t stick around we won’t have a company. And I think we need to shift the way we’re doing things. So, I’m pretty excited about it, but I think you’re right: a lot of companies aren’t doing that, and neither were we.

Megan Heuer: 

Well, I’m so happy to hear you’re investing there because it’s just the right thing to do, the smart thing to do. And, by the way, it’s really fun. I mean that’s great work to do as a marketer.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, it’s true. So, it’s interesting, even though I said we haven’t invested in it enough, every year at the start of the year I’m asked by our sales team, or my boss, our CEO, “what’s the big focus this year?” And every single year the big focus is highlighting our customers because — you said it before in your research — people buy from peers. So, I think you said 80 percent of decisions were based on a positive experience a purchaser had had either with the company themselves or through heard through a peer. Surprise, surprise: every company has great things to say about themselves. But if you have a customer, or an unbiased person say, “Boy ON24, or SiriusDecisions, boy are they a first-class company!” That’s trust, and that comes with a higher-level recommendation and consideration, right? So, for me, if you have happy customers and you can highlight them in pretty transparent ways, you’re on the road to some great marketing.

Megan Heuer: 

Oh, my goodness, yes. You know, and I think the opportunity there is to also make sure that you’ve got a systematic way to identify who those happy customers are and giving them a way to help them shine. You can tell their story and they can be a little bit famous, too. I think there’s so many good things that come out of that orientation.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, and you’re right. It’s different for different industries, of course, but we’re marketing to marketers. I mean, the vast majority of our customers are in the marketing department and most are in demand generation. It’s easier to highlight marketers. Marketers kind of want the limelight on them and they want to be the stars for a moment. My last company was in the procurement space and I have to say the procurement department was a little more shy to tell those stories. So, depending on your industry, it can be easier or harder.

Megan Heuer: 

No doubt, and you know, I’ll tell you, even in regulated industries we’ve seen luck with this. But one other thing that we found with the post-sale world, and our data has pointed to this, but we’ve also been able to sort of get it down to a science, is think about all that we know about how buyers buy and mapping out the buyer’s journey and knowing exactly what they want to consume. Because we’ve gotten all this great data. Marketing organizations that are really doing well, are, you know, “data’s our friend,” and they’re using it well, and they have it down to a fine science, like you said, it’s really you can know what you need to do. Well guess what? You can do that in the post-sale, too! And we do not see enough people using that same rigor to define, “What are the steps that my customer goes through? What do they at each of those steps?”

And, actually, they miss really even the most important thing, during the buying cycle, we identify buying for personas, right? “Who’s our buyer. What are they need? What’s different about them? What part do they play in the purchase?” Well, we don’t do it after they buy. We don’t start to say, “Who are our customer personas and what do they need after they buy?” That has nothing to do with making a purchase decision, right? “What do they need from us, and where do they like to go to get that?” And as part of that process of defining your customer personas, just like you do buyer personas, and defining their journey, as they work with you, you can at each stage of that journey, identify the ways that they’re probably going to be willing to tell a good story to others.

So, you can create this great virtuous cycle of providing the right resources for those customers, but also making requests of them to help you with your marketing as they go through that journey in just a systematic of a way as we do for the buying cycle today.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, that’s a great point, you’re right. It comes down to having a dedicated focus, post-signature. Because the relationship can change, but it can change in a positive way, and then then you can really embrace that.

Megan Heuer: 

Oh, absolutely.

Joe Hyland: 

All right, let’s turn to your ABM practice because I think ABM is a fascinating topic for a couple reasons. First, I remember, how many years ago is this? Fifteen years ago, when I was in marketing programs, my CMO, I was at a server company not too far from where you where you work, in Maynard, Massachusetts. In the old deck headquarters, a company called Stratus Technologies, and my CMO said to me, “Hey Joe, we’re gonna hire someone to do something brand-new, really exciting. It’s called account-based marketing, and we’re only going to go after, or, only going to focus on five or ten companies and these are very large organizations that we think we can sell a lot of product into.” And that was my first experience with ABM. Now, out here in San Francisco, you can’t walk one block without seeing an advertisement for the hottest trend in in marketing, which is which is ABM — and which has only been around for five years, which of course, is not true. So, one, I’d love to hear about the practice and what you guys are doing — and I’m sure you’re advising clients in some great ways — but I’d also I’d also love to get your perspective on ABM done well, and how a lot of people get ABM wrong.

Megan Heuer: 

Good questions. Well, in terms of how we’ve approached it as a business, like you, both my boss, Tony Jaros — who leads all of our product organizations and he’s been with Sirus from the beginning, so 15 years-plus — he and I worked together many years ago at a company called the Peppers & Rogers Group that was all about identifying customer value and customer needs and really using that to power or have that data-driven strategy underneath your marketing focus areas. And, of course, what does that point you to, but an account-based strategy? So, we’ve been doing this for a very long time — the 15-20 years that it’s been around. So, when he came to Sirius, and then when I came to Sirius, we both agreed that this was an area that we needed to continue to publish and focus on because we’re both big believers in the fact that it really, really works. And in B2B it’s inescapable, so for the last 15 years really, we’ve had content in the SiriusDecisions library. And, for the last ten that I’ve been here, I’ve helped to build that. And, for the last five plus, we’ve had a dedicated practice around it.

And the dedicated practice around it was really designed to say “How do we bring some rigor to how people buy account-based marketing within B2B? How do we encourage them to adopt it?” Because we know how successful it can be, but then also “How are we a little bit more flexible than some of the ways the market had been thinking about it?” I think historically the market really thought about it as, for some people at least, the large account model, right? About these big strategic accounts. Of course, you’re doing custom things to win them, that’s not really it. There’s a lot of different ways you can say “I know the universe of accounts that I need to go after, or the business, and then, therefore, that tells me some different things that I may need to do as a marketer and also in support of the sales organization and their go-to-market strategy.”

And we really approached it from that concept of saying, “It’s not just about your largest strategic accounts. You might have a named count list, you might have a vertical list that’s very defined within a particular area.” So, what you really want to do is go back to your go-to-market model, the B2B company — and this gets that your point about ABM done well versus not so much.

ABM done well begins with simply looking at “Who do we sell to?” And really knowing who’s in your addressable market, and I don’t use that in kind of the general product orientation sense of, “Well, we sell the company’s over, you know? $50 million dollars.” Okay, that’s not an addressable market, that’s the phone book. Does such a thing still exist? That’s not helpful, right? What you need to do is say, “Who is our buyer?” And that may look different depending on different segments of the market — you may have strategic accounts, you may have named accounts, you may have SMB, you may be all over the place in terms of the different accounts — but I would define most companies not to be able to narrow that down to a list of account names.

Once you have that list of account names, and you know how your sellers are organized against pursuing those accounts, you can say, “Okay, this tells me a lot about the kinds of account-based marketing, the kinds of demand I need to create as a marketing organization.” It’s a math problem. “Who do I need to reach?” And once you have that foundation in place, you can then define the appropriate approach to demand. That may be strategic accounts, that may be what we call “named account marketing,” which is really ABM at scale, it may be something a little lighter, what I would call more “marketing to accounts” than “account-based marketing,” because you’re not really you’re saying, “Hey, this is my target list of accounts,” but you’re not necessarily changing your messaging based on actual information about each account. But that’s okay, right? For a bigger segment of the market, that may be the right thing to do.

What we’ve identified is really a range of different demand creation styles that suit all different go-to-market models, all different types of accounts. And the trick for every company is to figure out what the right balance of those approaches is and then that’s what you put in place. That’s what you resource and you up-skill to and you come up with the right tactics to support. And you work in partnership with your sellers in a much more meaningful way — and that’s ABM done well.

Joe Hyland: 

And done horribly?

Megan Heuer: 

Ha-ha! Done horribly is when you call it account-based marketing, but basically you say, “I’ve got a list of accounts. I haven’t really thought about why I want to win those accounts, or even if it’s likely that they have any interest in talking to me, and I’m going to simply send messages to them based on what I want them to know, not based on what I think they need, not based on who they are, not based on anything else, but I’m just going to send stuff because they’re my target accounts, and I’m going to put ads in front of them, and I’m going to do all these other things.” That is not account-based marketing, that’s marketing to accounts, but that’s also kind of foolish in this day and age because there’s an awful lot you can know about your accounts before you ever try to talk to them. And, to me, it’s kind of a shame if you do that and call it account-based marketing. You’re just missing an opportunity.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I love this notion of marketing to accounts versus account-based marketing. I don’t know if you’ve if you’ve written any thought leadership pieces or even just a simple perspective on it —I think it’s a great point. I mean there’s there’s a massive difference — a huge chasm — between one and the other.

Megan Heuer: 

I agree and there’s a place for both, but I actually came up with that concept a couple of years ago, basically on a rant, because I was really sick of seeing people call things account-based marketing. I’m like, “Not so much, you’re targeting accounts all right, but there’s a whole lot of things you’re not doing that you could be.” Hence, the marketing to accounts versus account-based marketing. I’m trying not to sound overly judgmental. Even though I am.

Joe Hyland: 

That’s why I ask. No, I think there’s a lot of misinformation in the market, right? There’s a huge difference between everyone you can sell to, what’s your addressable market versus who’s your ideal customer profile. So, for us, we have, I dunno, there’s 250 or 300 thousand companies we can sell to, and I assure you we don’t have that many customers, yet, but we have a much more focused group. And you’re right, it needs to be down to the names where we say, “Boy, these are companies we feel strongly that we should be partnering with or should be using us for as part of their tech stack.” And if you can’t name them, it’s not part of an ABM strategy.

And I’ve spoken with a lot of sales reps who say, “I want to do ABM to these 10,000 accounts.” And I said, “That’s different.” Like, we can’t have customized messaging for 10,000 accounts unless it’s just a little trick that we use with off-site advertising where we put their name in an ad, which I have mixed feelings on, personally.

Megan Heuer: 

Well, you know it’s funny, I agree with you now based on the state of the art, but I’ll be interested to see as AI and Predictive Analytics and other kinds of technology gets better and better and the quality of the data that B2B marketers are creating and maintaining becomes better and better to support those tools. There may be a time when you could say, “You know what? I could use some form of real account-based marketing based on what I know to a pretty large number of accounts.”

Most companies aren’t there yet, but you got at the exact issues. It really can just simply start with saying, “It’s not my theoretically addressable market, it’s my practically addressable market.” Who’s in that? And that’s really the heart of our new demand unit waterfall, right? It begins with, what is your practically addressable market because in a realistic way, who do you consider to be the people that you can sell to? Now, how do you begin to measure how well you’re doing at engaging them and closing them?

Joe Hyland:

Okay, you brought up something — I’m really glad you brought up — it’s kind of — I don’t, do you have any sports or hobbies that you partake in or that are part of your life?

Megan Heuer: 

Well, I’m a big cook. I love cooking.

Joe Hyland: 

Okay, cool.

Megan Heuer: 

I’m actually godawful, of course, but I love cooking.

Joe Hyland: 

I can’t think of a good analogy in the kitchen. It’s really interesting how a lot of brands — and this will not be relevant to a chef —change things year-to-year. It’s like [how] a sneaker changes each year, or there’s a new season and you have to get the latest model. I’m a skier and it’s amazing how little changes year-to-year with skis, but we’re marketed that we need the latest and greatest. And I think there is a misperception on the demand waterfall that every year you guys come out with a new waterfall and nothing’s different, but it’s marketed as the latest and greatest. I’d love to hear some thoughts as to what justifies the change and how you look at each different iteration?

Megan Heuer: 

Yeah, I’ll start with I really wish it were the case that there weren’t all these really cool new things that come out for the kitchen all the time where you’re like, “Really, I need a 23rd different kind of whisk! Because it’s going to make my eggs that much fluffier.” No, it’s crazy, it’s completely crazy. So, you know, happily, some cooking equipment may be less expensive than ski equipment, but it’s still so weird.

Anyhow, that said, we’ve come out with, basically, three different waterfalls in 15 years. We had our original that came out many moons ago — predates me at Sirius. Then we had what we called the “re-architected waterfall.” And that was about five years ago, and then the past year we came out with what we call the “demand unit” waterfall and the thing that I was really excited about with the demand unit waterfall is I think it’s brought together a lot of things that previous versions didn’t. Not because I don’t think we were thinking about it necessarily, but because I don’t think we, or the market, was there yet.

So, for example, when we came out with some of the original constructs in the first two waterfalls, it’s very much of a marketing process model, right? It’s all about “marketing things going in the top and marketing things come out the bottom.” But the truth is we are all about sales and marketing alignment because we know companies grow faster and are more profitable the more aligned their sales and marketing organizations are. That’s a proof-point we’ve had over many years and hundreds of companies. So, we know that works, but here we have this kind of core construct that didn’t quite go there.

The demand unit waterfall does away with all notion of marketing versus sales, or marketing and tele versus sales, is gone. It’s all one view that says we all share the audience that we need to win, our target accounts, and we both share responsibility for engaging those accounts in different ways as they progress from cold to close. So, it’s a shared sales and marketing process model, but it also brings in the thought that, you know, in the old waterfall it really began at the point of somebody raising their hand and saying, “Hey, I’m interested!” But we know, as marketers, we are able to engage those folks right from the point that we can give them a name, right? We know their accounts and then we know them, right? Um, so there’s a whole bunch of stages that the old version didn’t capture that now technology lets us do much more effectively and quantifiably. So, we’re able to start earlier, um, but we also added the concept of “you don’t begin with an infinite universe of accounts.” The previous two versions began with any account that you possibly want to engage, but it only counts that shows up as an inquiry a hand raised.

And in this version, we begin with, “What is that practically addressable market?” The market you want to go after? And then we start to measure from there to say, “How well are we doing at converting from that denominator?” That’s a really key difference. And so, the part about it being shared with sales and the part about it not beginning from, you know, “An increase showed up, a miracle occurred!” Now, you know, let the measuring begin. It’s a much more practical way of looking at the market, and it reflects the reality of the technology that’s available to us to use to do that.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I love the hybrid approach with sales as well. I think there’s a lot of ways you can have sales and marketing collaboration and there’s a lot of ways to totally screw it up. Real joint ownership on goals, I think, is setting up both groups for success. So, I’m in alignment with what you guys have just released.

Megan Heuer: 

Well, I’m excited about it. You know, and we’re seeing a lot of companies and a lot of technology providers and services providers who are excited about it, too. Because it gives, I think, a really good construct and an instruction manual for how to take advantage of some of the really cool stuff that’s out there on the market and begin to be able to put it to work in practical ways that — your CFO and your CIO, not to mention your CMO, and your head of sales — are going to be very comfortable making investments in because you can show them, “Hey, here’s how it’s going to help us.”

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I love it. All right, well, listen, I think we’ve come to the bottom of the hour. So, Megan, I want to thank you. How active are you on Twitter? I see your Twitter handle here, @megheuer. Are you active, or you like me, and you post every six months when you’re mad at an airline?

Megan Heuer: 

Hahaha, well, I do that. But you know, actually, I have a little bit of a Twitter problem from time to time. I will be in there and quite active. I’m in there most days.

Joe Hyland: 

Oh, that’s cool.

Megan Heuer: 

Yeah, it’s definitely become a little bit of a habit.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I know my wife…

Megan Heuer: 

I get a kick of it. I have a great little, you know, TweetDeck view of the world. I love it.

Joe Hyland: 

Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, my wife’s pretty active on social and makes fun of me and says, “I don’t know how you’re the head of marketing — you don’t even understand anything about social.”

Megan Heuer: 

Well, I’ll tell you, though…

Joe Hyland: 

I won’t comment on.

Megan Heuer: 

I don’t even have a Facebook page. I won’t do it. Nope.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, you know it’s interesting. I do. I’m so inactive. For me, I found two things. One, that it just ate a ton of time. And then, two, I ended up spending that time looking at pictures of my friends-from-20-years-ago’s children. Which was fine, it was great to see what my old friends were up to, but if you’re not really actively friends with someone I’m not sure why you’re spending so much time looking at their lives. So, I don’t know, for me, I’ve pretty much stopped.

Megan Heuer: 

Yeah, I’ve heard, it was Matt Heinz, actually, who the other day said he quit the stuff. And, like, “This is not bringing joy in my life, therefore out it goes.” And I can see that. You know, I use Twitter 90 percent professionally and occasionally, I’ll put in the random tweet for something else. I actually have a separate account where I post recipes, but I’m much less active on that.

Joe Hyland: 

Recipes account? Well what’s that account? That’s the account I want.

Megan Heuer: 

Hahaha. Well, you’ll see how long it’s been since I put anything up there, but it’s @frommegskitchen.

Joe Hyland: 

Okay, that’s cool. That sounds interesting. Anyway, Megan, this was fantastic — thank you so much. I really appreciate the time and I hope you have an awesome day. Thanks for tuning in everyone.

Megan Heuer: 

Thanks. Everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for enjoying our, thanks for inviting me.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 3, Megan Heuer of SiriusDecisions appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep. 4: Yext’s Jeff Rohrs

CMMA Blog

Hi folks, and welcome to another episode of CMO Confessions, our bi-weekly podcast covering all things marketing. Once again, I hope everyone listening is enjoying this series and are drawing up some inspiration from, frankly, some kick-ass marketers.

This week’s guest, Jeff Rohrs, coincidentally, is quite familiar with kicking ass. Jeff is the CMO of Yext — a leading Digital Knowledge Management organization helping marketers and brands manage their image and data in the age of voice assistants — but he also has a stunning background in the B2B sector as both a leader and a writer. He’s also one of the few marketers I know with a Juris Doctorate (read: law) degree.

Pretty accomplished, right? That’s not even the half of it. Jeff has few books under his belt, co-authoring tomes like The Everywhere Brand  and AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers . Additionally, Jeff has previously served as the Vice President of Marketing Insights for Salesforce and ExactTarget.

You can find Jeff and his latest insights on his Twitter feed, @jkrohrs . Additionally, you can download his latest white paper, How Voice Search Changes Everythingright here .

Finally, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean . Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes and Google Play stores.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat .

Transcript:

Joe Hyland: 

Hello, and good day to everyone. I want to welcome you to our next episode of CMO Confessions. The idea here is this is a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24, and joining me today, and this week is Jeff Rohrs, CMO of Yext. Jeff, great to have you here.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Thanks, great to be here.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, you guys are on one hell of a ride. So, a little background on the Yext and then Jeff, I think people would love to hear your perspective on the company. Yext went public this past year, a leading digital Knowledge Management Platform — the DKM space. Do you want to give give a little more background on what you guys are doing over at Yext?

Jeff Rohrs: 

Sure, so folks, you know, basically understand our mission, and we we’ve had this mission since Howard Lerman and Bryan Distelburger really kind of founded this iteration of the company. And that mission is to simply give companies control over the brand experiences that their customers have across all of the Digital Universe intelligence services they use today, be it Google or Facebook or Yelp or navigation services other things.

Our own research and the way that things are evolving showcase that the consumer has moved obviously away from the desktop. Not entirely, but their time is now majority spent on mobile, whether it’s search navigation in the moment kind of the interests, and so that means we’ve moved away from a world of ten blue links to one that’s controlled by knowledge and answers.

You know, especially now that you see the rise of voice assistance — you’re often asking it, “where should I go for lunch?” and “What is the answer to this question?” And so, we really are that platform that companies use to make sure that all of their customer-critical facts are correct in the moment, be it locations, store hours, photography that’s seasonal and fresh menu items. For doctors, you know, what insurance do they accept? And so that whole world we call digital knowledge and our space we call it Digital Knowledge Management.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, that’s really exciting. And, so successful that you’re able to go public so congratulations on that.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Well as anyone who’s gone public will tell you that the beginning of the ride. So that is that’s just one wonderful date, and it was a wonderful experience, last year, to go through that.  But now it’s about meeting and exceeding expectations and making sure we continue to build kind of product that our customers need to achieve their goals.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, and working hand to hand with with your attorneys, which, I’m sure, any marketer can attest to is it lovely experience.

Jeff Rohrs: 

I shook hands with our general counsel yesterday, because one of my deep dark secrets that I’m a recovering attorney.

Joe Hyland: 

Well, actually, you lead me into my first into my first question, which is: I know a few CMOs who also have their JD. Walk us through how that happens.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Yeah, so, this being CMO confessions, I don’t have any degree in marketing. I don’t have any degree in Business. My undergraduate at Miami of Ohio was in Mass Communications and sociology, and I did a lot of stuff around radio. So, I was a DJ at a classic alternative rock radio station called 97x.

Joe Hyland: 

Really?

Jeff Rohrs: 

Yeah, if you’ve ever seen Rain Man it’s the one where they go, “Bam, 97X the future of rock’n’roll!” It was sort of amazing experience and out of that I started a music video show on campus that ran on, kinda, local cable access and got to interview all these different artists — like Trent Reznor and Bob Mould — and, basically, [I] just caught the bug for artists and artists’ rights. And so I thought, “Well, you know, I don’t feel, graduating from college, that I’ve got enough, you know, book smarts and world smarts.” And so I decided, “I’ll go to law school to do a dual degree, so I’ll get my masters in mass communication, and  also learn how to protect artists’ rights.”

I was woefully naive, got myself in six figures of debt before it was fashionable. And then discovered I had to go practice law afterward. I, fortunately, went to a great firm by the name of Baker & Hostetler, practiced there for a couple of years doing what I lovingly referred to as “whatever-they-told-me-to law,” which was mainly litigation. And the thing that turned me was — at the end of my dual degree program, my time in Boston, I went to Boston University —  they had installed, in the mass communication department, in 1994, a state-of-the-art Mac lab — power macintoshes, like fresh off the assembly line.

And I remember Jim Lingle — the instructor, who had previously worked at Apple, hauling in, you know, carrying this very heavy one-gig hard drive — and I took the first multimedia classes involving the internet in 94 at Boston University, caught the bug, but I had to go pay those debts, so I went to the DOS world of Baker & Hostetler, and instantly realized I got to pave my way back towards technology. Which I did in a series of jobs working at LexisNexis, and then an end-to-end consulting firm that burst when the bubble burst called Future Next and then — it started out as strictly an email marketing Services firm — but it grew into a full service digital agency as I became president called Optimum. That’s where I forged our partnership with ExactTarget and Scott Dorsey the founder of ExactTarget came calling after we won Partner of the Year. And he said “Hey, would you ever consider joining us?” And I said, “Hey, for the right price, I’d consider a lot of things.” And that led to a year-long conversation and I joined there in May of 2007.

Helped build-out thought leadership, content marketing, did a lot of around our annual event connections — was really kind of a bit of a, I called myself a Jack Black/Harvey Keitel, mix — so infotainment and fixer on some stuff. Had the great pleasure of working under Tim Kopp, who was the CMO and now is with Hyde Park Ventures — and has a great blog, by the way, called CMO VC if anybody’s interested — and rode that wave going public with ExactTarget. A year later where acquired by Salesforce, right in the midst of me writing a book. And that book came out in time for Dreamforce that year. It’s amazing what Wiley publishing will do when they realize they have distribution at Dreamforce. And then, lo-and-behold, two years into the Salesforce piece, I got recruited into Yext. With good timing, because I was interested in stretching my abilities and seeing what I could do and it was a great opportunity.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, that’s a cool ride, but one question I have is, I think I know the answer, but I’m curious to get your take is how curated was your career path? So here, I ask because hearing it in reverse, it sounds like you had everything planned out. Did it feel that way as it was happening?

Jeff Rohrs: 

So, I will say in a broad sense, when I got to the to the law firm, I recognized pretty quickly that I was “Which one of these is not like the others?” You know, when you get your reviews as a lawyer, and the number one common is “Jeff is very creative.” That’s not meant as a compliment. You’re thinking about what you should be doing. So, I always likened it, and I always thought in my mind as this very long circuitous path that I was going to take back towards technology and communications.

And what happened, when I left from the firm to LexisNexis, it was in the mid 90s, and this was back when LexisNexis — it’s a legal research service for those who don’t know — it had installed PCS and installed software at all of the major law schools and law firms in the country. So, the model of a rep was education, sales and tech support — so, you literally crawl around on the floor to fix, when a competitor had taken out your landline, or done something, or install new software.

Well, right in the midst — less than, I think, a year, into that role — they migrated and launched Lexus.com. We would now call it, “they moved to the cloud.” So, they changed the model from the install software to cloud-based technology. So, they’d still provide the computer, but now it’s going to Lexis.com. And I got to be on some product review teams and there was a competitive product that came out — not to get to in the weeds, but, the gold standard of citation checking in the law, the way that you make sure case law is still good for you to cite in a brief is called “Shepherds.” And Lexus acquired that and that was an editorial product — thousands of editors making sure the case law was good, updating it regularly with paper updates and then they migrated to electronic. Well, Westlaw, the competitor at the time, was innovating and they came up with a product called “Keysight” that didn’t use any human editors and purported to give you the same quality that Shepherd’s had.

But the truth was it was more like the from the school of “launch and fix it afterwards.” And in law you just couldn’t have that. So, if you were relying on the information you’ve had in Keysight at the time, there was a high degree what you were relying on was wrong and that could subject you potentially to malpractice or other very, very bad outcomes. So, to cut the story short, I created some marketing selects that were competitive and compared this, and I put him up in my law firms and my fellow reps saw them, and they said, “Hey can we use those?” And I said, “Sure here’s the files.” And they used them, and then I got this call from corporate one day that said, “Hey, did you put these together?” And I’m like expecting to get like spanked, and instead they said, “Hey, do you mind if we take this program national?” And I’m like, “Okay.” So, the light bulb kind of went off.

I interviewed for a product marketing job. Got offered it for less money than I was making in the field and I began to connect the dots that, “You know what? That world wasn’t right for me, I need to go over to the agency world.” And, so, each step was a step where I knew I wanted to get to something different — explore expand my abilities — and this was when the internet didn’t have books to train you it didn’t have rules. I mean, one of the the funny footnotes to my career as I was the first person to do paid search marketing for Sherwin-Williams, the paint company. That was a client, and I was buying the word “paint” for five cents a click on Ovature and Google.

Joe Hyland: 

Ah, the good old days.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Yeah, and here’s the here’s the punchline: they canceled the program or when it ran its course. They did not renew because we were sending too much traffic to their website, and they were embarrassed about their website at the time.

Joe Hyland: 

Love it.

Jeff Rohrs: 

This is, like, early 2000s, and so I’ve seen some things, but I’m of that generation where we grew up and had to figure out the internet —and internet marketing and digital marketing and then mobile marketing and then social marketing — as we went along. And so my communications background actually was probably the best I could have, because, at its heart, marketing is how do you emotionally connect with buyers and motivate action out of that. And there is also a huge interpersonal part to it in terms of marketing and leadership about how do you actually work with people? How do you see the forest for the trees? How do you balance short and long-term thinking? All of that.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you anymore. I think great marketing is the art of persuasion. I think in this high-growth, pressure-packed world that many CMOs or marketers find themselves in uh, it’s easy to lose that vision and being able to see the forest through the trees because you have one redwood right in front of you which is, you know, “I need to increase pipeline right now or tomorrow.”  And you very much feel that being a publicly traded company where every quarter you have to release your earnings, right? Your performance. How do you weigh those two?

Jeff Rohrs: 

Great question. First, you know, I benefit by working with one of the legendary CFOs, Steve Cakebread, who was the CFO when Salesforce went public when Pandora went public. And so, you know, his team and my team worked very close together to understand the financial implications of what we do in marketing and making sure that we’re aligned so nothing is, you know, out of alignment on that quarterly basis. And so that’s a very, very critical role, but to get to the funnel part of this, right? The demand generation piece, there, I’ve been very fortunate as well as this has evolved.

When I first came onboard I didn’t focus on demand because we had a pretty good demand process in place. I needed to focus on brand, messaging, positioning, category, and, honestly, our field marketing was critically important because we were starting to move from a centralized New York sales team to one that was regional and global. And I am a firm believer that, in B2B marketing, it is a far more emotional personal sale than anything in B2C. And the reason is that your buyers have their jobs on the line. And, so, field marketing sponsored marketing owned events are critical because it allows you to connect as an individual. And a B2B buyer ultimately wants to do business with people they like, and trust, and be a part of something. And I was fortunate in my career to see that materialize at ExactTarget, with our “orange culture” and our connections user conference and our 360 user groups, and then, through the acquisition, got to come in into a mature organization in Salesforce that was still growing by leaps and bounds, and see what they had done with their, Ohana, Hawaii-inspired culture that Marc Benioff had championed. And their community.

And to see what they’re doing right now, with the Trailblazer stuff, is phenomenal — they’ve really given their community this amazing engagement. And so now to come back to “how do you balance demand in all of this?” You have to be looking at the funnel, certainly, you have to be driving enough leads and marketing influence, but also, you know, renewal, upsell, customer referral — all of that is another piece of it that, as marketing, you often share — and I share with revenue and I share with our chief customer officer.

And, so, I feel very fortunate to work with some great people in that regards. So, we have a holistic approach. That’s not to say there haven’t been fire drills, and you know, and there hasn’t been a lot of change, but each step of the change has made us better and stronger, and we’ve got, what we feel, is a pretty good team and machine built so that we can mobilize as we need to.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah. I’m gonna go back to something you said a couple minutes ago, and truthfully is refreshing to hear, that B2B purchasing decision is emotional because I couldn’t agree with you anymore. Someone’s job, is in fact, on the line.

I’m a buyer, and I buy anything, I’m saying “I endorse this I recommended and, financially, I’m backing this.” I think a lot of people feel that on the B2C side, this is an emotional decision, but that on the B2B side it’s purely numbers — this is purely driven by ROI or a business decision And I think a lot of marketers, at least on the B2B side, are losing their way with the shift to making more data-driven decisions. Which is fantastic, I don’t think anyone would argue against using data, but I think that emotional element is as present as it ever has been because, as you said, these ultimately are decisions that impact someone’s job — and their job is their livelihood.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Sure, you know, striking that balance between the data driven and the human, emotional driven is the constant struggle I think that you have in marketing today. What we have done, and benefit from, is really aligning well with our sales and our pipeline side of the house.

So, there’s been great leadership added there and the way that I do it in my organization is I have you know direct line reports on a marketing core team. The person who owns the marketing operations demand side of that has a strong dotted line to my counterpart on the revenue side, who owns pipeline, BDR, SDR, etc. And, sometimes, you’ll see, and I saw this in my tenure, you’ll see BDR and SDR, you know that inbound-outbound layers, swing sometimes between marketing and revenue depending on the maturity of the organization, who’s who in the zoo, etc. And the key is that, that is a shared resource, no matter where it sits. They have to be on message. They have to have the right uh marketing assets. They have to have the right sales methodology. And so, that strong dotted line of that leader, she actually sits over on that leadership team, not just mine.

And that’s been a critical piece to make sure that we have that two-way street between revenue and marketing. And then we have other leaders of mine, who similarly have those strong dotted lines, reporting to other leaders in the org — some of them sitting on their leadership teams others, it’s a little bit more informal — but I have found that, A) that creates much better alignment, so there’s no “us versus them,” and B) it creates opportunities for personal growth for those leaders and their teams because they don’t just see and benefit from my experience, or what we experienced together — they benefit from greater alignment with revenue or marketing product and strategy or our experience with our CEO, and having direct project relationships with Howard Berman, our CEO.

So that’s been interesting. Because there is no one single roadmap, but in order to strike that balance I think you can’t be an insular marketing organization.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, I agree, and I think your point on cross-pollination is a great point. Which is having people sit in different groups and work with different groups and really live that. That’s how you get away from this bullshit of sales versus marketing — there should be alignment and it starts with the team. So, I think that’s a great point.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Well, and you need great leaders on that side of the fence who appreciate what marketing brings to the table as well. And, again, I have been very fortunate to have those kind of relationships with our revenue leadership.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier on a book you wrote, and you’ve written a couple books, right? You just released the “Everywhere Brand,” I think this past year, and then you had “Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers” right at the transition between ExactTarget and Salesforce. Any other books or just those two?

Jeff Rohrs: 

Actually, Everywhere Brand is more of an e-book that we released, so I don’t want to make people think it’s a 200 to 300 page-turner. But the Everywhere Brand, or was really one of a number of things I’ve written like that over the years. So, actually, Audience, my book that I wrote that was published by Wiley, was inspired by a lot of research e-book series I did at ExactTarget called “Subscribers, Fans and Followers.” So that was great to have that opportunity to kind of punctuate that research series and the ExactTarget experience by putting that book together.

Joe Hyland: 

Okay, when I was at Kronos, we authored a few books. We did it the opposite way, and I’m curious to get your take on this. So, for us, this was an 18-month process — we were compiling all this research, and Kronos is a workforce management company, it was it was workforce management specific in the manufacturing segment — fascinating, I know — and so after 18 months we released this mammoth book. For us, then, it was, truthfully, a demand gen asset for a few years. A guy by the name of Greg Gordon authored it and we put him out on the speaking circuit. So, you’re saying you did it [write a book] the opposite way, where you had created smaller pieces of content over the year, or years, and then towards the end said “Wow, there’s enough here for to justify a larger publication a larger book.” Is that fair to say?

Jeff Rohrs: 

It is, to a degree.

So, the “The Subscribers, Fans and Followers” came out of Morgan Stewart, and I. Who’s (Morgan Stewart) now principal and founder of Trend Line Interactive, a great email consultancy based in Austin. He and I came up with this idea that — and again this would have been, like 2000, late 2008 or 2009 — “Hey there’s a lot of talk that email is dead, that’s not true. All these emerging social channels are trying to position themselves that they are the be-all, end-all. We’re old enough and experienced enough to know the truth: that everything settles into its own kind of place — and we should do some research and ask consumers how they actually view the relationships they have with brands through Twitter, through Facebook, through email, through these different channels.” And so that gave rise to the research series. And as the data came back we realized we were sitting on multiple publications, not one.

So, we split it out into —the first series, I think, was six publications with kind of a summary — 7th, and it was at that time I realized there’s a book in this Morgan, and I both did and so we started to try and pitch. But [we] couldn’t get interest, but also, we had day jobs, and it was just hard to do. But then the series took off so well with our intended audiences of the C-suite of the marketers we were pitching, and our own sales team — they were using a very successfully in their conversations — that we then expanded the series. And we started researching other things, [like] “When is your mobile Independence Day?”

That was one of the subsequent ones — that was the idea, and you might remember this — for years everybody would predict “This is the year of mobile. This is the year of mobile. This is a year of mobile.” It’s hard to believe now. And we came out with that and we said “Look, the year of mobile is when you get your smartphone because your life completely changes and here’s what that means.”

And so as that continued then finally got an inbound call from Wiley, and they said “Hey would be interested in doing this.” And so that finally served as the catalyst.

But — at the core of what I’d been doing — I created the content marketing team at ExactTarget and we were doing content marketing before there was content marketing. “Subscribers, Fans and Followers,” you know, it started kind of right around the same time that my friend, Joe Pulizzi, was really spinning up Content Marketing Institute. He and I didn’t even know each other — we lived in Cleveland, just minutes from each other, and it took Ann Handley of Marketing Profs to introduce us — and now he’s “retired,” but that’s a whole other podcast about Joe Pulizzi at some point — but it was validating to see what he was doing and what I was doing, and trying to accomplish, because we had to educate.

And that’s often what we have to do in MarTech still today, is educate. Because all you have to do is look at that [landscape] and look at — what is it? Over 5,000, 8,000 different MarTech companies today? And, so, you have to educate as to what is your space? What is the value deliver? How are you differentiated? Why should you prioritize budget for this solution over other solutions because everybody’s knocking on your door. And, so, I feel like that was a really good thing for me to latch on as a communicator as a writer and have carried that through at Yext — because “The Everywhere Brand,” that is a piece of content that’s meaningful and generates conversation.

I’m actually going to be doing a keynote at Retail Week, live, in London, shortly about that — we have another one that my colleague Dwayne Forrester did about how voice search changes everything. So, it really is tapping into the Zeitgeist that connects with our product and our value proposition but creating something of value to that reader and that marketer.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, key word there being “value.” It’s amazing how a lot of companies want to be everything to all people. And focus is a beautiful thing and, I mean, I know, in our space, you’re right there’s —  that one Scott Brinker diagram that everyone points to —  5,500 or 6,000 B2B MarTech companies. I mean, you need to have a carved out a niche and you need to make sure our solving a real problem, or you perish. I mean, 4,500 of those companies will fail.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Well, all credit goes to our CEO, Howard Lerman. We have an annual planning process in which we have these goals, and all the teams have goals for this planning process. We also established “un-goals,” if you will, and they clearly delineate what we aren’t. And that focus was one of the reasons I was attracted to the company because it had already demonstrated — and I joined almost three years ago now — the ability to be multi-product, but then to spin off really good ideas, technical ideas, into a separate company when it wasn’t relevant to the core mission of the company.

As I’ve seen us evolve, as I’ve seen the product that strategy team grow and cement, we still have that laser focus on what is our ultimate vision. We want to put companies in control of their information everywhere. So, the customer-critical facts. What are the things that are going to allow that person from point A to point B to discover you? Whether it’s unbranded search or branded search, whether it’s you’re on a map, or you’re in, perhaps, a service like Uber. These are all the places this stuff is to be serving. You know, whether you’re using a UI, [like] text, voice or, [even], Google now has its Google Lens that you can hold it up in the real world and you can get information about places around you. So, all this is coming so fast and furious that focus ultimately, I think, is a huge way to distinguish yourself.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, focus. It’s a huge way to distinguish yourself and it’s also, in my opinion, critical to running the business.

You just gave a good example, it’s critical and marketing and sales decisions — it’s sometimes what you’re not going to focus on, or not going to do — is just as important as what you will focus on. And I think it’s sometimes easy to miss that, right? When you can sell to so many people, or quote-unquote “help” so many people.

So, Jeff, just to wrap up one final question — a two-part question. What do you love most about — and this can be marketing or your current job — and what do you hate the most? What do you loathe doing?

Jeff Rohrs: 

Sure, it’s all start there. I loathe having to sort through my inbox every day and delete the unbelievably voluminous number of unsolicited emails that I get from other company’s SDRs or sales people. I have a folder called “Bad Sales Emails,” and I don’t even — I mean, I delete some of them, and then the worst of the worst I’ll throw over there— and someday, I’ll write a book. Because there are, you know, there’s the desperation tactic of, “This is the fourth time I’ve contacted you if you don’t if you don’t contact” and then it turns into the threat tactic which is, “If you don’t respond to this, I’m gonna stop talkin to you.” Okay, that’s sounds good to me.

Joe Hyland: 

That sounds funny, I never asked you to talk to me in the first place.

Jeff Rohrs:

Exactly! You know, and then there are the ones that — I showed this to a colleague yesterday — I got this inbound email that, literally, if you would print it out, it was probably three full pages. It was so intense. You just don’t have the time to do that. And so that’s why the thing I hate most because it not only takes my time, but it reminds me of the desperation and the bad marketing tactics and the things that exist out there.

And what it drives me to do is actually partner with our revenue and our rev ops team to be involved in our sales onboarding process — and we just had our sales kickoff and I was involved in some training sessions there — because I want our people to understand and feel that pain and remember the person on the other end is a human being, so why would they respond to your email if you’re not providing any value? And “Your threats mean nothing to me, you know, select the number; Do you want me to respond? You want me to respond in three weeks?” I don’t care about any of that. And the ones that do penetrate, I was asked this by a rep as well today, are the ones that convey value and are respectful and understand who I am. That’s how you kind of get through. So, that’s probably the thing I hate most.

The thing I like most is working with you know a great team. I’ve had the opportunity to do that over the course of my career, and Yext is no exception, and, honestly, kind of a pinnacle. Because, now being in this kind of a leadership position, I’m working with some talent that I see — and they already have great careers — but, you know, they have really great futures and the opportunity to empower them to learn more, to become better marketers, to become better business people, to understand the sales and marketing gamut, but also understand the customer journey and customer pain points and all of that. That is, that’s highly enjoyable and is the reason that I get up and go to work. It’s not only to achieve our goals that we’ve set from a mission standpoint — of that idea of perfect information everywhere and putting customers in control of that —but also to work with such a great group of people who inspire me and are doing amazing things and will continue to.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah, those are two great answers. Life’s too short to work with assholes, right? So, it’s incredibly rewarding when you can help great people along their career journey. Just work with smart great people.

Jeff Rohrs: 

It absolutely is. And I want to emphasize that is not just the folks on your team, that goes down to, you know, folks on the facility staff. We have we have a killer facility staff, they are so positive. And I mentioned that because, as a marketing organization, we’re not just doing external events we’re doing internal events, too. And so you’ve got to — you’re building relationships that are going to last you a long time — and I’m always blown away by people that treat facilities staff horribly. I’m like, “I want to be friends with the person who has all the keys.” That seems to be a good relationship to have.

So, you know, it’s fun because, the organization, the other thing that we just did with our annual planning days, we had our entire crew in from around the globe and they were broken into 15 to 20 person tour groups, and there were 18 tour stops around our office, in which different groups had 10 minutes to present. Our marketing one was a brainstorm around campaigns and our “onward” theme — Onword is our annual conference — and it allowed people to see, “Oh, marketing, actually, is challenging. This brainstorming thing, like, creatively, is challenging.” But they also got to see other parts of the business in really interesting ways.

And that’s an example of — we have our fingerprints on that a little bit, that’s our CEOs vision — marketing can have an impact on the culture, and how the organization feels about itself, and how responsive it is to its folks and whether they feel empowered, and they have career opportunities as well. And, so, viewing it holistically, it’s not just about demand —although, that’s the thing you ultimately get measured on is, “Are you hitting the numbers?” — there is a much broader conversation where you can add a lot of value to the organization.

Joe Hyland: 

First of all, those are some cool ideas you guys, have and some cool things you do. Yeah, marketing gets to work on some pretty cool things, and I think getting insight into that for the rest of the company is rewarding, right?  And good for you…

Jeff Rohrs: 

We’re the guys who got to book Luke Skywalker for that last year. So, I mean, Mark Hamill isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Joe Hyland: 

Yeah — there are worse professions. Okay, Jeff, listen, this was fantastic. Thank you so much.

That’s all the time we have for this week’s episode of CMO Confessions. You can find us on Twitter at @ON24 or ON24.com. For Jeff, it is @JKROHRS or yext.com All right, incredibly exciting. Thanks so much and I’ll talk to you guys later.

Jeff Rohrs: 

Thanks a lot.

The post CMO Confessions Ep. 4: Yext’s Jeff Rohrs appeared first on ON24 .

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CMO Confessions Ep 5: HubSpot’s Kipp Bodnar

Books

Hi folks, and welcome to another episode of CMO Confessions, our bi-weekly podcast covering all things marketing.

For this episode, we got someone who knows content inside and out. I’m talking, of course, of Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot. Kipp’s work involves coordinating HubSpot’s global inbound marketing strategy, which means he does a lot of everything on top of a lot of writing. In fact, Kipp quite literally wrote the book on B2B social media marketing in his tome, The B2B Social Media Book: Becoming a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email and More .

In this episode, we discuss what went into producing his book, what goes into book promotion and how marketers ought to look to long-term growth  — even if a CEO is short-sighted.

As always, you can find Kipp and his latest insights on his Twitter feed, @kippbodnar .

Finally, if you’re interested in listening to our growing podcast series, you can find all of our episodes right here in podbean . Alternatively, you can also find us on both iTunes  and Google Play  stores.

Without further ado, welcome to CMO Confessions. Let’s chat .

Transcript

Joe Hyland:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of CMO confessions a weekly B2B sales and marketing podcast that explores what it really means to be a marketing leader in today’s business world. I’m Joe Hyland, CMO here at ON24 and joining me. This week is Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot. Kipp, how are you doing today?

Kipp Bodnar:

I’m doing great, man. How are you?

Joe Hyland:

I am fantastic. Thanks again for joining me, I really appreciate it.

Kipp Bodnar:

Happy to be here.

Joe Hyland:

So, I found out that we have a few things in common. One being a huge marketing dork — something that seems like you take a lot of pride in — the other, perhaps, an unhealthy love of ketchup.

Kipp Bodnar:

I do love ketchup guy get a rap for that. The waitresses at the restaurant always look at me when I ask for a second ketchup. I’m like, “Yeah, can I just have some ketchup for the table?” I want a safe space, I don’t want any judgment.

Joe Hyland:

When I was last in London, they have those very small tubes of ketchup that is pretty small, sufficient for, like, seven french fries. When I asked for more, our marketing leader for EMEA was like, “Joe this is not normal.” And he just sat there and watched. So anyway.

Kipp Bodnar:

I do like the chili sauce that they use in London in Ireland and everything with their chips. I like that trend as well though.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah chili sauce and chips are awesome.

Joe Hyland:

Exactly. Well, let’s talk about dorking out on marketing and geeking out. That’s really what we’re here today to discuss. So, I guess I’ll kick it off with a question: what’s your what’s your biggest pet peeve in marketing or in your role? What do you struggle the most with?

Kipp Bodnar:

Oh, two different things there. Pet peeve in marketing is people who do incremental things. Marketing’s job is to try to do new stuff that is interesting and creative and solves the problems our prospects and our customers face. And if you just kind of increment on everything you’ve done you lose all your leverage, you lose all your advantage and you’re just boring.

So that’s pet peeve. Things that I most struggle with: Scales real, man. Everybody tells you, “Oh, scale’s hard.” No, scale’s really hard. Scale is really, really hard. Let me tell you that Marketing in six languages and always having somebody doing marketing any hour of the day regardless, whatever you have to do that hour of the day. That’s not easy. That’s hard. Anybody who tells you that’s not hard. I don’t know insane or something. It’s hard.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. Well, I think the combination of those two answers is it makes it really difficult — is, one, scale is, and I couldn’t agree with you any more, scale is so real scale is difficult. And what worked before won’t necessarily work going forward, right? So, just trying to do incremental things or stuff is not is not the recipe for success, but that’s challenging because it might be what led to success up until now.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yes, it’s hard. Doing new stuff is hard. You know we call it “dragging the spreadsheet,” you can always just drag the spreadsheet out another year. Estimated another 10% improvement on this thing.

Joe Hyland:

I love that phrase. That’s fantastic. I never heard that.

Kipp Bodnar:

We talk about it all the time. You can’t drag the spreadsheet. It’s kind of colloquialism here. The flip side of it is like it’s easy to do too much new stuff.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar:

Right? If you do something new and it works, you got to drag the spreadsheet in a while. You need to basically figure out like your point of maximization of return of that discovery and that effort — you do have to do it for a little while. But still, like if you only do that and you don’t do any new stuff, then you’re eventually just gonna kind of shrink and shrink over time.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. So, you’ve been at HubSpot for a while, right man?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, year nine now.

Joe Hyland:

Wow, that’s crazy. How big was the team when you started? And compare it to now.

Kipp Bodnar:

I think the company was coming to about 100 people and I think we’re now like 2,200 people maybe.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s quite the ride.

Kipp Bodnar:

Somewhere around there? So, it’s definitely a change and 2,200 people across offices all around the world — so that makes it a little different too.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, that’s scale.

Kipp Bodnar:

Scale’s real man.

Joe Hyland:

So, I think there’s a lot of reasons people respect HubSpot so much. As a marketer, what you guys have built, the beyond the brand, I think that category creation is just something that’s admirable. And the commitment to content is, I think, the way to build a phenomenal marketing department — also a phenomenal company. But a lot of CEOs don’t either have the patience for that or the respect or recognition for how critical marketing is for growth. I think, when I started in marketing, we were kind of the T-shirt Department, right? You know, whatever sales needed but don’t be strategic at all and you know the tchotchkes.

I’ve seen that change a lot. But I still see a lot of CEOs who still look at marketing as the janitorial department of the executive staff. I’d be curious to know your thoughts, one at HubSpot, but also just in general, how CEOs are viewing marketing.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m good with the broom. I can clean it the best on them. Not my preferred skill though. I think that question is very different depending on where you are in the world, one. There are lots of different markets at different levels of maturation. You know, marketing is still much earlier on and its growth and life cycle in countries in Latin America and Japan. Other folks are a bit further along in a lot of the European countries — very interesting in that way.

The reality is that a lot of CEOs are short-term growth focused. And when your short-term growth focused you want to do bad crappy things that get you results in the short term — cold email, cold call, have a giant outsource call center in some far-off land to try to qualify leads for you — and do all of these things that have huge, huge long-term negative brand drag, prospects perception drag, customer perception drag. And quite frankly, it’s just gonna all be illegal soon. I think if you look at GDPR, for example, I mean GDPR essentially makes cold calling, for all intents and purposes, pretty illegal. There’s some B2B intent arguments to be made, but even then, like, the first thing you do if you’re in Europe and you cold call somebody you’re going to tell them, “Oh, by the way, I have to disclose to you before we start our cold call that I found your information on LinkedIn…” And it’s like, you actually think that’s gonna be effective? Like is that actually gonna work? Like, what person you like, “Oh, yeah, these are the people I want to work with.”

And so, I think, because of that, the brute force short-term thinking — like marketing can get undervalued and get a bad rap — and part of it is that I think it’s on the onus of everybody who’s in the marketing profession to focus on the business strategy and to be deeply integrated into the business and understand where the core opportunities are and make sure that the marketing strategy and the effort that you’re putting against actually like foots with that well. I mean, oftentimes this problem comes out of the marketers and the core leadership team being disconnected in terms of strategy and priorities there. And so, I think it’s our job to actually get aligned and make that happen.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, where you ended is really where I sit on that point. I think it’s marketing’s job to ensure that marketing is strategic, right?

Kipp Bodnar:

You have to be good at marketing. You’ve also have to be good at your job. Like it’s hard. Marketing is a hard job. There’s a reason that the lifespan of a CMO is sub two years, you know.

Joe Hyland:

It’s true. And few CEOs come up through marketing. So, it’s a challenge you have as being a head of marketing is that you’re reporting to someone who might not necessarily have ever practice your craft, right? So, yeah, you’re right, the onus is on you to ensure that they understand the value of it.

Kipp Bodnar:

Absolutely.

Joe Hyland:

You ran demand gen prior to being CMO, right?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, I did.

Joe Hyland:

So, how do you — it’d be interesting to see if this answer would change from when you were the head of demand gen versus owning it all now — how do you balance…

Kipp Bodnar:

Almost always is probably the answer to that.

Joe Hyland:

Joking, aside probably — perspective changes a little bit. How do you balance building pipeline and building that demand with the kind of broader brand and content messaging?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah for us, those things aren’t as much in conflict as most people, right? Because our content is how we get people to discover, learn about, not just our brand, but also our products, and get that initial engagement with us.

So, content is core to how we generate demand. Where you actually have that conflict is you know — if you think about content, I think there’s kind of two types of content in the world. There’s the content that your audience knows they want and your job is to give them what they want. And then there’s the content that your audience doesn’t know that it wants, and your job is to get the audience to believe what you want them to believe because you know, you’re right. And, if your job is demand generation, you really only actually really want the first part, which is the giving them what they want because your conversion rates are higher, your reach is higher your funnel looks way better when you look at the numbers.

If you run marketing and you’re a CMO you have to have both because you lose your brand if you only give people what you want, you don’t have a brand you’re not a point of view, you don’t have perspective — all those things. So, I think that’s probably the biggest change when you’re thinking about just demand generation versus the overall story of the business, the brand, and how everything that marketing does works together.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, and how about your — I’m not sure what you guys call them at HubSpot — your sales development team or the qualification arm. Are they kind of the intermediary between your group and sales? Are they only touching inbound leads or people who have expressed interest? What’s that relationship look like?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah for us, it’s interesting because those folks have a bunch of opportunities. They have people who are coming in and actively engaging with us and have expressed kind of a marketing or sales problem through the content they consume. They are people who chat with us on our website or on Facebook Messenger, one of kind of our instant interaction messaging channels — having l-time conversation. We have an amazing free CRM product and we have lots of people coming in and signing up and using that and so they are also connecting with users who are in their journey on our free products to understand the problems they’re trying to solve and if they might be a better fit for, you know, one of our professional products, for example.

And so, they’re not doing much of any what you would consider cold would be. Maybe they’ve they’re talking to a user or somebody from a company and they’re like, “Oh actually really need to talk to a different person at that company.” So, I need to go and like find the right contact and go and reach out to them and they might like add that contact in and talk to them, but those are the those are the types of people that they’re really going to talk to on a daily basis.

Joe Hyland:

Okay. Does that group sit underneath the head of sales? Your counterpart in sales, does it sit in your group?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, that’s in sales and I totally think it should sit in sales. I think putting SDRs or VDRs or whatever you want to call them, your kind of qualifying sales team, on marketing is just not as effective. You can’t give them the leadership, the coaching, everything they need to actually develop their career and become remarkable sales people and leaders long term.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point because while some BDRs or SDRs might go into marketing, the vast majority think of themselves as early in their sales career, right? So…

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Hyland:

They probably don’t want to look to you and I for guidance they want to look to the head of sales.

Kipp Bodnar:

I mean, I think I’m cool, but I don’t think they think I’m cool. So, they’re likely gonna want to look up at and work with other people and they should do that. And we’re in really good alignment with them and give them what they need, but I think that being part of sales is the right thing there.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I know from watching one of your presentations that you don’t think you’re cool, you just think you’re a marketing geek.

Kipp Bodnar:

Well, I am, and I happen to think of being a marketing geek is cool. So, I guess in a roundabout way, that’s true. But yeah, I’m a dork and I’d much rather be doing marketing than most other things. So that’s just who I am.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, you should love what you do and out here in the out here in San Francisco being marketing dork is certainly cool.

Kipp Bodnar:

That’s true, that’s true.

Joe Hyland:

I’d love to — I think it was a while ago you published this — but I’d love to talk to you about the process of writing your book.

I guess two reasons. One is I’m just curious since it’s been a while now. You know, what you think of it and what you think of the process. I also think it’s interesting from a career perspective because it was a pretty ambitious undertaking. I think a lot of the listeners would just be interested to hear how you even went about it.

Kipp Bodnar:

Like, how do you write a book, and should you write a book basically? It’s interesting — we talk about a lot about this internally. It’s like, you know, I think we wrote the book — I wrote my book with my co-author Jeff like five years ago, maybe — some like that? And then obviously Brian [Halligan] and Dharmesh [Shah] at the Inbound Marketing  book a couple years before that.

I think books are very important at certain stages of markets and both those books I thought were important and worth writing at the time because the market was so early on, there was so much speculation and so much thought that, one, you just needed to take the exercise of compiling a lot of research and information into a book to solidify your thoughts and recommendations to the market because there’s so much conversation and disagreement and debate in the market. And so, I think, when that’s the case, they can be very, very valuable. I think books themselves are a little less valuable today. It’s harder to distribute a book. It’s harder to get people to read an actual book today…

Joe Hyland:

What a sad statement that is.

Kipp Bodnar:

That is. It might be sad, but it’s also true I think, unfortunately. So, because of that you’ve got to really think that your message is new, novel, if you have a compelling way to tell it, and it’s what your audience needs right now. And there’s, one, that long format way to tell that story and that depth is really needed to tell that story effectively and that there’s no other kind of version of that story in this format that exists.

You know, I think when Brian and Darmesh at the Inbound Marketing book, for example, that was a fresh novel story that really didn’t exist. And people needed to have that book because it was like this it was a transformational thing. You needed to talk to people in your team and your company to do things differently and you kind of need the validation of this physical thing that other people read the publisher said was good that you can kind of point to and say like, hey we can do this thing. There’s a lot more credibility that you get from that maybe just an article on the Internet or a video or something.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. So, for this book, talk me through the initial genesis, how the idea even started and then what you did right. Like, who do you get in touch with? How did you start compiling a plan? Did HubSpot stand behind it?

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, so the HubSpot team, Mike, Brian and Darmesh everybody were like, “Yeah go do it.” Don’t see any issues any issues. So, basically did it kind of nights and weekends. So, on Sundays, I would spend like four to six hours on a Sunday, and I would just you know kind of head down right? I like to write early in the morning. So, I’d wake up and write for a few hours and then go about the rest of my Sunday and do that kind of thing…

Joe Hyland:

So that’s cool. Sorry to interject — you went to leadership and said “Hey I’ve got this idea. I think this is a unique point in the market, right? This isn’t just total BS. I’m not trying to get my name out there.” They nodded their heads. I like it. And then from there, you started working on it on your own time, though, it wasn’t like you were doing this 20 hours during the week.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, no, I was doing my real job and I just felt like, one, it was a topic that the market needed — it was a book about talking about social media from more of a B2B lead generation perspective — which nobody really talking about at the time. It was very much consumer, kind of community building, and so you needed that different articulation in the market. And I felt like there’s a lot of misconceptions and just myths and stuff out there. So, I wanted to kind of set that straight. Jeff, who wrote the book with me, kind of felt the same way. And so, we’ve known each other for a while so we decided to embark on that. I got connected with Shannon Vargo, who’s an awesome editor over at Wiley, and kind of talked to her about it, and she thought I was a cool idea. And so we struck an agreement with them pretty quickly and I think over the span of four to six months got everything written and edited and out the door.

Joe Hyland: Really? That is impressive.

Kipp Bodnar:

I am an impatient human being, man. I don’t do a lot of stuff over a real long period of time — if I’m gonna commit I’m gonna be all in and I’m gonna get it done.

Joe Hyland:

When I was at Kronos, a Massachusetts company, we authored a book as well. And I will admit that it was it was not that quick of a process. It was about a two-year process for us, so.

Kipp Bodnar:

It can be long, it can be hard. But, you know, it’s about what you’re putting in. If you’re clear on your point of view and you’re clear on the story you want to tell it can be fast if you’re willing to schedule it, make the time for it, and kind of make it happen.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I think the nights and weekends writing, while perhaps a little arduous, was helpful. It was just hard to squeeze it in with everything else we were working on.

Kipp Bodnar:

Exactly. Like anything else, you got to prioritize and make something a priority to get it done.

Joe Hyland:

So now you have a finished product — and, by the way, a pretty good name, “Becoming a Marketing Superstar ,” which is only part of the title —  is quite a popular theme in a lot of marketing campaigns now. Five years ago, you know, it really wasn’t.

Kipp Bodnar:

I think it was pretty novel at the time.

Joe Hyland:

I think it’s catchy title. So, then what happens next? Other than your parents and family are probably immensely, you know, proud of you.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, sure. You have some people proud of you and you’re just relieved to have it done. Then you go, and you speak on the circuit. You got a new platform, you’ve got something very clear to talk about and so you sign up at a bunch of events and you kind of have a kind of a 45-minute keynote summary of the book that you are delivering and gauging with people on and that’s driving book sales and getting your kind of point of view in the market out over the course of the next 12 months.

And that’s kind of — for anybody out there is thinking about doing it — that’s kind of what you’re committing to. You’re not just committed to writing a book, you’re committing to all of the commentary, the content, the presentation development and everything that comes after it.

Joe Hyland:

And, at HubSpot was this a demand gen machine for you? Was this used in campaigns? How successful was it from that standpoint?

Kipp Bodnar:

We used it in some campaigns. At the time, the Inbound Marketing book was still so resonate that this was like a sub-campaign element. You had that marketing book still being the core book campaign and driver by far because the book we did was just focused on social media. Whereas the Inbound Marketing book was more representative of the macro change across all the channels, which I felt like — especially if you’re doing demand generation, as out there who does knows —  broader subjects tend to provide better results, right? Because you’re reaching more people and everything in that regard. So yeah, that how we thought about it.

Joe Hyland:

Okay, cool. I just think that’s an interesting story to hear. All right, I’d love to just I’d love to get your perspective career trajectory and career growth. I get asked this question a lot. I think there’s a lot of ambitious marketers out there and they’re curious to know how people get to certain posts. So, did you have some master plan?

Kipp Bodnar:

No, never. I would be lying to you if I did. I just interviewed a candidate and told them the exact same thing. So, I’m just telling you what I told them. I’ve no master plan. My master plan was to do work I like with people I like. That’s really all I cared about then and still care about today. That’s my motive.

My advice to everybody out here on this topic is most of the time, the people who have very grand career plans and have very prescribed, like, “I need to be at this title in this amount of time.” That doesn’t work that well.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, I agree.

Kipp Bodnar:

You know what works really well? Solving remarkable problems in remarkable ways. That’s really all you need to do. My whole advice is find the most important problem that nobody wants to tackle because, maybe perceived to be boring, maybe it’s just not time for anybody else to do it yet, there are whole host of reasons, and if you go and do that and you have a big impact on that, then turns out you just keep getting the opportunity to solve more and more problems. Then you quickly become the person that everybody expects to solve all the problems.

And if you do that in a way in which you have a good attitude, and you’re helpful, and you’re somebody that people want to work with instead of against, then you can kind of do whatever you want in your career. You can lead the team or be a great individual contributor. I think manifests its way itself in many, many ways.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah. I love how you how you ended there because I think life is too short to work with assholes. I mean, you see your co-workers, I see my co-workers more than you see your wife or I see my wife and family, and so you got to love what you do, right? You want to be around people who are optimistic and problem solvers and kind are like-minded. So, I think you’re totally right.

Kipp Bodnar:

Yeah, one, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, right? If you want to be better, you need to surround yourselves with truly remarkable people doing remarkable work — and that’s just a baseline to accomplish success I think today.

Joe Hyland:

I think that is an amazing point to end on. So, with that, Kipp, I want to thank you.

Kipp Bodnar:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Joe Hyland:

Yeah, this has been great and everyone, thanks for tuning in for another episode.

The post CMO Confessions Ep 5: HubSpot’s Kipp Bodnar appeared first on ON24 .

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