How to Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With (with Dave Kellogg)
Dave Kellogg, who has spent 10 years as CMO and 10 years as CEO, shares insights on why CMOs fail and how to become the marketing leader everyone wants to work with. He outlines the three jobs of a CMO: run marketing, help the boss run the company, and market marketing itself.
- CMOs have three jobs, not one: run marketing, help the CEO run the company, and market marketing to internal stakeholders
- The key to CMO success is building a 'first ring relationship' with the CRO - answering each other's calls immediately and functioning as true partners
- Most CMO failures stem from being defensive rather than being a dispassionate analyst who brings data to conversations
- Marketing attribution debates can be avoided by creating working groups with board members and treating complex questions as collaborative problem-solving
- CMOs must think like salespeople during annual planning - if you can't deliver on the plan, negotiate resources or expectations upfront
"We're all long term interim anyway. If we're going to last 18 months, we're kind of long term interim."
"I don't want straight A's, I want some A's and some C's and maybe an F or two, right? And I want to figure out what actually matters."
"You can't be defensive if you're not talking. If you're talking, you may or may not be being defensive."
"Marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of the customer."
"I have great respect for marketers and great contempt for meddling amateurs who practice it."
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Exit. 1, 2, 3, 4.
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All right, this is a treat. So this is a recording from Dave Kellogg live at our marketing leadership retreat, the first ever one that we did. 89 NPS, the highest rated event we've ever done. And Dave was our keynote. And we have the recording exclusively for you here on the podcast. Even if you didn't buy a ticket to the event, we're doing it here on my podcast. Dave kellogg has spent 10 years as CMO, 10 years as a CEO, and has sat on 10 different boards. 10.10.10. I've been referencing his blog for a decade. He's been making me sound smart for a long time when I was leading marketing. So when I was thinking about how to kick off our first ever marketing leadership retreat, he was the first person we reached out to. And no surprise, his session ended up being one of the most memorable moments from the whole event. The room was a hundred CMOs and VPs from companies doing 50 to 500 million in revenue. And Dave spent 90 minutes breaking down, why Marketing leaders fail, what the job actually is, and how to become the CMO everybody wants to work with, even if you're not in a marketing leadership position today. I thought this talk was great and really gives you a good sense of what it takes to be a great marketing leader. Here it is, how to become the CMO Everyone Wants to Work with with Dave Kellogg Live a couple weeks ago in Arizona from our marketing leadership retreat. Enjoy this episode. The last time I had Dave on the podcast it was one of the most downloaded episodes ever. I know this one will be too. I asked Dave when I was thinking about like, all right, we don't want to do a lot of content for this event, but I want to have one thing to kick us off that's really meaningful. And so I asked him to come because his wisdom, I think is super incredibly relevant to all of you. And Dave's really interesting because he's been on all sides of the table. He spent 10 years as a CMO, then 10 years as a CEO. He's been on 10 boards. He ran marketing at Business Objects and took them from 30 million to a billion. He's been CEO twice. Anybody read his blog? Kel Blog over the years, yeah, made me look smart more times than I can count and I've been referencing this blog for a decade. His writing was also like it's also some type of therapy for marketers. His thinking helped me become more of a I love this term. He talks about this in the deck. The marketing leader needs to be a dispassionate analyst when it comes to talking about marketing performance at the company versus a younger version of myself. I would always get very defensive and hot headed when we were talking about the performance and marketing. It was never my fault. I had him on the exitfy podcast a couple years ago and if you go into our transistor account, which is where we host the podcast and sort it, his episode is still one of the top three most downloaded all time. And the cool part is I actually found out he goes to a bunch of our webinars and like reads my emails and he actually knows the content. So huge bonus when you can get someone to speak to the room and they actually know what they're doing. So his talk to kick off this marketing leadership is called how to be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work with, which I thought was great and I hope it'll be an evergreen manual for you not to just survive, but thrive in your career as a marketing exec. Please help me give A Warm welcome to Mr. Dave Kellogg.
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So there are a couple of chairs. I see some people standing in the back. I just freed up two. One for me that I don't need and one for my backpack. So feel free to down if you need. Thanks for the great introduction, Dave. Actually, there's only one left now. Dave took it. So I want to start today by asking. Making an observation and then asking a question. And the observation is the median tenure for CMO these days is 18 to 24 months. Thank you. I am a professional. Forgot to do that. Damn. So the median tenure, I suspect people could hear me anyway, to be honest. Yeah. Advantage of having a loud voice. 18 to 24 months. And this really crystallized to me once I was talking to my friend Lance, who's a repeat cmo and he was interviewing for a job and I was like, hey, Lance, are you going to take this as a gig thing or are you going to go in full time? And his answer was, what's the difference? We're all long term interim anyway. Which is just like, wow, in some level it's true. Right. If we're going to last 18 months, we're kind of long term interim. And at another level, back to the emotional part of this. Is it actually a healthier mentality to think of yourself that way? There are a lot of times in my career, I was a pretty big hothead where I would have been better off just thinking to myself, hey, this is just a job. You don't take it so personal. Your long term interim, like the gig mentality might have actually helped me do better in the job. But the question is if that is a fact. So that's the observation. The question is why? And as they say on reality TV, the interaction begins now. Why did we last 18 months? Shout it out. Okay. Unrealistic expectations. I'm going to recast it slightly. I'm not sure. They're irrational. It's a little strong. Hard to measure. Yeah. Not easily measured. Shot amount. No faith in attribution. No faith in attribution. I think like marketing's expected to solve things that are not marketing problems. Okay. Marketing expect. They got a lot of head nods on that one. Marketing expected to solve stuff. Some marketing problem. Other people, poor internal communication. Cool. Keep them coming. Under investment. Not understood. Not understood. Nobody understands us. It's hard to be us. No, it's true. I agree with all these. I just not surprised yet. I don't want to be surprised. But keep them coming. The company needs shift. They hire one type of marketer and then 18 months later, they need another type of marketer. Ah, interesting one. Okay, yeah. Need shift. The company hired a type A marketer, and they needed a type B result tied to business outcomes. Results are not tied to business outcomes. Is that what I heard? Okay. Yeah. Who's crazy? The founder. The founder's crazy. Okay. That's kind of a given, right? That's just endemic in the work environment. The product doesn't work. Ooh. Certainly does happen. I've seen it. Right. Not a card we like to play, but sometimes we have to. Yeah. Growth slows down and marketing is blamed. Okay, good. Keep them coming. Lack of trust. Lack of trust. Yeah. Okay. Keep them coming. Budget cuts. Boom. Lack of innovation. Lack of innovation. True. CEO thinks he's the marketer. Say one more time. CEO thinks he's the marketer. Ah. Imagine what it was like working for me. It was like total nightmare. Like, my CMO was like, I worked at Salesforce for a while. Being Benioff's CMO is like a really hard job. Right? Because he actually is the cmo. But in any case, you've got maybe a real marketer CEO or maybe a wannabe marketer CEO, but either way, your life is much more difficult. Keep them coming. CMO burns out. CMO burnout happens a lot. Right. These people aren't all fired. Right. A lot of them quit at that. 18 months. There aren't enough great CMOs, so they get hired somewhere else. Sales leadership. Finish that one. Then we'll go to you. Sales leader misalignment. Super common. And I heard one. Oh. I said, there aren't enough great CMOs to go around. So they get hired elsewhere. Ah, they get stolen. Oh, I like that one. Pretty positive. Okay, so these are some of the reasons why. And I want to come back in a minute, and we're going to try and categorize them a little bit and learn from them. But just in case. So Dave bought my 10, 10, 10 positioning. It worked, right? He literally. That's how I positioned myself. 10, 10, 10. 10 years as CEO, 10 years as CMO. 10 different boards. The realities are actually slightly longer. It's 12 years as a CMO across three companies, the most recent of which was during COVID So I did a really unusual thing in my career, which is I went kind of product marketing person to VP of marketing, cmo and then cmo, then CEO, then svp, GM and Salesforce, then CEO again, and then became an advisor. And then Covid happened, and one of my companies was like, hey, can you run marketing, I'm like, yeah, three days a week, I'll hold the fort, no big deal. And three days a week turned it to six and two months turned into 12. And I basically ran marketing for a year. So I learned an enormous amount from it, right? Having done all that stuff before, I'd kind of nostalgized or romanticized what it was to be a CMO. And it was like, holy shit. I really love 20% of this job. The other 80 I'm not so sure about, but I really love 20% of this Job. So I do consider myself marketing person by DNA. But the purpose of the 10-10-10 positioning is to say one of the value props I can bring to you is I can kind of say, let's look at this as a cmo, let's look at this as a CEO, let's look at this as a board member. And how does it sound to be able to switch those hats? So this is part of my unique selling proposition and hopefully we can try to leverage that today. There's a lot of people who talk about how to run marketing well. So this slide is partially for the online deck because I'm going to post the slides and they're going to be people who worked for me. Or like that guy thinks he was the CMO everyone wanted to work with. Like, no, no. I need to disclaim this in part, but I think, and this is part of my CEO coaching, I do a lot. I think I got what mattered right. And that's my definition of the CEO's job, to get what matters right. And it begets the question of what matters. So it's actually incredibly hard question if you're the CEO and if you're like me as a marketer, I was kind of a perfectionist, right? I wanted straight A's. I wanted everything to be perfect. I wanted everything done well. I wanted the names to be legible on the name tags. I wanted double sided name tags. I cared about the details. I wanted everything to be perfect. And that's not a good instinct in an executive. It may get us good grades in school, it may get us promoted when we're starting our careers, but when we hit the top, you really need to switch mentalities to I don't want straight A's, I want some A's and some C's and maybe an F or two, right? And I want to figure out what actually matters. And I give that advice to CEOs all the time because I think it's their job as it Turned out it just happened to work for me. I think I got in my CMO career, I think I got what mattered right by accident. Let's just say one, I had always very strong relationship with sales. We're going to talk about that today, like what that means and how do you know if you have one. And also I was able to see the whole business in discussions with the CEO. I didn't have much of a board relationship when I was a CMO and I do believe CMOs should. So I think it's incredibly useful to your career. I have friends who. This is an old example but he was plugged in by VCs consecutively to like Informatica, Marketo and NetApp. Right? They did four year gigs of those three companies. Like handed him on a silver platter by a VC saying we need to see, you know how much money you make when you do those three gigs in a row. Right. Like it is a very profitable way to earn a living. So VCs can help you enormously in your career or PE people if you're PE backed. But sometimes we don't build the relationships with them and I think we should, but I didn't. I built one, fortunately I built one and it was useful. And then for the team I got reasonable marks. But people didn't like my feedback style. There's a blog post on that about the three golden rules of feedback. They are, in short, one has to be timely, has to be honest. I was always really good at those. Sometimes too timely, like in the meeting, like with everyone around, okay, don't be too timely. Honest is always good. But I wasn't always kind. And that was a third rule that I think is an excellent rule for feedback. Honest, timely, not too timely, always honest. And then try to be kind in the way you're giving it. And I was not good at that admittedly. So I will tell you that I built this presentation in Gamma and I spent 25 minutes trying to get the reflected face not to look wrong. Make it confident but not too confident, make it pensive and it produces this grinning idiot on one of them. It was, that was AI productivity for me. But I didn't even bother to worry about the hair. It was like I'm not bald, I don't have hair either. But anyway, CMO failure patterns. That's what we started talking about. Why do CMOs fail? We're going to rejoin that conversation now. Then we're going to talk briefly. It's a very top down presentation. We're going to Start like, why do we fail? Then we're going to talk about the three jobs of the cmo, which started as two jobs. The boss once told me the meat of the presentation is the 10 tips for running marketing to be the CMO everybody wants to work with. And the argument for being the CMO everyone wants to work with is as follows. One kind of belt and suspenders. If you shoot to be the cmo, it just stays employed and you miss, you fail. But if you shoot for a higher bar and miss, maybe you stay employed. Right. But the other reason is it's going to help you longer term with career opportunity. Not just, oh, that was a decent cmo, that was a cmo. I love working with that cmo. Everybody loved working with that cmo. So I think it's a very important part of the job to aspire to be that. And last, it could get you promotions. Right. It could give you a shot to be a CEO. People like working with you. So my argument is there's nothing wrong with shooting for the higher bar of not just being an effective cmo, but a CMO who people want to work with, who recruiters want to recruit. Right. Who boards want to retain. Right. So. So maybe we should shoot for that higher bar. I've got 10 tips on how I think you can do it. Then we'll talk about marketing. Marketing. And then we will wrap up. So we're going to try and leave Q and A at the end. But I also want to do interaction in the beginning. I don't want to just blast through this thing and then have Q and A. I have a couple of laundry lists here because we're all in different situations and I know that. So the purpose of these lists is to. For you to find a little bit of yourself in some of them. And it's going to be different for each of you. Right? But the list is up here and I'll walk through it in a minute. So you could say, is there any of me in that Heimlich? Am I a Heimlicher? Do I inexplicably choke in board meetings? I have a CMO I work with, top school mba, super smart undergrad, lots of great experience, super competent marketer. Put them in a board meeting and it's literally, this person needs the Heimlich. I do not understand why, but I'm working with them and trying to coach them on how to get better and the remediation for each one of these things. If you are a Heimlicher, if you're right I do choke in board meetings. Why do I choke in board meetings? The renation was trying to find someone to help you. Ideally someone like me who's both sat on boards and been a marketer. Or maybe find a board member. Just find somebody who could help you with the problem that I choke in board meetings. Because trust me, you do not want to choke in board meetings. Right. Boards were making a decision about you very quickly. In one day, either a board member is going to say, hey, should we get a new cmo? Or the CEO is going to say, helen, thinking I should get a new cmo. And you want the board members to go, Sally. We love Sally. She gives great presentations. What's the problem with Sally? That's the reaction you want, you don't want. Yeah, Sally, you don't seem to underperform in the meetings or Joe underperforms in these meetings. That's what you don't want to have happen. So Heimlicher is one I'm working with now. I've got a choker. You don't see these as much anymore, but I never liked them myself. The vendor whisperer, the CMO who's surrounded by vendors and they never seem to have an opinion about anything. There's always just, well, vendor here. Does this better. A does this. Personally, I don't like those. I'm always wondering, what do you do other than hire very expensive vendors? Not everyone feels that way, but I do the finger pointer. So my first day at Business Objects, it was a $30 million company. I ran marketing there for nine years. It was really capable dollar company. But the very first day, I got to watch my predecessor, which was a really weird experience. They overlapped us for some reason and it was a qbr. And I watched the meeting and I'm like, I never want that to be me. Because this guy was like hyper defensive. Like, not my fault, not my fault, not my fault, not my. And just taking shots from all directions. And it was like I literally wrote about, don't be that guy. Like, triple underline. And like, how am I going to do everything in my career not to end up in this meeting? Not to end up hyper defensive with everyone taking shots at me. This one's harder to get out of once you're in it. But I have one very simple tip for you. You can't be defensive if you're not talking. Just think about that for a second. If you're talking, you may or may not be being defensive. Well, I don't want to be defensive, but how often have you heard that? If you're saying that, just stop. But I don't think I'm going to say anything. You're better off just stopping. So if you are a finger pointer and you are perceived as defensive, the first thing you can do is just listen more. Because defensive people. If Dave's critiquing me, I won't even let him finish this point. But Dave, you don't understand. I'm going to interrupt it before he's even said which that person won't like. Especially if they're a board member. They're not going to like that. And you're now talking instead of listening. So if you're worried about being defensive, just talk less. First tip, just listen more. This is what it teaches sales. My favorite sales training, and there's a lot of them is selling through curiosity. And the whole course I'll reduce to one thing. Be genuinely curious. So if someone's attacking you, be genuinely curious. Why does this bother you much? Why did you hate that program so much? Why did you do this? I really want to know why. This is back to the dispassionate thing Dave talked about. I am genuinely curious. I'm going to have an out of body experience. I'm not going to be me and get all angry and fight with you. I'm going to kind of step out of my body and say, tell me more. Why? Why do you dislike what we did? Other ones. I'll do two more and then we can talk. Please.
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I wrote this down because I've never been able to articulate. I have just a physical, like a version with this person. This person a lot.
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Okay. Swirling vortex of activity. Yeah.
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Because I feel like a lot of people will just tied by that.
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Like I got. You're not actually doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tasmanian Devil is a favorite. Thank. Thank you for. For highlighting it. Does anybody else. Did anyone know a Tasmanian devil? Do you want to talk? So talk to me about the Tasmanian devils. What do you think of them when you watch them deviling and spinning? What's going through your head? Insecurity. Yes. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. How do you think a board feels when they watch a Tasmanian devil? Yeah. Dizzy is a good word. Yeah. The typical reaction will be when the Tasmanian devil leaves the board meeting. It'll be, what the hell is that? Like what just happened? Like, we don't know what just happened here. If it was a good Tasmanian Devil, it'd be like the person seemed really smart and they seem to care a lot. But please don't invite them To a board meeting again. Right. And if it was a bad Tasmanian devil, it'll be like, I think what they were saying didn't make sense. The numbers didn't foot nothing added up. This person is just a defensive screen around an incompetent person. But those are the two outcomes. It's either seems great, don't want to see them again ever, or a famous quote, once this happened to a CRO I work with, the board said, was that the CRO or the VP of sales Ops? I'm confused. Literally. There's an actual question from board member and as you may have noticed, I marketing person. So I like to position things. That's a massive positioning problem. Right. You're the CRO and through your behavior and your slides, you came off as a head of ops. So the Tasmania devil could also be said that was the head of marketing ops. Right. That wasn't actually the executive running marketing. Any other archetypes people like or have questions about or recognize? Scapegoat. Which one I'd love to hear more about? The Scapegoat. The Scapegoat. Oh, I love that one. That's a favorite. So this is a story. My friend Pete called me and he said, hey Dave, could you come in and work with our company? And I did. And I met with Pete, I met with the CRO and I met with the CEO and it was kind of one of these slick enterprise CROs. And he's like, well, let me tell you what our problem is. Our problem, you know, we have a very good sales force and they can close all the deals we need to. We're just not getting enough of bats. And you know, really our problem is type of top of funnel. And no, no, 3x this market. 3x pipeline won't do it. We need 4x. Actually 5x. We need to start quarters with 5x pipeline coverage. And I'm like, okay, okay, I can see here. Now let's talk about the founder because this could go well. This could go very badly. Founder is product oriented person, doesn't know anything about go to market. Okay, so I had one question for Pete. Does anyone? It's too hard to guess, but I'm going to see if anyone gets it. After knowing everything I just told you was the first question I asked Pete. Any guesses? What would be the first question you'd ask Pete? If you're trying to help Pete, how much time do you spend with the CEO versus the Croat? That was my question. Because this guy has a worldview where you are Squarely. My friend, under the bus. You are looking up at the transmission and the oil pan. Everything is your fault. Stated very elegantly. But the possibility that maybe we should close more than one in five of our deals doesn't seem to occur to them. The fact that marketing needs to generate all the pipeline doesn't seem to occur to them. So the first place I went to was time because we've got a product oriented founder who doesn't know any better and we need to help them learn about our go to market. And the answer was Pete said I could barely get time with the CEO and the CRO spends all kinds of time with him. And I'm like, you're done. Because you need to either make a rule. This is what I told him. It didn't work in the end, but I said make a rule where every time the CEO is talking about go to market with sales, they invite you in and you're always available. Or when they're traveling, go. Because they did a lot of roadshows together, just say, I want to go on the roadshow with you guys. Because I cannot let this other person Shape this CEO's viewpoint right. For two reasons. One, self preservation, because it's putting me under the bus. But actually more importantly, from my perspective, it's going to get the wrong answer right. If you need 5x pipeline coverage, I have a bunch of questions. It's possible, I suppose, but I have a bunch of questions about what happens to deals and once we find them, does that one make sense? Was that okay? Yep. What do you got? I'd love to hear about the 2/3 one. Like is the school of thought that like if you're trying to be well rounded or is it like lean into
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the two thirds you're great at and
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like find a company where those 2/3 are important or higher. For the, the 2/3 is a really interesting one because you know, if all the company needs is X and yeah, great, go be a 2/3, no problem. The place where I see it hurts people's careers is if you take a demand gen person and give them the CE mo job and they don't lean in. Like I actually watched one of these go down where we made a demand gen person, the cmo. And I always say overcompensate. I'm a big positioning person. If they think you're weak, position is strong. If they think you're dumb, position smart. Like just overcompensate to the opposite so they think you're a demand gen. So go dive into Product marketing hard, right? And instead she did not even go to product marketing meetings. I was doing consulting with the company and I'm like, you're the cmo, you've got a VP of product marketing. We're having positioning meetings with the CEO me. And they had a product marketing. You're not there. That's a super bad look on the 2/3. You are confirming the 2/3, positioning your comms and demand gen. You've got zero product marketing and in this particular case, you seem to have zero interest in product marketing. Because as a board member and CEO, I actually think it just is a huge part of it. Like if you say, if I have two candidates who are both demand gen, people say they're both demand gen and comms and have no product. And one is telling me I'm super jacked to take this job because I want to embrace product marketing and learn about product marketing and I want to spend all my time with our great head of product marketing, right? Versus somebody who's like, yeah, I'm just going to hire product marketing and delegate that to Joe or Sally. Just I don't really need to be a part of that. I want this person every time, right? Because this person is telling me there are 2/3. I want to stay at 2/3 and. And they just want to manage the other function for resume, whatever. But so the thing I personally always look for is interest. Like convince me you are interested in this. And the fastest way to convince me you're not interested in this is to hire somebody else to do it and leave them alone. Right? I had one. I'll give you one example. A company I work with, pretty big and they decompose marketing, which is fairly common these days, which I don't like, as you can imagine. But they say, okay. And this is another true story. I was going to do this on the first slide. The CEO's friend of mine called me. He goes, I just can't do it, Dave. I can't do it. And I'm like, you can't do what? He's like, I can't hire another CMO. This company has had five CMOs in four years. I can't do it. I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to touch the hot stove again. So that was the start of the conversation. And it was like, okay, well, we're not going to hire a CMO because you don't want to touch the hot stove. So what are we going to do? And we decomposed it. We said, Product marketing is going to go to the product business units which they had. Demand gen is going to go to the CRO. Right. And then corporate communications and brand will report to you as an SVP of comms and brand. So we'll decompose marketing in that way and you won't have to hire a cmo. So at least make sense whether you agree with it or not. You got it. So they did that. And then I told the CRO the same thing I just told you, which is you need to convince people you care about marketing that you're not just managing this as self preservation, that you have a genuine interest. First thing she did was put marketing under ops. Yeah. Now they have a hell of an ops person. Don't get me wrong, they have a hell of an ops person. But still like just bad. Look, you want to be a two thirds. Like that's how you become a two thirds. Because you told me. I didn't tell you. You told me through your behavior, through your org chart that you want to be a 2/3, that you don't actually care about managing it just like on your resume. Any other ones? Yeah. More question of how because this happens all the time with me too. In advisory work where the CEO you try to convince the CEO why marketing should stay together in reporting versus allowing it. Yeah. So I'm going to go back to my example because that is my natural inclination. But there was just no way I could say that to this guy. Right. Like literally I can't do it. So sometimes you have to go with it.
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Right.
27:32
If you're an advisor. So I didn't even bother to make the argument in that case because sometimes the cards are just dealt and this person's like, I'm going to lose credibility at the board if I hire another one and fail. I could be putting my own job at risk. Let me fill in some of the dots here. So sometimes it's just not an option. You have to decompose marketing. And I'm a little clever. I make sure the person we hire in comms and brand could actually take the whole thing. And when we recruit the person in comms and brand, you say I'm not super subtle but you know, I could imagine one day that this was reunited. You know, like one day I could see this going to take the job that's on the table, which is comms and brand. But we like about your background is you do have some demand gen and you have some product. So one day if we decided to reconstitute this you would be certainly a really good candidate and especially if you show competence in it. So that's the best I can do in some of these situations because there was no way in that particular situation. And I rarely see non starters but the hot stove guy is like, I can't, I'm not going to tell this guy to reunite marketing. I can't do it. Other failure patterns. Yep. The second guesser. Yeah, thank you. So Gammaork two or three times. That's a typo. It should be the second guest. Thank you for getting it. And Gamma kept rewriting it to second guesser. But the second guest is a person who's being second guessed by others. It puts up an attribution table. Marketing by channel. This is a classic board meeting moment. I hope you never live it. But they put up, they put up all some various high level marketing channels, trade shows, events, direct mail, webinars, whatever performance advertising, organic. And they put the cost per opti and trade shows shows up with $25,000 cost per opti. It's enormously high cost per opti. And I call this retinal burn. So that when that chart goes there, it burns into the retina of the CEO like for three years. You're going to be hear that Trade shows cost $25,000 per opti. Right? True. This is an actual true story where that happened and you did it to yourself. I'm going to argue first. Yeah, the CEO was a willing collaborator, but you're the person who put the chart up with the $25,000 per trade show without disclaiming it. You didn't give them kind of eclipse sunglasses or anything. You showed it to their naked eye and it burned in the back. So it takes two to tango on that. But the second guesser is the person who's showing that table. And the board member goes, well, why don't we just stop doing trade shows then? Right? You just ask the question, what do you do when that happens first? If you've been in that meeting, what do you do? Or even if you're not, what do you do? You put the slide up. The slide said trade shows cost five times as much as anything else on a last touch attribution cost per lead basis. And the board is saying let's stop doing trade shows. I've got an idea. What do you say? Well, if you are doing it, let us tell you more. Yeah. Other tips and tricks. There's one tip I haven't heard yet. Keep going. There's other value we're getting from the trade shows that are not showing up here. Got it. Keep going. We're so close, but not quite there. Say it. Say again? Yeah, yeah. Do, do first touch and last touch and discuss. The trade shows are for awareness. Yeah, yeah. In the general category of not show that table by itself in the first place. Right. You're the guy who put the naked sun. Right, right. But, but yes, you can show two tables and say, look how it's different when we do this. The only one I was missing, you guys were all on the right stuff.
27:32
Yeah.
31:06
The time is an element there. Like, you know, when are you looking right now or it's long term. Yeah. You can tell them the rest of not doing it. So this is going to go back to my sales partnership thing. The real thing to do, in my opinion is look at the salesperson who agreed with you to do that trade show and do this and they better dive in and take the bullet. Right, right. So, and this is going to be back to my. Do you have a real partnership with sales? If that moment is happening and you know that you and Harry or Mary made that call together, you decided to do that show. They love that show. You're the one under fire right now. Secret Service dive in front and take this bullet. So that literally should be. Because you're going down, you're taking hits on the board. You are partially to blame, but that's if you know first. If you never talked to sales about it and did it on your own, then you don't have Secret Service protection. Right. But if you did agree on this, you need. It's not, it's good that we say all the stuff you said, it was all correct. Right. There's other value, there's other things. We close some deals, blah, blah. But I think the most powerful thing as a board member is that the CRO go, hey, wait a minute. We agreed on this together and this was a fantastic trade show for us. We closed this many deals, we advanced this, we did whatever. Any other questions? Yeah,
31:07
hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft, because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically. But the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what Customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out Customer IO. It's Customer IO Exit 5. Go and check them out. Customer IO Exit 5. Today's episode is brought to you by Converter. They're an enterprise lead data management platform. If you're running marketing at a large B2B company, like many of you listening right now are you know this problem well, Leads come in from LinkedIn, webinars, events, content, and the data is a mess because one form captures job title, another one doesn't. One says United States, another one says usa. By the time it hits your CRM, records are incomplete, fields don't match, and your routing is broken before the lead ever touches a sales rep. It's annoying. And now that everyone's plugging AI into their tech stack, bad data isn't just an inconvenience, it's actually a real liability because AI is going to scale. Whatever you feed it, feed it garbage. It's going to scale garbage. Converter is the layer that sits between your lead sources and your systems. With Converter, every lead gets validated, enriched and standardized before it touches your CRM or marketing automation. This gives you clean data every single time. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Stripe use Converter today. So if you're dealing with this, you're not alone. And there's a great fix. You can check out Converter right now at Converter IO exit 5. That's C O N V E R T R.IO/exit 5 Converter IO/exit 5 Self Promoter.
32:29
Yeah, let me see if you can finish on the second guest. Oh, I have one more trip for the second guest. This is what I always say. This is back to one of my higher memes of I'm just trying to get the right answer and these questions are hard. My actual belief in this question is a huge part of my job is figuring out how to spend the marketing mix. That is my job. That's what you hired me to do. It's not easy. We have tons and tons of data and these programs all interact with each other in subtle ways. We have some advanced modeling tools. This is really, really hard. I am welcome open to welcoming all comers who want to join the conversation. But if you want to join our intermediate French conversation group, you need to speak intermediate French. So we're going to have a baselining session and if you want to come and this is where the dabblers walk away. But once in a while the VC will say, yeah, I've got a great quant person. I'll send them. And you've just created a little task force where you're getting probably a Harvard MBA to help you for free on figuring out this problem. Why not? If you're smart and you want to get your French skills up to intermediate level French, you want to understand all the tools you're using, understand where all the data is. Now you can join the conversation group. So I'm a big believer in trying to offline things to working groups. And it's one of the ways you can build board relationships. If there is one board member who's biting on that, just say, I'd love to talk with you offline. Maybe you don't need a full working group, but I'd love to talk with you offline to dive into this. Explain what we're looking at. Can we grab an hour of time? Two goals accomplish. One, you've got the dead in the meeting. It's off the meeting. Two, you've now got a chance to meet a board member which could be really good for your career if it goes. And then three, they might actually have a good idea. Right? So now there was another one people want to talk about who was it was the self promoter. This is a super dangerous line and people would argue that I probably broke it as a CEO because I had a blog. But what you don't want to hear is this. I'll do the negative case. Where's Nick this week? He's speaking at some marketing conference. What's this talk on, like how to align with sales, right? That all the salespeople. He's not very aligned with us. That clown's telling other people, you know how to align. This is why marketing's so screwed up. Because guys like Nick are speaking in marketing conferences, right? Like you can literally create your own, like dogs and torches and villagers coming after you by being too visible as a self promoter, either for your brand, as a marketer or for a cause that you care about. Right? So in my mind you can do it, but just be careful. Know they're watching, right? People who like you, people who don't like you, everyone's watching. I think a little self promotion is good. And to me everything's a positioning problem. I tell everybody proactively, I'm going to this conference because I think it's going to make me a better cmo or I'm going to hear somebody speak or I'm going to do this. Like I tell people in advance I'm going. I won't ask for permission for the VP of sales, but I want them to know and I ask for their support if it comes up back to that partnership. Right. Just inoculate, right? To use the term, you inoculate against politicians. Call it you inoculate against the message. I'm going to inoculate people against the Dave's off self promoting message. And it doesn't always 100% work. Right. But at least you're aware of the issue you're thinking about. Are other people seeing me as somebody who's spending too much time like your CRO does, dare to say zero self promotion and might well attend zero conferences and groups. Certainly your CFO does that. Some of the people around the table, they just don't do that. And I think it's okay. I like, as Dave knows, I like communities. I think your time is incredibly valuable here. You just got to make sure your peers understand it that you're not often so, you know, watch what you post on LinkedIn. Not all hats and party, you know, have a picture of this grinding it out with Dave. Right. Be aware, be aware. So that's what I mean. Because I think it's important to do, but be super mindful and don't overdo it. Any other failure patterns we missed? Yeah. Question. You mentioned the cfo. I'm curious. I haven't seen that on any of the slides so far. So one of my many jokes is that I'm one of the few consultants who spends as much time as CFOs as CMOs because I do a lot of metrics work and financial analysis work. So I actually am pretty close to both Personas. I think a cfo, in the end, I think CRO, if you have to bet your chips, bet them on CRO because they're your internal customer and they have a lot of power. Right. Cfo. I mean, once in a while you can try. We're going to talk about changing minds in a minute, but a CFO could be helpful if you're trying to change the CEO's mind. Getting a group of people to all agree to kind of go together. I think it's important you have a good working relationship with finance. Don't get me wrong, but I think the magic is in the CRO relationship. No CFO is going to save you when the CRO is coming after you. Yep. Just in that scenario of scapegoat, though, where sales leader wants 5x pipeline. That's where you need the CFO. That's a good use case. Yeah. Yeah. Personally, I have other ways, but yes, the CFO would be very helpful in that case. I agree. There's some other things we could do. Industry benchmarks. What did other people close win loss analysis. Right. There's a lot of things we can do to say, do we really need 5x and what's happening to all those deals? But certainly having the CFO go, you know, according to industry benchmarks, that's too high. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. All right, so the three jobs of the cmo. So we talked about failure patterns. The hope was that you see one or two of them in you and you can think of some corrective action and you can not be that situation. The next thing we're talking about is the three jobs of the CMO. Then we're going to talk about the 10 principles, which is another kind of laundry list. We'll go through it fast. Hopefully you'll get some ideas from it, and then we'll talk about marketing. Marketing. One day, I was probably. The company was probably 7 or 800 million at the time. My boss comes in my office and he goes, dave, what's your job? I'm like, kind of trick question, because I'm a cmo. You know, my job's to run marketing. You know, am I missing something? And his answer was, you're wrong. You actually have two jobs. One is to run marketing, and one is to help me run the company. And you're spending 120% of your time. I'm marketing and I need some time. So you need to figure out how to make time to do your other job. And that was a super powerful message for me to hear because it was kind of cool, like, ooh, my boss actually wants me involved in helping run the company. I am interested in running the whole company because as we'll see from my definition of marketing, but this is cool, but I need to make time for this, and how am I going to do that? Right. And a lot of that comes down to the team you have working for you. The easiest way to make time is to have really good people working for you and then you're going to end up in the age old loyalty trade off. This person helped me build the team. They're great, but could I get somebody better who would give me that 20% back? And you have to look at it through that selfless lens. The quick tactic I have to solve that is just calibration. It's the HR buzzword. But go meet some. You're not interviewing, you haven't made a job wreck. But I just want to go have coffee, use this network to say I want to go meet five VPs of CorpCom, not directors of CorpCom. And I want to imagine if I had a VP level CorpCom person, would my life change? And if I think it would, maybe I'll go get one. If I think it won't, I won't. That's the easiest action you can take. Doesn't have to be dramatic. You can just go do some calibration. So my boss convinced me I had two jobs. Run marketing and help my boss. And then I will add the third job which I think is absolutely critical, which is market marketing. And I think this is the one that all of us forget to do. We're too busy to do and we're either too modest to do it or we do it wrong. We do it in too blatant a way and we're going to talk about that one after as well. But my mind, one message you leave with you thought you had one job, you have three. You got to run marketing, you got to help your boss do their job and you got to market marketing. And that's as important as the other two because if you don't do it, I hate to be dramatic, they come for you, right? They will come for you if you forget to market marketing. So this is one that people talked about in the failure reasons as well. I don't want to go too long on this because it's very, very hard to do. But just I'm going to argue once a year you get a chance to sign up or not sign up, right? It's the annual planning process and they're going to say here's what we need from you, here's the money you get. Do you sign up? And salespeople take that moment very seriously by the way, because they're signing up for a quota and they will be fired and compliance and everything. Marketing people in my opinion take it somewhat less Seriously. And I think the right answer to that is to really say, to think like a salesperson. I am signing up for this, I am signing up for the next year. And this is the logic a salesperson applies. If I sign up for a number I can't make, you're going to fire me anyway, so I may as well just quit now, right? That's how they think about it. Like, I will not be here at the end of that year if we sign up for that plan. So it's probably better for me to quit now than it is to go through 3/4 of hell and have you fire me. So they think about it in a very dramatic way. And I'm not saying you should do brinksmanship all the time, but I am saying you need to think about it more like they do to say, am I signing up for this plan? Can it be done? And if it can't be done, you have other recourses than quitting. One is to say I need more resources or we need to lower expectations. Or I could do things one and two, but not thing three. You have other recourses. This matters to me once a year. And it matters when you change jobs, particularly if you're going to a PE backed company. Because in PE budgets rarely change and they rarely get better. When they do, it's not up, it's usually down. So if somebody running a PE company says, come join our company, don't worry, we'll get you the resources we need downstream. No, no, let's talk about resources now. Like, before I join, I need to know what I'm going to have in vc. It's a little bit more like a road trip. Do we have enough gas? You know, enough gas to get to the next fuel stop and let's go and do that pe. It's all pretty determined. So to me the advice is get good at trying. This is a very hard skill. Get good at trying to figure out if you've given what you need and if you don't think you have it, go ask for more. And once again, who's your partner in crime if you don't think you have enough? The CRO. Right. Because here's my line about CROs. They're better at negotiating than you are. That's why they're salespeople and they have way more leverage than you do. So who do you think is going to win an argument with the CEO and cfo? You or the CRO. Or better yet, you and the CRO strapped together as one virtual human. So this is what I mean by partnership. Questions or thoughts on that? Because a lot of you talked about we don't have the resources to get the job done that begins here. Every year you get a chance to change that. What's asked of you, what you're being given. And these things come top down. They're not declared by God, Right? They're benchmarks. The board goes, we'd like marketing be 10% sales next year. Right? And you have to decide if you can sign up for that. All right, so this is a quote on marketing that a lot of people talk about. I love this quote is from Peter Drucker. He says, marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of the customer. And I think if you could embrace this as a cmo, I think it's great. The other quote I sometimes use is from Christmas Carol. Mankind was my business. If you remember Jacob Marley, right? The whole thing was my business. It wasn't just my little small part of it. And interestingly enough, the full quote actually goes in a very different direction than I thought it would. It basically says, therefore, concern and responsibility for marketing must permeate all areas of the enterprise. So Drucker is saying everybody should be in your shit, basically, Right? In the converse of this, what I'm saying, or as David Packard, founder of hp, said, marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department. One of my favorite quotes, and there's actually quite a bit of truth to that as well, I also think the converse, which is everything is too important to be ignored by marketing. If marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of the customer, then I get to weigh in. So I think it's a very important philosophy to have. It'll cause you to develop a broader understanding of the business. And we have to learn how to be respectful when on other people's lawns. If we think the actual problem on our sales funnel is close rates because our salespeople are hammerheaded with customers or they're bad with customers, we need to say that in a respectful way, right? We can't just say our salesforce are clowns. That's why we lose too many deals. You can say that. It won't go down well. So we need to bring data to that particular party to say that. But to me, if you want to be, we're still at the very high level of the fundamental job of the cmo. It's these things, right? And this is about thing two, Run marketing we'll talk more about in the next Section. This is thing two. Help your boss run the company. This is how you do it. And then thing three is market marketing, which gets a whole section. All right, so here's the meat of the deck. There's a lot on here. My advice is to look for one or two things you think you could use. Right? Here are the 10 rules. I think bring data to the party. We just talked about that. Number two, leverage AI. That's the whole purpose of this conference, I think, is for you to talk about that. So I'm not going to talk about it because the right people to talk to are you guys. Start with the audience. This is a very specific one. But all presentations must start with the audience. The road to hell begins in the slide sorter. If you say, I've got a presentation to make and you open another presentation, put it in slide sorter view and start plucking slides, you're blazing down the path to hell. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute. But you're prioritizing, reuse over audience. And that's a big mistake. Start with audience. Who am I talking to? What do they want to hear? Be an expert. Build a doctor patient relationship with sales. This is critical. Develop a first ring relationship with the CRO. That's my ultimate characterization of the relationship you want. Lead the horse to water. Worry about the whole funnel. Know when to be the dispassionate analyst and make ATF Q Answer the fucking question Part of your marketing culture. One of the top two, my blog, I started writing in 2005. One of the top two posts is called Answer the fucking question. And it's incredibly important for dealing with senior executives because they want particularly board members. If a board member asks you a question, answer it right. Don't tell a story. And we love to tell stories. We're marketing people. So I can't just tell you a simple answer. I got to tell you a story. And the more senior you go in an organization, the more they hate that. Well, it depends, Dave. It depends on a lot of things. You talk about churn from new customers, churn from existing customers. You talk about the last three year churn, two year churn. You could do a cohort analysis. We could do a multi year nrr. We could do a single year nrr. Right? And the example I put in the slide, so we developed. So I like code words a lot because I like to be able to just rake somebody up. So the code where we had at Business Objects was how much does the bus cost? So whenever somebody. Cause it actually happened one day we were on an analyst tour and we're like, hey Randy, how much does the bus cost? Can we take the bus to the train? What's the bus cost? Randy's like, well, you know, Boston is a fine transportation system. Was established, you know, going over and he's just going to fucking on and on. And we're like granny, how much does the bus cost? And that became code in the department for answer the question. Just how much does the bus cost? And when you can create your own code word, it is a friendly way. Much friendlier than saying atfq. A much friendlier way of saying you're not answering the question. What's churned? 12% last quarter measured on a grr basis. My tick is always leave a thread. Oh, are there other bases, Dave? Yeah, there are. You could measure it this way. We could do a cohort analysis. The two year ago cohort was much higher. Right. So the trick to ATFQ is answer it and leave a thread. Yep. How does that match with your eclipse sunglasses? The eclipse sunglasses and atfq. So I guess the difference is if I'm presenting, I'm choosing what's on my slides. Right. And if I'm going to show you a slide that can burn your retina without the sunglasses, that's my fault. Fault. Board members want demand have the right to interrogating you. Interrogating. They see it as part of their job. I'm governance. I need to make sure you're competent and I'm going to do that by asking you a series of questions. No emphasis on the word series. The other reason it's incredibly irritating to me personally when you don't answer my question is I have five more lined up and you're burning all the time on some story I don't care about and you don't know which direction I'm going. But trust me, I have a line of questioning. It's a board meeting. We don't have time. I'm asking you what was turned. Tell me 12%. Tell me 15%. And by the way, I can ask you other questions. Do you think that's high? Is that normal? How do you feel about that? What's driving that? You don't have to say all that without me asking because maybe I'm in a totally different direction than you. So I think the two are not incompatible. But yeah, you put it this way. If the board member burns their eyes during an interrogation, I guess they did it to themselves. But if you put A slide up. You did it to them. All right, so we're going to go through some of these. Bring data. The issue I have with these, to be frank, is everyone could be a half hour talk. So I really need to just kind of throw stuff out there and see what resonates with you. I hear this all the time. Nobody's heard of us. We're the best kept secret anyone ever hear that. Drives me fucking crazy. Right? Every time I hear some salesperson say that we're the best kept secret, if we could just get more at bats. Here we are, under the bus again. Whose fault is that that nobody's heard of us and that our sales force is perfect and boy, they can close every deal if we just put them in front of more people. Right? So we all have a certain emotional reaction to that when we hear it, but what are we supposed to do about that? The answer is bring data to the party. This is back to the general meme of dispassionate analysts. Huh? I wonder if that's true. That's my first answer. Is that why we're not selling? Gosh, maybe it is. Joe seems to think so. Now note that what Joe said was a hypothesis or an assertion was certainly not a fact. Right. And note that Joe also has skin in the game. Joe runs the salesforce and Joe wants to think they're wonderful. So I'm not going to get excited about this. This is just part of me doing my job. I'm going to hear stuff like this and I am now genuinely curious about what would help us sell more. Is awareness the problem? And I like market research. My basic belief is that most of you probably spend too much time navel gazing, looking in your own systems, looking at all the people you found. And we're not talking to the people who never found us or never heard of us or never talked to us. You have to do that through market research. And God bless you if you're doing both already, fantastic. But there's a strong availability bias to want to answer every question in the CRM because the data is there, we can go look at it. The problem is it's not telling us about the people we never found what they think. So. And if the assertion is people haven't heard of us, well, now I know I can't go to the CRM, right? Because who's in the CRM definitionally, people who've heard of us. Right. So I need to do market research. So what data could you bring? Certainly CRM reporting, certainly benchmark win Rates certainly lead surveys, going back to leads saying, did you buy? Who did you evaluate? In the end, what did you do? What am I doing? I'm cross checking on sales because sales said there was no opportunity there. It got disqualified. It got thrown back into nurture. I want to know what happened to it. Why am I trying to fuck sales? No, I'm trying to sell more software, right? I'm just trying to help the company sell more. And if you come at it with the wrong attitude of like, I'm fighting with sales and sales is bad, nothing good is going to happen. If you come at it with a good attitude is, I just want to sell more software. I have 100 units of marketing to go spend. Should I go spend it on awareness? By the way, the reason I feel so passionate about this is I actually worked at a company once where this happened, where we decided, it was a long time ago, we decided that nobody had heard of us. So we bring in shiny new marketing people, shiny new agency, millions of dollar campaigns. It's a 400 million dollar company. So it's pretty big multimillion dollar campaign. Ran Wall Street Journal ads, New York Times ads, big double spreads, incredible amount of money for like eight weeks. Ran out of money and canceled all the spreads, right? We would have been far better off just having a little box ad in the corner of computer world, right? For every episode, for every issue for a year. But instead we blew it all on this giant thing. And this was the fun part of the old days is leads used to be in piles so you could see them. You could literally walk around the SDRs and see all the piles. And the lead piles went from here to there. It's like, okay, we just doubled the height of the piles, but we don't have enough people to work through the piles anyway. There shouldn't be piles. And somebody's not looking at this through a systems view. Because if you look through a system view, you'd say, where's the kink in the system? And maybe we should have spent a fraction of that money in more SDRs to work the leads we had. Not go bury the piles. I tell the story just because it's so visceral, because I'm literally walking around going, this is insanity. Because these piles are now deep and we're spending money on an ad campaign that's not drip but on off. So I get very excited about this because what happens if you get it wrong? What happens if we believe the sales guy and say, yeah, nobody's heard of us doing Massive awareness campaigns, billboards, bus shelters, advertisements. Right. We could do all that. I can do that. I know how to do that. Is it the right thing to do? That's the question. So, thoughts on this one? I would add two things. One is, as my CEO taught me this the very first time I was a cmo, less is more the board See so many different companies all the time and if you just bark up all your data, it will overwhelm them and they'll have too many questions. So less is more on data. Tell your story and show trending and tell them what's going to happen in the future. Remind them that you told them that the previous board meeting and continue to make your proof points. And the second thing I would say is make sure the pipeline data is in your section, not the sales section. Okay, I think I agree on both. I think we're at slightly different points though, because what I'm agree, what I'm trying to say is for the every time you hear somebody say something that sounds like a fact, write it down. Because I'm on a different page. I'm like the question du jour. To me your advice applied really well to templates and like, what's my standard deck? It should be consistent. Same. Here's what I told you last time. Amen. Got it. All I'm saying every time somebody says something and they make it sound like a fact and you know it's not, write it down. And then in the meeting you say, you know, Joe said no one's heard of us. Joe said we win more than average deals in the space. Joe said we never lose to so and so. Those are three assertions. I'd like to go get data around those assertions because if they're true, we're going to do something different than if they're false. And maybe 1 and 2 is true or 2 and 3 or 2. But that's. So this is a bring data to. It's actually a two part exercise. One, find fake facts, right. Which CROs love to recite, right? So the stuff spewing out of their mouth, that's an opinion, that's an assertion. Like, oh, finally there's a data point, right? Write them down, figure out if we're making decisions based on them and then bring data to that party. So this is a little more specific.
34:55
I used to work with this sales and no joke, once a month he'd come to my desk and say, the website's down, the leads are broken, we're not getting any leads. It was like instant 911.
57:16
Yeah, yeah. Always a fact.
57:29
There's no leads.
57:31
Yeah, yeah. Never questioned. Always a fact. Again, it's endemic. It's what we do. It's gonna happen. So we can let it drive us crazy, or it can be like, okay, salesperson's being a salesperson. Now let's try and look at this analytically. And what are they saying? Is the website down? Let's go check with the monitoring app. Yeah. I have a question. What if the CEO and founder happens to be this while leading the sales team? What if the CEO and founder happen to lead the sales team? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Good question. Give me a second on this one. There's always an answer. Don't take a. I love that. So I think the answer is, I like hat theory. I don't know what they call it these days, but you try and get the CEO to switch hats and just say, I want you to think like a founder. I know you also run sales. Take that off for a second. You're also a founder. You own 25% of this company. I'm trying to get the right answer for how we sell more software. Again, if they always perceive you not as defending marketing, if you're not the defender of marketing, but you are instead of a person with marketing skills. Right, who wants to help us sell more software, that's the position you want to have. I just want to sell more software. I know how to buy billboards. I could do it. I could make great billboards. I can run a great targeted ad campaign. I can do a great ABM campaign. I have a whole kit bag full of stuff I could do for you, and I'm equally comfortable using any of it, because that's all one of the issues, like, oh, you're an ABM person. You want to do abm, or you're a comms person, you want to do comms, or you're a social person. So you want to. No, I'm an everything person. I'm a general practitioner. I have a bag full of medicine, and I'm trying to figure out what we need. So I need you. I know you also run sales, so just. I want you to take that hat off for a minute. I want you to put your co hat on and just try and do that. I think it's a. It's the only way I know to try and get somebody to switch their primary reference and then bring data. And on that specific question, like, I like loss analysis, right? Because I think the most unreliable form of Loss analysis is from sales, frankly. Ask a salesperson why they lose. So you got to get third party loss analysis with a third party firm interviewing people and then you bring it in in a non confrontational way. Right? This would be rule nine. Dispatch it out. Hey, I hired Velocity Partners. They read a written loss study, here's what it's saying. And you put that data on the table and it's not accusatory, it's just a fact. This is what it says. You can get mad, but you're like yelling at the weather, right? It doesn't do anything. Let's talk about whether we think this is true or what we want to do about it. Rule 3. I talked on some of these already. Always start with the audience. I said this once, I'm going to do it fast. Number one reason CMOs blow up on board meetings to me is they took the slides from the QBR and put them up on the board. They say, this is like saying, I don't want to be defensive. But they're like, well, I know I made these slides for qbr, but I'm going to be showing to you anyway. So there might be too much detail. You're dead before you've even started, right? Because who are you? You're the Tasmanian Devil. In all likelihood because you're bringing QBR slides to a board meeting. So what you gotta do. And I think this is like, I learned this as a product marketer. Hey, we just got off the analyst tour. We're doing a product launch. I just briefed 20 analysts and influencers about something and now I'm doing a sales training. Just reuse the slides. Oh, I built in the customer deck. Just reuse the slides. Look at me, I'm the reuse God, right? Like I'm so awesome because I'm reusing all these slides and then sales barfs all over the slides and then you listen to what they're saying and if you're honest with yourself, you're like, you're right. I didn't build those slides for sales or customers. I built them for analysts. And why in the world would we ever put a positioning chart up in front of a customer that talks about our competitors? Just to pick a dramatic example, right? You might put that in front of an analyst. Only a fool would put that in front of a customer, right? So I know there's a lot of pressure on us to do more with less reuse. Go fast. I start in the outliner, I start with a blank slate and maybe I make a note Slide like this presentation. Who's in the audience? What do I think they want to talk about? Right? And you start there. And if you have material, use it, by all means. But Lord help me, don't open another deck and start there and start plucking slides. You will get the wrong answer every time. And that's true in marketing. It is true in board meetings. And my Heimlicher does this all the time. The guy who just. The great person who chokes at the board meetings. He's choking because he's showing QBR slides. No, no. I just coined the phrase for this deck. I may tell him after, but he certainly knows he chokes. That part. We've been over this one. Look, no one ever. If you impersonate a dentist, you get arrested, right? There's actually a true story that somebody impersonated Dennis for two years, which is actually amazing if you think about it. To go in and pull people's teeth and drill. But no one ever gets arrested for person marketer, right? There are a lot of dilettantes or dabblers, whatever you want to call them, in marketing. I trust that you all are marketing professionals. I want you to position yourself such and be seen as such. Right? Miracle on 34th Street. My favorite marketing movie, where Santa Claus says, I have great respect for psychiatry and great contempt for meddling amateurs who practice it. If you remember, he was talking to Dr. Sawyer, the eyebrow guy. That's the way I feel about marketing. I have great respect for marketers and great contempt for meddling amateurs who practice it. So we should make ourselves professional. We should learn a lot. We should subtly remind people that we are marketing professionals, that we study this, we learn about it, we look at other examples. So this I won't put down. For me, this was very important because I transitioned from the technical side of the house. So I had years where people would call me for performance tuning questions, literally. I was director of product marketing. I was like, I'm trying to tune a server here to go. And it's like. So I had to really position myself as a marketer. But I think it applies to all of us to position ourselves as professionals. This is a key slide. If you went to the doctor and walked in and said, I need 500 milligrams of amoxicillin, what would they say? Hey, doc, hook me up with 500 grams of amoxicillin. Yeah. What are you doing here? Like what? Back up, Slow down. Let's talk about what symptoms you're experiencing. But when sales shows up and Says we need a VIP booth at the Yankees game. What do we say? Do you want 250 milligrams or 500? Right. That's what we say. We don't say, wait a minute, back up. What are the symptoms here? And I'm a big believer in saying yes to sales when we can. Like, every no counts. So say yes to the easy ones. Even though I believe in focus, if it's an easy yes, just do it. Just some money, Right. Like, I'm saving my nose because I don't have that many of them. Right. So I generally advise marketers to say yes to the easy thing. But depends how much this booth costs. It may not be an easy yes. Depends on your budget. So to me, it's always diagnose than prescribe. Because I'm a big believer that marketing exists to make sales easier. People sometimes misunderstand that as, like, servile. No, no. Doctors exist to make you healthy, and they're not servile. Right. They're an equal, and they're working with you to solve a problem. I'm going to skip through first ring relationship. The sound bite here is really simple. If you know the Watergate story, there's two journalists who broke it, Woodward and Bernstein. And the funniest part of the story to me is their editor called them Woodstein. That was the name. And in the movie, he'd be like, woodstein, get in here. And he'd yell. And that's who I want you to be with your CRO. I want you to be Woodstein. That that is the apex of this relationship that we're talking about. And Woodstein can go convince the CEO of things that you will not be able to on your own. Right. Woodstein is super powerful. So it's not alignment with sales. I mean, yeah, if you're misaligned with sales, you're probably not gonna last very long. But alignment's not enough. To me, the thing to shoot for is this level of partnership. And I have two metrics. One is, are you Woodstein? Three metrics. One is how many times you speak per day. And this is the ultimate to be. Do you answer each other's calls in the first ring? Because your spouse or partner, you probably answer in the first ring. Or you have a code for call me back again if it's urgent. You literally have some protocol. I want you to have that with your VP of sales, and that's how you know you're there. If you're not there, then you have work to do. This There's a whole book written about this and I would suggest you read it. Here's the problem with us as marketers. We love messaging and communications. We love air bombing, we love propaganda. That's not actually what changes people's mind. What changes people's mind? Look, over time it can, over time it works. But, and I'm not talking about this as a recipe for marketing, I'm talking about this as a recipe for changing your C suite, the people around the table. And if you want to know how to actually change people's minds, let's not go to rhetoricians and mass communicators. Let's go to canvassers. People who knock on doors and say, how do you feel about same sex marriage? Why do you have that view and could I change your mind? You want to talk about a hard job, right? That's a hard job. Knocking on doors one at a time, taking the most divisive political issues of the day and having conversations with people about how to change them. That's what this book is about. This book is about how canvassers change people's mind. And the thing I think I did worst as a cmo, I was really good at bringing data and argument because I'm a data and argument kind of guy. And this is another reason to partner with the CP of sales. I'm not a high touch, one on one long conversation seller. Right. And that's what this is, arguing. You got to sit down and understand your viewpoint and why the hell. I just want to make the ultimate leaflet on it. Here's why. You should have position X on issue. Yeah. And I'll make a great leaflet on that and we'll put leaflets in all the boxes. That's me. Right? But what actually that might work over time to change some minds. But if you've got a big issue, right, like how much is the marketing budget next year, do we open Germany or France or do we launch this product or not? And you got to change people's minds. This is the book for us. All the tools we have for changing minds do not apply. There's a whole nother way to change minds and we got to use these around the C suite. So that's the insight. Here. Read the book. It's a great read. Whole funnel we talked about already in the context of marketing. Dispassionate analyst Dave touched on it, so did I. My favorite example of this is a quote I used to say all the time at Business Objects, which is, well, I don't have that quote on the slide. But the quote was, congratulations, we made plan in France, but we lost market share, right? So go French team. You made your plan. Congratulations. 102%. But point of fact, here's my relative market share chart. We lost share and what's going on? This was dramatized for me because our Italians were maniacs. They would sign up for super high growth plans and miss them. So they'd sign up to do 100% growth and hit 85 and they're always in trouble. And then the French would sign up for like 25% growth and grow 26 and like, yay, go France. Right? And you just go like, this is screwed up, right? So how am I going to make people aware of this issue? That effectively were rewarding negotiation, not performance. The French are just better plan negotiators than the Italians. But the fact of the matter is, there is an absolute truth called market share. I can measure it in those two countries. And we are making plan but losing share. So go us. I'm not trying to take money out of anybody's wallets, but maybe we have the wrong plan. Maybe we should plan to gain share. That's dispassionate analyst. The quote I have is, I don't make the news. I'm just telling you about it. We lost share in France. And then to get the issue on the table and not assigning causes like here's one, I did a very politically charged consulting gig. We start. We have a tendency to misplan when we start the quarter with less than 2.2x pipeline coverage. That's a fact, right? The data said that 8 times out of 10, 9 times out of 10, we misplan. Whose fault is that? Lack of pipeline coverage? I never said. Why is lack of pipeline? I never said. I'm just saying here's the issue. And this quarter we're starting with 2.4. So I'm worried about missing plan dispatch. An analyst ETFQ we talked about already. How much does the bus cost? Right? Just get your own code word for that last section to wrap it up. I love the power of framing. You're not running marketing, you're running for office. Right? Think of it that way. You need to be kissing babies and shaking hands out there. Just like a politician. You want to be the CMO everybody wants to work with. You want to be the person out there. You want to have town halls with sales. Just like the people politician. Tell me about your issues. What can we do? Right? You want to meet the best sellers. One on one for sure. Right? Like, often the worst sellers have the most time to talk to you. Right? So you need to filter who you spend time with. Right. But you are running for office. Your customer is sales, the CEO is your boss, and the board is your boss's boss. And don't forget that. And by the way, sales is a what have you done for me lately? Business. They will come for you with the dogs and torches. That's all. If you wait long enough and you don't tell them what you're doing, they will come. So here are all the tips and tricks you can do. Any. The final thing is just. This is one of the original ads for advertising. I wasn't born when this was run either, but I think it's a great ad. Right? I don't know who you are. I don't know your company, I don't know your company's product. This is the original ad for advertising. It was McGraw Hill. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me? Right. So marketers have been marketing, marketing, or in this case, advertisers have been advertising advertising for a long time. It's something we can do and need to do. So let's wrap it up with any couple final questions here. Can we see the tips and tricks side again? Yeah. And I'm going to post all these. I'm just going to put the master tips and ticks shot up. Tips and tricks. That's the one. Any other questions? How do you balance the first ring relationship with the CRO and a relationship with the CEO? So I think the difference is to me, the CEO is my boss, the CRO is my customer. That's the way I think of it. I did a blog. I was talking to somebody last night about a controversial hot take I did, which was scenario CEO says go left, the CRO says go right. What do you do and what do you do? I'd love to hear your answers on this. Put them in a room together. Good, good. All good. Right? That's a hard situation. It happens more than you think. It's reductionist, but it happens. And to me, the answer is first. To me, I go right. I go with my customer. You're my boss. You're my customer. You think my job is to keep them happy. So logically, I go right. Then somebody said it. Get them together in a room. That's the right answer to say, hey, okay. But tactically, in the moment, if forced, I will go right, not left. And I've watched a lot of CMOs die going left because what happens is, and this happens when the CEO is not aligned with the CRO. So you're getting different direction. You think you're pleasing the boss, you think you're doing great. And then sales comes for you. Right. And you may get 100% of your OKR payments up until the day they fire you. Right, because you were doing what the CEO said. But sales will come for you in the end if you're not treating them like a customer. I'll take more questions. One more, then we wrap. How do you come up with so many great analogies? Yeah, I love analogies. Thank you for saying that. I love analogies and I think they're a powerful communications tool. And literally, like, when I'm trying to position a product, I'll put as much energy in, like, what's the analogy going to be? Like, what's the perfect. My favorite product analogy I ever heard is for cyber security, and this is ancient, but it was catching smeg was like catching smoke in a butterfly net. And like, wow, what a great analogy. So the answer is, I just put a lot of thought into it. I won't stop. All right, well, thanks very much. I hope that was useful, guys. Thanks, man. Awesome.
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Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become
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