Real Talk from Three CMOs: Attribution, Paid Media, and Why B2B Is More Emotional Than You Think

Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer.io 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 slash exit5. Go and check them out, Customer.io slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by ConsenSys, the interactive demo platform. Look, most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. They've asked ChatGPT and Claude about your product. They found reviews about you online. They've talked to peers who've used your product before. and by the time they hit request a demo on your site, they've often already come to a decision. So you're losing control of the narrative before the first touch point and now they have to wait three to five days for a demo. Consensus gives you that control back. They help you meet your buyer where they actually are with interactive personalized AI demos that live on your site. When a buyer shows up wanting to poke around on their own terms, you give them what they want. Plus, you get to see exactly who's watching, what they clicked on and who the decision makers are. So stop being a bystander while LLMs sell or even unsell your product. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use ConsenSys to turn invisible researchers into high intent leads. Go and check them out at goconsensus.com slash exit5. goconsensus.com slash exit5. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show. Hey, it's Dave. Today I have a session that we did with a group of CMOs in Austin. Actually, it was about a year ago now. And we're rerunning this because this conversation is one of those timeless, evergreen conversations. We got into a lot of what it actually means to own the role of CMO, why every CEO defines it differently, how to adjust your style as a CMO. And the panel was great. It was Megan Leaders. She's the CMO of Sonatype. Kim Storen, who's CMO at Zoom now, and Ido Mart, who is CMO at ManyChat. And my favorite line from this is Kim said in this episode, marketing can never be in the green if the company is in the red. Learn all about what she meant in this episode with my conversation with this panel of CMOs down in Austin. We run a community at Exit 5. We have 5,000 members from around the world. We have a popular a podcast, a newsletter. But every time we do any piece of content, people want to hear from those who are actually doing the work right now. I mean, these are all CMOs and they're not really doing the work, but we had them. No, I'm just kidding. Okay. So that's what Edo said on our prep call. He's like, are we going to talk about strategy? They love hearing from a group of marketing leaders who have been there. This is a super, super impressive group that we just reached out to based on recommendations. I said, hey, we're coming to Haas and we're doing an event. And these three names were like the names that came up in my LinkedIn post multiple times over and over. So we're going to hang out. We're going to get to share some of the knowledge. So let's first go down the line. And in your own words, like, who are you? What's your role? What does your company do? Just to set context for that. And I'm going to get into our questions. Megan, why don't you kick me? Megan Leaders and the CMO of a company called Sona Type. We are owned by a private equity firm called Vista. And I think this is my, I'm a four-time CMO. So then this couple of different ways, public company, venture backed and that paid. And just briefly explain what Solotype does. Well, I'll give you the 30 seconds skinny. Interestingly, if you work for a software company, 80 to 90 percent of your software is open source. And that open source is where bad people, malware vulnerabilities get in. So we protect those malware items getting in and doing damage to your code, which then becomes product. So we protect that software, secure the software supply chain in any organization that barricade. All right, good. And I'm just asking for context. So as we talk through what everybody does, like you can have more of a friend. Are you done? Yeah. Hey, everybody. I'm Ido Mart, CLO at Benichat. I'll tell you what it does. That fast. Thank you, Yusuf. Basically, we help creators and social media marketers do more on social. Grow better, engage with this mic right here. You got to eat it. engage better and sell more on social. We have over a million users. Good chunk of them are paying users, which is good. We like that. You're at a company probably a lot of people here now, Wix. Yeah, Wix.com. I was in the marketing team there. Probably don't need information. I did a stint at Spark Beyond, which was a very cool AI company until ChadGPT came along. I'm still a stint. All right, Kim. I'm Kim Astorin. I'm the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Zayo. We are a $2.5 billion annual revenue, PE-backed digital infrastructure company. So we basically do fiber, transport, and manage services all on top and service some of the biggest customers in the world, mostly hyperscalers, data centers, telecom carriers, and then enterprises as well. My background is I kind of came up through a management consulting background and then said most of my career in large transformation companies, IBM, AMD, Dell. All right, I'm going to kick it off with you. What is something that you know now about the role of CMO that you wish you had knowing when you started? For me, coming from a consulting and communications background, I didn't know what I didn't know. And I didn't realize that marketing roles, chief marketing officer roles, I should say, can be what you define them to be. And that because there's no straight up clear cut definition, right? Everybody knows what a CFO does. And that definition might be a little bit different at VC backed or PE or public company. But generally speaking, you know what that is. And in marketing, we don't have that same clarity of what our role is. And while you hear a lot of CMOs complaining about that right now, it's a huge and tremendous opportunity. And it can be a career-making opportunity if you are open to building that role in the way that you want it. The opportunity piece of it is to embrace that and own it and communicate to the org what the role of marketing is going to be at the company. And lean into your strengths. So for me, as a consultant, I like to do strategy. And so every marketing leadership role I've had, I've been able to raise my hand and say, give me a piece of corporate strategy as well. And coming from a communications background, I've always been able to add communications and product marketing to my marketing organization. So part of it is educating, but also part of it is taking the things that you're great at and your superpowers and building the function and the organization and the priorities that excite you. I just want to double click on that because that so I've been interviewing CMOs for basically the last decade. I don't know who owns the record, but I've probably interviewed more B2B CMOs than any of them. And what's interesting about what Kim said is when I was coming up as my first time head of marketing, I had this perception that you had to get to the CMO seat. You had to be totally well-rounded. I sure it's your senior general. Exactly. But now you talk to someone like this person came up through product marketing. This person came up through PR. Each example is like you know the thing that you're good at. You build a team around you, but you double down on it. I like that. There's something, though, to be said about every company needs a certain kind of skill. I don't think you just get to later your strengths and it's good everywhere. I think you have to also be lucky or choose well where you work so that your strengths shine. How do you evaluate something like that? A lot of it has to do with what needs to get done in order to see success. In some environments, you know, like they say in the startup world, that execution needs a strategy for reference. And that might be true sometimes. And then I discover, you know, that's not true everywhere. in some places the fundamentals are all that matters and then execution just can just be not an afterthought but you'll work it out so if you are somebody who's super clever and thinks i know all the new ai stuff and all the new methodologies and i on linkedin i read all the influencers you know that might cut it in some environments and other environments that's irrelevant for success so i think you need to find yourself where you need to be i like that What would you say? I would say when you are thinking about what direction you want to take, whether you want some specialist or generalist, you have a path and you get there and you choose something. But at the end of the day, when we all become a CMO, it depends on what and how that CEO sees the role of marketing and making sure that they are hiring, you're going into an environment where they are wanting you to do the functional role, either that you play or provide that journalist capability. What I mean by that is that we all define marketing one way. The CEO defines marketing a different way than sometimes we see it. But at the end of the day, there has to be alignment. And I think that's a big learning that we've all had and we've all walked in different companies. But the thing that has probably changed the most that I would not have anticipated quite at the rate that we're all seeing it is the rate of change that marketers have to embrace, adopt and adjust to so rapidly and it's so different than any other discipline. Like finance, you are not seeing change happening in the finance organization. Product you do, to some extent, marketers have had so much and abundance of change that we never were anticipating to influence how we think about our role, the people we hire, and the output that we produce and what we're measuring. That's great, by the way. A friend of mine is a guy, Kip Bonder, he's a CMO at HubSpot. And he told me, it's like the first job as CMO is to realize that the CEO is actually a CMO. And it's damn, that hurts to hear. A lesson from what you're saying, which is a good lesson to everybody, is that you have, you know, if you're going to have six or seven jobs in your life, qualify them very aggressive to make sure that you want to be the CMO that the CEO is. That's right. Just to go back to your point, you mentioned change in marketing. What type of change are you seeing? What type of change do marketers have to deal with that, the CFO? I'll just talk about my career, right? When I first started, talking about pipeline was not the thing that came out of my mouth first, right? You talked about brand or we talked about communications. We talked about product marketing. Today is all about pipeline generation. Oh, every conversation. And that's true whether I'm speaking to the CEO or the CFO or my partners and the rest of the go-to-market functions. And that is a big change. But how we market and how we have data to influence our decision making, influence how the people on my team do their job more effectively, influence how customers buy is changing and that rate of change and how we leverage data or analytics to either hire better, think about the customer differently, work more collaboratively with other functions of the business. Those are just a few examples of change that have dramatically influenced kind of a different team, a different environment, but also what we're measured and what we're able to offer. Can you want to build up? No, I was just going to say, I think also that point around like the change to pipeline, I think is a very, I don't know if you have the same experience as Silicon Labs, but in an infrastructure business, that's not the first thing we talk about, right? Because it's a very much a sassification of marketing. So it comes up like, I mean, I have a pipeline number, I hit it every year. Like, it's a big piece of what I do. No big deal. But it's different because we are selling into hyperscalers and really large enterprise and versus when I was in a SaaS business and like that pipeline conversation was like front and center. Even if in some ways you're like, all right, like it's an MQL to SQL death spiral. But I do think like it's interesting to see that shift that's happened, that sassification of marketing. and some of it started to come over to the infrastructure space in like maybe not a good way because SaaS is more transactional. Even the enterprise deals that have a longer lead time than when you're selling hardware plus software and really, really long lead times and construction and semiconductor R&D timelines and all of that. So how do you think it's a problem? I'm very far removed from that world. This is just like a student question. in that world, how do you measure and talk about the success and impact of marketing when it is much longer to talk about? I start out with the business value drivers, right? I'm never... Marketing is never green when the business is red. So I'm constantly looking at the larger value drivers versus the vanity metrics for marketing and looking at our bookings and our churn and all of that. And then on the marketing side, what I look at is how much faster does a deal close when marketing is involved versus the deals that are either sourced by sales or influenced only by sales. So velocity becomes really critical and size of deal becomes really critical when I think about marketing influence in that way. And those are the ways that I try to connect it to where the business is heading versus is just those vanity metrics that the MQLs that you can't show the conversion to the bottom line. Did you all catch that line that she said at the beginning? What'd she say? Marketing is never green when the business is right. Ding's a good rapper. Sorry, ding. Sorry, buddy. That's a bar right there. That's a bar. Think about it because it means that if you're celebrating marketing wins, but the company is not hitting the revenue goal, then you're not winning. And I want to show that every time marketing touches a deal or influences a deal or sources a deal, that deal moves faster through the pipeline, faster to close, and that those deal sizes are bigger and stickier than when marketing doesn't touch it. This question came to us in our community. This is from Jim. He's a CMO at a Series B startup. He said, I've asked them about shifting strategies in the growth at the right cost era, which is now, versus, he called it GAC, growth at all costs era. This is going to continue to be a big deal for VC and PE companies And payback is always the number one question I get from our board right now So state of marketing 2024 Yeah I can start So I'm in an environment, I think I'm fortunate enough to be in an environment where everything is marketing in terms of revenue. So there's no sales. It's all self-serve, high volume, high velocity marketing. So I get to get the signals that Raffling from what marketing does, which was cool. And then I think that shift, which is, it's a VC shift mostly, right? Only VCs allowed us to grow at all costs 10 years ago. And now VCs are reading this in. There's nothing else that created this. I think that doesn't really change much in terms of what matters, in terms of effectiveness and what you do. So you can think of kind of the effectiveness in light of the financial situation of the company. Like blended CAC is a good metric for that. Are we efficient at all in acquiring users or accounts or customers? But then there's also things, the efficiency of the various activities that would take part on that. Then there's metrics like return on ad spend and things are a little bit more granular. Those didn't change at all, right? Like a move from growth about costs and profitability. Profitability is a metric of the company, not of marketing fishes. So I think marketing remains unchanged other than instances, usually in seed and series A, where you suddenly get a green light from your CEO on board to just do whatever and see what happens. I think that's still true today. Today, you can spend 5% of your spend on experimentation that is extreme. Maybe back in the day, you could spend 30% of your spend on experimentation. So all you have to do is rein in experimentation. The rest of it sucks. Megan, do you have any learning from Seltite? At the end of the day, they're all different levers that you're pulling. You're pulling different levers to see what's going to work. Some of it could call it experimentation. Some of it today, this past week, we're trying to think about how do we scale using data differently? How do I scale using different resources in a different manner? because my cost per lead, if that's a factor, my cost of acquisition, if that's a factor, all of that has to change. I have to continuously get tighter. Whether you're VC, whether you're PE, at the end of the day, you're constantly toggling between how do I go acquire more? How do I impact greater? How do I become more efficient with my team, my people, my data? And how can I have a bigger impact in the world that I provide? Marketing in terms of the MQLs or the SQLs, All of that stuff is very much different levers of pulling it up, maybe more successful than another quarter. But I effectively have to keep in perspective the opportunities I have to pull those levers. But I'm always being measured on efficiency, optimization, on scale. I don't know that it changes much more from quarter to quarter. It's just a matter of kind of what I'll say what the business needs for that period of time. we live in a very cost constrained world because instead of just one PE owner, I have two. So it gets even like incrementally more fun when you're balancing those needs. And we're in a pretty low margin commoditized business. And so life is just about constraints for us and it hasn't changed. It's just how we've been living. And so what's been interesting over the last year is I've actually kind of flipped the script because, I mean, my dad's a CFO, so I love a good like CFO led conversation, but I'm trying to get out of that. And I'm talking a lot more now about positioning and how we're positioning for a evaluation or multiple that we're looking for in the market in say three to four years. I'm talking a lot about how we transform ourselves from being a company that's focusing on big hyperscale deals to one that's really verticalized and going into the enterprise. So the conversations I'm having now, I've kind of gotten myself out of this because we just are constrained and we're like being smart. But how do we flip the script and think about verticalization in a way from a go to market standpoint that is unique and differentiated and positions us well? And how do we start to think about how the broader market views us? And how are we taking advantage of the market tailwinds right now? And so I just kind of stopped talking about those constraints. We've been demonstrating. I've been there for almost four years now. Marketing did not exist at a $2.5 billion company when I started, if you can imagine. And so we've kind of passed that efficiency conversation off to now, like, let's talk about positioning for growth. And how do we position ourselves in a category where we're going to drive the multiple that we want? So this is what happened. Now we have to be profitable. And that's a constraint on the company. And what that did, it gave CFOs a metric to talk about in all your meetings. and now they're kind of managing the cfo is managing you because they need to keep the company ebita positive and profitable and now the cfos are starting to get into all your channels like hey is this was it worth spending a hundred thousand dollars on this event or this don't let them do that the moment you join a company or if you're already there start fighting the foot the good fight because they should not be involved in these conversations they should just say hey this is the goal for EBITDA, and then you can translate that into your world. Otherwise, you're in for a world of tailback. Yeah, I've learned to categorize. I no longer itemize all those resources. I know we all do, but to the CFO, they're all in categories. It's a category called programs. But imagine how broad that bucket is called programs. And then I have another one It's called web. And guess what? It's working. So as long as my CFO is not listening or anyone for VISA, I'm set. But be smarter. I'm glad we're recording this for a podcast in the future because like that was a two minute masterclass in the art of managing health. I love my CFO, by the way. But at the end of the day, like it is, it is different levers you pull. It's how you package it up. I do think marketers have one of the hardest roles because we're balancing the lever of how we position properly and message properly in the marketplace, how we deal with these cost constraints, how we continue to grow the bottom line. Oh, and by the way, we're supposed to launch every freaking product that comes down. We have to continue to be that evangelist in the company and have a comp strategy in the social program. I mean, there's so much that we do. And whether it's a flavor of the year, a flavor of the quarter, marketers have that opportunity to really kind of shine. though. Here's the thing. The three of you are like super successful, confident. You've done it. You know how to have that conversation. I've seen that a lot of times what happens is marketers, you get defensive with the CFO. You don't show any of those. So you have to earn the right. You have to be able to talk at a strong level to the CFO and be able to label it all as marketing. I feel like what's changed now is like you all answered that question about efficiency. And I almost interpret that as like, good. It's a good thing. That is how we want marketing to be measured. It's only a bad thing if you're just wasting money and spending things recklessly. You don't have a story. What you just said is, I think, a story of there's an increased visibility in terms of attribution these days. So now everybody in the company sees all your attribution numbers. Nobody's attribution is accurate. Raise your hand if yours is. But if you lean into attribution as a source of truth, then suddenly you're having conversations with your CFO and CEO on like, hey, this channel or that channel. I think attribution should be, first of all, not the way you defend marketing to anybody. Attribution is there to be, first of all, useful and not true, or useful and not accurate. To be used for decision-making and not for scorekeeping. And this is also true about the conversation between marketing and sales. Some of you might have a very bad time with your counterparts at sales, constantly fighting over marketing influence or not. right? It's not about scorekeeping. So I think it's a conversation that just needs to be shifted. And that's rooted in the efficiency story as well. From a CFO perspective, if you can be the first person to provide value to the CFO to say, hey, I've got some cost savings, like let's say the company is undergoing some constraints and we're all looking for dollars. Imagine when marketing, which is a total expense center, comes to the CFO and says, hey, I'm going to proactively get back a half a million dollars because I want to help preserve some of these other functions of the business. Unlike what normally happens. But I'll tell you, guess what happens when that when that they're like, no, we want to keep the investment in marketing. But as a good go to market business partner, which is what marketers have to be today. Imagine when you change the narrative as a business professional to say, hey, I'm going to find this half a million dollars. Here's how I can drive greater efficiencies through AI and that will reduce some costs here. And I want to put that money back into the kitty so that we can maybe not lose a person or invest in it in some tooling that we want. But that's one one area I will say change the narrative rather than, again, marketing is always the highest expense in many organizations from a true op-ex outside of dev and so forth. But you turn it around and it completely changed and transformed how they're coming to me and saying that we have a challenge. Right. And I just have to figure it out. Because the last thing that you as a marketer want to be told is how to save the money. Right. And that's often what happened. You're like, hey, you need to cut three people or you need to cut this program because it looks inefficient to me because I as the CFO, I'm just looking at a spreadsheet and it looks out of balance. When you change the story and say, I'm going to proactively hear what's going on a business. I'm going to come to you with something. It kind of removes that barrier of them coming to you to say, you could do this and do you do that, which no one wants to be in that position. It elevates marketing in a different place. All right, we're going to get to the question. This happens every time. I do great prep. I write all these questions. You can write a novel out of this. Then we have a great discussion and it goes off the sidewalls. As soon as you should, not like a rapid fire, but like one or two thoughts on this. I'm curious to hear something that's not working for you anymore. What was something that was a core part of your marketing strategy in the past that is not moving the needle in 2024 heading into 2025? That's cool. Yeah, go ahead. Email. It's not that it's not working. I just did a study. There's a lot of effort to write email sequences and programs. And you're talking about like marketing email, sales email? Don't get me wrong. Emails is how you advertise your webinars. It's so does social media and so forth. But the amount of sequences that you would invest in like BDRs to follow up with, that is changing because every other company is using BDRs, emailing and calling, and some have better successes. But email is a hard one because there's a lot of time that gets... I saw somebody posted on Halloween. They posted a screenshot of their inbox on Halloween. And how many brands said the exact same type of subject line with the pumpkin emoji. And it's just like, this is crazy. Okay, email. Guido, what about you? Data. I used to think that the more granular the data, the better my decisions can be. And now I'm at the opinion that I actually need to live in a lower resolution data world where I can see the trends, I can see things, but I'm not in the little details of what data informs me. I think that small data or granular data can inform very specific experimentations where everything is constrained. Is this landing gauge a better place to send this traffic to? That's a good place for granular data. But that should not tell you anything about your audience or about your reality or about your product or about your value prop. You shouldn't learn from the small data. And I think I used to. And I don't do that anymore. I don't know that it's not working for me anymore, but that's part of what drives me nuts. And paid media is like the top thing I think about all the time because it feels like a black fox to me. And again, I don't have fingers on a keyboard when it comes to doing that work. What part of it feels like a black fox? The metrics I get back don't match the behaviors that I would expect of an infrastructure buyer. And it feels like there's a lot of justification for how it all fits together. But then at the end of the day, is a very technical buyer making a pretty big decision for their company, clicking on pretty bad creative that shows up through like stack of that. I don't know. They're like, that's the ad that got to have been. Right. So I would just say like for me right now, like based on what I know about buyer behavior and B2B buyer behavior in general, I'm not sold on the effectiveness or efficiency of the current state of paid media. Interesting, because when I started at this company, we were not distributing good creative ads. So I turned them off because I was like, we are throwing money down the tubes. and you talk about a very good A-B test where you get very quick indication whether they have to turn it off, right? You turn it off and you realize like we did go down website traffic. It did have a correlation. Do I think it's the best medium? No, it's very expensive, but it did have a correlation. That's just my case to say on it. No, loves paid media. CFO also. It's like one of the few things that you can say like, here's what I'm going to put in. here's I'm going to get out. It's a huge cost letter because it's expensive. It is so expensive. Wait, say more. Keep going on that topic. What just the total budget to play to compete? I mean, between the spend on agencies and like all of the back and forth on creative and then the spend to be in the right place at the right time. And, you know, do you want more top of the funnel? I mean, all of it. If you just really look at like, I mean, these are the things that are not in the line items that are correlated. It just feels like a lot that even just the litmus test doesn't quite, it doesn't sniff right to me. Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack. Knack is a no-code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea, but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks. And by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep, that right there, that is the gap that Knack exists to close. Knack is a no-code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on-brand email assets so you can create, review, QA, and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through. After the email goes live, Knack also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipped to learning to improving you should check out Knack Go to knack slash exit five That K-N-A-K.com slash exit five. One thing I'll say about paid and all these things, even email, right? You can't turn these. You said your question was like, what are you not doing today? You have to, as marketers, you still have to do all this to stop. I'm still doing email, Don't get me wrong. We're still doing a lot of it. Turn it off. Yeah, let's see what happens. You're still doing it. You're still putting up landing pages. You're still investing in your web and your creative, meaning you've still got big events that you're doing as much as I think events need to be reimagined, right? How do we show up or when do we show up? And there's so much opportunity to pull different levers. But I don't know that as a marketer, I have stopped doing a whole lot. I feel like I'm doing a lot more, but I'm doing it more intelligently. Would you say that it's related to the stage of the company? I would say there's a certain stage like 5 to 20 million ARR, for example, where you kind of figured out paid ads and you could just turn them on and scale them up and it works. And then slowly, I guess at least that's my perspective, but slowly as you kind of get near to 100 million ARR, let's say, you need to be on a journey to reduce the reliance on paid media and see like more other organic channels, get you the results, right? and then you're at a 2.5 billion set. I'm assuming let's not like paid ads are not making the majority of what July is paid. So there's a jury from five to 2.5 billion of reducing the reliance on paid media. I think that's why I stopped thinking about it as a mix though, like to understand it. Well, and I don't know if y'all that are at this situation where so IBM and even sometimes now at Theo where all of a sudden everybody internally starts getting the ads. as the person in charge of the marketing budget, you're running around being like, don't click on it. Don't click on it. Don't text it because you're not the target audience. We're doing something wrong. We blocked IP. We blocked IBM's IP because of that. What's worse though than companies IP? Then you got the CFO being like, fucking Kim, I haven't seen any ads in three months. I get like a screenshot from my dad and I'm like, oh my God, please don't click on it. Do not make me pay for this. Challenge is organic, right? We all type in the same keyword and we all get different results. Why are you page one and you are page three? The flip side of that question, I guess, if there was one, is maybe give us one or two things that's working for you inside of the company right now. That's kind of like a newer channel that's promising, a sudden hero. If you want to turn off email, what's the one that you want to go invest in? Let's go with reverse order. So for me right now, I mean, the channel is sales. And they're our best advocates in the market. And they didn't really understand how to tell a story to an enterprise buyer. And so my product marketing team built a reference architecture and has started rolling it out. And we're enabling sales and we're seeing real traction in the enterprise in a way that we hadn't before. And so the criticality of product marketing, not just from, and we all know that like great demand gen starts with great product marketing, right? It's the foundation of everything. There's a couple of product partners in the room over like, yep. But we also forget that great sales enablement also starts with great product marketing. And so we've really seen that spending the time and effort on building that reference architecture for the enterprise, which, again, is not our, you know, we started in hyperscale and the carriers. And so to be able to verticalize and go into the enterprise is a really big go to market shift. And so that has become the channel that we need to be using a lot more. There are feet on the street. Yeah, I would preface my answer by saying that the only way to measure a channel is by its impact on the effectiveness of your marketing mix. So some channels might seem like they're not yielding results. Maybe your attribution is last touch or first touch, and then they're definitely some channels not yielding results. But potentially, holistically, they play a major role in the customer journey. So I wouldn't give up on any channel unless I figured out that by shutting it down, I didn't hurt some other thing. But then having said that, I think a major channel worth investing in, at least for my world, is influencers. And maybe for any world, I think where we now live in a world where even for enterprise, even for maybe for hardware, I don't know. Can review an election. That's true, right? There's an influencer for anything and it's really worth investing in two ways. One is to collaborate with them on content because they also help you understand what you need to say, which is good. And two is, of course, use their own channels to promote your content. Q me and a customer I.O. shirt right now. What you said is like, I just want to echo that because it's a topic that I feel really strongly about. I think that there's a group of, I don't know if it's CFOs or CMOs, but there's a group of people that, oh, we sell to B2B. Social media is like a fun thing for consumers. I think it's just fundamentally disrupted how marketing happens. And I think what people don't understand is Kim just mentioned the election, right? This is how humans on this planet get information now. We don't get them from brands and big applications. We get them from people. And whether it's infrastructure or social media or cupcakes, there is a person in that industry who is talking about that topic. And the strategy as a marketer is to figure out how can we work with them on your behalf. And that goes back to that old school mentality that B2B is not an emotional decision. And I would say, hands down, B2B is a higher emotional decision than a consumer decision. Because at the end of the day, if you're going to go buy a pair of cowboy boots, and I end up spending $500 on a pair of cowboy boots I never wear again, what's the impact? Right. Besides a little bit of that opportunity cost. If I, as a tech decision maker, go and sign a contract for a million dollars with a company that puts cake all over my face in front of my boss, my job is gone. And that's real emotion. People don't think that. Why? B2B is the most emotional thing. their job is on the line. You have to make that customer feel like a superhero for making that decision. And the entire customer experience has to live up to that promise that marketing has made at the beginning of that sale. This is why story and emotion is so important in B2B because of what Kim just said, right? She didn't talk about the product. She said, you have to make that person feel like you have to make them the hero. Your company is like the tool they use to save the world. And that happens to be in their company. Yeah. And I would say not to just echo the product marketing story, but positioning and messaging is probably the one of the most important investments for every company. And if there's any calls that I continuously get is for great product marketers and great product marketers that can understand what position is, what messaging is and how to translate that into value driven content. And the second part of that would mean that you could never go wrong with a strong investment into your customers, right? And really understanding your customers, what motivates them, how to drive your value messaging, to speak the language that they speak. So the customer pain that Kim talked about, I will get fired if I don't protect my software development and I have malware, right? If I have malware and I want a product and it blows up, right? Something bad happens, you are on the line. And so there is absolutely the need to ensure that the customer alignment is really tied very tightly to the strong positioning that the company needs to take with their product. And I know, Dave, you had asked us, like, keep this actionable, too. And so I will say if you are a first time CMO, the best thing that you can have in your pocket is a trusted strategic agency partner who you can bring in. Because like, I mean, a lot of us, especially if you come up through communications or product marketing, like you're good at positioning, you're good at category creation, but you need a trust agency partner who's going to get in the weeds with you and help you figure out that message and positioning and have that team. Amanda knows who I'm talking about, but I've got a very small agency, Mish, who I have brought to the last three companies with me, who the first thing I do is quick and dirty, get in there and work that positioning and that category positioning and messaging that becomes the basis of product marketing, website refresh, brand transformation. And that's like the secret weapon that you have to have. And it makes sense. That's a perfect example because that's a niche where like they're just going to have more reps and sets and experience doing the strategy and positioning that like, let's bring them in versus like, no disrespect, trying to hire someone junior to like do messaging. And that's what we do often. And it won't be somebody with a big agency name. It'll be that person that you trust. Yeah, without other. Well, get in the weeds with you. I just want to I know there's a lot of people like thinking about growing their careers in this room. I just want to share a story like you all have basically mentioned the importance of product marketing. I worked for this CEO when I was coming up earlier in my career. And I thought I had to be like a growth marketer. No disrespect to growth marketers, but I thought that's what you had to be. And I was really good at storytelling and copywriting, but I didn't think that was cool. I didn't think that was like essential to the business. I wanted to like, you know, be doing some maybe tests and I don't know, some cool stuff. And he pulled me aside one day. He's like, Hey, you need to double down on storytelling and copywriting because that is the evergreen skill that is going to give you like the most return on your career. That is going to have the biggest impact on our company. And that was the thing that clicked for me. Like, Oh yeah. Storytelling is the most important business skill for a marketer. I was chasing this other thing because I knew thought it needed to be well-rounded. He was like, no, double down on storytelling and positioning and messaging and that's going to be the thing and it's been true hi var i'm sandy i'm the head of marketing at focus all of this has been super helpful thank you all i have a question about the talking about attribution and channels what do you do when there's a channel that you know kind of based on vibes that actually contributes a lot but you're getting into that conversation with your CEO, your CFO, like, well, there's never been a single conversion. You spent so much money on it. How do you have that conversation and be able to defend those channels that you know, like, raise all time? I guess I'd just pull a Megan. It's programs, right? And there's five. No, really. I mean, I tell you how to do it. Well, we're early stage, I should say. I would recommend this. I think, first of all, it's a marketing philosophy issue at first. So I'm going to make this tangible, philosophical, but the marketing philosophy should be something that Seth Godin used to say, that's a million tiny whispers. So you are influencing your audience slowly with a million tiny whispers around them. That's your job as a marketer. Your job is not to figure out this one magic silver bullet, this ad that then you see the last click attribution. You're like, oh, 80% of our money comes from this ad. Let's invest a million dollars more in that ad. That's just how marketing works. And I think developing that understanding with your CFO and CEO is the beginning of this. And then don't do less elastic attribution. You can do that for tactical reasons, but do something else. Do a W-shaped, like a position-based. We can talk about it after. There's other models that are much more inclusive of all those other touches that might influence what you're seeking. So that's how you get it. So I've got a question for you guys. We talk a lot about acquisition, but how much time do you spend thinking expansion and retention? Because I think what I've noticed is a lot of people tend to spend a lot of time on acquisition, but don't think about the entire customer journey. And usually you can influence and help a lot more your company on the back end versus the front end as well. I think 80%, although don't quote me on that number, is upgrade and retention. So for us, I mean, we have started thinking about acquisition because like I mentioned, we have pivoted our go-to-market motion to be more vertically oriented. So there is an acquisition component to that pivot. But the primary source of revenue is that upgrade and retention. And so it's very important. I mean, we think about churn all day long. we're thinking about how we sell more, get more share of wallet with our existing customers. We think about it quite a bit. And when we think about how go-to-market has changed, marketing thinks so often about just the acquisition side. We as now marketers are in the go-to-market function. We are one very important cob in the wheel. The two other play, three other players, customer success we typically owns. Renewal is one of those big partners of years. And so a lot of our programming is absolutely tied to the renewal. And when we're thinking about marketing programs, we're thinking on that new acquisition. But a heavy load is on renewal and retention, but also programming specifically to increase the number of contacts upstream and downstream within that existing customer base. Hey, I'm Chara. I'm a co-founder of Ravne. You're a pretty early stage. So my question for Kim and you. So initially you said you focus a lot on marketing source pipeline. When the organization went to how you can't correlate it to like a single source marketing is more of a million is per influencing pipeline right so my question is two parts one what do you define as marketing source pipeline because like you said it drives the inbound even for the outbound is the product marketing enablement that drives the pipeline so you pretty much touch everything and things are going fine it's easy to say marketing is a million whispers it influences it but when things don't go find you need to look at one metric one trend to know what's influencing what so those are the two things i've seen you know like one how do you define marketing source pipeline and two when things are going well what are the metrics the trends that you look at to say hey marketing is on the right track something else that's not worth so you can aggregate everything that you do all the good and the bad together and see if it's driving the results that you are and i think what you're asking is what if it's not driving the results that you are then how do you diagnose it so then you have to go granular into the channels and you need to have hypotheses on what these channels do first for example you can have a channel like youtube where you show long form videos and you know that there's no last touch uh attribution that you know that that doesn't lead to pipeline at all right so your hypothesis on this channel is this is part of the journey And you need to validate that hypothesis by saying, if I remove that part of the journey, what is the influence on the effectiveness of the mix? And you need to start experimenting. One way to experiment this is by different geos. You could close it with one geo and keep it open in a different geo. Or by verticals, if you're able to target that way. You just have to go one rung deeper in the experimentation kind of granularity and start experimenting. Yeah, we talk about different levers that you can pull. try the different lovers but A testing is a beautiful thing right Before you just discount a lead source altogether and say email terrible No it not terrible It your subject line might be an experiment your header how it being delivered on mobile versus desktop may be your issue So it does take different A, B experimentation, the different level pulls. What are you driving them towards? And are you gating all your things versus letting it all be free? It's just those little tactics that really can make a big difference. Hey, I'm Rohan. I run an agency that helps companies with founder-led content to drive influence and also demand for the business. So my question for you is, how much awareness is this? Is there, especially with your CBOs, around creating this kind of like founder-led content motion, or it's like a content motion on platforms like LinkedIn to create problem awareness around your industries, create differentiation, and ultimately attract your customers into your product stack? So, I mean, we're not founder led. So, but if I think about like the executive presence on social has been a challenge, right? Our CEO is a baby boomer, proud baby boomer. He just did a multi-generational roundtable for me. So I don't feel bad saying that, but it's not his comfort spot. Our president and COO is a little bit more comfortable being out there, but it still feels very corporate-y and not super authentic. And I would also say that to his face. And he's got a great story and he's very authentic, but it's a lot of posting pictures of himself saying things. And so we've been working, we're chipping away at trying to bring a more authentic voice to our executive presence on social. But for a non-founder-led company who doesn't necessarily see the value, as I think a lot of founders do, they are the CMO, right? They are the number one for a long time kind of face of that company. And so I do think that bringing along an executive team that maybe doesn't see the value like a founder does is a little bit more of a challenge. I would say that, first of all, a founder could be just an influence for you, right? So it's influence for marketing, just using somebody down the hole, right? But I would say this. I think that if your customers are on LinkedIn, then it's a pretty good strategy to use LinkedIn that way. and founders have authenticity and they have something to say that's interesting. So I think it's very valuable. If you operate in a vertical that has pretty effective media, that is trade media, that is specific to that vertical and people actually read it, then PR using your founder is actually a pretty good tactic as well. The same way you would use them for LinkedIn. If the answer is no to these questions, then maybe that's not your main thing. My company today is founder-led and the CTO is also one of the original founders. And the thought leadership strategy very much relies heavily on them having a voice in the marketplace and in particular on LinkedIn. And I will say you've got to humanize it. They are not naturally, one is much more natural at doing it. The other one, we have to help guy, but it 100% has an influence in terms of the engagement. When we talk about attribution or other ways in which we can show our, I can't show did that impact the deal or not, but I absolutely know it affected the engagement we had with a customer base, whether it's current or in the future, right? A prospect customer base, but it absolutely influences an industry. So absolutely would make an investment. And if you've got that at your disposal. Just maybe one sentence and why stop at founders? All of your employees? CMO. I think it's like the same trend of influencers is going to happen inside of companies or like, just by nature, we become passionate. Not everybody, but there's a group. We can go inside of a company and become passionate about the company they work at. Give them the tools. That's social media, right? To share. What's going on, everybody? My name is AJ XC. And I have a company called Creator Match, which ironically, piggybacking off what you said, we are a LinkedIn creator marketing platform and agency. So we spoke a lot about internal influencers like founder-led content, turning your CTO into something that can speak to your audience. What are your thoughts on external influencers, but not Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, but for LinkedIn? I'm curious if you're seeing spend getting allocated not just for influencer marketing, but specific to LinkedIn as a channel for 2025. I'm not doing it because my customers are not on LinkedIn, but I do see it on LinkedIn. And I think LinkedIn is becoming what Instagram and TikTok are already. Just maybe for a niche audience, but it's big enough to be meaningful. So I do see LinkedIn adding all that functionality and caring deeply about promoting that kind of content. There's no stopping it. It's happening. And I think it's a worthwhile endeavor. I think it's a viable channel. We're doing it in a kind of a varied way of that. What I would just say to anybody who's going to make an investment on social, it has to be authentic. It has to be real, right? If I show or sniff or think in any way that this is bought and it is not true or it's not a true testimony or not a true customer validation or product evaluation, it really can damage a brand. So there's got to be a fine line balance. But I think there's absolutely signs we're even doing some things that not front, but it's got to be very real. And I would say when you look at like the intersection, especially in kind of deep tech or the B2B, like real enterprise side, when you think about who's an analyst and who's not, like there's a reason why Gartner can charge so much money for their events and for their engagement with you, your seats and your licensing, because they don't do pay to play. Right. And versus like if I go pay an independent analyst to write a white paper about my product and solution, people can like they know they know that when you get in an MQ, a magic quadrant, like you did not pay for that. So there is whether you believe the hype cycle or not, that is a legitimate analyst white paper versus where you pay for one. And so I think there is some a little bit of haziness there. But you're seeing, especially at IBM, where we had an entire dedicated practice around influencer marketing that does absolutely help your business if you've got the money and the wherewithal to put it towards that. But at the end of the day, I'll take a Barker MQ any day over a paid analyst who's going to say whatever he wants to in order to get that 50K. Hi, I'm Michael Robin. I'm a former CMO at marketing. Now I do product marketing consulting. So my question is about how once you've built an architecture and for teaching your sales enablers and solution consultants about product or what you're selling, how to get them excited and properly enabled enough to tell that story? Because that's a challenge I think a lot of us have. How do you market the marketing? I will say you said two different things, or at least I interpreted marketing. Marketing is marketers challenge. All is marketers have to solve for that. That is a hard thing and have to make a concerted effort of it. Like we're on to the next thing and forget that we have to celebrate and make sure that the rest of the company knows about something that was done or how they can participate. But the first part of your question was around to me was around enablement, right? How can I have created all this great content? Now I have messaging that should be delivered and evangelized by the sales team? How can I make sure that they are saying it, they're excited about it? I will say sales enablement in particular has a lot of opportunity, but it really needs to be a very dedicated focus. And it takes repetition, repetition, repetition. I will say where we talk about change and technology, there are a lot of great AI tools that have come of age that can help and augment that repetition to where it used to be hand-on-hand combat or the Salesforce model as you train from the top down and you keep training so that everyone has to be able to recite the same message. That is hard to scale, but there are great AI technologies that are doing it. But I do think enablement requires repetition, consistency, testing, validation, but there is no better substitute than getting market validation by going out into the field with your customer or with your sales reps to see how it's being utilized and receive at being receptive and this modify accordingly. And I'll say too, I mean, at least what I've experienced now over the last year as I've rolled out a five-year strategy is to have a little fun with it. And so I'm co-leading our five-year strategy with our chief product and strategy officer. And I wasn't sure going into it if his sense of humor was going to be on the same wavelength as me because I have a ridiculous sense of humor and you either like it or it makes you uncomfortable. And he like jumped in and was willing. So we built and deployed this five-year strategy. We really simplified it. We used some pretty old kind of Starbucks and McDonald's approaches to really simplify and make it graphical and also easy to consume. And then we had some fun. So we rolled it out with a talk show and he went along with it and He did a Dave Letterman top 10. He did all of the bits that we could pull in. We did a segment that was basically, we had a customer wingstop that we wanted to show how our strategy and reference architecture was kind of the exact transformation that they were going. And he, God bless him, was willing to do hot leaks. So we ordered Wingscop and he interviewed the sales guy and they ate spicy wings and it was hilarious. But the salespeople remembered it. They remembered the story. They remembered the way that it was delivered. We're going into our kickoff in a couple of weeks and we're doing trends. And we found this hilarious Saturday Night Live episode with Aidy Bryant from like a couple of years ago with these trendsetters. And we're going to reinvent the trendsetters. And instead of talking about what to where and when, we're talking about cybersecurity trends. We're talking about AI. We're talking about digital transformation and having some fun with it. And we're seeing that it's resonating because we're not doing the same old, same old that the sellers have gotten used to seeing. And nothing against our sales enablement team, but they have kind of a rinse and repeat model and we're shaking it up. I am Amy Tarkeeton. I own an agency here in Austin Culture and Industries. We optimize blog content. We turn blogs into digital hubs so that companies can make money. So my question is really more about like the people relationships within your organizations. So I think that like the C-suite has a lot of concepts, strategies that you need to happen. So how do you work or what are some of the things that you do with your direct reports, with your VPs and directors to make sure that like what you're thinking actually cascades down and these strategies and creative assets come to life? My mentality, it kind of starts at the very beginning and the top. So we co-created my leadership team and I and then rolled it out to the team, a marketing manifesto. So it's not taking away from our corporate values and purpose, but it's how do we want our marketing team to work as one of the most collaborative functions in the business? We want to have a little bit of a different vibe to our marketing culture. So that manifesto is the starting point for that. We get together once a quarter with the entire team and have a very specific conversation around priorities and how we're tracking against the priorities that we put in place. One of our core values is that there's no bad ideas. And we've created a lot of different ways. We do a monthly ops review that's really like metrics focused. But the team has a monthly marketing initiatives call that I am not involved in that people bring big ideas to the table. And then the team bubbles them up and comes and has a conversation around where they want to see investment. And then I personally have a monthly office hours where people can just book 15 or 30 minutes of my time and have a conversation about anything. And so recently I had a conversation with somebody. Should I go get my MBA? Did you like your MBA? Is that a good investment that you made? I've had conversations with people. What's the short answer to that, by the way? I was curious. For me. One, you were an answer. A one more. I need students here from McCombs that I've invited to say the race. Best two years of my life. You have to pivot your career to make your money back. Don't stay in marketing and be in marketing now. We got to wrap. I hate to cut it right. But look, we have to get up anyway. So can you stand up and do a round of applause for this amazing panel? That would make me real hats. 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 a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more. exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. 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. 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