Opportunities and Threats To The Marketing Function, With Tim Hines

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, powered by the Sales IQ Network. Hi and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zenna from the CRO Collective and I'm here with my co host, Lupe Feld. Hey, Lupe.

Hey, Warren. This is Lupe Feld and I'm glad to be here with you.

So this podcast is really for aspiring CROs and CEOs and current CROs whom are interested in learning from not only us, but the great guests that we're going to have.

We're here to tell you that there is other areas of the business that can drive revenue and we're going to look and inspect and come up with some great ideas for us to bring in as much revenue as we can and drive some meaningful change for the business.

So tune in. We have some exciting opportunities coming up for really amazing conversations and any B2B leaders think you're really going to enjoy it. So thanks for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you. And welcome to the next episode of the Sierra Spotlight Podcast. I'm Warren Zinn with the CRO Collective. And how you doing, Lupe?

I'm doing great, Warren.

Good, Good to see you. So we're excited today. We have a really great guest. Our guest today is Tim Hines. Tim Hines is also known as the marketing Starter. He's an author, he's a podcast show host. As a matter of fact, I was recently on Tim's podcast. It was a great conversation, so I'll give you little link to that later. He's a keynote speaker, He's a consultant who shows people how to harness the power of the entrepreneurial spirit to excel in all that they do. Tim specializes in developing omnichannel marketing programs within a variety of industries and partnering with startups to get their dreams off the ground. With nearly 20 years of experience, Tim has developed strategic marketing initiatives with a multitude of clients, including Dialpad, Tribune Media, TicketMaster and the CIA. I'm going to ask you about that one, Tim, so welcome.

Thanks so much for having me and it's a pleasure to connect. And yeah, I'm looking forward to expanding on even what you and I were talking about in the podcast that I hosted you on. So it's great to have reciprocity in this business. Thanks so much for having me, guys.

Sure. So, you know, you come from more the marketing space and Lupe and I, you know, we talk a lot about how sometimes marketing gets short shrift, you know, within the entire revenue operation. But recently there's been an explosion of conversation around Marketing's role in B2B companies, particularly as it pertains to things like outbound and inbound and demand gen. So if you don't mind, we'd love to hear a little bit of your own perspective on where marketing is today and how you kind of view marketing's role in the modern, like, B2B space.

Yeah, I mean, that's a big question. Obviously, there's a lot that can go into that. But what I think is really interesting is that for a long time, marketing got to and was kind of hiding behind the cloak, if you will, was kind of the wizard in the wizard of Oz. Right. There was a lot of interdepartmental questions around, like, oh, what is it that marketing does? Okay, cool. They built our website, we've got our fancy business cards. We see the ads posted on the side of the bus. Neat. But what are they working on over there? Right. And so I think what has come to fruition over the past 10, 15 years and is continuing to come more in the light is just that transparency, not only into results and the metrics of what marketing has been achieving, which we'll. I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute, but also behind the cloak of what marketing is doing internally. And that's something that I believe in strongly and try to champion, whether whenever I'm either working for a company or I'm consulting with a company is to try to try to sit down with the. With the leadership, reach across the aisle and make sure that there is no question on what marketing is working on. I think a lot of times, if we're looking at specifically with the revenue function and things like that and how there needs to be such a symbiotic relationship today. They were very much working in silos before and didn't necessarily have that mutual respect for each other. And the only way that we're ever going to achieve that is by opening the doors and showing what we have and being conversational, interacting with each other. And I know we're all in virtual and hybrid modes nowadays, but you can still make your appearance and show what you're doing on the marketing front. So that way there's no question from the revenue team on what marketing is doing to support you on the revenue side. You're not just out there in brand land trying to do creative things like it also, you can also show them tangible, real things that you're working on from a marketing side that's helping to move the needle forward and that you're both marching toward the same goal. So, so I think that's something that has really evolved even just as of recently. And it's something that I preach, whether I'm speaking or consulting or whatever, just making sure that marketing team understand that that in order to get the awareness that they need, they need to also have that transparency and be at the table, have a seat at the table. And sometimes they need to, need to demand that seat at the table. So I think that's a big thing that's, that's happening right now. It's something that I definitely champion.

That's great, Tim. I love, I love that open communication. So often, you know, you see in a CRO kind of realm, they sometimes own marketing and sometimes, you know, the CRO position can be viewed as like the head of sales and then they not our ideal vision of what the CRO position should be. But sometimes they have to partner with marketing because they don't own marketing and that communication is key. Give me some idea as to how you break down those sizes because I think they still exist in a lot of companies. And what are some of the tactics that you use to kind of open that two way communication?

Yeah, well, I think a lot of times too, marketers don't understand what that role of a chief revenue officer is or what a revenue function, what that means. I think marketing for the longest time didn't or hasn't understood that they have an impact on that, that they have a part of it. And so having more of a revenue mind or reven approach to what you do in marketing I think will only help to further, to lessen that divide between and build those relationships with anyone who's on the actual revenue driving function. I mean we know what demand generation is, right? But that's relatively new in the grand scope of marketing and advertising. Over its entire history. Demand generation is a blip in time. Kind of like how humans are a blip in time on the earth's history. Demand generation is so new and now there are actual people who focus specifically on that in marketing and maybe those people get a little bit more of what they're, how they function and how they relate to the revenue side. But then there's some other people in marketing that may not still understand that. And so my advice to marketers out there, especially marketing leaders that maybe aren't coming from a working so hand in hand with sales teams or have been very siloed in marketing is to, is to take a step back, recognize your worldview or your bias that you have for marketing and Try to learn something new by going and sitting down, literally sitting down with and talking with people in the revenue organization or taking a role where you have to adjust in that and work with a revenue team. This is actually something that Warren and I were talking about in the episode that I hosted him on because I wanted marketers to get a revenue leader perspective on what they can, what they can do to adjust and change and be and get with the times, for lack of a better description. You know, I think that any professional today, but especially those in marketing, have to be, have to have this forever student type of mentality, right? You're always learning and this is something that you have to add to your, your dossier of all the things that you want to learn. But it's how to be more revenue centric, how to understand how marketing impacts revenue and, and how really everything that marketing does at the end of the day helps to drive that demand. Whether that is filling the lead funnel at the top or nurturing all the way through the bottom. You are building and doing things that are ultimately helping to close business. And so when I am working on building a marketing plan or building out my marketing team or whatever, I always want to try to attach myself to revenue wherever possible. And so one of the things I do is I make sure to look at it from the campaign perspective and go, okay, we had a campaign, let's say it was a conference and we sent a couple people to a conference and it cost xyz. We got this many leads out of it and this much in deals came out of it. And I can point back and go, this was a, this was a marketing driven campaign that ultimately led to these deals. And I know which deals they are. And I can then turn back and say the return on investment of that marketing spend was X. And I think a lot of marketers for the most part haven't done that traditionally. And it's kind of like a different way of thinking about it because as a marketer who's been laid off five times in my career, I find it always more and more important to try to attach myself to revenue wherever possible. So that way I have something I can actually point to and say, no, no, no, I'm important, not just because of what I'm doing here creatively, but look at what I've done to drive the needle from, for the revenue team. And so it's about learning, it's about actual, having actual conversations, and it's about stepping outside of your comfort zone and taking on either a new project or maybe it's even time to make a shift in your career and find a new role where you are going to be more involved in the revenue function.

Great advice. I love it. I think, as I heard you say that kind of wearing both hats because I've had marketing and kind of the CRO role in my background and also sales. I think that advice applies to everyone. I think learning about the other side could be very beneficial to really collaboration and learning. And I think about, you know, revenue, you know, doesn't just stop on the front end. It really continues through the customer journey and there's so much revenue opportunity that sometimes is forsaken or forgotten on, you know, the customer retention side. So that's, that's really interesting. I appreciate that.

Absolutely.

You know, I appreciate that too, Tim. I understand your points. I think there's a couple ways to look at this right now. You have, I think you have more of a awareness than I've seen ever of marketing as either, you know, being looked at like, well, we can just get a bunch of SDRs to do a lot of the lead generation now. We don't need marketing as much anymore. We can get people on the phone and make phone calls and send out emails and qualify people that way and let marketing handle like things like sales decks and sales materials and sales enablement sort of things, sales support roles. Right. Maybe run, you know, online advertising campaigns, et cetera. But the whole lead gen thing in many companies is being pushed off to an SDR team, whereas there are other organizations that feel that's a really bad model because essentially you're just spamming people with a bunch of emails and you're doing what marketing should be doing, which is to build intent and build interest. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. So you're a cmo, let's say, Tim, you're hired and the company has an option whether they choose to use an SDR team or utilize your marketing team to build interest. Right. Or build qualified leads. And in this response, I'd be interested in understanding what your definition of a qualified lead is from a marketing perspective too, and how marketing should interact with an organization to, I guess you could say, advocate for a perspective or a way in which they should go to market. I know there's a lot of things you'd want to know with this scenario, like what kind of company is it, what kind of product do they sell. But you know what, I'll provide some guidance there. Let's say it's a SaaS based company and they sell a software product. It's a B2B company. Okay. Which I think is the common type of people listening to this program. Okay. So it's a SaaS based company, software based company, selling into businesses and you're the CMO and you're being asked to kind of formulate a strategy of how marketing is going to go to market, particularly pertaining to someone who runs sales that has their own, let's say more SDR based perspective. What's your thoughts on that?

So, yeah, there's a lot of unknowns, a lot of variables. One thing that I always try to look at, because this is actually something that I'm actively working at, it's funny that you bring up this scenario. One of the things I always try to look at is what has been tested historically, what has the company done, what kind of wins have already worked. Maybe they haven't done anything, or maybe they've tried the SDR thing and it's failed or they've done a big marketing push and that's failed or whatever. What were the things that went wrong there? What can we learn and glean from those scenarios that then we can try to apply to maybe a new mix that's going to be a little more impactful. I'm not a, definitely not a leader that ever says we should go put all of our eggs in one basket. Let's get an SDR organization and just jam, jam, jam, jam, jam. That should be one channel. Like you should maybe devote some to that to test it. And then you should have marketing be focusing on unique different ways through like ABM type of campaigns, especially with B2B SaaS. Like super impactful to be focusing on ABM, building, building things. Really focus around the core message, really understanding the buying patterns of, of that, of that business and of those of those customers. But I would also ask as a question, you know, what is the, what is the size of this, of this market that the, that the product or the service is going to be serving? Is it huge where there are literally 100,000 possible contact records that if I went to Infousa and decided to buy them, can I buy all of those? Can I do that? Or is it more finite? Like, hey, we have 200, 220, 500, something like that, big players in the market that we know, we know who their key buyer is or that Persona or that role at that company, Those are the people we need to go after. If it was more like upmarket, something like that, or more limited, then I would say, well then you know don't spend your time building a giant SDR organization, hiring internally, or even maybe going out and getting a service to do that for you, which you can do. There's a lot of great ones out there as well. I would say. Maybe then you want to put more of the effort on marketing to build some strategic marketing campaigns that are really targeting those people, those accounts with the right message at the right time, or if it's on the other side, hundreds, thousands of leads. Well, I mean, that's going to be something that I think marketing and a great sdr Org, whether that's a talented person or a company that you're hiring, can kind of work through and figure out how to. How to chip at. Chip at that giant. That giant monolith together. So I would say it depends. I hate that. I hate that it depends, but it kind of depends. I think at like, total market size and things like that. I mean, most of where I have worked in my entire career has been in B2B SaaS. And I mean, a lot of it, too, can also come down to, you know, what can we do on the partner side? And can we build out a great partner marketing effort which then is. Which then is almost tag team between the sales team and the marketing team. Right? Like, the sales team might be going out and trying to establish some of these partner relationships, much like they would with acquiring customers directly. And then marketing needs to support them, get them trained, and get them all the ability then to go out and sell on your behalf. So I think there's a lot of different things that you can kind of look at. But, you know, in summary, I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. And I would really look at like, okay, what is the mountain we have to climb? Is it a big mountain as far as, like, quantity, or is it a smaller mountain? And then we can figure out the different ways of how we, you know, chip away at that together. Either more marketing led or more sales led. It's going to kind of depend on that volume and also, also on the basic reception, too, of the. Of the industry. You know, how do they like to be sold to? You know, maybe these people are other salespeople or other marketers and they can't stand it when SDRs reach out to them. If I can tell you guys, I think probably even just this week of shooting this, this episode, I probably got a dozen people messaging me on LinkedIn. Tim, are you looking for blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, I'm in marketing, right? This doesn't work on me. Like, thank you. You also spelled my name wrong. Don't know what my company actually does. And you're just. And I could see right through you. I could see you're an sdr, so maybe your market's a little more savvy, and, like, that type of thing won't work. And so, like, those are also considerations that I would want to look at and understand before we say, like, yep, here's what we should try, but both, right? You want to test them. You want to test both sides and kind of see what's working, but set a framework for that. Be like, hey, we're going to test an SDR LED thing on this subset of this. Of these leads that we might have a bucket of for three months. I'm gonna give it a quarter. We're gonna see how that performs in tandem. You know, you're almost a B. Testing it in tandem. We're gonna set up an ABM marketing campaign, maybe to this subset, and then see how that performs. And then at the end of it, you can regroup and go, okay, so what we learned from this one and what we learned from that one, we can maybe do some sort of combination going forward or completely cancel one and throttle up on the other one. And so it's always a bit of testing and tinkering to lead to your final decision.

I love that, Tim. I think, you know, the test and learn approach. Test learn and measure approach works great. I heard you say, you know, look at what's worked in the past. You know, and sometimes I think that can be a deterrent of success, because if something didn't work maybe five years ago doesn't mean that it can't work today. And until you test it again and you really have, you know, A and B strategies that are continuing to kind of roll through the different options. And it could be a really in tandem approach of both, you know, marketing and sdr. But the reality is things change. And, you know, we've. We've known that we've learned that over the past two years. You know, the way we sell, the way we communicate, the way we even do podcasts now. You know, we're not all showing up into a studio and micing up and being in a soundproof room. You know, I think I have my cat meowing outside my door, but, you.

Know, I'm just waiting for my dog to bark. So.

So I think it's. I think it's really important to remain flexible and to remain open. Yet another reason why you know, marketing, sales, the CRO customer, you know, success need to stay engaged and need to really test and learn and adjust different strategies. So I love that approach.

Yeah. And I would actually say to build on what you just said that inter organizational skills or communication skills and planning skills that are more important today than they ever have been, just as the way we are in business, but also because we're more fragmented, working remote, doing those things. And you know, thank God for great tools like Slack and other things that make it easy for us to communicate. All of these, all of these organizations have different insights. And when you're operating in those silos, you might be building in a completely opposite direction of maybe what some great customer success representative has spoken to customers and knows because they're on the front lines and they're hearing exactly what customers are saying in the market. And marketing is like, da la la la la. No, this is what we research. I'm going out this way. And they might be like, wait, no, we've learned from customers that they like this and you can't ignore that. Right. And that's why when it comes, especially when it comes to anything related to product launches or any sort of major go to markets, I mean even ongoing tweaks to like how we're actually messaging and positioning ourselves, most of those core things are going to come from those frontline people, typically the sales, typically the customer success people and then marketing whenever they can get plugged in. And that's why in my book I have a section in a chapter where it's called take the time to get plugged in and, and that, and in there I give an example of like, hey, you're a new marketer and I maybe you're working on demand gen, maybe you're a field marketer, maybe you're a growth marketer. Whatever I say, you need to go and sit down with the sales team. You need to understand what their perspective is, what they're hearing from the customers in the front lines and immediately start digesting from them. Sitting in on sales calls. And heck, I even say in the example of you like they're going to a conference, you need to get your ass to that conference. You need to, you need to pitch it to your boss, you need to pitch it to your chief revenue officer and say like, hey, I'm not going to this necessarily for fun, although I'm sure it'll be fun to be with the team members. I'm going to learn. I need this to be part of my training. I want to be sitting there or somewhere nearby at the booth and I'll help support it and set it all up and make sure it's working. But I want to be able to hear my, my sales reps actually have these in depth conversations with prospects, with people in real life, which now we can start to do again as. As events are coming back here and be able to have that team Corro learn from them firsthand and then also be able to really listen and let that digest. And I think that's something that's really important that marketers need to do is sometimes, you know, we think marketers can often go, hey, I'm the smartest person in the room. We did all this great market research and this is what we know, and we did a customer survey and blah, blah, blah, blah. But you might be missing something if you're not talking to your frontline people.

Yeah, I like it. So your model clearly has a lot of focus on communication, which I agree. I mean, I think there needs to be a lot more collaborative relationships between these functions. I don't think that's the case enough. But a lot of this comes from leadership because the way you're speaking seems to be focused a great deal on the individual contributor who works in a marketing department who needs to think about things. A lot of these things are constrained by the way the organization is set up. Sometimes it's just not possible to have those types of collaborative conversations because the company's siloed. And it's hard for sometime someone who's on the marketing team to make a difference there if the organization is siloed off as a whole. Right. So you know, a lot what we're professing, you know, Lupe and I here in these conversations, is to have organizations think about this stuff when they arrange the way the revenue, operations and functions are working together so that you don't have to have that situation and that people have a better understanding. For example, I don't, I don't think enough is going on in the area where I don't know how many marketing people actually go on sales calls or listen in to sales calls or work, go to sales meetings, you know, or vice versa. I would say it's probably worse the other way. I think salespeople not enough for the most part, not all of them, but for the most part. Many salespeople don't really fully understand what marketing does. They don't know how they do it. They have a understanding. They obviously are doing online marketing and they're doing programmatic advertising and they're running ads on Facebook or whatever they're doing, but understanding it, really understanding it, knowing the way that they think and the way that they operationalize it and the strategies they take. I have a feeling I know it because I've done a lot of work in this respect with, with companies is when that information shared. There are a lot of these like realizations and ahaha. Moments that come from that where both sides can develop a better understanding of how what they do impacts the other. And because most organizations are focused so heavily on sales, it usually tends to lean in that direction. Right. How does this affect our sales organization? How does sales feel about this as opposed to the other way around? Right. And I think again because of what I'm seeing as a growth in kind of eschewing some of the more traditional methodologies of marketing and moving more towards thought leadership and creating demand, marketing is getting a much different type of seat at the table. I'm curious to know what you think about that. How do you look at the way leadership needs to be thinking about their marketing organizations as it pertains to their revenue functions and what's the right ways that you would advise, let's say like a CEO or a CRO, how to be thinking about the way they integrate these organizations better?

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And there's a talk that I actually give and I've done at a few marketing conferences recently and it's called, well, it's all about basically the post digital evolution that we're moving into right now. And I'll break that down to answer the question. So first evolution or first phase of the evolution? We had the pre digital, which was marketing was focused on brand building, was really intent on media buying. And the way we measured success was if the phone rang or if we had like a focus group at the end and said, hey, did you see this ad? Did it influence your buying behavior? Right. That was like the tv, the radio, the print days. Then we moved into the digital age, which we're in right now and starting to move a little beyond. And that's where we were really looking at digital metric conversions. We were then able to kind of see like what type of campaigns, as I was talking about earlier, are actually driving sales and potentially driving revenue across the board. We could look back at those things. We could see how much time people are spending pages like what they're actually buying as opposed to just hoping they saw our ad. And then there was a little bit of brand building element to that as well. And now we're moving into this post digital era where it's really all about intent and going back to the basics and being more human in what we do as marketers because the customers, whether they're B2B or B2C, are demanding that. But because of the wealth of data and information that marketing is the arbiter of, now we are able to call shots and have our seat at the table because we have all of our analytics data, we have purchasing behaviors, we have bamba bam ba, like you name it. We're collecting so much information about how consumers or customers or whatever you want to call them are interacting with our brand, are interacting with our messaging, are interacting with our marketing, and even with our salespeople. Marketing now kind of has this, this hierarchical view of that and can drive that down to the sales team or over, not that they're above, over to the sales team and up to the revenue function. So marketing can come to that table and say, look, Sierra, you know, I love that you have a great gut check on the industry. I love that you know how to build a great revenue Org, and I know that you love how to scale. But let me give you the tools, which is the intent, the right customer at the right time, their behavior, and all of these other data points we can now deliver to a CRO on a silver plate. And the CRO can then go, whoa. Marketing is so, so much more valuable than it was even five, 10 years ago because we're moving into this more post digital time where everything that we do now can be taken and turned into a tool for marketing to help drive business decision and business strategy. And that's why I think having a great marketing leader who knows how to then take that and deliver it to a CRO or a revenue team or CEO or whoever's, whoever's running, whoever's running revenue for the company and be able to point to things and deliver that in a, you know, in a great presentation is even more important than ever. So I think that's kind of interesting the way that things have changed. Before, it was just like guesses. Back in those print and TV and radio days, it was like, yeah, we ran an ad newspaper and a bunch of people came in and bought stuff. Good job marketing. But like, that was all they could point to. We can point to so much more. And on the converse of that, that makes marketing so much more accountable too. And so you can't, like, you know, even. You can't even hide behind that wizard of Oz wall anymore. You have to. It's gone, it's been torn down because everyone can see into dashboards, everyone can see into metrics. And so you, so this transparency goes both ways. You have the accountability, but then you also have so much more power now as a marketer to come to the table, share that information, have influence on the revenue function, have influence over the greater business and the direction it's going. So I think it's actually a really exciting time. And that's one of the things that, you know, I'm trying to do from my consultant perspective and helping to coach and train people is to do just that. And so, yeah, I think it's, I think it's really interesting the way that we're heading there. And then one final, one final thought is one of the things you said is, you know, marketing getting to the sales meeting, sales getting to the marketing meeting, that communication ongoing is super, super important. As a marketing leader, I have always given my employees the opportunity to be seen, which I think is really important, like, because we don't want to be behind the cloak. So instead of maybe me going to the Monday sales call or the Monday sales meeting, rah, rah, rah meeting to kick off the week, I send one of my people and then they talk about what marketing has been working on the previous week to support sales. So that way they have that exposure and then people go, oh cool, Katie, great. She's doing this. Oh, I know what she does here. Awesome. Marketing's here. So not only just having that person, but then also, but then giving your, the people who report to you as a marketer the, the platform to do that. And then I would say sales too. Like if marketing's having a planning meeting, sales needs to come to that meeting, like sales leader or whoever that the sales team is championing to come to that meeting and then hear what marketing is working on. So that again, it's that two way street. So I always try to coach people on doing just that.

Any thoughts, Lupe?

Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting as I think about organizations that have for years function in silos and driving and changing that behavior can be difficult. You know, you stay in your lane, we'll stay in our lane. You know, if we need you, we'll, we'll call you type of approach and in the, and you mentioned data, which I think is such a critical kind of pivot point for marketing. You know, you can inform what you're serving up, you can customize what you're serving up because now you have so much more information And I think a lot of what people are expecting as buyers is what they get in their day to day. You know, I mean, you open up your, your phone and Amazon reminds you that you might be out of Earl Grey tea because you buy it and you haven't ordered it and you know, they've counted the days. And so to some extent that experience that people are having in their day to day influences how they buy as a, as a B2B buyer. And so that, that explanation or that simplicity or the visualization of how or why people should care, I think is really important.

So. So Tim, let's kind of move into one last topic here. I want to get your thoughts on this. So I asked it before. You know, there's a lot of discussion now about what marketing produces. How does marketing, in your view, verify its contribution to revenue? What's the way that a company can determine that marketing actually made a measurable, even monetizably measurable contribution to the sales numbers?

Yeah, I think there needs to be. Well, first of all, there needs to be an understanding between marketing, sales, the revenue function, the executive leadership that marketing needs to be looked at as a laboratory versus a factory. Like marketing is 100% supposed to be driving man, supposed to be bringing in marketing qualified leads. It's supposed to be doing those things. But marketing is also there to build a brand, to nurture, to build trust and to experiment and try new things that are revolutionary for the industry, for the brand to change positioning, to do a lot, do different things that are gonna help to make that mark for the company. So whether that's the kind of the standard 20, 25% of any marketing campaign that you do, you chalk that up to brand typically. But of that rest of that 75%, the way that you do that is by being methodical in your campaign building and your campaign measurement. So I don't care if you're using HubSpot, I don't care if you're using Zoho, I don't care if you're using Salesforce or Google Sheets for that matter. Being able to track what you're doing based on the spend that you've been given. And hopefully you have a marketing budget. And that's a whole other question. We can talk about that. But even like your salary as a marketer, a lot of times I've even done that, I've taken my budget and said like, hey, it is our budget. Here's the revenue that's come out of the campaigns. Look at how great that did. Even if I throw in my salary, it's still paying for itself and killing it. Right? So being able to point to campaigns and the metrics and tracking the hell out of stuff is the only way you're ever going to be able to prove your case. And all of the buttons and levers and all the things in between and what channel do we use? Balancing SDRs versus versus marketing campaigns or whatever. Like all of those are all just different little functions that fit in there. But no matter what it is having a place where you can go and point to a campaign and track the deals, track the potential revenue and goal set to it as well. To be like, hey, you know, we think it's going to be this. Here's our goal. We were under goal, but it still paid for itself. We were over goal. Obviously it paid for itself. Being able to show that you're paying for yourself at the end of the day. And the only way to do that is to employ tools that are going to help you keep track of that. And you know, not every marketer is going to have access to that stuff. But the leaders of the marketing orgs should be setting those up and they should be working with the revenue teams, the CROs, to determine what those goals are, to determine those expectations and then making that part of what is the delivery to the revenue leaders to show them, hey, here's what marketing said they were going to do. This is what marketing did and here's the revenue ultimately that came out of it. Boom, here you go. Any questions? Right, so that way you're not leaving anyone in the revenue organization scratching their head going, this didn't, this doesn't make any sense. Make it make sense. That's the only way you're ever going to win them over.

So I have a question for you and it's recently been talked about a little bit more. I think it's even been branded recently. Dark Social. What are your thoughts about the responsibility of marketing on Dark Social, which is very difficult to track, but probably the best way to sell B2B?

Yeah, I mean it's, that's all going to come from the, the great content that you have. It's going to come from the messaging and the essence that your brand puts out. Which marketing is the typically the leader of those are the things that are going to create that invisible conversation that's happening. And those things aren't necessarily trackable. But much like brand, it is real and it's something that's happening and it' something that you can at least attribute some, some form of your marketing to like assuming that there's going to be some conversations that are happening outside of what you can see, there's. That's going to happen. And I think that's only increasingly happening, you know, things behind paywalls and other places through messengers, things like that. I mean, that's just dark. Social really is just the new way of saying word of mouth right over the Internet. Like, I might talk to you when we're not on this podcast and tell you something about Warren that is absolutely fantastic, but he would never know about it. But then you decide to go and work with him because of what we, what we had. And as far as a conversation, so that's. That to me is just one of those other more powerful tools. It's like, hey, this is, this is word of mouth. But the only way that you're going to be. You can't control the conversation, but the only way that you're going to be able to enable good conversation to happen is to be authentic, to be, to be real, and to be delivering as much value as you can with what you're putting out there. As far as your message and your marketing.

Great. I love it. I think that's great.

Yeah, you jumped on that one. I like that question so much. Lupe. I was thinking about that there's just certain things you can't measure. And the problem is, Tim, is that marketing spends a lot of time looking one direction backwards, which is they look at what can be measured and then they build their tools around the things that can be measured so that they can be measured as opposed to just getting results. And if they can't have attribution software for it, then, you know, they may just have to figure out different ways to determine its value as opposed to, well, we can't measure it, so don't do it. Because if I can't get measured for it, I won't get credit for it. And then marketing will be threatened. Right, because it happens. And so, you know, what's happened, I think, is attribution software. Attribution modeling has created a habit at companies where they're too worried about getting credit for things that they can show for investments as opposed to doing things that work. And, you know, the definition of something that works is something that can be measured, which is not true. That's not true. And so I think that that's a problem. And I, I see now what's happening is there's more and more and more evidence without question now that there's so much happens outside of the attribution window that people don't account for. But, you know, it sort of just happens, you know, it's like almost like I would call it, you know, ghost revenue. Right. It's like recurring revenue that happens in the background that no one has an accounting team for. But you know, it always comes in every month, so no one gets credit for it. And as long as it keeps happening, everyone's happy. So that was sort of where. And Lupe's question was perfect. It was exactly where I was headed with this is, you know, there is this murky new ground that marketers sort of need to stake a claim over. How do you go to a boss and say, I want to spend money on X when I can't provide any software to show that it worked, when in fact it may be the most effective thing you do?

And that's a, that's a great question. So that's where having a boss or a revenue partner or executive leadership of a company really understands the value of marketing in all forms. So I think a lot of times too, the reason why marketers try to go and point back to attribution models is because they're kind of scared, because they kind of go, oh, if I can't prove myself, then they're not going to see the value in me. And I might be at the chopping block at some point. Right? That's a legitimate fear. And also there's just so many tools out there that we can use now to track. Kind of like I was saying before, that lead you into, I'm only going to do those things that are trackable. But like I said at the beginning of that point I was making before is that you have to think of yourself as a laboratory, as a, as a scientist versus a button pusher and a factory. Nothing wrong with factory workers, obviously, but when marketing has to have a little bit of both, it has to have that functionality, that optimization, but you have to leave room for that, exploring that, that 20 to 25% of saying like, hey, this what? Part of what we're doing here is trying new things and putting parts together. And just so you know, I'm asking for this budget and that percentage of it is going to be going to that out of the gate. Right? So we have an understanding that some of this is experimental and you need to make sure as a marketer to communicate that well with the organization, with the executive team. But then also when you're working with or coming into an org, making sure that they, that's something that they also believe in. Because if you're coming in an organization that's just like, no, we're only numbers based, we only want attribution, there's no room for you to do exploration, then you might want to have a question mark around. Oh, is this the best fit for me? And so what I would say on the converse of that is what I would say to listeners of your show is to say, don't be also stuck on attribution, because then if you're stuck on it, marketing is going to be super worried about that and then they're going to turn into a factory and they're only going to be doing the same thing over and over and over again to make sure that they're showing you the numbers that you want to see to keep you happy. And then that's going to suck the creativity right out of the room. So make sure that you, as a revenue leader, recognize that part of marketing is that creative part, is that laboratory part, and implore them to do that. Otherwise your marketing is just going to be boring, it's going to be selfish, and it's going to flounder.

You know, I liken it to culture. You know, years ago, people used to think about culture as like that warm and fuzzy thing that would be a nice to have. And over the last couple of years, we've seen the necessity of culture and the investment that companies are putting into culture and making sure that people are engaged. You know, I think the best way to talk about dark social and the way I've, I've tried to explain it is kind of Lincoln labeled to decision makers buying habits and how they decided to buy one thing or another and help them kind of self identify that it was based on kind of the dark social movement. You know, if I, if I'm looking for a microphone, am I going to go on wire, you know, wire cutter, and look at what's rated the best, or am I going to reach out to Warren, who I know is obsessed with the way things run. And so that's the power of using an example to help people realize not everything can be measured. And, you know, culture in an organization can be felt but can't necessarily be measured. But at the end of the day, during the great Resignation, you saw people exiting, but they didn't exit great cultures. And so the people that invested in that, I think realized the benefits of it. So I kind of liken it to that.

Yeah, there's always a little bit of measurement that you can even look at some, some things like that can't measure culture. Well, how's your retention? How is your upward movement through the company? How's your referral? Referral for new employees coming from other employees. So there's always some things you can kind of look at, but they're fuzzier. But yeah, I agree with you 100%. Like again, that, that dark, the dark side, social and the conversations that are having that you can't see, that's just your OG word of mouth happening in a different way.

All right, Tim, I gotta ask you, tell me about the CIA. What'd you do for them?

Yeah, so I love having that in my bio. I. So when I was in my final, final semester of school at University of Illinois, they. So my advertising class was employed by them as an internship and basically we went out and hunted enemy spies all across the state. No, I'm just kidding. We didn't do that. We, we basically built an advertising campaign for careers on campus that they were using as kind of like a pilot program that they then took learnings from to actually launch an actual national campaign based off of the campaign that we put together. So like, hey, let's get this group of creative kids. Let's see how they can generate buzz on campus using a variety of different channels, different methods to talk about the awesome CIA careers. And you know, the CIA is a, as a career building institution. And then when it was all said and done, they actually took quite a bit of elements from that, applied it to a national campaign and offered us all jobs, which was cool. I ultimately didn't take it because I didn't want to go to basic training, but probably would have been pretty neat, especially with all those great government benefits. Maybe I should have done it. I don't know, maybe a different, different life would have been running around like someone doing marketing for the CIA.

Well, look, Tim, thank you. This is really, really great conversation. There's a lot of really good stuff we got into. So what other kind of final thoughts would you have? So we have a question we usually ask our, our, our guests before they leave. If you're speaking to a chief revenue officer. Right. Kind of briefly. Just giving a chief revenue officer a little insight into how a chief revenue officer should be approaching their marketing function. What are like a couple little tips that would be helpful for them to be successful in making sure that that particular part of their organization succeeds?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say that. I would say that you keep the perception that marketing is an integral part of the revenue function, but don't I guess, for lack of a better term, micromanage. But don't push them into being a factory. Allow them to maintain their creativity, you know, push them for their goals, push them for the hard metrics that they can bring. But never forget that they have this creative element and that they need to operate in kind of their own little world to be able to come up with those great game changing things that then they should be open to sharing and keeping the veil pulled back. So that way you have that view in there. So allow them the space, but get the view that you need and make sure you find a marketing partner or marketing leader that'll work with you that believes the same thing.

Well said. I like it. Thank you Tim.

Thanks so much. Great hearing from you and everyone. Look out for the Marketing Starter podcast you can find on Apple and Spotify, et cetera. Might listen to the conversation Tim and I had. Might sound similar, a little bit the inverse. And also you have a book, right called the Marketing Starter as well, correct?

Yes sir, my book called the Marketing Starter which talks about my journey and other marketers journeys as well as packed chock full of awesome tips and hacks on how you can use an entrepreneurial mindset to be a better marketing person. But it's great I think for salespeople and revenue people as well to take a look at and also makes a great gift if you're ever curious. But yeah, you can get that on Amazon. It's also on my website.

And how can people get a hold of you?

You can go to tnhines.com that's my personal website or themarketingstarter.com that goes there as well and of course LinkedIn. And that's just your normal slashes TN Hines. I'm basically TN Hines on everything social so you can find me anywhere. But please connect. We'd love to have conversations with you.

Great. All right Tim, thank you and looking forward to speaking to you again.

Thank you sir.