#103: B2B Marketing at Strava with Jonny Ross

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit exit.

Exit. So Johnny Ross and I were just chatting offline about the joys of parenting young children and cleaning up vomit. And so he was like, can you please start this podcast so we can talk about SEO and PPC and abm? So here we are.

What an intro.

Johnny, thanks for taking the time out of your day to talk to us. One of the reasons that I thought it would be interesting to have you on is you are doing marketing at a company that I think a lot of people here that are into athletics, into running, cycling, whatever you might do companies called Strava. And I'm at the point now with this podcast where I just enjoy talking to people in the marketing role. I don't have a set agenda for like I want to have you on. And here's the 15 questions I'm going to ask. And so I like to find like one or two jumping off points. And so for you, you said you've listened to this podcast a bunch, you're a member of Exit 5. We've traded a bunch of messages. But I'm super interested to hear about your role because you joined Strava a little over a year ago with the goal of coming in and building out the B2B marketing function? I think that would be an interesting place for us to dive in and talk about, like, how did you get the job? What does B2B marketing look like at a company that I see as a consumer app that I would use to track my runs and connect with friends and I think we'll go from there.

Sounds great. Thanks, Dave. So yeah, my name is Johnny Roth and I am, I guess one of the sole marketers or if not the sole B2B marketer at Strava. So, yeah, a lot of people know Strava globally. It's kind of one of these very like incredibly well known brands, particularly where I am in the uk. In the uk, it's kind of got incredible brand penetration just across the country. In terms of like your initial question about B2B, we have this product called Sponsored Challenges, which is kind of really our big B2B play. And sponsored Challenges are basically a way for brands to engage people at scale, is what we say. And what that means in reality is that if you know Strava well as an app, you can join a challenge. If you complete a challenge which might be something like cycle 50km in two weeks, you get a chance to win a reward. And that reward could be a discount or a kind of prize draw or whatever that might be. So obviously the brands that we're talking to are those in the athletic space, in the fitness space, cycling world and so on. For me, my job is very focused on kind of raising awareness of that product to that audience and all of what you'd expect that entails.

And was this challenge, was this developed before you started?

Yeah, so it has been around for a few years, but in terms of like how it's been marketed, how it's been taken to market, it's been pretty scrappy, actually. And it, despite that, it's been very successful just because it's got such a great product market fit as you'd expect. You know, if you're a brand looking to reach active people and you can get thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of them to join a challenge with your brand at the center, and when they join it, you can get them to redeem a discount on your website. As you'd expect, that's an incredibly kind of like attractive product. Those marketers, those brands.

Can you just give some of the history of Strava just for people that aren't super familiar to just give some context to, like, just roughly, like how big has the company been around? Whatever's comfortable and can be public, shared about. And then also I'd like to just hear about like the setup of the marketing team. Who do you report into? What does the marketing and revenue organization look like?

Sure. So on Strava, I'm not the historical Strava expert, but it's been around for a while now. Originally started as a cycle tracking app and expanded to runners, it's now kind of like really a good mix of both those two primary sports, but it's really kind of used by many People is like the way that they track their active life. So whatever you do, you know, you put it on Strava and sometimes people use that as a way of kind of tracking from an individual point of view how they're tracking against their own personal goals and metrics. Other people use it as a way to see what their friends are doing and maybe compete with those friends. But that's the general history of the company and it's been around a little while now. We've got over 100 million registered users for the app and as I mentioned, it's like it's an amazing brand to work for from that point of view.

Are you a user of the app?

I am a user of the app. I have been for a while.

In what form? What's your drug of choice?

A poor quality runner, I'd say.

I came back from a run this morning and I was like, I don't use Strava. But I, I'm more interested in using it now as I've slowly become more interested in running it. Seems cool. I want to post my runs. People can see my shitty running time.

Join a challenge. Join a challenge. And maybe that's a good idea.

That's a good idea. I'll join a challenge for you.

There you go.

All right, so you are a runner and you use the app and what does the makeup of the marketing team look like?

So it's a funny setup. So I work within what's called the brand partnerships team. So essentially that's. Those are the folks that look after sponsored challenges. There are about 12 of us across the US and the UK and Ireland, I should say as well. And within that, you know, again, I'm the sole marketer and I report to the director of that team and our team generally reports to the kind of marketing section of Strava as well. But we kind of have a cool cross functional relationship with the rest of the marketing team because obviously our audience are other brands, whereas the entire focus of the rest of the company, particularly the marketing team, are consumers. So it's a really interesting point of view to kind of roll to be in from that point of view. And yeah, it's a challenge that I've not had before in my career.

I think we can spend some time in a little bit talking about just your Overall perspectives on B2B marketing because you've been a head of marketing in B2B SaaS and I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that I want to dive into. But while we're on the Topic of Strava. So you come in, you get this job. First of all, why career wise for you, like you could have gone and done another head of marketing thing. There's a lot of people that listen to this that are, you know, thinking about making a career transition, going into a different role. You have an impressive resume. Like you could have gone and done a VP of marketing at, you know, any type of B2B SaaS company. This is a completely different role. You know, brand marketing inside of a fairly large, you know, consumer app. What was it that got you to, to want to make that shift in your career?

I think a couple of things. Firstly, the brand itself, as I mentioned, like, you know, you may have heard of it in the US and other territories. It's kind of reasonably well known in the uk. It's like one of the elite lighthouse brands. Not just in this world, just as consumer app brands. So the chance to be doing something for them full stop is pretty cool. The chance to be like the, you know, as the job description I think said, like building out a B2B marketing team or a function is like, you know, that doesn't come around very often. And one other reason which is like kind of not lame but like not as cool is just there was a team in where I live in Bristol, you know, in an office and like they're a really good bunch of people and having that relationship together with like the brand and the kind of the scope of the role, as I mentioned, is just, yeah, it's super cool.

That's not lame at all. Even an introvert like myself is like, hmm, maybe I should, should I like rent an office space and go in there a day or two a week just to do something different? So are you, are you like working at home or are you going in the office?

We're hybrid. So like, yeah, like three days in office usually.

Which is probably the best of both worlds, right? You got family, gives you enough time to do the family stuff on both ends and probably a flexible culture. But then you can kind of have your couple days a week of having the in person meetings with the team, right?

Exactly. Yeah, it's a really good balance and yeah, we're very fortunate to have it, I think.

Did you feel any less stress when you took this job? And I'm asking that because like the head of marketing role can be a super stressful position and you've done it a couple times now. I know myself, I transitioned from like leading all of marketing at Drift as an example and then in the Last year that I was there, I shifted to kind of just own creative and brand and I didn't know that I needed that. And that was like one of the best things that happened to me in my life. I was like, oh, like just. It's like you had 350. I'm going to talk in pounds, so excuse my translation, but it's like you have a lot of weight on the bench press and you're struggling to keep it up and you can do it, but it, you might tear something and you're going to get injured versus you take a bunch of weight off and now you're doing the reps and I see you nodding along and I wanted to bring that up just because I feel like that's something that we don't talk about often on this podcast. That like, yeah, the ego of saying I'm the head of marketing, I'm the cmo, I'm the VP of marketing. Like, are you sure you want that? And could you create a better, more fulfilling life for yourself in shifting to more of a niche role? I felt myself do that when I shifted to own creative brand. And I see you nodding along and I wonder if you have a similar story.

Yeah, I mean, obviously not at the level that you've had like leading a giant team at Drift and Privy, but I've definitely been in a situation where I've like been an IC all the way through to managing like five, six people and kind of have more responsibility for like being the ultimate go to market, like kind of driver, I guess, for a business, for a company, particularly a startup. Like I've worked at a couple of startups where like, you know, if you don't do your job well and you don't execute well, then people don't get paid and that's a problem. So yeah, I guess on your question, I think one thing that I've found is that firstly like job titles and like role titles are very kind of, they're very interchangeable and like you can call yourself the VP of marketing in a small company and feel really good about yourself, particularly early in your career. And actually it's not may not be the thing that makes you happy and actually you may not have the authority you think you have. And so like that's something that I've learned. And the other thing I'd say is just like being an ic, which I am now, it's actually a bit of relief to be quite honest, you know, because I like managing people. I don't think I'm a Terrible manager. But being an ic, you kind of, like. I think as you've alluded to, you're kind of freed up to put your time where you think it counts the most. And you kind of. Obviously, there are massive challenges with that as well, but you can really kind of like, make an impact where you feel you can, like, go all guns blazing.

I agree completely. I think especially if you. If you feel like you're in the right role and you enjoy doing your own work. There's something so liberating about being an IC again because you're like, I don't have to worry about the four or five other people that I'm managing. Their problems are not my problems right now. I'm. I got a number and a goal, and I'm just gonna go heads down and. And work towards that goal. And there's something that's very, very liberating about that.

Yeah. I think another thing is that I try to think how to word this properly, but, like, when you take on moral resource as a manager, but just as, like, a function, and we've both been in this situation, I'm sure where you're sitting by yourself and you're like, oh, it'd be really good if I had an amazing creative function or an amazing marketing ops function, because they could just take all this stuff off me. And then when you first get it, you're like, this is amazing. I've got these amazing functions that can just do this stuff really well. And then the more you have them, it creates an expectation that you have to continually push that forward and you have to answer very difficult questions and, like, push the agenda. And that's very good in some cases. But as you say, it could be a massive stress, like when you. You kind of open your potential resource up in that way. So, like, being an ic, you only have a pair of hands, you know, you can only do what. What you can do. So in a way, that's a bit of a relief.

Yeah, I. I liked it because for me, I like to move fast, and that's not the speed that everybody else likes to work at. And I just am very. It's a gift, and it's a strength. And a flaw of mine is my impulsiveness and ability to. To move fast. But, you know, I couldn't stand, like, having an idea and having to, like, submit it to another team or, like, pass it on to my team. And then I know I'm going to get the message back from my creative director, who's going to say, okay, we can do this, but we also have these 20 things that we're going to do. And so this person is now stressed out and burnt out because you're assigning them too much work. We're like, I love the freedom of being like, I got an idea and wow, I have the rest of the afternoon, like, free with no meetings. I'm going to go work on that idea and create that V1 of the landing page and write the copy and make progress on something. That's what I've learned over time. Gives me the most energy as opposed to being a people manager and managing the output of four or five people. And then to your point about what you said about hiring the team and getting the ops people, I always found that there's this honeymoon phase and it's really exciting for the first 30 days. Then, like, three months in, the CFO doesn't have so much fluffy excitement stuff to talk about. They're like, so, Johnny, we. We now allocated half a million dollars in resources to your team and, like, it's been three months and the numbers aren't up. So what's up?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's. It's not something I have at the moment, but it's definitely been something that I've been aware of in past roles. And it's like, let's be honest, when you get the right resource and you're aligned and you've got, like, really clear goals on the role, it can be brilliant. But there is obviously the flip side, as you say, like when, like when you haven't really scoped out the role effectively and you're not really sure exactly what you're looking for, and you can go down bad rabbit holes that way.

How much direction did you have when you came in? When you talk about you, you know, they hired you, you're here to build out. You started to build out the B2B marketing function from scratch. Did you have a lot of direction? Was it like, hey, go figure this out and go get shit done? And I'm asking that with the lens of, like, I like to hear how people start jobs, because I think it's a topic that a lot of people like to give advice on. My perspective is more like, get in there and start getting shit done. Other people's perspective is like, well, you need to get in there. You need to talk to people around the company, talk to customers. So, you know, like, measure twice and cut once. What was your approach to joining Strava and what was the kind of mission from the team?

Yeah, I mean, really good question. First up, I think it's my favorite part of any job is the first like two months, particularly like when you're being asked to like build out a function or build a team or whatever it might be. And it's like the expectation is anything is better than nothing. If you can come into a role, have a couple of quick wins, make a couple of improvements, it's a huge deal to the team you're joining and to the company you're joining. So in terms of overall approach, you kind of already outlined, touched on all of the things that I've done. But talking to customers, super, super important, massive cliche. But the more customers you talk to, the more viewpoints you get. And also they'll say things that people internally don't want to say or can't say for whatever reason. So I think talking to them is so important. Also talking to individual salespeople, ops people, people around the business in different, very different functions, very, very important. And yeah, just generally kind of working out what are the goals of this role? What does good look like? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to like do brand marketing? Are we trying to do like lead generation, demand generation? Are we trying to do like kind of sales enablement? And I think one thing that was interesting with my role is like, I think I'm sure you'll have some experience of this as well. Maybe others that you've talked to will have said the same. But there are some roles I think in marketing in particular, where the job description is never quite. It's impossible to write an accurate job description of a role until you get in that role and you work out what's going well, what isn't, what needs work, what doesn't. You kind of, you have all of these different potential avenues to go down as a marketer. So it could be that you walk into a role and it's like this is a pure demand gen piece. It's all about getting the leads in, building awareness, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out that it's actually all about efficiency, sales enablement, marketing ops, you know, cross functional support, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I always find that really fascinating with a new role.

You mentioned quick wins and how you can come in and simply by creating things. And this is exactly why I get a little bit bent out of shape when I've posted about this in the past and people have given me a hard time like, well, you can't, you can't just come into a new company and like do stuff because there's already people there and like you don't know the company yet. And I, I agree with that. But I also think in many roles you are being hired to fill a gap. And so at least how I've hired people in the past or been at companies, it's like we're hiring Johnny because like we needed a brand partner marketing and to focus on the B2B section like six months ago. And so I don't want Johnny to come into the company and spend 90 days like talking to everybody like, he's here, he knows what he's doing. Like, let's get some shit done. I believe that you can get something done in your first week and that could be fixing the navigation on the website or adding a page or adding a button to something like, and those things seem silly, but I think those matter. I think like in week one or like in day three, if someone can be like, who the heck is Johnny Ross guy? Like, cool. He added a new thing that we've been asking for a while. All right, cool. I think those things like compound and so much of doing marketing is about internal, the ability to work with other teams because you don't own all the things in marketing. And I think you build up a lot of credibility by like being that person. So yes, go and talk to customers, go around the company, but stack some of those quick wins. Can you think back to some of the stuff that you came in and saw that you did? Give me some examples of your quick wins.

I think like one this I. It's not the biggest win, but it just always sticks in my mind is firstly bringing in HubSpot as marketing automation. It's a good system, it's the basics, we know that it works, blah, blah, blah. But I think linking that up to Slack, you know, and what sounds really, really kind of minor, but we have created a kind of lead generation channel that shows any new inquiries that come into the business. And like, obviously we have ways of qualifying those inquiries based on Today's episode.

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Industry based on, you know, need, whatever. But I think even just that small thing of linking up inquiries cross functionally with other teams immediately created like this, this moment of like oh, we can actually see like all the different inquiries that you guys get and the nature of them. And like are they, you know, are they after a different kind of product that we don't have yet or are they asking for something that we could service? So that's not an example of like a demand generation increase or like a big Win for the team. But it was just like an example of like to your point, a small win that you're just like, oh yeah, why didn't we do this before? That kind of thing.

And that's a perfect example of something that like you could do on day one or two at a company. Exactly where like no one should be mad about that. Nothing's going to break. It's like you have a room in your house and you've never plugged the light fixture in. You plug it in and now it's working.

Yeah, exactly. So there were loads of examples like that. A lot of kind of essentially quite boring, but needed to be done admin and ops related work. So I think again, the nature of my role is that I'm kind of covering off a lot of bases. And I think, to your point, Dave, earlier, I think when you are the sort of person that just wants to execute, I think it sounds like I have quite a similar mindset that just like when you see a problem, you need to attack it immediately, even if it means swiveling around and stopping what you're doing and attacking that. And I think that's why the first like 30, 60, 90 days of a new role really appeal to me because it's like that's problem solving, like, you know, jungle territory. You're hacking all over the place.

Okay, that's a good like week one, quick win. What about looking back in your first year or so, what are give me one or two big wins for this program that you're proud of.

So I think to the point before of understanding what the nature of the role is, what are the goals of the role? One of the key elements was just like, how can we sort out a sensible, repeatable go to market function for us? How do we bring on new partners in a way that doesn't undermine the Strava brand? Anything to do with the Strava user base. And so figuring out that element which required us looking to outsource some of the go to market elements with a very personalized outreach agency that we use, finding that right partner that fitted perfectly for us as a brand and us as a team was a big win. So that, yeah, I'd probably say that was probably one of the biggest and like one of the key elements of like getting that, that go to market, right.

How do you manage the inbound that must come to you because you know, if I look at the website, right, like the brands that Strava is working with are the cream of the crop brands. It is Hoka, Patagonia, New Balance. Brooks, I'm sure you get a lot of inbound that's not a good fit. Well, I guess what I'm trying to get is like the relationship between inbound and outbound in the sense of like, why I guess you want to have inbound on because you always want to, like, see who comes in. But isn't the majority of your job going to be like, let's go out, let's make a Target list of 20 brands that we want to work with and go out and get them?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I think the first thing I'd say to that is this is a classic marketing problem of like, everyone can know who you are and you tap a brand on the shoulder, metaphorically, and you're like, hey, I'm from Strava. And they're like, oh yeah, we know Strava. But of course there's a difference between knowing about them and seriously considering them as an item of spend in their media buying. And so that's kind of the challenge for us and for me in particular is like, how do you create a go to market function that is constantly reminding brands A, that we exist, but B, that we're a really good solution for them? On the inbound versus outbound question. Yeah, I mean, we deal with quite a small total addressable market. You know, we have. We are limited in terms of the characteristics of the brands we can work with. We want to keep brand partners on Strava very authentic to the Strava experience. We're not just going to go out and find a brand that has absolutely no link with sport, with fitness or athletics. So that restricts what we can do and the brands that we can go after. But in a way that's a good thing because to your point, you can hand pick the brands that have a really good connection with our audience and with our platform. And ultimately you're going to get a better return from Strava.

So, okay, I think I found the page, but if you're listening, don't do it right now, but later go to business.strava.com I think this is an awesome example. It's a killer landing page. Now, caveat is most of us are not at Strava. And so you have an awesome, awesome product. Testimonials, fit stats, but I love to reach the largest community of active people in the world. You can be an interruptive ad for them on another platform or their source of motivation on Strava. Some of our partners, New Balance Then you have social groups, some of our partners, New Balance, Adidas, Solomon north face, Oakley, Lululemon, 100 million athletes, 190 countries, 40 million uploads every week, 6 billion activities. Then you have like just beautiful, simple product screenshots. Explain it about what you do. You have clubs, you have sponsored challenges, case studies and examples. It's just a good clean aesthetic that I think even if you're selling B2B SaaS and you just need a good like landing page template to go swipe, this is a great one.

Career highlight. Thanks, Dave.

Well, the career highlight, but what's fun about your job is you get to put pictures of like runners and bikers and most of us are out there doing like AI deep big data integrations.

Which is like, I've been there. What stock image sums up data provider on companies?

But doesn't this speak to like why taking this job was probably like a breath of fresh air. It's like, man, this is, this is much more fun to be putting this together. To be like mocking up this landing page and putting this together when it's like something that you actually are interested in and care about.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think it's interesting. We were having an internal meeting the other day where someone said like, guys, we get to make people healthier. Ultimately. I know there are cynics out there that will say, well, it's a company making money, blah blah, blah. But the output of Strava is people are healthier. And that is genuinely really motivating, like for everyone in the company, whether you're on the B2C or B2B side or supporting those. So yeah, 100% agree.

All right, I want to shift to more just your general a B2B marketing perspective. What would your approach to B2B marketing day? There's so much out there about category creation, demand capture versus demand creation, storytelling, strategic narrative, brand, product led growth, abm. Do you buy in? Do you have a particular framework or philosophy? Are the things that you think are overrated? Do you have a particular type of playbook? And I'll lead you a little bit in saying, like, for me, the way that I would answer this question is like, I fundamentally believe in like, you gotta be able to. The most important ingredients is the company story and the positioning, the tactics. You know, I think any tactic can work in pretty much any industry. But I'm curious to hear like if you have a, a take on that. As I'm scrolling through your LinkedIn and seeing you talk about AI and SEO and chatbots and stuff. I'm curious to hear your perspective.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have, like, an established playbook, but I think, like, there are some basics that you've kind of alluded to that whenever, any role, any company size, you need to just get right, which is like, what is the product you're selling? What's the proposition? Does it sound good? Do people understand instantly what that proposition is? And does it resonate with them and not just in your head, like, does it actually resonate with them? Have you spoken to them? So I think that's like the starting point, the next part of that, like, in terms of how you go to market, it just is so dependent on the industry and the company. I've worked for a telecoms company which could sell to any SMB in the whole of the uk, and I've worked for other companies, including Strava, where the TAM is absolutely incredibly limited. Intentionally so. I think you've got to play the role as it stands. Essentially, you've got to adapt your GTM to the role that you're in. But in terms of specific things that I've seen, like category creation, I personally feel there's a lot of rebadging of the old approaches to marketing, which is essentially, understand your customers, create great content that they'll consume and bring them closer to your brand. And category creation, I feel, is a subset of some of that. That's my hot take.

I agree with. I think they can be separate but related, because I think the thing with category creation is that I agree with you completely on the content piece. And I have been thinking about this as a junior marketer and intern all the way till now, but it's been basically. What year is that? 2009. So 14 years that I think HubSpot really started talking about inbound marketing and other people in the space. And that was, like, at the beginning of my career in marketing, and that was when I was like, oh, yeah, I could be a marketer, because I'm really interested and good at this, like, writing and communication thing. And like, oh, whoa. Turns out that, like, writing and content is the best form of marketing. And that's, like, what got me into marketing. I don't think that's changed. I don't think that's ever going to change. Like, shoot, look at Strava as a business, right? The best marketing that you have as somebody who's trying to go land big brands for Strava to work with is.

Going to be content 100%.

And I think that what's changed now is you just have to be better at it. You have to be more entertaining, more educational, more insightful. You have to do deeper research or whatever it takes. Right? I think that's always going to be the playbook. I agree with you completely. The category creation thing, I think that to me has got to start with like, I see that more as like a product. Marketing is very involved, but I think where people miss this is like, they think that marketing just goes and creates a category when it's like, no, that's got to be intentional from, from the founders. I, I actually, as I was making a cup of coffee before this podcast, which is why I was like two minutes late, someone tweeted at me, hey, I have some questions about your experience. Entering a commoditized market at drift and going the category creation route. Can you share your experience? And I'm like, well, there is no, like, one phrase I can tell you. And. But what I can tell you is that like, when I joined the company, the founders had a very clear, this is very early on. I was the first marketing person the founders had a very clear vision for. Like, we got this idea, we're going to start with chat and here's where we see this going. And we're ultimately going to like, create this new category that we're going to. We don't know what we're going to call it yet, but like, it's going to be like messaging based marketing because all of our lives have moved to text messaging and Slack and instant messaging. But with a business, you got to go to their website and submit a lead form. This is, I'm not making this up. This was the conversation that they told me in October of 2015 when I was interviewing at the company. And so right away I was like, yes, I want this job. Let me join this job. Because I think I can. There's something there. I can help you tell that story and bring it to market. I think if you don't have the founders that have that vision, then I think creating a category is not going to be an option. It's not like you're going to, it's going to be hard to have founders with a creative product. Then they go and hire Johnny and Dave and we're supposed to create the category. We're like, no, that's got to come from. We can work with the founders. But you know what I'm saying, like, it's got to be a, it's got to be a product thing, not just a Marketing story thing?

Yeah, 100%. And I think my experience that kind of is most relevant to this is this company called Bohost, which is kind of, I guess most relevant to your audience is like a UK CB insights. So the company basically when I joined 30 people in a basement, pneumatic drill taking down a concrete staircase next door. So it's like, you know, I was like, why am I taking this job? But it was an amazing company to work at because it gave me like, I basically learned the ropes of like B2B SaaS marketing there. And it also simultaneously like gave me a chance to understand what category creation means. And I think the reason I'm cynical about category creation is I think you can do it. I totally agree with you that it's a product led, it's not a marketing output, it's a product strategy kind of viewpoint essentially. And I think what we ended up doing was creating content purely around this idea of like, essentially it was a product where like you define what's called a high growth company in the uk, which should be based on like all kinds of things, fundraising, whatever else. And it builds, puts them in the database and defines those companies in that way. And it's a way to track the growth of like the next superstar companies across the country. And we sold access to that database, SaaS products and essentially like what I learned within the first six months was like, there's no point in creating kind of like demand gen based content around private company database or company data or anything like that. What people are most interested in is where are the next amazing companies coming from? Where are the next like fintech giants and like AI giants coming from and how do you define them? How do you find them? So that was a really interesting experience, particularly from that like interesting new category point of view and content.

I think the narrative has just been thrown so far in the other, in the direction that like the only way to build a wildly successful business is to create a category. And so I think like it's hard to find. I've always kind of struggled with like what's the distinction point? Like is it if you want to build a billion dollar business you have to create a category because like I'm building a small and successful business. Use Exit 5 as an example. It's a small business and successful business for me and this life. I'm not creating a category.

Yeah, so I was just gonna say like, I just think so much of it is differentiation which people have talked about for hundreds of years, you know, like category creation. Is the subset of differentiation in my view.

Yeah. Have you ever read the 22 immutable laws of marketing?

No.

It's on my list because it's two old American guys and it's Al Ries and Jack Trout. It was, I think it was written in maybe like the, the middle 80s. And I'm pretty sure. Wait, hold on, let me, let me look this up because we can do this. Because I have the Internet, I think law number one. So of the 22 immutable laws, I'm pretty sure number one is the law of leadership, which is it's better to be first than it is to be better.

Nice.

So think about how that would apply to category. It's better to be first than it is to be better. Right. If you're drift and you're creating conversational marketing, you're the first person to do this. The first person to talk about. If you're a HubSpot, you're creating inbound marketing. It's, it's this new way. We're the only people talking about it. We've been doing it for six months before any of the competitions. You have all those advantages.

Right.

So law number one is the law of leadership. It's better to be first than it is to be better. And the whole premise is this. It's much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product. Which I still agree with. Right. If you can be first. The problem is now in 2023, it's very hard to be first in anything. Right. Then there's law number two, the law of category. If you can't be the leader, set up a new category that you can be first in.

Yeah, I think we're back saying the same thing. Yeah.

The point is, like, have a point of view on marketing that's rooted in principle in some of these basic principles. And like sometimes I just, I don't have a positioning framework that I've used, but I think I've done a decent job in positioning, either working with companies that I was in house at or as clients with the framework of like, what do you do? Who is it for? How does it work? Why is it different? Like you could answer those four questions and do a bang up job on storytelling and positioning. You don't need to read a 300 page book and like have six different printouts and worksheets to go through. I think if you're creative and you're a good storyteller, you can do that with four bullet points.

Yeah. Totally agree. I just think that, I think the category creation thing definitely works and I can see examples of where that has worked brilliantly. I almost feel some marketers should just stop listening to that though. Just because as we said before, it's a product vision. It's a product vision that the whole company has to buy and it can't be led by marketing. Marketing's job is to make something different and sound different. But you can't turn the oil tanker around by yourself.

No, you definitely can't. Do you have any perspective on the current AI revolution, impending AI revolution, as a marketer and somebody who's been in this space for a while?

Yeah, I mean I think everyone's thinking about it. The obvious like soon to happen thing is like when ChatGPT based created content doesn't sound like ChatGPT created content because at the moment, like it's incredibly. We actually got an inbound the other day that was very clearly a ChatGPT inbound and people have started referencing ChatGPT in there. How did you hear about us form as well, which I quite enjoyed, but.

Love that now department people don't know how to harness that. They're like, I want more of that. How do I get more of those results?

So yeah, I mean, I don't think I've got anything to add to the Internet ether that hasn't already been added, which is just like bad content will get penalized even more. I think what nobody really knows is what's going to happen to SEO. In the past, you have the skyscraper strategy and you'd create these great pillar pieces of content and you make them better than everyone else's and that's the cornerstone of your search strategy. And that's just going to be thrown into the air I think in a few years time, if not already. So yeah, who knows, who knows?

But what do you think about the perspective? Should you be playing around? Should you be exploring it or what do you think? What do you think of my advice? Which is I wouldn't say, I'd be betting or maybe I've said this, someone can clip this out. But like I would be exploring it, I would be finding ways to force myself to use it to do things as I'm trying to problem solve things. Like, I think you need to have this default of like, huh? Is this something that I could try to use AI to do right now? Like in 20% of the time, it's like when you and me got our start in marketing, it was like, whoa, Martech is a thing now, like, let's use a tool like HubSpot instead of, you know, whatever. Do you believe in that approach? Like, just creatively playing around?

Definitely. I think we have a policy within Strava of not putting in any, like, valuable data at all into any kind of model. So obviously we're very aware of that. But in terms of, like, the generics and like, how you create, you know, ideas for content, ideas for anything like that, I think it's crazy to not be using some element of AI at this stage. There's just so much opportunity. And I think from a marketing point of view, you could make a list of 50 things you're doing right now and the sort of, the most boring, most repeatable actions, the 20 or so on that list are going to be replaced by AI fairly soon. So particularly when it comes to brainstorming content, I think if you're not using AI now to do that, it's a bit crazy.

All right, Johnny Ross, thank you for giving us a bunch of your time today. We'll let you conclude the the afternoon. It looks like you got some sun over there today at least, which is.

Nice for the moment.

Did you get a run in today or what?

No, Maybe tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Okay. All right, Johnny, thank you for doing this. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you enjoyed this interview with Johnny, go to LinkedIn. Type in Johnny Ross, it's J O N N Y Ross. And tell him, hey, I liked hearing your perspective on the podcast. I want to connect. My favorite call to action is having people connect with you personally. So I hope you get a bunch of messages from the show and I will. I'll see you around the community and on LinkedIn and wherever else we chat.

All right, thanks, Dave.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can Join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff.

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