#118: Marketing Leadership | How to align sales and marketing, why messaging matters over everything, and a new way to compensate marketing leaders (with Brian Kotlyar, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hightouch)

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One, two, three, four.

Exit. Exit.

All right, Brian, thank you for coming on the podcast. For people who don't know who you are, I got some great notes from my friend Shantal to prep for this, but you're an impressive guy with a great background. I'm excited to get to dive in with you today, but how do you explain who you are and what you do?

Well, who I am, that's a trickier one.

That's a deeper one. That's not for this podcast. That's for a different show.

Yeah, that's for when I go out therapy later, but in terms of what I do. So I lead growth and marketing for a company called High touch. We're a B2B SaaS technology startup. Basically, what the product is, is we just help marketers get access and make data much more usable in a very modern, fast, streamlined way.

I Already like you because I like when people explain their company in simple relatable terms, not what the boilerplate might say. So you're already on. My goodness.

Yeah, we'll save that for the press release, you know, and so, yeah, great company. We're growing really fast. I actually came here really interestingly by virtue of being a customer first, which I think is always a really interesting way to figure out a career opportunity is when you uncover a really cool technology that solves problems for you. And so before this, I was leading a similar role, kind of leading growth and marketing for New Relic, which at the time has since been acquired by private equity. At the time was a publicly traded company where we were basically engaged in a turnaround project. The company's growth had slowed down for a number of reasons. And I was brought in as well as a number of other leaders to help re accelerate that growth. And we succeeded. We basically grew growth by 300% over the course of about 18 months with a bunch of different initiatives and things like that. Before that, you and I were actually at different sides of the table competing with one another. I was at Intercom while you were at Drift where we were both sort of involved in the conversational chat space.

What was the name of the company?

Intercom.

Not familiar.

No, I'm just kidding.

That's amazing.

I was going to say, I'm pretty sure Bobby's been on this podcast. So I was going to say Bobby really didn't make an impression.

No, I love Bobby.

But yeah, so I came to there from Sprinkler, which is now publicly traded as well, where I joined that company by acquisition from a startup I was helping to grow. And I did sort of every marketing job under the sun there. My title throughout my time there was VP of DemandGen, but gosh, just sort of did everything as we were hyperscaling that business.

Awesome.

All right.

You're a machine. I wish I had you for three hours today. But we don't because I could ask. I was so much I want to get into what drives you professionally and creatively. You've had a bunch of wins. You've run marketing at a bunch of different companies, run the demand gen function, which you could argue is the most important function on a team. And I'm saying that more coming from the brand side. What drives you to stay motivated and keep getting after it at these companies? What is it for you?

Personally, I think. Well, personally, I think about tech companies as like there can be life changing for people participating in them and for the world. In their own way, obviously. For example, when I was at Sprinkler, we're dealing with social media. Or when I was at Intercom, we were dealing with chat. But the difference between having Intercom for your support chat and not is life changing. It's a great product. It really helps. The difference between having sprinklr deal with all your social media stuff and not is crazy. I listen to a lot of our sales calls here at High Touch and I hear in the voice of our customers some of the anguish they have from buying other solutions that didn't work and how it hurt their careers and made their life worse. And so I'm very motivated by products that help people. And then on the other side, I know through helping grow a company to ultimately ipo, when you're part of that, you personally, you develop and you learn in ways that you just can't get in other career paths. And then financially and economically, the upside is unlike most other jobs. And so I don't think you should get in this business counting on an ipo because lord knows they're few and far between. Right. But sometimes I explain this to family members, imaginary lottery ticket where you control the odds. And that's unique to what we do. So that's another very motivating aspect.

Yeah. And it certainly gives you more upside than a lot of other paths. And that's a very motivating view that you're helping people. Because I do think sometimes it's. There's a lot of people that I talk to are more jaded down. They're like, oh, you're just selling software, just selling marketing software to marketing people. But when you think about, when you come from this customer driven standpoint and you think about who the people are and how they're using your product, I think that's where you can really create a mission around the why for doing this marketing.

Right. 100%. And it's also as a marketer in the discipline of marketing. It's also where a lot of your best ideas for marketing are going to come from. Because like, if you look at the job, I'm trying to help somebody whose life would otherwise be worse. And then you realize, okay, well, what are those ways that it's worse and how will it be better? And what's that feel like? What words do they use to describe it? How do they talk to their peer or their boss about it? A lot of the best marketing ideas, they sit in that space where you understand really how you help people. I think it's very motivating for the individual, for the company, once it understands what that is. But it also is like actually the magic pixie dust that makes the program kind of work.

You said to me before we started that you enjoy mentoring early career marketers, and there's a good mix of people that listen to the podcast. I don't want to say that they're all early career, but I do think most of the people that are going to listen to this are aspire to be a VP marketing leader. What are some of the biggest themes that come up when you have discussions or mentoring early career marketers? Where do you see people get stuck? Where are the frustrations? What are the blockers? What are some of the 80, 20 things that you've taken away?

Sure. I mean, a couple that come to mind. One is, I hear a lot of folks. I hear this term, and honestly, it makes me cringe a little. It's like, I just want a seat at the table. And I'm like, first of all, as somebody who has a seat at this notional table, let me reassure you, it's not that great. Yeah, yeah.

It's like you have kids and so I often think of this. But somebody once said you used to think your parents were crazy, your parents drove you crazy. And then when you have kids, you kind of see the reasons why. Oh, yeah, I get why my parents did all those things now, and I'm doing the same things, and I. It's almost like getting into management and having a seat at the table. It's like, well, are you sure? There's kind of a nice lane you can carve out where you don't have to have that responsibility either.

Yeah. There's no shame at the other table at the bar, eating your meal, you know, or whatever opposite.

Sitting by yourself at the bar, watching something on tv, having your meal would be a nice place to be.

Yeah, it's a nice burger you're eating. Yeah. But what I often say to that, okay, like, let's assume for a minute that you actually do want it. With all the caveats aside, you actually do want that. My answer to the folks, a lot of time is that nobody gives you anything in life and business, whatever. The way you kind of carve that out for yourself is by sort of being the proactive marketer that you ought to be. You find the biggest business problem in the company and you find a way to attach yourself to that biggest business problem and help solve it. And lo and behold, suddenly you're at the table. It's not that you're invited, you need to earn, create the invitation for yourself. Nobody really just gets there by virtue of how good looking they are or how smart they are, how poetic they are. So a lot of what I help these early career marketers think through is what is that huge project? What is that big business problem? Is it helping sales qualify more deals? Is it our positioning? Is it activating a new distribution channel, whatever it may be, that is the biggest problem in the company. There's a way for you to help and you help and that's how you get that notional seat at the table. There's no magic to it. So that's one. I can share a few others if it's helpful.

Yeah, please. Well, I was going to just build on that and say you said you don't get invited to the table, but you almost do once you start to. When you become like Brian, the person that everyone in this like if you solve a problem. I've seen this with myself in earlier stage jobs adrift in the early days as an example, like I didn't set out to do this, but I was hungry, I worked on a bunch of interesting things and all of a sudden you become the person that the VP of sales wants you in that meeting, the VP of product wants you in that meeting. Brian in your career has been that person that like, oh, let's get them involved. And so I see sometimes marketers are like, no, that's not my job. I'm not going to get involved there where the best ones that I've known, the ones that have rose the quickest through their career and gained the most influence inside the company are like, sure, this isn't directly in my job, but this helps the company. I'm happy to come in that meeting. And the head of marketing is now deep in with customer success or engineering. It's finding your way into those opportunities by being a team member that wants to help the business win. Not just being like, nope, I only do marketing here.

Yeah, I agreed. I think there's two facets to that. It's a little bit well known, but I think it's. People hear the words but don't necessarily internalize the lesson. It's like this concept. First you have to be the CEO of whatever your job is, truly own and just crush the thing that you actually are on the payroll to do, blogging, emailing, whatever. Then the other thing is exactly what you were saying. Think like the CEO of the company and go find ways to help with all those biggest problems and act Like a shareholder. Act like somebody whose job it is to help the whole company grow. The hard part is sometimes when you go and you freelance without your home base being covered and, like, really nailed, people kind of look at you like, shouldn't you make this other thing that you actually are paid to do good, so you need to do both. But my experience is that if you're that motivated, you will make your kind of core thing awesome and then use that credibility you've earned from that to be heard and to be participant in all these other awesome things that you could be doing for the business.

Did you have any more that you wanted to that I didn't let you get to on the mentoring piece? Because I want to take us in a different direction. But I think you had something else that you want to get to.

Sure. I mean, for what it's worth, I'll just say the one other thing. It's a little tactical, but I think it's just to say that there's no real magic. A lot of times when I get on calls with folks, they're like, what's this one thing that will solve my problem? X or Y? Like, what's the tech I can buy? What platform should I license? What consultant do I hire? Should I start posting more on LinkedIn? Yeah, I'm sure you hear the same thing. And people ask those questions. And my answer, generally speaking, is, maybe I'm the wrong mentor for you because I. Maybe I just suck. And I don't know that answer, but I've never found it. I've been doing this now for a long time. It doesn't exist. And so I just really encourage people to just excise that whole shortcut mentality entirely from your life and just really deeply understand that you are not one Facebook ad away from solving your problem, and you're not one new tool acquisition away from solving your problem.

It's like a billboard. It should be a billboard. You're one Facebook ad away.

Exactly. And one of my stupid jokes my team gets tired of is, like, the only company ever built on ads alone is Google by selling. The rest of us have to do other things to win. And so, I don't know, I just feel like we're always looking for shortcuts because we want to get ahead and we want to think that somebody knows something we don't. And there are, obviously there's, like, wisdom and craft that you acquire, but for all the blog posts and all the what I have used, there's not actually this one simple trick. There is no. One simple trick.

Yeah. So much of it is rooted in. I love LinkedIn. I love writing on LinkedIn. But so often the answer to most marketing questions are like, it really depends. Yeah, I have no idea. It depends on your goal. And I think a simple framework that I've gotten more disciplined and followed over time is like, you can't figure out what marketing should do until you figure out what the company wants to do and how the company wants to get there. There's many different paths. And until you know the company strategy and marketing has to be involved in helping to set that, it's going to be very tough to figure out what the marketing strategy should be. And so it's like goals and then strategy and then tactics. It's very easy to just get in the tactics bucket without the right strategy and without the right goals. And almost everything that I've seen break down inside of the company. It's not because a tactic failed. It's because they set the wrong goal and had the wrong strategy. And that's where this all breaks down. Or this has happened to me. The VP of sales is comped completely differently than I am and we're going to compete no matter what, and our teams are never going to be aligned because we're fundamentally misincentivized. It's always those things that I've seen over and over.

Yeah. I will say one way I fixed that is last few jobs, I've just insisted that my comp plan is the same as the sellers.

Ooh, that's a good one.

It's a little bit of a bold move for a marketer, I'll be honest.

Yeah.

Wait, so let's talk about why you did that and what does that actually mean and what are the mechanics look like?

Sure. I mean the why is exactly a little bit what you were alluding to. It's like in B2B. Even in PLG, B2B, because no company stays pure product led, they always start loading in sales assist and upmarket sellers, without exception. So in B2B, you need to have really tight alignment with the human part of your selling process, even in plg. And most companies aren't that heavily plg. So it's really. Most companies will stop. So you want to make sure that there is no daylight between you and the head of sales. Now, there's ways to do that with relationship building and stuff like that, but ultimately to your point, when the incentives don't match, that daylight creeps in, you start to grow apart. You have different goals and incentives and it's problematic. That's the first really big benefit of that. The other benefit comes selfishly to the marketer is you can actually negotiate a lot more money for yourself because if you're willing to put more comp at risk, you can in turn insist on a higher total comp package and more rewards, just like a seller does. And so you can individually earn a lot more money by willing, be willing to do that. Now, it's a gamble, you know, I want to be clear about that. But that confidence manifests you differently to your other senior leaders and it puts you in a really different relationship with your head of sales that I think is very, very valuable and powerful for a typical marketer.

Yeah, this is great. People are going to love this. What led you to this? How did you have that conversation?

Well, greed, certainly in part that last point.

Also, side note, I've been there. You just find out things over the life of a company. I know how much a VP of sales made in a role where my team was responsible for generating pipeline and I was much younger in my career. This person was much more tenured, whatever. But they must have made 5, 6, 7 times the amount of money I did in the same year. And I'm like, wait a second, our motion is 90% inbound. We're driving all of this. This is totally out of whack. And it's exactly what you said, where the risk you can make way more because you're saying, hey, it's only going to happen if we hit these goals and the company signed up to hit these goals, right?

Yeah, it's a lot easier for the CEO or the head of HR or whatever to agree with because they'll be like, you just say to them very simply, if we did this as a company, would you agree in that scenario that I earned this increase in my comp? And they'll be like, yes. And you say back to them, and if we don't, I'm comfortable not getting it. And because at the time that you're doing the negotiation, it's all notional, people are much more comfortable signing up for it. Both you want as a risk profile and them in terms of giving you the money. But then the time does come, the quarter does close or the year does close and then check is due and if you nailed it, you're going to make a lot more money than you would have as a run of the mill marketer driving stage one ops or something. So I feel like I didn't answer your question though. I'm Sorry, Dave.

This is great. I can't wait for the fallout from this podcast. Like hundreds of marketers are going to go to the CEO, be like, it's the middle of February and you want me to change the. Yeah, I listen to this podcast and Sky Brian, he's like, change the con plan.

Well, I will say though, the other thing though you got to keep in mind is part of the reason that your old head of revenue made so much more money is that if they miss for three straight quarters, he's fired. Fair.

I just get to do webinars and do podcasts and keep keep my job.

Yeah, marketers aren't in that same position, so you have to also acknowledge that. So before all the listeners of this rush off to HR to say I want a new comp plan, consider that too. A, if you don't make it, you don't get paid. B, you're now in a much more of a revenue facing role, which means you're much more subject to that perception. Miss the target, things happen. And usually marketers don't have that problem. Or they might, but it's over a longer time period. It plays out over 18 months, two years. If a head of sales misses three quarters in a row, they don't get to be head of sales anymore. So you got to keep that in mind for sure.

And then how does that play out from a goals standpoint? So you set clear goals around revenue, but there's still going to want to be. My guess is there still needs to be some type of harder metrics that you can own. And basically what I'm asking is how do you break that down into actionable goals and inputs? Do you own leads or MQLs or meetings or demos or something like that? What are the metrics that fall from that?

This is where there's some nuance that maybe there's a lot of room to disagree. But my personal preference, how I've always done this, is just give me the revenue number and you can have two flavors of it. You can have it like the actual all up inclusive of churn and stuff, or you can say marketing is a lot more tied to new revenue added, whether it's from new prospects or current customer expansion. So you could pick, but either way my opinion should be money. Money is irrefutable. Money is what the company wants. Which is why when you go to them and you say, hey, I want to make more, but only in the scenario where we earn more money, that's why it's much more palatable to the organization. It's also, you can't fake it. You can fake opportunity metrics, you can fake a lot of stuff. Now the metric you're going to get paid on is revenue. But the thing that you as a marketer drive is not that the product in a PLG motion or a self serve motion has to get credit card swipes or the reps have to close. So what you need to have kind of backing. This is like, and I imagine other guests have talked about this, if not, let me know and I'll sketch it for you quickly. But you need to have a concept of your supply chain of revenue. So like what happens before a dollar goes into the bank? Well, they come visit to the site, which turns into a demo, which turns into a meeting, which gets qualified, which gets, you know, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And eventually you make money. And you have to understand what parts of that are you wholly responsible for, like the visit to the site and what parts do you influence? So for example, maybe because product marketing often plays a big role in sales enablement, you influence the qualification process, you influence our ability to set traps for competitors so that the deals move. And so you kind of have that notion and so you hyper optimize the stuff you own because you own it. It's your job opportunities, demos, whatever. Because you're on revenue now where before you used to probably just be like pretty chill. Well I hit the demo goal, see you in health. Now instead you're like, well wow, they're really getting screwed by that competitor. I better get them a battle card asap. Because you need that thing to close to make your money. And so that's very motivating and helpful as a head of marketing to approach it in this very holistic way.

Well, it's so great because it forces you to like remove all of the bullshit and you're like, wait a second, our job is to get customers, we have plenty of demos, but they're not closing. Then you shouldn't be winning, you're not winning in that scenario. Then you need to be focusing on how to get them to close. Also when you're at a high growth company or any company, it's like marketing is such a game of whack a mole. There's a thousand things you could do. This kind of isolates, let's look at the gaps, what are the highest leverage opportunities? And yeah, let's go do some more sales enablement. It's very easy to be like more, more, more, more and you might not need more. The Demand might already be there. You have to figure out how to convert it better.

Yeah, exactly. And then to your point about the sales relationship thing earlier is that the other benefit of this is nothing drives ahead of sales crazier or a CFO crazier than the marketer being like, I hit the demo goal, we're good. It just makes them nuts because it's like, well, that's not actually what we're trying to achieve, y'. All. We don't tell our board about our demo number. And so when the marketer goes much deeper, you just talk about seat at the table. You're just in a whole different relationship to everybody else. The way you lose a seat at the table is you bring a demo number to a board meeting. That's the problem.

Yeah, there was a younger version of me and we hadn't hired a VP of sales yet. And then we bring him in and I'm very defensive and I get, hey, yeah, you guys. Spend time with Dave. He's running marketing. Okay? So we get on the whiteboard, I draw out the funnel. I just met this guy 15 minutes ago. He's like, what you have is a bunch of contacts. You have a bunch of email addresses. I'm like, what are you talking about? These are leads. He's like, I don't care about leads. It's like, no, show me the buyers. And I'm like, well, I don't know. And that was like the eye opening moment. But this is so good because this is a perfect way of. This is what you need. If you're listening to this, you need this. You need to be on the same page with sales, how you do it. This is my biggest gripe. Oh, get a coffee with them, get to know them, do some trust falls, go get lunch. No, what drives everyone is the compensation, is the revenue. And that all gets set from the goals. And so what's cool about this model, Brian, I love this, is that you're basically saying, hey, you run sales, I'm your peer. I'm really good at marketing, you're really good at sales. Let's combine our superpowers to help the company win, and then we all win. And that's what I've been in companies before in the past where it's like, I'm not going to help out, I'm not going to build that battle card for them. I got 15 other things I got to do. But this really takes all that out of it and says, let's get a line on revenue.

I love this.

This is really good. How does this play? Are there downstream effects with your team? Like does the team. Your team, are they comped on revenue? How does this trickle down through the rest of the marketing team?

It gets a little trickier depending on the discipline and how senior people are.

Right. Because you got a content person and like you need to create good website content. But it's a little bit fuzzier to be like, well, we need to write articles, but it's not like someone's going to read an article and then instantly buy high touch. So how do you think through that?

Yeah, I mean, so I think at a certain seniority this should just be in play for everybody, pretty much. So we're a small company, but like to the degree that we have senior managers, managers, directors, stuff like that, I want at least a portion to be tied to the company's actual dollar and cents performance in addition to the value of their equity. As you get to maybe like just a pure designer, like a production designer, it gets a lot harder and it may not be fair. And also the culture, for example, I'll just use designers. I don't want to besmirch that discipline just as an example. Designer is a much more creative thing. People get into that job with different motivations typically than a seller did to make money. And so you have to be conscious of that as you set up these targets and these metrics. So my general rule would be above a seniority threshold and you have to kind of pick what that is for your organization. Yes, people should have a variable component tied to a really important business outcome. And then in certain disciplines, you may want to hold them back even from that with carve outs or whatever. But in others like demand gen, where there really is clear metric ownership and there really is a very tight relationship between what you do and what happens, then I think you can be more aggressive with this and make it either a higher percentage or tie it to more of a specific metric in that supply chain model I kind of laid out for you and work from there.

Let's talk about demand gen a little bit. What is the makeup? Maybe using your current job, you run marketing today, how do you articulate what demand gen does? And there's demand gen product marketing content. I'd be interested to hear like just the, the makeup of your team today and how you have the team structured and maybe we can use that as a way to talk about what's the role of demand gen in driving revenue.

Yeah, for sure. I apologize. I don't have a perfectly clean framework for this, but I'll share a few of the concepts I use. So I talk a lot with the team about this idea of there's distribution and then there's stuff you distribute. And I think a lot of the distribution is where people think about channels like we buy ads to push a message out, we send emails to push a message out, and so on. And so that idea of distribution, I usually rest responsibility for that with what we these days call a growth marketing team or demand gen team. It's the people who are kind of operating the dials and the knobs and the levers of the website's conversion rate and of the ads efficacy.

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Out, see to get drive traffic or clicks and so on. And that's usually sort of the more quantitative oriented, performance minded people that have found their way into the marketing job. Some of the best ones I've ever worked with or hired are people who graduated from college with degrees in like engineering and supply chain and stuff. Knobs and dials type folks a lot of times. And then I think of these other disciplines that are a bit more about what do you put into those pipes for distribution purposes. And that's a lot of times the product marketers who are thinking about positioning and messaging and assets or some content marketers or comms people and so on. And I think a lot of the art of the head of marketing's job is to coordinate those two things so that you're not over rotating on optimizations and fiddling with these little, seeking like little local improvements versus staircase kind of improvements. On the other hand, you can over rotate into product marketing and brand where like you're saying lots of stuff but no one's seeing it because it's not being distributed effectively. And I think that that's kind of the balance I'm always striving for.

Nice. I like that. That's a way to simplify a lot of the nonsense that we create inside of B2B SaaS orgs. One thing that I've seen is with demand gen, especially in this world where you're driving revenue, whether you're driving demos or revenue, it can kind of feel like all of the pressure and the stress of the job to hit the number is on demand gen. And there's also this kind of weird push and pull like demand gen kind of runs the marketing team because of that. But then there's like you got to work with product marketing, you got to work with creative. You know what I'm trying to get at? Like how do you Account for that. Well then why don't we just make demand gen run the team? But there's this team. It can be very challenging. Then like, yeah, we're behind on the number. I don't know creatives, Creatives out to launch product. Marketing's on vacation. But the demand gen team is super freaking stressed out because we're the ones trying to hit the number. Is that bad Org design? Is it bad goal setting? Where does that come from? And have you found a way to fix that?

I think it's very common and I've lived inside of that stress a lot in my career and I would say that I think the cause of that is the fact that demand gen pretty uniquely has the knobs and dials to turn. They can actually see things. The thing that I'm always trying to counsel my own team, myself at times and others in that role where you have the data, you're looking at the relationship between an ad and hitting the target is that the distribution system is basically our gum pipes. My ability to buy an ad has actually no very little bearing on whether or not the ad works. What makes the ad work or not is the concept and the messaging and the creative of the ad. Like I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now where we have our stock kind of pretty generic B2B tech ad we run that we've been running for like six months. And then we're challenging it with much more creative treatments that I've been working on with the product marketing team. And the outperforms by 3x we ran for ages a very literal campaign called CDPs are dead. CDPs are like a more legacy version of our software and it really wasn't working. We listened to a bunch of the product marketing team, listened to a bunch of customer calls and through those insights and the empathy reframed it into friends don't let friends buy a cdp. Which is the exact same idea but a much nicer turn of phrase.

It's awesome.

And much stronger copy. And the performance went up by 500%. Same ad program, same targeting, same budget.

Well, now you have creative in that world. Creative and product marketing are like, yeah, we did that. Like we created that thing. We feel like we're part of this machine now.

Exactly. And they're fired up to find the next one and they want to know the data for the next copy challenge and we're going to run against that one. And they're asking the question, this is how it's literally playing out. The distribution team, the growth Marketers are like, hey, we're starting to hit creative wear out here. Our target market is only so big. We've been showing them the friends don't love friends narrative for a while. We need something fresh. And so first we started with visual interpretations of that and that bought us some more time, but now really we just need something fresh. We just need a new thing. And the growth marketing team might be able to solution that on their own, but it's so much more likely to win if the brand team and the product marketing team is helping them, bringing those insights and bringing those ideas. You just can't win alone. So a lot of that stress does localize to the people that see the math every day, but they need to understand that despite the stress being localized to them, the solution is literally not possible just with them. And so you gotta broaden it. And just to tie the two conversations we're having, that is one other perk of having this kind of revenue minded aspect above a certain level of seniority across all disciplines because in some of the other disciplines that don't see all the math as much, that helps just keep them in that mindset consistently. So that's kind of a link between the two themes we've been touching on.

Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. The localized part is really good because it's like, yeah, you might be the knob turners, I forget exactly how you put it, but at the same time as you are, you also don't have the keys to all those things. You need to be able to inspire and influence creative and influence product marketing and content and you need to have, you're responsible for like delivering that meal, but you need to work with all these other kind of part time chefs or what, however you want to put it to help get it done. This is really good. This is going to be a really, really helpful episode for people. I'm taking, I have a whole notion note that I take during this and I'm just already really excited about this episode, I think.

Fun. Yeah.

So you've given some practical stuff for working with sales, for thinking about demand gen. Let's give some people some practical advice for reporting to the CEO. You've seen this, whether you've done this or seen this at a bunch of companies. Now, what's the right level to talk about marketing with the CEO? How do you prevent the CEO from getting in the weeds? One thing I talk about a lot is working with a CEO who gets marketing. How do you test for that? Tell me about your relationships with CEOs or just even the rest of the executive team when talking about marketing?

Sure, yeah, I was about to use the sentence, I've been blessed to have really good relationships with my CEOs, but that implies that it's an accident. And I actually don't think it is. I think there's a lot of things we can do proactively and I think that's what you're getting at. So I think the first is that some CEOs really get marketing, others don't, but I think they all kind of understand that it's really important, but a lot of it is dependent on like, okay, have they had a past relationship in sort of a more marketing oriented organization? Or like a lot of especially founders that are more technical and maybe this is their first company or second company. Are they coming at this as like an engineer? It's like, I need this thing. I don't really know it, I don't really understand it. You have to kind of grasp that yourself because it changes the way you talk about this with them. Like, what terminology can you take for granted? What ideas can you take for granted? So that is just something that sort of, you need to do an assessment of what am I dealing with? So my founders right now at High Touch, they're big believers in marketing because we've had some hits that have really accelerated our growth. So they see that. But they are all technical founders. And so there are times where, you know, we've got to just slow down and talk about the importance of storytelling, talk about the importance of messaging, talk about the channels, things like that. So I'm conscious of that. So I'll kind of do like a first principles explanation of things that maybe for a different leader, I might not have to. That's okay. It's no judgment. You just need to know, do I need to really explain the why of this or can I just go right to the what is what you need to assess? The next thing is, I won't belabor it because we talked about it at length, but is approaching this all as a revenue owner, not as the owner of some weird sub KPI. We talked about that a lot. That is very important. It changes the dynamic amongst you and your executives and your CEO. There's a great book that many people I imagine have read called the Hard Thing about hard Things. And there's this one by Ben Horowitz of Anderson Horowitz. And there's this one anecdote in there where like, the company was literally about to go out of business. And like his mid level managers are coming to him talking about some sub issue and he's like, he can't tell them the company's about to go out of business. They'll lose their minds. But you need to know, as the person coming to the CEO, that it's very possible that they know that the company's about to go under, they're about to run out of money. Silicon Valley bank, just whatever. And you're talking about your demo form, not firing. You know, you need to come to the room knowing that that's who you're talking to and where their mind is.

Right.

So you're at the right altitude and you're calibrating what you're talking about correctly.

There's some huge issue going on, some scandal in the business, I don't know, whatever. Something going on that you have no idea about, having that context. You're so right. I've always said I learned this the hard way, but you don't want to let them get in the weeds. Right. You might have a hundred things that you're working on, but you don't need to tell them all the hundred things. It's like, let's talk about that one core thing. And you got to trust that I got the rest of this stuff.

Yeah. And a huge asset for that, founders especially. But also they're just like, they just spew out ideas at the same rate. You cannot keep up. If I actually counted, I have three co founders, two co CEOs. I can't do all this stuff, it's impossible. So you need systems for catching it and essentially backlogging it so they know you didn't forget. They also know that you're not doing it.

And do you have a system? Is that system just like a brain gut thing or do you have an actual system for that?

We have a system. So we have. I'm very fortunate to have members of my team. I'm not a great project manager if I'm honest, but I've been able to bring members of the team that are excellent. And so I worked with them to set up. Essentially we use notion and we have like a database in there where all the ideas go. And depending on the discipline, there's a different database. So PMM has a different one than Growth marketing team. And inside of there we just really explicitly prioritize and then we groom that backlog kind of like a software team might on a regular public interval. And we're not afraid because the CEO is really passionate about something and we agree to jump and shuffle mid quarter, midweek even. It's not that we're inflexible, we're super flexible, but everything does go into this environment where we prioritize and look at it. Because a lot of times the CEO, there's two things that they don't totally grasp. It takes time to do stuff. Three things, actually. It takes time for things to work. And we're already working on their other good idea. And if they knew that their new good idea was going to kill our ability to do their old good idea, they might not want you to do the new good idea. They don't know that because they think it's already done. Because they understand that things take time. And so you need a way to manifest to them, hey, a week ago we said we're going to do six city meetups this week. You're saying you want a podcast. I have two product marketers. These are both good ideas and they're the CEO. Their name is on your paycheck. They're allowed to say, no, drop that one. But then you say back to them, let's be clear here, dropping it.

This is why I love doing this podcast and even just building this Exit 5 business right now. Because the more you hear from other marketers, I know for a fact people are going to be listening to this and like nodding their head and being like, wait, I'm not the only person who. This doesn't just happen. You've worked at all these companies now, Brian. This has happened at every company. I'm laughing because I find myself doing this now to Dan, who I hired to help me run exit 5. I send him a hundred ideas and he literally is like, okay, cool, these are good ideas. But like, we can't do these because you told me to do this other thing. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right, nevermind, just do that other, that other thing. However, and I've stressed out and burnt out team members of four and I can't help it. This is who I am. I have lots of ideas. I go fast. I do think that you have to have a culture where the CEO and others need to be able to be a fire hose and share all the ideas because they so often do have that visionary thing. And you're like, ah, that is a good idea. You can't just shut the team down and be like, nope, we're not taking it right. And so you're. This process, the fact that you actually have a process for notion where this is a database and people can show what we're saying. Yes and no to is goes such a long way. Because I feel like the only other alternative is to be like, nope, don't worry. It's very easy to get defensive and be like, stop sharing ideas. You know, we have so much on our plate.

Totally. I call this, like, I don't know if this is a real term. I just call it this. I call it founder energy. Founder energy is unique and inexhaustible. And it's my experience from a number. Number of companies. Pretty much the difference between a company winning or losing, because these companies are supposed to fail, like, statistically. Right. It's an active force of will to cause a company to shoulder its way into the market and to persist and exist. It's why so few win. So a CEO like yourself with Exit 5, or like my old CEO at Sprinkler, Raji, the last thing you want to do, the absolute last thing you want to do is to stifle that in any way. Do not stifle it. Do not block it. Do not stop it. But you have to harness it and you have to control it, because your poor junior content marketer or whomever given, like, you know, it's like standing in front of a wall of water rushing at you. You know, they can't survive it if you don't channel it and manage it. And that's one of the first jobs is like when I came to Hytrix, okay, I'm the barrier between the line marketers and the founders. And that barrier is not there to stop your ideas. The barrier is there to channel your ideas to the ones we're doing and the ones we're not. And we will work actively to constantly prioritize. We've developed a whole quarterly plan and changed it one week into the quarter. And I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not sad to do it. But we have the plan to begin with.

Love this. Great. Let's wrap up and talk a little bit about what's exciting to you right now. You're. You're at a company that's growing fast. You raised a bunch of money over the summer at a time where, like, a lot of companies are having trouble raising money. I go to LinkedIn just now, and I see you have all these good, great, featured customers. Like, the NBA uses your product, SoundCloud, Ramp Lucid software, some really cool GameStop, some cool companies. What are you excited about from a marketing standpoint? What's exciting to you in 2024 that you all are doing for sure.

So I think one of my biggest obsessions is very much that messaging point. It's like we're trying to nail the next friends don't let friends buy a cdp. And we're doing a lot of experimentation and research to explore that. And I say that because again, it's not a hack like I was talking about earlier. I can't offer a simple easy idea. I just know from experience if you get that right, everything is easier. The other thing I know is you don't need to get that many that right in a row. You can get three. Right. And that's your four year tenure as the CMO of a company having been competing with you at Drift. Right. Y' all had a couple really good ideas around conversational marketing, around this kind of hyper growth framing and you pushed that through a lot of channels. The channels weren't novel, but the message was resonant. And that one or two messages carried you for years. As a head of marketing, you don't need that many good ideas. You just need them at the right times and to really stress them. Friends don't let friends carry this for 12 months.

Yeah, I mean it's great. It's why I've become obsessed with people like April Dunford as an example where like the positioning and messaging, like it solves so many of the other problems. Right. It's so easy to get into the tactics when that's usually going to be the big thing that makes the rest of the stuff easier. It's good to hear you say that.

There's one other cool thing about that I'll say. And again, I love April's work. They talked about distribution and messaging. Right. Great. Messages have self distribution because they're memorable and they're interesting and people talk about them. So it's interesting. One of the ways you make the demand genes easier is with a message that causes people to stop scrolling and think about it and share it and react to it and then tell their coworker about it. Like you can actually have kind of crappy distribution if the message is good enough. Now that's not the goal obviously, but it's funny, you can kind of get away with it if the message is interesting enough and good enough. So that's one of my super big focuses. Another thing that we are really actively working on right now is I just do a ton of sales enablement. Going back to the revenue point and looking across the whole supply chain. We're really trying to uplevel our game there and teach Our reps, how to storytell properly and deal with competitors and things like that. That's another huge initiative we're actively driving. And it's not usually the reason why a marketer gets into the gig, but A, it's necessary given my revenue mindedness and B, it's actually really interesting in other ways. So that's something that we're doing a lot of work on too. And then I guess probably the other thing I would just mention is just the concept of community. It is true that a lot of the traditional distribution is harder now. Ads are very saturated, things like that. And so we're trying to figure that out. It's early days, but I really do think that that can be a moat for a business. And I mean, I literally just got off a call working on it with the team. Like, how do we solve for this, knowing that it's like a long haul?

And when you Just curious, because when you say community and just. I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about it, does that mean like you have a physical online place where people hang out or do you see it like community? I've been following this guy, dan, who runs VPA community at Apollo IO. He's been doing an awesome job on LinkedIn. I think they both work. I'm just curious to hear your perspective on it. Where there's also community. Like Drift was an example where we didn't have a community but we had community in the sense of social media was strong, podcast was strong, we did events and we built community. How are you thinking about it for your company now?

My preference is the Driftway. I think of it kind of like building a common identity. Yeah, I would like to do that, but I acknowledge it's hard and it's a little bit lightning in a bottle. Ish. Obviously you were super successful with it at Drift, but it's hard to replicate that. The same playbook won't always work, but that's my preference. I would rather have a great identity that's loosely formed in many places than if I had to choose than a Slack community or something. And the reason is it's easy to move the identity group into a Slack community. It's hard to take a Slack community and turn it into the other thing. So that's my thought.

Totally. I'm glad that I asked you that because that's kind of what I want to see more people get at is like Community does not mean, oh, we need to go set up circle or do a Facebook group or do a Slack Group, like to your point, you can do that when you have this mass community is like this group of people that have a shared identity that to me are following your business even if they're not ready to buy from that business, that you become a resource for them, an expert for them. Like me as a marketer, as a young marketer coming up in my career. That company for me was HubSpot. I didn't actually buy HubSpot until two years ago. For the first time I had worked there. I'd been a fanboy, you know, reading their blog. I'm making myself sound smart in my job because they set some template about like here's how to have a good one on one with your boss. And I use that. My boss is like, wow, this is great. You know, like you're arming your ideal customers to be smarter, better at their jobs, be more successful. Then community happens in many forms. It could be LinkedIn followers, it could be podcast listeners, it could be email subscribers. It doesn't just mean go build a private walled community and put a hundred people in there because almost all those eventually die anyway. It gets very hard.

100%. Yeah. I mean just speaking about again, the Drift Intercom thing, the hundreds of millions of dollars that Intercom made by being this incredible resource for product marketers and product managers. It's like we were to go back and pay John Collins, the guy who ran that content team. More like performance based comp. On all those blog posts you would own an island somewhere.

Totally, totally.

And it helped form an identity. But we never had a slack group or anything. But there was an identity of really interested people that the content was changing their lives and it caused the business to grow in a way that was super efficient and super fast. But again, it's not trivial to do that. John's team was really well staffed. We invested a lot of money in it. And I don't know that it's just like turn the crank that you can just pick up that same team and drop it in a new category, a new product and have it work again. I don't think that that's how the works. There is a little bit of alchemy to it.

So much of the story and the positioning matters. I also think that people wildly underrate how talented somebody like John is. This is my, one of the biggest soapboxes or whatever that I like to stand on, this content brand positioning. There's a it factor there that's very hard. Some people just are good at it and some people are not. You can't just. I love April as an example. You can't just pick up her book, follow the framework and just, boom. You're magically amazing at positioning. Because I've actually never followed a framework. We didn't go through a positioning framework at Drift. It was like David and I, the CEO, we were texting every day, coming up with like, oh, hey, what about this? You see this thing? Like, yeah, change this tagline. There's an it factor there that's also hard to, like, train and quantify.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. One of the huge unlocks at Sprinkler was when we came up with our descriptor of the product, which is the most complete enterprise social media platform. They don't use it anymore. But me and the product market and the CEO were working that for months until we nailed it, and then growth took off immediately.

Lines like that are great. You can spend weeks, you can spend months trying to get to one, and then one day you're just out on a walk and it just comes to you.

Totally. Yeah.

Brian, thank you so much. This was an awesome episode. Go find Brian on LinkedIn. I'll link to all your stuff. This is a great episode. I wrote the title while we were doing. I'm going to. I throw this all through chat GPT later, but I wrote why Marketing Should Get Paid Like Sales, Owning the revenue number and the role of demand gen with Brian Kotler, VP of Marketing Growth at High Touch. I hope that's okay. It's a B plus title. I'll work on it a little bit. But great to meet you, Brian. Great to hang out and I'm going to continue to follow you and root for you in your career.

Thanks so much.

All right, man. Thank you so much.

Foreign.

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