#77: Marketing In A Down Economy - What Can You Do To Drive Growth? (with Margaret Kelsey, Jason Widup, Shauntle Barley)

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1 2, 34 exit exit. We wanted to do a session that was bringing on other marketers who are in and around other B2B marketing teams right now so we can kind of do a therapy session slash state of the what's going on? And I want you to hear from other people who are in the thick of things right now as I wrote in the description. Because for me personally in my career that's always been to unlock when you learn that everybody else is kind of dealing with the same things but then also to get other perspectives. Like I was already like when we were backstage for five minutes I'm scribbling a bunch of random notes of like a bunch of good topics that we're going to dive into here. So let's go around the horn and just say like really quick intro who you are. What's your quick background in marketing so people know that you're relevant. Let's go Margaret Jason Chantal Awesome.

I spent the last decade in B2B PLG businesses, Envision AppCues and then most recently at OpenView, which is a venture capital firm that invests in B2B software. About six months ago I left and started an advising and consultancy business where I help founders and heads of marketing work better together and build future proof marketing strategies for specifically B2B PLG businesses.

Jason hey folks.

Yeah, I'm Jason Whitup, VP of marketing at Metadata. Been at Metadata for about four years now. Most of my background is in marketing operations and demand gen, so kind of my sweet spot and then hire everything else around me. Thanks for having me on.

All right, I'm yelling at Mo right now so you go oh that's okay.

Yeah, I'm Chantal. I'm a director of marketing right now at a company called Demand. Well and my whole career has been in baby SaaS, primarily sales led businesses ranging from enterprise down to currently sort of like SMB mid market deal sizes. So excited to have this conversation. It's very relevant for me right now.

All right, Margaret, you were talking behind backstage in the green room about this first topic, which is. And I think this is where a lot of things stem from in just B2B marketing in general. Down economy. Up economy, whatever. The success of marketing, at least in my opinion, is so dependent on the relationship with the founder, the CEO, and being internally aligned about. Jason's already smirking about definitions about what success looks like, what you want to do. And I'm not saying that you should go out and like, not hit your goals, but life is much easier when you're. Let's say you are not hitting your goals, but you're on the same page and have a shared vision about what marketing should be doing with the founder. You mentioned that one of the biggest issues is that the founders and heads of marketing can't talk to each other. Let's dive into that a little bit.

Yeah. So for me, I think it's not even shared vision. It's. It's more tactical than that, which is shared language. I think the founders speak a different language than heads of marketing do. I think that marketers have shot ourselves in our own feet in some regards by labeling everything that we do in marketing as its own different thing. This is abm, this is omnichannel. This is blah, blah, blah. It's like it can be such simpler than that. And if you can really break down your own marketing speak to be just human speak, or if you have a technical co founder into more of an engineering model, engineering mindset, the more that you can, as a head of marketing, think of your founder as an additional stakeholder that you need to build shared language and shared programs with. The more that you can actually unlock this, like, working relationship. And I think so often marketers think like, oh, I know how to get in front of my target audience externally. I know how to saturate that channel that they live in. I know how to use words that they use. I know how to rip terms that they use and use it back to them and reflect it to them to get the best outcome. And then we turn that internally and look up to the founder and we just like, use our language or else. And it's so silly. It's so silly.

Well, and God help you if your CEO is an ex marketer like mine.

And so even worse.

But there's some. There's actually. But there's positives. You know, there's positives to it too. I will say there are absolutely positives, especially if they recognize that like, maybe you're a better marketer than they were. So that's important, I think. But yeah, there can be all kinds of other challenges, you know, that kind of stem from that. But also I think there's a difference in expectations. Right? And so like the expectations sometimes and oftentimes what I see is people don't really dig deep into those expectations and kind of like, well, here's what I'm expecting, here's what I think you're expecting. And then like really getting on the same page with that. So I think that can also cause some challenges back and forth.

I've just found that like being really aligned on the high level goals makes such a big difference here because I think you get into trouble when the CEO can't really tell what it is that you're doing. Like, they don't get the why kind of. If it's like, well, we did all this stuff and we got all these views on this live event that we had, it's like, okay, so what? But if you're able to say, and this helped us hit this goal that we agreed upon at the beginning of the quarter, that makes a huge difference.

Yeah, I try to like level set the CEOs or the founders. Again, like, okay, you can usually like roll all of this marketing, speak up to two things. Marketing should saturate channels so you stay top of mind with your target audience. We're not even converting yet. We're literally just like saturating with the right message. And then you can identify signals of readiness and convert them to do the thing that you want them to do. And if we just like agree that marketing is those things and we can speak at that language, then to your point, like, you can say, oh, this views on the live event was great because we are priming and saturating our target audience so that we can convert them later on. Right. Or this conversion thing actually worked for this subsection. But it's like that's again, like removing all this marketing speak that we do and just saying like, can we align that marketing are these things and that like those things are important and like, then you can attach it to like the success of this campaign was not even towards this part of marketing yet. It was like this part of marketing.

Yeah, Building on that. I love those two definitions because I think that ultimately you have to have. And this is why it always comes back to like the company goals and the strategy. And so before we get into any tactics before we talk about how many, let's say this was a SaaS company, and I got to tell my boss after this that we had 800 people register for this and a couple hundred people showed up live and doesn't matter, right? But if we have this shared definition, if Margaret is the CEO and. And I report to her, and together we go into the year and we say, hey, what role does marketing play for our business? Well, Mark and I love the way you broke this down. Marketing is responsible for two things. This is our philosophy, right or wrong. It might be different, a different company, but at our company, we believe that marketing is supposed to do two things. Number one, saturate channels so we can do blah, blah, blah, so people know who we are. And number two, drive readiness. You know, do things that signal that someone might be ready to talk to us. Then from there, you can then go and build a plan, and how are we going to go do those things? And so those two become like, the North Star. And so, like, I've been in the situation where that means every presentation I'm giving to the company, every update I'm sharing with the board, with the company, internal, whoever, I'm like, hey, I'm Dave. I lead the marketing team here. First, let's just talk about what the role of marketing is at our company. You may have seen this slide before, but I think as a reminder, our goal is to do this and this. Oh, now it's like a Public Speaking 101. Like, I've now primed you to tell you how you should think about what we're doing as a marketing, as a marketing team, and. And now we're going to talk about all these things. I think the common mistake that a lot of marketers get into is it's like this tactic, the podcast, community, blog, email, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I don't care about any of that. Show me how, in aggregate, those two things are moving the needle as we work towards our goals of saturating channels and having signals of readiness. Curious to just hear your reaction to that rant.

Yeah. And so I think that the advice that you're giving is just solid communication advice, which is you should always scaffold your argument based on the last thing that you know that you agree on with the person. And so, like, if you get into, hey, here's my podcast strategy, but you haven't understood that you're aligned on the fact that podcasts are. Are the thing that we should be doing, you fail the entire conversation. And so you have to go up to our business needs these things like here is the way marketing contributes and then you can scaffold your argument on top of that but like. Or off of that, but like, you always have to like bring it back to the last thing that you agree on, not the first thing that you disagree with in order to start a conversation.

I like that. I want to use that next time. I think also like just remembering the most important metric for the CEO is going to be revenue, whether it's renewal revenue, new revenue, and so just making sure like everything that I'm putting in my plan has some kind of relationship to revenue. I mean, it might be really tangential, it might be off to the side, but at some point this is going to affect revenue in this way. And so you might say it in different ways even to your team, but with the CEO it's like, okay, these are the things that we think we can do. They're going to have the biggest impact on increase of revenue for the lowest effort. Effort, you know, so start doing the low hanging fruit stuff. So I think just keeping that in mind, you know, that's probably usually their number one goal.

Yeah, I also, I think like, not to be old fashioned, but the funnel is a really helpful framework that I think a lot of people understand. And I was recently talking to a founder that I'm consulting with and basically framed it as like, there are people who've not ever heard about us that we need to get in front of. And there are, there's a known audience of people who are on our email list who we have engaged with in some way in the past. And like, if you just think of those two audiences separately and how they kind of interact to ultimately become money for the business. Like, yeah, I agree. There's so many, like mql, SQL, all this language that is so specific and unnecessarily complicated to explain actually really simple ideas.

And they mean thing different things at different organizations. And I think that's always the challenge is like we show up to a new organization with these words that we both use. And this is the thing that keeps coming back with like, founders will use these words but have a completely different definition because the last company that they were at had it this way. And you come in as a marketer and you've built a program or maybe have more understanding of the nuance of this word, but you use it as a shorthand and then it's like we both don't actually speak the same language.

Yeah, 100%. Okay. Another thing that's related to the founder marketer dynamic that I would love to get your guys's take on. It's a slight segue, but every so often I kind of like retake a look at what Jason Lemkin writes about the role of a marketing leader is because I feel like he has really great points. But anyway, one thing I came across recently and I was like, duh, I kind of had forgotten about this was that the CEO should basically set the vision for the company and it's the marketing leader's job to execute on the CEO's vision. And I do feel like there's this kind of sometimes not talked about thing where the CEO is like, wait, but you, you set the brand and you set the main messaging and all of this stuff. And then the marketer is like, yeah, but I need to know like what direction to go in. Curious if you think that's part of it too, Margaret.

Yeah. Who's like, being the aspirational leader is oftentimes the thing that needs to be decided upon, which is like, hey, CEO, are you aspirational driving this forward or do you need the head of marketing to be that person? It's so dependent of like future company vision. Who actually can own that or wants to own that, the personality of the, you know, founder and head of marketing. But yeah, I agree that that's sometimes a unresolved piece of ownership that if you actually can put words to that, that can be really powerful, which is like, I can own some aspirational messaging, but like, we have to make sure that product is going to build some things to like follow along to this aspiration that I'm going to set and that it's in the right direction.

To your point, that's a loaded thing because I find myself in this trap too, which is like, oh yeah, just you need to work for a founder that has a vision and not all of us are lucky enough to do that. At a, or at a point in your career where you have your pickup jobs. Right. Like now I would never go work for a CEO that doesn't have that vision. Right. But like, you know, 26 year old marketing manager Dave is not going to be lucky enough to like push the CEO on like, well, I'm not taking this job. You don't have a vision. They're gonna be like, great, well, we're hiring somebody else. And I think that's where like you as a marketer in your career, you have to take a higher level view and say like, you know what Maybe this isn't the visionary CEO. I know that's what I want to go find in my next role. So that's going to shift what I do and I'm going to try to, like, take this as an opportunity, like, own some of the strategy and vision and push the CEO. And maybe this might mean in six to 12 months that, like, I burned myself out and I'm not in this job anymore. But, like, I took that year as a learning. I see this come up a lot in the Exit 5 community and around it. It's like you're building a career, you're building a resume, you're doing something over time. It's not going to be always the perfect job in the perfect market. Even if you're a marketer at a company that is at a product that's really struggling to sell right now. Like, can you flip that and look at it as a positive and say, man, I'm gonna have to, like, really dig deep and find creative ways to do that. And then two years from now when I'm working at a company that sells like hotcakes, like, this is going to be easy. Like, I think there's got to be some balance. You're not always going to get that visionary CEO. But I love going back to that line. Chantal of like, the CEO has to own the vision and the marketer has to execute on. I think that is such a good frame to go back and think about what the role is.

Yeah. And I just feel like it's another thing that's like, you have an opportunity to define this along with all the other things that we were talking about before. Like, if something feels like it's unclear, that can. I felt held back by that before, but it's just, yeah, a reminder to say, great, this is something we can define as a team, you and me. CEO.

There's one note in chat from Holden says, I've seen CEO driven brands blow up a lot, especially if it's not validated by research and customer feedback. I think what we're saying is not that the CEO has to be the face of the brand, but, like, I think that it's a cop out for the CEO to say, like, I don't have a vision for marketing. Like, the marketing leader has to do it. Like, that's like saying, like, I don't have a vision for fundraising. That's why we're hiring a CEO. I don't have a vision for which type of employees we're going to hire. That's why we Want to hire a head of hr. I think those are all cop outs. I think like the CEO by nature of the job, has to be involved in some way in all those things. And I think if you push deeper on the business strategy, you can dig into the marketing strategy.

Marketing strategy has to follow business strategy and product strategy. And so if you're working for a CEO that has neither of those, then I would be a little, little worried, a little confused. But like, it has to follow that. It has to follow those two strategies, but then it has to actually implement ahead of those two strategies. And I think that's where a lot of marketers get stuck is like your marketing strategy is built off of the business and product strategy, but then it gets implemented before product strategy.

Yeah, I was going to just mention a little nuance. You know, if you're creating a category, you know, if you have to create a new category, you're in the middle of that. That's oftentimes too, where ideally, when you're figuring out your narrative, you. That becomes a strategy. But I've also seen times where, hey, we're in a new category and because of that, we don't really have a strategy. So sometimes, like, that's just another consideration. Whereas if you're in an existing category, sure, there might be a lot of different strategies you can take, but there's a lot of other. There's other companies that have already like, done some of this. You're probably going to like, see this and see this and maybe molded after some of the things that have worked in other areas and not work. But creating a new category might throw some, you know, might have to dig a little bit deeper.

All right, let's say creating their own category these days, right?

That's a whole separate conversation. We don't have three weeks to go live and talk about that with everybody right now. The question that I wanted to answer first is this one from Alex. How do you balance all the report requests to get to communicate effective strategies versus actually on the ground execution of projects. Projects, since in the same month you have to prove ROI for the quarter. Any of you brave marketers on this panel want to tackle that?

I mean, having your data in order before it gets to this point, I think is a key thing here. So, you know, the more in order your data is, the easier it is to have these reports. I mean, ideally, you're not really doing too much report like reporting. It's there for you. You can add your insights to it, you know what I mean? And kind of go from there. But yeah, if you're still in more of a manual reporting mode, like unfortunately, I'd love to say that I'm in that other area right now. We just have everything just shows up at my desk every Monday morning right at this time we're not there. And so and I know some of our reports are struggle to pull. So like our head of demand gen, sometimes she has to spend way too much of her time reporting and then that's less time to execute. So I think also what I've learned is just make sure that stuff is in order before you get to the point where you really need it. Then hopefully it doesn't actually cause a drag on time.

I think if you can get your executive team, your internal team to care more about the velocity at which you're shipping rather than the reporting, you will be prioritizing the right behavior that then your reports will look good when you inevitably get to pull them. I think so much of this is trying to set up a perfect attribution model to be able to explain our work. And that's navel gazing and it's not actually doing the work of marketing externally. And the more that you can just have velocity. And I recently for a company started a slack channel called Shit Marketing Ship. And it's just literally to emphasize and prioritize the fact that things need to be public facing and we need to work on public facing activities. And I think so much of this, especially if you're a small team trying to do more with less and all that kind of stuff, get your internal team comfortable that we're going to not understand every single thing we do and the ROI and the impact, but we're going to have more at bats and understand the things we can understand and move quicker to just get stuff out there. And I think like prioritize that behavior and if you don't have a perfect report like the team will see your velocity and will trust you.

I think that the number of requests for reporting is a great tell for the CEO or whoever's asking for all those metrics that they don't actually trust or believe you, or they don't know.

What you're working on or they don't know how it's going. And I think this is super related to agreeing upon the metrics that you're trying to hit early on before the quarter even starts.

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I basically just have like one dashboard that's incredibly high level. It's like number of leads, number of opportunities, Number of closed deals, amount of pipeline. And that's the thing that's always up to date. And then the more nuanced stuff, I like update as I need to. But the CEO always knows the high level performance, so I think that helps.

I love the shit marketing ship channel. I've done this in the past before where basically marketing, like, we had a Slack channel for the product team when they shipped something and they would explain here's what it is. So not just shipping something and saying like, hey, here's a blog post, but like, actually having to explain, like, here's what we shipped, here's why this is part of this bigger campaign as a reminder. It's to do X, Y and Z. And I've done this from everything from like, the video person on your team should take a screenshot of the video that they just uploaded and explain it all the way up to, like, some huge project. And I love that. And I think marketing can be the, like, momentum department for your company when they see that. And I think that's a way that marketing can create energy. Okay, there's. Go ahead, Margaret.

I was just gonna say the last thing that you want is, like, somebody to say, what has marketing done? Like, oh, my gosh, we are the public facing, like, shipper. Like, just what have we done? Here's everything, right? And I think that it is so oftentimes that we start to work on the naval gazy stuff. Oh, we can run reports, we can facilitate things for other teams weekend, yada, yada. And it's like, if it's not going out to your target audience, especially if you're early stage, especially if you're doing more with less, like, it's not the right thing to be focusing on.

All right. We could talk all day about internal reporting and all this stuff. And so I don't think that we're done on any of these topics, but I just want to get to more stuff. And I really like this question from Jane because it's also related to a bunch of the stuff that we talked about backstage about free marketing and what you all have changed and are doing right now. And so Jane asks, what do you each see working right now to drive revenue when everything else seems to be down? Jason, why don't you kick this off and talk about this idea of free marketing?

Yeah, you're talking a little bit backstage. Like, I don't want to spend any money on marketing, right? Because, like, I got some resources cut back, some budget cuts, and so I've been trying to focus us on what can we do that is free? And so things, you know, the basic things like content and SEO, like we all know about that. You know, SEO might not be free, you got to develop the content. But ideally maybe you can use chat GPT to get yourself ahead, I don't know. But also things that aren't maybe as obvious, like something we've done at Metadata for two, two and a half years is we have automation running in the background that connects me and my marketing partner Mark probably knows to all of our target prospects at our target accounts. And so it's just constantly running in the background. We use up all of our hundred invites a week and then we post things about the company sometimes and then those prospects will see it. So it's basically just like seeing it in their feed, but now I'm not paying for that. And so things like that we also, you know, like a PLG motion, so maybe you're still going to get traffic to it, but free, you know, like people like to see, oh, I can try it now or, you know, I can try it before I buy email, of course. So, like, what can we do with email now? And that's free. And so, yeah, and then I think something that we don't often talk about is like focusing on existing customers. Right. So like, and you can market to them for free as well. And so I'm really trying to figure out, like, what are all these things we can do that don't cost a lot of money and then how the things that do cost money happen. We just become a lot more efficient with those.

Chantal, what's going on inside of demand? Well, what have you had to cut back on and what are you finding pockets of that's working.

Yeah. So to get super tactical, we've cut back on our paid ad spend and our sponsorship spend. Those were two, like two of our biggest expenses basically in any quarter. But we have really doubled down on to Jason's point, free or very cheap things that you can do just by spending time. So we've launched weekly webinars or workshops that we run every week. And we don't put paid behind it, but we promote it to our existing email list and it's on the website. So that's been actually surprisingly effective and fun and people are turning into opportunities from these weekly workshops.

Margaret, what about you and the companies that you're around and work with?

I think it's bringing, bringing folks back to the basics of, like, it's okay to do the unscalable things and I think that that's what we're talking about with like the free marketing, but also it's like tangential to free marketing, which is just like the unscalable stuff, like reach out to the folks that aren't converting and get a better understanding of why. Right. Start to really create that two way conversation so that you understand maybe your value prop, like doesn't resonate anymore because of the macro environment. I've seen that across a couple different companies where just like it's not the right value prop anymore. But you only understand that if you start to dive into more of the wind loss analysis and more of like that kind of two way communication, that to me is going to help you pivot in the right direction and it's unscalable and costs man hours, woman hours, but like it's going to actually give you the right direction as everything is moving so suddenly underneath us.

And oftentimes those things that don't scale are the things that actually help you stand out even more. So like you can get the bang for your buck on the qualitative side of it, even though you can't do a lot of it. And so yeah, I really like that too.

I'm also seeing like the normal channels are still working, like organic is still working, cold outbound is still working. Like I think, I don't know. In this time I do feel like we've kind of pulled back a little and we've really gone back to basics. And actually Jason, I noticed that you guys redid or you updated some messaging recently that I saw on LinkedIn. I wrote it down because I thought it was really smart about create more pipeline without increasing headcount, like double your pipeline, not your budget. You guys have some really like catchy stuff floating around on the web.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

That's a great little segue because one of the things that I wrote down was I think when I see this question come up, we as marketers, we like to run right to the tactics. What's the channel that's working like, okay, let's try email, let's try LinkedIn, let's try Facebook, let's try this, let's try this. Almost 80% of the time it's always the story, it's the pitch, it's the offer. And so can you go back and revisit the company's story right now? And is this a time to tell a better story? And you know, we kind of spin our wheels so often. I see lots of questions in the community about like you know, this channel or that channel and like, you know, how do you get like if you go back to early stage company and getting your first customers and people are like, how do you get our first customers? And I'm like, you email them, like you reach out to them and it doesn't have to be some crazy channel, but it's like, hey Margaret, I've done this research and here's a really compelling story. It seems like you know, you started a consulting business. Well, did you know that like we can actually help you do X, Y and Z things and here's how. And I made a two minute video for you and like reached out and you might hop on a call and buy and that might be the crazy marketing tactic. And so like do what metadata did and use this as the opportunity to like revisit the story. I don't want people to skip that one and, and overthink that. The other thing I would add on this one is also just like work backwards. Like go and do the analysis of like if you got 50 customers last quarter, where did they come from? Like specifically where did they come from? How did you get those? And then how are you going to go get 10 more? And when you. Now obviously this is much harder to do if you're working at Salesforce or HubSpot size companies, but I think the majority of the people here right now probably aren't. And even in that stage you can do it and you have a little bit more data to work with. But it's just like we're flipping the funnel to now work backwards and say like where are people coming from and how can we go and get more of them as opposed to trying to like just do a bunch of marketing. I think this is the worst time that you could just be doing a lot of stuff and not have it matter. And it's less about cutting budget and more about like time is limited, money is limited, like we only are going to have a couple swings at this thing. Like let's be really efficient with what we're doing.

And to your point Dave, like it could also be that the customers are different. It might be a slightly different profile of people that are actually buying. And so when I think about like all of the things you can expect experiment with in marketing, like there's so many different variables. Like there's the audience and like that target audience or who your customer actually could be in the different like people that you're actually targeting. There's obviously the offer, the message, you could say the stories in there. There's the channel in which you do it, there's the content type in which you like actually deliver that message, there's the conversion opportunity that you give, there's the timing of it. Whether that's actually like trigger based timing or time of the week or whatever. But you have to understand like all of the variables that you have open to you. And then the best experiments are obviously like isolating a variable to understand what's actually changing. And I think to your point like there is a really good variable there around messaging, but also around like the actual audience that you're targeting. And it might be that your company needs to shift those rather than shift channel or content type or cta.

Are you ready to focus on professional development, build your community with sales and marketing leaders and hear from the brightest minds in business and culture? Then join us at Inbound 2023. Inbound is an annual conference powered by HubSpot and it's back in person in Boston from September 5th through the 8th. With Electric Festival style programming and entertainment, you can choose your own adventure with content across sales, marketing, customer success and operations. From expert led sessions with industry thought leaders to spotlight sessions with people like Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Andrew Huberman and more, you'll leave feeling motivated to go out and tackle your next challenge at Inbound 2023. You'll develop tactical strategies to apply to your work, build relationships that last a lifetime and spark conversations like never before. Join the thousands of other business leaders buying tickets to one of the top educational and entertainment events in tech. You can reserve your general admission or limited availability VIP tickets right now@inbound.com today. That's general admission tickets or limited availability VIP tickets right now inbound.com today. I love this comment from Sarah Pion in the chat and I want to make sure we talk about it. I also found that focusing this is a great idea for right now. I've also found that focusing every single person on the marketing team to one offer slash one campaign and having channel owners only focus on that one offer for a month or quarter, not only does it make it crystal clear what the marketing team is marching towards, but being consistent with the offers in the market is generally the rising tide that lifts all boats. When we focus on one offer, we generally all see an increase in overall conversion rate on the website slash Inbound demo requests. I love that idea. I did a podcast last week with Tom Wentworth who's a CMO of Recorded Future. They're like a 250 million revenue company. And he talks about how the way that they structure marketing and what they go and do. He's like, we try to have two or three plays. They call them plays, campaigns, whatever. Two or three plays each quarter. And like, if I could go back and look at mistakes that I've made, I wish I could go back and just take this approach because it's so easy to just like have all these channels and we, we're doing all these things, but they're not making impact versus what I would want as a CMO or whoever is like, give me all these smart people on my marketing team working together on one goal, on one challenge. Like when you get screwed and then you is when you feel like, well, I got a team of 15 people and we're all doing 15 different things and like you're not achieving your goals or hitting your results versus like if you could rip all those plans away, put everything in the trash and say, hey, we're all going to meet on this. And this quarter our goal is to do X and put everybody singularly focused on that goal. I think that is such a good idea and I just wanted to make sure that. I would love to hear your all reaction to that.

I like it a lot and I know Sarah and I know that I love focusing on like maybe three things at a time. But my only worry would be what if that one offer doesn't really work, you know what I mean? So then if I'm focusing all of my resources on that one, then I might be missing out on something or slowing down my learning of something else. Not saying it's not a great idea, like, I love it and I do this on a lot of other things. But you know, when it comes to the offer, I'm more on the, like, how many experiments can we run, you know, statistically significant results and you know, learn where we're going a little bit faster. But I know that Sarah's idea could absolutely work. Like, I could see that looking.

I think it's about which piece of these variables you feel most confident in. If you're pretty confident in your audience and you're pretty confident in your offer and message, then absolutely, you can experiment with channel or CTA or whatever it might be and in those other variables. But I think the thing that I noticed a lot of marketers will do is that they almost don't like repeating themselves when like that is the thing that actually makes a message resonate is like repetition doesn't ruin the prayer, right? So I think to that point of, like, you're actually isolating the variables, other variables, and you're making sure that your message and your offer actually consistent across all channels. I can see that being really powerful if you have high confidence in the message and the offer.

Yeah, this is something I haven't been the best at historically, and I'm, like, still learning and getting better at it. But I think a big thing that we believe in is having a ridiculously good offer, which you can use in your marketing stuff. Your sales team can use it in their cold outreach. Like, make sure you have something that will really catch people's attention and get them down from the top of the funnel to the bottom really quickly. And then also just making sure, like, you have something going on at every stage of the funnel, every single quarter. Like, you have a list of things that you're like, here's what we're doing explicitly to drive X result at the top of the funnel. Here's what we're doing in the middle. Here's what we're doing to drive consistency in the bottom. And just like, being incredibly concrete about those things has been really helpful for me.

There's probably some offer types that you just know are going to work. You know what I mean? Like, let's say you don't have a free trial now and you're like, hey, we're going to pull a free trial together. Like, that's going to work. You know, like, it's probably going to work as an offer to get people in the door. And so, yeah, there's definitely going to be some types. And then I think what I like also about Sarah's is it means you can probably take on these more attractive offers, right? So, like, that might take a little bit more time and require more of those resources to really, like, deliver it.

So I think you can combine Jason's approach and Sarah's approach, which is, I think that the offer, the campaign and offer should be based on some data and intuition about, like, micro things that you've done before. It shouldn't just be like, here's a crazy idea, let's go buy six billboards and. And like, we're gonna do that. I think you got to be able to do both. And then I see this question from Ashley in the chat, which is, how do you approach being concrete in initiatives and goals when you haven't tried it before and have little to base a goal on? I just want to remind everybody that, like, to me, at least, this is the fun. Marketing is not. There's been a lot we have added a lot of science to marketing, but there is an element of art and betting and creativity and like you are going to miss. But I think if it was, there's never going to be this like paint by numbers, like specific, like you should go do this thing plan. I've come up with offer ideas that have driven millions of dollars in revenue. If I've come up with offers in campaigns that have wasted a bunch of marketing dollars like you have to, you got to make a bet. It's no different than product strategy. And if you're following along at home and had a dog puke on the couch on your bingo card right now, please feel free to cross that out and congratulations, you win a free Exit 5 sticker. All right, let me go to some of these questions in the chat. What advice would you give to first time heads of marketing for getting aligned with other function leaders? So let's talk about the function leaders. Let's say you're aligned in the CEO. How do you get everybody else on board? One of my favorite topics and least favorite things to do, I feel like.

Resident alignment person over here. I think that it's the same thing that we were talking about before where it's like these folks are just other stakeholders, other audiences for you. And so it's the same thing that you would do as you start to understand an external audience, which is you have conversations with them, you tease out their priorities, you tease out the words that they use, you tease out their mental frameworks and how they make decisions, their decision making frameworks. And then you figure out how best to communicate your value and your expectations and your needs and your priorities to them in the way that they best like to communicate and in the channels they best like to communicate. That's one that gets, I think, a little missed. Like there's lots of folks that don't use slack that are heads of that. Like maybe they're email people, maybe they're call them on the phone people. Sounds horrible. But there are people out there like that.

So I'll take the sales route. So, you know, my, I feel like outside of the CEO, my most important relationship is with our head of sales. And you know, I really see marketing as a sales support function. You know, we're trying to help drive more sales, right. And so that's just a critical relationship tied at the hip. You should definitely see eye to eye. You should definitely have one on ones, definitely come to an agreement on what's important to them and even just get their ideas. Like what ideas you have for market, they love to get there and you don't need to execute anything. Don't worry. But. Because they could be horrible. But ask their ideas. You know, they like to be asked their ideas and have a chance to at least kind of give you some of those. So, yeah, I'm really, really, really focused.

On, yeah, my perspective on this also. It comes back to goal alignment. And like, if you're ahead of a function and you're working closely with other heads of their functions, like you hypothetically, all have the same exact goal, which is the ending ARR number for the company at the end of the quarter. And the head of success might be responsible for NRR and marketing might be responsible for marketing source revenue and sales might be responsible for sales source revenue. But it's really everyone's job to help each other hit their goals. And so it really is a conversation in my opinion of like, okay, I know my goal and I know how I'm going to hit it. And I've like set this plan that's like very explicit in terms of how I intend to do it. And I know Betsy, my head of success. I know her role and I know her NRR goals and I have things on my list that are to support customer marketing to help her hit her goal. So I think, yeah, it just. If you have concrete goals and explicit planning sessions early on in the quarter, I just think that goes a really long way.

Yeah, the alignment piece is much easier when you're all rowing in the same direction. I've been at different companies and one of them where all the execs and peers were aligned around the same goals. And so you're trying to increase X. So am I. We have different ways of doing that. I do marketing, you do customer success. Yeah, we can help you. Where this breaks is where other teams want marketing to do something because they have a goal that is different than what marketing needs to do. And so then that team is mad or doesn't like you or doesn't believe that you're doing the right thing because you are spending marketing. You're basically, you become the no person to them. Hey, can you do this page for us on the website? No, I can't. Why can't you? Well, because we're doing these 15 other things and this like, this is a 2% problem when, like, I got to spend my time and people and resources on the 98%. And so I think it's much easier to get in line when you can really peel back the layers and be like, like, what are our specific goals that we all share? Here's a good question.

I recently just went through that with our customer success. Yeah. So make sure you have time to spend for some of the other goals as well.

And it's hard in a company, right? And like if you're the head of marketing and there's, you know, four or five other heads of X function and you're not all aligned, people are hard. You have hard conversations. If Margaret is the VP of partnerships and marketing doesn't really see how partnerships fits into our revenue strategy, then like when Margaret comes to me with a bunch of asks of marketing, I'm going to say no to them and she's going to be like, well, what the heck, I'm not. And she's comped on some partnership goal. But that's not how marketing is comptoned. That's where all this breaks. And I think you really got to push as a marketing leader to have similar goals and realize that you're. You all do different things. Here's a question I wonder if Jason will have an answer to this one, which is, what is your opinion on paid budgets only going towards net new prospects versus people that are already in your database? This is something our leadership asked of us with budget cuts.

Well, already in our database or in the funnel, I guess. You know what I mean? Like, so I guess I would have a different answer for both.

Wait, because yes, that is a different answer. So already in your database. To me this sounds like a red alarm alert function, which is like, this seems to me like you're probably gold around net new contacts and you're asking like, you know, should we change that goal? Which is a separate conversation. But I don't know how we should take that from here.

Jason, I would take this one from like, how am I going to use paid on just net new people, like trying to get them into the funnel versus people already in the funnel. I guess I'll take it maybe that perspective, like it's like pipeline acceleration type marketing. So I honestly, especially when budgets got cut, I had a hard time spending money on prospects already in pipeline, you know, paid dollars. And that's because a couple things, one, I already spent money to get them in the funnel, right? And now I have their email address and I've got a lot of stuff, I know a lot about them. So why shouldn't I just use email as like a free medium for that? And then the second one is, I think it's really hard to prove the impact of spending money, paid money, on pipeline advertising because what you're looking for is like significance and difference between like, sorry, the average deal cycle, you know, the, maybe the size of the deal. And if you're a small business and you're closing like 10, 20, 30 new customers a month, that's not a lot of volume to be able to tell. Like, is my pipeline marketing working? So I don't usually spend any money on paid ads against folks that are already in the funnel.

Also depends on what you define as paid because it doesn't have to be advertising. So let's say there's people that are already in your database and here's a group of people, here's a group of accounts that are really good fit and they're all in an area. Like I also look at this question as like, oh, why are we not like doing a small 20 person event or dinner for those people in an area that is also a way of spending money? So I don't, I don't always associate paid with digital advertising. And I think, I think the right way to look at this question is to zoom all the way out and just think of it on a strategic level. If they're already in your database or not, doesn't really matter. Like, where are they in this stage of like, who is going to be most likely to buy from you? And sure, if I'm going to try to grow Exit 5 members, it's going to be like, I'm going to probably be able to grow more by focusing on people who are already on my email list because they know of exit 5 in some capacity then have to go out. But I think you can do it. Just you got to have a more stronger story about like, what would the strategy be? Okay, there are some questions in the Q A, but I actually want to just turn it over to my wonderful guests right here. And just because we're going to run out of time soon. If there's a hot button or something that's come up that we haven't talked about yet, I want to give you the opportunity to talk about that with this group before I just go rifle through questions. All right, great. Thanks for your help there. I have plenty.

I'm just giving you a second.

I can get spicy about just about anything. Dave. Give me something to be spicy about and I'm happy to be spicy about it.

Okay. Shouldn't the CRO really be the CMO and all of sales should report into marketing. That's what I believe. That's a separate conversation. We don't have to have that right now. Let's talk about. I think you mentioned this, but you mentioned this over reliance on big B2B playbooks. And what we need is scrappy. Let's talk about that for a minute.

Oh, you want me to get spicy on that one? That's a good one to get spicy on. My read on the general, especially B2B marketing space over the last. Yeah, he did drop a bomb and then walk away. Gonna go mute. My read is that in the last 10 years, we as B2B marketers have really codified and like, and almost written into stone these marketing playbooks that the last three years, but specifically last three months have shattered into nothingness. And I think it is happening right now in the way that heads of marketing have structured their marketing teams. The folks that they've hired on as like very much specialists. I think individual marketers have really started to specialize over the last couple years in their practice. And I think what we're seeing is the world is shifting underneath us faster than what we can do based on these old dusty ass playbooks. And so if you ask me, any day of the week right now I'm advising founders to not hire specialists. Hire scrappy generalists that are willing to test and iterate messages and different channels and different content types and different audiences and really start to bring it back to the basics. And I think we've had a little bit of like fat cat syndrome over the last decade where we had enough money to start spending paid ad money. You know, like, I started off in B2B SaaS when, like, if I would have asked for paid ad money, I would have gotten laughed at. You know, it was all free marketing at the beginning. And I think free marketing builds up a creative practice where you actually start to differentiate your marketing programs and your marketing content in a way that actually resonates with your target audience rather than build a bunch of programs that half work and you can limp along with enough cash spent to actually get folks through the door. So I think that's a great thing for the industry. I think it's a great thing for us marketers. But I think we all have to sort of get off our high horses that we know what we're doing and get back to a practice of building things from scratch.

Yeah, if you follow a playbook, my thoughts always been like, if I follow a playbook, it means somebody else is doing it too. And so, like, if somebody else is doing that thing, then I'm probably not going to really stand out. And so one of the mantras in our team is, even if we're going to do something like a normal marketing tactic, how is it actually going to show up and be different? And so I think that's one of my problems with playbooks and just following other people's advice just directly, like, take it, learn from it. It's kind of like a parenting book, you know, for all the parents out there. Like, you don't read one parent. I got older kids. But like, you don't read one parenting book, and then you're like, I know exactly how to parent. I'm going to parent my kid with just. Just this one book from one person's perspective. You read a bunch of them, and then you kind of get in your head like, okay, that little piece is going to work. That little piece is going to work. And then put it together yourself.

Oh, my God, get me started on parenting books. The reason that there's so many is because somebody did it once one way, and it worked, and they thought they should write a book about it. Like, that's the same thing with us marketers. We did it once at one business, and then we were like, hey, this is the way you all have to do it. And it's just like, it depends. Build something just for yourself and just for your business.

I think we like the playbooks because it is safe. It's like, well, I'm not going to get fired if I tell my boss.

Like, well, we.

We did an event and it flopped. But, like, everybody in our industry does an event. And so, like, we're good here. And to me, this is the fun part of marketing. It's like being the outs, like, taking the opinion of, like, an outsider's perspective and being like, let's look at this in a completely new lens. And like, when I was at drift, at least in the early days, specifically, David, who was the CEO, was like, you're going to be pushed to, like, follow what everyone else is doing in B2B marketing. I promise you that the way that we're going to build this brand is by, like, doing the opposite. And so, like, see what they're doing and observe, but, like, look at the other opportunities and study other industries and study what different people are doing and then, like, see how you can apply that. I totally agree with all of you. I think sometimes we become our own worst enemy, which is, like, the more we know about who's doing what and how they're doing, it is like, like, the worst ideas you're gonna have on this. First, like, if you go all the way back and say, like, what are we trying to do? We're trying to get more people to buy from us. How do we do that? Like, let's come up with some ideas and let's do some stuff there. My pediatrician that we had in Boston at the time, we had, like, our second child was crazy for the first six months. Nobody slept. It was just an absolute nightmare. And she was like. We told her we bought all this stuff. We got all these parenting books. We got all these apps. We got everything. She's like, like, I'm gonna write a parenting book. And this is applied to marketing also. She's like, I'm gonna write a book, and it's gonna be one page, and it's gonna be called it's really effing hard, and I'm gonna sell it.

It's really hard. And every child is different. Like, so.

And I. I think if it works for the.

It's fine. Your baby will be okay. That's like my. If it works for your company, you're fine. You will probably be promoted. Like, do that if it works for your company.

I also feel like marketers have to, like, have this really thick skin and be able to understand that, like, everyone in your company at any given time is seeing how other companies are marketing, and you're gonna get hundreds of slacks from other people being like, why don't we have an ebook? And you're like, let's talk about the goals that I'm trying to hit and how an ebook might support that and this other plan that I already have to hit the goal, you know?

Well, that's one of the things, too, is all of, like, marketing is visible, that people all see it, and then they all just like, yeah, I think that's.

Everyone's an armchair marketer. Everyone's an armchair marketer for sure.

That's why I'm going to come back as a. I'm going to reinvent myself as an AI engineer. I think that would be the hottest thing right now. And that's what I'll be a chat GPT prompt engineer. That's what I'm going to be. We can finish with one question. I'm going to try to pick a. This question. I mean, let's answer this one really quickly, just because I think it's. We can be a quick answer for people. But this question is from Jane. What are growth positions? CRO, cmo growth? How does it all play together? I'll try to give us the very short answer on this and see where we can go. I have no idea. Growth is just a term that somebody uses inside of an organization. And so I think growth can mean, like there's often growth marketing versus marketing. To me, those are all just a type of marketing and kind of all fall under the same thing. I think typically in this context, you see CRO is more responsible for sales. And growth typically means grow revenue, grow users in some way, which falls under a marketing function. Any of you wise panelists have a thing to add to that?

I think of growth as like a version of demand gen.

Wait, the what version?

Like in a product led growth organization, you might have a growth marketer instead of a demand gen person, but what's the difference really?

No different.

Like, I think I could call myself a growth marketer right now, even though I'm the.

I'm the lead growth marketer at exit 5. That's. I'm changing my title.

Yeah.

If you're not focused on growing something, like, what are we doing here? What are we doing?

Yeah, Growing weed and grow lots of things you can.

It's today's 421. It's not gonna. It's not gonna match my closet. All right, we're wrapping up. Jason's catching a flight. Chantel's out of here. Margaret's out of here. Thank you so much. I wish this was in a live venue because, you know, we. A big round of applause. I'm going to go clean up the dog puke and continue on my day. This was great. One of my favorite reasons for doing this is because of the chat, having other marketers in there. The chat was electric and the panelists were great. Margaret, Chantal, Jason, thank you so much for doing this. I will see you all out there on LinkedIn and somewhere else, and I hope you enjoy your weekend. Okay, thanks everybody. See you later.

Thank you. Bye.

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 Smart 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. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch FM Foreign.

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