Amanda Natividad (VP Marketing, SparkToro) & Kaylee Edmondson (Dir. Demand Gen, brightwheel)

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My guests on this episode, there's two of them, Kaylee Edmondson and Amanda Natividad. And we talk about everything. Fun to have more guests on. We're doing this more often. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation with Amanda and Kaylee. Plus we had a little live audience of Exit 5 members. If you're in the Exit 5 community, we'll post these more often so you can hop in, add some comments, add some color, add some humor, make these a little bit more fun and less of a CMO interview and more of a let's talk to marketers who are actually out there doing the work today. So here's this conversation with Amanda and Kaylee. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What's up? So I had this, I was like, you know, it'd be, I did this live thing yesterday and it was way more fun with like people in the chat. And yeah, and so I just last minute today just sent out a Zoom link. So we're gonna have, we'll have some people live.

Oh, that's awesome.

Just to like throw throw comments in. It made just like more fun and funny and more opportunities to like just hang out.

So yeah, I tried doing this for my YouTube show or like the idea was to turn that into a podcast and have it be like a live thing, but it was too hard.

I know, I know the hard part, like I just was like inspired to do it like last minute and did it. But like the idea of thinking about setting that up all the time is, is not as fun. Yeah, hold On. I'm just going to make sure Kaylee can get in.

Yeah.

So shout out to the people that are here, because those are people who are like, they're in the community or they just got the. Oh, look at this. What I just told you. Jody said your live webinar yesterday is why I'm here today. Very, very multitasking today. Yeah. You can just. You don't have to.

That's awesome.

You can multitask, and that's okay.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Hi, friends.

Let's see. It's good.

I love your setup, Dave.

Oh, thanks. For a long time, my setup was, like, in a bathroom, so it's nice to have a nice little.

It's nice to not be in a bathroom.

Yeah. Okay, so we'll wait for Kaylie to come in, but, like, tell me more about you. I've seen you everywhere, but I don't actually know a lot about your story, so that would be a nice intro for today, anyway. Yeah.

Also, this might be our first time chatting face to face. Just kind of realize that. Yeah, yeah, definitely is so funny. Yeah. So I run marketing for a B2B SaaS startup called SparkToro, where we help people do instant audience research. We help marketers find their audience's true sources of influence. So, like, the social accounts, they follow, websites, they frequent, podcasts, they listen to whatever they do publicly online.

How did you get that job?

Through Twitter. Kind of, really. Kind of.

Yeah.

It's kind of a wild story in that. So SparkToro is founded by Rand Fishkin and Casey Henry. Casey is our cto. Rand, of course, is our CEO. And how did we get started? So I started building an audience on Twitter maybe like two years ago now or almost two years ago.

What were you doing then? When you were building this audience on Twitter? What were you doing?

Yeah. So when I started, I was running marketing for an SEO content agency called Growth Machine, and the founder is Nat Eliason, who. He's had a, you know, an audience online for quite a while. So the idea was to have another face of the brand. So it was kind of my job to build an audience, which I'd never considered before. Was terrified of it, but thought like, okay, I think I'm ready. I think I'm mature enough to do this. So I was doing that for a while, tweeting about marketing and content, and then eventually Rand followed me back on Twitter, and I was just floored by it. My friends were like, you got to message him. That's so cool. And I was like, Absolutely not. I can't think of anything more embarrassing than saying hello to one of my heroes. I'm just gonna quietly step away from Twitter for a little bit, but I did end up DMing him. The funny thing was I think I got on Rand's radar after a mutual friend shared one of my recipes with him. I'm a classically trained chef, so I cook a lot and. Hi, Kaylee. So my friend shared a recipe with Rand that I created and ran followed me back. And then I ended up, I think Rand asked me about the recipe and I was like, oh, here it is. And it was sent via my newsletter. So a non SEO optimized content. And I was like, I realize the irony in sending this to you, but enjoy.

It wasn't like a job opening. You had connected that way before.

So we connect. Yeah, we connected. And then a few months later, he happened to be in my hometown, Los Angeles, with his wife. We got lunch together and then I ended up kind of pitching him on my dream job in that I wasn't looking for a new job at the time, but it was a little bit of like, shoot your shot, why not? I'm not looking. So if he says no or if he's not into it, then that's fine too. And then we ended up just kind of commiserating on tech startup life, having a lot in common, and then ended up just finding a way to work together.

Love it. I'm just going to say what's up to Kaylee. Kaylee, we're already going, so feel no pressure. I'm not even saying that because you're late and you had that look on your face like, I'm sorry, but I don't want you to be sorry because this is, this is completely different, completely new. I want this to be very, like, free flowing, casual. I did this live website teardown session yesterday and it was so fun to have. It was one of the more fun sessions that I've done where like the people in chat were such a helpful part of it. And so it was great. I knew, oh, you were there. Get the heck out of there.

I'm here to support. Come on now.

That's so nice.

I appreciate you for that. Oh, nice. There was a heckload of value that.

It was very valuable. I was like low key, like, please do not pick the Brightwell website. We are not ready for this.

Well, it's actually funny. One of the, one of the companies that we had picked, we reached out to them. O' Shantel from Demand. Well, did she Reach out to them. And they said, actually, our PR team doesn't want you to give any advice on our website. And I, I thought that was interesting. And shout out to my PR people out there. So anyway, so. So there's just a side aside comment, but we did that session yesterday and it was just like I wanted to switch up the format of the podcast anyway and just kind of like bring on multiple people and just have a more like natural conversation because I've gotten bored of the like. So you got to CMO and you did X, Y and Z. Let's talk about that. I would just much rather jump all over the map. Like, I do anyway. Like, I already got a million things that I want to talk about, so it's less casual and there's people hanging out here. And like, I. And so I, like an hour ago I just was like, oh, maybe I should get people to come in live for this just as backup. And I sent an email. So there's like, there's 20 people here. And I told them there's no agenda. Free form.

This is what you get for sending email updates. I, years ago, like, turned my email notifications off because it's really great for your soul. So I joined whatever link you had sent us originally and then literally it took me five minutes to figure out that you.

I know. I'm the same way. I usually don't. Like, I try not to check my email all day and then I'll usually just go to what's on my calendar and it doesn't happen. So. Okay, so Amanda, I'm going to come back to you because I want to talk about. So your VP of marketing at SparkToro. Kaylee, quick, since you're talking now, just. Can you give people like, quick bio, quick background?

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, everybody, Kaylee Edmondson here. I'm currently the director of Demand Gen over at brightwheel. Brightwheel is an early education management platform. Most recently was the senior director of Demand Gen over at Chili Piper.

Cool.

Okay, so brightwheel was. You all were on Shark Tank years ago, right? Yeah, that's the company. That's awesome.

They were on Shark Tank, Like a software company on Shark Tank?

Yeah. That was the first round of funding, right?

Yeah. Mark Cuban ended up backing us.

How much have you used that in Demand Gen?

How much have I used that? We actually haven't used it as much. So we're prepping our first reel because, I mean, you know, I don't know, y' all get on Instagram. I'm sure you get or Maybe I'm in some kind of queue that's like, this person, like Shark Tank, but I get targeted with Shark Tank ads all the time, and Brightwell's actually never used that in any type of promo. So we're spinning it up now for our first test. It should go live in the next couple of weeks.

You haven't even used it yet. Love it. That's great. That's, like, free money, and those are, like, free checks. I got, like, a $2,000 tax credit check yesterday. It's like, free money. Let's cash that. So you haven't even used that yet. That's fantastic.

That's interesting. Well, it's going to be interesting to see if that resonates with your audience, because I wonder. I mean, I don't know. Right? Like, it'd be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Exactly. No, I'm fascinated to see, too. I can't believe that we've never used it before, but that's why we. We thought maybe there was, like, some legality around why we hadn't used it, but. Nope. Turns out it just, like, hasn't crossed anyone's mind. So drop Mark Cuban's name a lot. Yeah, we'll do that, too.

That's awesome.

Before we talk about specifically B2B marketing stuff and, like, specifically your jobs and your lives, Amanda, I want to go back to Twitter a little bit. Give me your point of view on Twitter today. 2022. To build your personal brand, to build company brand, what works? How do you feel about Twitter? How do you use Twitter, all that stuff. I love talking to people who have done interesting things on a channel to get their perspective about how and why. And then also maybe in there, people don't like this topic of should you or should you not build a personal brand? And I think we should talk about that as well, because, I mean, you literally. You got your dream job because you started tweeting. So I just would love to hear your thoughts on some of that stuff. And, Kaylee, feel free to jump in wherever.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think so. I grew my following on Twitter largely through viral threads, and I started doing this sometime at the end of 2020, I think, and the growth is mostly over 2021, I think last year I went from, like, 1,000 to, like, 65,000 followers in a year.

That's insane.

FYI.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it was pretty wild. I mean, I definitely got lucky with, like, you know, friends who amplified me and, you know, included.

You didn't get lucky you didn't get lucky. You don't get lucky to go from 0 to 65,000. Like, I, like 99% of the people that I know would struggle to grow a Twitter following from 0 to 6000 in a year.

Yeah. And I mean, I will say, like, I've had a Twitter account since like, 2008.

Sure.

And like, you know, so it definitely was for how long? Like, over 10 years of having, like, 500 followers. So for sure that was. But, you know, I wasn't trying back then. But I will say, I think now it's a lot harder to grow your Twitter following because everybody's doing threads now, right? You see it all over you log on on Twitter, first thing you see is Twitter University is free.

Wait, question. Before we get into the what's wrong about threads? I'm just curious, as a content creator, what was your process for creating threads? Were you opening up a Google Doc, writing them out? I'm sure you weren't just sitting there with your phone. You're like, I'm going to write a thread right now. What was your process?

Yeah, I mean, I very much stick with and have stuck with writing only things that I know very well. It just isn't really my style to read something and basically spit out a Wikipedia version of it. I stick with my experiences, my expertise, stats, or social proof that I can point to and say, I know this thing got 5,000 new leads because I did it. Stuff like that. I very much focused on that and very much focused on just finding my unique differentiator. I don't know that. I mean, there are a lot of people on Twitter, a lot of marketers on Twitter, but not a lot of people maybe who approach content marketing in the way that I do specifically. So really tried to make sure that I use my unique experiences and expertise to shine.

Are you feeling like threads are not working as well anymore? That's change. Or they still work. Or just more people do them. What's your latest?

I think they still work. It's just a lot harder to stand out. And I think it's why you're probably seeing even more of the, like, the hyperbolic. Like, I read, you know, 5,000 landing pages over the past week. Here are the seven last tips you need for.

That's like, if I was to write. Yeah, Like, I always think about that. The headline is just. And I'm all about, like, sometimes egregious headlines, but, like, you know, it's people saying, like, I've driven hundreds of millions in revenue for companies in marketing, here's what I learned and it's like, well, no, I worked at Drift and I worked at Privy. But like, I personally, you know, I like the, I think the tactical stuff is a little bit better. What do you think about beyond personal brand? I want to get back to this. And Kayla, I'm curious if you have a point of view on this cuff based on what you're doing. Twitter for B2B marketing as a channel. Yes or no?

That for me or for Kaylee or both of us go first.

Yeah, whoever hates.

I mean, I least. Well, I will be curious if Kayleigh has a point of view on the paid side because I haven't done a lot of. I haven't done a ton of paid stuff on Twitter recently.

Let me ask a better question. I'll ask a better question for the adventure. If you were at a B2B SaaS startup selling to HR or finance or humans, would you, from an organic, from like a brand building, audience building standpoint, would Twitter want to be one of the platforms that you invest time and content muscle on?

I would, I mean, I think I would prioritize LinkedIn, but Twitter would be the close second, I think. And that's like assuming the audience. Well, first I would check to make sure that the key audience is there. They probably are. And then I think the other reason too is, from my point of view on Twitter is it's one of the social platforms with social proof. Right. Like, and what I mean by that is you always see people on Instagram and stuff, screenshotting, tweets and then posting it on Instagram. So it's kind of a source of truth for getting that initial social proof. And I kind of feel like if you can grow a following on Twitter, it's a little bit more easily transferable to other platforms than the other way around. I think it's harder to, if you grow on LinkedIn, have a great following. I feel like it's harder to transfer that to Twitter than vice versa.

Kaylee, what did you learn from that? What did you learn from Chili Piper? Because I think Chili Piper did awesome. I think you focus heavily on LinkedIn @Chil Piper and there is a company page on Twitter, but it doesn't seem to be where all the action is at. What's your point of view?

Yeah, absolutely. For us, in early days, especially right when it's a hard game of level of effort versus level of impact to make sure that you're prioritizing properly, Twitter was just, it could never make the cut for Us, it was so much easier in early days for us to make sure we were finding our people just because obviously the data that LinkedIn provides you is so much easier to make sure that if you're growing, if your follower base is growing, you can go and look on Twitter and their name might be something completely random and you have no idea if they're actually your target or not. So on the organic side, it was easier for us to focus on LinkedIn and just scale there. And then of course from the organic side too, like a brand perspective, like personal brand perspective, it was easier to also start on LinkedIn. And I think that they each kind of fed each other instead of looking at them in silos. Like my personal page on LinkedIn really helped feed Chili Piper's page and vice versa versus Twitter. It was just harder for us to get a pulse on like, are these our people or are they not? But I do agree with Amanda's statement around. It's like if you can figure it out on Twitter in early days, it's easier to replicate that success on LinkedIn versus trying to go the other way around. And for us it was easier at the time to really go the other way around. We were a team of three in early days. Three people. What can you really get done? And so LinkedIn was the place for us to be.

Yeah. And I mean it's the only social network where you can get where you know everybody's titles or job functions or industries, like why not? And you know there's that the demand for content. Right. Is greater than the risk supply. So it's. So your content has a longer shelf life. It really is a no brainer.

Yeah, I think Twitter could work. I just think that most people like approach it wrong. And so I think there's a very specific way that you would have to make Twitter work. Like Amanda, if you think about your strategy for yourself going from 0 to 65,000 followers or whatever, right. The way you did that was not promoting your blog articles and your webinars and your company news and stats. And I think what happens is like a lot of B2B marketers use like the company Twitter page as just like another. Or they do the same thing on all the channels. It's like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube. It's just like you take kind of like one shitty message and like you just post it on all channels. And like that's what the role is versus like the way to actually grow on any platform, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, is to like focus on a niche, be awesome at adding value, being creative, funny, fun, educational, entertaining on that, in that niche and then use that niche to grow. Like you've now done the same thing with YouTube. And I even know for like, for me, LinkedIn has been huge for years. And it changed for me when I stopped using LinkedIn to just talk about like everything. And now I just kind of focus specifically on kind of marketing, like marketing, startup marketing, B2B marketing type of stuff. And the same thing of Twitter is like when I would tweet about everything, hey, this is what I had for lunch. This was my workout though. This happened in this, this NFL game or whatever. Like you don't actually build an audience. And so I think it's like it all comes back to like having a purpose for those channels and be like, well, why do we want to be on social media? And then what do we need to do on social media to intercept our dream customers on that channel?

Yeah, for sure. And I think like, you know what you said too about like leading with that value and that the value being whether it's really insightful advice or entertainment, like really leading with that and not being afraid to kind of give away for free the insights. Right. And I think it's also about like trusting over time that it's going to build your reputation and that eventually when you do post your links or whatever it is you're promoting, people will have a reason to trust you.

Yeah, if you're just posting blah like you know, the content is the most is the look at look like Instagram accounts or TikTok accounts.

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Follow in your personal life. Like, why do you follow them? Like, usually because they're educational or funny or both or informative or they're like so focused on a niche. But for some reason we haven't figured that out. Most companies just struggle to crack social media from a B2B standpoint.

Yeah. And I mean, I will say even at SparkToro. Well, I was going to say it's a challenge, but at the same time I was also going to say we don't really care for the company pages, largely because most people who are following us follow Rand. And then I just end up using the SparkToro Twitter account to retweet us when it's relevant. I know that's not the greatest thing to do, but again, it's like, I don't know that we care a whole lot about trying to optimize for it. And it's also only the Three of us at this company. Should I be spending my time trying to create an editorial calendar for Twitter for the company account? Probably not.

Yeah. So that's your strategy, is the three of you can be known personalities on social media, and that's going to help drive the business. Okay, let's. We're gonna change. We're gonna change directions in a minute. But I do like this question from Julia. I'm so nervous. To build a personal brand, commenters seem to be so harsh. Cold emoji.

Cold emoji. Yeah, I mean, I have a pretty strong point of view on this. I mean, about commenters being harsh. Yeah, they can be really harsh. I do think, though, that for the most part, in general, you kind of receive what you put out there. I think you kind of attract what you put out. So I do think that if you kind of focus your messaging on being positive or inclusive and you really lead with that, for the most part, I think people give you the benefit of the doubt or they reciprocate, but things happen. Things still happen. I will say that I think there also is, and I want to hear from you too, what you think about Twitter versus LinkedIn versus Instagram or whatever it is, the commenting behavior there. I'm very curious how your experiences are, but I've always assumed that Twitter comments were the meanest ones. But for me personally, they feel about on par with LinkedIn comments where, if anything, I've gotten a lot meaner comments on LinkedIn compared to Twitter. And it usually happens when I have a high engagement tweet that gets screenshotted and shared on LinkedIn with good intentions of like, oh, Amanda has cool content. And then I'll. I think I wrote something about a personal brand once, screenshotted, shared on LinkedIn.

And then someone shared on your LinkedIn or someone else shared someone else's LinkedIn.

Yeah, they shared my tweet that was like, yeah, like, build a personal brand. So it was like, with good intentions. Right. And then people commented on their tweets saying, like, who's this Amanda? Like, clearly some fucking nobody. Like, nobody cares. I was like, geez, like, you know, fair.

But first of all, like, that's. First of all, that sucks. I hate that. I hate that part of it. Yeah. Second of all, I bet you that the comments would have been not saying that people would still not, like, be assholes to you, because I think that's just the nature of humans and you're online and, you know, it is what it is. But I also feel like, because it Was someone else that posted it. You. This Amanda face almost seems like an anonymous. Like it could have been like Bob Smith with, you know, white guy with glasses or whatever. And it's like, that's not a. Doesn't seem like a real person to me. That's just someone's like, quick take. And I see that in the feed. And like, people just like to like, what they don't realize is that the things that they're saying in the, in the comments about that are like the same reasons that they're criticizing you for what you're saying. So.

Yeah.

How do you shake that off though? Like what, you know, to people that like, because, because like, I've been there where like, you put something out and then, you know, your comments blow up and you're like, man, people are just really coming for me right now. And like, I can't. You can't help but it's human nature to like, look at that stuff the.

Rest of the day.

And you're like, man, this is so, this is so silly. Like, am I so like internally stressed out about this? Like, forget it. So I think that's a real factor. Like, how do you, how do you deal with that? Like, you can't just be looking at your phone 247 or you go crazy.

Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.

You have to turn your phone notifications off though. Seriously, if you're going to start trying to do this. I think it obviously, to my point earlier, I've also turned my Google notifications off.

It's good for your soul.

How does somebody. I'm going to have to fax you next time. Like, how do we reach you? Yes, the question.

Oh, well, that's the thing though. Like, I chat, I check in a couple times a day, right? Like in the morning, midday, evening, and that's my thing. Right. I've like, got a real day job and I need to actually get shit done and I'm not going to get stuff done if I'm on LinkedIn all day, nor, like checking my Gmail. But I think, like, I don't have.

A real, I don't have a real day job. So that is okay.

That was not a shot. That was not a shot, but I'll take it. But I think early, like, early on I really did have like posting anxiety early on when I was like, oh, I think for Chili Piper it was like a, a real decision to try and be helpful. I was a solo demand gen marketer and I felt as though I was like really falling behind and I'M like, okay, well, I'm gonna be a team of one for another hot minute. Like, I really do need to try and start sharing, like, the few things I really feel confident that I do know, but then really also building a network of people around me that, you know, can also help me continue to grow in my own career so that I don't get behind because I don't have a team to really, like, riff with or challenge each other, et cetera. And when I first started posting, like, posting anxiety was so real because I'm like, wow, is this, like, helpful for others? I have no idea. Like, you need that feedback loop to figure out if what you're saying is really even going to impact anyone's day. And yeah, the comments, look, they're not always kind. They're not always kind. But I think that, like, posting on topics to Amanda's point that you feel confident on or have a strong POV or opinion, like, are, it's really helpful and grounding in that, you know, you can come in and read these hateful or kind of negative comments from a better lens than if you posted about something you weren't firsthand confident about. I think it's easier to brush off the, like, naysayers or like, negative Nancy's if you're like, no, I'm like, I stand firm in that. I said that. Like, I wrote that with real intent and I really thought about whatever it was I was trying to say. And, you know, it helped nine out of 10 people. So, like, you just kind of have to brush off the people that aren't going to agree with you. And there's also beauty in that too.

Right.

I've had lots of people come in and comment negatively, but really just like argumentatively about, oh, I don't actually agree with that side of the fence. This is how we do it here. And at the same time, like, oh, that's actually great because that works really well for your industry or your niche or your business. And that doesn't work well for my business, which is where I'm coming from. Right. So I think you can look at it two ways. One, it can be helpful for you to continue to grow from others who do have a different pov. And then some people are just going to be upset and you just have to let them be upset.

Yeah. Do you reply to all the naysayers?

Actually, no, definitely not. Not all of them. Right. If it's a different POV where I'm like, oh, that's actually cool. Okay, cool. I've never thought about it like that. Then, yeah, I do actually love to have a good riff in the comments. But if it's just like, somebody being hateful. No, get out.

Yeah, same here. I mean, like, the thing you can also start to see over time, as you kind of grow your following, get more engagement, you kind of start to see, like, the. What do you call them? I don't like, red herrings or the little traps where you're like, oh, I know what you're doing here. You're trying to, like, do a gotcha thing. I'm gonna ignore this, but I usually mute. I don't think I've ever really blocked anybody. I think I've blocked a couple people where it was, like, truly, like, harassment, right? Where it was, like, hateful or whatever. But that almost never happens.

I learned this now. Always mute. Don't block. Because, like, yeah, you block.

Yeah, yeah.

People will screenshot it, right? And then they say, sure.

It just.

It just makes. It just adds to the fire.

Right?

And that.

Yeah. And they totally. And they start saying, like, I didn't do anything wrong. All I did was hold them accountable. And you're like, that's not what that was.

It's tough, though. It is tough because, like, if strong opinions get stronger traction, like, for trying to grow something, right. If you're going to create a video series about working out and you said, like, you don't ever, you know, in five minutes a day, you can work out from your home without saying that's the message. That's going to be attractive to the most amount of people, but it's going to be very polarizing. And that's a bad example. But I think, like, it is tough because if you have, like, if you are just putting vanilla stuff out there all the time, it's going to be tough. And that doesn't mean, like, be divisive. And I've learned some lessons over the years where, like, people, I tweet and I write LinkedIn stuff, like, as me, and I'm a very, like, silly person and I don't take many things seriously and I'm. I just come off in a different way if you actually know me personally. But the problem is I don't realize that, like, 99.9% of people that you see that, see you online, don't think that. And so if I say something in my voice that, like, one of my friends would or, you know, or whoever would. Would totally understand, most people aren't. And so, like, for me personally, I try to, like, Stoke the fire less than I used to. And now it's more like I'm going to share like my opinions on things, my commentary on things. But like I have found myself like wanting to remove myself from more from more things. Like one time I posted a picture of a whiteboard with like a funnel and it said like ADA awareness, interest, desire, action. And I said, most B2B marketers today don't know this. And it was immediately viewed as like, look at this. Like, and that's not what I meant at all. It was like I didn't know that going in, like how many of us like went to college, studied marketing in college, have this textbook definition. It was more just like, that's like going back to basics. Let's go back to basics. And like that's an important thing. And it turned into this big thing. So anyway, I don't want to talk about this topic forever because. But it's definitely helpful. Both of you have an interesting thread in common. So you're working at different size companies now. So Amanda, Your company is three people. Kaylie, how many people at Brightwheel?

500.

500. Okay, so you have that. That's not something you have in common. What you do have in common is always that you have both been Amanda, you are now and Kayla, you were, I believe at Chili Piper, this kind of team of one doing marketing and trying to build an amazing brand, build brand affinity, build pipeline, do this random request for the founder. And I just would love to just talk about because there's a lot of people out there who want to hear this, like what have you learned in your journeys, being a team of one and specifically like you're a team of one. I've been there too. It feels like there's literally a thousand marketing things that you could do. How have you approached that? And let's try to like give some advice to other teams of one out there.

I think for me, when I'm joining a company before Brightwheel, because brightwheel is definitely the furthest along in terms of growth that I have ever joined, I normally do join scrappy early. If I'm not the first marketing hire, I'm like the first three. I normally like to join really early. From a demand gen and ops perspective, it normally means less existing spider webs, more opportunity to get in and build properly set up foundation for scale, which is the most exciting thing to me. But joining early for me really relies on my get in first principles. What are we doing? What's gotten us to this point? Traditionally I'll join post Series A. So they've got some funding, but they've also got some revenue to have earned that funding. So they've done something right. And coming in with a first principles mindset, breaking things apart, questioning the existing pipeline, what's been happening to date is normally like P0 so that I can figure out what's actually going to work for this business. Every business I've joined has been pretty different, even though most of them have been in the Martech space. It doesn't mean the same playbook applies to all. And so I think that that scrappy skill set of like questioning things is really critical in early days.

Yeah, agree. And I think for me it has, it's helped that, I mean helped a ton that I have worked in a more tradition, a larger, more traditional type of marketing organization. Several years ago I worked at Fitbit and was one of the earliest, I think I was the second person to join the B2B marketing team. So got to help build out that team, got to scale the content function and also just got to understand how a B2B team could or should be kind of built right. Like understanding those first principles, getting that foundational understanding of what is pipeline, all those types of things. And so now being a team of one, I have the foundational understanding to know, okay, here's how things should be or here are some of those demand gen related things that don't really matter right now for us in this specific context. And then also we do hire for a lot of agencies and consultants. So it's sort of like we all operate at a pretty high level. Right. I'm a team of one but I'm not a marketing coordinator who just started marketing last year.

You have leverage and you know how to spend budget.

Totally. Yeah. And we work with really amazing agencies and consultants. Like we've worked with, forget with Gia and Claire over at Forget the Funnel for the past couple years and have gotten some great, you know, feedback from them. We're sort of the case study client for their cohorts because they, they do a certification program for customer LED growth. So we learn a lot from them and have enacted a lot of their advice.

I love that, I love that model of like, of small team with agencies and I've tried to make it work in a bunch of different times. You just get hung up on like the right agencies and I think it takes, unfortunately it takes experience and like you worked with X at your last company and so when you go to Y, you're definitely going to bring them in and that could be true for technology or it could be true for vendors. I think that it's a good approach also because I think it's people that are. When you're in that mark first time marketing leader thing, and I know because I've been there, you're like, ooh, I get to hire, I get to build out a team, I get to be a manager. Like, and first of all, like, make sure you know what you're getting into. We could do a whole other topic about like the pros and cons of being a people manager. But also I found that like, I would rush to hire people before we had actually even proven out that we needed to go do X. And it's like, oh, let's go do event. Like, we want to do events this year.

Okay, well great.

Instead of me going to be like, my first thing is going to be to go hire an employee events person. How about first, like we scope those out and we try to run them, you know, Amanda and the two other people at SparkToro, you're going to run those two existing events without a team and then you've learned a little bit and then you can go. And I think agencies is one great way to do that. What I really want to know from you, you each though is more just like on a personal level, you have so much shit to do and you're each in this phase of like when you're the first marketer team of one, like, you could say yes to everything. And so you get the emails from like the founders, like, hey, we should be at this event. Yes, we should. We should have an article about this yet. Yes, we should. And so how do you, how have you learned to like, what's your framework for, like, what are you going to work on? What are you going to say yes to? Because really there's lots of different ways that you could grow SparkToro. There's lots of different rows that you could have grown Chili Piper in in those days. Like, how do you go about prioritizing what you should do and feeling comfortable, like, pushing back on what not to do?

Yeah, for me, I'm math driven, less creative, much more analytical. So for me it's always rooted in common currency. So in early days at Chili Piper, our common currency, our North Star for our marketing team was qhms, which is qualified held meetings. And so that was our common currency. So if anything were ever like thrown on the table, like, oh, we should be at this event, or oh, I need you to make me a frisbee that's branded or whatever. The thing is, like, cool. How many QHM is that going to drive for us? What's our common currency? So that we're looking at all opportunities that are on the table and figuring out which of those we really need to place bets on because they result in the greatest amount of common currency.

Amanda, do you have a common currency right now at sparkdorro?

I've never heard that phrasing. Is that something you made up or is that a thing?

I think it's a thing. I can't take credit. Do not give me credit.

I've never heard it, but I understood it as a concept. It's just like one to me. My translation that is like, common currency is like, everyone's aligned on the one key metric that matters the most.

Yeah. What's your thing? Right.

Yeah.

Is it like, is it revenue? Is it maybe. I mean, maybe you're early on. Maybe you're like, we just want to be on this MQL hamster wheel. We need to drive some MQLs, whatever that thing is. North Star common currency, like, what is that across even just your function, right? Normally for demand gen, I normally just start at the acquisition side. I'm not even dealing with, like, retention, activation, engagement. Like, I'm not even there. But common currency for acquisition, like, if it's not revenue, it should be something like SQL level. And for us, that was called a qhm. And so, yeah, it was super easy to push back. Right. Because then you. You've already come to the table with your committee. Right? I reported to the CEO, like, hey, this is our common currency. It's qhms. We want to get qualified humans actually holding and setting on that demo with our sales team. That's what we agree upon. Like, yes, yes. Cool. Like virtual handshake from here on out. That's what I'm going to say. And I said it so much. Well, how many QHMs is going to drive what's our common currency? Like, level of effort, level of impact? Like, I'm saying no to these six random ideas you've come to me this week with. And these are the things I'm going to continue to do until you come to me with another idea or I come up with another idea that's greater than our existing impact.

Oh, gosh, I love that. I feel like I'm also really excited because that's like the mathematical version of what I was going to say. And I'm more of a creative person. So what I was going to say Was, which is whatever we do has to have at least two other use cases, which is pretty similar. Right? I like that too. It's that and related to some level of whatever that intersection is between important and urgent. So maybe the way we think about it is if we're doing sometimes a high priority item might be a blog post for us and in some other cases it might not be, but where it is important will be. Okay. It's important because this is a blog post derived from that webinar we just did. So it's repurposing that content. It also helps us feed into our video content where we can do the blog post, embed the video. That's great. But it also becomes a talking point for a future event and then also becomes a place for us to inject some product LED content which kind of serves as our sort of demo because we don't do demos of our product, not really at least. So it ends up having all these use cases and it's like, cool. This is a really good use of my 10 hours right now. Like, this is going to create a lot of, a lot of value for our customers. A lot of value for us. It's repeatable and good.

I love, I love it because I think you both gave awesome answers and you can actually use them both together. Because what's interesting about hearing you both do that as the math person and the creative, I think also, like, the marketing team can often get misled about like thinking that a goal has to be some very hard, measurable thing. I found that like, sometimes a goal can be the why. So like, well, what's the goal for? The goal for this blog post is not necessarily three new signups for SparkToro. It's like, well, the why for doing this blog post is if we do this, we're using this to do X. And if we do this, we can also use it for Y. And it's like, okay, cool. Versus like, you know, you just start doing stuff and you ask the marketing team, you're like, well, why are we doing that? And it just kind of like I thought you, you know, just like it goes nowhere. So I, I love using them both. I saw this, this question before from Jody. How do you handle the random CEO requests? I think that I would push hard on like something that Kaylee said, which is like having that common metric. But I actually feel like a lot of the companies, and I talked to a lot of companies today now, and I see this, they don't even have that. And so they can't push back on the CEO because they haven't had the like.

Hold on here.

What is the goal of marketing? What is marketing responsible for? What is the metric that we want to be held accountable for? And so first step, if you're listening to this, is like, let's get on the same page with that first. Then you can have those conversations with the CEO and say, hey, Amanda, this is a fantastic idea. And it does give me FOMO that two of our competitors are going to be there. However, we've decided to take that 20K. As we talked about, we decided to take the 20, 20K from this quarter and we're actually going to spend it in here and we think we're going to get this from it. So we just have to live with that. That gives you the keys to be able to have those conversations.

Completely agree. And being able to make the case for why something might not work, but then also showing, well, here's what we can do with our time and money instead that we know will drive better results.

Also, you said this early and I meant to go back to it, but it's almost like a maturity, right? You have more confidence now because you had a job prior to this and you did some things prior to this. And so now you can come in this spot and have more conviction about what to do. Like, I was better at privy than at drift only because I had the experience of time and I made hiring mistakes. I made budget mistakes. I did X, Y and Z. And so if you're listening to this and you're in that stage of your career, don't stress out about, like, having to know it all, because whatever you're doing now, like, try to soak it all in. Learn from those around you. If your job is in production marketing, like, how can you understand what demand gen is doing and what content is doing? And then you might get another job and you might not. Like, I've never made this decision before myself, but I worked really closely with Kaylee and I saw how she set up demand gen and I know that the way we have it is. Is not set up right. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think there is some. Yeah. Some maturity to it. Although I will say that when I'm. It's hard, my answer's gonna be conflicted. And here's why. Right now at Brightwell, I'm working on building out my team. And of course I don't have any. Like, I definitely don't care if you have a marketing degree, because I really don feel like, it's going to get you anywhere. And I really don't care if you have 10 years of experience or three years of experience. What I really care about is. Yeah, regardless of the amount of tenure, let me say that I don't care necessarily how long you've been in the field or in the game. But it's like the material of exposure you've had in multiple scenarios. Right. Like severe wins, severe losses, shifts in team dynamic. All of those types of things are like, really critical to help build your confidence level. So that when we're sitting around this virtual table and figuring out where we need to place bets, it's still a mix of art and science. Right. Like, if we have six things around the table that we need to figure out what our common currency is, three of them are probably things that brightwheel's never done. So it's really helpful to have a team of people around that table that are like, oh, we tried it this way at this company. We've tried it this way at this company. So you can just ingest multiple lenses into that conversation. So for me, it's like, not necessarily about the years of exposure you've had, but the number of opportunities you've been exposed to that can really help fuel your confidence level. But also just a firm POV on the why behind what it is we're considering.

Totally. It's not the years of experience, it's the amount of receipts you can show.

There you go. Yeah.

Love that. Stack those receipts. Okay. Did either of you want to take this in a different direction? What's on your mind? I'll talk about anything.

We could go anywhere. This is too broad. What are you thinking?

I don't know. I thought my smart marketing guests would have some type of. Of some thought in their head, but who? Sorry for that.

Well, I'm curious, Kaylee. I mean, are you relatively new at Brightwheel right now?

Yep. Like past 90 days.

Oh, cool. Right on. What has been some of the greatest drivers of growth for you all?

Ironically enough, we have a really successful outbound team, which is like, so fascinating to me on so many levels. Yeah, we have in brightware.

You know why that works, by the way? It's because it's a good offer.

Yeah.

It's not that outbound doesn't work. It's like if you're going outbound with like a shitty a product that nobody wants or a value prop that doesn't resonate with anybody. So, like, I think that that must be amazing as a marketer coming, especially like with your skill set is digital, is inbound, is demand. Like, oh, we have inbound, that's work. We have outbound, that's working here. Like that must be awesome feeling.

Yeah, it is an awesome feeling. And honestly, it was a. It was a parallel to what had also happened at Chili Piper. Like Chili Pepper was around for three years before I joined. They'd never had a marketing team at all before I got there. So it was like three years of growth and a round of funding, seed round and an A round. So two rounds of funding before I got there with no marketing engine at all. Like zero investment. So there are lots of parallels in coming here as well because we've had a marketing team, but what we've never done is had an actual like a PMM leader, a direct, like a demand gen leader and a content leader all together at the same time. And so we've always like been hitting in some places and losing in others in our seven years of existence. And so this is the first time in Bright Wheels marketing history where we've actually had those three players at the table at the same time, which will be really cool. So our historical earnings are like outbounds, crushing it. Which means, yeah, the market has a real need for our offer, which is great. And now we've all been brought in to figure out how we can also fuel this with setting up an actual content engine, figuring out what our POV is, what's our strategic narrative. That's all the work that we're doing right now before we really start going to market. Hard to try and make some additional wins for the team.

Is there a new channel that you didn't get to use at your last company that you're excited to or using now that you think will make an impact? Is there a new tool that you're. It could be a tool. It could be a channel.

Yeah. So I've been in Martech, like largely my entire career. So leaving this Martech bubble and coming to the edtech space. These people really hang out on Facebook. We have Brightwell stood up a year ago, a private Facebook group for like community aspect, which is a great start. We're already just north of 3,000 members, but even like Facebook advertising is going to be huge here.

You don't say. Facebook groups, huh?

I know. I never thought a Facebook group would work.

I would much rather do it hosted on Slack or Discord or something. That's where the cool kids are. I'm being sarcastic for those at home. I'm a huge advocate of Facebook groups. And a huge advocate of like the. The channel is not why you'll succeed. But I think in this case, yeah, people are already on Facebook. One of the challenges community building is like, imagine each one of those people had to log in to some white labeled platform every time. Like the engage. It's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen. Actually, we just went through that memo because our community right now is private and obviously we would love to have greater reach and greater impact for the ECE space, early childhood education space, if we can get there. And so it's like, wow, well, how do we do that? Let's weigh the pros and cons. And in the decision memo was actually a consideration around leaving Facebook. And I was like, hard, no. Hard no. These people are so busy and so consumed with other priorities and like taking care of children and students and all their staff. There's no way they have time to log in somewhere else. Like, so we had to take that off the table, but also needed to consider it so that we could have like healthy agreement or disagreement about the pros and cons of both. But yeah, so we're going to stick on Facebook. But even Facebook ads, like, I haven't found, like, I mean, that's not been a major play for me anywhere in my career, but it will be here.

That's awesome. I mean this is a classic, like you market where your audience is right. Parent Facebook groups are huge. Nobody gets shit done. Like, like moms in a mom Facebook group. Nobody does.

Yeah, that's totally fair. And like, even center directors, right, like primary buyers are actually the center directors, owners, admins, operators who are running a preschool center, a Montessori school, et cetera, and are so busy doing a million things like, and of course we know that like the early education industry as a whole is understaffed and overworked and all of those things. And so to be where they are and just meet them in their existing way of operating is going to be huge for us. And yeah, that means that I'm going to spend a lot of my time on Facebook, which I have never done. So I'm excited to figure it out.

You know what though? A lot of people are like, I don't want to be on Facebook and I'm a heavy groups user, mainly because the Exit 5 community is on Facebook and so I spend a lot of time there. But there's also one like fitness related group that I'm in and one parenting related group that I'm in. And for some reason Facebook Groups are awesome. And I can tell you that I go to Facebook multiple times a day and I don't ever, ever check the newsfeed. And there's also like a newsfeed eradicator thing that you can use. And so for those that say like I can't go on Facebook or I don't want to go on Facebook, there's lots of ways that you can do that and strictly use the groups functionality. So we have like a couple minutes left and so I want to like hammer on some of these really, really, really quick questions. Maybe just one line or so answers if you can. What's Your take on Web3 Marketing? Have you looked into it? Amanda, what's your take?

Haven't looked into it too much. I'm into crypto, just like kind of quietly. I don't make it my entire personality.

I don't have to. I thought that's the rule.

I mean, I'm not into it. I mean web3 is still like still super early, right? Still super hard to use. Sure. Probably worth considering looking into, but I don't feel like it's, it's. There's. I don't feel there's a good reason to think it's a priority.

Okay, Kayleigh, this one's for you. Does a QHM occur after an introduction meeting with sales? In other words, are they pre qualified before that meeting?

Oh yeah, for sure. Like they're pre qualified before the meeting. But then also it matters that it's held, right? So it's like a qualified meeting would otherwise equate to like an SQL in most like pipeline scenarios. But what we as marketers were also on the hook for is also making sure that the human show up to that demo. So we need to make sure it is held because otherwise like what are we, what are we handing to sales if nobody's attending the meeting? So yeah, it's the held piece I think that's the most important like differentiator there to an SQL.

Nice. This one's from Spencer. How do you quickly develop the marketing intuition in those experiences you both mentioned before? You could obviously always go idea, execute, measure, scale or move on to the next idea, but seems like the best marketers have heuristics slash shortcuts to get what's most effective. I'll take that one, I think and you both can jump in after this. But I think that to me is exactly the. That's the catch. Which is like, that's the like the marketing is a talent and a skill piece of this and like there's just people who have it and don't. And I wish there was a better answer. You can definitely teach it. It's not like you two and myself, it's like we were born out of the womb. Like, I'm going to be in marketing. I think it comes from a curiosity and I don't know you, but both like super, super personal. Well, but I, I know you're curious. I know you're seeing what you just have this lens of like, I'm looking at what's working. And so for me, as a human, as a consumer, I'm seeing what types of content are people engaging with, what types of things are interesting to people beyond my product space, just as a consumer. And so I think you then take some of those things and triangulate them with like, well, what are we trying to achieve as a business? The other thing is I think you have to have a really strong bias for shipping from a marketing standpoint. And so I don't even like looking at this framework of like, idea, execute, measure, scale, because I feel like you can learn so fast in marketing today. And that's why it's so important to like build an audience on social media or your blog or newsletter for your company because you can really quickly test ideas. And so a high performing email newsletter that you send out could become the next podcast episode that you create or holy cow, this episode that we did today was awesome for X reason. I'm going to take that insight and learn. So I think part of it is like you have to have that like switch that's turned on, on that gets you to be thinking about that. There's also lots of. I would also go back and study classic copywriting books, specifically like Dan Kennedy Ultimate Sales Letter, Seth Godin Purple Cow books. That'll give you some of the marketing fundamentals and you can start to build a foundation. But I'm curious to hear if either of you have a addition to that.

Yeah. I would add to your point though, that you also need to have a level of humility to be wrong. Have a bias for shipping, but remove bias from everything else. You're always, and even maybe not always, Amanda, if you say something else, I would love to know. I naturally do have some biases around, like, I feel like in my gut, based on my knowledge, my insights, et cetera, that this is going to be the thing that wins for us. Yet still, 50% of the time I am dead wrong. And you have to have that humility to also just be able to call it that you're wrong and you're not going to get it. All right? So it's like, yes, be well read, be well informed. Dave got lists of books everywhere that he's read. I've read all of them and others that are very helpful to just source insights quickly from others, but then also just having that humility to be like, well, cool. We placed our bets here and it didn't hit. And not all of them will completely.

Agree with both of you. I was going to say strong opinions loosely held. Which, yeah, I think the other thing I'll add on to this is take the interest and expertise you have outside of marketing, the things you're passionate about in life. Maybe it's fitness, food, whatever it is, the things you truly love, and apply that lens as a customer to everything else you do. And I say that because too often I see marketers learning the wrong lessons from certain tests. One example was I talked to somebody who has a food product. They worked with a bunch of food blogger influencers. They found one of them happened to be a Japanese food blogger and they crushed it with the conversions. They're like, great, I'm going to sponsor more Japanese food sites. And didn't work for the rest of the food sites. And they were like, well, I guess it didn't work with a Japanese audience. And I was like, you learned the wrong lesson. That person wasn't successful in your acquisition channel because they were Japanese. They were successful because they're a great chef who is known for making amazing food which happens to be Japanese. So it was the expertise. Now you need to find other expert chefs or food whatever, gourmands, people like that. And that's the thing. I only knew because I happen to be a classically trained chef. I'm super into food. So taking whatever you have in your daily personal expertise and ruthlessly applying that to however you can empathetically to other marketing platforms or channels, that helps a lot too.

Love that. Love that example. Okay, we got a wrap. You all have real things to do, real jobs to go to. Thanks for joining us. I hope this was a fun conversation. I would honestly be down to just run this back. And this is our new podcast. These are the co hosts. But you all have like important, actual important things to do. So I appreciate it. Maybe we'll do it again down the road. Amanda, Kaylee, we'll put all your, all your info in all this and we'll drive all the traffic to places so people can find you all later. Thanks for doing this. And and we'll see you all on the next episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Goodbye. Have a nice weekend, day, morning, week, wherever you're listening to this. See you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. 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 ed setting an on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again, not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers and right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026.

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But this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to Paramark. Com Office hours. That's Paramark. Com Office hours.