Merging Funnels, Targeting Multiple Personas, and Restructuring Your Marketing Team

Marketing had a real. Always had a seat at the table. Marketing was always the revenue owner, always had to be creative to cut through the noise when you're marketing more at mass. And then When I joined B2B I realized, oh, B2B is quite different. To see the evolution of B2B to become more like B2C marketing has been really exciting but then is also I suppose played into a lot of my experience. You know, if you're coming up in a true enterprise B2B world, maybe that is what excites you. And that's great. There's loads of great, great companies you can go work for for that. But you know, this really sort of tapped into the sort of both sides of my marketing brain, the consumer side and the B2B side. So fit for me if that makes sense.

All right, so I got a great guest today. Shane is the CMO of Webflow. We're now running the Exit 5 website on, on Webflow so. So there we go.

Love it.

It wasn't my decision. It said be way beyond my lane of where I'm comfortable. But Dan, who's my business partner was like when we make this change we're updating the webflow and everybody's been raving about it. So that's awesome.

That is great to hear. Thank you.

Yeah. So we were talking briefly offline before about just like more enterprise type of marketing. I'm curious to talk about what the opportunity is at webflow. You taking the CMO job.

What.

What was so exciting about that? It seems like awesome company and, and product and product to be doing marketing for from the outside. I actually first got put onto webflow. I think they had a bunch of these like viral, viral ads or something. I feel like I remember from back in the day. So that's put me on but just the opportunity as a, as a company. What, what drew you there as a cmo?

Yeah, there are two big things like if I think first off about the space you want to be the company that has potential of long term momentum and if you think about marketing technology and particularly the website tech tech stack, it's still pretty. It's very like code dependent and outdated. It's really talk to anybody about updating the website or building the website in any sort of scale business, it is a nightmare. We have customers before they move to webflow. It would take them like two months to get any change done. And so obviously with the development of like low code tools and AI that completely changed and webflow is like we're A visual development platform. So we allow people to build all the power of code, right? But in a visual interface so designers can use it. And so it's just to me clear that kind of like electric cars, that ultimately this is how we would build for the web, like in a way that like the people who actually wanted to do the building were empowered to do it. And so big, big space that we could go and attack, which has been, you know, born out in the time we've been there. And then more, more personally from a CMO perspective, you know, I've kind of. I started in consumer marketing and then moved into B2B. My last job was very much like C sales led, more enterprise led marketing in my sweet spot. And what I love about webflow is it's real end to end marketing, right? From a go to market motion perspective, we have a very, very large self serve business, right? It's about 80% of our revenue. We've got an enterprise or sales led business. We connect the two with like product led sales motions, all that lovely stuff from a growth perspective. And then more from like a brand perspective. We have a CEO and really a founding team who care deeply about building brands. So it's not just by growth, it's also about brand. And so as a cmo, that's it. First off, it keeps me up at night, right? The number of balls I have to juggle is like, blows my mind, right? But that's the excitement of it, right? Being able to think creatively one moment about brand activations and then next moment you're in talking about SEO strategy and next when you're talking to the sales team about enablement, like it's just every day is like a different adventure. And I think, you know, as, as I know a lot of your audience are thinking about CMOs, I as becoming a CMO at some point and finding that lane for yourself I think is important. And this one really kind of like taps into all the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.

I think that's the most fun opportunity in marketing. No, there's plenty of people that listen to this that come from the enterprise side. But it is fun also. It seems to be more of the modern way of customer acquisition. Today you have a product that people can use for free or for 15, 14 bucks a month all the way up to like large enterprises running their site. And that just feels like, it feels like there's much more opportunity to do, to do creative marketing when you can, when you can have some, you know, it's like, you don't have to spend half of your day justifying like the value of content with this type of business. Right.

100%. Like, for me, selfishly, I started my career in consumer marketing and consumer tech. And so, you know, marketing had a real. Always had a seat at the table. Marketing was always the revenue owner and always had to be creative to cut through the noise when you're, you know, marketing more at mass. And then When I joined B2B, I realized, oh, B2B is quite different. And the. To see the evolution of B2B to become more like B2C marketing has been really exciting, but then has also, I suppose, played into a lot of my experience. Whereas, you know, if you're coming up in a true enterprise B2B world, maybe that is what excites you. And that's great. There's loads of great companies you can go work for for that. But, you know, this really sort of tapped into the sort of both sides of my marketing brain, the consumer side and the B2B side. So fit for me, if that makes sense.

So I want to get back to a couple of things. I take a bunch of notes and we'll come back to this. I got a couple of things I want to circle back to, especially the, the founder, CEO who wants to build brand. That's a great one. We'll, we'll dive in there. But what I think is interesting is you have these two funnels, right? You have the free, you have the free, you know, product LED funnel, but then you have this enterprise funnel. As a marketing leader and building the marketing strategy for this business, how do you do that effectively? I, I worked at a company when we were just going up market. I don't have a lot of experience here, but we were just going up market. And one of the things that I struggle with was how do you feed both parts, right? Because the, the things that might drive acquisition on the lower end don't always drive acquisition on the higher end. And it is kind of two different motions. And so I'd love to like go inside, like the webflow marketing strategy and, and figure out how you feed both funnels. How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, well, the way that we think about the world is in three pillars and there's a risk that I get too technical here. But the first part of marketing is like, generally how do we go and build a brand around, you know, webflow being this kind of visual development platform and that's supposed to raise all boats, right? Like that's Supposed to get companies of you know, all sizes who have those pain points into either funnel. And then that's sort of like you kind of have to have that bedrock I think of your, of your marketing. And then underneath that we have historically we actually had two separate growth teams. One on the self serve side which was responsible for much more of the scaled acquisition programs like Search for example. Like Search is like very broad targeted. You can't like pincer in at like a CMO at a large company on search. Right. So certain channels were clearly going to drive more mass market into the self serve funnel. And that was like one team who was doing that and very much through the website convert. And then we had a separate team which was our enterprise growth team whose job it was to be much more focused on places like LinkedIn where you can be a lot more targeted. Content syndication, strategic events like I'm going to Gartner next week where we know our upmarket audiences at those places, we can generate them to ours and push them through the sales funnel. That's how we were set up up until this year. At a certain scale those two things being an island starts to like cause a lot of pain. And also those funnels are hyper connected because you'll end up getting the perfect lead in through the self serve funnel. And so we've now combined them under one growth leader. And a lot of the work that we're doing right now is connecting those two funnels.

So that's interesting because I feel like what can happen is then in the first example you end up having misaligned incentives. And so it's like a good fit comes into one funnel but that team's not really incentivized to work that lead and then the whole thing breaks. So you're combining them which is super interesting because I was going to ask you about like I've done this on a smaller scale but like one thing I struggled with was like the shared resources and it's like well this, this part of the creative team is only working on this part of the business. And you, you know, how do you create this? And so like hearing you align these all under one growth leader seems like it would make a lot more sense like strategically and just for the sanity of the team.

Right? I think that's exactly right. And just for, I think our accountability up to the CEO, like ultimately the board and the CEO care mostly about the overall growth of the business. And if I'm coming to the table with very much like these two isolated sort of targets and approaches that. That doesn't resonate with them. Right. And. And I will say that the best way to drive up market growth efficiently is through customers you've already acquired in self serve. Right. They're kind of free. You're not going to have to pay for an mql. So yeah, there's a lot of efficiencies there. We're obviously early days in it, so find our feet. But it's been big benefit so far.

And then do you think about. I want to, I want to. We're going to get back to team structure too. I want to talk about that. But one of the questions that I see come up a lot in the Exit 5 community is like, hey, we're selling to multiple Personas, which you can do behind the scenes with email and targeting, but with things like the website, the content, how do you appeal to multiple Personas? And how do you think about that in your, in your marketing? And how do you not spend all of your day arguing over what should be on the website for this Persona or that? How do, how do you do that?

Yeah, so it kind of depends on what part of the funnel you're in. When we're thinking about the top, top of the funnel, the brand, we think about the Persona that we're targeting as not necessarily like an individual job title, like the CMO at a certain size of company, we call them pro website owners and it's a more kind of diffuse definition of a customer that has certain common pain points. And so if you're a pro website owner, when we say pro site, we mean like these larger, more complex websites. You know, your head of design could kind of see themselves in that Persona if they're responsible for the website. So can you head of growth and so can you head of engineering if they're managing the website. And so we try and do is find like these common pain points for those folk, create this like aspirational customer in the top of the funnel and then communicate that so that a more mass market can see themselves in it, even if it isn't like a specific job title.

Yeah.

And so we've done a lot of work on like, what is that? Like kind of core Persona for the top of the funnel, as you said.

So I gotta post this link later because literally yesterday there was a comment about somebody asking for examples of they're doing a website redesign and they want solutions like a solutions navigation. And I'm on your site right now and it's a perfect example. So you have like the main site, you have the product which goes through the different features of the product. But then if you go to solutions it's very clear like, oh, I'm a freelancer. I'm going to click on this. Here's the product marketing for freelancers. I'm a startup, I'm an enterprise, I'm an agency, I'm a, you know, I think this is a great example. So I'm just, I'm shouting this out because I think it's one good way to do it. It's like literally taking people through and say like yes, webflow can work for almost anybody, but here are the specific use cases and if I go to the freelancers page, I'm seeing copy and messaging and things that are specific to me and I can relate to that versus if I go to enterprise, I'm going to see more of the things that an enterprise might need.

Exactly. And so like we would consider our website like more middle of the funnel. Right. So at that point you're definitely starting to target for different Persona types. The other thing that we're starting to do, we recently bought Intellimize who are a website personalization company.

Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's a big opportunity for us and we were about to dog food that ourselves to really start to test on the B2B context how we can personalize for those different audiences. So if it's a returning customer, for example, we already know that they've been on the freelancer page. Shift the homepage to much more talk to them. And so there's a big opportunity there for us to better personalize the experiences that come in. But yeah, as you get lower funnel, that's where like very targeted messaging per Persona is needed. Yeah.

All right, can you, can you dig into your team structure? So there's you. How many people are on the team? What does the marketing org look like right now?

Yeah, so we're about 80 people which for our scale is on the largest side. But I think it's due to what I spoke about before about the surface area that we cover and we're struggling.

And speaks to the founder and CEO believing in marketing, maybe there's not so much scrutiny over having a bigger marketing team than that world.

Right, exactly, exactly. Like, you know, I, you know, at a company like Webflow we're pretty much almost 100% inbound, both on the sales side and obviously in the self serve side is all inbound. So big machine there to get that done. And so yeah, we're structured and I recently reorged this the team. So we have a central creative team who are responsible for supporting the whole of marketing and that that creative team is video, motion, design, copy and web. So like obviously for webflow our website design and build happens within the creative team. So we're pretty self sufficient which is great. And that is a central resource that supports everyone. Then I have. Wait, is it.

And then is there so you. For each one of these let's talk about like is there a team leader? So is there like a creative director or someone that runs CREAT that then reports to you? Can you give me each one of those? It's people love this.

Yeah. So I have a senior director of creative who reports directly into me and she runs. We have one leader, a director for web and design, one leader for video because that's a very specific skill set. One leader for copy and. Yeah, that's right. That's right. One of my missing. And then obviously ops, she, she has a dedicated ops team within, within her team.

Cool.

Then my next pillar is the product marketing and brand team. And so I have a, a senior director of product marketing brand. That was a change I made. I brought together product marketing and brand used to be separate and I brought them together under one leader. The reason for that is I think about it's really important that our messaging scales all the way down from our mission and double clicks all the way down to a product feature and then that our campaigns are all thought about in a consistent way from the brand level all the way down to a product launch. And so putting those teams together under one leader is critical for as we're starting to invest heavily in the brand this year. And so yeah, that's my next one. Then I have growth. So I mentioned that I used to have two growth teams. Now I have one. So I have a VP of growth that joined last year and then finally we'll maybe talk a little bit about this. But we our, our agency, what we call our agency Flywheel is hugely important at webflow. So that means that freelancers or agencies will sign up to webflow and they'll bring clients to us. They're a massive acquisition channel and customer. So we have a dedicated team within marketing who are responsible for our okr which is build a thriving partner channel. So that's everything to do with attracting agencies, enabling them to sell webflow, you know, incentives, all that stuff. So that's kind of the third one. And then lastly operations. So I actually have an open role for a head ops and then sure I should say the Last, the last, last one which is an individual is our head of our PNP director. So pricing and packaging reports directly into me. But he's an IC right now, so it isn't like one of the core pillars of the team. But critically important given like pricing and packaging for a company like ours is just critical. So summarizing that, backup creative product marketing, brand growth, our agency, team ops and pnp.

Beautiful. We gotta make a clip of that. This is great. So I got a bunch a couple follow ups on. On that. How do you, let's talk about how you think about brand. Cause you have, you have a create, you have a creative team, but you also have brand and product market and brand are together. Can you articulate the difference for, for people and how you see those two roles?

Yeah, 100%. So in our, in our brand team, within product marketing brand, their job is to define who is the audience that we're trying to go after. So this concept of pro website owner, what are the key stories that we want to tell them and what is a campaign roadmap that we would take to market to that. So for example, in July we're about to invest a couple of million in San Francisco, Idaho and their job would be to come up with the strategy for that. Write the brief, be like, okay, great. They would then go to our creative team and say, hey Joe Cintin, this is what we want to achieve. Creative team will go great. Okay, let's consider how we can bring that to life with a creative concept. Let's think about how we can bring it to life with different activations. And so it's a great partnership there. And a lot of the time obviously as the creative team pick at it, we'll refine the brief and there's a lot of back and forth there. And so that's how they play together very similarly to how a product manager would as well. If a product manager had a product launch to do, the product marketing manager would like to find, here's the audience for this launch, here's the story you want to tell for the launch and then go to the creative team and say, hey, can you bring this to life in a product launch campaign? So that's why we combined brand and product marketing is because effectively they're very, very similar processes and ways of thinking just at a different altitude of our, of our marketing.

I think that's a great example because I think in the past where if you just say hey creative team, we want to do this campaign, then they're like, they're missing the strategy of that. And it frees the creative team up to be creative and not worry so much about like, yes, you want to know, you want to care about the business outcome and be involved. But when you have the brand owner, I love that. And then also when hearing you explain that way, it makes total sense that you have product marketing and brand together. Because if you're going to ex. If you're going to create this out of home campaign, well, then, damn it better be aligned to the overall messaging and fit in that strategy. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. It's been great so far. Like, obviously, any change, we only reorg this way at the start of the year. And so we're ironing out the wrinkles, but it's been fruitful so far.

Okay, so we got creative product marketing, brand growth ops agency Flywheel, which is your. The partner program here. And then you have this individual contributor who does pricing and packaging. Have you owned pricing and packaging before? It's always a bunch of companies I've been at. It's kind of this weird. Like marketing sometimes owns. It depends on who. What the skill set is. Like, you don't want me owning that. I can tell you that. There's, you know, it might live in product. You own it here. How did that. How did that come to life at webflow?

This has been a journey, Dave. I'm laughing because.

And what kind of crazy man would raise his hand and say, I'll own pricing and package?

So I started my career in B2B. Like pricing and packaging. Consumer wasn't really anything like. It isn't B2B. Right. It's so much more simple, but sort of my career in B2B, an AD role where pricing and packaging wasn't really a thing. Where we were selling ad space essentially. So we just had a margin on top of the ad space we sold. First day at Intercom. Thank God you're here. Our new head of marketing. Our most important project is pricing and packaging. And I was like, what the is pricing and packaging? So I go on the Internet, I'm reading everything, I'm like, I got it. I got. Luckily there was somebody internally who was running that project who was like, you know, a lot more experienced and smart than I was on it. So we muddled through it, but it gets kind of funnier because then at Zoom Info, I didn't own it. And back in webflow and I own it again. I spent a lot of my time in the company thinking this, but Intercom when I joined had extremely confusing pricing and I don't think I. It was my first time go at it. I don't think I helped. I actually think that I probably made it worse.

Well, it's a tough. It's tough. Like, you know, we had obviously a competitive product at. At Drift and like other. I think pricing. The reason I asked about it is because it's like, for products that scale up and down depending on usage and different use cases, it's pro. It. It's a crazy thing to unpack. And like, it is. It's art. There's definitely science to it, and you got to make it right, but there's a lot of art of art to it too. And it really is a hugely nuanced thing and it can be such a hard thing to balance. And so, like, I don't envy that exercise at. At Intercom, like, at Drift, we had a guy who was like a former NBA VC type of role and like, super. Like, his job was pricing and packaging, and there was nobody better to do that. And I was like, let, Let, let him own that. But it can be a. It can be a really tough thing to unpack.

It is so tough. I'll end the story on this one. But so I been working on. Now I'm at workflow a couple of years and we rolled out some prices change. The end of last year, somebody tweeted, it looks like the person who's responsible for Intercom's pricing is now responsible for webspace pricing because it's so confusing. And I was like, oh my God, I could not believe it. I was like, I had to share it right in Turlo. I was like, oh God. To be fair to me, to be.

Fair to me.

It is extremely difficult. To your point. And the reason it's difficult is that particularly as companies like ours, we scale up market effectively. On the high end of the market, you have extremely high willingness to pay. Right. People are willing to pay $200,000 for their website, and then the low end, much lower willingness to pay. And so how do you like, kind of thread that needle? It's really, really difficult.

You just won me over, man. Like, for. For the. The humility to like, be able to make a joke about that and laugh on it on this podcast is like, may just turn me into a fan of yours. Like, yeah, man, this is hard. Someone that someone found that and posted about it is amazing.

It was, it was. It was a pride moment. Yeah.

And so. So how do you. So, so just curious, like, to. To kind of put a bow on this. The the role of pricing and packaging. How do you, how do you see that? We talk a lot about how to be a great marketing leader. You got to influence change across the organization. I'm assuming you got to get pricing and packaging buy in but not consensus from product engineering your customer team. What does it look like making changes and shopping that around and working with those other teams. So yes, it lives in marketing. You own that, but you got to really bring everybody else in. Right?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think the first change that I made and when I joined webflow was getting really clear on who was responsible. So we had used Daisy, you know, the driver, sort of approval, all that stuff and really tighten that up. There was way too many voices in it and I agreed with the CEO that ultimately like I would be the approver at that point and that, you know, I'd have a council of people inputting but ultimately I can make the call. And so I think being and that Daisy has changed now, but like I think being really clear on tightening who has a opinion that like has weight versus just like, hey, take this on if you can is really important. And I think that's true of like pretty much any complex decision is making sure that you're as tight as possible and separating what might be a council who's giving you advice that you then take on to make a decision on versus people who actually have an approval or not is critical. And I would then say the second thing is particular for pricing and packaging. You know, David, who runs our pricing and packaging is a uniquely skilled person in both customer insight and data. So that when you go and try to get sign off on these different decisions, you're able to back it up both in data and also in like, hey, here's five calls I made to customers or the survey that I did to make sure that the customers got this. So that most of your opinions are not like opinions are backed by evidence which then supports the answer. But it is extremely difficult, particularly when you've got different people on the exec team who have different incentives. Like, you know, your head of sales wants you to obviously maximize market growth and maybe your founder wants sort of to change the world, right. And so wants scale. And, and so I think just like making sure that as I said, those decision making roles is like, is locked in is really important.

All right, I want to talk about a little bit how you operate. So you mentioned you're doing this out of home campaign. You use the term campaigns. Before we, we went over team structure, how do you operate as a, as a marketing team? Do you believe in like you know, are there are the monthly cadences, quarterly things? Are you launching something every month? Are you doing campaign planning? People often ask about this and I'd love to try to unpack how you, how you do things. You're obviously going to have the always on stuff, you know, search, digital display, all that. But let's talk about campaigns a little bit.

Ye, honestly I've gone on such a journey on this. I will say that operations is probably like an area of development for me and so I really need to lean on people who are stronger on the ops front. But here's how we do it at webflow and I actually think that we've got a lot better at it. So on an annual basis we agree what are our top level okrs? What are the goals? And so the webflow marketing team is three One is become a wxp which is our category that we're going to like become for pro site. So this is the brand and pmm. Okay. Our how do you reposition the company? Two is accelerate growth up market. So that's all the self serve and enterprise growth to go and increase our acquisition of market. And then the third is build a thriving partner channel which is all our agency stuff. Right. So we've got those locked in and on an annual basis we'll review those and we'll set the actual metrics that we need to achieve to go in and do that.

Wait, let's pause on that. Actually I love the way you have those goals laid out. People often ask about, you know, setting the marketing goals and I think it's, it's very easy to set like the pipeline goal. Like we, we know we need to generate X. But like I like how you have these, these phrases of like you know, company pillars that we need to do. We need to you know, establish web. I'm just making it like establish webflow as X and I love the idea of setting those like as three to five bullet points going into the year as your strategic objectives and the metrics follow. Right. Is that, is that, am I hearing you right on that?

That's exactly right. So like on each of those and have multiple action metrics that we need to hit. Yes, growth are the easiest to set metrics but on the brand side we can set things like product adoption of our new products that are related to the category you want to become or branded search conversions growth at a certain scale you start doing the surveys, right. The awareness and surveys and sentiment Surveys, we're not quite there yet. I think you need to, at a certain scale to have the data come back to be meaningful. So you can set goals across all of those. And those are the metrics. And now we've got our north stars for the year. Great. We then coming into the year, break those down into, well, what's the work that we need to do to hit those? Those are what we call our initiatives. So each of those okrs has a set of initiatives. So for example, on our brand and PMM team, we might have build, build our brand with ICP content. So that's the whole content roadmap. It's like, you know, we want to launch podcasts, we want ebooks, all that stuff. Right. Those initiatives are set at the start of the year, but do we do change them in the middle of the year if we need to like kind of flex on that. But they're, I would say they're probably 90% locked for the year. We kind of know the work, the high level work we need to do. Then on a quarterly basis we've defined what are the deliverables. So if build a brand with ICP content is an initiative in that quarter, we might say we want to launch this ebook or we want to launch this podcast. If it's our strategic event initiative, it's go to Gartner Symposium, it's go to B2B forestry, B2B summit. Nice.

Do those ever change or are they pretty much set for the year?

No, quarterly. Now we're at the quarterly level. So those get locked. We riff on those quarterly and honestly, given that we're fast moving, they riff mid quarter as well. Right. Suddenly there's an opportunity to do something. We add in an extra deliverable. So we do need to be flexible, but we try as best as possible to plan that up front in the quarter so that particularly when we have teams like our creative team, they need some visibility, right. They need to be able to resource plan and all of that. And then on a monthly basis. So we've gone annual, we've gone quarterly, and now on a monthly basis, I have a monthly check in with each of my, with each of the OKRs, where we look at what's our progress against the actual outcomes that we were supposed to achieve. So the metrics, how are we tracking against that? How are we tracking against the initiatives? So what did we say we would do? Have we actually done that work? In some cases we'll have done all the work and it hasn't moved the needle. We Might go okay well good effort but like we're clearly got to change our approach here and so that we do we do that on a monthly basis and then on a weekly basis. I obviously have more like one to ones and team meetings but we have this concept in the team of a Move Mountain project where if it is of such a scale and importance that it's not just like captured day to day in the monthly check ins of the OKRs. We now have a weekly specific project with a project plan that I check in on a weekly basis. So for example right now we are just kicking one off for or we're calling our road to wxp. We're going to announce it like our actual. We've seen it in market that this is our vision. We're going to announce it later this year and there's a ton of work to get that ready for announcement. Like got to redesign our website. We got to do like a cost plan around it. We got to do event. We got all this. So there's a work back that's of such an important that I'm not just going to let that like hey, I'll check in once a month and see how we're doing. And that's got to be like weekly. Where are we? Much more hands on project management, quick decisions and all of that. So that's kind of the cadence of yeah annual quarter month and then week that we go through and we, we've been doing this now in this rhythm for since the start of the year and it's been. Yeah, it's been great.

Very nice. I wish you could see my, my notepad right now. This is great. So that's great. Okay, that's good. You answered that question for me. Let's talk about working for working reporting to the CEO. Something we get a lot of questions about. What's your relationship with the, with the CEO? What do they care about? What do you share with them? What's their involvement in marketing and maybe along the way any lessons you've learned about managing up and the relationship between the CMO and the CEO?

Yeah, so I've, I will say that I've had both in my journey either reporting into the CEO or into like a president and flipped around between that when reporting to the CEO. Typically the CEOs I've reported into have been founders. You know they've been very much the sort of visionary and I think when reporting into a CEO like that you have to realize that this is their like this is their thing. Typically the brand is them. And like at Intercom, the brand doesn't own.

Sure.

And you're taking. And they. And because they've built these incredible brands, they're clearly like, I'm going to use a music analogy. And incredible songwriters. They're actually great marketers. Right. They've written this awesome song. The challenge is, when the company was small, you know, they wrote it and, you know, maybe it was on the guitar, maybe there was some drums, whatever. Now you're stepping in and you've got to manage this thing at 80 people, you know, whatever. You're now a conductor of this massive orchestra. Right. And there's a big chance that you don't really fully understand the melody or the. The tempo that was. Really got the company to where it was going. And so I tell that analogy to say that, like, it's really important to get so close to that CEO that you can hear the music. And I've struggled with this and I think I've got it at some points. And then I'm like, oh, my God, I thought they'd like this. They hate it. And you're like, oh, God, I still can't hear the music. But the more you can leverage that, I think the better. And so that you build that trust. Because sometimes you will actually have to say no for this audience. Your music is not right.

Yeah.

And they won't trust you to do that if they don't think that you understand it, the core of it. And so I think it's just, like, really getting close to them and, like, appreciating the fact that they're probably really good at this and that they just have, like, 10 years of insight in the industry that you should not, you know, should try and leverage that. But also. But not over, like, just do what they. Makes them happy. Build that trust so that you can say, no, we need to go and do this other thing. Maybe I'll give an example, like, bringing back to PNP pricing and packaging. About a year and a half ago, we hadn't changed our prices in about seven years. And there was a big need to change the prices, actually increase the prices in one way. And, you know, Vlad was very nervous about it. It's like, he's a. He wants to change the world. He wants to, like, you know, make sure it's affordable to everybody. And, you know, luckily I'd built enough credibility and trust with him that he said, okay, like, go for it. And it ended up being very, you know, successful. And so, anyway, I just think it's building that Trust with the CEO is so, so critical.

Yeah, it's kind of this weird, it's like it's this double edged sword and that you want to work with the founder. Like the visionary founder who has great ideas for marketing can also be like a huge pain in the ass but, but you'd much rather work with that person than the CEO who's like has no interest in marketing, doesn't want to be involved, just looks you look looks at you at like a number and wants you to just you know, report on those metrics. Is that a criteria that you would look for? Like if you're someone who's looking for a VP of marketing job or wants to be a cm, cmo like how high is that on your list of criteria for like evaluating companies? How much the CEO is, has a vision for and is involved in the market marketing?

It's extremely high on my list that the company cares deeply about marketing for all the reasons that you said. And I also think that it's really important that you're back to the music analogy that your style somewhat like aligns with theirs because you're gonna have to play this music and if it doesn't that's ultimately not going to be successful. And what I've appreciated at webflow is that you know, I generally almost all the time agree with Vlads input. I actually now report it into the president for like a bunch of reasons around bringing go to market closer together which are the right reasons. But you know, keep a really, really close connection with Vlad on the marketing side given, given how important it is to him, which I think is dead right.

How do you stay sharp today? There's a, you know, you've, you've built a great career, you're running marketing at a successful company. You have a really interesting job. You still have to find time for learning. The best marketing leaders that I know are still always curious. They're tinkering on their own stuff. They're not just, you know, you might run a team of 80 people but you're still a marketer at heart. I'm curious as to how you stay sharp.

Yeah, I will say this definitely atrophied maybe last year. There's a lot going on at work and I found that I wasn't really keeping on top of other things. And so one of my newest resolutions which I've actually stuck to is I've get up now at 6am and my kids get up at 7. So I have an hour in the morning where myself a coffee if it's not snowy. I go sit outside and that's the time of the morning where I like, first off, I get ready for the day, right. Get my to do list, get the calendar, all that stuff. And then typically that takes about 15 minutes. And then I've got 45 minutes where I might listen to some gong calls or I might listen to podcasts, I might do some readings and research. And so that hour in the morning has been just game changing for me just to have some like, focus time before the like chaos of the day hits. And so I like, I would encourage anybody to find what that time is. It doesn't have to be the morning. It could be any time of the day. But having like an hour of the day where you're just like, you know, taking a breather, having a coffee and doing some step back thinking is like really important. Yeah.

There's a great book, I think it's called the Road Less Stupid. And he talks about. Let me, let me just look, I want to. I want to. The Road Less Stupid. I wanted the Road Less Stupid. Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah. The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. And he just talks about. It's written for founders and CEOs. But I think what you said is really relevant, related. You have to make time for thinking time for yourself. And if you don't block it in, it's like very easy to just hop into the day and just react, react, react, react. And so I love that you intentionally block that out. Are there specific things that you read or listen to? People are always asking, they want to know, they want to know what you're reading, what you're listening to. Where are you getting information from?

Yeah, like from a book reading perspective. Right now I'm reading Claire Hughes Johnson book Scaling People, which has been. Which is an excellent book. It's very, very tangible and a lot of like kind of exact how they did it at Stripe. And then I'm around here looking at about loads of books on sales management, like what sticks? And just any book that I see come out that like is interesting, I'll. I'll read it. And then probably the other the. So there's books and then there's like podcasts. So the CMO podcast is a great one. I obviously used to listen to your previous one. I didn't realize Exit 5 existed until I was interviewing on here. So I listened to this one as well, which is awesome. Add week of Good marketing podcast too. And so. Or the kip and Kieran's HubSpot marketing against the Grain is, is a great one, particularly as you think about keeping on the forefront. They're, you know, really leaning into AI right now.

Sure. And so that's actually what drew. What drew me in. I actually spent the day with Kip today. We, we played some golf this morning, Kip and I, and I was pumping him up. I'm like, damn it, I'm gonna give you lots of compliments right now. I've been listening to your podcast a lot because I do think they, they're doing a good job of like talking about. There's just a lot of interesting stuff happening marketing right now. And this show, we don't really cover like news stuff as much. They're like, Chad, GPT4 just came out and I was going to go and read all these like nerdy articles, but it's way above my head. I was like, ah, I bet you Kip and Kieran will do a podcast on this. Of course they did. I listened to that. They caught me up to speed. And so I like that you mentioned books. A lot of people will say I don't have the time. One thing that I do with books is like, especially when they're about a particular topic, like, I don't put the pressure on myself to finish the book. Like if I just pick up that like sale, like the Challenger sale book. Right. Somebody gave me that book. If I just go and grab like one or two chapters from that and treat it like a blog post, I just feel like you have to just always be sucking in interesting ideas from, from, from everywhere, you know, and, and I like to hear you talk about that.

And that's right. The thing I do is a lot of the time will, I will scan them. You know, there's a lot of filler content in some of these books. Like they have one effective like idea and they create a lot of content around that idea. So you can sometimes skip through and like kind of zone in on the more bits that the chapters that maybe are more tangible.

We're going to wrap in a minute. But what's exciting to you? What new, innovative stuff is the webflow marketing team doing behind the scenes that you can share?

Yeah, I think that this is going to be so boring. Maybe this is an interview. Oh, God. I think the most exciting thing for me right now is you're good.

You've over delivered. Whatever you say now is okay. You're good. It can't all be like 10 out of 10.

Pricing and packaging. Not the thing that's most exciting to Me now is that now we've defined this thing that we want to be, which is a wxp and we want to go after the DXP category ultimately. And there's just a lot of like, focus in the mind of creating a story around like more of a category. And I think you've been through this. In fact, like, you know, with conversation marketing. I know you did all. Did an incredible job of it and then all of the things that flow from there, you know, I'm excited this year. And again, this isn't like necessarily innovative, but going back to the basics and doing like classic brand building by investing and out of home in comms and analyst relations, it's like. I think what's most exciting to me as a CMO is when you have this very clear destination you're trying to get to for us is like this WXP and all of the things now are humming together. And so I think that that's what's getting me out of bed in the morning most year.

I, I'm not bored with that answer. What that answer tells me is that no matter how much is new, it's like we're just in these like cycles of new stuff and like the timeless. It's like product marketing is always going to be relevant messaging strategy. You know, you, you now are. You do have to play the analyst relations game as you're at a certain level of scale. And so like that is new for you to have to go study and, and unpack. Right?

That's exactly it. Um, sometimes the classic marketing is the best marketing.

Was it fun to take a, a new CMO job too? Like, I think it's for, for me, when I, when I left Drift and went to Privy as an example, like, I'd been there for, for four and a half years and I went to go take a new CMO job and it was like, oh man, I kind of. You kind of get like a fresh start even though the company already existed. But it's like I get to take all the things that I learned, the mistakes that I made. And it just made me realize like when I was younger in my career, I don't think I appreciated enough, like how much experience does matter. And I don't want to, you know, lower the. I don't want to like set a bar for people that says like, you know, you just got to, you just got like, some of it is you just do have to put in work and put in time because you need to learn, you need to have made mistakes. At Intercom and mistakes at Zoom Info and whatever you did in the past to like figure out what the right plays are for for webflow. Do you know what I'm trying to articulate? Like, you just the more reps and time that you have, the better you're going to. You're going to get. And so I just wanted to like leave people with that thinking to just push them to, to be okay with failing and making mistakes and messing up at the current company that you're at.

Well, look, marketers are the shortest serving exacts by some distance. And like the industry is littered with inverted commas, failed CMOs and so you kind of have to become comfortable with is a fit thing. You know, I know we're always the time but like I certainly after my experience at Zoom Info, which is an incredible company, just like, you know, we weren't quite the right fit for each other. And I think about it like so big soccer fan, right? And Chelsea, when I was growing up, managed by Jose Mourinho, their whole strategy was like very strong, fast players, direct football, like smash the ball into the goal. And then you had Barcelona who were like, let's just tap the ball up the field, very strategic and score a goal. Both teams were exceptionally successful. You want to make sure that if you're a Chelsea style football player, you're on Chelsea and you're not on Barcelona because you'll be extremely unsuccessful. And so I think the big thing for me is like in marketing just making sure that you're, that you find that fit and that you have some humility and you know that you're able to say, hey, I'm not great at everything. I've got a lane and not to try and try and I suppose BS it or whatever to try and get like a land the gig.

Yeah. I feel like the smartest people that I've worked with, it takes a dose of humility and be like, all right, at this point in my life and in my career, maybe this is not the right fit. However, while I'm at this company that is very sales led, can I at least learn about this motion and get smart about this so I can then like bring that to, you know, bring that with me. I think I got multiple times in my career I got hired, I got hired over. They hired three VPs over me before making me VP and eat. The first one was very hard, but after that I was like, you know what? Like, screw it. I'm just gonna learn. I'm gonna make this person like my best friend. I'm gonna treat them as my mentor. I'm gonna learn as much as I can from them. And I think, I do think that mindset like helped me so much in my career. So even if you're listening to this right now and you're at the wrong company right now doesn't mean just go jump ship. Like, is there a pocket that you can learn in the next 12 to 18 months and acquire some skills? Right?

Totally. Like the amount I learned Zoom Info is the most incredible go to market sales machine you ever seen in your life. It is just incredible. The amount I learned about how marketing support that and how automation can drive that was just incredible. And so I agree with that. And I would say, you know, back to your original question on like is it nice taking on a new gig? It is, but it's kind of like it does feel good, right? Fresh, freshly. But it feels like kind of like those, what is maybe not empty calories, but those calories aren't as deeply meaningful as when you've been longer at a company and you've been able to have big impact on some of this years. And so as I look at this year webflow, you know, I think that we are going to do some big stuff like when we get launch our WXP in market that's just going to be huge. And you know, a lot of our work has been building up to that. So there's kind of like more maybe dense calories that you can. Yeah. Live on longer.

All right, here's my final, my final question. Throughout your whole history in, in marketing, your marketing career, if you, if you could have one wish and solve any one marketing problem, some nonsense that we have to deal with, some magic thing like I wish I could get podcast emails for every, I wish I could get emails for every podcast subscriber. I wish I could perfectly measure, you know, attribution or something. What's Shane's one One wish, one snap your finger, solve any marketing problem. What would it be?

Yeah, the most it is attribution. And I think that that is the. Oh, I was at Adroll 10 years ago, we were writing ebooks on attribution. My last click is dead and here I am and everyone's using like last click and it's like it's, it's so such a challenging thing to solve for but it's kind of an obvious answer. So maybe if I give another one would be just on the website knowing who's on your website. And I think that we've got a lot better at that. And that is something that companies I can tell them. Why is that? We just bought like a built companies around, so that is more solvable, I think. But yeah, knowing who's on your website would be huge.

All right, awesome. Shane, thank you for joining us on the Xavier podcast. Maybe at the very least we turned you into a listener, even if it's only this episode to just listen to yourself back. If you're listening, do me a favor. Go find Shane on LinkedIn. Connect with him, send him a message, tell him you learn from. I took a bunch of notes. I've been furiously writing notes. It's a great episode. I learned a lot. I love doing interviews like this. Great to actually meet you and connect. Go find Shane on LinkedIn and go check out Webflow. I think they're doing a great job. Specifically, I see a lot of questions in the Exit 5 community about product marketing, selling to multiple Personas, having the two sales funnels. I think you all are doing a great job. So keep up the good work. And Shane, I'll see you around, man. Thank you.

Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.