Focusing On The Future Of Marketing - Ken Acer - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode #54

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Welcome. I'm excited to have our next guest today. He is a chemical engineer turned marketer, which mirrors my path, but we probably have done different journeys to get to where we are today. But we both started with some engineering and ended up in marketing. So today he is a seasoned marketing executive now with a proven track record. Helping industrial and technology-based B2B companies tackle their marketing problems. He brings 35+ years of experience to this podcast, and he is an expert suited for large corporate environments as well as small organizational companies with minimal marketing needs. He's everywhere in between. So I want to welcome to our podcast a Fractional CMO at Your CMO, my guest Ken Acker. Ken, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Joe. I really appreciate the opportunity to have a chance to share some ideas with your, your audience. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. This will be fun. It's when, you know, it's not normally stated that when two engineers get together it's fun, but today will definitely be fun, so I promise you that. In our audience as well. But let's get started. Our first topic that I like to kick off the show with is just a question around something that's of interest to you or something that you think that other C-suite professionals need to be thinking about or aware of these days. So what would you like to share with our C-suite brethren? Okay.

Yeah, it's an interesting, task opportunity I've got now to join Your CMO. I've been doing fractional marketing for 7 years with my own firm and then recently introducing Your CMO to my clients and potential clients. Introducing them to what fractional means is sometimes a little bit of a challenge, but a more interesting discussion happens around just the general idea of marketing. How big is marketing? What is marketing? This week I had a group of about 15 people. We were chatting about what marketing meant to them, and it meant something different to each one of them. And you know what? Each one of them was right. Marketing is what your organization needs for long-term growth in terms of intelligence, market intelligence, and in terms of competitive intelligence, in terms of, of how you're going to put together a program for growth. So Marketing for me, it spans a wide idea, a wide range of ideas, all the way from fundamentals like strategy and developing the right organization to what products, what unmet customer needs are out there. So what products do you need to develop or services do you need to develop? Then once you have products, then developing customers, adding customers to your base, that's very different from adding orders to your pipeline. So you have to acquire customers, and then after you acquire customers, generating demand, that's usually something that's shared between sales and marketing. You generate demand and then you have to generate orders. And that's generally thought of as a sales function, but the marketing team has an important part with order acquisition. And then, you know, we need to, you know, satisfy the order. That's often in the operations team.. But then after the product gets delivered to the customer, I think marketing has a role there as well in terms of ensuring client satisfaction, frequently asked questions, common usage questions, application questions. So marketing spans a really broad spectrum of different possible intersections with the marketplace and with potential customers and with salespeople. So what, what an individual client needs at any given time is going to be unique to their situation and their challenges.

Yeah, that's very well said. I think that it's so broad. It does, from a fundamental standpoint, I think it's all about connecting prospects with products and services. And that's kind of what I— my overarching definition of marketing is very simplistically. But when you start thinking about all the layers that you described, prospects, you've got to acquire their trust so that they can become client prospects or customers first, and then can you upsell them? And then how do you add more products and services? And what are the right products and services to be adding? There's just so many layers to that puzzle that I think many businesses don't quite comprehend until they start asking the questions themselves. Where can marketing best support our strategic objectives? I think that that's my favorite question for business owners to ask, is not what is marketing, but how can marketing and marketing professionals help support our strategic objectives? And sometimes that means at the beginning trying to understand what the market is. At the end, it's how do you understand and find new markets potentially. So that's not the end. There's, there's that side of it, and there's the creative side, which most people associate with marketing— the, the brand, the look, the feel, the website, the assets. Um, but I look at that as more of a creative function, not necessarily a marketing function. So how do you advise your clients?

Yeah, so you're right, and when people hear marketing, they often think, you know, ads, Twitter accounts, in the old days, TV and print ads. But those are all just tactics, just tactics to accomplish a specific goal. And you should have some specific goals in mind whenever you've got some kind of advertising or promotional activity in place. I go back to what is something that came out of Sun Tzu's book, The Art of War, which is to know, you know, yourself and you know your enemy, and you'll be successful in 100 battles. Or he says more poetically, 100 battles, 100 victories. And, and when I'm training marketers on their role, what I ask them to do is go out and look at competition in a very structured way. Who's first on in terms of market size, market share? Who's the largest? Who's the, who's the fastest growing? Who's the most innovative? Who's the closest to your position? And then make an estimate of the overall market size as well. From there, you can get some market share estimates. And then after you understand some ideas about where you stand compared to your competition in terms of share, then I like to look at, at customer needs and quantitatively, how do the 5 competitors that we just mentioned How do they compare to the customer's needs? And then you can get a, a really strong idea of where you're positioned comparing your feature set to competition and who's winning in the marketplace. And then add a third variable to it in terms of pricing. Where should you be? Where are you priced now and where should you be priced? And that gets into a price positioning discussion with your existing products. It also helps you with your product development activities because if you have a gap in the marketplace with maybe a low feature, low price product or a higher feature, higher price product, then you know where you need to fill that gap in the 2 to 3-year horizon and start working on product development activities.

When you look at a marketplace, how do you distinguish between, you know, what might be a, a fad that is an unmet need or need that's, that's kind of appearing in a fad fashion versus a, maybe a trend or a real long-term evolving need that needs to be met? Any differentiates between the two?

What I, what I like to do is, is talk to real users, real customers in their environment, in their workspace, and especially watch them work. Not necessarily ask them a bunch of questions or give them a survey. Or actually, you don't do that. You don't, you don't give them a survey. They won't be able to fill it out. You have to observe what they're doing in the marketplace and try to understand why they're doing it. And, and what I like to do is I like to find big customers, small customers if they represent a large segment,. And also people who, who are really pushing the envelope for your product category. People who are maybe being a little inventive themselves, adding features themselves, and, and trying to kind of bootstrap a product solution into, into your product line and, and understand why they're doing it. And when I, when I say that, it really takes a long-term mindset. It takes a 2 to 3 year horizon that you have to be aiming for. Because let's face it, product development is not easy. It often takes— I mean, a fast product development might be a year and a half, maybe in software it might be quicker, but often product development efforts are multi-year activities. And you have to be able to try to think about what the unmet needs are today that will be important in 2 or 3 years. And if it's something that's— if you If you hear about a fad, but you don't really see how it's helping some, some customer with a, with a, with a concrete benefit, then that's something I, I try to shy away from.

Yeah. The reason I asked that question is I, I, I wonder how much of AI is a fad versus a true change in our way that we need to think about marketing.

Yeah, well, I think it, I think it's definitely getting a lot of fantastic, uh, um, attraction and, and interest in the market. But the reason I think it's not a fad is because I just, like I just said, I've watched people use it and oh my gosh, what they're able to get out of the system answering questions in a, in a, an intuitive way in a conversational way. Really, when I use ChatGPT, I actually, I write please in my query. Can you please answer this? And I think somehow the responses come back in a different tone based on how I'm asking the questions. You know, when I'm doing, when I'm Googling something, I would never say please, you know, find me restaurant near me. I would just say restaurants near me. But it's a really, interesting interaction that at least I'm having with the ChatGPT interface. And I've just seen people have immediate tremendous value in essentially low-hanging fruit, I think, is creating first drafts. I've got a specific example of something I did this week. Yeah, I'll jump into it. There's a client that I haven't talked to in 9 months. And I think that they are still an opportunity, but I was feeling like, I was feeling awkward about how to approach this customer who I haven't talked to in about a month and a half. So I wrote to ChatGPT in that way. I said, I feel awkward about this, this person I haven't followed up with. And I, and they came back, it came back, whatever it is, came back with a really pleasantly worded email. I didn't send it, of course. I took it and I, I used it and adapted it changed it, and then sent the email off. But just getting that first draft out there was really a helpful first pass for me.

Yeah, I love that example because I've had the same, or I've had a similar thought where there's a lot of friction when you just wanna create something. And that friction that might be small, but for some of us, it's a a big sticking point. And ChatGPT seems to be a way to overcome some of that friction. What is an email I can send to this client? You could sit there and stew on that in your own mind, in your own head for days. But if you just ask the question and they spit something out, now you've got maybe you're 70% of the way done. Like, I just need to get over that initial hump to start. Now I can hone it in and send it. And I think that is definitely a really good use of ChatGPT where I was kind of— and as individual professionals in any, you know, any profession, you can use it that way to get over your own internal kind of angst or little, little stucks you have from moving forward. But I heard the other day this, this comment from another marketing friend of mine. She's a, she's a good personal friend. She also runs marketing for another company that, that I, um, am familiar with. And she said, speaking of this other company, she goes, the owner of this other company really wants me to build a, a marketing plan using AI. Like, that was the demand from up above. Like, I need marketing that uses AI. And I thought to myself, what does that mean? Like, now we have CEOs of companies telling their marketing teams to use AI, but like how and why and to what extent and what does that mean? And, uh, it reminds me greatly of the, the fad around QR codes like 10 years ago. I want a QR code, like, but why? So I'm just curious, like, how would somebody begin figuring out the why behind using AI in their marketing?

Yeah, I agree. It's like I remember I had a sales manager who just said, make more phone calls. Like, you know, I mean, that's— you make more phone calls for a specific reason to, you know, make cold calls or to follow up on leads or follow up on quotes. But, you know, it was, it was just his— what he wanted to see was people on the phone when he walked through the office, which maybe was helpful for his head, but it's not necessarily the right way to go. I think just telling somebody to use a tool doesn't make sense to me at all. You know, we were talking about getting the first draft out and the— and something that we didn't really touch on is just what is a marketer versus what is a salesperson? And I think it ties into what you're saying in terms of a marketer, I think, is somebody who's able to get inside somebody else's head. Salespeople need to do that also. But, but I, I think one reason this helps— this ChatGPT tool helps me with the first draft— is that I'm able to be a pretty good editor. I'm not a great writer. I'm actually not a good writer. Getting the first draft of something out is really hard for me. But I am able to have something drafted in front of me, and then I can look at it, I'd say, from my mother's perspective and see, you know, does it make sense to her as a non-technical person? And then, although I'm not a PhD, I consider myself a technical person, and I'm not a PhD, but I try to read something from a PhD's perspective and see if it makes sense, if the logic and the footnotes and the, you know, the references are there. So, you know, salespeople have a very urgent or an urgent mindset, a mindset that talks about a 1-week, a 1-month, you know, a shorter sales cycle, a shorter urgency in their rewards where marketing people think more about this quarter, this year, the next 3 years of of product flow and, and order flow and, and sales. So when you're, when you're out there watching customers, observing customers, you want, you generally don't wanna have a salesperson with you unless they're a unique salesperson with the ability to not derail the customer's ideas and stream of consciousness for, for, for why they're doing what they're doing. Hope that was helpful and interesting for you, Joe.

Yeah, I think that's a— there's a good differentiator there as far as how salespeople would view a market opportunity and how marketers would view the same market opportunity. The salesperson is going to look for that, and they should, and it's important that they do that short-term opportunity, whereas a marketer might look a little more broadly. At what am I seeing here and not losing the forest through the trees. I want to use that analogy where Salesforce might be chopping down the trees, the marketer may be looking at what's beyond this first range that is also going to be there for us 2 or 3 years from now to harvest. Sorry for that awful analogy, but With AI, I find there's this desire to want to use it right away from many of the business owners that I talk to. There's also many that are just like, I don't want it. It's nothing I want to deal with or think about. They're kind of burying their heads in the sand. I think the middle of that somewhere needs to be where the right balance is. Like, we have to be researching and understanding and seeing where it's going, but not overreacting and over-impulse buying as marketers and as business owners. I'm curious, we had this conversation yesterday, or not yesterday, last week internally, the difference between tools and tactics in marketing. And a lot of times I think we as marketers sometimes get confused or can confuse others. I think of AI, AI as a tool, not as a tactic. That's, that's my, my thought process. But some people think, oh, we've got to, you know, throw AI at this now. We got to start being, you know, AI is a tactic for getting new customers. Like, no, the tactics can be enhanced with this tool of AI. But the tactic isn't gonna change. There's no AI tactic that I'm aware of for getting customers. What would you say to that?

That's what I was trying to say earlier, and you just said it much better than I did, making the analogy about that, that sales manager who wanted to see people on the phone. The phone is a tool, and the tactic is the more important issue to resolve first. Is maybe the issue is following up on open quotations. So, you know, how do you do that? Does, does marketing have a role in that? Does, what, what is sales' role in that? And, and the following up on the quotation is the tactic. And then the tool could be many different ways to do that. You could do that in person, on the phone, by, you know, by email, many different ways.

Yeah, I think it's important to think of it as a tool and then not get glossy-eyed with everything that we can do with this tool. It's just a, it's a new shiny hammer, but we still need to hammer nails. You know, there's, it's not making that any different. But internally, when we look at AI, we're asking those questions right now. Okay, how can we use this tool enhance our market? How can we use this tool to provide more value for our clients? How can we use this tool to make our operations more efficient? That's how we're looking at it. And I think from a marketing lens, there's a lot of things this tool can help us with. It can make us a lot more efficient. It can give us a lot more creative, like, inspiration. But, you know, it's not gonna— if, if your audience doesn't read emails, all of a sudden posting a bunch of AI emails in front of them isn't gonna change the output. Like, it's not going to make a single bit of difference if your audience doesn't respond to it to begin with. They're not gonna suddenly respond because you have the ability to create 100 more emails than you used to be able to send. Like, that's not gonna change the result. Same with content, in my opinion. Like, if your audience doesn't respond to content on Facebook, by suddenly being able to have 100 times as many posts isn't going to change your conversion. But if you're able to find 50 different messaging strategies and now potentially increase conversion because all of a sudden you figure out that it wasn't the audience not responding. You just didn't have the right message, and now you can test it differently with AI at a much faster rate. There's how the tool can help you.

Yeah, absolutely right. And I, I think, you know, we, we all, or I think the best companies look to marketing for their thought leadership in terms of their product and service offering so that when the engineers get together and, you know, and make the new product, they're making something that someone's going to need in 2 and 3 years. So I think similarly internally, I see marketing folks getting pulled into the AI discussion because they're naturally thinking 2 and 3 years down the road. And then, and, you know, something that also is tied to this idea is is that marketing and branding, you know, it can be, it can feel great to think about, you know, a, a big brand like, I don't know, Coca-Cola or IBM and, and, and just thinking about the making the brand stronger or better with, with marketing efforts. But, but boy, at the level of companies that I've ever dealt with, marketing's job is always to drive sales. Yeah. And, and sometimes it's directly generating leads, but sometimes it's just making the salesperson's job easier with better tools and better collateral material. And, and sometimes it's, it's also helping the salesperson by post-sale environment, helping with frequently asked questions or service training or, or, you know, or usage training. So the salesman's not stuck helping teach the customer how to turn the product on or turn it off or troubleshoot. And, you know, our job in marketing is often to make the salespeople into heroes. So they, you know, they're, so they have more confidence, so they get out in front of customers more frequently, more confidently. And I think how we can help them efficiently use AI to be an answer machine for their customers, for them to be more effective answering questions for customers. I think that there's a role there for us as well.

Yeah, I think this might be a good time for one of the, the top 10 lists that I like to put together with my guests from time to time. It's picking a topic and then going back and forth and come up with 10 ideas to share with the audience. So if we thought about a topic being how marketers can use AI to help enhance sales, Let's come up with 10 ways that we can brainstorm on how we can use this new shiny object, this tool of AI, to enhance sales for salespeople. So one of us can start and we'll just go back and forth and share ideas until we get to 10.

And I tell you, I did one yesterday. I had a client that I'm looking at and I basically just went into ChatGPT as a first pass and said, what is this company's strategy? And I'll tell you what they sent, sent back wasn't perfect, but it, it was really interesting. And I've, I've put that into, you know, I put that into a part of the presentation that I'm gonna be making later this week. So helping salespeople learn about their, their prospects.

Yes, that's a great one. I would probably say that made me think about doing the same with competitors, helping salespeople better understand their competitors' current strategy using, using AI.

That's a great one. It's funny, I think there's going to be an explosion of content and also a devaluation of content, but. But helping create content for, yeah, blog posts would be, you know, a sort of low-hanging fruit.

Yeah, that's a, that is a good one. I think I've often wondered about the devaluation of content because of AI, and it does scare me from a marketer standpoint, like when you start having this massive influx of content that no longer is meaningful to anybody. Like, if the noise gets so great that you just tune everything out, what that's going to do. So if that does happen, then, you know, what can AI do with this universe of content that's just making no difference anymore. And I think the opportunity is to perhaps train the— think of it as a training tool for salespeople to be able to practice their pitch in such a way that they can be able to break through the noise over the phone and practice with this universe of content that's out there to find the the potential responses that are piquing interest using AI? What are some of the ways they can practice to this universe and then pull out gems they can then go use in person?

Well, that's an interesting idea. In terms of practicing, another idea that might help salespeople is to practice, or practice presentations to different personality styles., you know, maybe they've gotta be trained or skilled in, in noticing personality styles, but having some ideas on, on how to handle frequent objections from different personality styles might be interesting for sales folks.

Yeah, I do like that. And you could use AI to be able to tell you the personality style of your prospects, right? So that they can— I'm meeting with Ken Atker, and here's his LinkedIn profile, and here's— find everything he's written in the last 10 years on anything he's posted on social and tell me what his most likely personality style is and how can I best approach him knowing that. That would be a great extension of what you just shared. Along those lines, there's an old sales technique I learned called the Ben Duffy, and it's the— it was based off the— there was a small ad agency run by a guy named Ben Duffy back in the tobacco era, and he was going to try to win a big tobacco ad contract, and he was up against the big giant agencies. And what he did was before he went into give his pitch, he wrote down what the 10 questions that he thought the company would have of him. Why should I use a company your size? And why should we use you? All these questions that were his disadvantage that he thought he would be asked in that positioning. And he opened his pitch with, here's the things that I think you might be wondering about me right now. And he answered those right away. It's called the Ben Duffy approach. So I think a company could use AI to— salesperson could use AI like, what are the things that this customer might— reasons why this customer may not buy from— what are some of the blind spots I'm not considering? And train themselves— we're not even trained— just to decide what those questions might be so they can prepare a pitch proposal ahead of time answering those objections.

Yeah, that's a great one.

That's a great one.

I, yeah, the, I took a training class with that mentioned Ben Duffy also, and, and I thought one of his questions was, if you could change one thing about my product, what would it be? And that gets to, yeah, I guess I'm off the topic of the, of the 10 Oh, part of the 10 things AI might, might be used to help sales folks.

But, um, we're at 5 here, so, uh, we need 5 more. Need 5 more.

5 more. Okay, so here's, here's one way AI might be able to, might be able to be used to help salespeople, which is just, you know, find me a list of 10 customers like my favorite customer ABC and give them, give the, the AI some criteria about that customer and then have them find 10 more.

Yeah, I love that one. I just got asked today by a guy, I need to go market, he wants to send an email and a mailer to 100 businesses. So I, you know what, I told them, just go into ChatGPT and say, I want to send an email and a mailer to these 100 customers that look and feel like this. Can you search some lists and find me most recent addresses for those customers and a contact person? Now it's going to be 2021 data, right? Because it's limited to when it was last recently listed. Right now, maybe 3 weeks from now, it'll be completely different., but it'll still be a start, right?

Right. Yeah, that's a great idea. So, you know, having customers, asking AI to find out how customers buy these products or, or what triggers their buying decision and getting to the buyer's journey and understanding about what unmet need they're, they're really satisfying by, by going ahead and purchasing the product.

That might be helpful. Yeah, that's a great one. There are some really good AI presentation tools out there where you can go in and say, I want to— here's my, here's my pitch and my product and my service and the features and the benefits, and here's my audience, and Here's who I'm talking to tomorrow. And they'll develop a whole pitch deck for you using best practices and put it in and they'll add images and color and creative and design your proposal deck, if you will, in seconds. There's some of those out there I just came across. If I think about it, I'll add one to the show notes, but I just came across it the other day. I'm like, wow, that's insane. They can take your old one and just improve it too.

Easily.

I think one that I would use myself is give me a list— or not a list, but you can take an existing website. Let's say it's the Association of manufacturers, Northeast Minnesota or something. You, if you can grab a list, you can upload it and you can say, I want you to reference this list with, with publicly known information and highlight the top 10 prospects that might be interested in my product or service based on XYZ criteria. And have them sort through your, your list and actually help you rate the top most likely people to approach based on whatever criteria you can give it. Could be similar to like LinkedIn, it could be size of company, but it could also be associations with other companies they worked for. You can give it all sorts of strange criteria to help them sort a list of prospects for you.

Right. Right. That's a great one. And, you know, just directly with that is, you know, salesman's gonna be traveling on this path to get to this customer.

You know, what customers are within 25 miles of that highway or something like that. Just, ah, I love that. All right. We got to 10. Was, it was a little bit of a labor.

But we got there.

The possibilities are endless, but it, it's sometimes it's tough to Come up with 10. Yeah. Yeah. Which one of the 10 are you gonna use to help yourself find more clients?

I like the one about giving it criteria and saying come back with a prospect list. Yeah.

I think that's a really good one. Yeah. I like the, I like the idea of destination. Like I'm gonna be in, San Diego, California next week. Who are the top 20 clients that I might reach out to based on this criteria that look a lot like this other client that we have would be a great one, right?

It could look at your LinkedIn profile and your contact list and whatever else is out there on the internet that might be interesting.

Yeah, sure. But it certainly doesn't replace the old design or need to just reach out and call someone. Set up that appointment. It's not going to do all that for you yet.

That's what your virtual assistant's for, right?

Right, right. Yes. Well, Ken, what, what do you like to do for fun?

Well, for fun, uh, I'm a— I consider myself a pretty athletic person. I, I've, over the past few years, I've been playing a lot of tennis. Uh, I, in the past year and a half, I had 2 small surgeries, nothing serious, a knee and a shoulder. The parts were just out of warranty and needed a little bit of repair work. So I've been laying off of tennis recently, but I'm ready to get started with that again. We have a, a COVID dog. We got him just before COVID and oh my gosh, he's wonderful. I walk him every day for about an hour, and, and that's That's a great multitasking activity because I'm also making phone calls and on podcasts. So keeps me active and keeps me connected. I also have picked up sourdough bread making during COVID and a little bit of woodworking. I always did a little bit of those in the past, but I've gotten a little bit more serious on both of them. Wow.

It's quite a, quite an array of things you like to do there. That's awesome. Yeah. Um, we got a puppy recently as well. Not before, but right in the middle of COVID So that's been, that's been fun watching, watching that dog grow up. And, uh, she's great. Um, do you ever do pickleball? You're a tennis player, but have you ever played pickleball?

I've only done it once, and I had a great time with it. Uh, my wife doesn't move so well these days, and But boy, she played really well too. She actually was taught tennis by a squash player, a squash world— no, US professional. And so she has an interesting tennis stroke, but she did really well with pickleball.

I was really happy with it with her. Yeah, I heard the pickleball. I was talking to a guy the other day and he's a big pickleball player. He's been doing it. Quite a bit. He runs like pickleball tournaments in Nebraska, and he said that he ran into a grandson and a grandpa, like a generational pickleball teammates. And he was talking to the grandfather, and he said, this is the one sport I'm able to still compete equally with my grandson on the court.

Great.

Because you can play at any age, it's that particular sport very competitively. So that was interesting for me to hear. I've not really picked it up. I've been thinking about it. My wife and I are going to be empty nesters next year, and this might be a sport we try to jump into. I love sports you can age with, you know, not age out of, but age with.

And pickleball seems like one of them. For sure. And it looks like a lot of fun too.

A lot of fun. Fast game. Yeah. Well, Ken, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you if they want to learn more about, about you and what you do and get a chance to talk to you more directly?

The simplest way is just to send me an email. Ken@yourcmo.com. Or go to yourcmo.com and find the team and my, my phone number's in there and we'll drop the phone number into the show notes as well.

Yeah. And I would encourage anybody that's listening to this 2 or 3 weeks from now when we're filming it, I think that AI is changing so fast that some of those top 10 lists might be outdated by the time you get to hear this. And if they are, reach out and ask for our more recent top 10 list because this This is one of the things that we're gonna be studying and working at quite a bit over the next several weeks is trying to stay on top of the latest and greatest in AI for marketers. And so reach out and ask, and we'll send you our updated list as we get into it. Well, thank you again for being here. I really appreciate it. Appreciate your time.

It's been fun. Oh, I've enjoyed it very much, Joe, and I hope the audience got some value out of it. I know I enjoyed being here, and I've enjoyed your other podcasts with the other CMOs and other folks.

Appreciate it. Great. I appreciate that. And to our audience, thank you for listening. Do reach out to Ken for his latest and greatest AI tips as he's building them, and then consider downloading or, and subscribing to our podcast. I think my producer says subscribing to it is what we need people to do. If you enjoy listening to Ken and want to listen to more guests like him, please subscribe and And we'll keep you up to date and posted as we continue to interview more and more CMOs and other fractional professionals out there.

And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com, yourcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.