Customer Satisfaction That Drives Word-of-Mouth
Sarah McAuley shares her insights into how customer satisfaction drives word-of-mouth, improving customer loyalty with impactful engagement, and creating customer champions.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to "Demand Gen Visionaries."
I'm Ian Faze on CEO of Caspian Studios,
and today we are joined by a special guest, Sarah.
How are you?
- I am wonderful.
Thanks so much for having me.
- Thanks so much for joining us today,
excited to learn about paperless parts
and all the cool stuff that y'all are doing
and how you go to market.
And of course, get some of those insights
from your background and career.
So let's get into it.
How did you first get started in demand?
- Wow, I don't think it was called demand
when I first got started in demand.
I joined a company a couple years out of college
to run the communications and investor relations team.
And they said, hey, we need someone to run marketing.
What does marketing really mean in that context?
Well, our sales team, we're kind of coming out of growth mode
and into scale mode, and we needed more leads to work.
So they said, Sarah, go figure it out.
I didn't have a fancy title like demand gen back then.
I think they just called it marketing.
- Indeed, but who are we without fancy titles?
And then flash forward to today,
tell us a little bit about your role at paperless parts.
- Sure, so paperless parts is a quoting
and estimating platform for custom part manufacturers.
These are the folks who are making everything
from the casing that holds a medical device
to one of our customers made a bracket
that holds the flag on the moon.
Special types of screws that hold night vision goggles
onto military helmets that you can literally shoot a bullet at
and they won't break.
So it's the backbone of American manufacturing building,
really anything that you can imagine
and put into a 3D model or a PDF print.
- And we're about to get real deep into that here
in the second and the first segment.
The trust tree, this is where we go and feel honest
and trusted, you can share those deepest, darkest demand,
gen and marketing secrets.
So we know a little bit about paperless parts.
Who are your all's customers?
- Yeah, so paperless parts serves custom part manufacturers.
These are guys who own job shops
and our primary users of our software
are the folks doing the quoting and estimating.
So our typical persona has been in the business
for 30 or 40 years.
These are guys who can look at a part and say,
hey, this is like a $35 part,
but then they have to go and do a bunch of math
and they're whipping out their Excel spreadsheets
and their highlighters and doing a bunch of stuff manually.
And what paperless parts wants to do is bring a layer
of automation to that process,
reduce some of the manual steps that they're taking
so that they can get quotes out the door faster,
more accurately, win more business and grow their business.
From a career perspective, an entire left turn
from where I spent the last five years,
I spent the last five years of my career doing demand gen,
targeting DevOps practitioners.
People who hate talking to people,
want to read everything online,
who hate the notion of being marketed to.
There's millions and millions of them
and they work in every industry under the sun.
Every company is a digital company now.
So every company has DevOps team or a cloud architect
or cloud ops team.
So to make such a stark turn
into the vertical SaaS industry really forced me
to rethink what demand gen meant.
Our personas here, I have a little secret,
our highest performing channel for demand gen
is direct mail, which is not something I ever thought
I would say in my career again.
But we have a direct mail, or I guess to be fancy,
we'd call it an account based marketing program,
but really it's a direct mail program.
And these guys that we're marketing to
are so appreciative of the thought that we've put into it
that they literally just pick up the phone
and call us to thank us.
So it's definitely a different world.
I love that.
That is a very different world.
Excited to dig into that.
And so how do they buy, what does that buying committee
look like, how many sort of decision makers are there?
- Yeah, sure.
So the biggest challenge we have
from a go-to-market perspective is fighting the status quo.
As I mentioned, most of our customers have been doing this
for decades and decades.
They've been doing it.
I joke that our biggest competition is Microsoft Excel
and a yellow highlighter.
It's not a scenario where folks are online
necessarily Googling, best quoting
and estimating platform for custom part job shops.
If they were, they'd find us because we do do that too.
But the digital component isn't necessarily front and center
from our demand-gen strategy because we really have to
educate the market that there is a different way to do that.
That's different than how it's been done for the past 30 years.
It's sort of set against a backdrop of some macro things
that are happening in the industry,
which is a lot of these job shops are starting to change hands.
Most of these shops are generational businesses.
And when someone decides time to retire,
they typically take one of three paths.
They pass the business along,
usually to a family member, a younger family member.
They might sell it to a P-firm or a larger shop
that's looking to roll up a bunch of shops.
Or they just say, you know what, I had a good run.
I'm gonna cash out, I'm gonna sell the business,
sell the equipment, sell the building and move to Florida.
And either the first two cases,
that's generally a pretty good entry point
for paperless parts because they're turning the business
over to a more digitally native kind of audience,
an audience that's been used to buying things on Amazon, right?
They're very comfortable with SaaS platforms to optimize,
literally all aspects of their lives.
So they start to look for,
where can I drive this efficiency into this business
that's operated pretty much the same for the past 10, 20, 30 years.
- And then how is your marketing org structured
to go after those folks?
- Really exciting week to be asking me that question.
I welcome two new team members.
- I know.
- One started today, the next one starting next week,
but we had a little kick off dinner last night.
So prior to me joining, we were a marketing team of two.
We had a kind of generalist who was mile wide,
inch deep on everything in a content marketer.
I was brought in specifically after paperless closed RB round,
which was led by OpenView,
specifically to scale to go to market function.
We were doubling the size of the sales organization.
We needed to make sure that the marketing team
was gonna grow and support that growth
from a top of the funnel perspective.
I've since hired someone to lead our field marketing organization
and the all important marketing ops function,
the one person in my life that I cannot live without.
That's the person that started today.
So today is a wonderful day for me at paperless parts.
- It is true.
RevOps is the thing that makes the marketing world go round.
You mentioned that the sales team grew a bunch.
The marketing teams grown a little bit,
especially after raising round.
And obviously, in startup land, you have a time horizon of,
hey, we need to do X in this amount of time
and you need to be smart with your dollars,
but you also need to spend them.
How do you think about that process of going into that?
- For perspective, I just joined paperless
about three months ago.
First order of business was just doing some blocking
and tackling around program health
and actually thinking about when you're a startup
and a one man band, most of what you're doing
is reactive, so this guy wants to go to a show
or the CEO has an idea or you're launching a new website,
but there's a shift that happens when you go from that mode
into scale mode where you have to start thinking programmatically.
So even just defining what those programs looked like
and giving the team and the broader organizations
some swim lanes into how we should think about
what we're doing from a marketing perspective
is really important because it empowered the team
to be very clear, but we weren't gonna do
and that allowed us to go and get the work done
where we saw the highest level of opportunity.
So really without knowing a whole lot about our business
and customers yet, still in the on ramping period,
there's just some technical web enhancement activity
that anybody with some experience could kind of audit
the website and put a program in place to get us
from where we are today to a more aggressive traffic
and conversion number, things like looking at what percentage
of our web traffic was branded search
and high buyer intent type search.
So we did some optimization on that front.
We hired an onboarded a PR agency.
Again, we are fighting against the status quo.
So getting just that top of the funnel awareness
around paperless parts and who we are
and what we're all about was certainly first and foremost.
And then because this industry is so highly personalized
and coming out of COVID has been a breath of fresh air
that we can now meet and convene in person.
These aren't guys that are sitting at their desks
in front of computers, 10 hours a day.
Oftentimes they're walking the shop floor,
they're meeting with customers,
they're meeting with partners.
So the opportunity to get back out into the field
and bring some more in-person activity into the mix
and put some concerted effort around that,
really breathe some life into our demand-to-an activity.
- Isn't that the tricky part?
It's the last thing that they wanna do
in the given day is deal with this.
But you're like, but if you deal with this,
now you don't have to deal with all that other stuff
in the future, which is I know that you don't wanna do.
- Yeah, and change is hard for anyone.
It's one thing if you're trying to argue,
switch from someone else's platform to our platform,
that you at least have a framework for understanding
what a switch or a change in behavior would entail.
But when you walk into these shops and you say,
"You know this thing that you've been doing for 30 years,
we don't think you should do it that way anymore."
It's a bigger hill to climb.
- So you mentioned a little bit of the demand piece to this.
I'm curious, you have this essentially non-existent demand
but very existent pain that all these folks are having, right?
How do you create demand?
- Yeah, it sounds so cliche that I hate to even lead with it.
We're really going deep into understanding
your customer personas and the pain points.
People are pretty skeptical when they first learn
about paperless parts.
And you ask everyone to rate their quoting process
on a scale of one to 10 and how's it going?
And most people will give you like a six.
Nobody's like, "Yeah, I'm really crushing it.
It's amazing."
But it's also passable.
But as soon as you introduce the concept
of what we're doing and show them a little bit how it works,
then that six becomes a two.
They realize how bad their process actually has been
and how much better it could be.
So really it's just cracking that first moment of,
man, this is something that's really gonna change my life.
Like I can afford to go on vacation.
That's a very literal thing with our customers.
Like a lot of these shops only have one or two estimators
or the owner themselves is doing all the estimations.
They literally don't go on vacation
because they can't risk not getting a quote turned around
in time.
We have this amazing thing here.
It's one of the strongest parts of our culture is
we have a customer love Slack channel.
And when our customers send us notes,
we screenshot it and share it with the whole company.
Literally these emails come in all the time
and it's really just amazing to see.
- Any other notes on marketing org structure
or demand strategy before we get into the playbook?
- Yeah, I think just on the org structure side,
like regardless of names and boxes and lines,
I've managed teams of varying structures.
I've had marketing ops report to marketing.
I've had marketing ops report to a centralized bus ops function.
I've had geographically aligned field marketing teams
working with geographically aligned sales organizations.
I don't think any of that really matters.
You're gonna evolve your organization a hundred times
if you're there long enough.
But what I think is critical from an alignment
and organization perspective and where I see a lot of conflict
come up is when people are playing with different sets of data.
So regardless of boxes and lines,
getting alignment around what we're measuring,
what it means, what's the source data,
how are we maintaining the integrity of that data structure?
It's hard and it's boring and it's tedious.
But if you don't have that,
it doesn't really matter how you organize
'cause there's gonna be a ton of conflict.
- Yeah, I mean, similarly in the cliche realm,
it truly is like if you're speaking different language, right?
If you're not all on the same page,
if you don't agree with whatever,
there's no hope to ever figure the rest out.
- Well, and there's also an agreement that needs to have
a handshake between sales and customer success
and finance around what are the right metrics.
I remember kind of earlier in my career,
going back to that time,
I sort of had a solution looking for a problem.
I ran some of the best marketing campaigns of my career.
I had a cover story and Harvard Business Review
and I had an online maturity assessment tool
that people were filling out and capturing leads
and it was the cornerstone content
of our annual user conference.
It was multi-channel, it was compelling, it looked amazing,
it was awesome.
People are giving me high five left and right
for like how well executed it was.
And I threw up a scorecard and it was green, green, green,
green, around all the metrics that we set out
when we launched this.
The only problem was none of it was translating into sales.
We're getting going, but they never really got past
a certain stage in the sales pipeline.
It felt empty to celebrate the victory of a green marketing
scorecard if there's no sales that come out the other end.
Or really having accountability through the funnel,
like all the way to closed one deals
and you can't declare victory until there's that alignment
from the moment a lead comes into your system
to the day they become a customer.
And ideally to the day they renew and expand as a customer.
- I definitely agree with everything that you just said,
but I am so curious like why, if it was that good of a campaign
and you felt strongly that it was good,
why didn't it translate to sales in that instance?
- It was for a clean tech company.
In theory, everybody wants to care
and everybody wants to make smart and responsible decisions.
We had very credible experts saying,
not only should you care because it's the right thing,
but here's what you should care about
because it's gonna have a great bottom line impact
on your business.
But again, it goes back to understanding your customers.
These are people that have a list of my along of things
they must do, the things I would like to do,
rarely there's not enough hours in the day for a lot of folks.
So short of a regulatory requirement to start reporting
on some of these things or a price on carbon
or short of some macro driver that was going to change
what we were doing from like,
that's a nice responsible thing to do to,
if I don't do this, I'm going to get fired
and my company is going to lose a bunch of money
and we're gonna go out of business.
I think we just overestimated our customers' appetites.
It's something that they were intellectually curious about
that I think they knew was the right thing,
but was just never gonna bubble up to that level of,
I have to get this done, I have to get this done this quarter
and I have to get this done
instead of doing the other 10 things
that are also on my list to do.
- That's so fascinating.
From where you were as a stage,
it didn't seem like if it was a fit.
If your biggest thing was creating demand
from nice to have to need to have, it's like you failed there.
If your criteria, when you set it out was to say,
I want to go from off the slide to on the slide
in consideration, right?
It's like you would have crushed all those goals.
You'd be like, everybody knows who we are now.
We're like household name.
We made some of the people we're talking about
and they actually liked the tool
and like they know who we are now.
That's so crazy.
What an interesting case study.
Okay, let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
This is where you open up that playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
- You play to win the game.
- Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play it, it just play it.
- We already know one of your uncutable budget items
'cause you teased it earlier.
But what are your three channels or tactics
that are your uncutable budget items?
- So we already talked about our direct mail program
is uncutable, which is just hilarious to me.
And actually I was evaluating different direct mail platforms
because again, this isn't 1990s direct mail.
This is attached to campaigns and measuring ROI
and looking at claim rates and direct mail now
was very different than it was before.
But I was looking at different direct mail platforms
and I posted on LinkedIn, I said, "Hey, LinkedIn world,
"I'm in all my marketing buddies.
"I'm evaluating these couple direct mail platforms.
"Give me this kitty, good better ugly
"on all these different platforms."
And got a lot of really helpful responses.
But one person commented,
basically direct mail, so 1990s,
scrap it and focus on your content strategy
and thought leadership.
And I just sort of laughed when I saw that comment
because I think it's probably a pretty common trap
that marketers fall into is the notion
of like what worked at my last company is gonna work here
and if you're not starting with who your customers are
and where they're consuming information,
if you're starting with those assumptions
and not pressure testing them and validating them,
you might as well be guessing.
So that made me chuckle.
Our second channel that we ran an experiment around,
this is where data will tell you a story
but you're not necessarily sure
it's telling you the right story.
So we used to do a bit of print and digital advertising
with the industry trades, do like third party webinars
with them and go to their events and things like that.
And we weren't really seeing a ton of campaign ROI.
We weren't seeing the huge registration numbers
or click throughs or anything of that nature.
So we pulled back pretty considerably on the spend
that we were investing in those channels
and something interesting happened
are online demo requests numbers started plummeting.
So those programs weren't working the way we thought they were.
They weren't directly converting to,
from like I registered for this webinar
and now I'm interested in you and now please sell me something
but they were just seeing our name
and our value proposition and again,
the audience isn't sitting at their computers a ton,
isn't sitting and watching webinars
over their lunch breaks
but they were seeing the promotions for the different content
and they're like, oh, that looks interesting.
Let me jump online quick
and jump straight to the personalized demo.
So that's an area that we literally did cut in Q2
before I got here, but now we've added back in
and we're seeing those numbers start to climb.
So that would be net positive.
And then the third is the in-person events
and it's such an integral part of this industry
where face to face credibility really matters.
And that might change
as we see some of the generational shifts
and more comfort, self-educating through the buying process
online through technical content,
through a free trial experience or something like that.
But we just haven't seen that sort of tipping point yet.
- I was talking to our marketing team earlier today
and we were talking about the idea of the construct
of webinars and it's this idea of,
yeah, podcasting of videos,
you have webinars, all these different things
and it's so funny how in-person events
same sort of way where it's like,
I think so much of part of that experience
of whatever way that you learn mentally would be like,
okay, this is how I learn new information.
Like I go to a webinar once a week
and that's like my personal development,
or I go to this trade show once a year
and I learn everything that everyone's been doing
and then I take that back to the business
and I work on that in December or whatever,
implement it for the new year
and like I'm done learning for the rest of the year
or whatever that thing is,
or just how do you learn you're trying to find
what's like, where are their watering holes,
where are they spending time
and then what are they doing
when they're spending time there?
Why are they going to trade shows?
I just think it's so fascinating to hear that people
who are using trade shows in that way,
whereas we hear other marketers talking about
how they're cutting investment in trade shows
in big trade shows or certain types of trade shows.
So yeah, it's just fascinating.
- You know, my previous lives doing the big cloud shows,
the AWS re-invents that are so big and so noisy,
thousands and thousands of people
and you collect literally thousands of leads.
I think we did like 9,000 or 10,000 leads.
At the last re-invent, I went to,
and really only a handful of them
are qualified prospective customers.
For the manufacturing industry,
we just got back from IMTS,
which is comparable in size to re-invented
60 to 80,000 people depending on pre-COVID
or post-COVID kind of metrics.
Booth weren't even giving out swag.
There wasn't that same culture of why you go to this event.
Actually, I mean, a lot of these shops go to these events,
literally to buy physical equipment,
the multi-million dollar machines that are going to go land.
They literally purchased them,
one of our customers bought $9 million
worth of equipment on the show floor.
So that's, they're going with a,
I've got this objective, I need to get this stuff done.
Pivoting a little bit, trade shows and events in general,
they're a channel, right?
They're an avenue to get your message out.
I would say one of the things that's been critical
for paperless parts, and is critical for any kind of new
category or new paradigm type company,
is how do you operationalize your customer evangelists
in the most effective way possible?
As I mentioned, we have a customer love Slack channel.
Our customers genuinely love us
and love talking about us and love telling stories
about how we helped them transform their business.
I just think our customers are way better salespeople for us
than we are.
And they come to the table with so much credibility
and real world experience around what it's like
to change the way you've been operating.
So I look for different ways to incentivize that behavior.
And again, we don't actually really need to incentivize
our customers to talk about us,
generally speaking, they're super happy to.
Although we do have some customers who are like,
I'll totally be a reference for you,
but not for any other shops in my home state.
- Oh, it's just gonna say, yeah.
- I'm in Texas, I'll talk to any shop in California
you want me to, or vice versa.
But even that's sort of fewer and farther between.
They're pretty tight knit community,
and they're sort of thinking the tide that's gonna float
the American manufacturing industry
versus getting that little edge.
But so that's been a big focus of our team.
From a content perspective,
from a content distribution and channel perspective
to events, we were literally just talking today about,
do you think you could just incentivize a couple customers
to come and like stand and talk to people?
- Yeah, I mean, that is so weird
having that same conversation also earlier today.
Just like, how do you remove friction
to accelerate your word of mouth?
I'm working on a blog post to something to the effect of
Q4 is budget season, which means it's referral season, right?
- Yep.
- Everyone is asking their friends,
like what the heck did you do this year?
What software are you using for this?
What thing are you, you know, like,
it's like referral seasons here.
Like how do I get as many of my customers out there
as referral agents as possible and remove that barrier?
Because like the truth is, yeah,
if you create an awesome like little case study
I could put it on the website.
You know, you could go to castmeensudios.com,
you could check that out.
It's like, how do you do that stuff?
You know, the idea like the brand ambassador,
there needs to be like a new version of that.
If anyone has anyone who's listening
as a really good like brand ambassador program,
let me know, but that stuff is just so hard to figure out.
- I'll tell you the playbook we kind of lifted.
So are you familiar with the company called Service Titan?
- Yep. Mm-hmm.
- So Service Titan has a vertical-sattent company.
- A lot of podcasts.
- A lot of podcasts or vertical-sattent company
similar to paperless parts or toast or the companies
that are really trying to take a vertical-centric view
and become sort of the platform of record
for a given community.
And Service Titan has a very well-defined
and very specific customer referral program
where they actually incentivize their customers.
You know, if they refer a customer, they take a demo,
then the referring customer gets financial incentive
if that customer, or that prospect then signs,
they'll get another financial incentive
and they've run the numbers.
This approach lowers their customer acquisition costs.
It helps them grow faster and it cuts their sales cycle time.
So we've actually just implemented a very similar program
for paperless parts.
Little too early to tell if it's gonna be the linchpin
like it was for Service Titan.
And I have to give a shout out and a thank you
to Ross Biesman who was on our board
and works for Service Titan.
So really helped us sort of think through the finer points
and we're a little bit hesitant to go down this path
because our customers are almost always just willing
to talk about us anyway, right?
So it's like, so why would you pay them, right?
So if they're willing to talk about you,
why would you pay them?
And the answer we came back to was pretty simple,
which is number one, you should reward
and recognize your evangelists,
whether it's paid or an appreciation gift
or a thank you note or whatever.
Like the bare minimum is that you need to programatize
appreciating your customer ambassadors.
The second piece is everybody has day jobs.
And so it's like cool, they'll totally talk to you
or talk about you, but there's a difference
between saying, hey, like I just deployed this thing
and it's really cool when it comes up in conversation
and taking that proactive measure to let me introduce you
to my friends at Paperless Parts, they changed my life
and you should talk to them.
Like that's a different kind of motion.
And the third piece is that
like everything else in marketing,
you wanna be able to track and measure what's working
and what's not working.
And if you're just sort of like throwing it out to the wind
of, hey guys, talk us up, we really appreciate it,
do us solid, then you don't really understand
how well your brand champions are advocating for you
on your behalf.
And I think both with service Titan and Paperless,
a relatively small financial incentive,
like our customers, they spend millions of dollars
on raw materials, metal, machinery, labor,
their software budget, the money they have to spend
on software is like 1%, 2%, right?
So if we can give them away to offset some of that cost,
it just makes the resistance to adopting a new solution
that much lower and then the theory goes.
Once they've adopted it and they see how well it's working,
then they're gonna get the value
and they're gonna stick with it.
Like you can waste way more money chasing leads
that are outside of your ideal customer profile
through passive channels, like advertising or webinars
or you've got BDRs hitting the phones,
trying to get through, trying to get the qualification.
If you can shortcut that process
by throwing someone a couple hundred bucks, why not?
I mean, it's good for them.
It's good for the prospect that's coming into the fold
that's getting a solution that genuinely has value.
If you had a crappy product,
nobody's gonna be willing to do that.
I don't care how much you pay them
because the thing people care more about the money
is their reputation, right?
So they're not gonna be shilling a bad product on your behalf.
- I heard something really interesting
while back advice from, so shout out Matt Jafiro,
the CMO of Vapor.io who said this to me,
where he was like, Ian, at the end of the day,
anyone that I know personally,
if they're to send me an email completely cold,
that's just like, hey, we use this product.
I don't know if you're ever gonna look for anything like this,
but like if you do, you should check them out.
He's like, I will always look at it.
Like always.
If it's someone that I actually know and trust,
that's the thing about referrals is like,
even if you're not in consideration at that exact moment,
you now become in consideration.
- In consideration.
- You're like, I'm gonna look at it.
- Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
We did a whole episode with Jason from metadata
talking about pay demos and how well those worked for them.
So I mean, I think that this is this sort of idea,
is like we need to figure out how to maximize
the marketing dollars that we're spending.
If that means literally paying people to demo our stuff,
we're paying other people to get people to demo our stuff.
It's all part of the calculation.
But I think those are the type of investments that like,
you're not gonna see massive outsized results
from that.
But like you said, you can really stack up wins.
And if that's what your targets are at that moment in time
is to like stack up wins,
then that's what you need to do.
- Yeah, for sure.
- Next segment here, the desktop,
where we talk about healthy tension,
but if that's with your border sales teams,
your competitor, anyone else,
have you ever had a memorable desktop, Sarah?
- Oh, too many to count.
One of my more memorable dustups was,
was a sign of immaturity on my part.
And that is when you are so tempted to hit reply all,
that is just the biggest mistake you can make,
especially if you're past kind of alignment with sales
and what matters and what's real versus what are kind
of the vanity metrics that you put on display
just to make everyone think you deserve your bonus.
So I had a situation where a particular sales leader
was not fond of Salesforce
and putting things in Salesforce,
which made it incredibly difficult to report
on the efficacy of the programs that we were running.
And someone on my team was gonna take the fall for it.
The region was under producing,
the data wasn't in Salesforce.
And there was a healthy debate to be had there.
But instead of having the healthy debate,
we immediately downshifted into the,
you're not doing your job and you're not doing your job.
And all trust was gone and any interest
of actually figuring out a solution was quickly replaced
with, "He's a four letter word and she's a pain in the,
you know what?"
And it really just was not my finest moment.
It didn't help that this person was in dramatically
different geography when time zones were not super conducive
to just jumping on the phone.
I had a boss pretty early in my career
who'd actually be very disappointed to hear the story
because he was a proctor and gamble trained marketer.
And so in addition to training the team
on our actual go-to-market and marketing strategies,
whatever, he led the mini proctor and gamble marketing MBA course
for our team of marketers.
And there were two trainings in particular that he read
that really stuck with me,
even though in this particular anecdote,
I ignored both of them.
One of them was yes, no, maybe training.
And it was all about learning when to say yes
and when to say no and when to say maybe
and how to have those productive conversations.
And one was actually a communications training.
And it was like, if you were agreeing with someone,
a short email is usually a pretty good way to communicate that.
If you are disagreeing with someone,
pick up the goddamn phone, have a conversation or better yet
if you can get face to face in an office.
And man, I just threw both of those lessons
right out the window.
And my boss at the time called me on it.
We said, I'm gonna be really straight with you.
You came across as incredibly immature
in this conversation and I don't think you did
yourself any favors.
And it was such kind of an eye opening kind of moment
in my career.
I was sort of in that pivot point between like middle manager
and senior manager.
It was a big swing and a mess
that definitely kind of stuck with me.
- Okay, let's get to our last segment here.
Quick hits.
It's a quick question to quick cancers.
Just like how quickly,
qualify at helps companies generate pipeline faster
to happen to your greatest asset,
your website to identify your most valuable visitors
and instantly start sales conversations.
Quick and easy.
Just like these questions.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
We love qualified.
They're the best.
Been with us since the very beginning of time.
Go to qualified.com to learn more Sarah.
Quick hits, are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- What is a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
- I joke that my hidden talent is that I speak many languages.
Someone asked me what my hidden talent was and I said,
oh, I actually speak many languages.
And they were like, oh, French, German, Spanish.
And I was like, no, I speak Tim.
I speak David.
I speak Fielder.
I speak Busy.
I speak Jenny.
And I think that the ability to engage
with a lot of different type of personalities
to mirror their communication style,
to proactively listen and kind of synthesize.
I became a little bit known as what this person means to say
is translator in my company when different personalities
had to get in a room.
And they were known for not having
great or effective communication styles.
They would often sort of throw me in the room
and say go translate for him and come out with an answer.
So that's my hidden talent.
- Great answer.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast, or TV show
that you've been checking on recently?
- My favorite podcast is The Moth.
I am devouring a lot of Kate Quinn historical fiction lately.
I recently started coming back into the office.
I now have an hour commute where it has afforded me
the opportunity to start reading again
because I have three little kids at home.
So the notion of reading for pleasure was a fictitious thing
I only dreamed of for a few years.
But now that I've got an hour on a train or a ferry to enjoy,
I've rediscovered my passion for historical fiction.
- What advice would you give to a first time CMOs
trying to figure out their demand strategy?
Go build your personal board of directors.
- Totally.
- It's a little bit different than go find your team of mentors
in that when you think about building out
a board of directors for a company,
you're not looking for like that silver bullet person
who like knows everything and does everything.
You're looking for that one person
who does something really great that your company needs
and your company needs to be great at.
And you build a team of like five or six
or however many kind of directors you have on your board.
And I think when you take that same approach
to building your personal board of directors,
especially as a first time CMO,
then you start to think about who's the best leader right now
and I want that person on my board of directors.
It doesn't even have to be a marketer.
It's just who's the best leader?
Who's the best data geek I know
and what are the tools that that person's using
and what are the questions that person asks
every time they see a slide of metrics?
Who can I tap for that?
So I think if you're deliberate about it
and you're really looking critically
at the people in your network
and what they're really great at,
then sort of piece together.
That can be a really powerful asset in your corner.
- I love it.
Sarah, this has been awesome chatting with you
for listeners, you can go to paperlessparts.com
to learn more, check out their marketing.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- This has been awesome.
I guess one final thing to plug.
If anyone's looking for a job, I'm hiring,
even if you don't see it listed on the website,
this company is growing like fire
and I need great marketers to join the team.
Actually, we need great people across functions.
So check out our career site and come join the team
'cause we're building a pretty amazing company
that's a lot of fun to work at.
- Fantastic.
Thanks again for joining and we'll talk soon.
- Sounds great. Thank you so much.
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