Activate an Emotional Connection with Your Customer
Anna Kostroun shares her insights on activating an emotional connection with your customer, why workflow is important for your business, and why it’s important to have complete empathy for the customer experience.
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>> Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, I'm joined by a special guest, Anna, how are you?
>> I am so well. Thank you for having me.
I'm very excited to be here.
>> Very excited to have you on the show.
We're going to talk about all of the cool things going on at New Rocket and
demand in your background and everything in between.
Starting off, what was your first job in demand?
>> First job in demand gen and I've told this story many times.
My first job in tech was actually removing staples from purchase orders at Dell
That was during my last year of college and it was my first foray into tech and
what led me to really know that that's where I wanted to be.
In terms of demand gen, I was at Dell for a very long time.
I would say one of the most challenging and first roles I had in demand gen was
down in the bowels of demand gen.
I ran a Markham ops team and if you don't know what that means,
it is we are the plumbing behind the email templates and
all of the technology that's used to go and market to folks.
So really getting to understand the technology stack and how all that works
together.
It was really difficult because you're not actually talking to customers to
understand what they're looking for, but you're building all these inner
workings.
And so it really gave me a good baseline for what works and what doesn't.
>> I love that and flash forward to today, tell us a little bit about your role
in new rocket.
>> I would love to.
So I'm the chief marketing officer at New Rocket and
New Rocket is the largest pure place service now partner.
And what that means is we do all of the implementations of service now work
flows.
And if it's okay, I'll give a very short background on service now.
Service now sells a beautiful SaaS platform where companies can build digital
workflows.
And if you don't know what a workflow is, there's a workflow behind literally
everything we do, whether we're talking about business or consumer activity.
So for example, if you work for a big company and
you need to procure a new computer for your work system, there's a workflow
behind that.
You have to put in that order, it goes to someone in IT,
that computer has to be requisitioned and sent to you.
That's a workflow.
There's also many customer service workflows, like when you buy something from
Amazon and have to return it.
And all of these different types of workflows revolve around a customer or
an employee experience.
And I like to think of this in even bigger terms, because I think anything
revolves around a great experience.
And I'm sure you've had a bad customer service experience.
That is the result of a badly implemented workflow or a workflow that's broken.
So ServiceNow sells this beautiful SaaS platform.
And we as their integration partner, we go and
help architect these workflows to form a beautiful system so
that companies can operate holistically and unite people, process and
technology.
So that people have great experiences with their workflows.
>> We truly do live in a workflow, workflow society.
I feel like environment is creating more so than anybody else.
>> It's kind of thinking about it this way has kind of broken my brain.
Because I think about it and I'm like, there's nothing that doesn't exist
without
a workflow.
I mean, there's people, process, technology behind everything.
And in getting ready for this discussion today,
I started thinking about an actual orchestra.
So when you have musicians sitting around and
they're playing their instruments and they're beautiful and
this music is coming together in this amazing moving way.
You need people, you have to have those people playing the instruments.
You've got to have the process.
So they've learned the music, they've done the auditions,
they know their first chair, they know how to read the music.
And then you have to have the technology.
And I don't think we think about technology in this way, but
it's not just the sound equipment or the things that are required to hear the
music.
There's also, think about the pandemic here.
Think about the technology we needed to just keep things like orchestras
together.
The communication that it took to do rehearsals and
continue to do this practice and make things move forward.
And I think about that like a symphony.
When a workflow works, it comes together in this beautifully
architected way that helps people and makes people happy.
>> Let's get to our first segment, The Trust Tree.
This is where we can go and feel honest and trusted and
you can share those deepest, darkest demand gen secrets.
>> Ooh, I love that.
>> All right, cool.
>> First off, you said a little bit about what new rocket does,
but who are your customers?
Who is the buying committee?
Who are the people signing the dotted line?
>> Definitely.
So our customers, we're focused on some specific industries, but
our customers are business customers, most likely service providers.
And let's see, I'll use a few examples.
There is a large streaming service that is one of our customers.
And they have to be able to provide a wonderful streaming experience to
anyone that wants to log in and watch their favorite show.
And so we have to make sure that not only the technology works,
but that they're able to access that and get the entertainment that they want.
Our customers have either invested in the service now platform, or they haven't
They may be using a competitor.
But really, where I think our value comes in is any customer that has invested
in
the service now platform and really isn't seeing the value of it.
So one of the things we hear a lot about is how IT processes aren't adopted.
New technology, like a big corporation can implement new technology and
no one uses it.
Hey, there's a great new expense report system.
Everybody's going to be excited and use it.
Nobody does and it fails.
And it's because we've failed to explain or help folks understand how it
benefits them or make them want to use it.
So that's really our customer base.
We're targeting folks that are already using service now, but
maybe not seeing the value of it.
Or customers that are looking for a way to really unite their processes across
their company.
>> And so what are the different personas that are in that buying committee?
Because it seems like there's a bunch of different folks that might potentially
be a stakeholder in this.
>> 100%.
We have practice areas that are in customer service management, in HR,
in IT.
And when you think about our buyers, the folks that are signing the bottom line
the folks that are influencing whether or not they want to do something like
this,
it really has to do with the processes and the things they're trying to solve.
So for example, we have practice leads in each of those areas,
give you a concrete example.
Our HR practice lead used to lead HR at a really big company.
So she's been in the trenches, she knows what it's like to be on the receiving
end
of a bad HR process.
And now she is a master of going and helping customers of service now and
customers that just want to improve their HR workflows to be able to do that.
And so it depends on the solution that you're looking for.
Now, since we have so many areas of expertise across those workflows,
as well as security and portal experience.
So we can design the front end.
So you have a beautiful portal to work with.
We're really going higher up in the company.
I mean, we're targeting the CIOs.
We're targeting the CMOs who want to have a great experience for their
customers.
We're targeting, depending on the level of solution that people are looking for
it's all over the place.
And I'm curious because you support customers of service now,
how does that affect your marketing?
100%.
It affects it in a huge way.
So service now is our one and only partner.
We don't form relationships with other partners outside of service now,
except for in alliances with other businesses to implement service now.
And so it's really important to us that service now is happy with our work.
We spend a lot of time marketing with service now and being very specific about
what we're good at.
How can you hit a home run with new rocket and service now?
So many of actually in our value proposition, it's with service now.
It's not on service now or using service now.
We go to market with service now.
So our partnership is very, very key.
And he kind of challenges with that sort of sort of a thing.
Because I know that being a partner, being a channel or being those sort of
things
can be, you know, has it, have its ups and has and can have its downs as well.
100%.
Having one partner means that you've got to really stay in lockstep,
both with their strategy, their communication with their overall goals.
And I mean, I've seen that kind of go off the rails here and there.
And it's only when communication has broken down.
It's only when we aren't super aligned on what service now wants to go and
achieve in the market.
And it's been a really great partnership thus far.
And so my company came together because it was actually an idea from
a investment firm in San Francisco out in your neck of the woods called
Griffin Investors.
And they saw this opportunity, the market's consolidating very quickly.
And they saw this opportunity to take these six world class service now,
service providers and form them into one company.
And it's amazing because all of our areas of expertise are different.
So we acquired a company that's an expert in security,
secops and risk and resilience.
We acquired a company that's amazing and portal and UX UI.
Then we have these companies that are expert in implementing workflows and
designing workflows and developing workflows.
Put those all together and you've got this really holistic amazing partner.
And service now is really finding a lot of value in that.
I got to text the other day that there was an all hands going on at service now
And they mentioned us more than any other partner.
So that was a really great reason to celebrate at our company.
Love that.
I'm curious, how do you structure your marketing work?
Right now, we are doing a lot of different things to see what works the best.
So as a new company, as a small but growing very quickly company,
we're not sure what works, what will work the best and connect with customers
in the best way.
My personal experience, you can do all of the email marketing.
You can do all the events.
You can do all of the things, all of the various marketing tactics that
everybody knows how to do.
But if you're not emotionally connecting with your prospects and customers in a
way that's meaningful to them,
you're not getting anywhere and you're not doing anything different than
anybody else.
And I use a, give you an example of that.
I hate the term awareness.
Like when we talk about brand, the term awareness always gets thrown over,
you create awareness.
I'm aware of a lot of things, but I don't care about them.
Like I've got to be able to care about something before that awareness turns
into something that's really a connector.
And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about a new rocket
is experience.
And we've got some really good examples of how experience wraps everything we
do.
And when you're talking about technology and you say the word experience,
people mostly jump to user interface, UX, UI, portal, digital.
So people think about UX and UI in terms of experience, but we totally believe
the experience wraps everything.
So we talked in the beginning about workflows and how those are important, not
only in business,
but think about something that you did personally.
What was something that you did, had a great experience with recently?
You're going to put me on the spot.
Of course.
What's what dude is it like business wise or?
Anything personal.
Great experience.
I would say.
I just had a really, I just had a really bad digital one earlier today, but I'm
thinking positive.
Talk about that one.
Okay. Think positive.
Well, I can say I can share the bad one.
I was, you know, we learned so much from our failures.
I was signing up, which is having new nanny first time.
And I was signing up on this nanny portal.
And I completed kind of like my side of the onboarding.
And it didn't have like a link to like send to the nanny for her to figure fill
out her part of the onboarding.
It just like I had to do it.
And so I'm sitting there like handing my phone like here, could you put in all
of your PII and like all this weird stuff.
It was so bizarre.
I like hadn't done that in like so long.
And I was like, I was like, that's a pretty, that's a pretty tough, pretty
tough one there.
That's no good.
That's a bad people process and experience experience.
I mean, that's a terrible failure.
I was going to use one that's more personal and this is one that is very
relevant to me right now because I have an event coming up this weekend that's
going to be not exaggerating when I say life changing for me.
So I think about all of these things that are experiences and how process and
people and technology have to come together for these wonderful things to be
architected and to happen.
And back in 2019 through 23 and me, the ancestry service, I found out that I
have a DNA dad and four step brothers that I am going to be meeting this week
for the very first time.
Yeah.
And that that came about through a conversation with my mother when I was in
first year of college and sitting down at her with the table and it wasn't
anything scandalous.
We were sitting down at the table eating lunch and looking at pictures and I
said, it's really funny that I look so much like you, but nothing like dad and
she said, well, that's because he's not your real dad.
Well, thank you and I'll never look at grilled cheese sandwiches the same way I
think of that every time I eat them.
But that kind of sent me on a journey and, you know, I started making phone
calls and again, not scandalous.
It was because she and my father had fertility troubles and there was a donor
and this was back in 1974. So now you know, hold, I am.
But there wasn't a lot of data until the internet started becoming something
that was useful.
And then fast forward to 2016 when 23 and me became something that people are
doing genetic testing through the mail and that's insane.
Who's heard of that?
But thanks to that technology and then the people processes behind that, the
genetic testing that happened at 23 and me, the app on my phone, when I was
sitting in a conference room getting ready to do a meeting and the little being
came up from 23 and me and it says you have new DNA relatives
and I was like, oh, it's probably third, fourth cousins. It always is. And I
clicked on it and I found my DNA dad.
And then 2020 happened and as we all know, no one got to travel and things kind
of came to a halt. But through that period of time, you know, I started
connecting with them and talking with them.
And this weekend, I am going to a family wedding to meet all of them for the
first time and man experience process technology people coming together in a
beautiful way. That is a symphony.
Indeed. What a story. Wow. That's remarkable.
Well, it's a bit of a cliffhanger because you don't know how this wedding is
going to go away.
I also found out that, so I grew up a preachers kid in Kansas, also found out
that I'm Jewish. So this is my first Jewish wedding. So we'll see what happens
here.
That's pretty red. I always talk about how marketing is meant to be remarkable,
which means you actually have to talk about it to somebody else or spur
conversation.
That's like what we want is like people remarking about our products and
services or how it made them feel or whatever it is. And boy, that is what it
was an incredible story.
And I think it's a good reminder too that so often we don't know the stories
that come from our customers. And I bet 23andMe, Ancestry.com, all those sort
of places are loving those type of things and they probably can't get enough of
them.
100%. And you asked the question a few minutes ago about the things that work.
I think there's a lot of talk and I read articles all the time about great
content marketing and connecting with our customers. But I think we do it on a
very kind of high level.
I think we need to get down into the particulars and really understand their
feelings and how these solutions are affecting them not only in a business
perspective, but personally as well.
I mean, I know that when these solutions can be implemented in the right way,
we're not only creating great experiences for employees at work.
We're creating more time for them to spend with their families.
We're creating more time for them to do things that are cool, like innovate new
products and services. And what's more valuable than that for a business?
I mean, we hire people for their brains not so that they can spend all day
doing these arduous processes that take forever.
Let's get to our next segment. The playbook 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 to just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are uncuttable budget items?
Uncuttable. Well, I have worked at a very, very large company and then kind of
a medium sized company and a very small company.
And I never ever get upset when the CFO comes to me and says, "Oh, we got to
cut your budget."
There are so many things and so many pivots that we can make to do great
marketing, no matter what the budget is.
The first one I said was absolutely connecting and it's putting our prospects
and customers into the shoes of the people that are really experiencing these
solutions.
And it's telling the stories in a really, really amazing way that helps get
that connection.
This answer would have been different six months ago or a year ago, but now
that people are finally starting to get back together,
right now the one uncuttable thing in my budget is events.
I want to get out there. I want to see people face to face and shake their hand
We're getting ready to be a sponsor of ServiceNow's flagship events called
Knowledge.
Those are coming up in the next few weeks.
And I think all of us are so excited.
The very best marketing tool we have is our people, our employees.
And if I have done my job and done it well, then all of our employees, now we
have over 500, can articulate the story of New Rocket and why it matters
and articulate this experience story as it relates to our clients and their
clients and employees.
If we are successful in connecting with people like that, especially in person,
those words that communication is the very best marketing we can do.
Having our people talk about us in person and on social, mostly in person right
now.
So yes, not cutting the event spend right now, absolutely critical.
The other thing I think is an uncuttable part is having a great web presence,
especially during the last couple of years.
And even beyond that, this is where people go.
People aren't looking for web pages that are talking about, this is how great
we are.
This is what we do.
They're looking for things that make them feel a certain way.
And if we can have our own clients talking about us on our website, wonderful.
Great case studies, great examples of where we have helped our customers.
So the website is really important.
And then driving traffic to that site through content syndication or through
various outreach.
I love to use all of our executive leadership team and our practice leads, all
of our smart people within our company for thought leadership.
Again, we hire people because of their brains.
We want them speaking and writing and talking about the things they're
passionate about because that's what gets people just connected and wanting to
talk to your company.
It's a great, great point.
And I love how you kind of folded those two things together because I think
so often the strategy for an event is about getting people together,
specifically getting your sales people out to talk to other people.
But when you do have a ton of people in your company, making sure that they're
on message is definitely not always the biggest kind of priority to people who
are, you know, go to the marketing team or to maybe the marketing team can be
on message. But other employees or if you're selling to engineers, you're engineers or if
you're selling to IT, you're IT or you're selling HR, you're HR people that are
there.
Having those people be on message for what you need to evangelize during that
period of time about new products and services or new or something that's
really cool.
Or like, oh, have you heard this one customer story? Like, we want every single
person in this entire conference to know that we just partnered with blank and
they we increase them for X, you know, like, if every single person comes out
of this knowing that, you know, this new customer
signed with us and we drove results, like, those are great, great, very
tactical outcomes.
I'm curious, like, how do you think about goals going into an event?
That's, that is a question that is asked of me a lot. I'm sure you know this.
It's always hard, depending on the kind of event, it's always hard to say what
's going to be our return on investment from this event.
And it really depends on the quality and the kind of conversations that are
being had.
It depends on the speaking sessions and how well we engage folks that want to
talk to us after the fact.
But I think from a marketing perspective, it's really capturing that
information of the folks that are interested in us and continuing those
conversations.
Like, we will be talking to as many prospective clients and clients existing at
knowledge to say, you know, what new rockets and new company now.
We've got expanded capabilities and relating these things to them through
stories of other clients that have had great success with new rocket.
And really taking that back and giving it back to our sellers and our
architects to say, let's have a more meaningful conversation with this client
and see what we can do for them.
Measuring ROI is something that is absolutely necessary.
And when you talk about uncuttable budget items, if you don't have an answer
for how are you going to measure the success of this event or this tactic or
this campaign, you're in trouble.
So, you know, I go into everything with here's how, first slide, here's how we
're going to measure success on this particular program.
And then it gives me a great framework for coming back and reporting results
after the fact.
Got any examples or any things that you've done from an events perspective that
was maybe something that you're like, hey, we want to go do this and it works
really well.
Yes, as a matter of fact.
And I had my doubts about it. It may sound horrible, but it worked out really,
really well.
I used to actually use to run global events at Dell for a period of time.
And it gave me a really good bird's eye view about the whole spectrum of
different things that can be done.
I mean, we did huge industry events.
Then we did small customer events and, you know, everything in between.
In my last role in my last company, one of the things that I put together was
our customer advisory board.
And it was meant to be a group of very senior CIOs, CEOs that would come
together and really help us steer the ship.
Like, we wanted their input to tell us, how do we more effectively grow this
company to better meet your needs?
And our CEO at the time was like, we wanted to be intense.
We wanted to be like two days of 500 slides and everybody around this boardroom
table.
And I'm like, that sounds absolutely terrible.
Nobody's going to want to do that.
And in the end, it was two days and it was lots of slides.
But instead of having us talk, we let our customers talk.
And they all presented, they presented things that we had helped them with.
But more importantly, they talked about things they didn't like about us.
That we could then go and work on and fix.
And it was my job to come back to that group and say, based on all of these
things that you told us from a high level
about how we can make this company more successful, we are implementing this,
this and this.
And they all like raise their hand to help us.
We had more customer participation in helping us do big things.
I mean, these people aren't getting paid to do this.
They're doing it because they care about the company enough and they work with
us enough that they want us to succeed.
So I thought that was a really amazing example of a reciprocal relationship
that made all the ships rise.
I mean, it was really incredible.
I could do an entire episode on customer advisory boards.
I love, I think it's like one of the most underutilized, impactful things.
I think it's so rad and being part of it is just a win-win-win all around.
It's networking, it's memorable, it's provides feedback to your product teams.
It gives you ideas for marketing, it helps with sales.
It's just like it is such a powerful thing.
Yeah, that's cool.
It really is.
It really is.
And when it's done right, I think that, you know, in the very beginning,
when we started reaching out to our best customers to get them involved,
I think there's a lot of companies asking for, hey, can be on our client
advisory board or things like that.
They have to be done well and they have to be done with the customer first
and complete empathy for the customer experience, again, with the word
experience.
But it had to be about what were our customers going to get out of this.
And we made sure to show them immediate results, immediate fruits of their
labor.
Like they put in this time and here's what they got.
And it was a great experience.
I highly, you know, would highly love to do that again here.
We will eventually.
Yeah, right.
On the, on the docket.
Yeah.
You mentioned web presence.
How do you view your website?
It's got work to be done.
Our website is very basic right now.
And that is, again, I mean, I mentioned a little bit ago in January,
we relaunched our company as new rocket.
So prior to that, we were six separate companies, all smaller companies,
that were brought together.
And we have an amazing chief creative officer who was actually the founder of
the original new rocket.
And when we came together in January, we did a lot of pre work coming up to
that date to say,
what are we going to name our new company?
What's it going to be?
And there was a lot of passion, a lot of excitement around the name new rocket,
both internally
and with our customers.
There's so much we can do with that.
And it's just, it's, it seems like it's an inspirational name.
It's something an aspirational name and something that people really clung on
to.
And so when we came together in January, we had a mandate of we have to have a
website. There has to be one.
We have to sunset all of the other ones in a very short span of time.
And so our chief creative officer, again, who's incredible,
did all of this work and we use Webflow platform, which is fantastic.
If you've ever done anything on Webflow, it's great.
We do as well.
It's great.
Very intuitive.
Very intuitive.
Webflow.
And yeah.
Oh, it's fantastic.
Yeah.
Great platform.
Anyway, we were able to architect a website that really highlights our core
solution areas and some of our great customer stories.
At the same time, it doesn't click down into the big buckets of the things that
we do.
For example, if you're looking at the IT solutions tab, it doesn't have IT
asset management.
It doesn't have some of the big solutions that we offer.
And that's really, really important because we want to lean on SEO.
We want to make sure that we're coming up when people are searching for us.
So we've got a lot of work to do there.
We've got a good foundation.
And that's what I've told folks at our company over and over.
We've laid a solid foundation.
Like the foundation of the house is there.
Now we just have to put up some more walls and make it a mansion.
I love it.
What a fun project to be part of.
That's quite the turning six brands into one.
And that's what I you're going to have.
You know, quite the experience you're from now looking back at the past two.
It's going to be pretty crazy.
Yeah.
It is.
I'm going to take a nap at that point.
Yeah, that's right.
Because it's been a while.
No, but it's been manic.
It's crazy.
And I never know from day to day what, you know, what I'm going to be doing
that day because
it's something different every day.
Blocking and tackling for lack of a better term.
But it's so much fun and it's so challenging.
We've got such an amazing opportunity in front of us.
And I'm just really excited for the future of this company.
I think we're going to just grow by leaps and bounds.
What about your most cuttable budget item or maybe something that you're not
going to be investing
in perhaps going forward as much?
Most cuttable.
So since we are focused primarily on generating leads with service now, I think
it would be
cold outreach.
I think that we're going to be doing much less cold outreach to, you know,
various wish list
prospects and focusing much more on organic growth on looking at.
I mean, think about the customer and prospect lists that came in with each of
these individual
companies.
For example, if you were a security risk and resilience customer from one of
the legacy
companies, you don't know that New Rocket now can help, you know, design
customer service
workflows and HR workflows and build you a beautiful portal.
So that cross-sell and organic growth is going to be a huge focus for us in the
near term
and probably in the next year.
So, you know, things cold outreach doing events with, you know, pure prospect
ing.
I think that's going to go to the wayside for a minute.
Okay, let's get to our next segment.
The dust up is where we talk about healthy tension.
The dust up.
Whether that's with your board, your sales team, your competitors or anyone
else.
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
Oh my gosh.
Dust up, I refer to dust ups as recognizing a closed door when you see one.
So, and I'm thankful for those closed doors.
So I have had some memorable dust ups.
One, now I can't name any names here or say where I was, but we were doing a
huge consulting
project with an external, a huge external consulting firm.
And I was responsible for the marketing portion of this consulting piece.
And I was in a boardroom with very, very high level executives and there had
been a slide put into my deck that I was unaware of.
And it turned out it was an org chart and my name was not on it.
It was my organization and I wasn't on it.
And I was looking at the faces of everyone in the room.
And one of them just turned white.
And I remember him saying, we weren't going to put this slide in the deck,
which caused me to turn around and see my team without me on it.
And so I just very calmly turned around, finished presenting the rest of the
slides,
walked out of the boardroom and started calling my network and saying, you know
what? I am really interested in new opportunities.
Oh my gosh.
Understanding closed doors is something that I think, especially people that
are new in
their career, it really sucks to come across a closed door.
Like, you know, layoffs or, you know, reorganizations where your jobs are
getting eliminated or
changes within your company, strategic direction change where you're going to
have to pivot and do something completely different.
If you can get to the point where you view those things, those closed doors as
an opportunity to go knock on another door.
Because chances are that door, you didn't want to go through there in the first
place.
You don't want that.
That was a favor.
So go and knock on the next one.
And I guarantee you're going to find something better than you had before.
So, you know, closed doors are a gift.
I'm curious.
Do you have a favorite campaign that you've had over the years?
A favorite campaign.
Oh my goodness.
There was a campaign that we did at Dell many years ago.
We actually won some kind of content marketing award for it.
But it was when the conversation about the future ready workforce was really
just kind
of coming into fruition.
And we spent like a month locked in a conference room talking about the
messaging behind this
campaign and what we were going to do.
And Dell was really one of the first and foremost out of the gate on getting
your workforce future
ready.
So the mobile workforce, work from anywhere.
And I remember when that, this was a long time ago, but it was a really new
idea.
And the future ready workforce campaign was something that was kind of
groundbreaking in the industry at the time.
Really sharing that idea that you can work from anywhere.
You can be productive from anywhere.
You can do anything you need to that you're, you've got in your home office
right here.
You can do it from Starbucks if you need to.
And that was the whole foundation for the campaign.
And it was highly successful.
We did really well with that.
There was another campaign that I wanted to mention.
And I can't remember now exactly when this was.
But we left it open and it was instead of saying, here's what we do.
It was leaving it open for the customer to fill in the blank.
So we can help you with this or be ready with this.
And it led to a lot of really good and unique banner ads, ebooks, things like
that.
It just, it wasn't something common that you'd always see.
It was more of a question and it led to a lot of clicks.
One thing I will mention is we did a really unsuccessful campaign one time, a
long time ago.
This is when I was first working at Dell and we sent out cheese wheels to a
whole bunch of customers as a door opener.
And you know, I don't know why.
Getting a giant block of cheese from a stranger.
I mean, that should be something that makes you incredibly happy.
It didn't.
We need to have like a.
To manage envisioner is audience pull of like, would you or would you not
accept a giant wheel of cheese?
I feel like that's like, don't be deterred by this.
I don't, I don't think that I am staunchly against.
I know I'm some very fortune pro cheese, but I am pro cheese also, but I'm
saying, I don't know.
I don't know if it was too big or maybe unsolicited cheese is frowned upon.
I don't know.
I don't know.
It was not successful.
It's going to be a new cast me in podcast unsolicited cheese.
I am, I'm, I'm, I'm for the campaign.
I think that even though it didn't go well, I appreciate the audacity and the m
oxie.
What kind of cheese was it?
It had a, it had a big wax thing on it.
I can't even remember.
Yeah, I guess this was like in the late 90s.
I guess well, depending.
Yeah, I, well, now they have like cheese, the month club and all sorts of crazy
stuff.
My thing is always that it's just too much.
You know, it's like, I don't need, you know, like a pound of cheese each week
to eat.
I just want like a tiny little like mouth sized amount, like every, every now
and then
and a few extra anyways.
You know, I think that getting things through the mail or through Amazon or
whatever, getting
things delivered to you has become much more widely accepted now.
I mean, think of the things that you order now that in the late 90s, nobody
would have
ordered through the mail or whatever.
I don't know.
I'm with you.
We've done a bunch of episodes recently on how important, like how, you know,
especially
in B2B and ABM, how much delivering things can, can, and direct mail is like,
you know,
a viable channel again for a lot of those reasons and all that stuff.
But yeah, I bring back, bring back cheese marketing.
Yeah.
We did one campaign where we actually sent superhero capes to folks when people
were in
offices and they loved them.
Personalized bobbleheads that looked like them.
So this was, you know, purely ABM.
We couldn't do this on a large scale, but found a great partner that would take
photos
and create bobbleheads of people that looked like them dressed as a superhero.
And so we'd send them a bobblehead of themselves.
They were, you know, the IT superhero and a cape.
And we got such a huge response from that.
It was incredible.
Okay.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick questions and quick answers.
Sure.
Just like how quickly you can talk to somebody on your website.
If you're using qualified, go to qualified.com to learn more.
It's quick and easy.
Just like these questions, go to qualified.com to learn more.
We love qualified.
They're the absolute best quick hits.
Anna, are you ready?
I am as ready as I will ever be.
Number one.
What is a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Oh, my goodness.
I play the piano poorly.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast, TV show that you've been recently
checking out?
Oh, my gosh.
Everything by Malcolm Gladwell.
I listen to revisionist history religiously.
I love Adam Grant's books.
I read everything that Stephen King has ever written.
Do you have a non-marketing hobby that maybe indirectly makes you a better
marketer?
Yes, I do.
It's very weird.
My family for many years has volunteered for a local charity, Williamson County
, Brown
Sanitz, the Sheriff's Department.
Every year at Halloween, we turn the historic jail into a haunted house and we
scare the
bejesus out of people over the month of October.
That's pretty good.
That is great.
You have more marketing lessons from the Freightland.
Exactly.
If you weren't in marketing, what do you think you'd be doing?
Probably decorating haunted houses and scaring people for a living.
Ever since I was little, I've liked to take mundane situations and make them as
fun and
funny as possible.
So one of the odd jobs I had when I was in college, I worked at Comedy Sports.
It was a little improv club that's over here.
Well, it's gone.
That's gone by the way, five years ago.
It was kind of like whose line is it anyway?
You just get up on stage and the audience yells things at you and you do them.
So probably something like that, something very spontaneous and creative would
be really
fun, wouldn't make me any money, but that's all right.
What's your best advice for a first-time CMO trying to figure out their debut?
Demand strategy.
Take risks.
Don't be afraid to do big things and have big ideas no matter how big your
company is.
Take risks.
Don't wait till you have all the information or you will get analysis paralysis
and you
will not succeed.
Jump in, do things, take action and be brave.
Anna, this has been wonderful having you on the show.
Thanks so much, everyone.
You can go to newrocket.com to learn more if you're a service.
Now customer, you should definitely be checking out a new rocket and any final
thoughts, anything
to plug?
Oh, thank you so much.
Yes, please hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to talk about anything marketing
or anything
having to do with growing up as a Preacher's Kid and a tiny town in Kansas.
Happy to talk about all those things, but it has been such a pleasure talking
to you.
Thank you so much, Ian.
Awesome.
Take care.
Bye.
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