The Proverbial Question of ROI
Learn from Stephen Gold, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer (Previous) at SparkCognition about finding success within a long sales cycle.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Casping Studios,
and I am joined by a special guest.
Steven, how are you?
- I'm doing fantastic, Ian Franks.
- Excited to have you on the show.
We're gonna chat marketing.
We're gonna chat spark cognition,
everything in between, your background,
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First question, Steven, who is your first shop marketing?
- Yeah, you know, it's a bit of a loaded question
because you would think that the title
would somehow resemble marketing, but I would tell you,
coming out of grad school,
I started a business in retail.
And I think every marketer at some point
should spend a stint in retail,
'cause it's an amazing vertical, amazing environment.
You're working with the public,
and pretty much everything you're doing
is really thinking about your customer,
the value you provide, how to create a compelling story,
how to engage, how to meet them where they are.
And so why my title itself wasn't marketing,
pretty much everything I did every day
surrounded, you know, traditional marketing aspects.
- And flash forward to today,
it tells us what it means to be not just see 'em though,
but chief sales marketing officer at Spark Ignition.
- Yeah, it's, you know, it's so funny because,
you know, sales and marketing are so conflicted.
You know, one has a, you know,
a nice orientation on the here and now,
and get the deal done.
And the other is gotta be looking forward
to the next prospect, to the next customer,
you know, to the position, to the narrative, to the message.
And it's interesting in that straddling the two,
you find that balance, you find that purpose.
There's an advantage because you see the results
of the investment and the effort on the marketing side,
as it kind of flows, you know, downstream into sales.
You see from a sales point of view,
the type of support that marketing can provide
and the benefit it has.
I love the straddled position between the two.
- You said it exactly how I always think about it,
which is sales is responsible for closing the deal.
Like, that is the job.
And marketing is responsible for all of the other stuff
to get the deal to that standpoint.
In addition to hopefully moving the deal,
you know, along with the help of the sales rep.
And I think it's so funny because so many people
have built these sales organizations
that have all these different moving parts
that have nothing to do with closing deals.
And I find that kind of funny.
- It is.
And I think it depends, at least in part on industry,
it depends on part on the organizational maturity.
Younger organization, scrappy organizations,
you're gonna find sellers doing a lot of different roles
from mature organizations, big companies.
They're very focused on, you know,
probably that one activity in the process.
And so I've spent time on both sides.
I've spent time in the valley and startups.
And you have spent time in New York with IBM
and two different ways of looking at what you just talked about.
You know, what's the job?
Neither one, by the way, right, both of them correct, right?
It just depends where that organization is in their journey.
- I definitely agree with that.
I also, I would push back a little bit
on sort of like both ways correct.
I think that there are certain responsibilities
and like specifically I'm thinking about like outbound,
for example, I think outbound is like
specifically a marketing function.
I don't think it's a sales function,
but you have sellers doing outbound, which is fine.
But you can put it wherever you want.
You can have the people in sales or whatever.
But like that is marketing.
Like those people are creating demand for the product, right?
Like you can have sellers doing it,
but that is a marketing, that is what marketing is.
- There's no question.
And I mean, you certainly pull people in more directions
when you're an evolving organization,
a smaller startup, a growth business.
And I think the difference I would draw is one of process
in that that smaller company,
you don't have as much process.
You don't need as much process.
You have 70, 80, 90, 100, 200, 300 people.
Coording that activity is very different
than in a large enterprise where you have two, three,
four hundred thousand people.
And so you're right though.
I mean, the activity you do may have a different label.
Marketing is still marketing and sales is still sales.
And if you take a marketer and you stick them in an event
and they're talking to a customer about the offering
and asking about their need, well, that's sales.
- Yeah, good point.
Okay, let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree.
This is where we go and feel honest and trusted.
You can share this deepest, darkest pipeline secrets.
Tell us a little bit about what does Spark cognition do
and who are your customers?
- Yeah, we design, develop and deliver AI applications
for the industrial sector.
So as a consumer, we're very much aware
that AI is all around us.
We see it in forms of autonomous driving
and chatbops and search engines and virtual assistance.
It's not quite as obvious to most people
how AI is playing a pivotal role in industry.
And so what we do is we help organizations
using the data that they have in all forms,
recognize when an asset is gonna fail.
Help them understand the best course of action to take
to address a problem.
Help ensure that workers are kept safe
and come back the next day.
Something as simple as helping them retain knowledge
is people age out and retire from the business.
These are all really good problems to solve with AI
and that's exactly what Spark cognition does.
- I'll share some stats.
147,000 cameras under contract with Spark cognition
visual AI advisor.
9.6 gigawatts renewable energy capacity enabled
by Spark cognition industrial AI suite.
I mean, some real world impact AI
solving for your customers.
- Yeah, it's a great point that these are not science experiments.
AI has been around for a long time.
It's been around almost 70 years now.
And I think over the course of the last couple of years
as organizations have wrestled to the ground,
the big data problem has, as they've gone through various
proof of concepts and pilots,
you know, we're now moving into that next phase
where people are actually incorporating this technology
into their everyday business, their everyday practice,
their everyday process.
And it's important.
I mean, we don't have enough people
to maintain the level of productivity we need.
And so technology is a great place to turn to augment it.
- Who's in that buying committee?
Obviously, these industries are so different
with energy manufacturing, government, education,
retail, transportation.
I mean, yeah, I imagine completely different buyers
of what do these committees look like?
- Yeah, I mean, the way probably to look across
that are these industries, you know,
we're often engaged certainly with senior leadership,
with the C-suite, not unusual to find
that this is a CEO-led initiative.
There's a tremendous amount of emphasis
from the board and the community on adoption
of these types of technologies.
You're gonna see the, you know, certainly the COO,
the CIO, the CTO, you know, often evolve.
But really where I think the rubber meets the road
is line of business.
It's solving a problem.
It's not about IT adding another asset,
another software solution.
It's really about the people and charge of the business.
In a manufacturing environment,
it's a plant manager or vice president of operations,
you know, in a school.
It's gonna be a superintendant or the board itself.
When you look in oil and gas, again,
depending whether it's upstream, midstream or downstream,
the titles may be different,
but each of the individuals we work with
are running the business,
they're trying to solve a problem,
they're trying to move faster, be more productive.
And so much of what we do is actually centered around
the domain itself and not the technology.
We don't lead with, you know,
talking about machine learning and natural language.
We lead with, you know,
how do we help you get more out of an asset,
like a pump or a motor or a centrifugal asset?
- Yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, not to go super deep into this,
but the areas of waste that we can start to look at
with AI, you know.
What I was talking about this day or time,
I just put in new stuff in our garden.
And I was running the lines to automate, right?
So that we had on after on the,
do the sprinklers or whatever.
You know, and you just think of like,
these are, you know, pretty dumb sensors.
There's no sensors in the ones that I put in right now, right?
But, you know, you just think of, you know,
this times, obviously the scale of
types of customers that you're looking at.
I mean, AI is able to, you know, detect
obviously massive things.
And it puts you as a marketer,
I think in a really interesting position
where like you can educate your customers on potentially,
I mean, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars
of waste over time horizons that are, you know, pretty vast.
And it's just a great place to be anytime your marketer
that's educating your customers about themselves.
- I love that.
And, you know, I was talking to just a friend
other day and he says, well, what you do
doesn't really have an effect on me.
I said it does.
I think I'm a great example.
We were working at working with a big bottler
and part of what we were looking at was energy,
water and electricity consumption.
And we were able to identify and reduce
the water and energy loss, you know,
by upwards of 20%.
What does that really mean?
Well, it means a couple of things.
One, it means that it's less expensive
to run the process, which translates to lower cost
for the manufacturer, which translates
to more competitive prices of the shelf.
But it also really impacts sustainability.
But if you can help one company, one plant,
save that much in the energy side,
it's an incredible benefit to the broader society.
So there's a lot of goodness that comes from, you know,
what technology can bring, what AI brings.
- Well, that's some of the hard parts
that I think people are having with AI, right?
Is like telling those stories or they have been,
obviously you've been in doing this,
you know, for a while, Sparklar Ignition
have been doing it for 10 years.
So I think you have your stories down pretty well.
But I think for a lot of the people
like trying to figure out, you know,
what are these use cases that you can really
sink your teeth into and how,
and it's super important, right?
It's gonna change everything.
I was just reading a use case today where it's like,
you know, scientists have been using AI, you know,
this style is like 1.7 million researchers
or you know, using AI to look at all sorts of different stuff.
But anyways, there's so many different use cases,
but as a marketer, it's about telling the story to the,
you know, to the person who needs to hear that exact story.
- Well, and you know, you touched on something
really important in, you know,
in the line of work we're in, education is so critical.
You know, if you think about it,
most products you don't need to explain
to the consumer professional what it is or what it does.
- Right.
- You can hold up an iPhone and I understand the purpose
of its existence.
But when you talk about AI,
people tend to batter it about as if it's one thing,
but it's so many things, it mimics, you know, human abilities.
So from a marketing point of view,
the ability to tell a story, to help educate,
help engage, to help make this relatable.
It's a complex science, so you have to simplify it
and make it relatable to your audience.
- Okay, so I know this is a big question,
but how do you describe your marketing strategy?
- When I think strategically,
it's about how do we engage our audience?
How do we educate the audience to the comments a moment ago?
How do we motivate them?
And then ultimately, you know,
how do we bring that to close?
And, you know, the engagement part I think is
probably more emblematic of what marketers do.
You meet the prospect with the prospects are,
you do it through outreach, you do it through influence,
you know, you do it through a variety of mechanisms.
The education is a bit different
than maybe what some marketers have to face.
Education is, you know, more fundamental in complex,
well, you know, not well understood products.
So, you know, there's a content piece to that
that weighs heavily, that we have to narrate.
There's ways in which people experience information
through rich media, videos, podcasts, you know,
short form content and social media.
We think a lot about that education.
We think a lot about motivation.
It's interesting, but, you know, I always joke that,
you know, people don't spend seven figures
when they're completely confused or intimidated.
And so, it's really important that we align
and understand the motivation of the business,
of the individual, the decision maker,
and that we address those concerns head on.
And so, being able to articulate a value,
being able to provide a more interactive experience
is really important.
And then we try to, as a marketer, you know,
take them from top of funnel all the way bottom of funnel.
So, we don't get the luxury of just dumping them
at the top and run and say, now it's a sales problem.
You know, we have a long sales cycle.
It's not a news or a goat, you know, six, nine, 12 months.
So, we've got to stay with that prospect that whole time
and we have to find a meaningful ways
to continue to dialogue and interact.
So, the strategy really, you know,
kind of centers around that notion
of engage and educate, motivate and close.
- And is there anything different about your marketing team?
Obviously, you run marketing and sales
for the biz.
So, your total org is a little different.
But anything specifically without your marketing sales team,
that might be a little different than the average.
- I think the way we work together,
it's probably different.
You know, we are not siloed operations.
You know, we are very much aligned in effort and activity.
I think that's an important aspect.
So, we push hard on that kind of cross-functional collaboration.
Maybe more so than in other industries largely,
'cause again, you know, we're gonna be with that prospect
for a long time and through multiple interactions.
And so, the team is very unified.
- Love it.
- All right, let's get to the playbook
where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics
that help you win.
What are your three channels or tactics
that are your uncutable budget items?
- What's interesting about that is it's not what I would have
predicted coming into the business.
I think it's again, probably a representation
of the audience and where they are in their journeys.
So, we find situations where we can get an extended period
of time in front of a prospect to be valuable.
So, things like webinars turn to be really important.
And historically, you're like,
yeah, when I go to a webinar to learn more about a stapler,
of course not.
I understand what it does.
I'm not gonna invest that kind of time.
But our audience, because of what's at stake,
spends a considerable amount of time with us.
And so, that's one vehicle that's critical.
Events turn out to be critical.
Historically, I would tell you that as a marketer,
the returns from an event were relatively low for us.
Again, being out in a market, being able to actually interact
and talk to a customer, being able to expose our brand.
When you're a Fortune 500, you take for granted,
the value of the brand behind the marketing effort.
But when you're nimble, when you're scrappy, when you're smaller,
getting the brand out in front of the business
is really really important.
So, I would say that's number two.
And then probably more contemporary social media,
clearly is a vehicle that allows us
through a variety of formats to interact with our audience.
We think very thoughtfully about how do we use different vehicles?
So, if I think about it, those are really the three vehicles
that we would use.
- I love it.
Yeah, you mentioned that this might be a little different
than what you originally thought it would be.
Why do you say that?
What do you think sort of maybe you went in thinking?
- You know, I think you go in, you know, you say it a lot.
I can focus on digital marketing.
I can focus on outbound campaigns.
I can drop in a nurture stream.
I can do lead scoring.
You check the boxes of all the buzzwords,
and things will be good.
You know what, those didn't work for us.
And so you experiment.
You know, you trial different things
and different combinations.
And again, when you have an extended sales cycle,
it's never one and done.
It's not like one thing's gonna make it happen.
You have to find the combination of things,
and you have to find where those things fit into the funnel
to be effective.
And so to certain extent, you're in the kitchen
messing with the recipe to try to get that ideal meal
and that perfect taste.
- I'm a little obsessed with this sort of like the 95,
five sort of rule of people are only, you know,
in market for 5% of the time in 95% of the time they're not.
We, Caspian Studios has sales cycles similar to yours
where like someone wants to build like, you know,
a podcast series or a video series or, you know,
a fiction series or anything like that.
It's like, it's usually about a 12 month sort of thing
just because, you know, maybe they could do it in six months,
but usually, you know, you gotta figure out
a bunch of different things that are gonna happen
and it's usually pretty high-vis because of, you know,
it's gonna be a big sort of production.
So we're in the same scenario as you are
with longer sales cycles and just general complexity, right?
And so this sort of, this 95% of time,
I think that makes perfect sense that you would say
that your top three are the most human centric things,
the most long-form things, right?
It's like, so I just released this,
my sort of new thoughts on this, my strategy of this idea
of like shorts, shows, and moonshots,
and that's basically kind of exactly what you're saying,
which is like shorts are all the things
that people consume at entertaining, you know,
they hopefully see it, you know,
once a day, once a week, you know, somewhere in there.
The shows or the webinars, these things that they can get
really deep, rich information from and then,
and events are the same way.
And then, you know, moonshots are hopefully something
that can, you know, get them standing up every now and then,
you know, and it's just, it's interesting that you'd say that
because I think the more complex the buying,
the buyer is in the buying cycle and the more complex
the product, the more you need to lean on those type
of deep experiences.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So what's working within those?
Like when you launch this webinar thing,
is there ways that you're trying to do that stuff?
Is your events, is it sort of like old school events,
you know, taking, you know, a bunch of people golfing
or, you know, like what's working?
Industries are different.
- But when you think about it, you know,
it's really about story-calling, you know,
first and foremost.
So when I look at a webinar, it's about the audience
and it's about the story tell, it's about the value create.
And so I think, you know, just doing a webinar,
first party, third party, you know, executing it,
sticking up on on 24 or a platform, yeah,
and anybody can do that.
But to hold somebody's interest for 45 minutes, right?
And what we found is that there's not a single format.
We actually use right now four formats.
So we have a format that's really more educational,
more, we have one that's more topical,
we have one that really is featuring customers.
We use these, these variety of formats.
And I think that's a formula that's working really well.
When we think about events, you know,
unfortunately it's not golf,
and it's not the wine and dine.
It's, you know, we all have short attention stands.
And the last thing, the last thing anybody want to do,
if they're walking some trade floor,
is to stop and listen to a sales pitch.
And so what we have found is that we actually use AI
to engage the audience.
And so one aspect is our visual AI,
where we literally have a camera running.
And so as people come up, the AI is able to recognize them.
It's able, depending on the models that we're running,
we can detect certain articles, a briefcase,
a backpack, a computer, a hat, and people are fascinated.
Right? It's almost the, you know,
if you've ever been to one of these,
one of these fairs or circuses that have these mirrors
that are oddly shaped and they make you look at ball
or short or thin.
And it's kind of that phenomenon.
People just stop.
And, you know, the minute they stop,
it's our opportunity to engage.
And so it's not intended to be a gimmick.
It's really intended to stir their curiosity
as to, you know, the art of the possible.
Hey, if you can do this, you know, at a trade floor,
could you do this to my factory?
Could you recognize a forklift?
And could you recognize a forklift in a person?
And can you predict when the two of them
are going to intersect?
Turns out that that's a very common accident.
And we can and we can do that.
Can you detect a spill of the floor
so someone doesn't slip and drop fall?
We can do that.
Can you detect a door that's been propped open
that for security reasons should be closed?
We can do that.
And so it's really starting this conversation
in a way that's a non-threatening type environment.
- I absolutely love that about just starting the conversations.
So are you doing, are these owned events?
Are these ones where you're, you know, paying for a booth?
Is it combination of both?
- It's a combination of both.
When we do our own event, so it's interesting.
We actually have an R&B center.
And it's a 50 acre campus multi building.
And we typically will do it there
because we can bring them to an environment
and make it very immersive.
So rather than just, you know, a talking head or a panel,
we literally allow them to get personal with the AI.
They will experience drones and they will experience oil fields
and they will experience an F-16 and maintenance repairs.
And it's not talking about, it's the physical things
that are there that we can show them,
that we can immerse them into an understanding
of how technologies being applied.
And to me, you know, that's invaluable.
You can't get that type of return anywhere else
then to put someone into that environment.
- And what about the people that you're putting
in the webinars and the events, you know,
on social posting about that?
Like, who are the types of people within the organization
that you want to sort of carry that message?
- It's the business owners.
It's the plant managers, it's the operators,
the operation folks, it's the quality control,
the folks charge with inspection.
It's the health and safety personnel.
Anybody who's touching the business,
whether it's a factory or a refinery or school or else,
you know, we wanna get to the people that ultimately
are charged with that part of the business,
that own that part of the business.
The person who says, "I own the output here."
And ultimately, you know, this all rolls up
to what's important to the business to the C-suite.
- Are you like co-creating the content
and the webinars and the events like with those people,
like with your prospects and customers,
where do you have like designated people
from your team that are going out and doing it?
- Yeah, it's both.
I love to have a customer or a partner participating.
You know, we do that at our own events.
We'll put, you know, the customer up on stage
to tell their story.
We'll have them participate in demonstrations
to show how they're using the technology.
We'll bring them on webinars and, you know,
have them talk to a topic that's important to them
and how it relates to the employment of AI
and how they've used it.
I mean, nothing is going to be more compelling
to a prospect than hearing from their peers,
what they've done and what work and what didn't work.
- Yeah, completely agree.
And I think that that's part of the thing
with the complex sale,
and especially with the industries
they all are working with,
that like they really want to hear from their peers.
What about what's not working?
What's something that you're most cutable budget item?
- Probably what I would call traditional communications.
- Hmm.
- You know, public relations, you know, a great example.
Not that the medium's not good.
It's just out of touch with where people are.
We all have a bit of ADD, you know,
we have a short of pension span.
We can't, you know, we're not reading long form content.
We're not even reading short form content.
You know, give me three bolts,
seven warroves in a picture, and I'm much happier.
I think some of the,
I'm gonna call the old world mechanisms,
just don't work in the new society.
And I think that's true, whether you're selling AI
or you're selling automobiles, I think.
People's behavior is just different today.
- I wholly agree that you gotta,
you gotta just jump and grab it.
- What about your experimental budget?
That little 5, 10% you got set aside.
Any experiments that you made in the past year,
ones that you wanna make next year?
- Yeah, you know, we try to set actually
a little bit bigger portion aside,
probably more in the 15 to 20,
in part because we serve different industries,
and the little behavior across industries isn't the same.
So we don't have the luxury of just doing one industry
and saying, oh, we'll try three things.
If we try three things,
we gotta try three things across multiple industries
and it picks an incredible amount of lift to do that.
- Probably the one thing that we experiment the most
is the combination of activities
and the outcome that they derive.
So we take her a lot with what, traditionally,
people would have said, oh, I have an interest stream
and I set it up based on time,
I set it up based on activity or action.
It's not that simple, right?
It's trying to figure out what's the right sequence
for a market or a type of buyer for a type of persona.
And we think of that a lot.
We do a lot of traditional AB and multi variant testing.
Now we move to a cookie-less environment,
things will get a little bit harder.
We look at AI as a tool to understand
can we predict behavior?
So our own technology opens up so much more
for marketers to learn, hyper personalization, right?
The ability to meet them in the moment
and deliver exactly what they need.
Sounds so simple and straightforward,
but in a B2B world, that's not as obvious as the consumer.
- It's so fascinating that you can sort of test
in one area and see if it, you know,
try to bring it to one of your other industries
and see if it'll work there.
Just way more complex than, you know.
Single verticalized company or something like that.
All right, what about AI tools other than, you know,
you have your own AI obviously
that so of course your company is all in on AI tools.
Well, ones are all used in that
that have been particularly valuable
or how do you think about, you know,
investing in AI for your marketing and sales team?
- It's less about the tool for us
and more about what it is we're trying to accomplish.
So we want to be able to predict customer behavior.
We want to be able to do that,
that personalization in the moment that we talked about.
We want to better understand, you know, product recommendation
and product for us is a bit different.
It's more feature led and capability than it is package.
And, but it's equally as important.
Social media, you know, being able to look at at sentiment
and understanding trending.
You know, all of these things are now almost embedded
as part of these tools that give marketers
an incredible, an incredible capability.
And I say AI, but it's AI, it's analytics,
it's reporting, it's the combination of things
that we can access.
So it's not AI for AI sake.
And I think that's one of the big things, you know,
learnings for our marketer.
Don't run to the shiny toy.
If you can do things in a very, you know,
easy, traditional, non-invasive way and it works, it works.
And I think, you know, it's easy to become
infatuated with the tool.
And you've got to look beyond the tool
to what is it you're trying to figure out.
And for us, you know, we have to pause
on it for a while saying, are we over-engineering?
Yeah, you know, the issue.
And do we need to back up and, you know, take a more holistic view
is how to get to the data that we really want to get to?
Yeah.
Any examples there of stuff that has helped her?
Yeah, I think probably the, at least for us this year,
is the how moments have come more from our website.
Experience, understanding the experience someone has.
And not just, you know, simple things, not just SEO
work and it's not just, you know, simply, you know,
time on page and bounce rates and all the traditional metrics.
It's really understanding for us the journey.
And we've worked really, really hard to improve it.
I'm not talking navigation.
I'm talking about how someone really is exposed to
and experiences and works through what we intend by design.
You know, if you put a work right up, what do you want to happen
when someone gets there?
And it's not the, oh, they go to the homepage,
then they go to the navigation bar, then they do the drop-down,
then they click on what, it's like, that's not the way it works.
Yeah.
And so we've learned a lot about ourselves and about our audience,
just diving into the website.
I gosh, I couldn't agree more.
It's very well said.
I, we've been thinking about that a bunch as well.
We're redoing some stuff to our website,
Casping Studios.
And it's, yes, the same thing, right?
It's just so complex.
It's so darn tricky.
All right.
Any other thoughts on budgets or budgetems or tactics or anything?
Yeah.
I mean, I think the one thought there, you know,
there's always a question, the proverbial question
hangs over Markler's heads that says, you know,
am I really getting a return on my investment?
You know, maybe we can cut the budget and, you know,
we're not going to feel the effect.
And, you know, marketing unlike other areas of the business,
it's probably harder to quantify the impact
because it touches so many parts of the business.
And, you know, I think that the one thing is,
is marketers are constantly or should constantly
be thinking about how do I demonstrate
to my organization, right, qualitatively and quantitatively,
the value we bring.
And we work really hard to produce content internally
for consumption by other executive members,
by the rank and file.
You know, who doesn't want to work at a business
where the brand matters?
Who doesn't want to work at a business
where they're doing social good?
And, you know, we're a small company,
and 400, but it's still important that you get the word out, and it's not easy.
You have
to put a concert effort to do that. I'm curious, like, how do you think about
that? Because
I truly believe that there are things within marketing, there's activities
within marketing
that you just have to believe in your gut should be done. Webinars, for example
, you could
cut webinars. Of course you could. Anyone could cut your webinar function.
Nobody is going
to starve because you stopped doing webinars. But you also know in your gut
that X amount
of people are attending these, like, they are important to do, right? Also, you
can't
draw an ROI and say, our webinar program in a silo is worth X ROI. It just
doesn't work
at all. It just doesn't work that way. It's funny. I was talking to an
executive in the
business yesterday and they said, I hate webinars. I thought about that
statement. It's like
one, one, I don't know how you get emotionally charged over a webinar, but okay
. But the
point isn't whether we like them or don't like them. The point is, are they an
effective
part of the overall program that you're going to deliver? To your point, it's
not silo.
You can't just cut one thing and not have a domino effect in the model. It's
really a
hormone. I always joke with people. If you're not sure marketing is working,
stop doing it.
Here's the good news. If you were right, you probably saved yourself a lot of
money. If
you're wrong, you're in a serious state of trouble because you can't recoup
that time.
So for us, if you look at a 9, 12-month sales cycle, if you stop doing
marketing for 9
, 12 months, you will know whether or not it was working. But unfortunately, you
can't recover.
We're seeing this all right now in tech because the last 12 months, people have
been cutting
marketing budgets a ton and we're seeing quarters get missed and you say, yeah,
because your
brand didn't do a single thing for the market because you've got a bunch of
marketing spend.
I get it's a hard time. I mean, we kept budget on certain things too. It's
tough, but you're
going to feel it. One way or the other, you're going to feel it.
Well, when it goes back to what we talked about earlier, is if you cut your
budget and you
cut the activities and spend, then what happens is the downstream effect, the
seller now
has to go do marketing. Yes. And you don't recognize that that's what happened.
So, not only
your sales drop because you've distracted the seller from their primary mission
, but they're
ineffective at it too. That's not their primary vocation. They're not good at
it.
And I think what we've seen unequivocally in like Jason Lemkin has talked about
this and
start a plan is like, the good reps are still going to hit their quotas. Like
it's the bad
reps are going to be torched. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Even the medium reps.
Just so much
of marketing is just not siloed. This actually is a good segue to our next
segment, the desktop
where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your board or your
sales team, your
competitor or anyone else. And you're sort of mentioning a desktop here of
somebody who
says, "Hey, I hate webinars." We get that a lot with like, "Hey, podcasts." Or,
"Hey, this."
Or you know, like, "Hey, events." Or whatever. And it's like, "Hey, yeah. Who
cares what you
like?" Because you're not the buyer of our product. So, that's fine. And the
whole point
of marketing is to engage people in the different mediums in which they do like
. So, then you say,
"Well, what do you like?" And they go, "Why like this?" It's like, "Guess what?
We do that too."
And that's the great, whatever we get that question of like, "Why don't really
like podcasts?"
It's like, "Well, 400 million people do. I don't know what to tell you. You don
't want to.
But any, you had any other memorable dust steps? There's always been a most
organizations
of friction, maybe a healthy friction between sales and marketing. And so, when
you have,
and I would advocate that you should have probably two different people,
because I think that that dust up is a natural process in which sales is
constantly testing
the value of marketing and marketing is constantly testing, whether or not
sales can actually
execute. And that friction is good. And I still try to invite that friction
among my direct reports. Because marketing shouldn't be doing activities that
aren't driving
the direction the business wants to go and executing on strategy. And sales
ultimately
has to be accountable for accepting what marketing does and executing on it.
And so, that,
to me, is the proverbial dust up in my career, as always, is sales marketing
interaction.
I think it's healthy tension. All right, let's get to our final segment. Quick
hits. These are
quick questions and quick answers. Just like how quickly someone can go to
qualified.com right now and
talk to a salesperson, you can help your company generate pipeline quickly. Tap
into that
greatest asset your website to identify your most valuable visitors and instant
. And I mean instantly
start sales conversations. Quick and easy, just like these questions go to
qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits. Stephen, are you ready? I'm ready. Number one. Do you have a hidden
talent or skill that's
not on your resume? I do. I love woodworking. Oh, cool. What thing are you most
proud of building?
We've moved nine times and every time we move, I install a wine cellar. And
every one of them
has been very different. And so it's a fun project. Very cool. Love work with
my... When you work in
marketing, I think you need a hobby that's you work with your hands. Like, you
need to do something
physical because everything we do is digital. That's true. Do you have a
favorite book podcast
TV show that you recommend? My favorite podcast is called The Best One Yet. Oh,
I don't know that.
Oh, you've got to check it out. It's quick news stories. Oh, cool. New things.
Yeah, it's really good.
Oh, great. This sounds great. I'll check it out. If you weren't in marketing at
all,
we're business. What do you think you'd be doing? If I had the talent, I'd be a
professional
golfer, but that's probably not realistic. But to your point of working with
your hands,
I've always been fascinated by the construction industry. And I guess that's
another form of business,
but completely disparate, obviously, from technology or marketing or any of
that. That's the physical
aspect that's just to me fascinating. Perhaps make them wine sellers. There you
go.
What's your best advice for a first time CMO?
So I recently shared this with individual. I said, you know, when you move from
from having a
marketing title, director of marketing or demand gen or communication, whatever
, and you move
through the ranks, when you hit CMO, the world changes because it's no longer
just dependent upon
your skill set or your expertise as a marketer. You need to navigate the
organization now.
You're a leader in the business of culture and understand the dynamics of the
culture and the
corporation is really important. So it's one part skill. It's one part culture.
And you need to
learn to play nice. It's one part collaboration. And you know, you can get away
in a more isolated
area of marketing with not necessarily being collaborative. And you see that.
You see people
who often style themselves off. The, especially nowadays that we work from home
, it's even more likely
that you can enable yourself to be, you know, kind of this this independent
entity. But the CMO,
your job is balancing those things. It's not just good enough to be a great
marketer. You need to be
a great marketing. You need to be a great leader. You need to be a great
partner. And if you're not,
you're not going to survive. Steven, it has been wonderful chatting with you
today.
For listeners, you can go to spark cognition.com to learn more. If you're in
energy or
manufacturing or government or education or retail transportation and are
looking for some really
cool ways to use AI, go to spark cognition.com. Steven, any final thoughts,
anything to plug?
Yeah, I think the one thing I would share is, you know, we live in a data rich
world.
That's important, but trust your gut. I think too. Any action is better than an
action. So if
you're not sure, try it. If you fail, it's okay. You'll fix it. But never
getting started. It isn't
going to work. And then I'm a big, big believer in what gets measured, gets
done.
So if you're not going to track it and report on it, then why are you doing it?
Fantastic. Steven, wonderful having you on the show. Thanks again for joining.
Yeah, we'll talk soon. Take care.