Aligning Brand Awareness and Demand Generation
Mario Paganini shares his insights into aligning brand awareness and demand generation, creating and converting demand, and qualitative versus quantitative marketing.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to "Dumanj and Visionaries." I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Mein Studios,
and
today I am joined by special guest, Mario, how are you?
>> Doing well, Ian. Good to see you again, and I'm excited of all of the smart
people
that you could have on the show picking me quite an honor.
>> Indeed. I know that for a fact. Are many marketing chats about what you all
are doing
at Stored will come to the forefront. So we're going to chat about the really
cool marketing
and the stuff that you've been doing at Stored. We're going to talk to your
career. We're going
to talk to Manjan as always and marketing as a whole. So let's get started.
What was your first
job in demand?
>> I'm thinking about this. On one hand, you could say that never worked in
demand, and then on the
other hand, you could say, I've always worked in demand. I think most
accurately, it was at a
company called Disgust. It's an audience engagement tool, aka the comment
section for online publishers.
And I joined them as a product marketer and through a confluence of some
fortunate, some
unfortunate events. I showed up to work one day, and then the company had
changed drastically,
and the CRO at the time was like, hey, Mara, you want to be the head of
marketing now?
>> Good luck. Have fun, Matt. And then on that point, things started to open up
, and my scope
certainly increased significantly. And prior to that, really being much more of
a content and
product marketing-focused guide to seeing over the whole spectrum and have been
doing it in some
way, shape, or form ever since overseen. Entire go-to-market teams, overseen,
full-stack marketing,
obviously heavily inclusive of demand, Jen.
>> Let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree. This is where we go and feel
honest and
trusted, and you can share those deepest, darkest-dimension secrets. Tell us a
little bit about
stored in your role as VP marketing. >> Yeah, so stored were the pioneers of a
new category of supply chain solutions that we call cloud supply chain. And the
way I like to
describe this to really anyone who's supply chain is it's analogous to cloud
computing.
You think back to, not even that long ago, 15, 20 years ago, you think back to
the early 2000s,
and I grew up here in Silicon Valley. So this is something that's near and dear
to me. You want
to start a tech company in the early 2000s. And before you could write any code
, before you could
deliver any customer experience, get any feedback, you'd have to go out and
lease warehouse space,
and then rack that space and put servers and computers in that building. And
you would need
to literally keep up with a commensurate amount of physical computing power to
fuel your technology.
And it creates this constant cat mouse race where you've got CIOs and CTOs
having cold sweats
in the middle of the night because they're worried they're not going to have
enough computing power,
and they're constantly optimizing as they grow. And even though this was going
on as recent as
10, 15 years ago, it seems absurd to even think about today because everyone
that's
in the modern tech space works with a cloud computing provider. They're working
with Amazon
Web Services or someone similar. And they plug in right when they get started,
they instantly get
all of the infrastructure, all the computing power they need to fuel their
business from day one.
And as they grow, that cloud computing provider magically expands with them and
gives them
exactly what they need when they need it. And those same people, instead of
having the cold
sweats over, did I put enough servers in my server farm, are thinking about how
do I build
better software? How do I deliver better customer experiences? And so what we
're doing at
stored as opposed to trying to look at one individual piece of the supply chain
stack and say,
okay, how do we provide a better third party logistics solution with cloud
supply chain?
We're delivering that same paradigm shift where you connect with stored once
and get all of the
technology you need to manage and optimize your supply chain backed by our
massive logistics
network that can give you all of the physical capabilities across
transportation, warehousing,
fulfillment, parcel, even packaging, such that as you grow, you're never going
to need to go out
and find another warehouse, another shipping carrier, another third party
logistics provider.
You have that elasticity and scale that has traditionally been exclusive to the
technology world,
but in the physical world. So that's what we do at stored. And then me
specifically,
I head up the marketing team here at stored kind of encompassing all the
traditional stuff you'd
expect. So obviously heavily focused on demand, gen product marketing, content
and communications,
brand and design.
And for our listeners, you could just go stored.com and check out how different
the marketing that
you all have is one of the coolest websites. And we'll get into that here in a
little bit.
But from the moment that we first met, and I learned about your marketing team,
there's a lot
of really cool stuff that you do the way that you think about marketing and
differentiating,
you know, within supply chain, which is, you know, historically, maybe not been
the most exciting
field. And you all do a lot of cool stuff. But who are stored customers?
Who are the types of companies that you are selling into? And what does that
buying committee
look like? Yeah, so we're playing today, predominantly in the kind of mid
market to enterprise space
for physical goods, commerce companies. So looking at folks anywhere from the
range of 50 million up
through a few billion plus and annual revenue, physical commerce companies,
regardless of whether
they're selling direct to consumer through e-commerce channels, through their
own retail stores or a
mix of trading partners. And unlike a lot of other players in the supply chain
space that
may service specifically e-commerce logistics or specifically B2B logistics
stored is servicing
you regardless of where you're selling or really what you're selling. And you
have that ability such
that, you know, today, when we look at the market, everyone wants to be omnich
annel. You sell a
direct to consumer and you want to get that security of being able to move mass
amounts of
product through the targets and the wal-marts of the world. You sell
exclusively B2B today and
you want that new revenue stream, you want that connection to your customers,
the real challenge
is figuring out how to do that. And so ultimately, when you have that right
partner that can help
you move either from direct to consumer to B2B to get to omnichannel or from B2
B to direct
to consumer to get to omnichannel, that's where the magic really starts
happening.
And then who's the actual buyer who signs the dotted line and how are they
making that purchase
decision? Ultimately, depends on really who in that ICP were going after in
these kind of larger
enterprise brands. The buying committee is almost exclusively housed within the
actual
supply chain logistics organization. So it's a chief supply chain officer VP
supply chain
VP logistics that these larger omnichannel brands are going to have a whole
organization that's
dedicated to making sure that they're efficaciously managing both the digital
and physical elements
of their supply chain. So pretty traditional setup and selling kind of directly
into
the folks that really speak the language that we speak and have a lot of
familiarity with the
stuff that we do. And a lot of cases have actually kind of already brushed
shoulders with a lot of
the folks on the stored team. But what I actually personally find the most fun
and I think where
some of the more out of the box marketing that we deploy is acutely effective
is with some of these
emerging direct to consumer brands where if you are a hot shot direct to
consumer brand,
your supply chain isn't this, you know, back of office operation. It literally
is the connection
between your business and your customers and how well you're able to reach your
customers is the
make or break for your business. And with the importance of fulfillment for
these direct consumer
businesses and the little bit earlier stage in their maturation curve, we're
oftentimes dealing
directly with a founder with a CEO with a COO and you know, we've talked to
folks all the way through
you know, marketing customer support, product development and some of these
smaller and up and
coming organizations. Yeah, that makes sense. Especially like you said, where
it's in those
DDC companies, it is their whole company, right? Where everybody is dialed in
from the go-to-market side
to the product side. How do you structure your your marketing work to acquire
these accounts?
Do you all have a traditional sales team? Do you have a traditional marketing
team? How does it look?
Yes, to both we as traditionally define, we have a sales team and a marketing
team working
obviously extraordinarily closely together that you know, without that trust
and partnership,
you know, I don't know how either side is, you know, possibly doing their job
even remotely
efficaciously. So on the marketing side, under my organization, there's really
four functions. So
we have a dedicated demand generation org that oversees a lot of the
traditional digital marketing,
lead generation, event, account-based marketing programs, as well as a SDR team
. So that's kind of
one of the four functions sitting under me, kind of your traditional demand gen
playbook
inclusive of a outbound SDR team. We have a product marketing team that
oversees our positioning,
messaging, sales enablement strategy, audience analysis, really kind of the
internal blue that's
connecting all the pieces internally from product development to go-to-market
to operations and
executive. We have a content and communications team overseeing our website,
our blog or social
channels, which is definitely one of my favorite pieces of what we do here at
Stored, as well as
all of our external communications and PR efforts. And then we have a brand
design team,
the folks that are the real heroes, the experts that are able to figure out how
to somehow
continuously up the bar on quality and innovation as it relates to branding and
visual design,
as well as interactive web development. So those four functions sit under me on
the marketing side
underneath the Mario our head of sales. We have a few different teams largely
denominated by
product offering, as well as by segment of the market that they're going after.
And do you have a marketing strategy that you subscribe to or how do you think
about marketing?
When I think about what we do at Stored, it really comes down to a few pretty
straightforward
buckets. And it starts with creating awareness, driving awareness in the market
creating demand. People need to know who you are. People need to know what the
problem
that they have is and how you solve it. Capturing that demand, which is making
sure that as you see
these intense signals popping up, people showing interest that you have the
appropriate tactics
in place, whether that PPC ads, whether that be webinars, whether that be cold
outreach,
linked in a mix of all of the above, and then ultimately converting demand. And
so ultimately,
I think one of the things that's somewhat unique about my
vantage into demand, Jen, really coming into the space as an outsider of
someone who really
kind of built my own career in the product marketing side is that I see a lot
of
demand, Jen folks who put so much emphasis on that capture demand portion of it
. And I see
entire organizations that think demand, Jen is that capture demand portion. And
don't get me wrong,
that's extremely important. And I'll be the first to admit that tactical
allocation of PPC
campaigns is the furthest thing from my personal strength. And yet it's
extremely important
that said, I do genuinely believe to have an efficacious demand, Jen strategy,
it is the combination of
all four of those pieces. And depending on where your company is in its m
aturation curve,
for stored, we're not brand new startup, but we haven't hit that paradigm shift
where every single
company that ever thinks I have a supply chain problem immediately goes to
stored, that for us,
ultimately, if we were to put even the majority of our efforts into that
capture demand phase,
ultimately, the amount of demand we're capturing is going to be pretty small.
And the amount of
demand and that small amount of demand that we do capture, they're going to be
coming in,
thinking that we're going to solve the same problems that some other logistics
company has
taught them to think that they have, rather than the problems that they truly
have,
and the ones that we're going to be great at solving. And so in my opinion,
maybe a controversial
take, but that create awareness and create demand piece of the puzzle,
especially for a growing
company or someone who's working to create a new category or shift a paradigm,
might be the most important piece of the entire strategy.
It's so true. But at the end of the day, it's like you said, if you're focused
so much on capturing
the demand that someone else is out there creating, when you get put up against
deal,
and it's you versus them, the way the problem is currently framed, especially
if they're a legacy
competitor, then that's probably how the buyer's going to look at solving their
problem.
And one other thing I'd add on strategy where I've spent more hours than I'd
like to share,
listening to other people talk about marketing and demand and trying to learn.
And there's so
much great insight out there, but so much of it is gated behind a level of
understanding of the
tactics that not everyone is going to have. And so I almost feel like there's
this level of
gatekeeping in demand, Jen, where it's like, if you don't know the secrets, if
you don't know the
codes, you're not going to get the insight. And for me, what really makes great
marketing is
unbelievably simple. It's about creating excitement and doing things that
people like.
So at the end of the day, whether it's your first day on the job as a new
demand, Jen
marketer, or you're the CMO of some massive Fortune 500 company, the one piece
of advice that I give
to every single person on my team and every single person that I ever talked to
about marketing is
so unbelievably simple. Whatever you do, whenever you put something out there
in the
ether, whether it's an ad, a blog, a video, LinkedIn post, a Instagram post, a
frickin tick talk,
ask yourself, what about this is going to blow someone away? What about the
thing that I'm
publishing isn't genuinely going to excite people gets lost in the shuffle. And
so obviously,
to build a efficacious demand-gen program, you need the qualitative and the
quantitative.
You need the ops. You need the tactics. But if you're asking me to choose all
of the tactical
setup, lead mapping operations, versus putting great content out there with
absolutely no way
to track it, I could do one or the other. I'm picking, I'm posting completely
untrackable,
non-attributable content out there and dying on that sort of that's the way
that's going to
ultimately drive the most value for the company. At the end of the day, we're
largely emotion driven.
If you are incapable of creating some sort of positive emotion with the people
you're going after,
you can't even get to the point of building that trust and actually having that
tactical
conversation. I'm so curious. You have this amazing website that is so
different from other
people's websites. You have this brand that's so specific. You have a podcast
called Supply Chain
Therapy, which is so different from any other supply chain podcast out there.
It feels like
you are so different from every other supply chain company out there. Clearly,
this is all on purpose.
Why did you feel the need to create a brand and a go-to-market strategy that is
different
and differentiated? I'll give my specific answer. Here's the deal. Supply chain
has been around for
as long as humans have been moving physical goods. The idea of manufacturing
products,
moving those products, storing those products and getting those products to an
end has been around
since almost the dawn of humanity. There are companies out there that stored
competes with that
have been doing some of these physical services, whether that's freight truck
ing, whether that's
warehousing, whether that's packaging, whether that's fulfillment for no joke,
100 plus years.
That's a lot to come up against. Then you couple that with,
stored is certainly not the only startup logistics company or the only
logistics company that has
some sort of a technology play with it. You look out into the sea of solutions.
There's massive,
massive, massive public successful companies with brand equity and 100 plus
years of experience.
There's a sea of startup companies that are trying to somehow fit that mold of
operating at
the convergence of logistics and technology. Ultimately, I look out at that and
say,
they're all doing it completely wrong. Here's why that despite how much money
some of these
companies have made and how much press they get, if you look at how they
operate, they're all
solving what I would consider to be the symptoms of a broken, dated,
inefficient supply chain.
Here, supply chain is inefficient or broken. You might run out of space. You
need to get more
space. Your orders might be delayed. You need to find somebody to get those
orders out faster.
You might not have insight into this individual piece. You need to get a better
report.
But if all the solutions out there are just numbing those symptoms and not
addressing the
underlying causes, they're falling so far short of what we really need as
consumers who rely on these
brands for all of our products and these brands that are trying to grow.
Ultimately,
the true cure to dated and efficient supply chains comes when you can truly
have that
convergence of physical and digital when you have your entire supply chain
interconnected
from a single source of truth and you have the ability to move at a similar
speed to the digital
world in the physical world. The approach that storage taking is radically
different
than what all of these other companies are doing. When you combine the fact
that there's so many
people out there that I don't think we can beat against, but admittedly, there
's a lot more
education you do in the market before the world sees it that way. You couple
that with the fact
that our approach, our actual products and services, I would argue are equally
as differentiated as
our marketing. If not more so, I think I look at all of our marketing and I say
, "Wow, I'm so proud
of that," but I'm still trying to fight the goal of making storage marketing as
valuable and as
cool as the services we actually offer to our customers. When I look at it, it
's like,
"You run the game theory." Given that plain board, is there any strategy that
you could even fathom
working for what we're trying to accomplish that doesn't involve us taking a
radically different
approach than everyone else out there? There is no light at the end of the
tunnel for a company
like Stored if we play like everyone else out there in the industry. In my
opinion, it was kind of a
no-brainer. That doesn't mean, "Oh, I knew from the very beginning this is
exactly how we were going
to build our website. Smarter people than me helped us get to that point." But
I knew from the very
beginning that there was no possible path to success by playing the same game
everyone else
is playing. That Stored lives and dies by creating the game that we're going to
play and then
beating everyone else at that. By the time that our competitors realized they
should be playing
the game that we're playing today, I think it's going to be too late. I know I
'm going on here,
but last thing, last night is perfect timing. Something that I predicted a year
ago actually
happened. I won't name the company, but I saw another company brand themselves
as a cloud supply
chain solution. From the very beginning when we started building this category,
I always said,
"One day, we will see people emulate us." When I was younger, I would see
people copy my company's
marketing and I'd get upset. But the amount of joy I had last night from seeing
this because it
reinforces that ultimately we are playing the game of the future and everyone
else has the choice
of either, "You can go another five, 10, 15, maybe 20 years playing the game of
the past,
but that road is going to end." The sooner that other players in this space
realized that cloud
supply chain is the future and realized that any solution they offer to
commerce brands needs to
operate at that convergence of physical and digital, they're going to start
copying us. I was just
filled with joy to see this actually immediately went and slacked a bunch of
people internally.
I actually made a LinkedIn post about it today. I was just so happy. We're the
first cloud supply
chain company. We're currently the only cloud supply chain company, but I don't
think that's
going to last for long. That's a good sign that it's working. Let's go to the
playbook.
Playbook is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that
help you win.
You play three channels or tactics that are your most uncuttable budget items.
Okay, so 100% content is number one. What are your three channels or tactics
that are your most uncuttable budget items?
Okay, so 100% content is number one. If you don't have great content, nothing
else matters.
I talk to my team a lot about all of the things that we do. At the end of the
day, no matter if
it's enabling our sales team, generating awareness, generating more leads,
attracting you talent for
store. It doesn't matter how great your promotion tactics are if the stuff you
're putting through
the pipes sucks. So ultimately, keeping the bar outrageously high on the unique
nature,
the quality, the production value, and ultimately the insightfulness, it's not
all bells and whistles.
It's about providing real value to prospects. So content is absolutely number
one for me.
You and I both have talked about this in the past together,
affair, but it just blows my mind that people don't realize that there's a
minimum quality
standard, which is really high for companies to create content. And it's so
funny because
all the stuff that you all put out is really high quality. The design assets,
all the other
stuff, it's hard to do that. It's expensive for maybe first time marketing
leaders or people
are trying to up level their game. It requires a amount of faith, but it's
impossible to do it
without great talent, without great resources, without in a lot of cases, some
really great external
resources. I feel like we live in this world where every marketing team is like
trying to shield
the world from the contractors or the agencies that they work with to
accomplish this stuff.
I think it's kind of the opposite. Getting content and getting really anything
to that A++ level
requires having the foremost expert. The reason I know Ian is he works with me
on the stored
podcast. When we thought about producing some sort of an asset like that, the
decision was
either we are going to make the best supply chain podcast there's ever been. I
don't think we're
there yet, but we're on a path to get there, or it is not going to frickin' do
it. And so,
you need to have that conviction and faith to be able to convince the rest of
leadership,
the board whomever that these are investments worth making. It's the reality,
like you said,
there's so much stuff out there that anything that's not AA+ level just gets
totally thrown by the
wayside. To me, it's a plus or bust, and that's the mentality that folks
absolutely need to have.
We talk about all the time, there's no traffic on the extra mile. You have to
go the extra
mile. All of those things matter on the extra mile to make it that much better,
to make it that
much more interesting, to make the show that much more targeted, or the asset
that much better.
If you've already gone this far, you may as well just go a little bit further
to take it to an A.
The other two tactics or pieces that I could never see cutting or never lower
the bar on,
talent, and that's extremely obvious for everything we've been discussing over
the last
five minutes that you can have the greatest fricking process in the world, and
the greatest
all the peripheral things. If you don't have great talent, it's not going to
work. So absolutely
talent. And then the last one I would say is audience targeting and audience
research,
that without a unbelievably strong understanding of exactly who your audience
is,
what keeps them up at night? What are the real problems that they have? I see
so many marketers
that go out with this kind of generic marketing and assume that magically the
people they're going
after, it's going to resonate with them. But ultimately, and this is something
I stole from
another great marketer, the folks over at GONG. I forget to love their
marketing. One of their
folks years ago told me that if you can communicate a customer's problem more
clearly and more
eloquently than they can themselves, you're always going to be the solution.
And so you just can't
compromise knowing who your audience is, deeply understanding their problems,
and then using that
to both make sure that with all this great that you're able to create great
content that resonates,
but also that content, if you're incapable of actually getting that content in
front of the
true people that it's going to move all this investments for not. So talent and
then audience
understanding and targeting would be my two and three. I have to ask about the
website. So
what went into this? Because this thing is crazy. It is the most unique BDB
website. It's got to be
the most unique one on the frickin planet. It's so crazy. I think when we set
out to make it,
and from the beginning, there was never a point in time where like, we've got
to go do this. It wasn't
until months into the process that we actually got to the point of like, this
is how we're going
to do it. A lot of that deep analysis, soul searching on the stored side,
audience analysis,
a lot of research that was done months of work prior to any sort of design
being put together.
But we knew going into this process when I joined stored about a year and a
half ago, I was just
unbelievably in a way that I don't think I've ever been before in my life blown
away by
the innovation and vision put forth by Sean and Jacob, the co-founders here
at stored. It's, you know, I get a handful of people on a weekly basis hitting
me up about,
oh, you should come and talk to us about working here. And 99% of it is, and
this seems like a
total waste of time. But you know, when Sean and Jacob hit me up and I started
talking to them,
I don't think I've ever been more taken back by the potency and power of their
vision and
the innovative nature of how they were approaching supply chain problems. And
so I was like,
all right, sign me up. But I hold up all their marketing in the site, not just
anything negative
about old stored. But you know, if you looked at stored's old site on way back
machine, you might
say it's one of the worst marketing websites you've ever seen. So I was like,
we are solving this massive problem. We are these hyper successful category
creators. We have a
vision for what could be decades of success to come after this. And no one in
the world gives a
shit about it. And most people in the world don't even know about it from the
beginning. I knew that
we needed to up level our marketing, our branding, both on the messaging and
positioning side because
it's not all flash needs out the substance, but also on the flash side and the
branding side to,
like I said at the top, it's not about necessarily making our marketing the
best ever. It's about
making our marketing and branding on par with the value and innovation driven
through our product.
So we kicked off a process. We partnered with these folks, Studio Freight out
of Columbus, Ohio.
Again, I'm very transparent about who we partner with. These guys are absolute
ballers. They've made
some of my all time favorite website. And you know, when it came time for us to
work with someone,
there really wasn't anyone I could think of kind of other than them to go on
this journey with.
And obviously they knocked the heck out of the park. But from a process
perspective, the first,
probably month to months was all about understanding like we need to be so
unbelievably crystal clear
about what the store vision is, who we're doing it for, what we care about
philosophically,
how do we want to be perceived by the market? What do we truly want to
communicate? And once you
have all of that, it's challenging for people like me who aren't designers by
trade to get
really deep into the visual and brand design world. And it's impossible to do
that without that
kind of baseline and that understanding. So once we got that, we were able to
have a lot more
productive conversations and brainstorm, you know, mood board ideation on what
we actually
wanted this shit to look like, because we knew this is what we were trying to
communicate. And
at its simplest form, we really see stored as an optimization company. We're
not a software company,
we're not a logistics company, we're not a transportation brokerage. At the
deepest level,
we got down to what the essence of stored is. So the essence of a toy is to be
played with,
for example, the essence of stored, we actually made up a word, we called it om
ni-opti, unlimited
optimization in every direction. And so the true value of what stored provides
to customers
isn't some physical logistics or some dashboard. It is the ability to optimize
across the physical
and digital worlds. And so as we started to figure out, you know, how do we
actually
communicate this very abstract concept that, you know, we're just grappling
with ourselves.
And through a lot of exploration, we came to this conclusion, how cool would it
be to actually be
able to physically show what's going on. And so what we did was we built this
huge 3D supply chain
world, like a fictitious city with a port with retail stores, with houses,
apartment buildings,
warehouses. And as you go to our site, it's all live 3D in the browser. You see
this just live
city with traffic, with products moving, with containers being taken off the
port, with deliveries
being made. And from when you land on the site, you see that God's eye view.
And there's this huge
stored control tower looking down on the whole experience to symbolically show
that God's eye
view, that optimization that stored provides. And then as you scroll through
the site, we actually
pan through that entire experience, port to port, of how stored helps you both
specifically what we
do from a capabilities perspective, but also how we tie all those pieces
together.
That's so cool. And it's just cool to see how much thought you all put into the
website and how
important it is to you all and the brand. And obviously we talked about this
every episode.
It's the storefront, it's everything in between. But to see just how much
effort and energy you
all put into that is cool. It makes it something different than just a website.
And that's pretty
neat for a B2B company. All right, let's get to our quick hits. Quick questions
and quick answers,
just like how quickly you can talk to somebody at Qualified. If you go to Qual
ified.com right now,
Qualified Prospects are on your website and you can talk to them quickly. If
you use
Qualified, we love them dearly. They've been with us since the very first
episode of Demand Gen
Visionaries. And they'll be here for the 100th episode and the 1000th episode
and many more.
Quick and easy is Qualified just like these questions. Quick hits. Mario, are
you ready?
I'm ready. We like Qualified too. We don't work with them, but we've been
chatting with them and
we're very excited about what they do and appreciate them having us on.
Heck yeah. Huzzah, that's awesome to hear. What is a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your
resume? I was about to say vegan chocolate chip cookies, but I legit think that
's on my resume.
So that doesn't count. But I'm like stealthily athletic. I go and go to the
basketball gym and
I'm this like average size, like white guy and people are always very impressed
by how quick
and agile I am. So I'll say like stealthy white guy basketball moves definitely
Do you have a favorite book or podcast TV show that you've been checking out
recently?
Favorite book, I would say Eat and Run by Scott Jurek and podcast supply chain
therapy with
Storm. Love it. Do you have a favorite non marketing hobby that maybe sort of
indirectly makes you
a better marketer? I run ultra marathons competitively and I don't know if it
makes me better at
marketing. It is a physically and literally a long haul endurance sport and
great marketing
is not about quick wins is not about launching that next Google ad. It is about
figuring out
what your vision is creating a great brand and having that endurance to make it
the long run and
admittedly endure some pain along the journey to get to the end. You know, if I
think about the
ROI or value of marketing over time, most companies curves look like this. It
goes down. You're going
to have to survive this period where you've been hired as a CMO as a company.
You know, you spent
a bunch of money. You haven't driven any results. Your CEO, whoever you report
to is asking you
and you have to be the one that has the conviction to hold to your guns and
know that all of this
foundation you've invested in is eventually going to turn that hockey stick
uptick. So maybe there's
some parallels between ultra marathon and marketing, but that's what I got. I
think you just proved it.
All right. What advice would you give to a first time VP marketing is trying to
figure out their
demand-gen strategy. Easy, actually. Make sure you are genuinely really excited
about what you're
doing. Because if whatever you're doing doesn't like get you jumping out of
your seat and like
so excited to share with the world, no chance anyone else is going to care
about it.
I love it. Mario, it's always great chatting with you. I love the energy we
could probably go for
another hour. Any final thoughts? Anything anything to plug? I believe it. Oh,
yes. I have a stored
tattoo and we've actually launched the stored tattoo program. So originally it
was just for
employees, but I'm willing to open it up to anyone in the world. You want a
stored tattoo?
Invoice me stored marketing, picking up the tab. You need the exact graphics.
You know how to find
me. [email protected] offered to anyone and everyone. Sweet. Well, if you want a
tattoo, free tattoo,
you know where to find Mario. Thanks again. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks so much
, Ian. Good
chat. Okay, ma'am.