How Emotions Drive Purchasing Decisions
Chris Lynch shares his insights into how emotions drive purchasing decisions, why customers respond well to strong storytelling, and why it's important to understand the consumer from a data standpoint.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Chris.
How are you?
I'm well, how are you?
I am doing very well, excited to chat with you, excited to chat about MindT
ickle and
all the cool stuff you're doing in marketing, a recent rebrand, which we'll get
into and
your background and everything in between.
So starting off, what was your first job in marketing?
My first job in marketing was, I was a marketing manager, real Jack of All Tr
ades junior role
at a startup, which was called Social Text at the time.
They've been acquired or sort of subsumed into some larger portfolio since then
But pretty much, there were only four people in marketing.
So I was doing a little bit of everything from PR to product marketing, doing
some event
stuff.
So some of the good news when you're younger in your career and you work at a
startup
that is a little more resource constrained, you kind of get a pretty big cross
sampling
of the function, maybe faster than you would if you joined a larger marketing
organization
out of the gate where you're going to get stove piped into doing like one
specific thing
only.
And so flash forward to today, tell us about what it means to be CM of MindT
ickle.
So for me, MindTickle became a logical path on my journey from there.
I think that I sort of by happenstance or by accident developed a specialty in
doing marketing
for products or platforms or portfolios of that have a number of different
applications
or a number of different modules that are associated with them in the
technology space
because I had managed product marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which
was a collection
of different applications, everything from email marketing to marketing
automation.
I think a lot of your listeners would know things like Eloqua.
That was one of our core acquisitions.
And then at Sijian, where I became CMO, similar deal, that was more in the PR
technology space,
but pretty highly acquisitive company where we dealt, we brought together a
number of
different applications that were all related to the same function, but we're
doing discrete
things.
With MindTickle, what attracted me to the company was the breadth of the
portfolio, the
difference being from my previous engagements that they've gone to the build
route rather
than buy.
They've really developed a lot of core functionality in sales enablement and
training, conversation
intelligence, sales content management, and the summation of all those things
we call
sales readiness.
So my job at MindTickle is really to manage the marketing and the BDR
organization or
called SDRs and some orgs.
So everything from the brand awareness and story, our positioning and messaging
and demand
gen falls under my purview at MindTickle.
And you also had a stop over as CMO of one of my family's favorite brands,
which is
Q.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, QU was a fantastic experience.
I really wanted to, particularly when I was at Oracle, worked with a lot of
consumer brands.
We had brought over responses, which was an email marketing tool.
And so I sort of got a sampling of the e-commerce and retail world through that
purview.
My brother is actually COO of a company called Marine Layer, which is a really
well-known
brand for Vore what they do in more lifestyle context.
And with QU, I had an opportunity to go in there and really focus on where I
had some
skill sets, which was really around data-driven marketing, how you pull
together lots of different
consumer data to make for a fantastic compelling experience.
So from a brand standpoint, I was probably less hands-on there because we had
real authentic
hunters who really knew what they were doing in the outdoor space and the kind
of really
extreme needs they had around product.
My role was really more around sort of the campaign construct of what we did.
But it was a really fantastic experience working in consumer.
It's a unique opportunity for someone who had predominantly been in B2B.
You sort of get your PhD in data because the volume of data that you're
operating with
in consumer is significantly larger.
And so that was a really great experience.
Also great, you know, in B2B marketing, you put out positioning messaging
campaigns, but
then depending on the length of your sales process and the sellers really on
the transactional
end of that, it was also fascinating to be part of an organization where you're
putting
out different campaigns and stories and then seeing how the market reacts to
them in real
time.
Well, I can tell you that it was working because I think my dad would buy half
the store every
year for Christmas.
So I was at his queue, so it's a queue.
A queue, yeah.
Shows what I know.
But yeah, I have a sweatshirt that he got me earlier this year in my little
nephew.
Zach is fitted out for this next season coming up.
It's awesome.
Love hearing that.
Yeah, such a cool brand.
And we always would make fun of my buddy because he had a full, like, sweet
outfit, like head
to toe, a queue, everything.
And me and my brother were rocking the...
I think I was wearing army fatigues at the time.
Back in my army days, I was like, look at Brian figuring out how to wear actual
gear in the
elements.
But anywho, but no, that's fun.
I mean, the reason why I bring it up is it is exactly what you said is, you
know, there's
so few people in B2B that jump back and forth to something like that.
Really well-known niche company that's been around a long time that has like a
really
strong brand and is trying to figure out, you know, new ways to do that.
Anyways, interesting that it did affect kind of your B2B the way that you think
about
things and build kind of a different skill set in that way.
Yeah, I think that for me, the biggest learning was you need to really focus on
...
From a data standpoint, what are the things that you have in front of you?
What's the infrastructure you have in front of you?
And where will that be helpful or a challenge in terms of how you make
decisions?
And one thing in that role that I was very proud of was that we really focused
a lot
on our customer and figuring out what we had to do from a data standpoint to
both make
sure we understood the consumer at a very real and deep level, but also make
sure that
we were respecting privacy, particularly for that audience, privacy of data,
how we use
data was very important to them.
So we held ourselves to a really high standard in terms of how we did that.
And just I think that then the other key learning for me relative to the B2B
piece is that there
are certain things around marketing that are the same across both.
I think sometimes the difference between B2B and B2C is a little overblown on
both sides
of the fans.
I mean, there are certain things that just apply to both.
People respond well to strong storytelling, no matter if you're in a consumer
context
or you're in a B2B context.
Because even in B2B, there are people making decisions.
And I think one of the biggest misnomers that people who don't work in B2B have
is they
think, well, how is there any kind of emotion in the buying process?
Because there's definitely a motion in the consumer buying process.
Everyone agrees with that, right?
There are certain people who will buy Nike purely for the brand and making sure
that
that brand is tattooed in a very certain way, even sometimes overlooking maybe
relative
quality things, right?
Not that I'd say Nike's doesn't make quality stuff, but there's just a brand
affinity piece
there that is very emotional.
I think there's more emotion in the B2B process sometimes than people realize.
I think the B2B sales process is more data driven than it's ever been in terms
of like
you're not going to be able to three martini lunch your way into making a sale.
But when you start getting into these more like six, seven figure type of
engagements,
people are really betting their careers around that.
And you better believe that that's also an emotional decision relative to what
they make
with a brand.
So, I think a big takeaway for me was there are certain things that are very
different,
but then there were other things where it's just good marketing is good
marketing.
And a lot of how you drive strategy and how you lead a team still has to be
guided by
some specific principles that you may have as a leader.
Okay, let's get to our first segment, the trust tree.
This is where we talk about trust and the place you can go and feel honest and
trusted
and share those deepest, darkest demand, gen and marketing secrets.
So zoom out, tell me about MindTickle.
What do you do?
Who are your customers?
Who are you selling to?
So MindTickle is a sales readiness platform.
And what that does is in a very short and a very simplified way, we help more
sellers
and every B2B sales organization hit their quota.
And we do that by one, really ensuring that they have these skill sets that
they require
to be successful in the role.
We ensure that they are prepared relative to either developing those skill sets
or preparing
for their interactions with prospects and customers.
We also want to look at their overall interactions.
How are they interacting in a meeting and what can sales management learn from
that interaction?
So MindTickle is really about helping sales organizations prepare, develop
skill sets and
ultimately get more sellers to attain quota.
Yeah.
So what are the types of companies?
What does that buying committee look like, size of organizations and all that?
We primarily sell to companies with a B2B sales force that can be scaled from
mid-market sized
companies up into large enterprises with sales forces that are tens of
thousands of people.
The buying committee varies.
So if you're talking enterprise, you're usually looking at a chief revenue
officer, potentially
his or her head of rev ops and then their head of sales enablement.
Now the head of sales enablement is a title that I feel like you see more in
the technology
sector like companies that sell technology often have a department that is
called sales
enablement with discrete budgets, etc.
That focus on this construct of writing your sellers.
In other industries we serve like manufacturing, life sciences, some of these
ones, I think
you'll see that where that person sits can kind of vary.
Like you can see them sit in a learning organization or something of that sort.
But really our sweet spot has typically been a combination of sales leadership
and the
person who is tasked with helping onboard and ramp up their sales reps and then
also
keeping them productive.
Because I think the big challenge that a lot of companies have is that almost
every company
will have some kind of onboarding program for their sellers go to our bad.
They do one exists.
The challenge that they typically have is that these markets can move so
quickly where
you have two competitors that consolidate that creates new market dynamics.
Company your competitors decides to change their pricing model, new dynamics.
So these things move quickly and I think oftentimes quite honestly these
programs can't move at
the same speed.
So one of the things that our technology is really focused on is helping
companies really
adapt to change and helping their sellers adapt to change.
Because I think that's sometimes where the best laid plans of certain sales
enablement
programs don't work out.
And so how do you organize your team to acquire those accounts?
What's your marketing strategy?
From an acquisition standpoint, if we're talking in the enterprise specifically
, I'd say there's
a mix of both digital and now as we're seeing some normalization in this world
pandemic
we've been living in with on offline events, we're starting to see a flex more
back into
the event space.
But the channels that we focus on most are SEO and organic is a critical
traffic driver
for us in terms of how we bring in inbound demand based on people in their
research process.
Related SEM remains a major channel for us just in terms of, but I always say
SEM and
SEO go hand in hand, you can't do one well without the other, you need that
sort of really
strong indexing on the organic side and then you mix that in with the paid side
And so those are critical channels for us.
Content syndication has been really big for us.
And I think like for a lot of B2B brands, the reason for that has been that you
're often
dealing with a buyer that's trying to do a fair amount of education and content
syndication
offers you slightly longer form content opportunities, but getting them in a
way where you can place
them in specific spots.
And then our chatbot with Qualified has been really important for us because I
think that
both in our enterprise business, you have a lot of people who are doing
research on behalf
of the buying committee who are coming in in the commercial mid market business
, it might
be the buyer themselves that is coming to the site and wants to know more.
So having our BDR organization work, the chatbot has been really vital for us
because as someone
who's now worked in consumer, it's sort of like the equivalent of the person
who shows
up at the retail store and asks like, hey, can I help you?
Can I tell you a little bit about our brand or story and what's going on?
I want to learn about you.
It allows us to have that interaction.
So that's been another critical channel for us.
Let's get to our next segment, the playbook where we 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.
You end up that playbook.
Tell me your three uncuttable budget items.
Three uncuttable budget items.
So right now, I would say the uncuttable budget items are our SEM budget.
I mean, I know that's a very unsexy thing to say, but if we didn't have
advertising,
I think that would be quite challenging relative to the B2B buyer and education
process.
Yeah.
I definitely think the chatbot and related just the overall web experience,
right, in
terms of like the touchpoint of having a fantastic website and then
interactions between
us and the prospects as they're coming through.
And then the third piece right now is an uncuttable budget item.
At least as it relates to channels would be content syndication.
It's been working really well.
Let's dig into it a little bit.
So I'm curious, starting with SEM, how big is your team?
You're a SEM team.
So we have our demand and campaign team.
Well, put it another way.
Demand, web, and content all sort of sit in one organization.
And that's probably about 10 people right now for where we are.
And relative to SEM, the demand managers, we have three demand managers that
are sort
of cut across our market segments.
All of them have SEM as like part of their remit.
So it's, but they also are managing like our nurture program and other things,
right?
So like a lot of B2B marketers, they're kind of their cross channel in terms of
how they're
thinking and managing.
And then we do have an agency that helps us with executing some of the buys as
well.
Any insights that you all have been able to glean from SEM, obviously, you know
, you
are in a somewhat competitive space just because revenue folks, sales enable
ment sales, you
know, being understanding how to be sold to and all of that.
But at the same time, the other side of that is salespeople are always looking
for more
stuff to whatever they can help them get their quotas is they're always surf
acing new tools.
So yeah, curious any tidbits there.
So for where we're at, I think there's a little bit of a less is more component
to consider.
And I actually think that's true for SEO as well.
And what I mean by that is less is more doesn't necessarily mean budget.
I mean, you probably are going to have some level of investment as a marketer
that you
decide you have to make for your business.
I know I have to do that every single day.
But what I mean by that is in our space, there's a space and then there's a lot
of little
micro spaces where it's easy to kind of get lost in the noise.
So I have competitors that bid up highly on things like sales content
management, right?
Because that's like actually the core thing that their product does.
I have other competitors who bid highly on conversation intelligence because
that's, you
know, the core thing that their product does.
So for us, because our platform is a summation of a lot of different things in
our space,
I think that's important for us is maintaining discipline on the prospect
journeys where
we feel we are going to be the most competitive and where we can actually drive
not just a
volume of inbound demand, but in this world we live in now.
That's also the quality of that inbound demand.
And I think for us, we've sort of gotten some religion around, hey, we would
almost rather
focus in on a few key avenues of SEM that we think are really critical and are
high converting
for us, leverage the website itself to encourage some of those people to
explore more of the
story, rather than kind of pushing the story out in so many different perm
utations of it
to so many different areas where you could spread yourself just thin enough to
like be
interesting to nobody at the same time, right?
So I'd say that's been a real key learning on the SEO side.
I also think that one other part about SEO that I think is important, SEM, I'm
sorry,
one part about SEM that I think is important is intent matters, right?
B2B marketers are very big into intent data.
It's a data point.
It's just that.
It's a data point.
It shouldn't dictate your entire strategy for how you're driving demand from
your ad
channels.
I see some B2B marketers really putting a lot of their eggs in that basket and
I think
you got to be careful there.
Why do you say that?
Is it something that you just get people with false positives or is that you're
not
casting wide enough net?
Well, I think when all of the account-based marketing, the ABM platforms were
coming out,
there was a lot of excitement and rightly so because I think particularly for
people
who worked in demand gen, I came up through the product marketing side of the
house.
But I know all my colleagues I worked alongside with demand gen, they would get
sick of playing
the MQL game, right?
It's sort of where we're generating MQLs.
Sales doesn't convert enough of them.
And then even when they do convert, they complain about the relative quality
and quantity.
It's like the classical B2B sales and marketing arguments.
And I felt like ABM offered this sort of, I think a lot of the demand marketers
ran
towards it because it offered this flip the script type of perspective on
reporting and
metrics where it's like, "Oh, well, no, no, it's about accounts.
It's not about leads.
It's about accounts."
And yes, it is true that if you're in B2B, you sell to a company.
Company is still staffed by people.
So there is still some onus on you as a marketing organization to make sure
that you are getting
in front of the right people.
I also think that, so that's just number one is like, I feel like where we're
moving
and there's going to be acceptance of this is like a blended model of leads and
accounts
is vital.
And I think if you tip too far in the lead direction, you're probably just
harnessing
a lot of crap into the system.
But if you lean so hard into the MQA area as well, I feel like you're, I don't
care
how good they say those intent models are.
I think you're losing opportunity for business somewhere by just maybe a lack
of hustle in
certain channels or in your outbounding.
So yeah, it's a really interesting point.
I think with intent, I think you have a lot of opportunity that things are
really hot
and you get a better look at certain types of people.
And then there's other types of people that it's going to miss.
And I think that one of the clear ways is the conversations that are happening
in Slack
channels and group texts and, hey, buddy, you're catching up and I just did
this one thing.
You just did this new software.
Have you thought about doing that?
You're like, oh, no, I've never thought about that.
Like, oh, yeah, it's great.
Like you should check it out.
Like those are the sort of things where you kind of have this B2B sort of, we
have this
like you've done all the research 80% of the journey and now you're ready to
buy in tons
of people by that way.
And I think that there's this other part, which is like the completely cold
hasn't done
any research and is hearing word of mouth or different sort of ways that they
're going
to then kind of go into that conversation and that person or that account is
going to have
really low intent because they haven't necessarily decided to make an
investment there.
And you just don't know.
Like you said, that's an opportunity where it's like, well, you don't know that
their
board just had a big conversation about how they need to invest in AI or
whatever it is.
Yeah.
It probably depends on the maturity of the industry you work in.
Yeah.
If you're doing category creation, if you're doing that sort of stuff, like how
would there
be a ton of intent signals there unless you're doing something really cool and
creative with
the way that you're looking at what people are doing.
For sure.
I want to talk about content syndication because it kind of struck me through
this conversation
that if you believe that it's moving towards this blended approach, well then
clearly that's
why potentially content syndication might be an important avenue for this.
What types of things are you doing and how is it working?
So content syndication is allowing us, I think, to just grow mind-sharing
awareness around
different topics that we care about, particularly on the top of funnel, right?
Because like every company, right, on our SEO and organic, right, there's a
certain set
of things we want to grow mind-share around.
You're doing all the things around how much can we write for people versus how
much we're
writing for the machines and keyword density and all of this stuff to try to
get that traffic
coming to us organically.
I think content syndication is offering is it's almost this hybrid.
I almost viewed as this hybrid approach between the full stop nature of a
promotional ad.
And then you kind of have owned and earned media, right, which is it's more
overt that
that is you speaking as a brand.
But I think with some of the where content syndication is interesting is as it
kind of
proliferates and gets around to some of these areas, I think you're widening
your opportunity
factor to get the right topics in front of certain audiences.
And we've really seen just a pretty massive spike in overall lead flow that's
come from
that channel.
And I think what I like about it is even though it's top of funnel, you can
assume some intent
just by virtue of the stuff that they're clicking through and coming and
deciding to engage
with.
So I think that's how we've been looking at it has largely been a top of funnel
thing.
But I like that it's content driven, which inherently means there's some level
of education
that the prospector user is already interested in.
Yeah, it's super fascinating because we actually funny enough, we hear, I'm
going to ask you
this question a second of what is your most cuttable or something that might
not be working.
We actually hear content syndication quite a bit coming up in things that
people aren't
investing in because the juice ends up not being worth the squeeze.
And then what they end up doing is choosing usually a lot of times to create
their own
series or channel or something like that to kind of fill that void.
And I think that exactly what you're talking about is like this building
awareness around
content as a key pillar of the strategy.
That stuff that is going to help people learn or grow or do those sort of
things is really
valuable.
And you have to kind of find the way that works for you the best.
But at the end of the day, if you're not, if your brain is not near smart stuff
being
set about either your industry or that person's career or profession or maybe
it's somewhere
that they're looking for information or whatever it is or near reviews or
something, then you're
probably not showing up.
You're not painting the skies in your brand colors as our buddy Chander says.
Yeah.
I think that it's another one, right, where it probably depends on where your
company
and brand is at and what makes sense for you in that given moment.
I feel that content syndication has probably made a lot of sense for us because
candidly
mine tickle has had to go through a bit of a journey to just increase our
overall brand
awareness during the last year.
I mean, that was a big pillar focus for me is like we had gotten the from our
customers.
You guys have such a fantastic product, great customer service.
But when I go and talk to my colleague who's in the same chair at another
company, they
haven't necessarily heard of you.
Yeah.
Right.
And I think frankly, that was a catalyzation for me joining the company because
I think
our founders, they really took that kind of feedback to heart and they're like,
yep,
we got to start investing.
So that, I think made content syndication made a lot of sense for us because it
was sort
of a fast path to getting that type of awareness.
And here's what this company is doing and how they might be able to help.
I love that.
And that exactly that totally explains it, right?
Is if you're trying to drive that brand awareness, especially when you're in
the middle of a
rebrand.
So tell me about coming into the role.
We always joke about it.
It's like, everyone's like, I'm going to listen the first 90 days.
I'm just going to listen.
I'm going to see what's out there.
And then of course, everybody ends up doing some type of rebrand and some form
of fashion.
And of course, website is always one of the things they get worked on.
So how did you go in thinking about the rebrand?
So I actually start always by figuring out what's our story and how do we want
to then
portray it.
So for me, it really came down to simplifying how we talked about this concept
of sales
readiness in our space, which is really about how sales readiness is about
enhancing rep
performance, unifying seller data, and helping sales organizations adapt to
change.
And for me, first coming up with a narrative of how I personally would go and
pitch a chief
revenue officer in say five minutes or less about what we do.
I first had to challenge myself to do that before you can start getting into
brand aesthetics
or websites or anything else.
You have to get very clear on what your story and positioning is.
And for better or worse, I have a very active product marketer, part of my
brain.
So I definitely come at it a little bit from that standpoint of drawing the
line of narrative
and then narrative that you know can be backed into something that you actually
solve in
the market.
Unfortunately, a lot of brand led exercises for brand led sake in B2B generally
fall short
because you just end up being in these in sort of platitude land of like grow
revenue
or reduce turn or like whatever kind of thing where it's like you see so many B
2B sites
like this where take the language and not only could you swap out your entire
competitive
set like you could probably swap out like 30 different market categories in B2B
tech that basically proclaim to do the same thing.
So I think if you start your brand exercise too far away from like the core
essence of
like what what problem do you actually solve?
Why is it valuable to a person?
Then it's really hard to work on all the other things.
So first I'd say first thing first was getting that story right.
Were a founder led brand so also getting them comfortable with that story does
it still
jive with your initial vision?
Do are we capturing enough of where we came from but also being thoughtful
about all the
things that we want to add.
So getting clear on that was number one.
Number two for us I felt was mine tickle was from a brand perspective high on
the fun
factor because going way back like almost 10 years ago one of the founding
insights of
the company was when it comes to things like sales enablement you're inherently
trying
to get a cohort of people to do something that they don't really feel like
doing.
So how do you make that interesting right so they're they were really
leveraging gamification
and some of these engagement mechanics that were kind of moving from the
consumer space
into enterprise at the time.
Now since then they've really honed focus quite a bit and it's a it is a very
serious
piece of software in terms of what it does.
But the fun had sort of been a big part of the brand and I said look like
already with
the name mine tickle that invites a conversation to begin with.
So now that we're selling to really large enterprises we really have to focus
on having
a clean and elegant look to our brand.
So right now like for instance if you go on our website you'll see that our our
entire
logo is all lowercase and that was something that came out of our brand team I
thought
was a fantastic idea.
It really just created more of a minimalist feel and sort of a little bit more
of an
elegance to our presentation in a way that that looked really cool.
But again before you can even get to those decisions you have to be clear in
your story
and our story was hey a huge part of the world of sales performance for so long
has been
anecdotal and not terribly scientific in terms of how we quantify what is a
good seller
outside of like them closing business or not.
So having that kind of idea we call it the science of sales in mind that sort
of impacted
a lot of our different decisions and I think the other thing we went through
was thinking
about hey you know if our brand is a person who would that person be.
And I think for us you know despite the fact that we work in sales tech like we
weren't
necessarily started by sales people we were started by very smart people who
understood
the value of data the value of being able to give sales management all these
different
inputs in terms of how they want to modify seller behavior that's a really cool
story
it's a sophisticated story it's different than other people in the space where
I think
you see more of like a type A personality kind of permeate the branding.
So for me I said look it's okay that we're coming at it from this different
angle but
let's have the brand be befitting of that angle.
And so I'll just pause there for a moment before we get to the website I feel
like getting
some of those core elements were what we had to do.
Yeah 100% I mean you know it's that 7.10x to start with why exactly but more or
less
right I mean it's the idea that you really can't add in all the you can't paint
the car
until you put the right engine and the right wheels on it and all that stuff it
just doesn't
make sense.
I think that makes a perfect sense and then it brings you to the website which
is you
know the digital storefront as we all know now but it's like if you don't have
all that
other stuff and all the market texture in place as well you know then you have
a new
brand and new website all this stuff and then drive all this value and then
they go to where
and it's not captured.
Yeah I think with the website this is another one where I feel like B2B
marketing tends
to over complicate so many things when it comes to website development.
I think a website should say what do you do why is it valuable and what are the
potential
outcomes that someone could expect from using your stuff.
And so many different sites get so lost in the noise of their own brand
exercises that
the taglines the headlines all of this stuff are statements that unfortunately
lack the
context of that brand exercise and thus don't make a ton of sense to anyone
reading them.
And so I think one of the things that I was pretty keen on with this version of
our website
and I say a version because you never really done with a .com it's always
evolving or changing
but what we decide to err on the side of with this one was hey this is a
complicated market
where there's a lot of different players offering different things.
A stated goal we should have is someone who visits our site if they're willing
to spend
anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes on the site they should be able to close
out and
walk away with a very clear sense of what we do.
And I wasn't really convinced that we were there I think we had some good
things on our
legacy website but it's you know we were at an interesting inflection point a
year ago
right we're a late stage startup we took our latest round of funding from Soft
Bank back
in I guess it was August and what ends up happening is is your website kind of
grows
in the linear fashion that the business grows so as you add new products as you
add new
services you kind of you add it to the website and it's like anything else
where once you
add things in that linear fashion it's hard to keep control of the user
experience because
again things just get added without any kind of thought necessarily to what was
already
existing do things you have pulled out I mean like I'm sure so many brands you
talk
to you like when we did a website I mean we had a massive graveyard of pages
that we
just had to retire get rid of which actually feels really great.
Feels like you're cleaning your house up as you're doing it but for us that was
the goal
of the site like how could it be a reflection we felt like the best possible
reflection
of what we do and why it's valuable to our customers.
Any final lesson or takeaway that you know now that it's been been rolling for
a little
bit that you know looking back something that you would have done or something
you glad
you did.
I think the big thing is with branding you there are times to get consensus and
be a
little more democratic about things and then there's times to be a little bit
more unilateral
and undemocratic about it and I think that you can kind of get into this phase
of particularly
when you start looking at things like the logo and the colors and all this
stuff where
if everything by committee you are just never going to make everyone happy and
you got to
be careful because if you keep if you keep making tweaks based on you know the
entertaining
of all those conversations it'll sort of be like one of those bills in Congress
that no
one's really happy with because there were so many different negotiations that
happened
that the thing that came out was so watered down to the point where none of the
points
of view are really shining in any particular sort of way.
So I do think that there's a time and a place to get consensus and then there's
other times
where you just got to move and frankly ask for forgiveness later and you know
you'll get
some commentary from the employee base and other places but you just have to
have thick
skin about it and move forward.
Oh what's your most cuttable item or something that you might not invest in?
Most cuttable item or something that I might not invest in?
I would say that for me let's put it this way I'll give you a sort of a middle
a little
bit of a middling answer but I think for me I'm always looking at these various
things like this industry associations really closely.
Those are a popular ask of your marketing budget.
We got to work with this group or association because they purportedly have
this type of
audience that is absolutely the audience that we want.
Those lists are a little hypothetical because it also just matters who shows up
to the engagement
that you paid for or sponsored.
So we're not cutting those but what I will say is I've really instructed my
team to be
looking at them with a very critical eye because I think that oftentimes they
just don't
drive the sort of outcomes that you want so then they kind of get into that all
is
it good for the brand scenario which is a whole other kind of quotient where a
lot of
things try to hide out there.
Well yeah it's not super high converting but it's good for the brand.
We work with some associations that are great so I don't, anyone listening to
this I don't
want them overly reading into those comments but there's certainly just a
number of things
where the perceived reach I don't think really squares with reality and so that
's something
that we look pretty heavily at.
Alright let's get to our next segment, the Dust Up where we talk about healthy
tension
that's with your board a competitor or anyone else.
If you had a memorable Dust Up it sounds like you talked a little bit just now
about some
you know disagree and commit stuff so I'm sure you have.
Yeah I mean I think that the biggest thing that I've run into perennially like
just regularly
in my career is we all do it especially your listeners who work in demand gen
right there's
a basic decisioning that you make in your marketing plan around quality and
quantity
of the demand you're going to drive and I don't care what anyone says about all
of
the different targeting at our disposal there are still decisions you make even
within those
targeting tools around how wide or how narrow to make the aperture of the
market you're
going after and the demand you're going to generate and so for me where the
Dust Up's
often happen is sort of figuring out okay like in B2B marketing's job is to
drive demand
with these accounts and these leads ideally you're doing it with an ICP fit in
mind ideally
your BDR team is doing what they tend to kind of pre-qualify this if you will
and like kind
of understand is this someone we really want to be engaged with and then it's
going off
to sales and then it's their job to really kind of diagnose and understand
whether or
not that is that is right and again like these are issues that just have
happened since forever
right so I think a lot of it is always just sort of determining you know how
quality was
some of the demand you generated in marketing I always tell my team if you're
not ready to
show up to a meeting where you can go deepen the data look at all the demand
you generated
from an account and lead standpoint and feel confident that that was the right
type of
demand that you wanted to generate then you know let's not go and beat anyone
up in sales
because we clearly haven't brought to the table what we what we need to bring
okay let's
give our final segment quick hits this is quick questions and quick answers
just like
how quickly you can talk to somebody on qualified dot com go to qualified right
now we love qualified
they're the best they've been with us since the very beginning of the show and
we love
them dearly go to qualified dot com to learn more quick and easy just like
these questions
Chris are you ready I'm ready hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume
I'm ambidextrous
favorite book podcast or TV show you've been checking out recently the rewatch
ables great
new favorite non marketing hobby that might make you a better marketer golf if
you weren't
in marketing what do you think you'd be doing writing advice for first time CMO
trying to
figure out their demand gen strategy all the data I love it Chris thanks so
much for joining
the show today we really appreciate it for all of the marketers out there go
knock on
sales door and tell them to go to mind tickle.com head up your head of sales
engagement and
tell them to check it out any any final thoughts anything to plug Chris thanks
for having
me today really enjoyed it yeah thanks so much for joining.
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