Preparing for the Future of Content
Jason Widup shares insights on the future of content, benefits of long-term thinking, and having intention behind the content you create.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm mean phase on CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing great, doing great, looking forward to it.
Yeah, excited to chat with you today,
excited to learn about metadata and all the cool stuff
that you are doing in your own marketing and marketing
in general, and MarTech and beyond.
So let's get into it.
How did you get started?
First job in Demand Gen.
Most of my career was in marketing operations.
But the first time I actually got a sneak peek into Demand Gen,
I was at Getty Images.
I was director of marketing operations.
And a lot of the work that I was doing,
a lot of the insights that I came up with,
and a lot of my recommendations, I think our CMO was like,
"Huh, maybe you should be doing Demand Gen as well."
And so I got to add that to my title.
So I got to keep everything that I was already doing.
And then, so I think it was like director of ops and Demand Gen.
Or Demand Gen in operations, it was like a random title.
And kind of quickly fell in love with just,
yeah, just the Demand Gen aspects of it.
And so flash forward to today,
tell us a little bit about your role in metadata.
I was our first marketer hired about coming up
on three years ago, actually.
In September, it'll be about three years.
The first six months, I was consulting kind of as a side gig.
I had a full-time job at a much larger
established company.
And I just really fell in love with the startup component,
'cause most of my career I've been in enterprise companies.
And just, yeah, just really fell in love with the product.
And then came over and said,
"Hey Gil, I'd like to help market there."
And, you know, Ipso facto, three years later, here I am.
But, you know, early on when I first started out,
I was doing everything.
Of course, I was a one-man shop.
I've always been supported by quite a few freelancers.
So I always have like a great set of freelancers.
But today, I'm responsible for all of marketing.
We have a team of nine people now, including myself.
And that just grew by six this year.
So it was just myself and Mark Huber for the first year
and some change.
Then we hired our head of content, Justin.
And then, yeah, everybody else I got now.
I had a demand gen, product marketing, ops.
So yeah, events, communities.
And now I've got kind of people
leading all of these different functions.
- Let's get to our first segment, "The Trust Tree."
This is where we go and if you're honest and trusted,
then you can share those deepest, darkest demand gen secrets.
So what does metadata do?
- We're ultimately building what we're calling
the first marketing operating system for B2B.
At the end of the day, it's a platform that automates
just as many of the repetitive, mundane technical tasks
as possible for the B2B marketer in an intelligent way.
And so, but our first foray in the product
was around paid campaigns, 'cause we were like,
paid campaigns, that's where most of us spend
a lot of our time copy, paste, data in one platform,
data in another, create a campaign in LinkedIn,
then go and try and do the same thing in Facebook.
There's just all of this additional work
that the B2B marketer has to do
that just computers can just do it better nowadays.
And so, that first instance of the product
was really focused on paid campaigns.
And with some of the success we've had in building that out
and some of the recent funding we got,
now we get to build the rest of it.
So in a couple of years from now,
metadata will be doing a lot more for B2B marketers today
we're really focused on automating paid campaigns,
optimizing those campaigns to what drives
the most efficient revenue,
and then basically giving our marketers
as much data as possible so,
they can plan their next set of campaigns.
- And yeah, what are your customers,
who are you selling to, what does that buying committee look like?
- Yeah, so we're selling to demand-gen marketers
primarily B2B software companies
seem to be at the top of the list for sure.
- I know a few.
- Yeah, just a couple of them out there.
We started to see some signs into FinTech,
it's still tech in there,
but not just straight B2B software.
Some e-commerce, so we're starting to see
some manufacturing actually, business services,
but a lot is very, very squarely tech, 100% B2B.
So 100% B2B and very probably 80, 85% of our customers
are in some kind of technology software space.
And right now we're really only selling in,
we're only going to market in North America,
but we do have maybe five to five plus percent,
our customers are outside of North America.
- What company size is primarily,
or is it across the board?
- More focused on the mid-sized business right now,
I'd say our sweet spot is 200 to 3000 employees.
We have a lot of customers above that,
but what we've recognized when we were smaller
is that sales cycle is a nightmare.
And so we just didn't have the resources,
just nine months, sales cycle with 17 demo calls
and bringing everybody else in.
And so we kind of capped our targeting,
but now as we've gotten a little bit bigger,
we've been able to open that up
because also our analysis shows,
those bigger customers do have more success with us
and stay with us longer.
And so starting to do that,
traditional going up market motion.
- How does demand fit within your marketing strategy?
Obviously you don't have a demand gen team per se,
you have a small one,
but where does demand fit within the broader strategy
and what's your demand gen strategy?
- Yeah, so because of just how much I love demand gen,
like we're set up as a demand gen team.
We're either capturing demand that's already out there,
or we're creating our own demand to capture it,
you know, them down the road.
And that involves everybody.
So mark and myself,
we basically lead to slightly different areas.
But our first hire was content
because we knew that our approach,
we wanted our demand gen approach to be one
that was content focused.
And, but like not SEO content,
not content to bring people to the website,
content that actually would help marketers
do their job better,
agnostic of any tools that they own,
they don't have to use metadata at all
to get incredible value from our content.
We would actually reach out to recognize professionals
in our industry, you know, outside of metadata.
And the first year we actually,
we had $3,000 a month in our budget
that we would pay external professionals
just to write unique content.
'Cause we didn't want to repurpose stuff
they'd already written.
So we're like, hey, will you write unique content for us?
And then we have these big names, you know,
in demand gen that we're writing content for us,
people were getting value from it.
We did things like our benchmark report
where we used all of the data in our own platform.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend
and opportunities and all this data to write content about,
you know, and then we did our big demand event
last year for the first time.
So our strategy has always been,
let's focus on the B2B marketer who will,
who are either today in our shoes
or will be in our shoes and looking for help in the future.
And through our brand,
through the intelligence that we have around B2B marketing
and demand gen, the successes that we're having,
the partnerships that we have,
let's pull all of that together and let's create a website,
let's create almost a media entity
that can stand on its own
and that people that actually want to participate in it,
get value from it, read, the strategic thinking was,
if we do that well, people will come to our content
and they'll think, oh, wow, this is smart.
This is actually helping me do my job.
Who wrote this?
Oh, it was metadata.
Oh, well, let me go check metadata out.
Maybe they're, maybe they have a smart platform
and that's what ultimately happened.
That was a big part of our strategy was content.
So we had this rich content and ungated it at the same time,
which is also hard to track, you know what I mean?
But it worked.
And then the second part of our strategy
was really predicated on my early use of
conversation ads in LinkedIn with an incentive for a demo.
So I like to think of myself,
I'm not the father of incentivized demos by any means
'cause they were happening before,
but I do feel responsible for the growth of incentivized demos
just 'cause of the success that we had.
And the amount of talking about it and writing about it
that we did.
And then all of a sudden I started getting my exact same ad
back to me all the time, you know,
and people writing playbooks on how to do this
and how to use incentivized demos.
And had you asked me four years ago,
"Hey, what do you think about paying somebody $100
to come get a demo?
"I would have been like, your product sucks then.
"If you have to pay somebody to come,
"either your marketing sucks or your product sucks.
"You have no word of mouth, no product market fit.
"That's how I would have thought about it."
But when I started that play at a startup
where we have zero awareness
and I saw how it worked, here's what happened.
The $100 basically end around timing and pain.
So like normally if I'm gonna take a demo,
if I'm just gonna give my time up for a demo of a platform,
I have to have some pain.
What am I experiencing right now
that I just can't solve on my own?
Just got me right when I was having this pain.
Yes, let me get a demo.
Well, when I offer somebody $100,
they probably, they may not have that pain at all.
They might say, "That's a hundred bucks.
"That's a half hour of my time.
"That's $200 an hour."
That sounds worth it.
I wanted to tell the marketers, "Your time is valuable.
"I know your time is valuable.
"You're getting 9,000 other Martek tools
"asking for your time."
And I knew our platform was so good,
I just needed them to get on the phone
and see it and have the light bulb moments go off.
Just wanted to get them on the phone.
That's all I needed to do.
And sure enough, they'd get on,
they'd see it, the light bulb moments would go off,
and then they wouldn't buy.
They're like, "Oh man, what's going on?"
We did some analysis.
Our incentivized demo is converted at 3%,
and then unincentivized at 12%,
and yet the economics still worked.
And then when we looked at it six months later,
we were like, "Where are all these organic demo requests
"coming from?"
And it was the people that had already had a demo.
And then now they were like, "Oh, I remember that demo I had.
"We got in front of them first.
"They knew about us, and then they came back,
"and they're like six, nine, 12 months later,
"and they came back organically, and converted that time."
And so then when we look at it over time,
the cost of the incentivized demo is actually lower
than an unincentivized demo,
because we sureked the timing at first,
and so it didn't look like it turned into something
over the long term it really did,
and it was because we got in front of them first,
in a lot of cases, and made those light bulb moments go off.
So that's like our two-part strategy.
It's such a gut-driven hypothesis
that I think that we're all so afraid of numbers
and doing a campaign, and saying like,
"With this one didn't work,
"and especially then you see the numbers and you go,
"that didn't work."
And instead you just kept pulling the yarn and saying,
"Yeah, but why?
"Like, why didn't it work?"
This idea of like, marketing has to be remarkable,
which means you actually,
like the person should talk about it to someone else,
and you know what you talk about?
Getting a hundred bucks for a demo.
- Yeah, we believe that too. - You go to remember?
- Getting a hundred bucks for a demo. - Yeah, yeah.
And we put that same thinking into our other ads too.
So a lot of our ads, we build them to not feel like an ad.
We're doing very low budget stuff sometimes.
One of our best performing ads I built in 15 minutes.
It was a 15-minute video of me.
I start by typing, like I'm just talking to you.
And it talks about how we do our demos
and how our sales process is very much consultative
and not aggressive.
Just come just pop on a demo with us.
Talk to a friendly sales rep.
That thing performs so much better than I thought.
And so we do a lot of that, just lower budget,
just let me get in front of you, you know,
with just authenticity and transparency.
And those are what's working really well for us.
- But would you say that the reason why you can do that stuff
is because of the foundational commitment to content
and improving the lives for the people that you're selling to?
'Cause I think that it's really easy to say like,
"Hey, you should be authentic."
But it's like you also have the entire iceberg
below the water that's like,
"Oh, all of our stuff has actually been authentic
for two years or longer."
I think that that's like, sometimes when people want
to make an ad like that and they don't feel like they can,
it's because the rest of their stuff has been transactional
or their salespeople are actually very transactional
or they care about new logo, new logo,
or whatever it is.
- No, you're exactly, no.
- I'm curious to hear.
- You're very, it's a very good point
because you can liken it to your personal selves, right?
So sometimes like, let's say you got something about yourself
that you just wanna change and you just hate it
and you try and change it and like all your friends
and stuff, like they don't expect that from you.
You know what I mean?
They're just like, "Wait, that's not you."
That point you said is very interesting
because that is absolutely the case.
You can't be this like you said transactional
or like you just don't know,
are there people behind this company?
Or is it a bunch of machines?
And it would be jarring probably just all of a sudden
shift like, "Wait, all of a sudden they have their CEO
"coming out, talking about itself and the growth
"of the company or whatever it is,
"whatever is transparent or man,
"this part of the product doesn't work very well."
You know, like we've actually done that before ourselves.
Then as a more gradual, it's like a slower role, right?
You've gotta basically have that
and that's gotta come from the top too.
You know, and so I think that's where a lot of marketers
are having struggles is they've either joined a company
where it's like, "Oh, I can't do the kind of marketing
"that I wanna do because either our culture
"or the leadership."
So I do recognize the luxury that I do have
that I started this.
I started it here, I set the tone,
I hired each marketer and you know,
the relationship that Gil and I have
and the way that we think about it makes it work.
- How'd you settle on a hundred bucks
as the dollar amount to people?
It's a great question.
I wanted it to, it had to have three numbers in it.
Anything less than that just doesn't quite look enticing.
Also, I wanted it to like jar somebody a little bit like,
"What, why are they, how can they offer me a hundred dollars?"
That's a lot of money.
And I wanted to show them how good at targeting my platform was
that I targeted the right people with that offer.
So there wasn't a lot of like extra money
that I had to give away.
I just wanted to see would people just like, "What?"
Did they calculate my value?
Is this a unique number just for me?
They calculated my hourly, but you know, still fun.
- I'm also curious.
So when you got at those conversations
and they came back organically,
which really is not technically organic,
it's, but they came back.
That after you had this like wave of people that came back,
what was that process like to think about like,
why they came back and what were the levers
that you were doing because I'm sure you were retargeting them.
I'm sure that you have brand campaigns that are running.
You have couple of podcasts, your additional content.
Was there other touches in the attribution there
when they came back and I know this is going to vary a lot?
But was it like they came back like,
"I don't remember that demo at all."
But like, "I'm here for the new or was it like?"
No, I actually just wanted to buy this eight months ago,
but you know, sales cycle.
That's how it is.
- Oftentimes it was timing.
It was like, "Oh, you know, when I got that demo,
it was a $100 offer, but I wasn't in my budget cycle.
You know, I already had everything spent that year or whatever.
Sometimes it's, "Oh yeah, I had traditional ABM platform.
I realized I don't need it."
But I was paying for it.
And this is where we get into this category problem
that we kind of have since we don't have our own category.
A lot of our customers have like a six cents and metadata
because six cents has like really good intent data
and it's like a good account prioritization, you know,
for sales, but it's considered an ABM platform.
So like they pay for it out of their ABM platform line item
and then they're like, "Ah, I don't have any more money."
And we're like, "Well, we're don't worry
'cause we're not an ABM platform."
They're like, "Well, but I don't have a category for you."
And so oftentimes it was, "Yep, great.
I just wrapped up with six cents or been just waiting."
Sometimes it's, they didn't have a competitive platform.
Like I was mentioning early on,
there's this light bulb moment that goes off.
It's the same light bulb moment I had.
I couldn't even say one of those reasons
were like the most popular one over all the others.
Although timing one is probably like the clearest
timing and budget.
- One more thing before we move on the next segment.
So as you mentioned at the top,
like this is very counterculture to the product-led CEO.
If you build a product good enough,
people will just fly off the shelves
and marketers forever in a day have been saying like,
"No, that's not the case.
Like obviously you need marketing."
So this is like the next step has that
which is like not only do you need marketing,
you literally can pay your customer or your prospects
to become your customers
because the product is so good.
And then the CEO is like, "Yeah, but the product is so good."
And you're like, "Yeah, I know the product is so good."
And so in SAS, in B2B, where it all compounds,
where lifetime value of these customers
is extremely high, especially for enterprise products.
Like we know that to be true.
Why do you think that stuff like this
hasn't caught on before?
Why was no one using this?
I would surmise that it's because you have a lot of these
like product-led CEOs or CTOs that are like,
"Hey, the product good enough?
Like I'm just curious, like why was no one doing this?"
So I used to think a couple things.
First, I used to think I can math because I was an ops, right?
I was like, I can math my way into marketing success.
I was just like, it's a marketing is a math problem.
You know, I used to think that, which is just not the case.
And then I also used to think like,
"Oh, no matter what, at the end of the day,
the best product is gonna win."
You know, 'cause ultimately like, you know,
it might take years and years and years,
but since working here,
I've changed my tune on these things
because first of all, like,
the best product doesn't always win.
You know what I mean?
And I've actually seen that happen before.
I bought products, you know, in fact, that weren't the top,
but I felt like they were the absolute best.
And at the same time, we couldn't do a PLG motion.
So I want to, I would love to.
But like because of the amount of,
we have to integrate with your LinkedIn ads account,
your Facebook ads account,
you have to sign data protection agreements
'cause we're dealing with PII.
You know, there's just like a little bit too much
for us to be able to offer it.
But I really, really wanted that.
So without that, for us,
the focus on brand has been like,
the biggest, I mean, I'm 45 years old
and it's like been the biggest thing
I've learned in marketing in my career was just how,
and probably especially in Martek, I'm gonna guess,
like, 'cause there's so many of us out there
and literally you could go to my website,
you could go to three other websites of other Martek
that are actually in completely different categories.
Like not even my same category.
And we may all sound exactly the same
and the buyer won't know at all what to buy and what we do.
And so that's where I started to see like,
oh my God, the power of brand.
And when we realized like we had a strong brand behind us
and then when I saw what that actually did,
our sales reps, for example, they love working here.
First of all, I'm fed 70% from inbound.
So like 70% of my book of business
is already basically brought in for me.
And then that other 30% that I have to outbound,
every single person knows who we are.
And they say and they'll,
they're happy to take a meeting with me.
And so that to me, that was where I was started to say like,
wow, brand is so important.
And now I've completely changed my tune
in the course of two and a half, three years
from this like best product wins.
Now, you know, category leadership becomes
so much more important.
Learning more about how categories work in software
and how leaders of categories will take 50%
or more of the market share.
And like basically leave the scraps
to the rest of the folks there.
And I will not be a scrap eating CMO, you know.
And so.
- All right, let's get to the playbook
is where you open up the playbook
and talk about the tactics that help you win.
- You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play it, it just play it.
- Talk a lot about tactics in the previous segment,
but we still need it.
Three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget.
- Yeah, so first off, I already mentioned it,
the LinkedIn conversation ads.
And this is what surprises me is that
that's what started this ride.
And it still is our strongest performing paid campaign.
And I honestly am puzzled why.
How has anyone ever run the same tactic for three years
that actually was still your number,
maybe paid search, you know, but that's easy.
The same paid social campaign for that long
that actually still brings in a majority
of your inbound demand.
So, LinkedIn conversation ads,
if that got swept from me, like,
ah, all right, back to the drawing board.
Our own events, I know it's a big part of our strategy
and our culture is to reward B2B marketers, you know.
And to give them, like, make them first class citizens.
So like the B2B Emmy Awards that we did,
Emmy stood for experimental marketer of the year awards.
I gave $10,000 cash to the top winner.
We had a bunch of submissions and great innovative market,
you know, B2B marketing campaigns.
We were able to like have a big show
and show everybody all these things
and then give away $10,000 to the winner.
Events like our demand event.
We did the first one last October.
We blew away our registration goals.
We had almost, you know, 4,500 people register
when it was just three of us marketers
running this entire thing.
And it was like a lot of people talk about
just how good of an event.
And so it was, so now I actually have a full event marketer.
She is an absolute pro.
She just started and we have our metadata live customer event
coming up, we're starting to do things in person.
So like events would be the next one.
And then content, you know, like the content that we have
is now not only a competitive advantage for us,
it's a moat.
No other company could go and create the amount
and quality of B2B marketing content that we have
in a year.
It would take them more than a year to go
and try and create, you know,
the same amount and quality of content
and differentiate it really too.
So content is a moat for us.
That's a must have.
- So you're at a minimum year ahead of your competitors.
And then they go, yeah,
but what's the ROI of that?
Like, yeah, you have all this stuff,
but like what's the ROI of that?
What do you say?
- The way we know it's working is a couple things.
First off, we did see a huge boost in just organic,
you know, visitors to the website.
And it was very clear from when Justin started,
you could see this like, you know,
six weeks, eight weeks in for this hockey stick,
you know, on our organic traffic.
You know, he's like a content repurposing master.
So A was just organic traffic to the website.
And not only that, but we had a secondary goal
on qualified demos that came from organic visits
to the website.
So we saw those start to go up.
So we're like, cool, you know, that's working.
The rest of it is feedback that we get.
Qualitative feedback, we have tons of gong trackers
that we use to understand when a prospect mentions
our podcast, a piece of content,
an event that we did.
We have self-reported attribution that we use
instead of trying to like get fancy with digital attribution,
which doesn't work, we just ask people,
how did you find out about us, you know,
or what got you to convert today?
But then we see these things like when we launched
our beta community, which we just launched like last week,
how many people that we already have waiting
to engage with us.
And that's where we started to like realize,
we actually have a community out there.
We have people that are constantly consuming our content,
they're writing about it, they're posting about it.
We just haven't given them a centralized place
to really come together and chat
and see how that might actually have a commercial,
some kind of commercial benefit to us down the road.
And so we said, let's do a community as well
and start to bring these people together.
So yeah, those short answers we don't know,
the better answer is, luckily our CEO is 100% on board
with us and so it allows us to keep doing it.
But the one thing I will say is,
I wouldn't have been able to do any of the brand,
content stuff, if I hadn't come in
and immediately drove demand.
And that was, I think, gave,
'cause our CEO, Marketer himself,
some of the things he knows are older things
that just won't work.
And a lot of the things he's,
he was a very good demand gen marketer
from like a numbers and like running things,
technology perspective and just like scaling.
So his approach would have been more of a mathematical
like ops approach like I would have done.
I had to start by showing,
I can drive demand very quickly, efficiently,
I can bring in demos, so great.
And so once I've proved myself there,
then it just gave me the runway
to be able to do things that aren't measurable
because the trust is there already.
- Yeah, agreed.
At Caspian, we're making podcast and video series
for people.
So the idea that you get to someone
and it's like, oh, is it working?
It's like, well, we don't have three episodes.
So normally, our first season is gonna be,
you know, like a year's worth of content,
like spread out, you know what I mean?
Like, we're gonna be doing 24 episodes
over the course of a year,
and then we're gonna judge the campaign
over the course of a year.
And I think that these time horizons
that get shrunk into the next quarter mentality
into that thing, and it's like content is just not like,
you know, those might fall to the wayside.
I think people just like, forget that,
that it's like, this is a long-term build
when you're doing stuff like this.
- That can be difficult again if you have a CEO
that is more, you know, or even a CMO
that's just like, show me the immediate results
because none of the content stuff,
had I been asked that,
I would have had to stop doing content, you know,
pretty early on, 'cause you're like,
oh man, we built this amazing piece of content
and oh man, it's just not getting a lot of attention
right now, but it's not that single piece of content.
You're not gonna like have a silver bullet
with one piece of content all of a sudden,
it's a commitment to it, you know,
it's a commitment to it, and our commitment to ourself
was this, it was, we're not gonna use SEMrush
and these tools to like, just tell us exactly
what content to write, we're gonna actually ask marketers
like ourselves, we're gonna ask ourselves, you know,
what content would we have wanted to have,
what do you need?
And then we're gonna write that.
And then when we write it, we're gonna write it in a way
not to try and get through it to get it on there.
What's the right way to do this?
You know what I mean?
I'm the right person to write this thing.
It was the intention going into it.
And that's what I say a lot is like,
the reason a lot of our stuff worked
is because of the intention behind it.
Like our demand event, the intention,
I never showed one dollar of commercial benefit
to our CEO to get approval to do that event.
I never even had to, he never even asked,
he's like, how much are you gonna spend?
I'll be able to create those connections, you know,
is ultimately what's working for us.
- One more thing on short term thinking.
I think that because we have all these tools
that you can use and dump money into in a short term
and that those can kind of bandaid over things.
I think that there's an over-liance at times,
obviously on those things, and they do results.
And very spammy outbound is another example
where you say, you know, the SVP of sales says,
well, look at how well all of our outbound is doing.
You know, we're getting three percent conversion or whatever.
You're saying, yeah, but the 98% or 97% of people
that are pissed that we keep spamming them,
what do they think?
And it's like, those are the sort of things
that like, I think a really savvy CMO has to weigh,
is like every inch that you're putting into like
building a content, you know, framework
and a portfolio of amazing stuff
is time well spent towards building something,
not spamming people, right?
And so like again, not that there,
I'm not saying like one or the other,
but I'm just saying from a mindset perspective,
yeah, those things.
And so anyways, when you get into the like,
well, like this quarter, we have to win this quarter.
It's like, yeah, but our competitors
are also doing that exact same analysis.
And where we can beat them is by thinking more strategically
and smarter and making bets today that pay off in a year,
because if they keep dumping money into Google
every single quarter for the next 10 years,
they're gonna continue losing money every quarter.
Whereas we can build so that two years from now,
we have more money.
It's like that sort of like long-term thinking
just doesn't really for certain executives,
it just doesn't like add up to them,
which I don't really get.
- That runway is very short, you know what I mean?
That is not a very long runway.
And so we had to do both.
We had to give the right amount of time
to the short-term things to get the goals done.
And then every other last minute on the things
that are gonna build trust, build a relationship
because that's really what I'm trying to do
is I'm trying to build trust and relationships
with B2B marketing prospects as call,
but I don't care who you are, B2B marketers out there.
And that takes time.
You don't build trust in that in like one interaction.
And that's where like, if I just have one message
from a BDR going out to somebody and it doesn't land,
that's your first impression.
That's your brand's first impression to that person.
And that's not building the relationship.
And so that's really our first,
it's like the first level of thing we need to do in marketing.
And that's long-term.
And so these events, these content that we build,
when you do it consistently,
'cause again, if you just do it once,
then it's like, well, I can't trust
you're gonna do it all the time.
So the trust isn't there.
So it's like, build a trust relationship.
And then what honestly happens is people
don't need as much convincing about the product.
'Cause they're like, well, you haven't lied to me
in your content, you've been very transparent,
you've been very helpful.
So why would I think that I would get
a different experience using your product?
And that's really, I'm hoping,
and I was 45 years old, I was, this is my first startup.
And I worked at all these big companies as a buyer
and I just, all the marketing and sales
thumbnails that I had gone through,
it was like, this is what worked for me.
You know what I mean?
And I was buying it Tableau at Getty, Microsoft,
big companies, this is what worked for me.
Building that trust, building that relationship,
nothing transactional, that didn't work.
And then getting B2B to stop being boring.
I needed humor, I needed to be self-deprecating,
I wanted to be humble, witty and funny.
I want us to be able to be funny and entertaining,
'cause I want also to be entertained.
Like my job is already hard enough.
Make me laugh, and you've won,
make me laugh and you're smart at the same time,
I'm like, shh, take my money.
- Let's get to the desktop.
We talk about healthy tension,
but that's with your board, your sales team,
your competitor, your CEO, or anyone else.
If you had a memorable desktop in your career, Jason.
- One thing I'll say is, you know, in most of my career,
I always played like the,
I always wanted to create like win, win situations for a bit.
I really tried to avoid conflict,
and I would create these like,
solutions that I thought were win, win,
but I didn't realize that like,
oh, I'm avoiding conflict in this,
but I'm creating a watered down, you know what I mean?
Like end of the day watered down solution
that kind of like gives everybody a little bit
of what they want, but not doesn't serve one person
exactly how, you know what I mean?
They want to be served.
And I say it that way because after taking this role
at the startup, it was like, man,
you really kind of have to look out for what's right.
You know, you can't center everything,
you can't have everything like, you know,
average out to the mean, you've got to stand out,
and that can oftentimes create conflict.
And my CEO and I can have some decent conflict,
but it took me a while to like figure out
actually how to do it.
I would most of the time just like,
oh, you're right, you know, no, you're right,
you're the CEO, you're right, you know,
I don't know what I'm doing.
And once I built up the confidence,
more of the confidence, then I was like, oh, wait, you know,
I have these feelings, I'm just gonna tell them right now.
No, I don't want to do that, and I don't like it.
I don't like that idea.
You know, Gil was probably like, wait,
where's this coming from?
This isn't the normal Jason.
And so we've had, you know, we've had a couple of dustups.
We're both respectful, you know what I mean?
There's neither one's being offensive, you know.
Here was the behavior.
Here's kind of was my assessment of it.
And you know, this is, you know, where am I wrong?
And I've learned a lot through that too.
Gil has been the most direct boss I've ever had in my career,
which has actually been a great thing for me.
I'm really not good at reading between the lines
in my personal or my professional life.
- Let's get to our final segment, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like conversational marketing with qualified,
you can go to qualified.com
and talk to someone quickly,
just like these questions,
qualified prospects are on your website right now.
And you can talk to them quickly with qualified,
go to qualified.com to learn more.
We love qualified.
They've been with us since day one of this podcast.
- Oh, we love qualified too.
- Forever be with us in our heart.
- We just implemented it.
I don't know a couple of months ago.
- There we go.
- Jason loves qualified too.
- Yeah, we love qualified.
- There you go.
I need I say more.
Jason already vouches.
Okay, quick hits.
Jason, you ready?
- Yep, let's do it.
- Number one, what is a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- Beyond your resume.
- I can show other reasons.
- I do.
- That might be on your resume for other reasons.
Do you have a favorite book podcast TV show
that you've recently checked out or would recommend?
- No, I mean, I've been reading a lot
about category creation more recently.
So like, just the manifesto on it, play bigger.
But my thing is I tend to not read a lot
or listen a lot and I'm trying to figure that out.
But or I'll read like the first three chapters of a book.
I'm like, I got it, I'm good.
I'm a pro at this now.
So yeah, I don't have a lot of great advice.
- That's what you're supposed to do.
- Is that what they say you're supposed to?
- I'm doing alright.
- Well, somebody, I think it's Tim Ferriss or somebody,
somebody along the way, I was like,
yeah, if you never feel guilty buying a book
and if you stop reading it,
whenever you stop reading it, it's like.
- That's where there we go.
- Basically like, essentially like, well, anyway,
it's not to get all into it,
but I think it's like generally speaking
that publishing that maybe, no,
maybe it's set to go and talk about this.
Anyways, somebody talks about this
about how like, essentially the second half of a book,
essentially most of the time is just examples that
prove the question. - That's kind of what I thought.
Yeah, I was like, man, I feel like I'm getting a lot
of these like the ideas I wanted from the first part.
So yeah, yeah, maybe that's okay.
- Yeah, you're doing great.
You know, I really like Dave, your heart.
You know, I think everybody probably says that,
but he's actually also an advisor for our company.
So I get, you know, I meet with him every week.
I just kind of like his approach and, you know,
he's kind of been through it with a couple places.
So yeah, I like Dave.
- Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby
that maybe kind of indirectly makes you a better marketer?
- One of the things I like to do is I like to,
I mean, I'm a mountain person first and foremost.
So like, if I'm not here, you can find me up snowboarding,
hiking, just doing all kinds of things in the mountains.
But that, I don't know that helps me, like, you know,
be a better marketer.
Legos, I'd say.
I actually still, I have actually won right now
that I've been working on for a while.
It's like, it's a Porsche.
It's like, it's got a full working clutch in it.
Like they worked with Porsche to come up with like
to build this thing.
My wife got it for me.
You know, I think it's like just slowing down a little bit,
getting the pieces organized, you know,
before trying to like, you know, put them all together.
So yeah, I'd probably say like playing with my Legos.
That's probably the closest hobby I have.
So like that helps me with marketing.
- I love it.
Final thing.
What's your best advice for a first-time CMO?
- Managing up to the CEO is probably like one
of the most important things, parts of your job.
Your staff is looking for you to be that buffer.
They're looking to you to see, can they stand up for us
when the CEO is asking ridiculous things?
I think coming in first time,
you have a very important role to play with the CEO
and how that gets translated into marketing and back.
So I think building that relationship,
building the trust, learning how to manage up to the CEO,
I think is probably, yeah.
Give that a lot of focus.
I think a lot of other things will fall into place.
- Jason, thanks so much for joining.
We really appreciate it.
For listeners, go check out mededata.io.
If you haven't already, clearly you should try a demo
'cause it sounds like it's just about--
- Get a hundred bucks too.
- Jason, any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Yeah, there you go.
- The one thing, who doesn't need a little extra?
- No, the only thing I'd like to plug is our demand event.
Again, this year, October, October 20th, I think,
20th or 21st, I can't remember.
But if you go to our website,
it's banner at the top can get you there
or mededata.io/demand-2022.
- Oh my goodness, and how could I forget
that you have a popular podcast called "Demention You,"
Jason and Mark co-host and great stuff
and obviously perfect for our audience.
Jason, thanks so much for joining.
We really appreciate it.
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