Strategies to Drive Brand Differentiation
Maria Pergolino shares her strategies to drive brand differentiation, the importance of setting goals for customer success, and the power of automation.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Fazan, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Renah, how are you?
I'm so good.
I'm so excited to be here, Ian.
Thank you so much.
I am so excited to have you on the show.
I was telling you this off air, but my call before this
was with our growth marketing team.
And we're talking about active campaign and some new newsletters
that we are going to be dropping soon
and a bunch of other stuff that we're working on at Caspian.
And I was like, man, how fortunate are we
that we get to talk to the CMO of active campaign product
that we use every day.
So super excited for this interview,
excited to chat about how you all go to market
and everything in between.
So let's get started first job in marketing, Maria, what was it?
I did my grad and undergrad degrees in marketing.
So I have been a marketer my entire career.
I think my first job as it relates to marketing
was I worked for a realtor kind of putting together
like little pages and mini websites early in my career.
As soon as I graduated, I went and took a marketing job
in the chemical industry.
And you think, well, that is that exciting?
Is that not exciting?
All of my friends were going into more consumer side,
which seemed very exciting, but I found a love for B2B marketing.
And that's where I am today.
And where you are today, CMO of active campaign,
tell us a little bit about your role.
Yeah, so I get the great privilege of representing
over 180,000 customers, that active campaign
as the chief marketing officer.
We help companies with things like you were talking about,
newsletters, email marketing, marketing automation, CRM,
essentially everything that's going to help a company grow.
I think sometimes brands think, oh, I'll build a website
or I'll start a database of my customers, I'll open a store.
And they think the customers will just show up
if they have a great product.
But unfortunately, that is not the case.
We have to spread the word about that product.
We have to remind people, even that they may already love
our product about it.
And we're here to help them with that.
The coolest part about active campaign is that we're allowing--
and I think you feel this in what you're doing with active campaign--
you're able to spend your time making great podcasts
because the tools going to automate the stuff that you don't want
to be thinking about every day.
And so it's not just technology, but technology that lets
companies work on the things that they want to work on.
And then as chief marketing officer,
I get to help spread the word about that.
Marketing to other marketers or other businesses is so fun.
It keeps you on your toes because you have to do good work.
They'll catch you if you mess something up.
Being able to use our own product to do that marketing
is really cool because you get to then interact with the whole company.
We get to talk to engineering.
We get to talk to support all of the different areas of the company
about how we're using the product, which makes it just incredible.
Yeah, what do you call it?
Do you call it sipping your own champagne, drinking your own kombucha?
What's your terminology?
At Active Campaign, we often refer to it as Active Campaign for Active Campaign
when we talk about it.
And I like talking about that way because it makes us feel just
like one of our customers.
I think that that's important, that we shouldn't have two outsized voice,
that we want to be one of those 180,000 customers,
not the special one out of them, right?
Yeah, indeed.
You know, we always say in marketing, our first customer is sales, right?
It's like that's who we have to serve first and foremost.
And if marketing is not doing their job from a sales perspective,
it's not going to be great.
Let's get to it, our first segment, the Trust Tree,
is where we can go and feel honest and trusted.
And you can share those deepest, darkest demand, gen and marketing secrets.
So you mentioned that you also sell to marketers,
but who specifically are you selling to?
What does that buying committee look like?
I like that, the Trust.
I hope people send me lots of their secrets.
So our buyer, we're selling often to smaller organizations
up through mid-sized organizations.
And so that buyer may be a solopreneur,
somebody who is doing the work on their own all the way up through
a company that has a marketing department and a sales department.
And those different personas, different messaging, different information
for all of those groups.
I think beyond that, we have about over half our business outside of the US.
And so that often means that that may be received in Portuguese,
French, Italian, German, Spanish.
And so that buying committee may look differently
or be taking a different approach depending on where they are in the world.
And so for us, we really like to think about things as it relates to the use
case.
What is somebody trying to do?
What can they automate that's going to make their day easier
or make it be that they can deliver more for their customer?
For an e-commerce business, which we serve many,
that's going to be different than, let's say, a B2B company,
that e-commerce business may be looking to tell somebody about shopping cart
abandonment or for getting more people to their site,
getting past visitors back where a B2B company,
it may be a lot around education, content that they want to share,
a lot of educational materials.
And so that's going to yield a different type of marketing.
And so we're trying to make sure we're getting those right use cases
to those right prospects.
What's your marketing strategy?
Our company's mission is to help customers grow through customer experience
automation.
And so I would say that our marketing strategy is to help achieve our mission
through our company values.
The way that comes to B, and I think a little bit of our secret sauce,
understanding that we're in the trust tree, is that we start with a company
plan,
marketing looks at that company plan, our company plan has five items on it,
and we think about how we're going to achieve to those five items.
And then we create up to five of our own, each with metrics,
and have a plan behind each and try to drive to that.
And sometimes that goes great.
And sometimes it doesn't work the way we hope.
And so we use that plan and those metrics that we set to pivot throughout the
year.
And how does demand fit kind of within that?
Yeah, so as you can imagine in that company plan,
there's goals around how we want our customers to be successful.
There's goals around how we want our employees to be successful,
but there's also revenue goals.
And for our company, and just a hint for those marketers,
I love working active campaign, because it is a business to business company.
We sell to other businesses, but it is not always through a sales person.
A lot of our business self-serve.
And that's really empowering as a marketer because it really,
that means you have to be so crisp in your message that you have to have
the right information out there that people feel comfortable buying
even without that salesperson.
There's no safety net there.
I love in creating that plan and creating the goals for the team,
having that piece that we have to make sure our delivery is so good
that people can buy on their own, and that then we're supporting the sales team
to make that even better.
So we have to think about that self-serve piece, right?
And so that is a mix of marketing pieces.
One of the things that is amazing at active campaign,
we have five ways that we acquire new business.
We either acquire through somebody coming to us through search,
like Google or another search engine, depending on where you may be in the
world,
somebody coming to us through paid advertising, often PPC for us,
somebody coming through an agency, somebody who's delivering for us,
somebody who's coming through an affiliate.
So Ian, you could have a link that for our active campaign,
and we would give you something back.
I know that's not the case here, but we have that situation.
And then we have what we would call direct,
which is somebody comes right to our website,
and that one we had to figure out is because they're a past customer
because they were referred in some way.
But those five sources, which are pretty unique for us,
we have demand programs behind each one of those.
And each represent about 20% of our business.
It's very rough, but it means a lot of diversity in the marketing.
You think about a stock portfolio and how you don't want everything in one area
and that's definitely the case for us.
We're fortunate that we have our own tool to be able to measure
and understand the impact of all of that.
But let's say affiliates there, we're not just educating our consumer,
we're educating people that they can educate other people,
and that takes a little bit of a different marketing motion,
and there's a plan there that's separate than when we're doing paid advertising
which is often to the pain, which somebody looking for lead nurturing or lead
scoring,
or maybe somebody looking for something like shopping cart abandonment,
or email marketing.
And so we have campaigns that go behind each of those.
I love that that's really cool.
We talk about the portfolio approach all the time on the show
and how to break up those buckets and all that,
and we'll get into uncuttable budget items here in a second.
It's a very savvy approach, and we don't hear a ton of affiliate on the show.
We haven't in the past, so I said it to dig into that too.
I'm curious within that structure,
is there anything within the structure of your organization
and how you go to market and your marketing team
that might be a little different or unique?
I think this team is incredible.
So I would say that part of the recipe for success is just incredible people,
and I feel privileged every day to work with the team here.
One thing that I feel very proud of is that we've hired to our values,
one of which is diversity.
And when I think about diversity, obviously diversity in approaches,
I think about my direct reports and how different they are from me.
And then I think about how they've built their team.
And it causes some conflict.
Sometimes we don't hire for different personalities
because it means that you're going to have to take more time to explain things.
People are going to come with different approaches,
but I do think that gets us to better.
And so I try to encourage, and it's not always perfect for sure,
but a healthy conflict that there is debate.
And I think in the short term, it makes for better marketing for our customers,
I think in the long term.
It really provides amazing career paths for the team
because they've seen lots of different approaches.
They've seen lots of different opinions.
And so I think that is unique for us.
I think you have to hold that bar when you are marketing to marketers,
that you have to be doing some really great work
because customers will call some BS, right?
And we want to meet their bar.
We want to meet their expectations.
I think we do use our own product really well.
I have worked in sales and marketing technology for well over a decade,
but the way that we use the product, the nurturing that we do,
the scoring we do, the way we choose to follow up with some people
and give people the path to explore on their own for others.
Our own use of automation has really been transformational for us.
Like you said, spending four million years in marketing automation
at a bunch of the big companies.
Something that's been common across all of those
that I think is really important for any marketing leader,
or any marketer, is that you don't get to something exceptional.
There are so many companies, regardless of what space we're in,
whatever job you have, that are trying to do the same thing.
And I just don't believe you do anything exceptional
without doing it something exceptional.
Like, there's just not magic.
You have to do it.
And so you have to out-market.
I get really scared of best practices
because that's what everybody can do.
What are we going to do a little bit different?
How do we say, "Hey, we're not going to do exactly the best practices?
We're going to, hey, maybe not do this as well
so that we can do something else really great
and use that to make the difference."
I think if you're just trying to, like I call it checkbox marketing,
if you're just trying to do what every other company is doing,
you're going to get as good as every other company,
but for you to have a fast growth company,
for your company to grow, you have to do something different.
And that's why I think automation is so important
because if you can, as much as you can automate or like,
you know, let the checkbox stuff be the checkbox stuff
and then put your time and value into what you do great.
Yeah, I love that.
That's a perfect segue to our next segment.
Let's go to the playbook
where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello.
You play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Now you got to differentiate.
You got to get outside the box for this.
You just give the mantle here.
Yeah, I think even before the budget,
like as marketers, we choose our jobs.
We choose the companies that we work for.
It has to be a mission that you stand behind
and it has to be something you can differentiate.
There are many products out there in the world
that you can't tell the difference between two of them.
And if you can't, it's then really hard to differentiate.
It's really hard to do great marketing.
You have to choose an opportunity where you feel like you can do something
with your skill, with that marketing.
And I'm fortunate to have that here and at my past companies.
But sometimes it does not matter.
It could be the greatest marketer in the world.
And if they're marketing the wrong product,
it's just never going to get there.
And so it is up to us to choose where we can do great marketing.
I spend time at companies.
I spend four or five years at companies.
It would feel awful if they weren't ones that were growing.
So one, choose a great company where you can then have those
non-negotials that you asked about.
I think first it has to go to team.
The way that I build an org chart is not with anybody in mind,
but I build the structure to the goals.
So starting with the goals, what do we have to achieve?
How would we then achieve them?
What are the roles we need to do it?
But then putting great people in those roles.
We're fast.
Marketing is interesting, a part of the business.
When you look at a business, most parts of the organization,
it's the team costs that are the only costs.
In marketing, it's half people, half programs.
And so you have to make sure that you don't put too much thought into those
programs and not enough into the people.
And so I think starting there.
That's where-- and not that you want to use every dollar for those,
but do you have the right people there?
And do you understand what the value of those roles should be
to make sure that you can bring in the best talent possible for those?
How do you choose one of them to do really well?
And so my negotiable is in, like, what can the team do well
versus what is the one thing?
I think having good software, being able to do that automation,
and that is with products like ActiveCampaign, of course.
But what are you going to use for your SEO research?
Yeah, the architecture.
Exactly.
So I think that's really important.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
It's funny that you set the table with, like, you have to have an ace team,
and you have to have really strong architecture.
But like that, it is the case, right?
I mean, we had on a CMO on the show many, many, many episodes ago.
And she changed role in becoming a new CMO.
And one role to the other was, like, one had really poor
architecture, bad website, like, structurally very poor.
And then in the new role, it's like, all that stuff was all, you know,
the previous CMO was really sharp.
And the new company had all this stuff.
She's like, oh my good, what a difference this makes to come into a company
with the correct architecture in place.
She's like, I can sprint from day one versus, you know, the other thing
where you spend a year just getting the house in order.
There's a woman, Sideway Gmin, who has a book, Reality-based Leadership.
I think our jobs, whatever the company needs, it's okay that that's what it is.
So maybe the value for that CMO was putting that in place, right?
And that doesn't make it a better, worse job than if that's already in place.
Like, whatever needs to be done.
I like to think about like that is the important work.
But getting that into place, if it's not, is definitely going to be the case.
And you need to be able to see what your return is.
You need to be able to see what your customers are doing.
You need to understand what's making them successful.
And if there's not a lot of the infrastructure we put in at the front of funnel
leads through
and understanding the customer lifecycle as well.
So I use this example with our customers all the time because our product is
not just doing
email marketing.
We're trying to tie in all of the pieces of your engagement with your customer.
And I think about, I was one time on the phone with like a food delivery.
And while I was on the phone with them, I got with my dinner didn't arrive
right, all
of those things that are painful, you're just hungry, right?
It's the worst of yourself.
And I get an email from them and I'm like, goodness, like that they probably
realized
what's going on.
They sent me an email and it's it's solved.
And instead it was an email offering me a coupon for my like having my order
and how
happy I was.
And it made me so mad.
It was so mad.
And it's it shows you how like much our work as marketers means because done
well, you
don't notice it.
It's elegant.
It does what it needs to do.
But when it's bad, it really goes bad, right?
And you feel it.
And so having the things in place that it doesn't go bad and you can do great
marketing
is important and the market texture is a big part of that.
What are some other uncuttable?
Where are you spending your money that we can copy?
I think once you have the infrastructure in place, there's three things that I
think make
up all of marketing.
So you have content that goes through channels to people to send it to people.
You often need to know who those people are.
So you have three things that you ultimately spend money on.
You're either spending it on the content, you're spending it on distribution of
that
content or you're spending it on who you're distributing it to, you know,
building out
the database under, you know, doing data pens, things like that.
I think we talk almost all the time about the channels and how we put our money
there.
Non-negotiables would be around the other two.
How do we have it going to the right people?
Not only, I don't just mean more people.
I don't want to annoy anybody who doesn't want to have the product, but how do
we enrich
their data?
How do we know what they want to hear?
What's going to be interesting to them?
So it's actually impactful.
So that data- appending piece I would be relentless on and probably not the
answer that
most people give, but probably why it makes a difference for us.
That allows you to do better segmentation.
It allows you to have more relevancy in your communications.
And then at the top on the content side, you know, what you're going to put
through those
channels, I think having that right education again for us self-service
important, we're
going to put dollars there.
I know that I'm guessing a lot of the answers are often around the channels
themselves,
and I think those you can trade off and you can choose which one you do well,
but I think
it's less important.
How about something that you see that's out there that maybe isn't working or
fading away?
I think we all have to right now get more clever with what we're doing online.
The people are tired of sitting in front of their computers, so they're not
comfortable
yet at big conferences.
And so how do you meet people with where they're at and when they're ready to
receive
it?
And I think it is hard.
I think that it is changing.
And I think it's part of what's pushing us to think about metaverse or some of
the new
paths to acquisition NFTs or whatever way people are trying to find a market.
But I think that that's coming from like all of the previous channels not
working as well
as they did because we're tired, we're exhausted from all of the noise from
being in front of
a screen.
You think, okay, well, how do you solve that?
And is it going into new channels?
Is it going to new places?
I actually think it all comes down to segmentation and relevancy.
How do we still deliver?
How do we still get great marketing?
And it has to be so personalized, so segmented and it has to be relevant
because the flip
side of that is I every day buy products out of social media that I had never
heard of
before, but it hits me.
That's the thing I need.
I'm excited about it.
It comes with the things that are important, social proof, positive reviews,
all of those
things that are going to make me trust to buy it at that time.
People haven't stopped consuming.
It's just the way that they're deciding to consume is changing and we have to
meet people
there.
Yeah, but I'm curious, how would you market to yourself?
Because you said the same, you said, you know, screens, not really that
comfortable with
necessarily being in person a ton right now.
What's left?
What's going to be the same thing I think for you, right?
It's going to be through social proof.
One of the things that works really well at ActiveCampaign and this is going
into kind
of our secrets.
The company when I joined the CEO, Jason Vanne-Boom, was a small business owner
who wanted to
do great things for other growing businesses.
And so it's not only the product that's strong, it's the way that we go to
market.
So there's all these like special things that we do.
We have really great value-based pricing.
We do free migration, free implementation.
All these things that our competitors don't do.
Most of our competitors, you're required to buy a like a startup package or a
lot of upfront
costs.
And so what I realized is these are all differentiators for us, right?
And so we package them into what we call our customer success commitment.
We commit to being a great value.
We have never raised a price for a current customer unless they bought more.
Even if our pricing goes up, it does not for them, right?
These are all special things about the company that what marketing did is we
didn't add those
in.
We just packaged them and it made it easier for us to sell.
But it also helped our customers understand why they liked us.
Sometimes marketing has to do that translation.
So the customers were benefiting from that, but they didn't have it all
packaged together
to explain it.
So we put together the customer success commitment and we see customers telling
other customers
about it that they can now better tell their friends about the value, about
what we do
for them.
And so it's not just about putting together, when we talk about customer
marketing, it's
not just about putting together customers to case studies or telling your
customer stories.
It's having your customers able to share why they like using you, having your
customers
able to articulate those things that are important to them and make that pitch
for you.
And that's why you had brought up affiliates.
That's why that affiliate channel isn't important to us because it's not like a
lot of our affiliates
are not people who professionally are affiliates, but they're people who are
influencers just
sharing about active campaign and then getting a little bit for that because
they're so excited.
Yeah, I mean, we talk about customer marketing all the time.
I think it's still probably the most under-invested category.
It's crazy to think about talking about features and benefits, especially cold
to people like,
okay, features and benefits.
Well, they're searching for solutions, but they're searching for someone that
looks like
them and acts like them that is achieving results that they want to achieve.
Like, yes, I want my emails to not go to spam.
For sure, I want that.
Yes, I want my automations to be really cool.
We send a email newsletter for a podcast.
I want somebody to opt in and the way that we craft the sign up or whatever it
is.
Yes, I want those things, but ultimately, I want a connected audience where I
want people
to know what is going on and I want them to be able to write value to those
people.
Yes, I don't want it to go to the spam, but I think that so often we forget
about the
destination of the journey and marketing the destination of like, hey, look at
this person
in the way that they did that stuff.
It's so much easier to remember a story, right?
It's like, is that the person who, do they do, is it 500 contacts that you get
for free
or is it what?
No, you don't remember that stuff.
You go look it up later, but you remember like, hey, like, wasn't company X?
Weren't they using ActiveCampaign to do their podcast newsletter?
That's a pretty good one.
I'd like Biden to be like that.
I don't know.
I think it's under-invested.
I think that it's under-invested because it's often under-utilized.
Like the easy thing is finding a customer to tell a story for a case study.
It's how do you have a group of customers out spreading the word when you're
not there?
I think that is customer marketing, but I think it's a very different thing.
It takes a company-wide approach, not just one customer marketer trying to do
that.
We all get into our silos and each of the teams, everybody's thinking about
their role, and
it takes a lot to encourage a company to think beyond that.
The CEO here I mentioned, Jason.
He's so thoughtful.
When you open up our product on every screen, there's this little heart at the
bottom and
it gives everybody the link to share.
We make it easy.
We're reminding them.
But even I think about the way, it doesn't say refer, it's just this little
heart.
I think that was really purposeful on his side.
Like remind people that they love what they're doing right now and connect it
to that symbolism.
Yeah, I always think about it.
How do you, the marketer's job is to, how do you accelerate word of mouth?
People are talking about you, both good or bad.
You have to be worth talking about.
I always talk about this idea of remarkable marketing.
You have to talk about it with other people.
You have to remark about it.
You have to tell your spouse.
You have to tell your boss or somebody that you work with.
That's marketing's job.
That's exactly what you're talking about with affiliates is these people want
to talk about
it and there's aligned incentives so that if they do talk about it, the thing
that they
love, they get money back, which is everybody wins.
This whole session is around demand gen, but, and I am known, I am often known
as somebody
who like built their career on the demand gen side.
I wrote an article for Forbes once that was hoking the bear a little bit that
was like
as a CMO, you don't want to be known for brand or demand or product marketing,
right?
Like a lot of times the CEO will be looking for one in particular, but really
the way
to be a great demand marketer is to be able to differentiate, right?
Like you need that differentiation.
You could be using demand in an amazing way, but if you're not differentiating
and giving
somebody that story, like you just said, you said people are talking about you
good or
bad, but if they can't tell that story for you, if they don't know why they're
excited,
like it's going to land flat.
And so helping really create differentiation in the market is a really big part
of demand,
even though it feels like product marketing or content marketing sometimes.
A lot of times when I think about how to do things in marketing, like just
starting with
a piece of paper, and this is again going to age me, but writing out like what
you're
trying to do and like, would somebody else like buy into it?
Because sometimes like, well, we'll do marketing and I'll look and I'll be like
, now why did
anybody think this is going to work?
Like it's not exciting.
It doesn't differentiate.
And so making sure we don't skip that part, right?
Just doing the greatest ever PPC bidding, buying the perfect TV spot, being on
the most amazing
podcast isn't going to do anything if you can't say something impactful through
it.
And so that part of marketing we sometimes skip, but is probably the most
crucial.
Yeah, it's funny.
So I interviewed April Dunford, who's like a positioning expert.
Yeah, amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's great.
This is for a different podcast that we do called often imitated and it's all
about
customer experience.
And so anyways, she's rad.
Her books are rad.
But one of the things that she talks about was like she's looking at, I think
it was
as Oracle and IBM's, I think it was them two very big companies.
And she was talking about positioning and basically is like of their of the two
products
that were there comparing, it was like, let's say there's a thousand features.
It was like 999 of them are more or less very similar.
And so they both marketed about the 1000th.
And it's like, if you want open and accessible and like that type of thing,
choose IBM.
If you want closed, like controlled environment, like choose Oracle.
And it's just such a great lesson in positioning is like it doesn't matter if
you're the same
in every single way, you have to position where you're different.
And that's how you win.
I talked about building teams too.
And I saw this article that compared between like it was like Facebook, Google
and Apple
for like a product marketing job.
They clearly had just copied the requisitions, the job postings were the exact
same like word
for word across these three.
And it's like, that's great except you want to hire the best.
So like you have to say something a little bit different too.
So differentiation matters in our products, but also as we try to build our
teams.
Okay.
So I'm curious.
How do you view your website?
I view the website as our storefront, as our front door.
When we think about front doors, as we always think about the homepage, but
when we talk
about a website, every page is a front door, right?
It's a different path in.
And so for us, we want to empower our customers.
And so we have hundreds of knowledge based articles to each of the different
things they
could do.
And so every one of those, not even the, you wouldn't call them like the
marketing pages,
but all front doors for us, right?
All windows into the company.
And so I think the website is critical.
It's how many of our customers buy.
It's how many of our customers learn from us.
One thing that has really worked for us and is very unique is, you know, a lot
of us put
a lot of emphasis into our blog or customer stories, maybe our product pages.
Active campaign has something called recipes, which are like the automations
that people
want to do.
This is how you do lead scoring.
This is how you may do that shopping cart abandonment.
This is how you do your sales stages, whatever it is that somebody's trying to
do and even
have recipes around like, this is a flow you'd run to maybe clean up your
database, but
they're always to help people put in automations and having them as entry.
So we know somebody wants to do something.
We're giving them the recipe to do it.
It's not that far of a leap to have them then do it with us.
And so trying to emphasize those as those front doors for us.
And what's important about thinking about it that way is, and I wouldn't give
our homepage
in age grade because it's a page I'm like, not as interested in as a page where
somebody
is having a pain and then we're getting them to the page that's going to solve
that pain.
That's what's going to be either a happy customer, you know, if they've already
purchased us
because now they're going to know how to do it or somebody who is going to buy
because
they know we can solve that.
Many of our customers don't know that what they want to buy is marketing
animation or
CRM, but they know they had a thousand people to their website that put items
in their cart
that didn't buy or they had a thousand people to their website that didn't
convert on forms
that they really would love to talk to again.
And we can help them with that.
But giving them those recipes to that has been really important for us.
And it's different.
Again, it's not differentiation in product, but it's a different way to go to
market similar
to that customer success commitment, which, you know, doing it different when
it's a
very crowded space.
There's a lot of options has really made us stand out.
I mean, our growth has been tremendous.
When I joined, I think it was more like 80,000 customers from now over 180,000
customers.
To give a sense of that, that's more customers than sales forces announced
publicly.
The last time they gave number now, we have as much smaller price per deal.
So we're obviously not as large, but I'm really proud of that adoption.
And it's because of all the things we've talked about today.
Are there anything that you've been doing from marketing perspective or go to
market perspective
or demand perspective that particularly notable?
What I think you have to be ruthless and in sometimes like saying no, you
cannot do everything
and that's not probably going to be the path to success.
So one of the things in our company plan, the way that we do it and our CEO
concept of this
and I really adore it is we have what we call emissions.
And there are things, I'll give you an example of one of our emissions this
year.
We would love to put on a big customer event, but we looked across the things
that we wanted
to do and it just was not going to be, we couldn't do all those other things
well if
we did that and we want to do it.
It's not on a mission because we don't want to do it.
It's a mission because we want to do it, but we're saying, hey, we're not going
to consider
until we get these other things done.
And so I think when we're thinking about demand being okay, saying no to some
things.
And sometimes, and I think this is one of the hardest parts of a demand
marketers job
is I can't tell you how many times I've gotten ideas from people.
They're not bad ideas.
You just can't do everything.
And I like make this joke all the time that I never call up our CTO and say
this is the
code I want you to write.
But people all the time call me up and say, why don't we do this marketing?
How don't we do marketing this way?
And they're not bad ideas.
They're all very valid, right?
We all experience marketing, we all know great marketing when we see it.
And so I don't want to discount that.
I don't think I'm special in that I know magically how to do marketing and
other people
that are consumers of marketing all day long.
Don't.
But marketing is so much about the choosing a few things and executing well.
And so being able to prioritize, I think sometimes it takes, you have to put
your ego
aside and not do the thing that you want to do.
You have to hear what the company wants to do, where the momentum is.
I believe much more in experience versus playbooks.
Okay, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how quickly you can talk
to somebody
when they're on your website.
If you're using qualified, go to qualified.com to learn more qualified
prospects or on your
website right now and you can talk to them quickly with qualified quick and
easy just
like these questions.
Mary, are you ready?
I am ready.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I'm really getting into fitness.
So I've become a pretty decent rower and I don't highlight that there.
One thing that is on my resume though, but people overlook, I'm really into
wine and
so I have some designations and stuff there as well.
I would also note you contributed to a bunch of different books and things like
that.
Seems like you like creating ideas and writing ideas and all that stuff.
Yeah, I wrote a chapter in Anthony Kanata's content creation.
I think I have some lines in content rules by Ann Handley.
There's probably a couple others, but I think maybe that's another trick is
just trying
to make sure you're never the smartest person in the room and I get to find my
way into
rooms with really smart people and try to learn from them.
What about a book podcast TV show or something that you've been checking out
recently that
you like?
I've named two books that are great ones.
We've talked a lot about automated marketing and one of the things questions I
'll get all
the time is, what's the right number of emails to send to somebody?
I'm sure Ian, you think about this all the time.
The reality is there are emails that we look forward to.
I wake up in the morning and I look, there are two emails that I read every day
and so
the question is not what is the right number of emails?
It's how do you become that email that people want to have every day?
That is the real question, right?
And so every day I read the skim, which is like a summary of the day and I read
the broad
sheet which talks about issues in business often as it relates to women.
I love those too.
I'm a fan of like masterclass learning from people not just within the industry
but also
outside the industry and trying to think about how whether it's through sports
or amazing
shafts, wherever somebody's excellent and what they do, like is there a lesson
in there
that I can apply to what I'm doing and that's often, it helps to get out of
your bubble,
right?
It's easy to get all caught up in what we do every day but how do I hear
something, you
know, often that's right in front of me but through somebody else's eyes.
Do you have a best piece of advice for a first time CMO trying to figure out
their demand
gen strategy?
Yeah, I think just a piece of advice for a CMO and even on this call who's not
a CMO,
I think the thing that shocked me most about being a CMO was that you think
your whole
career, it's like you're learning to do marketing in different ways and you're
growing in that
leadership but when you're a CMO you spend almost all your time not doing
marketing but
representing cool marketing that other people are doing to the rest of the
executive team,
your jobs cross functional and so it's often a bunch of people who are not
really focused
on marketing that you're talking about marketing to and that has its challenges
, you really
have to hear them and what they're doing and why their priorities are important
So just being comfortable with that and knowing that that's the job you want
because I was
a little bit shocked, I was all excited to talk about marketing and nobody
wanted to
hear it, they wanted to talk about their orgs and figuring out that balance
within the
organization is really important and sometimes the right thing to do is not
marketing and
to do something for one of those other orgs.
If you have a product issue, get that product issue fixed before you go out and
market something,
we want to be great marketers and bring great product forward.
I think as it relates to demand is kind of what I've said a couple of times
here, it's
not a single channel.
If you have a CEO that just thinks like TV or let's say PBC or social media is
the worst,
if you're fighting that, it's just going to be miserable versus hearing where
they think
marketing can be successful and finding a path that way.
There is not one right way for any of our brands and in fact the greatest
brands we can often
highlight why they take a unique approach and so finding that for yourself is
important.
It's been absolutely wonderful having you on the show today.
Thanks so much for joining.
For all the marketers listening, go to activecampaign.com and check it out if
you're not a customer
or you can try for free.
We use it here at Casby and we love it so give it a check.
Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
I love what I do.
I love this company.
I love the team I work with and for anybody if you're still listening, like you
care enough
about marketing to be listening to the song, make sure you're in a situation
like that
too.
Like it is life is too short to not be having fun doing this and if anybody has
any questions
or comments, like don't hesitate to reach out and ask.
I am inbound marketer on almost every social channel.
I'm the only Maria Perglino in the world so you can find me I promise.
I love it.
Awesome.
Thanks so much for your appreciated and take care.
Bye.
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