Scrappy, Out of Home Marketing Strategies for CMOs
Shafqat Islam shared how his team at Optimizely is getting scrappy and spending less when it comes to their marketing strategies.
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Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
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And today we are joined by a special guest, Shofka.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Great to see you again.
Yeah, great to see you again as well.
I am super excited for this episode.
We chatted years ago about marketing and
oh, hasn't the marketing world changed.
And we've never talked about it on Pipeline Visionaries.
So I said it's chat about optimizes
about your background,
little nontraditional background to be a CMO.
And of course, we're going to talk content and demand.
So what was your first job in marketing?
Believe it or not, this is my first job in marketing, CMO.
I'm not even joking.
My background is I was a co-founder and CEO of a software company.
Granted, I spent most of my time building products for marketers.
I was pretty deep into marketing,
but I never had a marketing job per se.
I was the CEO of the company.
And then post acquisition, once optimized the acquiretas,
I was still running our old business,
which was called Welcome.
Previous to that, it was called Newscred.
And been the CMO for six, six months now.
And what the heck does it mean to be CMO of Optimizely?
It's a great question.
I think Optimizely has a pretty legendary brand.
We were talking about this earlier.
Most marketers over the last 10 plus years
have interacted or used Optimizely in some way.
It was one of the first to ever invent the category
of A/B testing and A/B testing platforms.
We have some amazing products.
I think it's a real privilege to be a CMO
of this type of legendary company.
It's a large company, much larger than I'm used to,
coming from the startup role
and being an entrepreneur and founder.
We're 1,600 people, it's global.
And we have an amazing product portfolio,
mainly geared towards marketers.
But also digital teams and product products as well.
- Let's get to our first segment,
the Trust Tree, where we go and feel honest and trusted
and you can share those deepest, darkest marketing
and demand and secrets.
So yeah, tell us a little bit about more
of what Optimizely does and who do you sell to?
- Yeah, absolutely.
Before I tell you what we do,
I'll tell you kind of our three core beliefs.
So if you'll indulge me, number one is I think
a company's digital presence is potentially
the most important product the company has.
Number two is content is at the core of every customer
experience, you and I both have content background.
So we pretty aligned here.
And the third is this belief that there's creativity
and science required to really optimize
and create these amazing experiences.
And so with those three core beliefs, what Optimizely does
is we have a number of different products
where we help digital teams, both marketing and product teams
create and optimize customer experiences across web.
So we help you create better content experiences.
We have CMS product, a CMP product, a BAM product.
We help you experiment and A/B test on any channel.
I think that's what Optimizely is fairly well known for,
especially in the US and in the Bay Area.
I think a lot of people didn't even know we have a CMS
but we have a very large CMS business.
But experimentation, A/B testing is probably
what we're most well known for.
And thirdly, we help you monetize any of those
customer interactions.
We have a great commerce product as well.
So it's a pretty broad portfolio of really amazing products.
- Yeah, what are the types of companies
that are your customers size and scope?
- Yeah, it's a pretty wide spectrum.
I'd say we skew more enterprise.
So enterprise to large enterprise.
Again, it depends on the product.
We're global.
So across the entire world, we service most industries.
You know, and we work with some of the most amazing companies
in the world, whether it's Nike to run experimentation
for them, GE Healthcare uses our CMP
or counter marketing platform in our DAM.
We have amazing customers on our CMS,
like travelers or Dolby, Zoom.
So really some of the best and biggest
and most ambitious brands in the world use us.
But we also, you know, what I like about Optimize
is we have an interesting mid-market business too
of really high growth companies and smaller companies
that just have bigger ambitions and are more mature.
So it's a pretty wide swath.
In terms of the persona,
mostly marketers and digital marketers.
But because we have an experimentation product
that can be used inside of your app
or inside of a product, we do have product marketers
as a persona too.
In fact, we just went through a whole ICP exercise recently.
So very timely question.
- Yeah, indeed.
And what's the breakdown for like B2B versus B2C?
- It's actually fairly split down the middle.
We have B2C companies like
will luxury fashion companies and we have industrial giants
and manufacturing companies.
So from the super sexy to the very boring
but very important businesses,
I think we have a few thousand customers.
So really it's touching almost every industry
that you can think of.
- Yeah.
And anyone else in that buying committee
or that's important to you, obviously,
layering up to the CMO, I'm sure important.
- Yeah, CMO is important for sure.
We do have a lot of technical buyers
'cause again, our experimentation product
while it can be used on the web
and like simply be testing for landing pages,
that's more of the marketing persona.
But imagine you're a company like Venmo,
real customer of ours.
They're not really testing much on their website.
Their core product is their app
and right to do testing inside of your app,
to do feature flagging, to run experiments.
You need to be aware that the buying committee,
in this case would include product managers,
potentially engineers.
And then because we do so,
a pretty broad portfolio of products,
having buy in from the CIO is pretty important,
especially in this economy as customers
are starting to rationalize their tech stack
and look at their costs.
Now a CIO is gonna go through and say,
"All right, why are we working with so many vendors?"
And one of the benefits that we have is,
through one vendor relationship with the optimizer,
you can buy your CMS, your experimentation,
your commerce products,
and your digital asset management, that's an example.
- What's your marketing strategy?
- It's a big question.
I'll say we tore apart the existing strategy
this year when I took over.
And we did something that,
whether some people call it zero based budgeting,
which is started with the completely blank slate.
We also used kind of first principles approach.
So really blank slate, both from a budget,
but also one of the things that we do.
And we then reformulated it from the ground up,
starting with like every dollar
and every initiative, every activity.
And one of the things that we,
I think did pretty well is we started
with our top most business goals.
So when I asked my CEO and our board,
like what are our business priorities?
So we started with kind of six marketing big bets
that are aligned to our business priorities.
You know, as an, I'll give you some examples.
One was get our swagger back in web experimentation.
We used to be the absolute dominant player in that business,
growing super fast.
Now there's a lot of competition.
I think we need to like regain some of that dominance.
And so that's a priority for the business.
So we have a big bet around that.
Another big bet is more crystallized,
like our messaging around our content products
because we have two or three content companies
that we acquired as CMP and a CMS.
And it was kind of unclear to the market.
How does this all fit together?
And so our marketing priorities were tied
to those business priorities.
But it's at that point, it's still a little nebulous,
like a marketer on the ground or an SDR,
how do they attach to that?
So then we created these integrated campaigns
that led her up to each one of those priorities.
So those integrated campaigns, you know,
when we're saying crystallize our message
for content products is,
hey, we have a really important plan
and product strategy around headless and headless CMS, right?
And we want to be known as a pioneer
and kind of a leader in the headless space.
And so we have a whole integrated campaign around headless.
And then we have all these activities, events,
out of home, webinars, emails around headless.
So the activities led her up to the integrated campaign
with led her as up to the bet.
And so that kind of structured planning process,
it sounds maybe a little bit over engineered,
but we did that for literally every single bet
in every integrated campaign.
So then all of a sudden,
every single thing we do in our marketing
felt more intentional.
And people had purpose,
like it aligned up to that, those big bets.
So that's kind of more on the strategic side.
And remember, we cut our budget back down to zero
and built it up again.
We stopped the approach of,
"Hey, what did we do last year?
"And should we do this again this year or do more of it?"
Which is, I think, how most marketing teams were.
We just, "Oh, we did events last year,
"so let's do more events or we did webinars,
"let's do more events and more webinars."
I just said, "Let's," I don't know if most of our marketing
is working, if we shut down,
I literally said this in our first all hands,
which I don't know if maybe made me popular or unpopular,
but I said, "Hey, I have a hunch.
"If we stop and shut down all of our marketing activities,
"I don't think it would change
"or pipeline that dramatically or at all."
And that's like, in some people may interpret
that as insulting, like, what do you mean?
You're 100 and something people, like, of course it would.
But others thought of it as very freeing.
I said, "You know, all the stuff that we just do
"because we feel like we should do it
"and we feel like marketing teams should do it.
"We're now, the shackles are gone.
"We can start afresh and we can come up with all sorts
"of new ideas, some crazy, some wacky,
"some maybe repeats."
So that's kind of what we've been up to in the last six months.
- Yeah, that's incredible.
It's not to say that everything that you've done
hasn't worked and it's not to say that marketing is useless.
It's to say that if you could hit the tear button
and rebuild it, then what would you build?
And that's like super exciting and freeing.
And I think a lot of CMOs, when they come into a role,
like they don't really have that ability to do that.
Or there's not the sort of intestinal fortitude
of the organization to be able to do that.
So it's absolutely fascinating.
- I have a very supportive CEO
and I think I'm just like this crazy founder guy
so I'm willing to do it.
I think the other thing is I'm not here to be a career CMO.
I did this job and I'm doing this job
because I was asked to and the company needed someone
in this role and I wanted to do anything to help.
And so I'm able to take a little bit more risk
and to your point, I'm absolutely not saying
the stuff before didn't work.
I'm just saying there's probably a lot of things
that didn't work and some things that did
in all things in life that's probably true.
So let's just take the learnings
and focus on the things that did work.
And then for the things that didn't work,
let's run more experiments
and there's gonna be more failures and that's okay,
but let's run with it and learn.
- Yeah, so as part of that, I'd imagine that there's,
there has to be a re-org or re-imagining of the org
if there's gonna be a re-imagining of all the priorities.
So how did you think about team?
- We made some major changes and what we did
when I came in and this was absolutely not the plan.
Some of it happened organically,
some of it was intentional, some of it was like,
we just looked at performance
and also just looked at what's the type and culture
of marketing that we wanna do here.
We wanted to get a lot scrappier,
a lot more entrepreneurial, a lot cheaper,
like spend a lot less money, even though we have big budgets.
And it just requires a different type of person, right?
And so as I mentioned, some people opted out,
some were encouraged to find a better fit somewhere else
and the entire leadership team in our marketing
or turned over very quickly.
And I had the opportunity and I think this is probably
the most exciting part about this job
is to promote the layer of management
that was like one layer under the existing MLT,
MLT is marketing leadership team.
So they all left and all the people who were doing
the job one level below got promoted
into the new marketing leadership team
and they've absolutely crushed it.
Like I'm so proud of them because they were just waiting
in the wings to take on more responsibility,
get shit done, prove that we can run
a very different type of scrappy marketing organization
and sometimes you just need like a little bit of luck
and an opportunity and they've really stepped up.
And as I mentioned, it's not necessarily right or wrong,
it's just the only way I know how to build something is
like it's a very scrappy, agile, like test stuff,
break stuff.
I would describe them as like Mavericks.
And I had all of these folks on our team
who were Mavericks who just needed the opportunity.
So that's my new leadership team and I love working with them.
- Yeah, I think it's also super fascinating.
I think it's also, I think it's really different
marketing to marketers as we both have done in our careers.
And as what a marketer is looking for in solutions
is just very different from what a CFO is looking for, right?
So it's like the way that you go to market to marketers
is just very different.
And if you want to have a sort of,
and I'm not saying that this was the case,
but if you want to have a more legacy mindset,
then you need to be selling to type to people
who would receive that.
So it's interesting that you say all that
because I mean, I always think that being at the cutting edge
is why we make this show literally is to be at the cutting edge
and to talk to the people who are doing stuff right now,
to know what they're doing right now,
to see the playbook right now.
So I always want to know that,
to plays that are working today.
- And honestly, like the people who were here
before, they're amazing and potentially
they're going to be very successful marketers,
but maybe in a different size company
with a different style marketing playbook,
marketing to different people.
One thing when you're marketing to marketers is
we get so much kind of marketing messaging
thrown our way, emails, SDRs, cold calls, ads.
Like we tune out most of it, right?
So in one hand, it's so fun.
We get to market to marketers.
On the other hand, it's pretty brutal
because there's thousands of companies
marketing to marketers.
I get hundreds of emails a day that I never open.
Give me an example.
We decided in order to market to marketers,
we better not have any sort of jargon
in our marketing messaging.
And we're still doing work to clean it up,
but I always tell my team, let's write like how we speak.
When we speak to each other,
we speak like normal human beings,
but somehow when we write copy for a website,
it sounds like a robot wrote it.
And no human would ever say those words.
So let's stop doing that.
That's just one example of like,
I think what marketing needs to be going forward,
at least for us.
And a lot of it is the culture that we have as people.
I think that should be reflected in the marketing that we do.
- So how do you organize the org chart?
- So we have similar structure to a lot of marketing teams
in that I have someone who runs digital.
I have someone who runs my field marketing team.
And we have a field marketing team
because I have a global team.
We operate in so many different markets.
We have field marketers and all over.
We have our head of SDR.
So the SDR org reports into me.
I think that's not always the case,
but I like it because it creates really tight alignment.
So marketing campaign doesn't end,
or marketing event doesn't end when the event ends.
We are totally aligned to make sure the follow up
is crisp, it's within 24 hours
and the SDRs have the right messaging.
So I think it creates good alignment,
having it within SDR, the org within marketing.
We have, let's see our corporate kind of event marketing team
as well, who am I missing?
Product marketing is a key key function within my team.
And I have customer marketing within product marketing.
And I think that's really important
because customer marketing is not just like
organizing customer events,
but it's really driving adoption,
cross-sell and upsell from our existing base.
And in this kind of 2023,
we're driving a lot of demand and pipeline
from our existing base.
So that customer marketing team
tightly aligned with the product marketing team
to drive that cross-sell and upsell
is a key component of my team.
And actually, to me, customer marketing and product marketing,
they're as responsible for generating demand.
You'll notice I don't have a separate person
whose title is like, "Demand Gen"
which I think is obviously very common
because I said everyone's demand gen.
Like every single person on my team is demand gen.
If you're organizing Opticon, which is our flagship
kind of brand conference,
if you're creating content,
if you're on the product marketing team,
if you're digital, like everyone better be thinking
about how you're generating demand for this business.
- Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about pipeline, right?
It's like, it could be super early stage.
It could be, I'm not ready to buy for two years,
but when I'm ready two years from now,
like I'm gonna be talking to someone
or the person who says scorching hot lead,
like I want this right now, send me a proposal.
Like at the end of the day,
it's all about pipeline and B2B.
- I totally agree.
The other thing we did kind of specifically
that's different is I've reoriented marketing schools
around the entire company's pipeline,
not just like marketing source pipeline.
I think kind of the traditional playbook
was like marketing sources, whatever,
40% of overall pipeline.
And that's what we're KPI towards.
I think it's interesting to measure marketing source pipeline.
I don't really care, frankly.
All I care about is are we generating enough pipeline
as a business across marketing, SDRs, AECSM's partners?
Those are the five people who contribute to pipeline.
And so the overall pipeline is the thing
that we should all care about.
And for my marketing team, that was a big shift too.
Like prior, they were very kind of
myopically focused on marketing source pipeline only.
And now I've said, it's all company sport
and we're all responsible for that same kind of bigger
pipeline number.
- Yeah, I mean, again, these are things
that are like so obvious now
that like we've all been through the past few years,
but it's like, hey, if you bring in a deal that churns
versus a deal that, you know,
decides to buy more stuff from us,
those two things are not created equal, right?
Like, you know, that customer journey
is actually super important.
ACV is super important.
The type of accounts that you go after
that can produce the best ACV and produce the longest
and like the longest LTV, like those are all super valuable.
So like, we shouldn't just view like in MQL.
Of course it's a super flawed statistic
'cause does that MQL have all of those traits
and how many different pieces of content to the data?
I mean, it's so, so much more dynamic than it was.
- You're absolutely right.
- Which is why like the MQL is almost to me,
it's irrelevant.
There's people who care about it in their roles,
specifically because they are trying to drive
kind of at the way top of the funnel.
But I care about this stuff becoming an opportunity,
but to your point, if you really think about lifetime value,
then you have to think about what type of opportunity,
what product is it, what industry is it, what persona,
what size of company and all those things will drive
some sort of predicted retention rate.
- And you're right, but I think now we're stretching
marketing past where it's traditionally been.
- I would say that for the listeners of this podcast
who's listened to 100 CMOs
and marketing leaders talk about this stuff that,
I would say like the majority own SDRs now,
I would say the majority of them are tied to a pipeline number,
I'd say the majority of them are in B2B
are doing some type of account based experience.
I'd say the majority of them are owning a piece of customer
marketing or upsell or journey,
like it's all moving that way.
And yeah, and I would also add that there's one other piece
that we've talked about a bunch on the show
of like the chief marketing officer being the chief market
officer that like this is the person who actually understands
the market better than anyone else in the company.
And like that part is really exciting to me.
- As a marketer where it's like who else would own it, right?
- Yeah, I think I have a distinct privilege as well
because we sell a lot to marketers and I'm a CMO,
being the chief market officer means I get to work closely
with product as well.
I spend a huge amount of time with product.
We actually use all of our products.
I'm the alpha or beta customer for every single product
we put out, we give a lot of feedback to try and help shape
the right product roadmap.
And I think that's another area that CMOs can contribute
to the business overall.
- All right, let's get to our next segment,
the playbook where you open up that playbook
and talk about how you're spending that money,
the tactics that help you win.
What are your three channels or tactics
that are your uncuttable budget items?
I know it's all brand new for you right now,
but what's uncuttable to you?
- To me, anything that's measurable is uncuttable.
Anything that's not measurable is cuttable.
So it's pretty straightforward.
Obviously things like paid for us is very measurable
and very attributable.
To me, we've been aggressive.
In terms of paid, I'll give you an example,
Google Optimize, which is an A/B testing product
that's free from Google.
Has always been a competitor.
They're the largest in market share,
we can free, we were second, they're shutting down.
They have a sunset date, I think it's in the fall.
I know I have a tight time horizon
and we are just stepping to the pedal to the floor
super aggressively because we can just measure
every single detail of how we're spending money.
So like, I think that's an obvious one.
For me, events has always been not cuttable,
or uncuttable if you already used,
because to me, events are very measurable.
I can track every single person that walk through the door
and whether they were sourced at the event
or influenced or accelerated by the event,
I can track all of that directly back to pipeline
and can show the ROI of every dollar is spent on events.
And to me, some companies are like cutting back on events.
We're actually going bigger in events,
so we're gonna have a bigger Opticon.
We're doing road shows, it's been really good for us.
I'm gonna throw in not necessarily my third most uncuttable one,
but I wanna throw in a Northadox one that we are doing.
So I don't know if it's gonna make a long-term or not,
but out of home, which most people are shocked
as like me from my personality and like my DNA of CMO
that I'm doing out of home.
But I'll tell you why.
Yes, I'm obsessed about numbers and tracking
like every single cost per MQL and cost per op
for every channel and I obsess over that kind of stuff.
And out of home is inherently hard to measure.
They'll tell you you can measure it this way in that way,
but really it's hard.
But two reasons that I'm investing aggressively
or at least pseudo-aggressively,
and I'll tell you what that means in a second.
Number one is when everyone pulls back
and everyone says, "Oh, we're not doing X anymore,"
then I'm interested.
My brain just switches on and I'm like,
"Oh, now I'm gonna dig into it."
Because a few years ago, you go down the 101 in San Fran
or any subway, it's plastered with every SaaS company's ads.
Now, economy since 2022, the economy's tough, layoffs,
people are not spending, marketing budgets are getting/
everyone's pulling back and one of the first things
you pull back on is that type of out of home spend.
And so we've just figured out really creative
and scrappy ways to buy direct, buy programmatically,
get inventory that you would never imagine
we would be able to get at the type of surprises.
We're able to do, we're doing it all in-house,
we're not going through tons of agency.
So we kind of figured out this really scrappy way
to do out of home.
And when everyone's pulling back,
we think there's an opportunity to lean in.
And the second thing is,
I've pulled the lever very hard
in terms of moving dollars from brand to demand
because we had to get scrappy this year,
just because of scrutiny of every dollar
that we spend in this business.
And I am obsessed about kind of sales and marketing efficiency
as a ratio to bookings.
And at some point I just realized
that when you pull the lever that hard,
you have to be really careful
because things look good in the very short term,
but your brand is the most precious asset
that we have long term.
- I'm curious, how do you do attribution?
- I think the first thing I told my team is don't obsess
over like getting the perfect multi-touch attribution model
because otherwise we'll just spend six months, 12 months
in like meetings and building stuff.
And then we're gonna say it didn't work
and scratch it and start again.
So we have-
- Sounds right.
- Yeah, and we have obviously,
and when we look at our BI tools, we use Power BI,
and we have all of our kind of Marketo and Salesforce data
and data from other tools all kind of aggregated
in our dashboards in Power BI.
And we have very basic first and last touch attribution
models there and an influence model.
And all I care about is like,
are we intentional about what we're doing?
So if we are going to an event
or if we're organizing an event,
are we intentional about,
hey, this event is really for prospects
that are already in the funnel,
they're already opportunities created.
So really this is an acceleration play versus,
hey, this is an event in a territory
where we have no customers, we don't really know anyone
and we're inviting net you through SDR outreach
and it's a totally different type of event
where we would expect first touch attribution
to be impacted versus the previous one,
it's really an influence model.
And so just knowing that and being intentional,
I think is the key.
I also realized like,
optimizes as massive brand power,
we get so much organic and inbound traffic,
but it's very easy for us to say,
oh, everything is inbound and everything is contact us,
because that's like the number one channel
by which someone enters our pipeline,
especially if you look at opportunity,
where did we source most of our opportunity?
Someone fills out the contact us form
and we have massive amounts of this
where very lucky as a company.
But I know like someone,
most people didn't just wake up when they go to Optimize.com,
go to a contact us page and then fill out a form.
Like they obviously saw that out of home ad
or went and sat through a webinar down a red,
18 pieces of content and then eventually decided
they have a pain.
And so just rather than trying a tribute, like,
okay, they observed or they read 10 pieces of content
on the journey towards becoming a lead
and then try and like give $100 to each piece of content.
I don't try and do that.
What I do is I hold my content team accountable
and say, hey, is the content that you're reading,
you're creating, is it being read on the path
to someone becoming an opportunity?
If your pool is big enough,
I think ultimately this is one of those things
that over the longer term, I'll be able to measure
kind of how it impacts all my other demand channels.
But there is one thing that we are going to do.
We're going to re-amplify that out of home,
massively on digital and social.
- Yep.
- Make it seem and feel like we're a much bigger company, right?
And spending millions and millions of dollars
and not necessarily kind of the budget that we are spending.
And I think we'll get a lot more mileage out of that
out of home on digital channels.
- One thing before we get to our last segment here
is funny that you started with saying like, you know,
obviously we're going to be scrappy
and we're going to try to, you know, do more,
you didn't say do more with us, so I shouldn't say it.
But we're going to be scrappy.
And then the first thing you listed was paid,
which is like the least scrappy thing you can do
is spend a bunch of money on paid.
And obviously that's a brilliant example
of like this, like golden opportunity
that you have coming up of like,
this is the most perfect opportunity for paying.
- Yeah, no one else is doing it.
- Yeah.
- And same with out of home, no one else is doing it.
I think it kind of goes without saying to be frank,
like we have this massive inbound engine
that on a weighted basis brings down our cost per MQO
and cost per opportunity, right?
We get so much inbound traffic, content SEO.
Like we get content SEO works really hard for us.
I'm hoping by now your listeners
all have some sort of content marketing program
and a content engine and have,
and maybe they don't, if they don't, they should start there.
I think you have to earn the right to do paid.
You have to earn the right to do out of home.
I'll give you an example.
Like we, this year, we're gonna spend
$7 million less in program relative to last year
or like 30-ish percent less, 40 percent less.
So we're spending 30% less on a cost per MQO
or cost per op basis.
And that's like we had a target that we set
that was already aggressive and we're beating that.
And we're generating kind of 30% more pipeline
with that lower spend.
And what that does is it allows you permission
to try these new channels,
to try aggressive new paid channels,
to try out of home, to try whatever podcast advertising
that maybe we wouldn't have tried before.
So to me, it's like you gotta get the basic,
gotta nail the basics and be a very efficient marketing team
before you can start spending.
- Well, speaking of podcast advertising,
boy, do I have a great opportunity for our listeners.
You should go to Qualified.com.
'Cause Qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster.
You know this if you've been listening to the show
'cause they've been with us since the very beginning
and we love Qualified dearly.
And all of this content is on Qualified Plus
where they have all sorts of great content.
- We're actually, sorry, just an organic plug.
We're switching to Qualified right now.
I had no idea they were your title sponsor
but it's a good product.
Look at that. - Shaft, that's just.
It's serendipity, that's great.
They're the best, well, you know they're the best
'cause you're gonna switch over.
Now your pipeline really is gonna skyrocket.
- I hope so, that's what I was promised.
- Oh, you know what?
I can promise it as well.
It's like everybody.
I mean, everybody who we ever here switched to Qualified,
they're like, this is the best thing ever.
So I don't just say it, I believe it.
Quick hits, quick questions, quick answers.
Shaft, are you ready?
- Born ready, let's go.
- Do you have a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- Ooh, I was a DJ for a long time.
Hip hop, DJ, old school, hip hop only.
- DJ, what is your DJ name?
- I just used my name, my real name.
It was really boring but the music was dope.
Yeah, that's true.
People probably thought I made it up.
- Yeah, they probably did.
Do you have a favorite book podcast TV show
that you're checking out that you'd recommend?
- I'll just recency bias.
I'm gonna go with the show The Bear.
It's about a restaurant in Chicago.
It's amazing and the reason why I love it is
I have a little side hustle, just opened a restaurant
and a bar, I know nothing about those two
but I'm learning a lot from The Bear
and reading out a lot of books about it.
- Oh, good luck.
That's awesome.
What would be your best piece of advice for a first time CMO
trying to figure out their marketing strategy?
- Well, that's me.
So I would say don't feel obligated to hold on
to the way things were working in the past.
Start with first principles approach, break things,
zero base budgeting, be really ready to try stuff
in experiment and know that a lot of the stuff
is not gonna work.
So I'd say like break things, like move fast,
break a bunch of stuff and I think,
"Oh, one other advice I'll give.
"Don't market your marketing."
To me, that's like a really important one.
I told my entire marketing team,
"If we're successful, the company will know
"because looking as it's gonna go up,
"cales are gonna go up, we're gonna be successful
"as a company."
We don't need to sit there and say like,
"Look at our marketing, it's so good.
"Everything's working, everything's great.
"Make fancy PowerPoint decks.
"Like we don't make any decks anymore."
- That's funny because that is definitely something
that I think some CMOs would disagree with you on.
That's fun. - Oh yeah, for sure.
- Chuff has been awesome.
Thanks so much for our listeners.
You can go to Optimizely.com.
Obviously everyone's heard of Optimizely,
but if you need to CMS, if you need a content marketing
platform, if you wanna do some A/B testing,
experimentation, monetization, all that stuff,
go to Optimizely.com.
- Mailed it, mailed it.
- Hey, you know I try.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, I think we have an amazing company and amazing brand,
but there's a lot of great products
that people don't know that we're in those categories
and we're leaders, so go check it out.
Give me some feedback on our marketing if you ever want.
You can fill out the contact us for 'em
and just do like, "Hey, Shav, here's feedback
"for your marketing."
- That's perfect.
I'll give you some feedback.
I mean, I think your stuff's great.
So, you know, there's my, I love the website.
I think it's pretty slick.
And I'm sure you've got a huge website,
Rebuild Plan Ready 2.
- No, no, it's good.
It has this little smiley face with sunglasses
in the top right, if you click on it.
You go into dark mode, it's kind of a nice,
nice little Easter egg.
- That is fun.
I did notice that.
Cool. - Thank you.
- Thanks so much and we'll talk soon.
- Enjoyed it, thank you.
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