The CRO to CMO Advantage: Reimagining Go to Market
Orlando Baeza, CRO & CMO at Flock Freight, and his team are creating a more cost-effective and efficient future for the trucking industry.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Cast Mein Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Rilando, how are you?
>> I'm doing great.
And thanks so much for having me, excited to have the conversation.
>> Yeah, excited to have you here.
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Super excited to get into all things.
Pipeline, marketing, revenue, and
hear what the really cool stuff that you're doing at Flock Freight.
Let's get into it.
But first, what's your first job marketing?
>> First job marketing was actually an internship at Nike.
Nike East in the basketball category.
Which to say the least was both exciting and hard as hell.
[LAUGH]
Talk to anybody from Nike and they've got some war stories.
But you learn so much in that space and
you're just surrounded by incredible talent left and right.
So a lot of incredible learnings that wait into kind of the foundation of my
career.
But certainly also moments of just like all right from the icons that you're
working
with in terms of the athletes to the icons you're working with in terms of the
company.
Just some incredible talent that has come out of Nike.
>> And flash forward to today, tell us what it means to be Chief Revenue
Officer and
Chief Marketing Officer at Flock Freight.
>> Yeah, I appreciate that.
So here at Flock, I oversee acquisition, marketing, and customer success.
So in many ways, really owning the customer lifecycle in the commercial org.
I joined Flock about a year and a half ago as the Chief Marketing Officer.
And earlier this year was promoted into the CR role and
taken on the additional responsibilities.
>> Let's go.
It's like anytime we see that, you love to see it.
CMOs turn into CROs.
>> Yeah, it's been an interesting trend line, right?
Like I think we're seeing more and more of it than we've seen in the past.
You know, oftentimes what we hear about is the short tenure,
the short average tenure of the CMO role.
I think more and more lately we're seeing CMOs turn into CEO,
CROs, COOs, presidents, etc.
At really every stage and level of a company, right?
I can obviously talk about my story, but then there's the ever tailors at Kick
starter.
There's the Sean Trezvant at Taco Bell.
There's some really interesting trends happening right now.
And I think CMOs are really starting to get some additional recognition for
the complexity of that role and how much they actually carry.
>> I interviewed every years ago, different podcasts.
And as one of those people where I met him and I'm like, this is a really sharp
marketer and then bang years later.
It's funny how that sort of sort of stuff happens.
It's like when he was at CMO at RT.
>> Yeah, Everett's a really good friend of mine.
We've actually built our friendship in recent years and
he's one of my closer friends at this point.
I'm such a big fan of what he's doing over there at Kickstarter and
what he did at RT and how he's built his career and how he lives his values
every day, constant inspiration and a good brother of mine.
>> Yeah, marketers would come and CEOs, become and see arrows and stuff.
You love to see it.
Okay, let's get to the trust tree.
This is where you go and feel honest and trusted and
share those deepest, darkest, pipeline secrets.
Zoom it out.
What does Flock do?
>> Yeah, thank you for asking the question.
So Flock is creating a smarter, more sustainable supply chain.
That's the cliff note.
I'll explain why, but before I do, I think it's important to understand the
problem.
The problem is we have a big utilization problem in this country as it relates
to
over the road freight.
So what I mean by that, half the trucks you see on the road,
53 foot trucks that you're driving past on the freeway every day,
half of those trucks are half empty.
That creates an incredible amount of waste.
But it's the byproduct of a supply chain that really hasn't been innovated on
in 100 years.
So really there's two primary modes that people ship freight over the road with
which is truck load, meaning you buy the full truck.
One truck, one driver goes from your pickup to its destination.
It's the fastest mode, it's very little damage and loss in the process,
so it's the best service quality.
The alternative is LTL.
LTL is when you don't have enough goods to fill up the truck or
that it doesn't make economic sense for you to send the full truck.
So you'll send it on what is the hub and spoke model, right?
Which hasn't really innovated in the last 100 years.
Which means it's going to stop terminal after terminal after terminal.
Your goods are going to get transferred from one truck to the next truck to the
next truck.
And it'll zigzag to its destination, right?
It'll ultimately get there, but it'll be significantly longer transit time than
had you have shipped it truck load.
And damage and loss goes up by 15x, not 15%.
So oftentimes there are reproduction issues,
you have to reproduce and reship because it didn't get there.
It was lost or it was damaged to the point where the retailer can't use it.
Doesn't get to your end consumer.
Which creates a whole host of inefficiencies in your supply chain.
So it is an imperfect supply chain.
And it's been that way for a very long time.
What Flock has done is created a third mode.
It's called shared truck load.
We've built a series of patented algorithms and technology that allow us to
predict
the movement of freight throughout the continental 48.
And in turn, allows us to identify the optimized pathways and
routes to ride, share, or carpool freight across the country.
Which allows the shippers to save money, the carriers to earn more money.
And us to be able to cut carbon emissions being emitted into the atmosphere
buys much as 40% organically.
Then there are additional programs where we leverage offsets as well to bring
that all the way to carbon neutral for our core product Flock Direct.
Which is the shared truck load product.
So what we do now is what we're trying to do is scale penetration,
scale adoption, scale awareness, concept awareness of this third mode.
It hasn't existed prior to us.
We don't own any terminals.
We don't own any trucks, right?
We're non-asset.
If we put something in a shared truck load, it goes on the truck at your origin
point.
It doesn't get touched again until it gets to your destination.
So it is truck load service quality at LTL prices.
Which is where the cost savings come into the equation for a lot of our
customers.
>> And who are those customers?
What are the types of companies that you're selling into?
>> Yeah, I mean the customers is really up and down the tail.
So we have very, very large enterprise shippers from every category you could
imagine.
Some very household name brands that we all know and love.
All the way into the long tail of SMBs, right?
Small, small regional operations, customers, construction companies, food and
bev, startups, mid-market, you name it, right?
We have a long tail of SMBs in addition to the mid-market and
enterprise shippers and our customer.
>> And what does that buying committee look like?
How do those, I mean, obviously very different from enterprise to SMB, I'd
imagine.
What does that buying committee look like?
What does that personal look like?
>> Yeah, look, it definitely ranges pretty widely, right?
So at a smaller company, it could be the CEO.
It could be the COO.
When you get into the larger enterprise companies, their entire orgs built
around the supply chain.
So it might be a director of transportation, your VP of supply chain, your
chief supply chain officer.
We also talk to a lot of heads of and chief sustainability officers, right?
They see the opportunity that exists in really reducing their scope three
emissions,
which we can be an incredible partner for.
So we talked to a wide variety of decision makers and
influencers within a given organization, but
the title itself really varies depending on the company and the stage of the
company.
>> In that sales process, how do you think about your marketing strategy?
>> Great question.
How I'd answer that is, our marketing strategy has a few different
responsibilities, right?
I always start from like, what's the job to be done from a marketing standpoint
And first and foremost, top of mind is concept awareness.
Not just brand awareness, yeah, we want people to know flock freight.
Yes, we want people to know the brand name, but
we really want people to truly understand what shared truckload is, what it
means.
Again, going back to the point I made a second ago, right?
There hasn't been an innovation like this in 100 years.
Right, we firmly believe that.
And so it's really important that we scale concept awareness.
So people truly understand the shippers and the carriers alike,
truly understand what this model means for them and what it means going forward
I think for the first time, we've got a mode and
an option that actually caters to the customer's needs versus forcing
customers into one of two not so great options.
Yeah, I mean, similar to the category creation category design sort of a piece
where there's when you're bringing something completely new to the market,
you have to educate the market on that.
You know, obviously a ton.
That's exactly right.
We have a lot of education to do.
And then obviously given the density and
the complexity of the supply chain itself and attention spans and
mind share being the exact opposite end of that spectrum.
Right.
We have made it a clear strategy to leverage humor and
wit as a way in to educating people and gaining attention span and
making people care.
Care enough to tune in, care enough to view, care enough to read.
So that we can give them the education and the details on what we're up to and
how it's affecting shippers, carriers and the planet.
Now that you've moved from CMO to CRO, what's the difference been for you?
Like what's your org structure look like now as CRO?
You sort of mentioned at the top what you do, but digging in there,
like where does marketing fit within that?
Yeah, so marketing fits in the center of it, right?
Like we are service function, right?
And so we've got clear stakeholders in the customer success and
the acquisition orgs, right?
And marketing is here to drive efficiency and success for them,
but also to partner and collaborate with them to find ways to
continue to innovate in their processes as well, right?
So one of the big things we've done is really re-imagined our go to market,
top to bottom, from org structure and design all the way through go to market
materials and sales and enablement to messaging, right?
To even thinking about the inbound versus outbound dynamic and how we prospect.
So we've done a lot of organizational shifting to create what we believe is
a much more dynamic, much more efficient organization that will set us for
scale
into the future.
Curious, how do you sort of think of bucketing your money on that sort of like
more brand and sort of category and sort of problem-centric thinking versus
like
the product sort of, hey, we can solve this for you?
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to resource allocation, right?
Because it's not just dollars, it's heads, it's tools, it's software, etc.
I always start from a problem statement and what are the main objectives we
need to solve for
in a quarter, in a year, etc.
So really it all begins with the things that the firm needs to accomplish.
And then starting to think about what parts of our org are best set up to
accomplish that,
what do they need to be successful.
So we rip it apart that way, really thinking about it from a functional
standpoint,
as well as potentially objectives and what objectives require a certain level
of resource.
The other key thing here is measurement, right?
We spend a lot of time thinking about how to engineer things for measurement.
So that we are not just putting tactics out into the world and getting a feel
on if it's working or
not, it is measurable in multiple ways, right?
So that we can bring that back to what ROI might look like for that given
resource expenditure
and then have a point of view on whether that's something we want to double
down on,
whether that's something we might need to throttle back with,
whether there's another version of that experiment we should try or test.
But that measurement piece is crucial when it comes to resource allocation,
because you want to feel conviction that if I'm going to put budget against
this thing,
it's going to serve us, right?
And it's going to help us accomplish that goal that we're setting out to hit.
So I think resource allocation comes right back to measurement most often.
And we're always putting our dollars where we've got the most conviction.
Very cool. All right, let's get to our next.
[Music]
segment, the playbook, where you open up that playbook and talk about the
tactics that help
you win. What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget
items?
I actually think one of the biggest mistakes people make is bringing a playbook
with them.
I think it's incredibly important for you to build something bespoke everywhere
you are.
I also believe it's important and a real focus of mind to reimagine and
question the existing
playbook that the company may have had prior to me arriving.
And that's not to be changed for change sake. I'm actually quite against change
for change
sake, but it's to bring a fresh pair of eyes to the problem areas.
And to figure out where in that playbook there are opportunities for innovation
where there are opportunities to think differently about solving the same
problem,
where there might be new tools or resources to help you attack that in a
different matter.
Right, we think about social media and how much that is that is contained that
landscape
has continued to change. There's just channels continue to pop up.
Right, there's so many different ways to go about this job that I think oft
entimes
you get used to a playbook, you get comfortable in that approach and you
default to bringing that
to all of your challenges. And that ends up being a mistake. So, as it comes to
your question,
what are the three, what are the three kind of non-negotiable channels for me?
Social is at the very top of that list, right? In my opinion, that's the window
to our business,
right? In a pre-social media, pre-digital era, right? The window to the retail
shop,
you better get that right. Think you better get social right. You need to know
who you're
talking to, you need to know what they're looking for, you need to build the
right content,
create the right levels of engagement. So, I think social media is incredibly
important.
I think in this business specifically, sales enablement is incredibly important
As I mentioned before, we have a huge, huge lift in terms of education. We've
got a lot
to teach and to show and to unveil. A lot of what we do is new for a lot of sh
ippers.
Haven't worked with a company exactly like us. Haven't used this mode before,
right? So,
there's a big lift there. So, product marketing, sales enablement is incredibly
important
into the mix. And then demand generation is incredibly important. And that is
brand and performance.
I think those two have to hold hands, right? It's something I say to my team
all the time,
brand is performant. It is not brand for brand's sake and performance for
performance sake. We're
not looking to just optimize all of our performance marketing engines against
DR focused activities
and content that are just focused on get the click, get the click. We need to
mix these worlds.
It makes for a higher quality click. It makes for a higher quality conversion.
It makes for
sticky customer. I think doing one without the other, not intertwining them,
often ends up being
this church and state that we see in many marketing orgs today that becomes a
tough dynamic to
overcome as an organization. And it becomes confusing for your consumers
because your customers end up
seeing two different messages from those two different channels and are always
trying to reconcile
what they're walking into. And then undoubtedly in a B2B situation, then they
're going to talk to
a salesperson who is neither brand or performance. And they're going to have a
different way to say
it. So, alignment of messaging is incredibly important, which is why I always
talk about the
mesh between brand and performance and why I always talk about brand is perform
ant, if it is to be
successful. So, I think that's where I'd go with those three.
One thing that seems like you'll invest pretty heavily in is this impact report
that you do.
Your CEO, so for our listeners, you can go to flockfreight.com/sustainability.
So, you all are a B Corp. You have a very serious commitment to sustainability.
And you publish
this impact report, which is beautiful. It's extremely cool thinking and
engaging from that
perspective. But you have a massive impact on society, on sustainability, and
the obligation
that you want to do lots more of that. And help other people do that. However,
those types of
things, which I would view that as a non-negotiable sort of a, "Hey, we have to
figure out a way to
tell the story." But you did it in a really cool way. And I'm curious, there
are people who,
that speaks to them. And there's other people who, dollars on dollars, speaks
to them, like,
"Hey, I can save you X amount of dollars. I can make you more money." So, just
curious,
like, how do you think about marketing something like your 2022 impact report?
Yeah. Great question. Look, this comes down to extreme segmentation, right?
Understanding who
you're talking to, understanding what that customer's priorities are. Do they
have
VSTU goals at a corporate, right? A lot of these enterprise shippers do. And
they need to hit those
goals. And we can be an incredible partner. And it's also an incredible
differentiation for us
in the space. I think more than anything, like the reason I didn't mention in
the previous three
is because it's not a choice that we're making whether or not to do. It is in
the heart of this
company. It is the core in this product, right? Like, there is no escaping it.
It is what we do.
It is what we care about. There is a very, very large majority of flocquers out
there that are
here at floc freight because of our impact on the environment and what we
represent.
So, it's inherent in everything we do. And to your point, some shippers care
more about it
than others, right? And that is just the reality of it. So, we take those
efforts seriously, right?
And you can see that from the impact report and the amount of time and a
resource that went
into preparing that, shooting those videos, building that content, etc. And
love hearing the
positive feedback from the people where it really strikes a chord because it
means a lot. It means
a great deal to the team here at flocquers. And we do a lot locally and
nationally to hit on these.
But there's also other shippers that are more price sensitive, that are, you
know,
thinking about their P&L, right? For God's sakes, we're in the middle of our
session, right? People
are feeling it. People are looking for the savings opportunities in their P&L.
They're looking for
efficiency gains. And we want to be able to let them know that they can do good
while doing good,
right? Where you reduce the friction for people making the right decision is
when you can make it
profitable. Make doing the right thing profitable comes a lot harder to say no,
right? If we can
provide you a more efficient supply chain outcome, right? Where we're saving
you money,
but you're not sacrificing on service quality. And oh, by the way, we're
avoiding ever emitting
X amount of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. So you're having a positive
impact on the planet
in the process. It makes you feel good because you're doing something good, but
you're also
prof, profitably benefiting from that decision. And that is the, that is always
the needle of
thread, right? If we can thread that needle with any given shipper, that is
when it becomes really
compelling. And in most cases, we're able to have that conversation, thankfully
. And that's, you know,
because of the technology and what it affords us in terms of the comparisons in
the supply chain
today. When I first checked out the impact report, I was thinking, like,
obviously, this is really
cool and to see the impact that your company has on the world is awesome. And
the second thing was,
gosh, it's so hard to get a CEO to sit down and shoot video.
Like, oh my goodness, that's like every marketers nightmare is like, we're
going to shoot a bunch
of video with our CEO. Yes, we, we are very, very fortunate to have a CEO that
really like this is,
this is something that's ingrained in him, right? Integrity is a bry with him.
He cares immensely
about solving this, this crisis and wants to play a big role in it. So he is,
you know, both hands
raised as a volunteer anytime we have an initiative like this where we feel
like he's the right messenger.
And, you know, thankfully, this has been an incredible partnership and
experience with him in that
he is always giving and generous with his time and his insight. He's been in
this industry since he
started his career. So he's got a lot of insights that that is helpful to our
team, top to bottom.
But he's also very willing to give of his time for any efforts that we think is
impactful for
the company. And it is a wonderful advantage that we have available to us.
Yeah, that's awesome. When you have a senior leader who's extremely dynamic,
hopefully it's
your CEO, but if it's not your CEO, someone else who's extremely dynamic,
especially with domain
expertise, like you have to use them. And it's so, so impactful when you do
like everyone just
cares more. Like when the CEO speaks, like people care more, like if you have
that, you got to figure
out a way to back up a production engine and a marketing engine to get their
story out there,
to get their continued thought leadership out there. Like it's such an
advantage and it's
super under invested by a lot of people because it takes time. And like nothing
's more important
than your CEO's time. Man, it's so true. You're bringing up a great point. It's
, you know, it's
not only incredible to have a messenger like that, but increasingly so when
that message wraps around
purpose, that is a leading reason why nearly our entire employee base is here,
right? So to know
that their leader cares so passionately about solving this problem and that is
in the core of
the product, right? And that is also true, by the way, of our CTO, LUE, our CFO
, our like completely
throughout the C-suite, like everyone is here for purpose and impact in
addition to, which
certainly makes a marketers job a lot simpler when you have content that you
want to shoot,
thought leadership you want to create with people who are willing to raise
their hands up and say,
oh, I'm happy to support this, right? And then in addition to that, you've got
to be able to back
it up, right? And I think for us, the impact report is a wonderful way to show
that these are not words,
these are actions, these are results, right? When we sit there and report that,
you know, 35,000 metric
tons of carbon emissions were avoided ever entering the planet because of what
shared truckload
produced in the last year, that means a lot, right? That's millions of cars off
the road, right?
And that is impactful, right? Over the road freight, one of the worst polluters
in the world,
this is a global issue, the utilization problem that I mentioned at the top of
the program,
a global issue, and while we've launched in the continental 48 now, we believe
firmly that,
you know, this technology, this third mode shared truckload has real scale well
beyond the walls
of the United States of America and are super excited about what that might
mean in the future
because it's a very, very large landscape, right? Over the road freight in the
US alone is about a
trillion dollar TAM. When you get into the globe, we're talking closer to seven
. So when you think
about TAM's that large, marketers get excited. And when you think about mirror
ing the penetration
opportunity with the impact on the planet, now you're getting into special
territory in terms of
doing something that matters. Is there one area that's like your most cuttable
item or
something that you don't want to be investing in going forward or something
that is a channel
that's not really working? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say right now it
might be out of home.
And it's not because it won't work. It's not because the channel doesn't work.
It's
the way you quantify it and what is needed to support out of home, right? In
terms of large,
vast distribution and activation, I think the best out of home use cases are
ones where there's
activation opportunities surrounding those out of home placements, where you
really get to maximize
the value that you're getting out of those awareness gains and that presence.
And again,
in a world where you can't do everything at the same time, right, where you've
got to make choices
and trade-offs, that's probably the one that we've went a little lighter on. We
've used out of home
in the past. We've gone a little bit lighter in our current strategy due to the
reasons I just
mentioned, but I wouldn't be shocked or surprised if we brought it back into
play at the right time.
Okay, we got to talk about the campaign that y'all did. I didn't think we were
going to get there.
Yeah, we have to. So you created a campaign. Well, what do you call it
internally? Do you just call
it the fuckload campaign? What's it referred to as? I was going to ask this
question at the top of
the the top of the program, but I didn't know if we can curse on here. Go ahead
. We can always
weep it out in post. It's all right. All right, fair enough. So it's affection
ately referenced as
the fuckload shitload campaign internally, but the official title for the
campaign is Define Your
Load. And that was partially because as we wanted to make sure that we
distributed this and it got
played, there weren't curse words in the titles of the spots because that would
automatically flag
it on the different distribution channels. So we had to kind of dull that down
a little bit in
terms of the title, but certainly people use shorthand internally. So yeah, so
why do you do this thing?
Yeah, so I talked a little bit earlier about brand awareness, concept awareness
, and why concept
awareness is so incredibly important for us. We got a big education gapped fill
. I was thinking about
how do we communicate and educate people about shared truckload when the topic
of supply chain
itself is so dense and attention spans are so small. How do we how do we make
that work? And
as I stood on that, where I landed on was I think humor can play a big role
here. The company
already uses a lot of humor internally. We play on the name our onboarding
program, for example,
is called flock you. We have fun with the name. And so I thought there would be
an appetite for
using humor as a tool. But we hadn't landed on the concept. And this is where
you know, partnership
and you know, with our agency partner, maximum effort, which is led by Ryan
Reynolds and his
business partners really came in crucial. We spent a lot of time talking about
the problem,
talking about the challenge, talking about what we needed to overcome, and that
we wanted to
leverage humor. And we ended up landing on this concept of why don't we define
a term or terms
that we've already been using in plain language to capture people's attention
span, and then
translate that into the terms that are more typically seen as industry jargon.
Right. And that is where
we landed on fuckload and shitload being alternatives for full truckload and
shared truckload. And
the the differences there were actually not that difficult to get to because
everyone kind of
unanimously agreed that fuckload was more than shitload. Right. So that worked
out in our favor.
Right. So the FU works for full truckload. Right. The SH works for shared truck
load.
And so we were able to use that alliteration in our in our advantage. And
obviously, then the fun
comes in when you get into the script writing phase of this portion where we're
just trading
ideas and thoughts, probably using more curse words and meetings than than I'm
used to. And I'm
someone who curses more than enough in meetings. So people people that know me
or all my teams will
laugh at that because they know well, good and well that that is true. But yeah
, I mean, we had
some fun in the script writing phase trying to find the right mix of funny and
humor and education.
Right. And I think the thing that this this campaign while it ended up being
awarded and really
highly regarded, I think the thing that people come back to all the time is
like, yeah, it's
it's hilarious. And yes, it's incredible, you know, really thoughtful, talent
casting.
And well shot the graphics people highlight all these things. But everyone
comes back to I learned
something like you guys did an incredible amount of work while making me laugh.
And that was the
primary focus for us was making sure that it did enough work and that it wasn't
just humor for
humor sake, right? And that you could walk away from watching a 30 second spot,
a 60 second spot,
and actually know what shared truckload is, right? And I think that was one of
the best examples of
success for this campaign. And it happened very early on. Like I remember the
first time I pitched
this to our CEO, I probably gave 87 caveats because I was worried about how he
'd receive it.
Right. But um, but as I finished his response immediately was that might have
been the best
articulation of what we do that I've heard. Right. And that was incredible to
hear, right? Because
it's easy to get lost in the language. It's easy to get lost in the jokes. And
it was really,
really important for me to make sure that the work did not get lost. And so to
hear him respond
that way. And then as I, you know, went ahead and socialize that throughout the
organization,
because I wanted to make sure everyone was comfortable with taking a risk like
this,
the feedback was just incredible. And we kind of knew instantly that we had to
make it.
What was the experience of your, of your customers, of your community?
I mean, just phenomenal, right? We're, we're months and months post launch at
this point,
and still have customers calling in saying, Hey, you guys are the fuckload shit
load people,
right? And, uh, and so we, we are still taking those calls. Look, I think the
important nuance here
isn't about, is it funny and sticky, right? It is both of those things, but it
is aperture changing.
Right. When you're trying to, when you're trying to sell, when you're, when you
're B2B company looking
to make inroads with the right decision maker, you're trying to turn a cold
conversation into a
warm lead. If they recall and remember what you did, and they have reverence
for that thing you did,
the aperture is different on the phone. The interest is different on the phone.
Your conversation is
dynamically different. You're all of a sudden not explaining, Hey, we're from
flock fray, and we do
blank, blank, blank. You're immediately into here's how we can help you,
because they're already
interested. And that aperture shift was felt significantly on our side, right?
It was, that
campaign was quickly followed by a record setting acquisition, acquisition
quarter,
record setting margin profile quarter. Like we had wonderful tailwinds,
awareness jump,
triple digits, recall jump, triple digits. We had incredible measurement in
place to be able to
track all the successes and or failures of what we were going to launch. Um,
and thankfully,
there were a lot of successes, right? And we didn't, we knew there was a risk.
We knew there was a
risk that people might be offended by the language, that people might not see
it for the thoughtfulness
that we put into it, and just, you know, capture the superficial language of it
all and not love it.
And that could be customers. It could be employees. It could be, you know,
anyone in the flock ecosystem
or partners. So we were aware of that risk. We teased and tested some of that,
to get a feel for
it. The responses were, were really positive, which is why we felt comfortable
with the risk.
And then what we saw on the other side was just a lot of appreciation and, and
like-mindedness
from our customer base, from our employees, just everyone just kind of wrapped
their arms around
it. Everyone appreciated, you know, just the irreverence of it all and, and how
we approached
the humor and, and the, the care we put into making sure that we communicated
what shared truckload was
and, and making sure that this, this humor carried work alongside it. Keep them
laughing, keep them
learning. Right? That's right. It's like laugh and learn, right? We talk a lot
about lunch and
learns and employee cultures. Laugh and learns. That's right. Tyler Vidyer
taught me that.
Um, I love it. It's so cool. And you know, it just begs the question, this
stuff works so
freaking well. Every time we have someone come on and tell these type of
stories of doing some
really cool quote unquote brand campaign, it ends up doing a lot more than
brand. It's like, why don't
we do cool stuff more often? Like, what are we doing? Why do we do boring stuff
? Like,
how much money we're gonna dump into Google ads before we drive ourselves crazy
? It's just like,
I don't know. Yeah. I mean, there's diminishing results, right? You can scale,
you know, these
performance channels. Um, and, and that is absolutely true. But at some point
you're going to bump
against efficiency issues, right? There will be points of diminishing returns.
And this is where
brand plays a key role because it will make your performance media
significantly more efficient.
And we saw way better. We saw that. Yep. So clearly. And what's better is
typically,
a successful brand campaign, even post flight will have a halo effect for
months on end on the
efficiency of the performance media. So it is not a short, you know, people
always talk about
brand as a long term investment, um, and a long term goal, but they're not
usually talking about
it from a media efficiency standpoint. And it's a miss. It is a massive
efficiency driver when you
do it right. So it is something that is often overlooked, but it's usually it
comes back to
measurement, right? The onus is on us as marketing leaders to truly understand
how to measure and
quantify the impact of what brand does and be able to articulate that to C
suite, to the board,
to understand why we're allocating dollars and resources to put towards this,
right? Because it
is hard, harder to quantify than a direct conversion that you can easily
attribute, right? Um, so
it is naturally a little bit more of a lift. But again, I think if you can nail
how to measure
and how to articulate that measurement, that impact on the business, it becomes
very much a
no brainer. It becomes something you need to invest in. Of course you invest in
because when
you don't and when you stop, you see the differences. You feel the differences,
right? So putting fresh
creative in the market and just challenging your teams to not be burdened by
the tried and true
historical truths of an industry or a category, right? Oftentimes the
creativity exists on these
beat in these B2B companies. They're just not leveraging it. Um, and, you know,
I think it's one
of my benefits, having a consumer background, right? Nike, Call of Duty,
Paramount, like bringing that
consumer thinking into my approach, uh, on the B2B side has been a different
iator for me as an
executive and the teams that I build and the campaigns and the strategies that
we put out into the world.
Um, but I hold it near and dear. Again, I think the measurement is, is, is the
secret sauce. If you
know how to measure, if you know how to articulate impact, um, I think it's
really hard to argue
that you shouldn't do it. Let's get into our last segment. Quick hits. These
are quick questions
and quick answers just like how qualified.com helps companies generate pipeline
quickly tap into
your greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable visitors and
instantly. And I
mean instantly start sales conversations right on the site. Quick and easy.
Just like these questions,
go to qualified.com to learn more. Quick hits Orlando. Are you ready? Yes, sir.
Number one, do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Yeah. Um, I played basketball at a pretty high level. So played basketball
through college,
um, played high school ball in California, college ball on Rhode Island. So you
used to play basketball.
That is not a hidden talent today. Blue out money a couple of times. Haven't
picked up a ball in a while.
So don't think you got a ringer on your rec league team. That's not me anymore.
But back in the day,
it would have been just hidden mid range. Just, uh, pull up job result. Do you
have a favorite book
or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out recently? Oh, that's a
great question. Uh,
I'll do a quick plug for Apple TV. Uh, Apple TV plus insane content right now.
Uh, there's so good,
so many things, but shrinking comes to mind as something I watched really
recently. Uh, the
bear season two just dropped. Um, so I, I went through that pretty quickly. How
do you suggest that?
That's FX on Hulu. Um, so shots out to the streaming, to the streaming players
out there.
They're doing it right. There's a lot of great content out there. Do you do
have you done mythic
quest yet? I haven't done mythic quest. I've had multiple people tell me to get
into it. I haven't
jumped in yet. It's just like, so it's like such a great modern like workplace
comedy,
like dramedy, but it's just great. It's just so I gotta check it out. All right
. I'll listen to this.
Yeah. Um, what advice would you give to a first time CMO who is trying to
figure out
how to drive their pipeline? Mm. Build your tribe. Um, I think for first time C
MOs who were figuring
it out, I remember my first CMO job, I was certainly figuring it out. Um,
building your tribe is
incredibly important. And I don't mean your team. I mean your, your tribe
externally,
your advisors, your friends, your peers, people have been doing that job before
people have done other executive jobs before. I think it's incredibly important
to be bouncing
things off of people to get another opinion and to, and to lose the ego in the
process. Right.
There is certainly some ego that comes into play, um, especially with senior
titles. I don't think
this job is an ego job. Um, at all, I think it's quite the opposite. I think
servant leadership is
super important and, um, and building a tribe that'll hold you accountable,
keep you honest,
and give you some differing points of views. So they'll challenge you super
important to be
unsuccessful and ramping up into the seat. Or Lando, it's been absolutely
awesome chatting with you.
Uh, we super appreciate it. Um, such a cool mind and, and marketer. Um, thanks
again for listeners.
You can go to flockfreight.com. You can check it out. Check out the
sustainability report.
Super cool. Check out the Steve Burns investigates. Uh, how much is a, a, a
fuckload? Um, it's so
funny and cool. We'll link it up in the show notes. Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Thanks so much for having me. And I think, you know, nothing else to plug. I
definitely
would implore the listeners to go check out flockfreight. Go see what we're
doing. Have an amazing
impact on our customers, on our carriers, on the planet. Um, and, uh, and
excited to continue to,
to spread the word about shared truckload. Right. And we got shit loads of
freight to move all
around the country. So, uh, let us know if we can be of help. I love it. Thanks
for Lando.