The Benefits of Data-Driven B2B
Dylan Steele shares his insights into the benefits of data-driven B2B, why sales enablement matters, and why mapping the customer journey is important.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today, I am joined by a special guest, Dylan.
How are you?
Great.
Good to be with Ian.
Glad to connect again.
Yeah, great to have you on the show.
Excited to have you on this show.
We've chatted with you on other podcasts in the past.
And really excited to be talking about coalition,
talk about demand gen, talk about marketing,
your background, and everything in between.
So let's get started.
What was your first job in demand?
My first job in demand-- well, I think my first true marketing
job was at Salesforce as a product marketer,
where I helped position the Salesforce platform
and the ability to develop apps with low code.
Now, low code is everywhere.
But you think it's hard to create demand with customers.
Imagine doing the work to try to create a new category
and get low code app development on the radars
of the gardeners and foresters of the world.
Perhaps, though, I'll go back even further and say,
my first true demand gen job was working
for a small political campaign in Colorado,
where I grew up for county commissioner.
And people say service jobs are great ones for learning,
interacting with people.
But I'll tell you what's even harder
and gives you a lot even more empathy
is going door to door around your neighborhood
and meeting your neighbors, trying
to convince them to learn more about your candidate,
care about your candidate, and leave preconceived notions
behind.
So a lot of learning from that first demand gen experience
and a lot of miles walked through the neighborhoods
of Jefferson County, Colorado.
Let's get into our first segment.
The trust tree, this is where we can go and feel honest and trusted,
and you can share those deepest, darkest demand gen
secrets.
What is coalition?
What does the company do?
Yeah, so coalition.
First, let's start with the problem
that I think a lot of companies experience,
and then we'll talk about how coalition solves it.
I think today it's no surprise if you look at the headlines,
you see the amount of organizations
that are facing cyber risk and potential cyber attacks.
And there's just many different types of cyber risks,
cyber attacks that can come from anything
from spearfishing to ransomware, but funds transfer fraud
and other technical risks that you might not traditionally
associate with the cyber sphere.
And what we found is there are a lot of organizations
who are just simply falling through the cracks
of the traditional cybersecurity industry.
And take small businesses and medium-sized organizations,
for example, who can afford to buy an expensive cyber security
tool and may not have an in-house C so,
even a cyber security expert, sometimes not even someone
running IT, it's outsourced for them.
So kind of what options do they have to protect themselves?
Well, they can try to find someone to part-time help them.
They can try to implement a more expensive tool.
You can try to find third-party help.
But often what we see is they don't get any help,
and they don't take action, and they're left quite vulnerable.
And we actually find that there's a lot of small companies
that are now on the receiving end of cyber security attacks.
And so coalition came up with a really interesting idea,
which is to help small businesses,
you not only need to give them a little bit of technical help,
but you actually have to align the incentives,
the financial incentives and the business incentives
to help protect an organization.
So coalition combined cyber security tooling and support
with insurance.
And what we do is we offer folks what we call
an active insurance policy.
And with active insurance, you get kind of the protection
of traditional insurance so we can help you
make you financially whole if you suffer a catastrophic event
that can threaten your business.
But we also offer support from the beginning
before a cyber attack through a potential issue
all the way to post-attack, to hopefully help prevent
an issue before it occurs, to help you manage your risk,
close potential loopholes, and potential threat vectors,
and then offer you incident response and support
if an attack does occur to get a company back up and running.
And so I think kind of a novel approach through active insurance
to help manage, transfer, and mitigate risk
for really small and medium businesses.
For example, like yourself, who probably doesn't manage
a physical office and worried about fire and flood,
but has the majority of their IP stored in digital systems.
- And so how many customers do you all have?
What is the size of the organizations that you all are
talking to?
It seems like there could be a pretty big group there.
- Yeah, I mean, we have a large customer base
and it's continuing to grow.
We have over 140,000 customers and there are different types
of customers that we have, some are policy holders,
some access, some of our expertise and software tools
on their own.
So like any business can go to control.coallitioning.com
and get a free risk assessment and just understand,
get a picture of their existing cyber risk,
and use that as a tool to perhaps get some tips
on how to remediate some of those risks.
So we have 140,000 customers,
mostly mid and small businesses,
but we roll right policies to businesses up to $1 billion
in revenue.
And when we think about, we have a really unique motion
and this is where I'll say, we don't have to follow
the demand-gen framework one to one for myself
and a lot of your listeners should probably come
from a variety of industries,
but we actually go to market through trusted partners,
which are brokers.
And businesses go to brokers to purchase a range of risk,
transfer and risk protection.
So our goal is to help brokers understand the value
of active insurance, the need for cyber insurance
and help bring that to policy holders all over the US.
Right now we're in the US and Canada,
expanding to the UK soon.
So we have a couple of different motions through the brokers
and also direct to potential small businesses
with cyber risk assessments, et cetera.
- One of the reasons I was so excited to have you
on the show is I did this, I went to coalitioning.com
and I did a assessment back on March 8th
when we last spoke and no we deal with zero critical
vulnerabilities for cast-meant studios.
But it was an extremely cool process and as a marketer
my ears were perked way up because I thought it was such
a cool value add.
And just in the past couple of days we've had
a bunch of different spear fishing types, stuff happen.
It's just this, and I think I told you
that we're doing this crazy cybersecurity podcast.
It's this fictional series that we're doing called
The Hacker Chronicles with our partner.
And it's been this really fun journey.
And so we've been in the world of cyber security a ton.
And I was thinking about you and I was thinking about
this idea of like this is what you want as a small business.
You just wanna be like, can you just take a look real quick,
tell me where I'm at and then show me a couple solutions
of like what is possible.
And I don't know what a broker is, you know,
as a small business owner, I don't know how to go to brokers.
There's all that sort of stuff.
So I'm so curious how you think about, you know,
going to market when you kind of have this,
this, you know, this business owner out there
in the wild who might know they have a problem.
They might not have a problem.
They might, you know, need, might not understand the space
at all or cyber security in general or the landscape.
- Yeah.
Well, first of all, thank you for going
and taking a risk assessment and congratulations
on not having any critical issues at the moment.
And now part of what's so interesting and so challenging
about cyber and cyber risk is that it's constantly evolving.
It's changing all the time.
And so an assessment at any one point time is great.
But the idea that you can assess
and then monitor is actually even more important.
And this is where kind of our world diverges
significantly from more traditional insurers.
When you think about just like insurance,
which has been around for hundreds of years
and was like originally created to protect ships at sea
and distribute the risk and transfer the risk around
should something happen to those ships,
they're traditionally designed to take a look
at historical risk and then try to make some assumption
of your current risk and future risk.
So they look and say, say like, you know,
what's the likelihood that you're gonna have a flood
in your area based on a hundred years of data,
50 years of data, project that forward in the future?
Cyber risk is just changing too quickly.
There are new threat vectors popping up all the time.
Sometimes it's because of something you did.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with you.
It can be your whole technology supply chain
that's evolving and changing.
And so what's really unique about coalition
is not just our ability to help people with cyber tools,
but behind the scenes is really interesting technology.
That's scanning the public web,
scanning open ports to actually get a picture
of your live risk.
And we use that to do all kinds of interesting things.
Underwrite you if you want an insurance policy
through a broker who are amazing trusted partners.
Help you monitor and assess your risk.
If we see something that looks suspicious
or we know you're running a certain operating system
and there's a new vulnerability,
we'll actually email and alert you as a business owner
or as well as your broker to help you close that.
And again, that's that whole incentive alignment,
which is, you know, we aren't just selling software
and saying, good luck, hope you implement it.
We're actually selling you an insurance policy.
We would prefer that you not have a cyber incident and get hacked.
I suspect most people would hope that the same is true for them.
So now our incentives are aligned.
And so when you buy an active insurance policy,
you actually are safer.
And the data backs that up.
When we look at the industry average,
you know, coalition policy holder had 70% fewer claims
than the industry average for cyber policies all up.
And that's just goes to show you if we can assess your risk,
but then we can actively monitor and respond to that risk
before something bad occurs,
we can actually make companies safer
and incent them to close their security loopholes.
So that's just a little bit on the product.
We think about the go-to-market motion
when we talk a little bit about brokers.
I mean, yes, brokers essentially have been the stewards
of risk management and risk transfer.
So they're great partners for us.
Helping them reimagine their role
is also a key part of what we do at coalition.
Imagine your job always being, hey, I'm here
when something bad happens
and thinking about how to help a customer respond to risk.
And suddenly we're saying, hang on, with active insurance,
you can actually help prevent risk at your customers.
Like this is a reimagine of your role
from just reactive to proactive.
So that's been a fun journey to go on with our brokers
to help them rethink their role in helping not just respond
to risk, but actually identify spot
and prevent it before something bad occurs.
- So I'm curious, you know,
from marketing strategy perspective,
you have a lot of SMBs.
And like you said, companies up to a billion dollars.
How do you think about going to market
to those different types of organizations?
Do you have, is there a different approach?
What's that GTM look like?
- Yeah, I mean, our GTM strategy is a little bit different
because it's a channel strategy via brokers.
So, you know, we think about becoming trusted partners
for those brokers and doing what we can
to help them learn cyber.
And again, they helping them understand the cybersphere.
Sometimes it's making, helping take complex concepts
and making them digestible.
It's also helping them bring the idea
of cyber insurance to their policy holders
by helping them understand their risk.
So in addition to the coalition control,
which anyone can access as a business owner,
we also put a coalition risk assessment
in the hands of our brokers
that they can bring to potential businesses
to understand their risk.
A lot of our engagement happens with brokers
and the channels where they engage regularly.
We engage with them via email,
a lot of work happens via email.
It's a very in-person business.
Someone once referred to it as stakes and handshakes to me.
So a lot of deals happen while you're eating those stakes
and doing those handshakes.
So we spend time getting in front of brokers,
getting to know them.
We've got a great sales team,
both inside sales and BD team.
And they work to help those brokers get onboarded,
help them understand the process and the challenges,
help them explain the cyber insurance to his value
to potential small businesses and nurture them
through the experience.
Now, that being said,
we end up developing a relationship
with the policy holders as well,
not so much on the sales side,
but more to help them make sure they're closing
their security loopholes, they're hearing from us,
they understand that our role is to help
not just sell them an insurance policy,
but actually keep them protected.
And so, you know, you can come into coalition
either through coalition control of your policy holder,
or it may be through a broker introduction
when your policy gets activated, we reach out
and we begin to build a relationship that way.
So a little bit of a different model
and traditional SaaS as we go through
a primarily kind of channel focused business.
- Yeah, so I'm curious,
did you have experience with that,
with that type of channel first approach
before you came into this as coming into CMO,
how did you approach coming into the role?
- Yeah.
- It's been a really interesting journey for me
and one I've actually enjoyed.
I've spent the last 15 years primarily focused
on kind of B2B sales, so I spent some time at Salesforce
and then it's Splunk, both selling enterprise software
and Visa before that.
So it was a shift, it was actually a shift I was looking for.
You know, I'm an anthropologist by training
with some more with an MBA after the fact.
So I enjoy the challenge of,
hey, here's a new audience, here's a new market.
How do we understand what the brokers' needs are?
How do we spend time with them to do the first party research
so that we understand where they find challenges,
where they see opportunities, what they care about.
So a lot of my early time joining Coalition
was spending a little time getting to understand
the needs of the brokers, how that interaction happens
between them and the policy holders, where they see value
and what channels can be most effective to us.
So it's been a bit of fun.
And I always say, you know, when you think about marketing skills
that are super valuable, everyone lists,
like there's so many technical skills
and there's writing skills, but just the ability to listen,
to do the simple research can be incredibly valuable
and go a really, really long way.
- So tell me a little bit more about the brokers
and how you structure your organization
to go after the brokers and how that would be different
from like a traditional enterprise SaaS approach.
- Yeah.
So first of all, I think structuring our organization
to understand the broker model.
And I kind of joke sometimes that, you know,
our marketing model and our business model
is more like a rideshare company than it is B2B SaaS.
And I say that because a rideshare company
not only needs to sign up a driver,
but signing up a driver is not enough.
They have to continually work with them
and then send them to try.
So we're doing the same with the broker.
We need to activate them to be able to sell
our coalition's hybrid insurance.
And then we need to nurture that relationship as we go.
So it's a bit of a different design.
We have a team that focuses when you think about our sales team,
we have inside sales that brings brokers in
and gets them to that kind of first quote, first bind,
and then a business development team that carries them
from that first bind and do an ongoing relationship with us
that hopefully is a happy and healthy one.
So our marketing team is also designed
to kind of support both pieces.
We've got an amazing growth team
that's really has been focused on acquisition
and doing a ton of interesting experiments
to get to the right mix of kind of outbounding,
using outbound channels to drive interest.
A lot of that early on was done with email
and now we're getting a more kind of robust
and complete marketing mix of developing
an inbound channel, outbound channel.
Inside of my marketing team, I also have a brand team
that focuses on high level message and story.
We've kind of driven some meaningful changes.
So my call it category creation,
I think it's all about getting really good
at your positioning and then scaling that out
to understand how to communicate that differentiation.
We've got a product marketing team.
I'm a reformed product marketer.
I think they drive a lot of a strategy.
So they, for better or worse, have to spend a lot of time
with me, but they're really skilled and wonderful.
And then as our online presence becomes a bigger part
of what we do and scales up, we have a digital
and demand team as well.
So we're running, we're doing a lot more
on the digital side to drive inbound interest,
specifically for brokers, but also for potential
small businesses and policy holders as well.
So I think all those pieces kind of work together
and depending on the time and the quarter
and where we are managing our funnel,
we're turning on and off resources
across those different groups.
- Let's get to our next segment, the playbook,
where you open up the playbook and talk about the tactics
that help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play it, it just play it.
- So this is interesting.
So it is channel sales, but what are your three tactics
that are your uncuttable budget items
to try to get those brokers fired up
about doing business with coalition?
- So first I'll say, we're in an interesting time
and as we watch the economy go through shifts and changes
and business approaches go through shifts and changes,
I almost say like it's important for me,
I say I wouldn't put anything off the table from being cut.
Anything can be cut as buyer preferences change.
When I think about our most effective tactics right now,
we've really focused in on a few things.
One, we do a ton, again, without bounding to our brokers,
we're perhaps boiled and that many brokers are registered
in their states and they share a lot of information publicly
because they are sales people.
And so taking advantage of data that's already out there
is an incredible resource for us to get to know
where those brokers are and what they need.
We've done a lot, I mentioned some of the work we've done
on the brand and the category creation side.
I think that's a major investment for us in an industry
where a lot of insurance products are commoditized
and the differentiation isn't clear.
Helping us tell the story of our differentiation
through a number of different channels,
a number of them are kind of paid social,
also our organic social channels as well.
Primarily LinkedIn has been incredible.
If you know who your audience is,
not just by demographic, but actually who they are
and you have their email information,
you can be incredibly targeted.
So that's been critical for us as well.
And then I mentioned just getting out
and spending time with brokers
because there's so much involved
in kind of long-term relationships with those brokers.
We drive a number of different retention activities.
Some of those are events driven when we can
and as we figure out the path forward out of lockdown,
I think spending time strengthening those relationships
in person remains kind of critical.
But we also do simple things, webinars and others
that allow us to engage with those brokers
on a regular basis and keep up relationships.
So there is nothing sacred that we wouldn't cut
if we felt that broker preferences change
and finding a way to stay on top of what's working
and what's not working, it's critical for us.
- Yeah, I'm curious about from a content piece
and what they're engaging with
because obviously cybersecurity is so critical to you all.
How concerned are they with running their orgs
versus cybersecurity versus, you know,
like how do you break down the type of content
and things that you're creating webinars
and events and things like that?
- Yeah, so it's interesting to do a split across
kind of three categories.
One is kind of thought leadership
or driving some understanding of category differentiation
as we try to change people's minds
or guide them down a new path.
So we have that kind of umbrella work that we do
around active insurance and reimagining your role
as a broker, so we're investing at a high level.
Then there's activities that are all about
how understanding the opportunity
and how to do your job better.
So we call it kind of becoming a cyber savvy broker.
And part of that is what's the monetary value
of being a cyber savvy broker,
getting smart about helping your customers
see the value in cyber.
And I think, you know, the cyber savvy broker work
that we're doing has been super valuable
as we think through the broker experience
and the broker journey of getting smart
on technical subjects where you may not have
a lot of technical background and expertise.
So spending time helping them get more educated
has been kind of a key pillar for us.
And we always say like the best marketing provides value
before you ask for value.
So the idea is we want to help brokers get smart
about cyber or if they use that to position
and sell coalition wonderful, if they use it
to do something else and sell another competitor,
that's the cost of doing business.
And we think that's great too.
We bet that rising title I'll float everyone's
about including our own.
So we're driving those types of activities as well.
Other types of work and campaigns
that are really important for us are just,
you know, as we get lower down the funnel,
just explaining the product, the how to, how to use our product.
What's interesting about coalition is,
you know, we have a broker experience in broker dashboards
where you can get access to not only all the quotes
and potential claims that you might be processing,
but also things like a risk assessment
for every potential customer.
So think of it as a selling aid.
If you can go to a customer and say to them,
kind of here's your personalized risk assessment
rather than we think you have a cyber risk,
that can be a really effective tool.
So helping brokers understand that,
get into the experience, use that as part
of their selling process has been really valuable for us as well.
- I love the cyber savvy.
It's great.
I think that that's a really cool positioning.
I'm curious how much of your work is just trying
to create either bingeable or little tidbits or things like that,
like short form versus like medium form
or more of those like deep dive type things.
'Cause I'd imagine that a broker is sitting there saying,
hey, with 10% of my, you know, bandwidth,
I need to be learning about stuff.
And of that 10%, I don't know, 0.5%
is gonna be getting cyber savvy, for example.
Or maybe they don't even know that.
And then this is their first foray into it.
So how do you think about creating that cyber savvy
sort of content?
- Yeah.
Well, as a challenge for every marketer,
how you balance your audience and their level of,
not just knowledge about your product,
but just their level of complexity and knowledge
about your industry and your offering
is something we always think about.
And that's true in the broker space
as it is kind of in cybersecurity as a whole,
where you have just different knowledge levels.
So we're actually kind of operating at two levels.
One is kind of welcoming new brokers in,
perhaps folks who know that cyber insurance exists,
but are perhaps less comfortable selling
and making that digestible to them is something,
you know, definitely something we think about.
And, you know, we'll probably start with blog posts
and think in terms of how do we codify this material
as something written, see if there's interest.
And there's so much you can do taking that written content
at blog posts and spinning it off into a couple
of little short videos that are easily digestible,
perhaps some interviews.
If we create a whole set of blog posts that we like
that can live together as a series,
compiling those into a larger downloadable asset,
which can actually drive leads for us.
And then there are actually, we do have a number of brokers
who are really smart on cyber,
wholesome brokers who spend all their time on that.
So we also have to kind of continue to show
our cyber chops and cyber differentiation.
What's also amazing about coalition is like,
almost half of our company has a technical background
and is working on either as a software developer,
security experts, security engineer,
instant response team, et cetera.
So we also want to show off our deep expertise and knowledge.
So we're generating some of that short snackable content
for people who are perhaps new.
We also have some of the more advanced people
where we're pushing out, you know,
what you need to know about the log4j vulnerability
so we can act as an expert and resource for them as well.
So we have to work on two different paths.
I think a lot of marketers kind of grapple with,
hey, I've got either different audiences
or audiences at different levels of complexity.
And oftentimes the answer is not,
have to pick one or the other.
It's do a little bit of both.
- Yeah, I think one of the things you said it is really
fascinating to me about this idea of comfort level,
that when you're using channel sales,
they have to be really comfortable to be able to talk about it.
'Cause otherwise they're never gonna sell, right?
It's like, no matter if everybody's beating down their door
to want cybersecurity insurance, sure,
they're gonna be able to get smart on it.
But that the savvy person who says,
hey, I just saw this ad for this webinar
that's like everything you need to know about cyber insurance
or everything a broker needs to know,
like one-on-one level, whatever it is,
like, okay, you can get them to the level of comfort
where they say, okay, yeah, I can do this.
Like, this is something I could make a concerted effort for.
And then to be able to share that content
with their customers, right?
I mean, that's the other piece is like
getting them smart enough to know about it is one thing,
but then they wanna be able to share that
with all the people that they know,
say, hey, we're the place to go for that.
And I think that the way that you set it of comfort level
is a lot more important, you know, here than in enterprise sales
where, yeah, I could, you know, the stakeholder
or the champion, the internal champion.
Yeah, I need to get them comfortable
to be able to talk about it internally.
But at the end of the day, like,
a bunch of people are gonna see our pitch deck,
a bunch of people are gonna do this.
They don't need to necessarily be fluent in the solution.
Whereas for you, for the channels,
they have to be pretty darn fluent.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, you know, the savvy product marketers
or others who may be listening might say,
hey, a lot of his work sounds like
just more intense sales enablement.
And so if you wonder, you know, does product marketing
actually help you as you go out in your career
and other jobs across marketing,
whether it's marketing leadership or elsewhere?
Like I use a lot of tools, I bring a lot of tools
out of my sales enablement playbook
because essentially the channel reps are, you know,
there are salespeople only, it's more complicated
because they're not inside and they could choose tomorrow
to sell someone else's product instead of our product.
So we use a ton of great tools from sales enablement
and, you know, things I've learned over my career
and marketing to help make sure they're empowered
that they have the resources that they need
to really be impactful on our behalf
and hopefully see the value in what they're selling
and what we've created.
I'm curious, how do you view your website?
You have two, so you have Colishnay.com,
and then you also have control.coallishnay.com.
How do you view those two websites?
How do you view websites in general?
- Yeah, so when I joined the company, I would say,
the website was not a meaningful contributor
of leads for us and pipeline and for us, of course,
we think of mostly about those leads as broker leads,
getting them signed up and activated.
So we did a nice retooling of our web experience,
really designed around those brokers
to help tell the story for them,
to help highlight our differentiation.
And again, when we talk about active insurance
as a differentiated product offering,
we try to break that down for brokers,
both from the technology under the hood
that you might never see,
but that just plays out in the risk alerts.
The thing you might only see as an email,
but the complex work that happens
underneath a security alert email
is pretty astounding to do,
to not just run a scan of our policy holders
or potential customers,
but also to output,
like to analyze the data from that scan
and cross-reference it to potential vulnerabilities,
as well as with data that we have as proprietary claims data,
instant response data that created risk levels.
So telling that story has been really important to us.
We've really been focused on my team jokes
and Steve Ballmer style.
If you see any of his old keynote where he got up
and talked about developers and screamed on stage,
I've done the same thing around brokers
who really focus this on our audience in the near term.
Get the broker journey right,
figure out how to optimize for broker on-boarding
and broker activation after education.
So the journey goes quickly from education
about active insurance to potentially some resources
we have on offer,
whether it's on the e-book on active insurance,
what it means or our cyber claims report,
and then give them the opportunity to get activated
or get appointed, which is really key for us.
Control is different.
What's interesting, complex, some days infuriating,
but mostly fun, is that we're also offering a free product
and tool to small businesses, right?
And you don't have to necessarily access
that tool via brokers.
So anyone can get their free cyber risk assessment.
Controls a related domain that you can access
from our homepage or go direct to control.collisioning.com.
And so essentially we're slowly creating bifurcated
experiences for the broker and for small businesses
or potential policy holders.
And I think we're still in early days.
We fully optimize for the broker now.
I think we're getting better and more measured
about that journey.
But we're also kind of slowly stepping
into the policy holder space,
or at least the small business space.
Not because we're trying to sell the insurance
direct to the policy holder,
but we're just trying to provide them the tools
to keep their business safe
and understand the value of the security capabilities
we offer.
So it's a bit of a split audience.
I think for a marketer,
that's actually one of the more difficult challenges
you'll face is how do we create an ecosystem around this
where you need a healthy ecosystem of demand
from the broker and from the policy holder.
And that's something that we work on regularly
and debate within our organization.
- Let's switch gears
to our next segment.
- The dust up.
- This is where we talk about healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your sales team,
your competitors or anyone else.
Don't have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
- Oh man, well,
I would say a healthy company in general
is a marketplace for ideas.
And I think it needs to be a place for debate
and a place where you can kind of approach them
constructively and align on goals.
So I'll say like, I encourage debate
and conversation within my own team.
And like we get into healthy conversations,
I think all the time,
especially when there's so much unknowns either
you're doing something that's never been done before
or you're taking a new approach to a market
that might be channel sales,
whatever it may be,
or you're debating, I'll tell you,
things like category and positioning
are sometimes the hardest challenges
for marketing and marketing leaders to navigate.
Because essentially it becomes a conversation of opinions
without a lot of fact.
And so I absolutely,
I've been in those conversations
that in every job I've ever had,
there's a combination of like,
how to pull the right data
to get some kind of insights,
not just from your company,
but also your customers or prospective customers.
They won't tell you when you're right,
but they'll tell you when you're way off and you're wrong.
Then there's a little bit of,
building internal support.
And oftentimes that support comes from other leaders
across the organization.
And then ultimately figuring out who has to either decide
and push us to decision or disagree and commit.
And I would say,
in every big marketing, positioning,
and category conversation,
because it's so subjective,
there's always someone who has to be the disagreeing committer.
I've been that person before who said,
I don't know if this is the idea,
but if this is the way we're marching, let's go.
So you have to create that space to have the debate,
but you also have to be able to drive to decision.
I'm very lucky in coalition,
you know, as with the launch of active insurance,
which could have been a bit controversial.
Getting to a good place and a good understanding
with our executive team,
the goals we were trying to accomplish,
the ways in which we were trying to do it,
setting the stage that we will not be fully factually accurate,
and exact technically to every specification,
which is sometimes a trap that marketers fall in
when they're trying to create high level positioning,
is nailing everything to a technically specific detail.
You need to set the stage with your high level language
and then dive into the supporting technical explanation
and documentation.
So we were able to get kind of those foundational elements
decided early on,
and ultimately, the decision like that comes either the CMO
or the CEO, hopefully in partnership,
and that's something that we drove successfully at coalition.
But also in previous jobs, hasn't always been so easy.
Disagree and commit models, sometimes a good one
to help a team navigate a sticky decision.
Positioning always, always brutal, always, always,
it's where you gotta have the data,
everybody's talking about it,
dated for everything, but you really gotta have like,
well, this is what our customers physically say,
this is what people are searching for on the internet.
This is what, you know, like whatever.
And this is where we believe the future is headed
sort of a thing rather than just the like,
well, I like this word better, you know,
or this color better or whatever.
- I like to say that marketing and HR
often have the hardest jobs because their job is to work
with people and deal with people and do things for people.
And we are all people, so we all have opinions
on how those things should work
and how they should resonate with us.
You're right that you should have data,
data can get you, like I said, really helpful insights
and tell you if you're way off base,
but sometimes the magic is figuring out the combination
of what your customer says they want,
what's aligned to their value,
how much you have to shift their perception
and change their mindset of what your product can be
and can do and then find the sweet spot
with a little bit of hopefully someone who has
some messaging and positioning experience
as well as some writing experience.
So I will say data purely as your guide,
data will get you perhaps 60% of the way they are,
but there are a number of additional steps
that you need to take into consideration as well.
- Let's get into our quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers,
just like how quickly you can talk to someone
on qualified.com, we love qualified.
They are just amazing partner for the show
and they have been since the very beginning
qualified prospects are on your website right now
and you can talk to them quickly with qualified.
Quick and easy, just like these questions,
go to qualified.com to learn more,
Dylan, are you ready?
- Let's do it.
- Number one, what is a hidden talent or skill
that's not on your resume?
- I grew up in Colorado,
so spending out time outdoors was kind of de-rigger,
so spending time was a big snowboarder for a very,
very long time and it tried to keep it up.
COVID made it a little harder,
but spend a lot of time on the hill when I can.
- Do you have a favorite book, podcast, TV show
that you've been recently checking out?
- I mean, I've really loved watching all the recent,
we crashed and the Theranos and Superpumps
just seeing the dark side of what can happen
when we pump up too many folks with perhaps too much VC money.
I've really enjoyed those and I think they are both
and enjoyable to watch and perhaps a cautionary tale
for folks as they navigate the business reality right now.
- Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby
that sort of maybe kind of indirectly
makes you a better marketer?
- Beyond the basics of kind of continually reading
and writing all the time, I'll say travel's always wonderful.
I mentioned, I think at the top of the show,
I studied anthropology before I ended up
in the marketing world and studied journalism,
so the ability to travel and make connections
and kind of open yourself up to new ideas around the world.
It's super critical to be able to make those connections
with people and at the end of the day,
that's what marketers are tasked with doing
is building connections.
So it's always good to get out of your home,
especially now that we all work and live and sleep
and eat in the same four walls.
- Do you have a favorite marketing campaign
that you've run recently or over the years?
- Well, I'm biased in that I've been thinking on
and coalition terms and active insurance terms,
which I've been pretty proud of the transformation
we've been trying to drive.
We held a huge launch event at the beginning of March
and it was fun, we got to do everything from
actually have some people in person
at an insurance industry event in New York City.
But we also got to engage some celebrity folks.
So we had the Eli Manning come to our live event
in New York City.
We did a live webcast, active webcast with Brendan Hunt
known as Coach Beard from Ted Lasso.
So sorry you won't find that out on the web
because it was a one time use,
but the ability to tell that active story
was a really fun one for us to lean into.
And I think there's a lot more still we can do with it
to kind of change perceptions in a legacy industry.
- If you weren't in marketing, what do you think you'd be doing?
- If I wasn't in marketing, well, I mentioned
I'd run some political campaigns in the past.
And while, I think it's less about working
on the politics side, but more perhaps in public service.
I do think about like, you know, as I think about my career
in multiple chapters and my journey
and there was a public service journey,
the marketing and private sector journey has been quite fun.
I'd love to find myself back in public service in the future.
I think a lot of our doesn't have to be at the national level.
I know it can be polarizing at the national level,
but in our local communities and at local pounds,
there's a lot of impact that I think people can have.
So I'd probably find myself back in the public sector,
or perhaps doing some writing or journalism
for a local community as well,
which is perhaps another underserved part
of our national conversation and our world right now.
It's just great local journalism as everything's been consolidated
and moved to the national sphere.
So hopefully that's not too polarizing for folks,
but that's where I'd see myself spending my time.
In that next chapter.
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, I would say I've mentioned spending some time
getting to know your customers and understanding them
and their journey.
It's very easy to get caught up in the data of why things are working
and the data is critical, right?
You need to be informed by why things are working,
but sometimes it's not clear the short term or long term trade-offs
you are making.
You may have created a really successful campaign that's driven
a lot of short term interest,
but what is that doing to your long term brand perception,
relationships with customers, et cetera,
depending on the tactics you've used?
So spending time getting to know customers
or your prospective customers,
meeting with them, finding a way to build a bit of a relationship.
Those relationships always pay off,
and I'll say that's probably something that's been instilled in me
from the sales first days is just spending time with customers
and prospects of understanding who they are,
what their needs are that will never be due astray.
So I would highly encourage you to get out,
spend some time with the folks who are important to you.
And that will, at the very least,
just inform the messaging, the positioning, and the tactics
you decide to use as a marketer going forward.
- Dylan, that's it.
That's all we got for today.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, I'm super thankful for being a part of the podcast
with you and getting a chance to reconnect again.
And we already mentioned all the fun stuff you can do
with Coalition.
So if you are a small business and you're trying to figure out
help, go to control.coallitioning.com
and you can hop on there and get a risk assessment.
And talk to your broker if you think you need a little bit
of coverage.
We're happy to help with that too.
So I'm glad we got a chance to talk.
- Yeah, thanks so much Dylan.
We really appreciate it and take care.
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