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Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Said Differently.
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I'm your host, Jennifer Sephora.
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This show is sponsored by Troop, and we are here to give you a discussion around all things B2B messaging, positioning in the marketplace, and the leadership strategies related to that.
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And today's topic is really about the credibility of the CMO and how messaging and storytelling plays a role in that, and why the CMOs really need to take a big ownership lead in thinking through new models in attribution and how messaging needs to be measured so that they can rebuild trust within the organization.
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I've got a great guest here today, Janessa Lance.
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She is a fantastic, seasoned marketing leader who is uh out doing her own consulting practice and advisory work now.
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Janessa, thank you.
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Can you introduce yourself more to the folks listening?
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Yeah, Jennifer, thanks so much for having me today.
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I might get a little bit ranty about our topic today.
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I have very strong feelings.
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Yeah, you and I had a lively pre-interview on this.
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I'm excited.
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Lots to cover here.
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So most recently, my my most recent in-house role was with DBT Labs in the data management space.
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I did about five years there, uh taking the company from sub 1 million in revenue to close to the 100 million uh recurring revenue mark, just built the whole marketing function and then left there at the end of 2023 and have been doing fractional consulting work since then.
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Um, prior to DBT Labs, my roles have always been in content and communications.
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So did a stint in comms at HubSpot, um, held content roles at startups before that.
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So care so much about the message and the story of marketing has kind of always been the animating force in my career.
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Um and then having the experience of sitting in that seat and owning the pipeline number and having all the attribution and quantitative measurement conversations around that as well.
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Um, and then kind of arriving at this place in my career where I'm now thinking about um the intersection of those two things.
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However, yeah, no, I love it.
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I I uh what you and I I think really connected on as we got introduced a few months ago is how the role of the CMO is, I would say, under fire.
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I might be overstating that a bit, maybe I'm not.
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Um, but you know, there's a real shift here going on, and AI is certainly a factor, but it the shift I would say has even predated that, right?
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For the past few years, the role of the CMO in B2B, especially B2B tech, has um really been under a microscope.
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Uh, it's no surprise that, you know, to most people listening that they'll hear statistics around CMOs having some of the shortest tenures in a C-suite.
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I was just looking up that Forrester late last year published a report saying that the presence of CMOs in B2B has actually dropped in terms of reporting structures directly to the CEO.
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It's actually 6% fewer heads of marketing are reporting directly to the CEO than there was even just the prior year.
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And you know, we're seeing lots of change around.
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I'm hearing, I'm eager to hear what you're hearing and seeing.
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I'm hearing, I'm seeing CMO roles being broken up, split up, um, where you have product teams reporting to heads of product, you have growth teams reporting to the CRO or a chief commercial officer.
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Um, I hear a lot of buzz about, oh, I'm just gonna create an AI agent to run my marketing too in the most extreme cases.
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But what are you what are you seeing and hearing about the CMO role?
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Yeah, it's a it's a super hot topic right now, definitely on LinkedIn.
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Like I know uh Kip Bodner and Karen Flanagan from HubSpot just did an episode about this on their podcast against the grain.
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And uh this is always coming up in CMO Slack groups that I'm in.
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I think Ramp is probably one of the higher profile companies right now who's really been talking about their decision not to hire a CMO.
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Um Intercom is another big one, right?
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I think they they had a CMO in seat and then made a very intentional decision to move away from that model.
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Um, so it's everybody's kind of talking about it, you know, and this is coming off years of short tenures in in marketing.
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Um one of the places where I encounter this a lot is I work with a lot of early stage founders around their Series A, you know, pre-seed Series A, um, Series B, and they're they're in the process of hiring their first um like CMO or first marketer in the team.
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There's a ton of anxiety about hiring for this role.
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Um some of them have are trying it for their third time.
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Some sometimes founders have just heard it from VCs like, oh, this is going to be a tough role for you to hire for.
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So this is like a known thing that founders are thinking about and talking about of just like, hey, this role has not, it is not super successful right now.
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And I do not personally believe it is because marketers are fundamentally bad at their job, right?
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There's something else going on here.
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Um, and hoping we'll we'll dig into that today.
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Yeah, we definitely are.
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I think, you know, one of the things that you and I were talking a lot about is that there are these sort of long-standing fundamental ways that are well deeply entrenched in the way marketing has been measured in terms of its contribution to the business, right?
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So measurement often drives behavior.
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And so as uh executive running a department, you're on the hook, you're responsible for certain metrics that you need to deliver to the business and outputs to deliver to the business outcomes, I should say.
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Um, so you know, those will dictate where people focus their time and attention and energy.
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And obviously, marketing plays a role in driving pipeline and revenue.
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Um, and we've struggled, I think, for quite a long time to figure out how to measure that um, you know, in a in a really meaningful way that the board cares about, that the CEO cares about.
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I know you have some strong opinions about this, and we're gonna dig into that a bit more.
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So why don't we just go for it?
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Yeah.
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Jennifer, I think like what you said there is like what the board and the CEO cares about.
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Um so like sales sales has this saying, right, you get you get delegated to who you sound like, right?
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So if you show up and you talk about technical features, they're gonna hand you off to maybe an engineering manager or developer, right?
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If you show up and you're talking about business outcomes and impact and and value, you might get a CTO level conversation.
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And so, like my my kind of fundamental thesis is that this obsession with MQLs has led astray an entire generation of B2B marketers.
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Like, I think it has just created so many bad behaviors.
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It has eroded trust.
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It has created this idea that marketing is like a lead gumball machine instead of a strategic partner to the business.
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So, like in my time at DBT Labs, we tracked MQLs, we tracked leads, we tracked all this stuff.
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Yep.
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We didn't talk, I never talked to the board about it, right?
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And so when you show up and you're talking about MQLs to the board, you're saying, I'm a lead gumball machine.
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So at the board level, you have to be talking about pipeline and opportunity and answering the foundational question for the business where are we getting the highest value deals that are closing the fastest, and how do we go and find more of them?
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Yeah.
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And that often has much more to do with the state of the business, right?
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At DBT Labs, it was like it was always about um technology adoption.
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So we're adopting a cloud data warehouse.
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Wow, we really wanted to get DBT into those conversations, right?
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That has nothing to do with our channels or marketing has everything to do about how do we find businesses in that state.
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That's right, right?
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So that's what I mean by like elevating the conversation to how do we go out and find more of our best fit customers?
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And the MQL is just not it.
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And if you show up and you're having an MQL conversation, you're gonna get pushed over to report to the CRO because you're not at the CMO level.
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And where I have a lot of empathy for marketers is that we have been told that the MQL conversation and the attribution conversation is how we earn a spot at the table.
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And I just think that everything that we're seeing today is like, it's not.
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If we're having, if we're getting mired in detailed technical conversations about attribution MQLs, wow, we've completely lost the plot about how to grow the business.
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I could not agree more, Janessa.
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I was um customer number 49 of Marketo um way back when uh in when I was working um at Golden Gate Software.
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And I remember they had something called like the the definitive guide to lead scoring.
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And it was groundbreaking.
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You can picture all of the little pipes, the recycling, the sort of like that is that is like burned in my memory.
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It is because marketing, it was so groundbreaking at the time that we were like, wow, we finally have a way that we can put a number, like an actual data metric on what marketing is producing.
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But I think in practice, as I reflect on it over these many years, what were we really doing?
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We were trying to think of attribution.
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Um, you know, so we had MQLs, but then we also struggled with first touch, last touch attribution, right?
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Which channel did they come in through?
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Or which was the channel that most recently influenced them, right?
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Like, yeah, we might have met them at a trade show nine months ago, but it wasn't until this most recent webinar that we actually converted them.
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Okay, that's all really interesting.
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But what did we say to them?
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What did they respond to?
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We have been missing that piece of it, which is really the messaging and the story.
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And we've been hung up on these, and I'm not saying they're bad things to measure.
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Yes, you do need to care about how your channels are performing so you know how to allocate your budget, but we have been missing this really big piece, which is what persuaded them, right?
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How did we define, you know, like what's your reaction to that?
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Well, it's it's what persuaded them, but but I think that that I think marketers sometimes have kind of a delusion about how much we can move people.
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Like at DBT, the thing that we felt so acutely there is that we were riding a wave that was bigger than us, which was the adoption of the cloud data warehouse.
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And so, yeah, our our marketing worked, and there were we were good at marketing, and there were certainly like we wanted to get into these conversations where companies were adopting the cloud data warehouse, but also recognize there's something bigger behind you.
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And honestly, that's a beautiful place to be, right?
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It is, and it creates this inevitable success for your business, which is wonderful.
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So, are we persuading customers, or is it more like what is that?
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Um, I almost think about it as like entry points.
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Like we're on this highway, there's all this motion, but then we have to like create these on-ramps for our customers to meet them where they are.
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They're not on our highway.
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They might, and and so what that arm on ramp looks like is like, what is their current technology stack?
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Um, have they just got a new leader in seat?
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Um, what other tools do they integrate with?
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Um, what's going on in the business environment more broadly for their industry that could create it, be creating a motivation for change?
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And then are we ready to act on those things, right?
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And so again, that all comes back to messaging, like in a very literal sense, these entry points that I'm talking about often end up being like the drop down on your top-level nav called like solutions, right?
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That it but that is saying, hey, your context is this, and and and we can meet you there.
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It's totally, I mean, some of that is absolutely persuasion, but the way I think about it is more just like, what is their context?
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And how do we clear, like, we're not gonna make you do the work to figure out if we can help you or not.
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We're gonna meet you right there and we're gonna get you onto our highway.
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That's a really good point.
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And I think there's so much more data now available to us that can help us enrich, you know, what we know about somebody.
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There's there's signals we can pick up in terms of their own behavior, although that's getting a little bit harder and harder as um, you know, to track people's behavior.
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But the discovery piece is so critical, right?
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You want to make sure that you're tailoring that communication, that that dialogue, that message to their context, right?
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And you brought up a good point.
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So it's not enough to know that, hey, I like I was just at the CMO summit in San Francisco last week, and I'm like, it's not enough to know that they were there, right?
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Like, yeah, that's a channel, that's an event, but just because they were there doesn't tell me enough about them that I need to know.
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I need to know all these other things in order to message to them in the most effective way and to know which messages are actually resonating with them.
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Which what are they reacting to and what are they not reacting to?
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That's always the question, right?
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And like what just sounds so bonkers to me is when we say things, it's like, you know, they converted on Google Ads, so we need to spend more on Google Ads.
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And you're like, well, what do we put in front of them?
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That's right.
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Right?
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What is the message they converted on?
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And so if somebody is engaging with um, the closest we were able to get to this at at DBT Labs, and I think this is true for most companies, it's really like at the campaign level, which often has a message baked in.
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But really, what is ideal is you would be able, you would want to be able to see message performance across top of the funnel channels all the way through to how your salesperson is talking about it, right?
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And that's where you start to say, like, oh, what are the levers that we have to pull to find more of these accounts to accelerate these deals on pipeline and to close them at the highest dollar value possible?
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Those are not, it doesn't matter if somebody finds you on email or Google Ad.
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It doesn't matter what their last touch was.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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It's like, what is their context?
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Um, what is the message that that they're responding to?
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That's how we get more of them.
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Your point about following it through the sales journey is also really critical, Janessa.
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And it brings back to like what you said sort of at the beginning of the conversation, which is the trust piece and why MQLs fall down, because that handoff to sales, it's sort of like, you know, marketing has kind of stopped.
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I don't want to generalize too much.
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I hate to do that, but you know, if marketing stops studying what happens to a prospect at that handoff point, then they're missing the larger value of that buyer's journey, right?
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So they have to continue to pay attention to what is happening at all those sales touch points, too.
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That can be hard to do.
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We're gonna talk about that a little bit more in terms of a proposal to a better way.
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But the sales conversations, I think marketing has felt a little bit left out of that.
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We have mechanisms to improve that now, like dumping transcripts into an LLM and asking it to take away some highlights.
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But what's your take about like, you know, what are the lessons we can learn there from the past about how we can do better on that front?
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How marketing can get much more connected to the business in terms of the sales trust?
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Well, I I think that there, I think that there are maybe two important things here.
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And one is like speaking the same language as sales, which people always say, and it's like kind of, yeah, yeah, we all shake our heads.
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And to me, this comes down to like very fundamentally marketing thinks about people, which is leads and email addresses, and sales thinks about accounts, right?
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So we actually have these like um foundational ways, like our our our unit for describing our work is different.
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Yeah.
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Which is why the MQL is so bad.
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Because it says we're not gonna get out of our world to talk about the way you see the world.
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We're always gonna stay in the marketing world and we're gonna pitch these units over to you that you don't actually care about because everything in your world is about the account.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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So at a very fundamental level, these teams have to have a shared unit for talking about the world.
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Again, leads matter, MQLs matter, email addresses matter.
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You cannot be a CMO and not care about email addresses, right?
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Right.
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But that's probably not the thing that you talk to the CRO about, an SDR, go for it, right?
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They can meet you there.
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But an account executive, an RVP, a CRO, not so much, right?
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So, like that is like a very critical thing to saying we speak the same language.
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That is the language of pipeline and revenue, right?
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Yeah.
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In addition to that, when when it comes more to like understanding their world, um, the the work that that I have been doing more recently, because it's possible now with AI, is being is setting up systems that can more proactively inform marketing about what is going on in the customer's world, in the sales world.
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And so I increasingly see marketing's job as being managing the intelligence we have about the customer and the market, right?
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So much AI has commoditized so much.
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But what we have is we have the conversations we're having with customers, we have our unique knowledge of the market.
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And so, practically like one of the very practical ways that that this happens is like take your sales transcripts, parse them against like MedPick or whatever your preferred structure is, and then start start to track things from there.
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And it's very, it's very easy to then say, um, you know, AI, you know, all of the content we've ever produced.
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Where are the gaps?
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What's coming up all the time on our sales calls?
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Um, so this is some that I use for clients is starting to be increasingly proactive, where it's like, hey, three people have raised pricing issues because they're confused about your pricing page.
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You want to change that.
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Hey, this objection has come up four times and we don't address it anywhere on the site or on the blog posts.
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Here's a content asset we could make about this.
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And this is not like advanced AI use cases.
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Right, right.
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This is just a simple way that a lot, but but what's so powerful about it is that it was very difficult to do these things historically before.
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And so marketing actually has the opportunity to show up proactively to sales, not just the grumpy loud salesperson who just got had a bad call, right?
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Not but actually proactively show up with data, with customer quotes, with real insights to say, how do we win more deals, a higher contract value, and faster?
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Yes.
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And again, not an MQL conversation.
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It's a message conversation.
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Yeah.
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It starts to feel a little closer to B2C and the way they can measure, but you know, not quite.
00:20:10.240 --> 00:20:21.440
I don't think B2B is ever going to be truly like B2C, but there are some things about B2C that you can get those data patterns identified, right?
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:37.920
That you can make decisions off of larger data pattern sets rather than these one-off cases, like you said, the grumpy salesperson who just had a bad call or a happy salesperson who just had a great call because they tested the message.
00:20:38.240 --> 00:20:39.759
Change our homepage messaging.
00:20:40.240 --> 00:20:40.400
Right.
00:20:40.640 --> 00:20:41.440
This resonated.
00:20:41.519 --> 00:20:43.519
We got to change the pipeline right now.
00:20:43.839 --> 00:20:44.400
Right.
00:20:44.640 --> 00:20:45.039
All right.
00:20:45.200 --> 00:20:54.559
So, Janessa, where do you see you tease that AI is allowing us to do some of these things, even in simplistic use cases of AI.
00:20:54.720 --> 00:21:06.000
You've seen what Troop can do, and Troop is actually taking it to another level, which is connecting all of that directly to your CRM system so that it's identifying patterned outcomes, right?
00:21:06.160 --> 00:21:20.000
Not just pattern message usage, but what happens when messages are being used and being able to cut that it through different ways of looking at it, like tell me how that looks when I'm acquiring new business or mid-market versus enterprise business.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:27.039
But like going back to because I don't want to make this a troop sales pitch, that's not what we're here to do.
00:21:27.279 --> 00:21:49.279
But if marketers don't make this shift, like one of the things I'm struggling with and seeing is that marketers know that something needs to change, but they're not there's this sort of habit of doing this, and how do you break these habits and start to make this leap?
00:21:49.359 --> 00:21:51.119
Like, what does that look like for you?
00:21:51.279 --> 00:21:54.799
How would a CMO make this transition?
00:21:55.119 --> 00:21:56.640
Uh, what would you recommend?
00:21:58.000 --> 00:21:59.759
I I I I I'm very sensitive.
00:22:00.400 --> 00:22:03.119
To the fact that I'm not speaking from experience.
00:22:03.359 --> 00:22:04.799
Like I have not done this.
00:22:04.960 --> 00:22:06.640
I have made the transition.
00:22:06.799 --> 00:22:07.039
Yeah.
00:22:07.279 --> 00:22:07.519
Yes.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:09.599
I have experienced the marketing leadership role.
00:22:09.680 --> 00:22:14.799
I have done, I did some things very right in my time, and I got some things very wrong.
00:22:14.960 --> 00:22:17.599
And I, you know, learned my lessons.
00:22:17.759 --> 00:22:22.400
And I am now doing that work with much earlier stage companies, right?
00:22:22.559 --> 00:22:27.039
So the challenge is very different when you're working with change management.
00:22:27.200 --> 00:22:27.519
Yes.
00:22:27.680 --> 00:22:43.680
But I would say very simply, I think what anybody can do today is uh elevate your conversation from an MQL conversation to a conversation about how do we win deals faster and at a higher dollar value?
00:22:43.839 --> 00:22:44.240
Yeah.
00:22:44.480 --> 00:22:46.720
And I actually got some pushback on this.
00:22:46.880 --> 00:22:53.839
This was early on when I when I started working more closely with the board at DBT, some pushback around like, where are all of our campaign numbers?
00:22:53.920 --> 00:22:55.359
Where are all of our MQL numbers?
00:22:55.519 --> 00:22:57.920
And like, I don't want to position myself in that way.
00:22:58.000 --> 00:22:58.079
Right.
00:22:58.319 --> 00:22:58.480
Right.
00:22:58.559 --> 00:23:01.359
Because I think it's a bad spot for a CMO to be.
00:23:01.519 --> 00:23:01.839
Right.
00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:15.440
So what how how do you elevate that conversation to be talking about business priorities instead of um metrics that are great to talk to your RevOps person about and your marketing ops person and your SDR leader, right?
00:23:15.599 --> 00:23:17.119
Just not board level or CEO.
00:23:17.200 --> 00:23:18.079
So that's one thing.
00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:26.160
I think the other thing is that marketing has the opportunity today to shift into actually being the voice of the customer and the voice of the market.
00:23:26.319 --> 00:23:26.640
Yes.
00:23:26.799 --> 00:23:39.440
And so what marketing has been very obsessed with since like the AI fervor, you know, of the last few years is how do we get more, how do we produce more?
00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:39.839
Right.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:43.839
All of the early use cases are like, how do we create more blog posts?
00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:44.240
Right.
00:23:44.400 --> 00:23:46.079
How do we send more emails?
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:48.640
How do we talk about a gumball machine?
00:23:48.720 --> 00:23:48.799
Yeah.
00:23:49.200 --> 00:23:50.160
Talk about a gumball machine.
00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:50.319
Yeah.
00:23:50.480 --> 00:23:52.240
So you're like, it hasn't really been working.
00:23:52.319 --> 00:23:53.599
So let's do more.
00:23:53.920 --> 00:23:54.240
More.
00:23:54.400 --> 00:23:54.799
Right.
00:23:54.960 --> 00:23:56.720
And and that's kind of been the place.
00:23:56.880 --> 00:24:02.799
But I think what's the what's so fun about AI right now is I see it really moving into the product marketing world.
00:24:02.960 --> 00:24:07.039
Like it's been in the content marketing world, it's completely up-ended things there.
00:24:07.359 --> 00:24:10.799
We've been talking about GDM engineers for the last few years, right?
00:24:11.039 --> 00:24:16.720
It's done all kinds of things there, some of them good, some of them very, you know, slop canon.
00:24:16.880 --> 00:24:22.640
Anyway, but now it's like it's starting to be adopted at this more foundational level in product marketing teams.
00:24:22.799 --> 00:24:27.039
And this, I think, is so is like where the fun happens.
00:24:27.279 --> 00:24:33.680
And like you think about AI as being like this wonderful pattern matching machine.
00:24:33.839 --> 00:24:34.160
Yeah.
00:24:34.319 --> 00:24:37.759
And so now we can do always-on message testing, right?
00:24:38.079 --> 00:24:41.279
We don't have to show up and say, we think this is the value prop.
00:24:41.599 --> 00:24:44.559
We can say, here are the exact customer quotes that are supporting this.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:49.519
Or run a really simplistic A-B test that's very constrained, right?
00:24:49.599 --> 00:24:56.880
That that yeah, now we can do much more than we can, but also we have the whole data set of sales calls.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:24:57.279
Right.
00:24:57.359 --> 00:24:58.160
That's right.
00:24:58.319 --> 00:25:00.559
So do you need to run an A B test or can you?
00:25:00.880 --> 00:25:03.200
Oh, yeah, no, I'm saying the exactly what you're saying.
00:25:03.279 --> 00:25:06.960
I'm saying we do away from the old way of approaching A B testing, right?
00:25:07.200 --> 00:25:08.079
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:08.160 --> 00:25:08.480
Yes.
00:25:08.720 --> 00:25:09.039
Yeah.
00:25:09.200 --> 00:25:14.079
So you can do just like work with you know the data in a different way.
00:25:14.240 --> 00:25:21.519
I think that where this gets a little bit hairy is there's this idea that like you can just put AI on top of all your sales transcripts and do this.
00:25:21.680 --> 00:25:28.799
And like I spent too much time in the data management world of like dump all your data in a cloud data warehouse, right?
00:25:28.880 --> 00:25:30.880
And you're like, that's just not gonna work, right?
00:25:30.960 --> 00:25:35.440
You do have to structure it, you have to tell it what matters to you.
00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:45.119
But once you start to do that, it's the opportunity for marketing to be far more proactive and you know, in in directing the business.
00:25:45.200 --> 00:26:01.680
And in my very small way, like um, I had this with with a client recently where my signals coming in from you know competitive scans and sales calls picked up on a content gap before before it came to me from inside the company.
00:26:01.839 --> 00:26:06.960
And so by the time somebody was saying, hey, we should have an asset on this, I was already working on it.
00:26:07.359 --> 00:26:10.799
And that was like this, like a very small win.
00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:17.039
But it's like in that moment, I'm going, oh, I've never quite had this experience.
00:26:17.200 --> 00:26:21.920
Like, I just always feel like marketing is kind of one step behind the rest of the organization.
00:26:22.079 --> 00:26:22.400
Yes.
00:26:22.559 --> 00:26:31.519
And the mad salespeople and the product team that's run off to build this thing, and the CEO with his big idea, and we're kind of responding to everybody.
00:26:31.680 --> 00:26:47.119
But if we're managing our intelligence with the market and the customer really well, suddenly we have the ability to be on the leading edge of that, to show up at the board meeting and say, here is actually what is changing within our customer base.
00:26:47.279 --> 00:26:52.880
Here's what we're seeing within this segment, here are the messages that are resonating in this country, right?
00:26:53.039 --> 00:26:57.599
It's just a total, it's it's so much more strategic.
00:26:57.759 --> 00:27:03.839
Yes, and and aligned to the business than what we could really even do in the past.
00:27:04.160 --> 00:27:06.000
I would I agree with all of that.
00:27:06.160 --> 00:27:14.160
I I would also add in that marketing needs to just sort of get over itself a little bit too, like some humility.
00:27:14.240 --> 00:27:16.480
And let me give you an example of what I mean.
00:27:16.720 --> 00:27:24.799
Um, and I've been guilty of this in the past, where, you know, pre-AI, I would listen in on sales calls.
00:27:24.880 --> 00:27:30.559
I would have my weekly calls with sales leadership teams and get their feedback and input.
00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:40.240
And I would almost sometimes be like, oh, you know, they'd give me feedback or ideas for content or messages or positioning.
00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:44.720
And I'm like, why are they coming up with these ideas when marketing isn't?
00:27:44.880 --> 00:27:47.839
Shouldn't marketing be the ones coming up with these ideas?
00:27:48.160 --> 00:27:56.000
But I think we need to get over like and acknowledge that sales is absolutely on the front lines of delivering that message to the market.
00:27:56.319 --> 00:28:10.720
And if we are not having that really strong integrated relationship with them, so there is that feedback loop, we are gonna miss out on those opportunities that you just cited, Janessa, which is where do we have a gap in our messaging?
00:28:10.880 --> 00:28:16.319
Where do we have a gap in content or whatever it is that we're bringing to the market?
00:28:16.480 --> 00:28:25.039
Like the sooner we can identify where we can do better with messaging and content, the better, the better that is for the business.
00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:33.680
So their marketing shouldn't feel like, oh, well, that came from sales, it should, you know, that's not a lesser thing.
00:28:33.839 --> 00:28:34.880
That's a good thing.
00:28:35.519 --> 00:28:46.240
Well, and and sales is sales has regardless of what marketing wants to be, sales is more connected to the customer and the and the buyer.
00:28:46.720 --> 00:28:50.720
And that is ultimately what your organization is trying to orient around.
00:28:50.960 --> 00:29:04.319
So the the tension that I certainly felt as a marketing leader working with a very visionary CEO is the reason you don't really want marketing reporting into sales is because marketing does have to bridge the future vision, right?
00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:12.720
So we have to tell the story that's energizing to the investors, uh, to partners, to employees, to reporters.
00:29:12.960 --> 00:29:15.839
And that's not necessarily the sales conversation, right?
00:29:16.160 --> 00:29:27.200
So you do have to tell that big visionary story, but then you want to be like this with the head of sales when you're saying, what is the message that is going to land us?
00:29:27.519 --> 00:29:28.799
Should I say it again?
00:29:29.039 --> 00:29:34.240
You know, the best customers, biggest deal, size, close the fastest, right?
00:29:34.319 --> 00:29:39.200
And so that that is where it's like, it doesn't matter where that knowledge is coming from.
00:29:39.359 --> 00:29:40.480
It doesn't matter, right?
00:29:40.640 --> 00:29:41.599
Just get it.
00:29:41.759 --> 00:29:47.039
But what is possible for marketing today is to build systems to manage that knowledge.
00:29:47.200 --> 00:29:48.480
A lot of it comes from sales.
00:29:48.559 --> 00:29:56.880
I think sales call transcripts are like every single marketing team today should have a very good system for managing their insights coming out of their sales calls.
00:29:56.960 --> 00:29:57.200
I think that's a good idea.
00:29:57.359 --> 00:30:00.799
Yeah, and if they're not recording, you need to make sure that that's happening, right?
00:30:01.039 --> 00:30:01.519
Yes.
00:30:01.759 --> 00:30:03.359
So there are exceptions.
00:30:03.440 --> 00:30:06.240
There are some countries, whatever.
00:30:06.559 --> 00:30:07.119
Absolutely.
00:30:07.519 --> 00:30:08.960
That's that's the baseline.
00:30:09.119 --> 00:30:15.680
And then from there, you have like conversations your product managers are having, uh, transcripts from case study calls.
00:30:15.839 --> 00:30:22.079
Um, you know, uh, how are you getting information from your team who was just on site at a big conference, right?
00:30:22.240 --> 00:30:27.039
Or like, hey, we attended these sessions, we're doing our regular competitive scans.
00:30:27.119 --> 00:30:29.759
And so marketing is taking all this information.
00:30:30.480 --> 00:30:34.240
And then how do we build systems that help us activate on that information?
00:30:34.400 --> 00:30:42.960
And to me, this is the A, these are all the AI use cases that are so much more exciting than like, how do we one-shot a blog post?
00:30:43.440 --> 00:30:43.839
Right.
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:44.880
Don't care.
00:30:45.119 --> 00:30:45.359
Yeah.
00:30:45.519 --> 00:30:58.319
But marketing is in this place where we can manage that intelligence layer for the business and and and activate on it and finally be ahead of like where the market and where customers are going.
00:30:58.559 --> 00:31:00.000
Yeah, I I agree.
00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:09.039
This was I think that's a pretty great note to end on, Janessa, unless there's anything else you wanted to kind of bring up during this discussion that I may have missed.
00:31:09.119 --> 00:31:11.519
Anything No, I I think we stayed pretty positive.
00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:14.480
I didn't I didn't get into uh probably as heated as we did.
00:31:15.039 --> 00:31:16.319
You didn't rant very much.
00:31:16.640 --> 00:31:17.359
No, no.
00:31:17.599 --> 00:31:19.440
I mean for another time.
00:31:19.680 --> 00:31:34.000
Yeah, I mean, I certainly could have dug up some nightmares from my past about going in and trying to calculate MQLs and having those crazy conversations and and uh battles internally, but I'd rather not go back there.
00:31:34.880 --> 00:31:37.200
We we all we all want to get get out of there.
00:31:37.440 --> 00:31:55.920
Maybe I'll end on on maybe I'll end on the on the trust note is I I do believe that a lot of times when we're having attribution conversations, uh when we're having those conversations with revops and with strs, um we're having conversations about how do we get more at bats and they're very productive.
00:31:56.160 --> 00:32:05.759
When you're having attribution conversations with your CRO, your CEO, the board, often those are conversations that are masking a trust issue.
00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:15.759
And so it feels like um it feels like you're having a conversation about the and it can be a conversation about improving the model and better insights.
00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:22.240
But often what the what the CRO or the CEO is saying is, I don't trust you.
00:32:23.279 --> 00:32:27.599
And you're never going to get the attribution model good enough to fix that.
00:32:27.839 --> 00:32:28.160
Yes.
00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:40.079
So you actually have to show up in different ways, even though everybody in the business is saying, um this is the solution, a better attribution model, more MQLs, that's the solution.
00:32:40.160 --> 00:32:44.160
You can deliver on that and still not solve the fundamental trust problem.
00:32:44.480 --> 00:32:54.079
So, like if it if you are not trusted as a strategic partner to the business who can help grow revenue, your as it doesn't matter, your attribution model isn't going to fix that.
00:32:54.640 --> 00:32:56.480
That's very that's an excellent point.
00:32:56.640 --> 00:33:03.200
There's there's bigger, more kind of uh high-level things here that CMOs also need to navigate.
00:33:03.279 --> 00:33:09.279
And you know, you have to trust being liked, being valued within the organization.
00:33:10.480 --> 00:33:16.240
All super huge important things in order for these other things to work.
00:33:16.559 --> 00:33:30.000
Yeah, you can otherwise, you know, you can, as we said, like you can measure somebody to their heart's content, but if you still don't ultimately trust them, it's and and your CEO may not be able to tell you what great looks like.
00:33:30.079 --> 00:33:31.359
They've probably never seen it.
00:33:31.519 --> 00:33:43.680
That's it's possible your CRO has never seen it, it's possible your board hasn't seen it, and so they're going to ask for marketing what has been asked of marketing for the past 20 years, which is more MQLs.
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:50.079
And so, how do we shift that conversation to saying, let's actually talk about growing the business?
00:33:50.400 --> 00:33:51.200
That's right.
00:33:51.440 --> 00:33:52.079
Great.
00:33:52.400 --> 00:33:54.559
This was a great conversation, Janessa.
00:33:54.720 --> 00:33:56.160
Thank you so much for your time.
00:33:56.480 --> 00:34:04.160
I um I uh I'm I appreciate it and I I hope that um we start to see a real shift here.
00:34:04.400 --> 00:34:11.599
I again, I don't think MQLs are gonna completely go away, but we have to introduce new things that are of higher value.
00:34:12.239 --> 00:34:14.960
And I'm not worried about the CMO role going away either.
00:34:15.199 --> 00:34:16.000
Me neither.
00:34:16.320 --> 00:34:16.719
All right.
00:34:17.519 --> 00:34:18.800
Take care, Jennifer.
00:34:19.039 --> 00:34:19.920
Thank you.
00:00:16.079 --> 00:00:19.679
Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Said Differently.
00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:21.199
I'm your host, Jennifer Sephora.
00:00:21.679 --> 00:00:32.719
This show is sponsored by Troop, and we are here to give you a discussion around all things B2B messaging, positioning in the marketplace, and the leadership strategies related to that.
00:00:32.880 --> 00:00:58.320
And today's topic is really about the credibility of the CMO and how messaging and storytelling plays a role in that, and why the CMOs really need to take a big ownership lead in thinking through new models in attribution and how messaging needs to be measured so that they can rebuild trust within the organization.
00:00:58.560 --> 00:01:01.359
I've got a great guest here today, Janessa Lance.
00:01:01.759 --> 00:01:11.280
She is a fantastic, seasoned marketing leader who is uh out doing her own consulting practice and advisory work now.
00:01:11.519 --> 00:01:12.640
Janessa, thank you.
00:01:12.719 --> 00:01:15.120
Can you introduce yourself more to the folks listening?
00:01:15.439 --> 00:01:17.359
Yeah, Jennifer, thanks so much for having me today.
00:01:17.439 --> 00:01:19.760
I might get a little bit ranty about our topic today.
00:01:19.840 --> 00:01:21.040
I have very strong feelings.
00:01:21.599 --> 00:01:24.079
Yeah, you and I had a lively pre-interview on this.
00:01:24.319 --> 00:01:24.879
I'm excited.
00:01:26.079 --> 00:01:27.280
Lots to cover here.
00:01:27.519 --> 00:01:33.280
So most recently, my my most recent in-house role was with DBT Labs in the data management space.
00:01:33.359 --> 00:01:49.920
I did about five years there, uh taking the company from sub 1 million in revenue to close to the 100 million uh recurring revenue mark, just built the whole marketing function and then left there at the end of 2023 and have been doing fractional consulting work since then.
00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:54.959
Um, prior to DBT Labs, my roles have always been in content and communications.
00:01:55.120 --> 00:02:00.400
So did a stint in comms at HubSpot, um, held content roles at startups before that.
00:02:00.560 --> 00:02:06.640
So care so much about the message and the story of marketing has kind of always been the animating force in my career.
00:02:06.879 --> 00:02:16.879
Um and then having the experience of sitting in that seat and owning the pipeline number and having all the attribution and quantitative measurement conversations around that as well.
00:02:16.960 --> 00:02:22.479
Um, and then kind of arriving at this place in my career where I'm now thinking about um the intersection of those two things.
00:02:22.560 --> 00:02:24.319
However, yeah, no, I love it.
00:02:25.039 --> 00:02:36.719
I I uh what you and I I think really connected on as we got introduced a few months ago is how the role of the CMO is, I would say, under fire.
00:02:36.879 --> 00:02:40.719
I might be overstating that a bit, maybe I'm not.
00:02:40.800 --> 00:02:50.240
Um, but you know, there's a real shift here going on, and AI is certainly a factor, but it the shift I would say has even predated that, right?
00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:59.919
For the past few years, the role of the CMO in B2B, especially B2B tech, has um really been under a microscope.
00:03:00.080 --> 00:03:09.199
Uh, it's no surprise that, you know, to most people listening that they'll hear statistics around CMOs having some of the shortest tenures in a C-suite.
00:03:09.599 --> 00:03:24.080
I was just looking up that Forrester late last year published a report saying that the presence of CMOs in B2B has actually dropped in terms of reporting structures directly to the CEO.
00:03:24.479 --> 00:03:32.319
It's actually 6% fewer heads of marketing are reporting directly to the CEO than there was even just the prior year.
00:03:32.560 --> 00:03:35.360
And you know, we're seeing lots of change around.
00:03:35.599 --> 00:03:39.360
I'm hearing, I'm eager to hear what you're hearing and seeing.
00:03:39.520 --> 00:03:53.439
I'm hearing, I'm seeing CMO roles being broken up, split up, um, where you have product teams reporting to heads of product, you have growth teams reporting to the CRO or a chief commercial officer.
00:03:53.680 --> 00:04:02.000
Um, I hear a lot of buzz about, oh, I'm just gonna create an AI agent to run my marketing too in the most extreme cases.
00:04:02.240 --> 00:04:06.080
But what are you what are you seeing and hearing about the CMO role?
00:04:06.400 --> 00:04:09.599
Yeah, it's a it's a super hot topic right now, definitely on LinkedIn.
00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:16.399
Like I know uh Kip Bodner and Karen Flanagan from HubSpot just did an episode about this on their podcast against the grain.
00:04:16.720 --> 00:04:20.879
And uh this is always coming up in CMO Slack groups that I'm in.
00:04:20.959 --> 00:04:28.959
I think Ramp is probably one of the higher profile companies right now who's really been talking about their decision not to hire a CMO.
00:04:29.040 --> 00:04:31.279
Um Intercom is another big one, right?
00:04:31.360 --> 00:04:37.439
I think they they had a CMO in seat and then made a very intentional decision to move away from that model.
00:04:37.839 --> 00:04:45.360
Um, so it's everybody's kind of talking about it, you know, and this is coming off years of short tenures in in marketing.
00:04:45.519 --> 00:05:02.879
Um one of the places where I encounter this a lot is I work with a lot of early stage founders around their Series A, you know, pre-seed Series A, um, Series B, and they're they're in the process of hiring their first um like CMO or first marketer in the team.
00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:06.000
There's a ton of anxiety about hiring for this role.
00:05:06.319 --> 00:05:10.160
Um some of them have are trying it for their third time.
00:05:10.319 --> 00:05:16.480
Some sometimes founders have just heard it from VCs like, oh, this is going to be a tough role for you to hire for.
00:05:16.720 --> 00:05:27.040
So this is like a known thing that founders are thinking about and talking about of just like, hey, this role has not, it is not super successful right now.
00:05:27.120 --> 00:05:32.800
And I do not personally believe it is because marketers are fundamentally bad at their job, right?
00:05:32.879 --> 00:05:34.800
There's something else going on here.
00:05:34.959 --> 00:05:37.759
Um, and hoping we'll we'll dig into that today.
00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:38.959
Yeah, we definitely are.
00:05:39.120 --> 00:05:56.319
I think, you know, one of the things that you and I were talking a lot about is that there are these sort of long-standing fundamental ways that are well deeply entrenched in the way marketing has been measured in terms of its contribution to the business, right?
00:05:56.399 --> 00:05:59.120
So measurement often drives behavior.
00:05:59.360 --> 00:06:13.759
And so as uh executive running a department, you're on the hook, you're responsible for certain metrics that you need to deliver to the business and outputs to deliver to the business outcomes, I should say.
00:06:14.240 --> 00:06:21.360
Um, so you know, those will dictate where people focus their time and attention and energy.
00:06:21.680 --> 00:06:27.040
And obviously, marketing plays a role in driving pipeline and revenue.
00:06:27.279 --> 00:06:41.920
Um, and we've struggled, I think, for quite a long time to figure out how to measure that um, you know, in a in a really meaningful way that the board cares about, that the CEO cares about.
00:06:42.160 --> 00:06:47.040
I know you have some strong opinions about this, and we're gonna dig into that a bit more.
00:06:47.120 --> 00:06:48.399
So why don't we just go for it?
00:06:48.560 --> 00:06:48.720
Yeah.
00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:55.279
Jennifer, I think like what you said there is like what the board and the CEO cares about.
00:06:55.439 --> 00:07:04.160
Um so like sales sales has this saying, right, you get you get delegated to who you sound like, right?
00:07:04.240 --> 00:07:10.959
So if you show up and you talk about technical features, they're gonna hand you off to maybe an engineering manager or developer, right?
00:07:11.040 --> 00:07:18.240
If you show up and you're talking about business outcomes and impact and and value, you might get a CTO level conversation.
00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:29.279
And so, like my my kind of fundamental thesis is that this obsession with MQLs has led astray an entire generation of B2B marketers.
00:07:29.439 --> 00:07:32.560
Like, I think it has just created so many bad behaviors.
00:07:32.639 --> 00:07:34.160
It has eroded trust.
00:07:34.319 --> 00:07:40.959
It has created this idea that marketing is like a lead gumball machine instead of a strategic partner to the business.
00:07:41.279 --> 00:07:47.360
So, like in my time at DBT Labs, we tracked MQLs, we tracked leads, we tracked all this stuff.
00:07:47.519 --> 00:07:47.680
Yep.
00:07:47.839 --> 00:07:51.120
We didn't talk, I never talked to the board about it, right?
00:07:51.199 --> 00:07:58.000
And so when you show up and you're talking about MQLs to the board, you're saying, I'm a lead gumball machine.
00:07:58.160 --> 00:08:11.680
So at the board level, you have to be talking about pipeline and opportunity and answering the foundational question for the business where are we getting the highest value deals that are closing the fastest, and how do we go and find more of them?
00:08:11.839 --> 00:08:12.000
Yeah.
00:08:12.160 --> 00:08:15.439
And that often has much more to do with the state of the business, right?
00:08:15.519 --> 00:08:20.079
At DBT Labs, it was like it was always about um technology adoption.
00:08:20.240 --> 00:08:22.560
So we're adopting a cloud data warehouse.
00:08:22.720 --> 00:08:25.920
Wow, we really wanted to get DBT into those conversations, right?
00:08:26.079 --> 00:08:33.360
That has nothing to do with our channels or marketing has everything to do about how do we find businesses in that state.
00:08:33.600 --> 00:08:34.480
That's right, right?
00:08:34.879 --> 00:08:40.799
So that's what I mean by like elevating the conversation to how do we go out and find more of our best fit customers?
00:08:40.960 --> 00:08:43.360
And the MQL is just not it.
00:08:43.600 --> 00:08:52.240
And if you show up and you're having an MQL conversation, you're gonna get pushed over to report to the CRO because you're not at the CMO level.
00:08:52.320 --> 00:09:01.279
And where I have a lot of empathy for marketers is that we have been told that the MQL conversation and the attribution conversation is how we earn a spot at the table.
00:09:01.440 --> 00:09:04.960
And I just think that everything that we're seeing today is like, it's not.
00:09:05.120 --> 00:09:14.960
If we're having, if we're getting mired in detailed technical conversations about attribution MQLs, wow, we've completely lost the plot about how to grow the business.
00:09:15.279 --> 00:09:17.600
I could not agree more, Janessa.
00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:29.840
I was um customer number 49 of Marketo um way back when uh in when I was working um at Golden Gate Software.
00:09:29.919 --> 00:09:37.200
And I remember they had something called like the the definitive guide to lead scoring.
00:09:37.360 --> 00:09:38.879
And it was groundbreaking.
00:09:40.240 --> 00:09:47.120
You can picture all of the little pipes, the recycling, the sort of like that is that is like burned in my memory.
00:09:47.440 --> 00:10:05.519
It is because marketing, it was so groundbreaking at the time that we were like, wow, we finally have a way that we can put a number, like an actual data metric on what marketing is producing.
00:10:05.919 --> 00:10:13.200
But I think in practice, as I reflect on it over these many years, what were we really doing?
00:10:13.360 --> 00:10:15.759
We were trying to think of attribution.
00:10:16.080 --> 00:10:22.559
Um, you know, so we had MQLs, but then we also struggled with first touch, last touch attribution, right?
00:10:22.639 --> 00:10:24.559
Which channel did they come in through?
00:10:24.720 --> 00:10:28.399
Or which was the channel that most recently influenced them, right?
00:10:28.480 --> 00:10:35.440
Like, yeah, we might have met them at a trade show nine months ago, but it wasn't until this most recent webinar that we actually converted them.
00:10:35.600 --> 00:10:37.200
Okay, that's all really interesting.
00:10:37.360 --> 00:10:38.799
But what did we say to them?
00:10:38.960 --> 00:10:41.120
What did they respond to?
00:10:41.519 --> 00:10:46.320
We have been missing that piece of it, which is really the messaging and the story.
00:10:46.559 --> 00:10:51.360
And we've been hung up on these, and I'm not saying they're bad things to measure.
00:10:51.440 --> 00:11:02.399
Yes, you do need to care about how your channels are performing so you know how to allocate your budget, but we have been missing this really big piece, which is what persuaded them, right?
00:11:02.559 --> 00:11:06.080
How did we define, you know, like what's your reaction to that?
00:11:06.320 --> 00:11:16.480
Well, it's it's what persuaded them, but but I think that that I think marketers sometimes have kind of a delusion about how much we can move people.
00:11:16.960 --> 00:11:25.919
Like at DBT, the thing that we felt so acutely there is that we were riding a wave that was bigger than us, which was the adoption of the cloud data warehouse.
00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:40.159
And so, yeah, our our marketing worked, and there were we were good at marketing, and there were certainly like we wanted to get into these conversations where companies were adopting the cloud data warehouse, but also recognize there's something bigger behind you.
00:11:40.320 --> 00:11:43.279
And honestly, that's a beautiful place to be, right?
00:11:43.440 --> 00:11:48.320
It is, and it creates this inevitable success for your business, which is wonderful.
00:11:48.639 --> 00:11:54.559
So, are we persuading customers, or is it more like what is that?
00:11:54.639 --> 00:11:57.679
Um, I almost think about it as like entry points.
00:11:57.759 --> 00:12:05.840
Like we're on this highway, there's all this motion, but then we have to like create these on-ramps for our customers to meet them where they are.
00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:07.360
They're not on our highway.
00:12:07.519 --> 00:12:12.960
They might, and and so what that arm on ramp looks like is like, what is their current technology stack?
00:12:13.120 --> 00:12:16.080
Um, have they just got a new leader in seat?
00:12:16.240 --> 00:12:20.399
Um, what other tools do they integrate with?
00:12:20.559 --> 00:12:27.759
Um, what's going on in the business environment more broadly for their industry that could create it, be creating a motivation for change?
00:12:27.919 --> 00:12:31.279
And then are we ready to act on those things, right?
00:12:31.519 --> 00:12:45.840
And so again, that all comes back to messaging, like in a very literal sense, these entry points that I'm talking about often end up being like the drop down on your top-level nav called like solutions, right?
00:12:46.240 --> 00:12:53.200
That it but that is saying, hey, your context is this, and and and we can meet you there.
00:12:53.519 --> 00:13:01.200
It's totally, I mean, some of that is absolutely persuasion, but the way I think about it is more just like, what is their context?
00:13:01.360 --> 00:13:05.279
And how do we clear, like, we're not gonna make you do the work to figure out if we can help you or not.
00:13:05.440 --> 00:13:08.480
We're gonna meet you right there and we're gonna get you onto our highway.
00:13:08.720 --> 00:13:09.840
That's a really good point.
00:13:09.919 --> 00:13:16.320
And I think there's so much more data now available to us that can help us enrich, you know, what we know about somebody.
00:13:16.559 --> 00:13:26.639
There's there's signals we can pick up in terms of their own behavior, although that's getting a little bit harder and harder as um, you know, to track people's behavior.
00:13:26.879 --> 00:13:29.519
But the discovery piece is so critical, right?
00:13:29.679 --> 00:13:38.639
You want to make sure that you're tailoring that communication, that that dialogue, that message to their context, right?
00:13:38.720 --> 00:13:40.000
And you brought up a good point.
00:13:40.159 --> 00:13:48.559
So it's not enough to know that, hey, I like I was just at the CMO summit in San Francisco last week, and I'm like, it's not enough to know that they were there, right?
00:13:48.639 --> 00:13:55.759
Like, yeah, that's a channel, that's an event, but just because they were there doesn't tell me enough about them that I need to know.
00:13:55.919 --> 00:14:04.159
I need to know all these other things in order to message to them in the most effective way and to know which messages are actually resonating with them.
00:14:04.240 --> 00:14:06.879
Which what are they reacting to and what are they not reacting to?
00:14:07.200 --> 00:14:08.320
That's always the question, right?
00:14:08.399 --> 00:14:17.919
And like what just sounds so bonkers to me is when we say things, it's like, you know, they converted on Google Ads, so we need to spend more on Google Ads.
00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:20.480
And you're like, well, what do we put in front of them?
00:14:20.720 --> 00:14:21.200
That's right.
00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:21.519
Right?
00:14:21.679 --> 00:14:24.000
What is the message they converted on?
00:14:24.159 --> 00:14:36.639
And so if somebody is engaging with um, the closest we were able to get to this at at DBT Labs, and I think this is true for most companies, it's really like at the campaign level, which often has a message baked in.
00:14:36.879 --> 00:14:47.600
But really, what is ideal is you would be able, you would want to be able to see message performance across top of the funnel channels all the way through to how your salesperson is talking about it, right?
00:14:47.759 --> 00:14:59.440
And that's where you start to say, like, oh, what are the levers that we have to pull to find more of these accounts to accelerate these deals on pipeline and to close them at the highest dollar value possible?
00:14:59.679 --> 00:15:03.600
Those are not, it doesn't matter if somebody finds you on email or Google Ad.
00:15:03.840 --> 00:15:05.679
It doesn't matter what their last touch was.
00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:06.080
Yeah.
00:15:06.240 --> 00:15:06.480
Right.
00:15:06.559 --> 00:15:08.879
It's like, what is their context?
00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:12.159
Um, what is the message that that they're responding to?
00:15:12.320 --> 00:15:14.080
That's how we get more of them.
00:15:14.399 --> 00:15:18.799
Your point about following it through the sales journey is also really critical, Janessa.
00:15:18.879 --> 00:15:32.639
And it brings back to like what you said sort of at the beginning of the conversation, which is the trust piece and why MQLs fall down, because that handoff to sales, it's sort of like, you know, marketing has kind of stopped.
00:15:33.120 --> 00:15:34.799
I don't want to generalize too much.
00:15:34.879 --> 00:15:47.039
I hate to do that, but you know, if marketing stops studying what happens to a prospect at that handoff point, then they're missing the larger value of that buyer's journey, right?
00:15:47.200 --> 00:15:52.639
So they have to continue to pay attention to what is happening at all those sales touch points, too.
00:15:52.799 --> 00:15:54.000
That can be hard to do.
00:15:54.240 --> 00:15:58.480
We're gonna talk about that a little bit more in terms of a proposal to a better way.
00:15:58.879 --> 00:16:05.360
But the sales conversations, I think marketing has felt a little bit left out of that.
00:16:05.519 --> 00:16:12.399
We have mechanisms to improve that now, like dumping transcripts into an LLM and asking it to take away some highlights.
00:16:12.720 --> 00:16:21.840
But what's your take about like, you know, what are the lessons we can learn there from the past about how we can do better on that front?
00:16:22.000 --> 00:16:27.519
How marketing can get much more connected to the business in terms of the sales trust?
00:16:28.159 --> 00:16:33.440
Well, I I think that there, I think that there are maybe two important things here.
00:16:33.600 --> 00:16:40.159
And one is like speaking the same language as sales, which people always say, and it's like kind of, yeah, yeah, we all shake our heads.
00:16:40.320 --> 00:16:51.360
And to me, this comes down to like very fundamentally marketing thinks about people, which is leads and email addresses, and sales thinks about accounts, right?
00:16:51.600 --> 00:17:00.720
So we actually have these like um foundational ways, like our our our unit for describing our work is different.
00:17:00.879 --> 00:17:01.279
Yeah.
00:17:01.519 --> 00:17:04.079
Which is why the MQL is so bad.
00:17:04.319 --> 00:17:08.880
Because it says we're not gonna get out of our world to talk about the way you see the world.
00:17:09.039 --> 00:17:17.279
We're always gonna stay in the marketing world and we're gonna pitch these units over to you that you don't actually care about because everything in your world is about the account.
00:17:17.440 --> 00:17:17.759
Yeah.
00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:18.319
Right.
00:17:18.480 --> 00:17:24.960
So at a very fundamental level, these teams have to have a shared unit for talking about the world.
00:17:25.039 --> 00:17:28.240
Again, leads matter, MQLs matter, email addresses matter.
00:17:28.319 --> 00:17:31.680
You cannot be a CMO and not care about email addresses, right?
00:17:31.920 --> 00:17:32.160
Right.
00:17:32.400 --> 00:17:40.720
But that's probably not the thing that you talk to the CRO about, an SDR, go for it, right?
00:17:40.960 --> 00:17:42.079
They can meet you there.
00:17:42.240 --> 00:17:46.000
But an account executive, an RVP, a CRO, not so much, right?
00:17:46.160 --> 00:17:52.319
So, like that is like a very critical thing to saying we speak the same language.
00:17:52.400 --> 00:17:54.720
That is the language of pipeline and revenue, right?
00:17:54.799 --> 00:17:54.960
Yeah.
00:17:55.359 --> 00:18:16.640
In addition to that, when when it comes more to like understanding their world, um, the the work that that I have been doing more recently, because it's possible now with AI, is being is setting up systems that can more proactively inform marketing about what is going on in the customer's world, in the sales world.
00:18:16.720 --> 00:18:25.440
And so I increasingly see marketing's job as being managing the intelligence we have about the customer and the market, right?
00:18:25.759 --> 00:18:29.119
So much AI has commoditized so much.
00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:35.359
But what we have is we have the conversations we're having with customers, we have our unique knowledge of the market.
00:18:35.599 --> 00:18:52.640
And so, practically like one of the very practical ways that that this happens is like take your sales transcripts, parse them against like MedPick or whatever your preferred structure is, and then start start to track things from there.
00:18:52.880 --> 00:19:01.920
And it's very, it's very easy to then say, um, you know, AI, you know, all of the content we've ever produced.
00:19:02.160 --> 00:19:03.039
Where are the gaps?
00:19:03.200 --> 00:19:05.519
What's coming up all the time on our sales calls?
00:19:05.680 --> 00:19:15.680
Um, so this is some that I use for clients is starting to be increasingly proactive, where it's like, hey, three people have raised pricing issues because they're confused about your pricing page.
00:19:15.839 --> 00:19:16.880
You want to change that.
00:19:17.039 --> 00:19:22.480
Hey, this objection has come up four times and we don't address it anywhere on the site or on the blog posts.
00:19:22.799 --> 00:19:24.799
Here's a content asset we could make about this.
00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:27.599
And this is not like advanced AI use cases.
00:19:27.759 --> 00:19:28.240
Right, right.
00:19:28.720 --> 00:19:37.440
This is just a simple way that a lot, but but what's so powerful about it is that it was very difficult to do these things historically before.
00:19:37.759 --> 00:19:48.160
And so marketing actually has the opportunity to show up proactively to sales, not just the grumpy loud salesperson who just got had a bad call, right?
00:19:48.319 --> 00:19:58.960
Not but actually proactively show up with data, with customer quotes, with real insights to say, how do we win more deals, a higher contract value, and faster?
00:19:59.200 --> 00:19:59.599
Yes.
00:19:59.839 --> 00:20:02.160
And again, not an MQL conversation.
00:20:02.319 --> 00:20:03.759
It's a message conversation.
00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:04.480
Yeah.
00:20:04.720 --> 00:20:10.000
It starts to feel a little closer to B2C and the way they can measure, but you know, not quite.
00:20:10.240 --> 00:20:21.440
I don't think B2B is ever going to be truly like B2C, but there are some things about B2C that you can get those data patterns identified, right?
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:37.920
That you can make decisions off of larger data pattern sets rather than these one-off cases, like you said, the grumpy salesperson who just had a bad call or a happy salesperson who just had a great call because they tested the message.
00:20:38.240 --> 00:20:39.759
Change our homepage messaging.
00:20:40.240 --> 00:20:40.400
Right.
00:20:40.640 --> 00:20:41.440
This resonated.
00:20:41.519 --> 00:20:43.519
We got to change the pipeline right now.
00:20:43.839 --> 00:20:44.400
Right.
00:20:44.640 --> 00:20:45.039
All right.
00:20:45.200 --> 00:20:54.559
So, Janessa, where do you see you tease that AI is allowing us to do some of these things, even in simplistic use cases of AI.
00:20:54.720 --> 00:21:06.000
You've seen what Troop can do, and Troop is actually taking it to another level, which is connecting all of that directly to your CRM system so that it's identifying patterned outcomes, right?
00:21:06.160 --> 00:21:20.000
Not just pattern message usage, but what happens when messages are being used and being able to cut that it through different ways of looking at it, like tell me how that looks when I'm acquiring new business or mid-market versus enterprise business.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:27.039
But like going back to because I don't want to make this a troop sales pitch, that's not what we're here to do.
00:21:27.279 --> 00:21:49.279
But if marketers don't make this shift, like one of the things I'm struggling with and seeing is that marketers know that something needs to change, but they're not there's this sort of habit of doing this, and how do you break these habits and start to make this leap?
00:21:49.359 --> 00:21:51.119
Like, what does that look like for you?
00:21:51.279 --> 00:21:54.799
How would a CMO make this transition?
00:21:55.119 --> 00:21:56.640
Uh, what would you recommend?
00:21:58.000 --> 00:21:59.759
I I I I I'm very sensitive.
00:22:00.400 --> 00:22:03.119
To the fact that I'm not speaking from experience.
00:22:03.359 --> 00:22:04.799
Like I have not done this.
00:22:04.960 --> 00:22:06.640
I have made the transition.
00:22:06.799 --> 00:22:07.039
Yeah.
00:22:07.279 --> 00:22:07.519
Yes.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:09.599
I have experienced the marketing leadership role.
00:22:09.680 --> 00:22:14.799
I have done, I did some things very right in my time, and I got some things very wrong.
00:22:14.960 --> 00:22:17.599
And I, you know, learned my lessons.
00:22:17.759 --> 00:22:22.400
And I am now doing that work with much earlier stage companies, right?
00:22:22.559 --> 00:22:27.039
So the challenge is very different when you're working with change management.
00:22:27.200 --> 00:22:27.519
Yes.
00:22:27.680 --> 00:22:43.680
But I would say very simply, I think what anybody can do today is uh elevate your conversation from an MQL conversation to a conversation about how do we win deals faster and at a higher dollar value?
00:22:43.839 --> 00:22:44.240
Yeah.
00:22:44.480 --> 00:22:46.720
And I actually got some pushback on this.
00:22:46.880 --> 00:22:53.839
This was early on when I when I started working more closely with the board at DBT, some pushback around like, where are all of our campaign numbers?
00:22:53.920 --> 00:22:55.359
Where are all of our MQL numbers?
00:22:55.519 --> 00:22:57.920
And like, I don't want to position myself in that way.
00:22:58.000 --> 00:22:58.079
Right.
00:22:58.319 --> 00:22:58.480
Right.
00:22:58.559 --> 00:23:01.359
Because I think it's a bad spot for a CMO to be.
00:23:01.519 --> 00:23:01.839
Right.
00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:15.440
So what how how do you elevate that conversation to be talking about business priorities instead of um metrics that are great to talk to your RevOps person about and your marketing ops person and your SDR leader, right?
00:23:15.599 --> 00:23:17.119
Just not board level or CEO.
00:23:17.200 --> 00:23:18.079
So that's one thing.
00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:26.160
I think the other thing is that marketing has the opportunity today to shift into actually being the voice of the customer and the voice of the market.
00:23:26.319 --> 00:23:26.640
Yes.
00:23:26.799 --> 00:23:39.440
And so what marketing has been very obsessed with since like the AI fervor, you know, of the last few years is how do we get more, how do we produce more?
00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:39.839
Right.
00:23:40.240 --> 00:23:43.839
All of the early use cases are like, how do we create more blog posts?
00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:44.240
Right.
00:23:44.400 --> 00:23:46.079
How do we send more emails?
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:48.640
How do we talk about a gumball machine?
00:23:48.720 --> 00:23:48.799
Yeah.
00:23:49.200 --> 00:23:50.160
Talk about a gumball machine.
00:23:50.240 --> 00:23:50.319
Yeah.
00:23:50.480 --> 00:23:52.240
So you're like, it hasn't really been working.
00:23:52.319 --> 00:23:53.599
So let's do more.
00:23:53.920 --> 00:23:54.240
More.
00:23:54.400 --> 00:23:54.799
Right.
00:23:54.960 --> 00:23:56.720
And and that's kind of been the place.
00:23:56.880 --> 00:24:02.799
But I think what's the what's so fun about AI right now is I see it really moving into the product marketing world.
00:24:02.960 --> 00:24:07.039
Like it's been in the content marketing world, it's completely up-ended things there.
00:24:07.359 --> 00:24:10.799
We've been talking about GDM engineers for the last few years, right?
00:24:11.039 --> 00:24:16.720
It's done all kinds of things there, some of them good, some of them very, you know, slop canon.
00:24:16.880 --> 00:24:22.640
Anyway, but now it's like it's starting to be adopted at this more foundational level in product marketing teams.
00:24:22.799 --> 00:24:27.039
And this, I think, is so is like where the fun happens.
00:24:27.279 --> 00:24:33.680
And like you think about AI as being like this wonderful pattern matching machine.
00:24:33.839 --> 00:24:34.160
Yeah.
00:24:34.319 --> 00:24:37.759
And so now we can do always-on message testing, right?
00:24:38.079 --> 00:24:41.279
We don't have to show up and say, we think this is the value prop.
00:24:41.599 --> 00:24:44.559
We can say, here are the exact customer quotes that are supporting this.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:49.519
Or run a really simplistic A-B test that's very constrained, right?
00:24:49.599 --> 00:24:56.880
That that yeah, now we can do much more than we can, but also we have the whole data set of sales calls.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:24:57.279
Right.
00:24:57.359 --> 00:24:58.160
That's right.
00:24:58.319 --> 00:25:00.559
So do you need to run an A B test or can you?
00:25:00.880 --> 00:25:03.200
Oh, yeah, no, I'm saying the exactly what you're saying.
00:25:03.279 --> 00:25:06.960
I'm saying we do away from the old way of approaching A B testing, right?
00:25:07.200 --> 00:25:08.079
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:08.160 --> 00:25:08.480
Yes.
00:25:08.720 --> 00:25:09.039
Yeah.
00:25:09.200 --> 00:25:14.079
So you can do just like work with you know the data in a different way.
00:25:14.240 --> 00:25:21.519
I think that where this gets a little bit hairy is there's this idea that like you can just put AI on top of all your sales transcripts and do this.
00:25:21.680 --> 00:25:28.799
And like I spent too much time in the data management world of like dump all your data in a cloud data warehouse, right?
00:25:28.880 --> 00:25:30.880
And you're like, that's just not gonna work, right?
00:25:30.960 --> 00:25:35.440
You do have to structure it, you have to tell it what matters to you.
00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:45.119
But once you start to do that, it's the opportunity for marketing to be far more proactive and you know, in in directing the business.
00:25:45.200 --> 00:26:01.680
And in my very small way, like um, I had this with with a client recently where my signals coming in from you know competitive scans and sales calls picked up on a content gap before before it came to me from inside the company.
00:26:01.839 --> 00:26:06.960
And so by the time somebody was saying, hey, we should have an asset on this, I was already working on it.
00:26:07.359 --> 00:26:10.799
And that was like this, like a very small win.
00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:17.039
But it's like in that moment, I'm going, oh, I've never quite had this experience.
00:26:17.200 --> 00:26:21.920
Like, I just always feel like marketing is kind of one step behind the rest of the organization.
00:26:22.079 --> 00:26:22.400
Yes.
00:26:22.559 --> 00:26:31.519
And the mad salespeople and the product team that's run off to build this thing, and the CEO with his big idea, and we're kind of responding to everybody.
00:26:31.680 --> 00:26:47.119
But if we're managing our intelligence with the market and the customer really well, suddenly we have the ability to be on the leading edge of that, to show up at the board meeting and say, here is actually what is changing within our customer base.
00:26:47.279 --> 00:26:52.880
Here's what we're seeing within this segment, here are the messages that are resonating in this country, right?
00:26:53.039 --> 00:26:57.599
It's just a total, it's it's so much more strategic.
00:26:57.759 --> 00:27:03.839
Yes, and and aligned to the business than what we could really even do in the past.
00:27:04.160 --> 00:27:06.000
I would I agree with all of that.
00:27:06.160 --> 00:27:14.160
I I would also add in that marketing needs to just sort of get over itself a little bit too, like some humility.
00:27:14.240 --> 00:27:16.480
And let me give you an example of what I mean.
00:27:16.720 --> 00:27:24.799
Um, and I've been guilty of this in the past, where, you know, pre-AI, I would listen in on sales calls.
00:27:24.880 --> 00:27:30.559
I would have my weekly calls with sales leadership teams and get their feedback and input.
00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:40.240
And I would almost sometimes be like, oh, you know, they'd give me feedback or ideas for content or messages or positioning.
00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:44.720
And I'm like, why are they coming up with these ideas when marketing isn't?
00:27:44.880 --> 00:27:47.839
Shouldn't marketing be the ones coming up with these ideas?
00:27:48.160 --> 00:27:56.000
But I think we need to get over like and acknowledge that sales is absolutely on the front lines of delivering that message to the market.
00:27:56.319 --> 00:28:10.720
And if we are not having that really strong integrated relationship with them, so there is that feedback loop, we are gonna miss out on those opportunities that you just cited, Janessa, which is where do we have a gap in our messaging?
00:28:10.880 --> 00:28:16.319
Where do we have a gap in content or whatever it is that we're bringing to the market?
00:28:16.480 --> 00:28:25.039
Like the sooner we can identify where we can do better with messaging and content, the better, the better that is for the business.
00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:33.680
So their marketing shouldn't feel like, oh, well, that came from sales, it should, you know, that's not a lesser thing.
00:28:33.839 --> 00:28:34.880
That's a good thing.
00:28:35.519 --> 00:28:46.240
Well, and and sales is sales has regardless of what marketing wants to be, sales is more connected to the customer and the and the buyer.
00:28:46.720 --> 00:28:50.720
And that is ultimately what your organization is trying to orient around.
00:28:50.960 --> 00:29:04.319
So the the tension that I certainly felt as a marketing leader working with a very visionary CEO is the reason you don't really want marketing reporting into sales is because marketing does have to bridge the future vision, right?
00:29:04.480 --> 00:29:12.720
So we have to tell the story that's energizing to the investors, uh, to partners, to employees, to reporters.
00:29:12.960 --> 00:29:15.839
And that's not necessarily the sales conversation, right?
00:29:16.160 --> 00:29:27.200
So you do have to tell that big visionary story, but then you want to be like this with the head of sales when you're saying, what is the message that is going to land us?
00:29:27.519 --> 00:29:28.799
Should I say it again?
00:29:29.039 --> 00:29:34.240
You know, the best customers, biggest deal, size, close the fastest, right?
00:29:34.319 --> 00:29:39.200
And so that that is where it's like, it doesn't matter where that knowledge is coming from.
00:29:39.359 --> 00:29:40.480
It doesn't matter, right?
00:29:40.640 --> 00:29:41.599
Just get it.
00:29:41.759 --> 00:29:47.039
But what is possible for marketing today is to build systems to manage that knowledge.
00:29:47.200 --> 00:29:48.480
A lot of it comes from sales.
00:29:48.559 --> 00:29:56.880
I think sales call transcripts are like every single marketing team today should have a very good system for managing their insights coming out of their sales calls.
00:29:56.960 --> 00:29:57.200
I think that's a good idea.
00:29:57.359 --> 00:30:00.799
Yeah, and if they're not recording, you need to make sure that that's happening, right?
00:30:01.039 --> 00:30:01.519
Yes.
00:30:01.759 --> 00:30:03.359
So there are exceptions.
00:30:03.440 --> 00:30:06.240
There are some countries, whatever.
00:30:06.559 --> 00:30:07.119
Absolutely.
00:30:07.519 --> 00:30:08.960
That's that's the baseline.
00:30:09.119 --> 00:30:15.680
And then from there, you have like conversations your product managers are having, uh, transcripts from case study calls.
00:30:15.839 --> 00:30:22.079
Um, you know, uh, how are you getting information from your team who was just on site at a big conference, right?
00:30:22.240 --> 00:30:27.039
Or like, hey, we attended these sessions, we're doing our regular competitive scans.
00:30:27.119 --> 00:30:29.759
And so marketing is taking all this information.
00:30:30.480 --> 00:30:34.240
And then how do we build systems that help us activate on that information?
00:30:34.400 --> 00:30:42.960
And to me, this is the A, these are all the AI use cases that are so much more exciting than like, how do we one-shot a blog post?
00:30:43.440 --> 00:30:43.839
Right.
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:44.880
Don't care.
00:30:45.119 --> 00:30:45.359
Yeah.
00:30:45.519 --> 00:30:58.319
But marketing is in this place where we can manage that intelligence layer for the business and and and activate on it and finally be ahead of like where the market and where customers are going.
00:30:58.559 --> 00:31:00.000
Yeah, I I agree.
00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:09.039
This was I think that's a pretty great note to end on, Janessa, unless there's anything else you wanted to kind of bring up during this discussion that I may have missed.
00:31:09.119 --> 00:31:11.519
Anything No, I I think we stayed pretty positive.
00:31:11.599 --> 00:31:14.480
I didn't I didn't get into uh probably as heated as we did.
00:31:15.039 --> 00:31:16.319
You didn't rant very much.
00:31:16.640 --> 00:31:17.359
No, no.
00:31:17.599 --> 00:31:19.440
I mean for another time.
00:31:19.680 --> 00:31:34.000
Yeah, I mean, I certainly could have dug up some nightmares from my past about going in and trying to calculate MQLs and having those crazy conversations and and uh battles internally, but I'd rather not go back there.
00:31:34.880 --> 00:31:37.200
We we all we all want to get get out of there.
00:31:37.440 --> 00:31:55.920
Maybe I'll end on on maybe I'll end on the on the trust note is I I do believe that a lot of times when we're having attribution conversations, uh when we're having those conversations with revops and with strs, um we're having conversations about how do we get more at bats and they're very productive.
00:31:56.160 --> 00:32:05.759
When you're having attribution conversations with your CRO, your CEO, the board, often those are conversations that are masking a trust issue.
00:32:06.000 --> 00:32:15.759
And so it feels like um it feels like you're having a conversation about the and it can be a conversation about improving the model and better insights.
00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:22.240
But often what the what the CRO or the CEO is saying is, I don't trust you.
00:32:23.279 --> 00:32:27.599
And you're never going to get the attribution model good enough to fix that.
00:32:27.839 --> 00:32:28.160
Yes.
00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:40.079
So you actually have to show up in different ways, even though everybody in the business is saying, um this is the solution, a better attribution model, more MQLs, that's the solution.
00:32:40.160 --> 00:32:44.160
You can deliver on that and still not solve the fundamental trust problem.
00:32:44.480 --> 00:32:54.079
So, like if it if you are not trusted as a strategic partner to the business who can help grow revenue, your as it doesn't matter, your attribution model isn't going to fix that.
00:32:54.640 --> 00:32:56.480
That's very that's an excellent point.
00:32:56.640 --> 00:33:03.200
There's there's bigger, more kind of uh high-level things here that CMOs also need to navigate.
00:33:03.279 --> 00:33:09.279
And you know, you have to trust being liked, being valued within the organization.
00:33:10.480 --> 00:33:16.240
All super huge important things in order for these other things to work.
00:33:16.559 --> 00:33:30.000
Yeah, you can otherwise, you know, you can, as we said, like you can measure somebody to their heart's content, but if you still don't ultimately trust them, it's and and your CEO may not be able to tell you what great looks like.
00:33:30.079 --> 00:33:31.359
They've probably never seen it.
00:33:31.519 --> 00:33:43.680
That's it's possible your CRO has never seen it, it's possible your board hasn't seen it, and so they're going to ask for marketing what has been asked of marketing for the past 20 years, which is more MQLs.
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:50.079
And so, how do we shift that conversation to saying, let's actually talk about growing the business?
00:33:50.400 --> 00:33:51.200
That's right.
00:33:51.440 --> 00:33:52.079
Great.
00:33:52.400 --> 00:33:54.559
This was a great conversation, Janessa.
00:33:54.720 --> 00:33:56.160
Thank you so much for your time.
00:33:56.480 --> 00:34:04.160
I um I uh I'm I appreciate it and I I hope that um we start to see a real shift here.
00:34:04.400 --> 00:34:11.599
I again, I don't think MQLs are gonna completely go away, but we have to introduce new things that are of higher value.
00:34:12.239 --> 00:34:14.960
And I'm not worried about the CMO role going away either.
00:34:15.199 --> 00:34:16.000
Me neither.
00:34:16.320 --> 00:34:16.719
All right.
00:34:17.519 --> 00:34:18.800
Take care, Jennifer.
00:34:19.039 --> 00:34:19.920
Thank you.
