The Modern CMO’s Survival Guide
Today’s CMO is under crazy pressure. Join all-star panelists as they spill their strategies for surviving and thriving in the current climate.
>> Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's segment,
the Modern CMO's Survival Guide.
I'm Mora Rivera, I'm the CMO here at Qualified,
and I am so excited for our panel discussion that we're going to have today.
We have a total all-star lineup.
We have Sarah Franklin,
who's the President and CMO of Salesforce,
the Cloud Computing Powerhouse.
We have Scott Holden, who's the CMO of ThoughtSpot,
the Modern Analytics Platform,
and we have Sarah Varney.
She's the CMO of attentive,
they are a leader in mobile marketing, former CMO of Twilio.
We have such a rock star lineup in all of these folks I've had
the pleasure of working with throughout my career.
Today, we're going to be talking about all things pipeline generation,
and we're also just going to pick each other's brains
about what's on their minds as CMOs as we wrap up 2022,
and we go into 2023.
It's going to be a great session.
>> Thanks for having us. It's exciting to be here with everyone.
Good friends here.
>> Good friends. Lots of history in this room,
which is super, super fun.
I think to start us off, Scott,
I want to start with you.
Craig referenced in his opening segment,
something that you said that's really stuck with him,
which is as a CMO,
if you're not hitting your pipe gen targets,
nothing else matters.
You can't do any of the fun stuff.
All of that is put on hold if you're not hitting your pipeline targets.
I would love to start with you and just here,
where does pipeline generation sit on your priority list right now,
and has it changed on your priority list
as we wrap up 2022?
>> Well, thanks for having me,
Mara, and it's great that you got this old band back together.
Excited to be here with the two Sarah's.
Well, I've said this before,
but for me, pipeline is always number one,
and nothing ever takes over that number one position.
I often tell people that my CEO only calls me for two things.
It's pipeline and story, which is more of our brand narrative.
But really, the only time you ever calls me in a panic state is over pipeline.
And the way I look at it,
if he's calling me about this quarter's pipeline,
I'm in trouble.
It means that something's already gone wrong.
Because as we all know as marketers,
it's not like you can fix your open pipeline problems for this quarter
more often than not.
It's something you got to be ahead of.
And so that's the thing that always keeps me up at night.
And it's a critical thing to think about,
and maybe we can get into it here.
But I always think of pipeline in two ways.
One is the creation engine.
It's you're always feeding and keeping track of.
And the second is pipe maturation.
So ideally, if you're always creating a steady clip,
you back into what your teams need.
That once the quarter begins,
the open pipeline management, if you will,
comes down to sales execution.
And so if you have those two things figured out in advance,
usually it goes pretty well.
But as we all know, it's trying times right now,
and so everybody's probably getting a little extra pressure
on their pipeline at the moment.
- Definitely.
And I'm curious this past quarter,
if there's more of a stress or focus on that pipeline maturation piece.
Like for us, we've talked a lot about window shoppers
when it comes to pipeline generation.
And buyers are still out there.
They're still checking out your software.
But they might not be as ready to kind of progress through a sales cycle.
Have you guys seen any trends in terms of needing to spend more time
focusing on pipeline maturation than you have pipeline generation?
In quarters past?
- I'll jump in.
I mean, I think for in my view,
you always have to have a short and a long game when it comes to pipe gen.
I think right now in the economic conditions,
we're living under there is a desire just to focus on
those short-term tactics that you know we're going to show up
in your spreadsheet in two weeks.
There's a real desire to make sure that everything that you're doing
from our perspective shows instant ROI.
And I think that works to a certain extent.
You can go buy branded Google keywords all day long and show ROI.
But that's not necessarily going to build a healthy long-term funnel.
And so I always try to communicate with my stakeholders
if that's my CFO, if it's my head of sales, if it's my CEO,
that investing in both top of funnel as well,
investing throughout the entire funnel honestly
is going to create a healthier, more efficient funnel long-term
and ultimately save your company money.
And I think there's no better time than right now
to be making sure that that argument is clear
and to whatever extent you can back it up with metrics
and real data, the better off you're going to be as a marketer.
That's great, Sarah Varney.
Oh yeah, go ahead Sarah Franklin.
I was going to chime in and say,
I of course agree with everything they both said.
And just adding that right now,
what we're seeing is that you just need more coverage.
And so pipe gen is so critical.
Pipe mat's very important.
But we just, what we're seeing right now
is you need to juice your coverage ratios
because you need more pipeline
when you're on certain budgets with your customers.
Totally. Craig was talking about that in his segment.
He was saying that 5X is the new 3X
in terms of pipeline coverage that's needed.
Sarah Franklin, I'm curious for you guys at Salesforce
how you're thinking about pipeline generation.
And I'm using your last name since we have,
we were saying two Sarah's.
And Sarah, Sarah's not.
So we have a lot of S's in the room.
But Sarah Franklin, I would love to hear
you guys are such a mature organization, right?
Salesforce is massive and all of us have worked there.
That's where I got the pleasure of working with all three
of you guys a long, long time ago.
But in terms of being at such a massive company,
have you guys pivoted your strategy a lot
from a pipeline generation standpoint
or how are you thinking about pipeline generation
for such a big company and a small company?
It's easier to turn off programs, turn on programs,
pull levers, shift budget.
But what's it like leading the marketing
at a massive organization that's going through change?
Is a great question.
It's really, when you say the word strategy,
it's actually a strategy hasn't changed.
The strategy is long term.
And as Varney was saying, your strategy is balanced
between top of funnel, bottom of funnel,
and then your focus on which channels
you're going to go through.
And what you are looking at right now
and what we're seeing is just how it can be more efficient.
So we're really doubling down on our analytics right now
and seeing what is performing super well.
And as we mentioned, increasing the ratios.
I love saying that 5X is the new 3X
because you really need more coverage.
And the strategy remains the same of we're working
on building our first party data strategy
and zero party data strategy so that we can get
our customers and prospects to subscribe to our brand,
to drive personalized engagement at scale.
Nothing about that strategy has changed.
Just the tactics may vary and we are looking more and more
into analytics to be an AI, to help us do our best marketing
and put the best tactics in market that work right now.
And you combine that with relevant messaging.
So there's the mechanics of your pipeline.
But then just also, I'm literally going through all
of our content and saying, what do we retire?
What do we create?
Because we've gone from this rapid change from a pandemic
into now a rapid change with economic downturn.
And so that means that you need to not just message growth
but message about efficient growth
to your customers and prospects.
We'll go over click on that whole creation
versus maturation topic because I think it's a fascinating one.
And there's certainly a feeling out there
that 5x is the new 3x.
And in general, if you could snap your fingers
and make that happen, why not?
It's in this climate.
It's definitely the thing that you should do.
Come on, Holden.
You got it.
Snap right now.
I have X pipeline.
But it's interesting, right?
Because ultimately, marketing contributes to pipeline.
And so do your SDR team or your partner team.
But ultimately, at the end of the day,
it's like sellers that create pipeline.
And one of the things that we're wrestling with,
and I'm sure every company's wrestling with,
is that if you're having your sellers
have to work harder in this climate to close business.
And then you turn on and say, well,
I know you're working harder to close it.
Why don't you work even harder to create even more?
Because you know it's not going to work.
Something has to give.
And you think, Sarah, we're kind of focused on the--
Sarah, Frankl, that is.
We're focused on the same thing, which is some people,
like if you're working some really big deals
and things are going pretty well,
distracting you from that to telling you to go create 5x
coverage when you're likely to close and hit
your target versus places where there are something
that might not have later stage pipeline in the works.
And they actually would benefit from having more top
of funnel.
The thing that we're seeing as we dig in
is that we've got pockets of strength where we need more,
and we've got pockets of--
or we need less, and we have pockets of strength
or weakness where we need more.
And so it devils in the details a bit.
And I'm spending a lot of my time
trying to make those trade-offs right now,
instead of just the blanket silver bullet.
Everybody needs 5x.
Yes, but where are we going to put that, can it?
Yeah, I mean, I think--
It's also--
--as you can be with your spend right now.
It's every dollar matters.
And I also think making sure that you're fine-tuning
every break point or-- every conversion point
of your funnel to irk out as much efficiency as possible.
Like speed the lead has never been more important.
Follow-up has never been important.
You don't want to leave a pipeline dollar
on the table these days.
And I think with-- even though that might seem small
on the margins, my dog's excited about this too.
If you can hear it in the background,
even though it might seem small in the margins,
that can add up to get you closer to what you
need by the end of the quarter.
Yeah, it's not like we're all getting bigger budgets
in this climate to go get that fly back.
Like what can we do right now to bend the curve with no new
dollars?
And that's what I'll ask.
I mean, it's the one that's been put on us.
I'm sure we're all getting that.
But you've got to be smart about where you place those bets.
Yeah, 100%.
And I was going to ask the question.
I think now is the time where we're all probably
getting a lot of scrutiny from other stakeholders
in the business.
Scott, you talked about those calls from your CEO.
I think right now we have CFOs, CEOs, people
who used to kind of maybe--
not saying CEOs would, but maybe CFOs paid less attention
to marketing.
Now they're our new best friend, whether we like it or not.
I know I've been in a lot of meetings with our great finance
team looking at the data, giving them justification,
talking about ROI.
How do you guys think about creating trust
with those counterparts and kind of helping educate
and get buy-in from teams who might not
be as familiar with marketing?
Sarah Franklin, you had talked about analytics being really
important right now and having single source of truth
to kind of justify your investments.
But how do you create trust with those partners,
especially for things that might not have that short term
return?
Sarah Barney that you talked about,
but it's a longer investment in the company and the brand.
How do you guys think about those relationships
and building trust there?
I can start and just say something
which is very sales force and this crew will know,
which is transparency builds trust.
And we've created our heart of marketing,
which is our deep analytics, which
I have shared with the entire team and leadership team
and distribution, marketing, et cetera.
Anybody who wants to know how we're spending our money,
where it's going, our budget is completely transparent
and completely accountable to the return on those investments.
And I think you build a trust through that one,
that transparency.
Two, you just show up with common sense.
If something doesn't work, you admit it.
And you say, yeah, I did this and didn't work.
Or, yeah, I ran this event.
Maybe it could be a little bit more cost efficient.
And we don't need the live trees and the waterfall.
As much as we love the live trees and the waterfall.
Those.
[LAUGHTER]
I did mainly add that those sales force events.
Right.
No, but then when you say that, you say, hey,
we could take away the waterfall,
then hold in exactly that emotion comes out.
People say, no, no, no.
I don't want to lose the waterfall,
or I don't want to lose the stuffies.
But you can really just show up yourself as a real person.
And don't get defensive.
It's a fair question to ask when somebody says,
is this effective to spend?
It's your money just as much as their money.
And it's fair.
So when you lean into the logic of it,
now the emotion, you let the analytics guide you.
And then you bring them in the fold a little bit.
And you get them close to it.
They get attached.
The other thing is--
and I've just been through this-- where candidly,
we cut some stuff.
And now it's two quarters later.
And they're like, hey, where's that pipeline?
You're like, well, see this negative sign?
That's what you see.
When you cut that money, that pipeline goes down.
And they're like, oh, we don't want to do that.
So sometimes you have to roll with it.
And that would be my advice.
I was going to say very similar things.
I think it's easy to take things personally in this environment.
I think you have to quickly put your shareholder hat on
and say, what is the best thing for the company?
We all have efficiency that we can gain in our business.
And I think that even though it's trying times,
we're going to come out of it stronger and better marketers.
But I also think it's really being clear on what's above the line,
what's the below line, what are the trade-offs if we don't fund X,
Y, and Z.
Unfortunately, palm trees and stuffies aren't
the below lines for me right now.
But I think just being hyper clear,
like, hey, if we cut that budget,
we might not be able to deliver the number of leads
that we were thinking in for our lower segments.
And if we don't do that, sales is
going to have to make up that gap.
And just I think being really clear on what those trade-offs are
and saying, be very neutral about it.
As a shareholder, these I am concerned that we're not
going to hit our target in X. I think
you're going to get a way better response than being
like, why is marketing always get the short end of the stick?
And why are we just constantly moving stuff to sales
or whatever the dynamic is at your company?
I think if you can be calm and measured about it
and very practical with numbers and say, hey, this
is what we'll get for this spend and this is what we won't,
you're going to have--
to Sarah's point, you're going to build more trust
with those stakeholders over time.
Yeah, and I think it's kind of simple, right?
It goes back to communication.
It goes back to being data-driven.
Sarah Verney, I was curious about you guys,
because attentive, you guys are blowing up right now.
I've seen you guys make all these big brand plays,
big billboards on the 101.
You just had a huge conference.
Was it your thread conference?
How are you thinking about those big investments?
Because you guys have burst onto the scene.
And it isn't a natural time to want to pull back
once you have this momentum.
So how are you guys thinking about it at attentive?
Well, I think we're going back to these good bets.
Being really mindful about where you're placing those bets.
When we went and bought, went through the process
of buying our out-of-home placements,
we went and went super pop culture,
touristy, center of the world type stuff.
Like, right in the middle of Times Square.
And we had a bunch of salespeople take pictures with it
and share it all on their social networks.
Like, we didn't go and spray and pray
a bunch of different places.
Or we went close to events where we knew a lot of our audience
was already going to be, and they were likely to go
and share the content.
So I think it's-- I still believe you definitely
will always want to have that short and long game.
And you just have to figure out how can I--
those ratios might change a little bit right now
in this environment when you really have to put your dollars
to work.
But I think with the remaining budget
that you have to still think about how to invest in brand
and think about how to invest in those long-term tactics,
you just want to be really smart with how you can make those
dollars go as far as possible.
I mean, I always think that there's a--
people think that there's pipeline generating activities
and then non-type line or brand.
I think of it as all connected.
I mean, everything we do, especially in B2B marketing,
is in the service of pipeline.
Even the brand things that we do.
Even the palm trees and the music and dream force,
I mean, it all matters.
And people are like, we all buy with emotion.
That doesn't matter.
They ultimately do feed pipeline at the end of the day.
The challenge, I think, for us as marketers
is that we're in this world of art and science.
And the science part of marketing is really complicated.
I mean, it's hard to explain all the nuance of what we do
to people that aren't in the trenches with us every day.
And I think one of the things marketers claim
to be great storytellers, we have
to be great storytellers and educators inside the company
about how marketing works.
And so I invest a lot of time to try and explain
whatever programs that you're doing,
already you mentioned segments like understanding
the different segments behaving different ways,
different marketing channels behaving different ways.
All of that stuff matters when you're showing up
to your CFO hat in hand.
If they understand the mechanics of what we do,
they're much more likely to greenlight that initiative
or that budget for that new program.
- That's great.
I think you guys all have the shared sentiment
of like bring them along for the ride,
bring them into the journey, create a partnership
so that it feels like they're kind of bought
into what you're doing.
Scott, I'd love to ask you the same question,
thought spot, you guys are one of the most modern brands.
You're a brand I look to all the time for your website,
for your videos, for your conferences,
your beyond conferences in the spring.
How are you kind of looking at priorities for 2023?
Are you toning down everything from a brand perspective?
Are you keeping it full throttle,
knowing that it creates this halo for pipeline generation?
- Well, even if I try to turn it down,
I think our creative team and our brand team
would always be trying to dial it up.
It's funny when folks have passion around something,
you can't hold them back to some degree,
but I'm in a thought spot as an analytics platform.
We're in a hyper-competitive space,
actually, Sarah Franklin and I compete
with one of her many products on this dimension.
- Friendly competition, it's good.
- But it couldn't be more important time for analytics.
And so even though the macro climate is not great right now,
analytics, people need it even when they're going down,
they need to study those numbers
just as much as when they're going up.
And so we haven't really seen any major impact there.
I think people are making your work a little harder
to justify spend, but that's generally good practice anyway.
So in terms of where we're focused,
I think for us, it's less about the macro conditions
and more about, we've historically,
and you know this more, you've been following us for a while,
like we sold to generally the Fortune 500,
the Global 2000, like really big companies.
And recently we just started selling
to basically everybody, we've launched a $99 a month product.
And so I am really focused on that whole segment worldview
and what worked in terms of big ABM tactics
for the Coca-Cola's and the apples of the world
are not necessarily going to work
for the 10 person startup down the street.
And those tactics and how we allocate dollars to them,
like that's actually the conversation I'm having
with our CFO right now, because as you ramp
new businesses, new segments, the mechanics are different
and everybody needs to understand how those mechanics vary.
So that's where I'm spending a lot of my time
deep in data justifying those investments by segment.
- I would just add on to that,
- Oh yeah, go ahead. - We're going to go quickly
on analytics where we tend to focus
on the marketing tactic analytics.
There's a lot more analytics as well
or just around your organization,
which are so important to pay attention to
in terms of what people are doing,
where they're investing their time.
And there's a lot better ways now to look at that.
And the percentage of your budget between program,
head count, what you're spending on, what you've augmented,
head count with contractors and things like that.
And that's another thing, which as a CMO,
you have to have a really strong understanding
of the business that you're running in your team
so that you can have that strategic conversation
of where you need to be growing and investing
and what asks you're asking for,
if you really need head count or if you really need program
and how to balance that through the year
so that you can also work with your finance business partner
to not just be given a bunch of money at one point in time
and then have to just go big on some paid media
or something at the end of a quarter,
but really so you can balance those things out.
So there's a lot of strategy in your budget planning
and your workforce analytics.
So you need to not just look at like how well
your marketing is doing.
You really need to look at how well you're performing
as a marketing organization.
- I think that's a great segue to my next question,
which is thinking about your marketing organizations
and your teams.
You guys all have big teams
and this has been a trying year to lead teams.
How have you guys kind of taken your teams
through these shaky times, your internal marketing teams?
And how do you think about leading with optimism
and getting them excited for next year?
We talk about the fact that for a lot of people
in the workforce, this is their first downturn
they've experienced.
So how do you guys think about leading as a CMO
and keeping your team motivated
as the world around us has changed a lot this year?
- I'll take it.
- Okay, you guys got?
- Well, I mean, we're in this climate
of doing more with less and that's a tough time to be a leader
and we all find ourselves going from pandemic leadership,
which for me personally was the hardest thing I've ever done.
Trying to lead teams remotely.
We changed a bunch of things
and aren't going to market during that time
and that was trying.
And now we're entering this new era of down economy
and it's hard also.
And so I think the number one message
that I've been giving my team is about focus.
And it's easy to say we need this, we need this,
and I keep telling them push back on me.
These are the priorities.
We've just gone through our whole v2 mom process,
which we all learned and loved from Salesforce days.
And I've spent a lot of time on that
and I'm asking my team to push back on me
and say these are the things that matter,
let's debate what the priorities are.
And then if you find yourself working on something
that isn't on the priority list
as we've outlined it, challenge me, push back.
And that, it's a forever battle.
It's one of those things I think when times were tough
as leaders we got to over communicate
and communicate and communicate.
But that's the normal thing for me is focus
because I feel the tension in the team
and the only thing we can say is like,
okay, it's not like we're never going to do that,
but maybe we can push that out a little bit.
And that's, you kind of got to fall back on that
as the play is opposed to like, okay, let's give up.
You got to move forward.
- No giving up ever.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Right now it's one.
- I completely agree.
Like V2 Mom's so important,
having clear prioritization, focus, all of that's so important.
What I would say in addition as,
in this group is one that leads from the front,
you're there with your team, you do all those things.
A shift, I will say, is that I'm a huge believer
in in person right now.
We are coming off of two years of people being away
from each other, away from a culture.
The serendipitous conversations that you would have
just five minutes here, five minutes there,
you don't get that in the digital world.
And it's very interesting because people very much
like think they want something,
but it's different than what they need.
And a lot of people want to be at home
to have the flexibility to not have the commute,
to do the lot, like it's all great,
but you don't understand, I didn't understand until really
recently how much we need to be together,
to learn from each other, to connect with each other.
It doesn't mean that you have to be in the office every day,
eight to five or nine to five or whatever,
but that has been a shift that we've been really purposely
working on, which is getting people back into the office
and getting people and our get back with our customers
in person.
And I think that that is the next step level change for us
coming out of the pandemic.
- What do you do there?
- What's typical, like are you back two days a week,
three days a week, five days a week?
- It's interesting if I'm in,
if I'm home, like meaning in my home area,
I'm in the office, unless it's maybe a Friday or something,
but I've balanced that with being out with customers
and traveling, so I've done a fair amount of traveling.
I know Varney you've done some traveling,
you go to New York fair bit.
- Just getting together with the moments that matter too.
I think there are certain things in marketing
that are like, they're possible to do on Zoom.
It's just a terrible experience.
Like I don't know if you guys have written a keynote on Zoom,
it's awful.
And so like, I think of course we just don't,
there's not money ran out of the sky to do off sites
everywhere.
We're primarily a remote organization and attentive,
but if we have something coming up that needs a level
of collaboration and getting in front of a white board
and thinking through some creative challenges,
I've really tried to figure out how we can get in person
and tackle some of that live.
'Cause even if you're gonna, you know,
spend those dollars to get everyone the same place,
it's gonna be much more efficient than having, you know,
15 people on 20 Zoom meetings to achieve the same thing
you could do in two hours live.
- I think you guys are right.
That's what's motivating right now is remembering
it's about like the relationships and the people
and working on projects and getting your hands dirty.
That's what will kind of carry people through.
Sara Verde for you, how are you thinking about leading
your teams to these kinds?
- Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with everything
that Sarah and Scott said.
I think getting people to think about new ways to engage.
You know, I think about, you know,
prioritization, how important that is right now.
I think the one thing I'd add is just,
I'm trying to reward creativity wherever I can.
And I try to remind people that some of the best companies,
best software companies in the world,
were born in these crazy times of uncertainty.
Salesforce being one of them.
Salesforce started in 1999, right before the dot-com bust.
And, you know, I think that I'm trying to encourage people
to think outside of the box,
think about how we can be investing in things
that are pretty much free except for the people resource.
Like, how do you think about,
this is a great time to clean up your SEO strategy
and to start, you know, really investing in content.
This is a great time to really think about
how you can engage your super users to go do your bidding
for you and get more reach.
And so wherever I can, I'm really trying to encourage
my employees to think about, you know,
how we can do more with less, really.
- That's awesome.
- And I think about what Bernie just said is that,
it's something I love about her is that she's super fun.
And so when you're embracing creativity,
it's like, we need to have fun,
do more with less, but still have fun doing it, right?
And we work hard, but we can have fun at the same time.
And that's what we'll engage your employees to.
And so, you know, this is one of the funnest bunches here.
It's, we used to have a lot of fun in the office, you know,
with silly things, even with just having little headbands
at your desk or, you know, whatever you do,
like that type of, that type of fun.
And I love Barney Hays said rewarding the creativity
because there's a lot of fun creative ideas
that people can bring.
- That's great.
I know we're almost at time, but in terms of what I'm doing,
just do recently more, he like just like Halloween thing.
(laughs)
- Very cool.
- So, my studio, Stan Darcy is our talent.
Starkey might leave us for Hollywood soon.
(laughs)
But we have, we have just a few, but it's left,
but I'd love to wrap.
You guys are talking about motivation
and motivating your employees.
We have an audience here full of CMOs and revenue leaders,
and they're looking for motivation for 2023
as we kind of tackle a new year.
Any sage advice that can kind of be lightning round
as to how you think CMOs should be thinking about pipe gen
going into 2023, or kind of where their head should be at
as we go into a new year.
Scott, I'll start with you.
- Let's see.
So, I mean, there are two interesting trends
on my mind right now, and they're kind of juxtaposed,
sort of competing for brain space.
And one is that, you know, it's been said
that every company is becoming a media company.
And if you look at what Salesforce has done
and Sarah with Salesforce Plus,
like we're all trying to put out this amazing high-end content
to inspire our buyers and you're kind of like
really trying to punch up.
And then you've got this other thing on the horizon,
which is AI-generated content,
which is done by a machine and lacks, you know,
I think by most people's estimation,
that lacks some of the finesse and some of that,
you know, connective tissue to get people excited and emotional.
And so I'm trying to get my head around these two things
and be like, when do I, you know,
how do I think about them at the same time?
And I think both are massive trends
that we need to be taking advantage of,
but how you do that and how you place your bets
needs to be thought out carefully.
- And how about you, Varney?
Any, I'm going by last name, you know,
'cause it's just easier.
Any advice for kind of the crowd
of what you think CMO should be focused on
as we wrap up the year and go into 2020?
- Yeah, I mean, I would just say, you know,
expect the unexpected.
This market is moving fast and, you know,
just from a general management perspective,
I would think about how you can leave like 10 to 20% of slack
in your roadmap for next year.
Like if you think about, if we go back a year in time,
it was like omnichron central.
We were all still doing like virtual wine-tape things, you know,
like, and just think like how different the environment is
we're living in today.
So, you know, I think to the extent that you can save a little
slack for your team in the case that,
who knows what's coming?
I'm not saying a global pandemic,
but we just don't know like what's going to happen
from an inflation standpoint, from a market standpoint.
And I think to the extent that you can be agile
and flexible and move to that
and move to where your customers are,
the better off you're going to be as a team.
- 100%.
Sarah Franklin, I will be you.
- Everything that they've said,
I would say to add on, just be steady in your strategy.
Whether, like as Scott said, you're, you know,
wanna be a media company, you have, you know,
really highly produced content or, you know,
community created content.
That content has a purpose.
It's to create people subscribe into your brand
and building your first party data strategy
and building that out.
So whatever the tactics are, don't lose sight of your strategy.
And as Varnie said, be flexible, be sane.
Know that, you know, tough times don't last,
tough people do, and we'll all get through it.
And so there's more to life than, you know, only pipeline.
Although that we do live and breathe by the pipeline.
But that's where, you know,
you can tap to and building a CMO network in CUNY is so important.
Whether you're a CMO, whether you're head of marketing,
whether you do demand gem, whether you do creative,
tap your brother's sister friend in the industry
is ever more important and keep yourself steady.
'Cause it's gonna be tough times, but we'll get through it.
- That's great.
Well, I think that's a great note to end on.
And I think it's important that everybody
who's in the industry is ever more important
and keep yourself steady.
And I think it's important that everybody connects
with each other, looks to each other, learns from each other.
'Cause it's easy to get heads down in your own world,
in your own business, and to learn from each other.
So we feel so grateful that you guys are able to join us
for pipeline summit.
Scott, Sarah, Sarah, what an all-star lineup.
It was so fun to reconnect and just hear kind of where your heads
are at from a CMO standpoint, especially as we wrap up the year
and go into 2023.
So a ton of valuable nuggets in this session.
And we will see you guys soon. Thanks so much.
- Thanks for having us more.
- Thank you.
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