The Venn Diagram of Content Marketing
Gerardo A Dada discusses his ungated content strategy and the Venn diagram of content marketing as well as sticking to your ICP.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Harada Haru.
Doing great. Thank you, Ian.
Plus, you're being here with you.
Excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat marketing,
catch point and everything in between.
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First question, Harada, what was your first job in marketing?
Well, I have a bit of a unique story.
I became a marketer.
I decided to become a marketer when I was in middle school.
I read this book called "The Positioning,
The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Rice and Jack Trout.
I was a kid that loved reading.
When I read that book, I said,
this book about combined psychology and strategy and business,
a lot of stuff, so I decided to be a marketer.
At the time, I decided to start my own business,
and naturally, I focused on the marketing side.
I was an entrepreneur for the first part of my life.
Then, after I got married in 1998,
I told my new wife that just like an actor needs to go to Hollywood,
a technology marketer needs to go to the Silicon Valley or the Silicon Hills,
so we moved to Austin.
That's when I got my first job officially as a marketer working for a different
company.
I love that.
Fly forward to today. Tell me what it means to be CMO of CatchPoint.
Well, I think today, there are different types of marketing leaders.
There are some that I would call more operational leaders or folks more on the
band generation.
There are some CMOs that just think about the marketing function.
I think there's a big opportunity for marketers to become
the right-hand partners for the CEO,
to take a more active role in the strategy of the company.
If you look at the world marketing, we're supposed to be the experts on the
market.
That means we need to own the knowledge about who are buyers,
who are competitors or alternatives,
what are the market opportunities, what are the underserved markets,
how to grow, like the job description of a marketer in short is growth.
If you take that approach as opposed to taking the traditional functional
approach
of what marketing is, which is maybe generating leads for some companies,
or running the website, or there are a lot of CMOs that come from a brand
perspective.
At least from my perspective on the technology side,
a CMO means that you're the person leading the charge in terms of growth,
and in terms of helping the company position itself,
and position itself for growth and become successful in the market.
Every interaction in the market is owned by the CMO.
I think CEOs and even boards of the directors are in dire need
for somebody who can bring that perspective to them,
and somebody they can trust with that knowledge.
Yeah, I love it. I couldn't agree more, and I think I love the definition of
Chief Market Officer.
I think that, and I've talked about this a bunch on the show,
that sort of sales job is to close the deals that are happening,
whereas the marketing job is to understand what conversations need to be
happening,
what the conversations need to be happening to the market broadly,
to all of your different communities broadly, to the different types of
communities,
how are you bringing your message into that market?
Was the market ready to receive that type of information,
or how should they be receiving it, what platforms should they be receiving on?
It is a much more strategic function.
Not even saying it's more strategic than sales, or more important,
but it is interesting that for so often,
it has been just like, "Hey, it's Legion," and that's it, when clearly that was
never the case.
That's true. A lot of people think that marketing is advertising,
and they ask about, "How can a company grow without marketing?"
Well, they can't. You can be successful without advertising, without spending
money on advertising,
but not without marketing. Even if it's implicit in your strategy, you have to
do marketing.
And as to your point, it is critically important that the marketer takes that,
it's truly a more strategic perspective than sales. It doesn't mean that it's
more important
in sales, so that the job is easier or more difficult, but marketers need to
think long-term.
If you're in sales, you think about the quarter, maybe this quarter or next
quarter,
and that doesn't mean your job is not important and difficult. It just means
that that's typically
the mindset. You're trying to close a quarter, and then you start at zero, the
next one,
where it's in marketing, you need to think about, "Well, how do I help my sales
team close this quarter,
and how do I position myself for the rest of the year, and where does the
company go for the next
five years, and what are all the elements in the market from you to a point?
Communities,
influencers, press, competitors, people, how do you influence all those factors
in the market
to give your company the best chance of being successful?"
I love it. Okay, let's get to the first segment, "The Trust Tree." This is
where we go and feel
honest and trusted, and you can share those deepest, darkest, pipeline secrets.
What does CatchPoint do?
So, we are the company that the internet relies on when it needs to rely on the
internet.
Let me explain that. We built the company's been on for 14 years. Our CEO is to
be a practitioner,
a double click later acquired by Google, and when he left the company, he built
the tools that he
wished he had when he was working at double click and later at Google. So, what
the company does is,
we have a very deep and detailed view of the internet. We use a number of
different tools,
probably the most interesting one is called synthetic monitoring, which means
imagine having secret shoppers, like a robot basically acts like a secret sho
pper that is testing
every part of the internet. So, for example, right now it's testing my computer
connection
between my computer and my router, router to AT&T, and all the information all
the way back to
Google or whatever this is, this podcasting technology is hosted. So, if you're
a large company,
you're relying on the internet for everything. In the past, companies used to
rely on technology
that was on your IT department, which was typically a closet in your building.
Now, everything's in
the cloud. So, I used to work in the early days of the cloud with a company
called Rackspace,
that was kind of the pioneers of the cloud. I used to think, restaurants are
probably going to be the
last business to adopt the cloud. But if you think about now, without the
internet, you cannot use
Yelp to find the restaurant. You cannot use Google Maps to drive to the
restaurant. You cannot
do a QR scan to look at the menu. The app that the server uses cannot be used
to enter the stuff
in the menu. There's no communication back to the kitchen. There's no way to
present you with a bill.
There's no way to charge your credit card. So, all those things in a restaurant
, which is pretty
much an offline, like in-person business, when you think about businesses like
Amazon or Sony or,
you know, e-commerce stores, they depend so much on the internet. So, we are
the company they rely
on to make sure that every aspect of the internet they need to rely on is
working.
From, you know, the core of the internet, their ISPs, their cloud systems, etc.
It's a pretty unique
technology, very different from anything else that is out there. And what are
your customers,
what are those type of companies? It's a great question because I find that
many marketers
fail to be very clear in defining their ideal customer profile. That's one of
the first things
we did when I joined the company with my team. So, we decided we're going to
focus on 6,000
companies only. We picked the top 100 of those that we want to be like our top
target customers
in four segments. If structure means cloud infrastructure like AWS or Google or
Microsoft
Azure, second e-commerce like Walmart or Amazon, third SaaS companies like
Netflix or any of those,
and then fourth financial services. And we picked those because we already had
some traction in
those industries and because we felt like those will be the companies that rely
most on the
internet so the ones will see more immediately the value we bring. We're trying
to follow this
strategy called the bowling alley from Joffrey Moore, which is one of the
greatest students
of technology marketing. Instead of trying to go after the entire market, you
pick one bowling
pin, imagining a bowling alley, right? You pick one bowling pin and when you
have enough to dominate
that market, then you look for the next two adjacent bowling pins. So, that's
what we did. We started
with infrastructure. Today, for example, most marketers are familiar with the
CDNs. Every CDN
now their uses catch point to monitor their performance and even to show their
performance to their
customers. So now after that, we're going after the next three pins behind that
. And the second
part is that not only defining your ICP, but also having the discipline of
being truth to that
definition, meaning from a sales perspective, of course, we will be opportun
istic and take some
other opportunities. But in terms of the ICP today, that definition for target
customers defines
our marketing strategy. What media do we go after? What events we attend, etc.
Because it's easy
just comparing the attendance or the audience of a particular channel with the
ICP definition or
those 6,000 companies that we're going after. I love it, Pareto, music to my
ears. Because,
you know, like when we sit down with a customer, a cast me and we talk about
like, hey, let's make
a podcast or a video series or something like that. That's the first question.
Okay, what's your ICP?
Tell us a little bit more about the ICP dig in there. What's the number of
accounts that you care
about? Okay, what are the top 100 accounts? Literally, I had to say that
exactly, like every single
time. So funny, because so few people that you comparatively can answer all
those questions.
It's remarkable to me. It's such a basic marketing question, right? Such a
basic question. And it's
not only about ICP in terms of the company itself, it's also about who are your
buyers,
who are your persona, right? It's also very important to understand not only
who are those
personas, but what are their titles? How they think? Because, you know,
nowadays, especially in B2B,
you're selling to committees, right? Like it's not one buyer's, multiple buyers
. And each buyer has
different filters or different criteria in how they're going to evaluate your
company. And even
if you don't have that empathy, that truly the understanding of their emotional
side,
then you have less chance of being successful. Because at the end of the day, I
believe that
people buy emotionally and then they justify their decisions rationally. I've
seen that in my career
for, you know, for maybe like $6 coffee cup all the way to companies making
billion dollar investments.
100%. I mean, it's sacrilege to even think that it's not that way, you know,
like, that, you know,
you're exactly right. And you're going to like our next question because it is
about the buying
committee. And it's part of the reason why we structured the beginning of the
show exactly how
we structure this is because if I don't understand, you know, what your company
does, who you're
selling to, what are the personas within that, how you structure your team,
then asking how you,
how you spend your money doesn't matter at all. Because who cares if, if, if R
ardo is targeting,
you know, SMBs, I don't care how he spends his money, it is matter to me how he
spends his
money if he's starting SMBs, if I'm selling enterprise advice for us. Exactly.
100%.
Anyhow, how do you, what's your buying committee look like? What are those
personas look like?
So it's, it's also a great debate that we've had internally, or I think many
marketer struggle
with, right? Because it's, it's easy to try to go to the sea level decision
maker, right?
Everybody in technology selling to the CIO or to the CISO used to be in
cybersecurity,
my previous job. And when people said, let's go after the CISO, he's ultimately
the, the, the,
the biggest decision maker. So like, yeah, but there's another 8,000
cybersecurity companies
going after that same person. So the chances of you talking to that person are
going to be
fairly minimal. And you need to make sure that your, your problems that you're
solving are
relevant to that buyer. On the other side, you don't want to be going too
tactical, right?
Because unless your product is, let's, it leads itself to be sold tactically on
a PLG product
growth basis. We, we've recently implemented this sales methodology called
command or the
message. And one of the principles is you get delegated to the person you sound
like.
And that's why it's so important to understand your target buyer. So in our
case, we're targeting
either the VP of IT or, or the VP of server ability. But at the end of the day,
what we're looking
for is not, is not necessarily who do we want to sell, but who's really going
to become our champion,
right? And, and I use champion in, in a very deliberate way. I, I encourage all
my marketing
peers to read the champion sale from Richard Rivera. He, he, obviously is
somebody who
trains sales teams and advises sales teams. But understanding what, what's
really that concept of
a champion means it's somebody who's going to be your advocate and who has
access to the economic
buyer. So it's not the economic buyer. Is somebody who, who are going to have a
vested interest
in solving a problem where they will be willing to partner with you to, to
bring that technology
into the company. And he's going to be the champion, meaning working with
procurement and working with
security in, and letting you about challenges on roadblocks and, and basically
working one-on-one
with your company to make sure that this is a joint project that it becomes
successful.
I love that. It's such good advice. Great book recognition as well. And I think
that
another thing that you don't hear a lot of is sort of that idea of, of who is
your,
who is your champion and what, what are they seeking? You know, what is the
thing? And like,
if it's, I've always say this, but it's, uh, sometimes that thing is getting
promoted.
Sometimes that thing is like going from senior director to VP is a huge step
for anyone to get
to that level, right? So it's like, you're, if you're the best company in the
world at helping,
you know, IT senior directors get promoted to VP, that's a valuable position to
be, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely. But you also need to think what would, what we need to
do as a company
for that senior director to help them get promoted, right? Right. And it's
super satisfying. We just
had somebody in Germany, a big company that a lot of people recognize the, our
champion got
promoted. And, and he, he said, like we, I got promoted thanks to the work I
did with you guys.
And, and that's very fulfilling, right? Professionally and, and at a personal
level as well.
I love that. Um, how do you, how do you structure your marketing team?
Well, I think my, my team is, is fairly standard in terms of I have a small
group that is,
there's customer marketing. Any time you're selling SaaS, which is most
software, you,
you can, you need a customer marketing team. I have a demand generation team
that includes also our
content, um, and operations and content means not necessarily the creation of
content, but the,
the publication, also meaning website and, uh, and, and all the creation of
asset graphic design,
etc. that support the demand generation. And then I have a product marketing
team that
owns competitive intelligence and it's aligned, uh, by based on the skillset of
that team,
based on different types of solutions that we sell. Uh, I come from a product
marketing background
myself and I think it's really important that as a company, you need to decide
if it makes sense
to do audience marketing, product marketing or solutions marketing. And, and
depending on how,
how you sell and what your portfolio looks like and sometimes a combination
might be the right one.
And, and last, I also recently, as of probably six months ago, inherited
acquisition sales as well.
So now as a marketer, I own everything from the Korean awareness from PR,
the manger and SDR all the way to closing deals and then a separate team knowns
the expansion,
right? So it's, it's full accountability. There's no finger pointing at all, uh
, to anybody else,
except for to myself. Love that. Uh, and then final question, uh, for our trust
tree here.
What's your marketing strategy? We, we've obviously with, with a targeted list
of customers like we do,
we follow an ABM strategy, right? So rather than, uh, fishing for customers
with a net,
we're fishing with a spear spear gun. Um, we are very deliberate about the
companies we want to go
after and we, we do two things that I think are fairly unique or maybe
unconventional to me,
make their common sense. The first thing we did is we, when I joined the
companies, we
ungated all our content. Being a relatively small company, awareness and brand
are critically
important for us, right? The first thing we want to be is be considered. So
when, when a company
needs to solve a problem, like the type of problems that we solve, we want to
be one of the first
companies they think about. And so if we put our content behind a wall gate, uh
, then that's friction.
Against that, right? I've done this in, in the past in my career. So what I did
when,
when I joined the company, I actually ran myself a campaign on LinkedIn. I, I
went very detailed on,
on, on, who was the idea of customer, I, and they built a campaign offering a
free gardener paper,
a white paper. So it's third party, very high reputation, very valuable. And I
measured
normally the click rate to the page, but also the completion of the form. And
what was really
surprising is typically for every 100 people that visit a page, one person will
complete the form.
And in my experiment with my audience in this catch point, it was 400 to one,
meaning for,
for us, if we wanted to pursue a gated content strategy, we would be giving up
the opportunity
to influence 399 customers for every one customer we had the opportunity to
influence. And that,
for what? So that we can have a group of SDRs calling people that just wanted
to download
white paper and try to sell them, right? They, they didn't have any really
interest. So we changed
that completely and said, like, look, we're going to focus on our content
strategy, not on producing
volumes of content, but on producing a small number of highly valuable,
relevant pieces of
technical and educational content that we're going to set free and we're going
to make available to
anybody out there. Like, for example, we built a piece with a company like
Walmart, another large
retailer, it's about how to optimize your CDN, right? And, and we made it a
very high value
educational piece of content where it doesn't even mention our company until
the last page,
right? So it's really about helping the end user and building that trust that
we, we know the
stuff we're talking about. And, and so we, we set that content free and we
point at the end of the
document back to our website where they can find more resources. The second
resource in that chain
of, of, of content that a prospect might be interested in, it still is
educational and technical
and valuable, but it starts introducing our company and how we can help solve
some of those
problems. And then we start making content that makes our, the opportunity to
engage with,
with our company a little bit more evident, like, request the demo as for
pricing,
Nebraska technical question. And so we, our sales team does not engage with
leads. We don't do
lead scoring. We, we go to a trade show and we don't scan people at random.
Like I used to go
previous companies, it was a contest of who can scan the most people, right?
And you,
you have your scanning gun and you're trying to scan even the, the, the service
people or students
or whomever, right? So, so now, you know, I was in London recently at a trade
show and somebody said,
hey, can I get one of your touch keys? I forgot t-shirt or something we're
giving away. So like,
sure, here you go. And the person naturally says, say, do you want to scan my
badge? It's like,
no. And the person was confused. Like, what, what do you mean? It's like, you
don't even know what
we do. Why would I scan you? Do you want to have five emails and five calls
from RZR?
No. And, and for me, why would I have my SDR team calling you if you have zero
interest in our
products and technology, right? So it's a complete waste of time on both sides.
So we came up with this,
with this concept of, look, we're only going to focus on, on what we call high
intent marketing
qualified leads. And, and, but what, what I mean by high intent is, is one,
there are a member of
the ICP. Right. So both company and title. So the, the company is part of our
target list. And the
title is one of the personas we want to talk to. Second, that person has done
some level of research,
meaning that person has red white papers, red videos, been to our website
multiple times. And,
and three, that person is actually asking us for something. Right. So that's
the intent. I have
an intent to evaluate your product. Not intent as, as many of the ABM vendors
will let you believe,
right? Like they, they read up an article that is loosely related with your
company. So, hey,
you have an intent lead. And in this case, is we, we know this person is
interacting multiple times
and they're explicitly asking for something as the next logical step in their
evaluation criteria.
And, and the consequence of that is, is one, our prospects allow the idea of
being able to explore
on their own without marketing or salespeople trying to nudge them and force
them to do things that
are not natural or at their own pace. But the other side that's very powerful
is that our sales
teaming, even the SDRs, instead of having to call 700 leads from a trade show,
they focus on the 25
people that spend 30 minutes with us with whom we have a very specific
conversation. We evaluated,
they have a problem we can help them with. And they asked us, hey, can you help
us set up a
meeting? Can I talk to your technical guys? Do you, you know, technical
questions, etc? So our
SUS team then can do a lot more research about that company, about their needs,
about their strategy,
and how we can help them and have more meaningful, valuable conversations with
those customers.
That's very different from companies like, you know, $1,000 bribe to accept the
meeting, right? I get
those same as like, hey, we'll give you a free Columbia jacket if you spend 20
minutes with my
sales guy. And it's like, you know, I could donate the jacket to a shelter or
something, but it's
a waste of time for both sides. Like my time is more valuable than that. And I
feel bad taking your
jacket and your time, I'm really not interested. So you're really to a point, b
ribing customers to
take on natural actions when they're not really neither leads or qualified,
none they have intent.
So it's a little bit of gaming the system as a marketer.
So I first of all, I love everything that you said,
hard of 100% in agreement with everything you said. The final piece about sort
of like bribing
to people, I think that that's a really successful strategy for some folks and
I've
and I've seen it work really well. But I think that the execution, it's all
about execution, right?
Where it's like, sure, if you're, if you're buying a sales conversation that
you said is high intent,
then 100%, it's worth the 100 bucks. It's like, if you're buying a conversation
to give someone,
you know, 100 bucks, like that doesn't make you anything. Well, I love that
type of play for is like
the, um, hey, try us again for the first time messaging, where it's like, hey,
you used to be a
customer and you guys have been away from us for a handful of years. Products
totally change,
stuff is new, like, do you want to come back and just, you know, we can have a
conversation,
we'll, and we'll give you the free thing. If not, no worries at all. And then
at least you can
have a conversation that's a little bit more productive to say, you know, we
quit because you
didn't have, you know, whatever. It's like, oh, well, wouldn't you know, that's
a feature that we
have now, you know, or whatever it is. But at least, you know, some type of,
you know, reference
points. So anywho, I can let me make a comment to that because you made a
really good point that
there are some products and some instances where that might be the right
strategy.
If your market is very broad and your product has a very low barrier to trying
it and it's
highly sticky, then it might be worth it, right? Like there's a company called
No Relic in our
space that for years they offer a free t-shirt for creating an account. But
they knew that by
creating an account, a lot of developers will try it out and they knew that a
high percentage of
those people who try it out will end up liking the product and subscribing,
even if it's a free
account. But they didn't, what's important about doing that is that you're not
creating the illusion
that that's a lead. You know exactly what are the chances of that person being
in your target
customer and what are the conversion that you expect from there to become an
actual customer.
I've also been in a marketing team that I should remain unnamed. Very similar
strategy.
We needed more downloads or PQLs in that case. And so we created a ton of very
cool t-shirts.
And we artificially inflated what we would appear like demand, but it was not
real demand.
To the extent that, you know, we're selling to ITs or IT departments like the
shirt so much,
they created dummy email accounts so they could get more shirts. And so
literally there was cake
at the end of the month to celebrate the high number of leads and the sales
team missed their
number because they had a high number of people that had zero interest in
buying, right? So if
you're going to do that, it's worth doing as long as it's strategic, you know
the conversion rates,
and you have maybe an interesting step in place to indicate who from all these
people that we
bribed are the ones who are really interested that we think can convert to
customers.
And then doing the math to make sure that that makes sense from a business
perspective.
Gosh, couldn't agree more. You know, they say the best podcasts have a little
bit of a descent,
but I sure can't find it with you so far. Let's get to our next segment, the
playbook.
For you, open up your playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win.
What are your
three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable bunch of items?
Well, so anybody who is going after an ABM strategy, my three tactics would be
content.
Second would be, I call it loosely intent, which is basically, I would not even
call it intent.
I say like people who have a little bit of a signal that they might have some
loose interest in the topic, and the third one targeted marketing which can be
done
through LinkedIn or something like that. So those would be like those that
three schools
foundational. In the side of content, I already mentioned it's ungated and all
that.
I believe that the best content marketing strategy, especially if you are in a
position
where you try to educate the market, you're trying to establish that leadership
is finding that space in the center of three concentric circles. One is what
your audience cares
about. The other one is what you know more than anybody else. The third one is
what the technology
or the point of views that will predispose your prospects to buy or increase
likelihood of them
to buy. I love that. That's really great. I spent my form in a few years in the
army. I was talking
about sort of fight where you can win. That second chunk that you talked about
there about the stuff
that essentially you have a unique piece on. I think it's so important because
so often,
when I say fight where you can win, it means what can only Caspian teach you. C
aspian studios can
teach you something that nobody else can teach you on this earth. Whether it's
we have some
proprietary data that we did, we have a study that we did, we have some
insights from our customers,
or something that is uniquely us, that someone couldn't really copy or they
could, but it just
wouldn't feel the same. If you have that, or you should have that, and if you
don't, you need to
figure it out. If you're creating content with that in mind, well, boy, nobody
's content is going
to be like yours because your content is wholly unique. I think that just so
often, people don't
want to do that. You're right, because especially now where our content teams
are driven by SEO
optimization. They all look for the hot keywords and they will outsource
content production.
With generative AI, it's so tempting to create a content farm that can spit out
tons of content,
pretty bad content, impersonal, pretty vanilla. But if you all do care about
publishing 10 articles per day, you can get it done fairly quickly. My take is
it's more
valuable to create one authentic, valuable, unique piece of content that is
going to be
closely tied to what makes unique. The way we plan our content is, I told my
team is like,
I don't care about a blog post every Tuesday, I don't care about a LinkedIn
post in the morning,
when in the afternoon, throw away the calendar. We'll post whenever we have
something useful to say.
That's the only rule. If a week goes by and we have nothing useful to say, that
's fine.
The worst thing we want to do is have a writer somewhere to write an article
about
recipes or something that is irrelevant. People then get trained to think when
cash from
publishers is going to be useless, we want to create the opposite, where every
time we post
something on LinkedIn or on our blog, people say, I want to read that article.
It just keeps
scrolling. The scrolling is endless in all social platforms, LinkedIn and
Instagram, wherever you are.
If your content doesn't hook people in the first two seconds, you're gone
forever. It's useless.
It's better to say, oh, I know this guy has something useful to say, so I'm
going to stop,
and I'm going to read this. If it's not relevant to me, at least I read the
first 10, 15 seconds,
and I can move on. You have a higher chance of having a true audience where you
have an ability
to influence the market versus just a publishing machine.
I totally agree. I talk about all the time, throw away the content calendar. It
's completely
useless. The reason why content calendars matter is because it helps us
organize our thought
leadership, not helps the customer organize how they want to think about buying
the product or
learning about the space or getting a new job or getting a promotion or
whatever. You need to optimize
your, those things for them and what they want to learn about, not just how you
want to create
content. One of the examples, building a series for someone is kind of like, it
's a very intimate
thing because you see how they're marketing. One of the things that we always
talk about is,
well, these are our themes for the year. You say, well, is this what your
customers care about?
Are they, well, we want to make sure we talk about this and that and this. It's
like, yeah,
I hear what you're saying. But at the same time, it's like, what is most
interesting to the audience
is this, this, and this? Shouldn't that be the thematic elements? And to the
final point there,
obviously, I love content so I can talk about this forever. But I think so
often people are trying
to think about what to write instead of how to deliver it in the best way.
Does it need to be delivered in a 30-second video? Does it need to be delivered
in audio format?
Does it need to be delivered in a short newsletter? Does it need to be
delivered in a long form?
You know, thing, does it need to be delivered picturally? Does it need to have
no words at all?
And those are the sort of things that you start thinking about instead of what
to write, how to
deliver it and how, what is the utility of the consumption of it? Oh, this
person is going to be
walking their dog. What should I be delivering them? You know, like, it just
changes how you
think about things. And then you don't think about, hey, what could I throw
into Chach EPT?
You think about, like, how could I deliver something that's exceptional to them
that they could get
all the information they need about, you know, about, you know, whatever,
containerized, whatever,
in, in, you know, five minutes a week or whatever. I completely agree with you.
So one of the things
we do around that is that we have five or six different key points of view. And
those points of
views are fairly extensive, right? So it's not just say something you're done.
It's a story and
it's a way of thinking and it's elaborate. So we constantly think about what is
the right hook to
get people to start reading about this? What are the right blog posts to get
people in that journey
to learn about this? What are those white papers or videos? What is the right
format to tell this
story? How can we improve our storytelling about this point of view? What are
the new
customer stories that we can add that illustrate the point of view and just
keep improving in those
points of view as opposed to this mentality that's just like let's just produce
more and more and
more, right? And so it's better to continue to focus and refine invest money
and time and resources
to refine your key content assets and make them better all the time than trying
to produce new
content assets all the time, especially when you have a B2B sales team. You
typically end up with
a sales library that has hundreds and hundreds of documents that nobody has the
time to even
categorize or read much less your customers. Okay, so that is your number one
uncutable budget
item is content. Correct, because in our case, we are trying to create a
category and we have a
fairly unique point of view. We're trying to educate people on like I used in
the example of the
restaurant, the importance of the internet, how things have changed and
everything is interdependent,
right? How after the pandemic, the majority of workers were remote, working
from home,
working from a hotel, and you need to be productive to do your job. And what's
interesting is that
market research shows that about 45% of remote users experience significant
digital friction on a
daily basis. In our case, because we're educating customers on why they need to
think about this
new category of solutions, we need to prioritize education. That's different
from selling a
category like I don't know if you were selling antivirus or CRM, companies know
that they need
those technologies. The only question is which one should I buy, right? Then
there might still be
an element of education on maybe the value of having a broader platform that
does more than CRM
or the latest antivirus technologies and detection systems, etc. But the more
that you are trying to
get people to think differently, the more important thought leadership and
content becomes.
100% agree. What are your other uncutable budget items?
Well, the second one I mentioned is targeted marketing paid advertising through
tools like LinkedIn,
right? Where you can set up either a list of companies, a group of industries,
company sizes,
a set of titles, and then target very specific people and show them those hooks
that you think
are going to get them to engage with the company. What I see in the market with
my colleagues in
marketing is that they typically have a part of marketing team that's really
smart about the market
and customers. Then they have the demand team that does their own thing and
tries to optimize,
but they are oftentimes forced to create their own content and make guesses. It
's a huge opportunity
to have those teams working together and develop continuously build this
culture of experimentation
and education internally to try new things, try new angles, try different hooks
or try different
phrases. Yeah, seriously. What about something that's maybe not working or
fading away or something
you're not going to be investing in? Well, like many companies, we went big
into social,
right? We had a Facebook account and we had an Instagram account and so on. At
this point,
we're not investing in those channels anymore. I think the challenge is that
there's two-fold.
One, marketing as we were saying is becoming more and more complex. There are
more ways to
interact with the market, more tools, more places where you need to be, more
things to be paying
attention to. The work of a marketer is never done. It's not like sales where
you close your
quarter or, I don't know, if you're in support, you close with your incidents
and you go home and
you have nothing else to do. In marketing, there's always more. More research,
more you can learn
from customers, more places where you could put your finger, more place where
you can interact with
the market. So that's on one side. And then on the other side, there's always
new technologies
and new shiny objects that distract us. Remember location-based marketing and
Facebook commerce,
an augmented reality and all those things that we're going to be in the future
of marketing.
Remember, we're supposed to be in the post-email era or the post-PC era as well
And the reality is that marketing has not changed that much. There's some
things that have evolved,
of course, like we talked about APM and some other things, but the foundational
things don't.
Well, it's really important to experiment and to think through the validity of
those technologies
and tools. It's important to recognize their tools to meet one objective, which
is growth.
How do you think about experiments and investing those little, "Hey, we're
going to try this,
we're going to try that. We're going to put 5% of our budget into this?"
I think it's mandatory. I think you need to spend maybe 5% or maybe less
depending how big your
budget is in experiments. An experience could be new channels, new messages,
new ways of thinking.
But the critical part about experiments is being very clear from the beginning
what is going to be the measure of success. And the measure of success cannot
be
likes or cannot be what are called a vanity metric. How many people clicked on
something?
We used to have at one of the companies I work for, we had a video that was
very funny.
It was super successful in terms of use. People loved it, but nobody was
interested in buying
anything. It's like the Super Bowl ads, right? Super Bowl ads are optimized for
entertainment,
not for influence. And I think that might be because advertising agencies make
money on
creativity awards, not on sales. Maybe they should change the compensation.
Really quick on that, I just want to jump in and say that. It's funny. We are
our companies
want a handful of different awards and things like that. And it's awesome when
you get awarded.
And I think it's more of a team thing. But I heard a marketer say this one time
that they're like,
"I want our team to win awards because I want our team to be award winning and
I want people to see
their impact on the marketing org that thinking creatively and doing things
like that can win
awards." But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is like, are we
driving pipeline?
How are we supporting sales? How are we influencing the market? Those sorts of
things that awards
are like, there's something else. They're this thing that can drive us to do
and to create and to
tap into that part of our brain. And when we put our cast-meant stuff out there
, I'm like,
"I don't mention that we have all these awards. Who cares? Who cares if we got
a webbie or not?
No one really cares." It's cool. As an example, I was working with one of the
leading consumer
electronic companies. And they were talking about their social media strategy.
And the guy who was
the director of social media said, "Our goal this year," and this is back in
the day, I'm thinking
2009. Our goal is to get to a million followers and ask them, "And then what?"
And he was like,
"What do you mean then what?" "Yeah, is that your goal? But then once you get a
million followers,
how are you going to use them?" It's like, "I don't know." But then what's next
? He said,
"Maybe two million followers?" Yeah, so I think marketers are going to be more
strategic to the
business as we were talking about the role of the CMO. The more they think
about the true
scoreboard for the business. In our case, my team in marketing, the managing
part of marketing,
the only scoreboard is revenue and growth. That's it. There's nothing else
matters. So if we say,
"Hey, we had a bunch of leads and name QLs," and we went to a trade show and I
don't know,
our article was picked up by this publication or whatever, it's completely
relevant if it doesn't
ring the cash register. And so back to your question, experiments need to be
measured in terms of
actual revenue. So you need to have the instrumentation, maybe not to know, but
at least you have a good
indicators that what you're doing is moving to the needle. And the reason why I
say not to know
is because the whole attribution thing is I think one of the things that needs
to go out.
My team is prohibited to say marketing source leads. And also there's not such
thing as cell
source leads. There's, because look, there's not one person who can buy from us
without talking
to sales and without going to our website. So everything is influencing us,
right?
It goes back to the idea that people buy emotionally. And so we recognize that
people buy emotionally
and that even if you ask people, "Why did you make that decision?" you cannot
really even acknowledge
the true reason for your decision making as a human. And then third, that about
70% of the purchase
process is what people call the dark funnel, right? So companies don't have
visibility into that.
Trying to make scientific decisions based on how a customer moves to the funnel
is absurd, to be
honest, right? Because we don't see any of that. You're just making guesses.
And if you rely on that
bad data, then your conclusions are likely going to be incorrect.
A good example, we did a study. I used to work at SolarWinds. And they said, "
Should we continue
investing in trade shows?" And they said, "Well, if we look at our attribution
data,
the answer is no." Because there's no direct attribution from a lead we got at
the trade show
to somebody actually buying. That efficiency was very, very low. So if I just
look at that data,
the answer would be, "Absolutely no. Let's kill those ratios. Never do a trades
how ever again."
However, if I interview customers and ask them, "Where did you first learn
about a company?"
the most common answer was "Tracios," right? And this was person-to-person,
right? 100% different
answer, right? So if you look at the qualitative scientific answer, the answer
is no. If you look
at the qualitative human response, the answer is yes, we need to do more of
those.
I'm extremely data-driven. I think we all should be. But data-driven does not
mean you just
follow the numbers. That's the whole point. Data-driven is not about following
the numbers. It is about
test, iterate, look at numbers, try to understand why the things are happening.
What are the reasons
why those things are happening? If you want to sit there and tell me, "Hey,
what we realized
with trade shows is that the T&E budget for our trade shows was so much money,
we are not ROI
positive on trade shows," okay, that's an interesting thing to say that like, "
Hey, that might not be
the case." It's incredibly complex. And I think it's reductive to just say, "Oh
, the data shows blank."
It's like, "Does it really?" And you're so right about that. In fact, I wrote,
I have a blog
that's called Adaptive Marketer. I wrote a blog post I think is now 10 years,
14 years ago,
called the Mirage of Data. And I built this one. Big data was a big thing. One
of those big trends,
both IT and marketing. And my writing was about this illusion that if we only
have more data,
we'll have the answer. But, well, I'm not suggesting that anybody just do
decisions based on the gut,
but at the same time, the assumption that the answer is always in the data
assumes that one,
you're capturing the right data, that your data is correct, and your data is
forward-looking,
where in reality is oftentimes the opposite. Companies, the problem is not that
they have
too little data, they have too much data. They don't know what to do with it.
And now with AI,
the risk is even bigger, right? They will ask this AI engine to analyze data
and come to conclusions
and take those conclusions as truth, where if the data that they're acting upon
is incomplete
or inaccurate or misleading, the conclusion is going to be equally incorrect.
We deal with this a lot with podcast stuff because people will start a podcast
series.
So first of all, they're like, what's the podcast strategy? I'm like, there's
no such thing as a
podcast strategy. What is your content strategy? AKA, what is your marketing
strategy?
Like, marketing is content. Every single thing in marketing is content. There's
nothing in
marketing that you do that does not have content. Someone wrote the copy or
created the stuff.
So there's content somewhere. First off, second off, this is just saying, what
is the audio-focused
portion of it or video-focused portion or whatever? And then how do you build a
series?
You're like, oh, we did a podcast three years ago. It didn't work. Like, oh,
let me go look at it.
It's like, oh, you did five episodes where you're some person on your team
interviewed random people
and you published them over the course of the year. Like, yeah, you're
confusing the execution
with the viability of a channel or tactic. Yeah. If you said, hey, we're going
to do some SEO stuff
and you wrote three blog posts and you're like, SEO doesn't work. Like, that's
the equivalent of
what people are doing, like constantly. That's very true. Well, you just did a
really bad job
at making a podcast. 100% of what you did. So anyways, like, and then so then
people will
dismiss the channel. And the same thing with events or the same thing with
newsletters or email or
whatever. The one thing that I will say though is the thing that drives me
crazy. I'm blanking on
the term when the planes come back that are full of bullet holes and yeah. And
then they, you know,
they're like, oh, all the these planes got shot up in the wings. We must be
getting hit on the wings
so they up armor all of the wings, but in reality, all the planes that didn't
come back,
survivors bias. Yeah, they do this survivors bias where it's like, hey, will we
source all
these deals from outbound? It's like, yeah, but you're getting a 1% response
rate,
pissing off 99% of people. So, and before you bring that, because that's
actually going
about your question about it, three non-negotiables. That's why I like to
invest my third one would be
in an ABM tool that is in 10 base because that gives me a little bit of
visibility in what I,
you know, another way of saying this in more visual ways is the dark side of
the moon, right?
You only see one side of the moon all the time, which is the type of the side
of the market that
you always interact with. The customers that see you at the ratios and the ones
that see you at
LinkedIn, what about customers that don't go to the ratios and are not on
LinkedIn? You're missing
on that dark side of the moon. So, you need to think holistically about the
market and make sure
that you take their voices into account from an overall market perspective.
Final segment here,
quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers just like how qualified
helps companies
generate pipeline quickly, go to Qualified.com to learn more. Qualified is the
best tool in your
entire toolkit. Go to Qualified.com to learn more if you use Salesforce, that
is, if you don't,
then don't worry about it. Harder, are you ready? Yeah, ready. What's a hidden
talent or skill
that's not on your resume? Curiosity is the main one. I'm just a natural,
naturally curious person.
So, I've listened to 400 audiobooks so far, and that's on top of paper books
and, you know,
ebooks and a bunch of other stuff. So, I think that that curiosity, which
manifests itself in
learning and reading is extremely powerful. What is a favorite book, podcast,
or TV show that you'd
recommend? I've read every marketing and strategy and business book that I can
get my hands on.
I have three that I recommend to a Remarketer. The first one, obviously, is
positioning the
battle for your mind because it's the book that helped me find my calling. And
it's a great book.
Those authors all rise in Jack Trout, they're phenomenal. And all their books
are pretty good.
The second one is predictably irrational. So, one of the things that fascinates
me about
marketing is that psychological side. So, Dan, I really is one of the leading
behavioral economists
and the experiments that he talks about and the irrationality of how people
make decisions,
I think, is fundamental for marketers to understand, but also understanding
that it's predictable,
meaning even though it's irrational, we behave the same way all the time, just
as irrational
all the time. And the third one is made to stick. That's another book by the
Heath brothers that
teaches marketers just to speak with clarity. I love it. If you weren't in
marketing or business at
all, what do you think you'd be doing? Part of me thinks I would be a
photographer, right? I don't
know if that's kind of like a dream job for most people. For me growing up, I
love
international geographic and love photography. I had my own dark room when I
was like 12 years old.
And so, for me, the idea of traveling around the world, taking pictures
and it's fascinating just capturing the natural beauty of the world we live in
is just incredible.
What's your best advice for a first-time CMO?
My best advice for a first-time CMO is to learn to think like a business person
. Don't think like
a marketer. I think it's good advice for every person in business to think like
your boss, right?
So if you're a CMO, you need to think like the CEO. In fact, you'll be better
if you learn to
think like the board. And it sounds easy, but it's really difficult. It
requires changing your mindset,
right? It's like marketing. You need to understand that's your audience, right?
What do they care
about? What is the language they care about? Do they care about leads? No. They
care about marketing.
No. They only care about growth, right? And profitability and other metrics. So
if you're trying to find
ways to learn how to think like your CEO, I encourage you to read some of the
financial
statements for publicly traded companies. Read their quarterly reports, their
investor
presentations, listen to their investor calls, subscribe to business magazines,
like what
ask your CEO? What do you read? What podcasts or books or websites or business
week, whatever
that is. And the more you think like the business, the more you can become that
right hand person
for the business. And the more they can become, instead of an operational
advertising or brand
CMO, you can become the CMO that is the engine for growth for the company. And
the CMO that is the
primary interface to the market that knows more about the market than anybody
else.
Prorardo, it has been wonderful having you on the show. Again, I can talk to
you for hours.
For listeners, you can go to catchpoint.com, check them out. This SRE report
2024 is out. You
can download your copy, all sorts of cool stuff to give an elbow to your VP of
IT. And tell them to
check out catchpoint if you're in a global 5000 company. Prorardo, any final
thoughts,
anything to plug? To plug, well, I enjoy writing on my blog. I haven't done
that in a while, but I
have a lot of all content or good content that I'm making a promise to keep it
updated.
Theadaptivemarketer.com. Yeah, some really good stuff on the adaptivemarketer.
com. I was going to
promote that and I forgot. Great article. I like the one at the top on
marketing,
to Seth Godin. There's a bunch of other great stuff in there, some old
interviews and things,
so check that out as well. Great. Thank you for reading that yet. I hope you
find it useful.
Yeah, indeed. Thank you again. Take care. It's a pleasure, Ian.
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