The Focus Factor: Driving B2B Success

Drew: Hey, it’s Drew. You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio. Our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The marketing leaders of this episode are JD Dillon of Tigo Energy, Laura Beaulieu of Holistiplan, and Kevin Briody of Meteor Education. They joined to talk about the power of focus, and that’s the key to strategic marketing that drives businesses forward. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one podcast for B2B marketers. Alrighty, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to the CMO Huddles Studio, the live-streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter famously said the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. For CMOs, with multiple options at every juncture, choosing what not to do is harder than it sounds. It takes discipline and a willingness to say no to the extraneous, regardless of the source, to appreciate the benefits of a tightly defined strategy and an equally focused executional plan. Today, we’re speaking with three masters of their craft. So with that, let’s bring on JD Dillon, CMO of Tigo Energy and returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss B2B branding on a budget and aligning marketing with your business goals. Hello, JD, how are you and where are you this fine day?

JD: I’m doing wonderfully, and I’m in Campbell, California, right in the Bay Area.

Drew: I love it. Now I always go back and forth between Tigo (Tygo) and Tigo (Teego). Can you just make sure I get it right?

JD: Tigo (Tygo).

Drew: Tigo (Tygo). I am becoming my father who could mispronounce any word no matter how hard he tried, even avocado he would screw up or Toyota. So I just, what can I say?

JD: Lived a long life, so that’s a good thing.

Drew: Exactly, exactly. Maybe the secret to a long life is mispronouncing words that are easy to repeat. Alright, Tigo (Tygo), it is. You have introduced this very cool program, the Green Glove Service. Just take us through how you got there and what it is, because it’s become a focus. And I just love this program.

JD: Sure, it’s a premium service for solar installers. We sell our equipment to solar installers before, during, and after the installation. It’s got a six-point plan. It basically brands good service, and it has differentiated us in the marketplace. And how we got here on the second part of your question, basically turning a problem into an opportunity. There’s two spaces we serve, residential. We’re a very distant seventh player in a duopoly. We needed to say we’re able to help you in residential, in commercial, industrial we’re a market leader that had a little bit of a rocky reputation. Both of those we’ve solved through the Green Glove Service Program.

Drew: Wow. Two birds, one stone.

JD: Absolutely.

Drew: Now we got the green glove. Look at that, and there is the Tigo logo on the green glove. And yes, it is green. Now I understand how you got to finding a way to differentiate by service. And I’m imagining it’s very hard to differentiate in your category on a product level. I mean, it feels like, you know, not that solar is a commodity, but I think if you were shopping for solar, you might think it was a commodity. So how has this? And I know you didn’t sort of suddenly say to everyone, here’s the big idea, let’s go. It sort of grew from like a test, a small program. And I love this talk about the sort of you solve the problem, but you know, I don’t think you necessarily, as I seem to recall, got there by just saying, “Okay, well, everybody’s all in on this,” right?

JD: No, not at all. We are a product-focused company, and service is needed to play, and that’s the way we had been, and frankly, all of our competitors are as well. What we did was we ran into a couple of issues. We gave extra special service to the customer, and they said, “Wow, this is special and different,” and sort of organically we said, well, let’s do more of it. Number one. Number two, this was my thought was, let’s brand it somehow. Our color is green. Green is renewable, of course, white-glove service. We turn it into Green Glove Service, and now we actually have people asking us about it. We go to a show and people say, what’s so special about this Green Glove Service? And best of all, and I think this is what you might be getting at, it’s galvanized the whole company. Everybody talks about, we just had an all-hands for the company. We talked about the service. We just hit 306 different sites have been served. September 11. It’s growing like crazy. It’s now being asked for. People are saying, “What can I do to get in?” And by the way, it’s free, so all you got to do is raise your hand.

Drew: There’s no extra charge for this. This becomes, you know, in the old days, a sparkling drop of ruts, and this becomes your little secret sauce, the that you can have that’s part of you. If you’re doing business with Tygo, you’re going to get the Green Glove Service. But by branding it, you got employees excited about it. You got your partners excited about it. And so let’s talk about the rollout of this, and how did people sort of internally, how did you get a sense that people were going to get excited about this?

JD: The internal excitement came. We’re an in-office company, and it’s around the lunch table, so we actually have a free lunch. Can order in ahead of time, and they deliver it. Everybody sits down. It’s like a family, and we sit down. And I heard people talking about it, and I went to a conference, and one of the guys, who’s a service tech out of Vermont actually said, “You know, I have more Green Glove Service customers than anybody else.” Well, as soon as you’re starting to compete internally, that’s wonderful, and at some point it becomes the brand Tigo. With Tigo, you get Green Glove, period. End of story. Drop the mic. And funny little sidebar, the other day I saw the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for those who’ve been around a while, that’s what we want to get to, that you could actually put the Green Glove as a, yep, this installation was Green Glove served and Good Housekeeping, which was wonderful marketing for many, many years, seal of approval is what we’re trying to get to.

Drew: And it was, in fact, just marketing, right? That’s a wonderful part of that. It became its own thing.

JD: You say just marketing, but you have to deliver on the promise too.

Drew: Right? Yeah,

JD: I’ll tell you. I got an email three days ago from an installer who was unhappy, and they said in bold letters, this is not Green Glove Service. It gives us something internally to live up to. You’re gonna work harder because he was right, by the way, in that particular instance, we weren’t providing Green Glove Service. Well, it’s something for internally, we all want to live up to that, that badge as it were.

Drew: That’s so interesting. There’s a lot of things that I want to just sort of put a punctuation point on. One, you branded. You took a metaphor White Glove. You made it your own with Green Glove. The simplicity of this idea is where you know the power is the ability to focus the entire organization against a goal that is somewhat aspirational, and the fact that someone called you out on it is awesome because then you can go back to them and say you’re right. Is sort of a Jay Baer Hug Your Haters moment, because that person can be converted again. You just say you were right. Thank you for calling us out on it. And the fact that there becomes bragging rights associated with how many folks are delivering on the promise is awesome. That is everything that we want to in this show, in this reminder that a very simple idea can become a business driver, and looking for that in this simple metaphor, two words, Green Glove, right? It’s amazing. So alright, well, thank you for that, JD, and now we’re going to move on, and we’ll come back to you. So let’s bring on Laura Beaulieu, who is the VP of Marketing at Holistiplan, or I’ve probably butchered that one as well. Are you going to correct me on that? How do you pronounce it, Laura?

Laura: It’s Holistiplan.

Drew: Holistiplan. So easy. So anyway, Laura is an industry expert who has graced our stage before to delve into the topic of Account Based Marketing. So hello, Laura, how are you and wonderful to see you again. Where are you and how you doing?

Laura: Hey, Drew. No, I’m doing absolutely fantastic. I’m based in Boston, and the weather is pretty nice today. So all is good in my world.

Drew: Yeah, we got a little rain here in New York, but it’s all good. We need rain like everybody else. So let’s talk about you’ve only been there a few months, and this is the moment where you know you’re drinking from the fire hose. There’s a million things that you could probably spend your time on. How did you sort of start to get to the place where you could focus?

Laura: Yeah, so that’s a really good question. So for me, a big part of being a good leader is being able to take in all the information from multiple sources, organize it, systemize it, and really simplify it for your team. You have to have the ability to really zoom in and zoom out of programs to be able to lean into what’s working and, you know, pause or restart what’s not working. And so when I went into this role, I had already had a 30-60-90 day plan that I had talked to with the leadership team about and I got their buy-in. And you know, during the interview process, you get a really good feel for what’s working and what’s not working. And so those first few weeks are really about validating those assumptions. And so I went into it, and the very first thing that I did is I wanted to interview all of the stakeholders, right? All the people on the leadership team, our sales team, everybody who’s interacting with customers, really get a good grip on specifically what’s working and what’s not working, and what should we lead into.

Then from there, it was really important to talk to customers directly, face-to-face, and do one-on-one interviews, to really start to build out those personas and really get a good understanding of not only how do they use Holistiplan, which is a tax planning software, but how does it fit into their world holistically? And how can we help to really streamline it? And, you know, start learning what really for them stood out, and how can we use that as an amplifier to get even more customers? So going in and you know about doing all these conversations and having the recordings helps, but you start to hear the common themes, right? People start to say all the same things, and you’re like, “Okay, yep, you’re the fifth person that told me that webinars are absolutely crushing it, and I’ve heard that a third of our customers are referred by other customers.” And, you know, I’m seeing this one customer is referred like 20 customers. So referrals are another huge thing. And so you start to really build out that project pipeline of things that you want to work on and things that you think you should work on. And so then from there, I like to really validate with the leadership team and say, hey, it’s been 30 days. I’ve talked to, you know, 50 people. These are the top things that keep coming up, and this is what I want to work on, and you get the buy-in. And then from there, it’s really just building out the priorities and the systems.

Drew: A couple things that I want to just ask you about before we get into the details of where you went. One, did you do the 30-60-90 day plan before you got there?

Laura: I did, yeah.

Drew: I know that there’s some folks that are in transition that are reluctant to do that. I can’t emphasize enough these days, how helpful it is. And I just wanted to point out the fact that you had a 30-60-90 day plan running in allowed you to have a running start, and you knew that, also that you had gotten buy-in, at least initially, that this is what you were going to do and how you were going to approach it. 

Laura: Yep, exactly.

Drew: So important point for those of you in transition. Just want to re-emphasize that. And then what I also heard, and I think this is so important, is you have hypotheses. You don’t have answers. You have hypotheses, things that you’re thinking about, you’re hearing, and then you bring those back to the folks that have been there a while and say, “Is this right?” And validate them. And it sounded like that’s what you did.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. Having the conversation to validate it, but also looking to find the data, right? Is there data in the business that supports these assumptions that says, yes, you know, this is a good approach, or no, we don’t have enough data yet, and this is something that we need more information on.

Drew: So as you’re doing all this, can you give us an example of one or two areas where you said, “Okay, we’re gonna really lean into this from a marketing standpoint.” And you can start whether it’s strategy or execution, totally up to you.

Laura: Yeah. So there’s two main buckets. The first one is webinars, and then the second one is referrals. So webinars for us are a great driver of new business. And we have two current themes for webinars right now. One is for our future customers that we have with one of our influencers called Debbie Taylor, and then another one is for our current customers, which is a master class. And we find that once people start coming to these webinars, they kind of get hooked. And so I wanted to create an influencer pipeline. Right when advisors are hearing from other advisors on here’s the best practices and here’s how to scale up your business, it’s so much more impactful than just having the brand saying it. And so what I wanted to do was build an influencer pipeline. So what I did is I went through all of our NPS scores, and I picked the people who were giving 9s and 10s and who were kind of raving fans already, and just did some interviews with them right, getting a good sense of their personas and their personalities, and the people who were really gung-ho about Holistiplan, I invited back to say, “Hey, would you want to do this test with us. Would you have any interest in doing a webinar on how you got up to speed and how you started to scale this at your business?” And I was honestly really surprised with how many people were really interested in it. And then once we deployed some of these webinars, I was just absolutely blown away by the engagement and the comments of people who are really just like learning so much and had so many questions on the tactical execution of how they do it, that we’re going to be turning these into a series. So it was really, really awesome.

Drew: It’s interesting because you’re verging on to community-led growth, in a way. I mean, it’s sort of somewhere between influencer marketing and community-led, but it feels like you’re getting the point where you’re bringing folks together who have common interests, common challenges, and you’re enabling them to connect and share value. And because you’re the person who brings them together – the connector, you’re getting a lot of good sort of halo effect stuff happening.

Laura: Oh, no, it’s amazing. It’s been, it’s been really incredible, like, from a learning standpoint, for me, in terms of what are the most valuable things that people are learning, and also for our future customers, right? They’re deciding, do I want to start tax planning? Do I feel ready? And this is really helping nudge them along their buyer journey.

Drew: Interesting. So the focus that I’m seeing – it’s funny because the webinars and the referrals are kind of coming together because the referrals are those super customers who love you. Now you get those super customers to be on the webinars, and next thing you know, it’s one focused program against sort of amplifying your advocates, right? And helping your advocates look great.

Laura: Exactly. No, it’s a really nice program. I’m so excited about it.

Drew: Have you started to think about branding? Do we have a Green Glove-like thing for Holistiplan?

Laura: We don’t have a Green Glove yet. We’re calling it the Advisor Influencer Pipeline right now.

Drew: We can do better – Advisor Influencer Pipeline. And what’s great about this, in my mind, is that it is not just about acquisition, because you really are – every time you have celebrate someone on a webinar, you are basically saying, “Thank you for being a customer. We respect you. And you honor us by doing this.” So it’s bringing together that. And I know that there’s so much pressure on CMOs right now to, particularly in the first 90 days, to drive, you know, opportunities, but you don’t often think, Oh, well, that’s just about new customers. It’s not, it’s about existing customers and new customers somehow or other, bringing them together, right?

Laura: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Drew: Alright, well, that’s awesome and exciting. I can’t wait to see how this rolls out and how it becomes sort of a cornerstone. It feels like it could become a cornerstone of your marketing.

Laura: Yeah, I think it will be.

Drew: And the hard part will be to keep people from saying, “Well, this is great, but let’s do this too,” right? Because, I mean, this is the challenge that you get a successful program up and going, and then people just sort of get internally, get a little bored with it, or whatever, and to keep everybody, “No, no, this is the big thing.”

Laura: It is. No, I mean, it’s good. So it’s funny you bring that up. So we just recently started doing OKRs for our team, and in marketing, as you know, you have 1 million things that you could be doing at any given time, and it’s really about figuring out what are the most valuable things, most impactful things that you can be doing. And our team had, you know, they had a little bit of a hard time narrowing it down to three to five things, right? Because you’re like, well, I could do this today and I could do this tomorrow, and it’s like, no, no, what are the three to five most impactful things you could do in a quarter to drive the business forward? And so that really helps to narrow the focus and not boil the ocean.

Drew: I love it. Alright, well, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re narrowing the focus. Okay, next up, we’ll be back with Laura, but next up we have Kevin Briody, CMO of Edmentum, who previously joined us to discuss ed-tech marketing and top-of-the-funnel challenges. Hello, Kevin. Welcome back.

Kevin: Good to see you again.

Drew: Where are you this fine day?

Kevin: I am in what seems to be the theme, also rainy, North Carolina.

Drew: Alright, so let’s talk about your north star for Edmentum, and how that sort of came to be.

Kevin: Actually there’s a little simpler variation of that kind of first famous Michael Porter quote of strategies is the art of saying no. Something I always like to use, but the North Star you’re talking about is something I’ve used in my current team. And really, the last couple spots I’ve been it’s been a bit of a consistent theme. It’s been this idea of do fewer things exceptionally well to drive greater impact. And the big thing on that is it’s not just about cutting down the workload. It’s really a cultural set piece. It’s about this idea of consistently creating headspace for everyone in the team, at all levels in the organization, to be both creative and strategic. It’s that idea of when you get just lost in the churn. A little bit what Laura was saying about how do you pick your priorities, but when you get lost in the churn of production, of just getting the work out, and especially when it’s reactive to the constant influx of all the crazy asks that we tend to get in marketing, that’s where it gets really challenging to be creative problem solvers, and I’m a firm believer that that’s where marketers thrive. That’s what makes the work fun. That’s what makes it rewarding. It’s a lesson from my agency days, and that the most fun stuff was always when you get in the brainstorm, you get a really needy challenge and problem, and you can flex your creative muscles. And I think the challenge for marketing leaders is really intentionally creating the conditions for your team so that they’re able to have that headspace to be creative, to tackle those big challenges. And that means you have to go through the strategy. Setting process, you have to whittle down the stuff that’s less important. You have to make sure that there’s time set aside for that creativity. And it’s not just the reactive, crazy churn of the work, and candidly, that’s it’s more of an aspirational goal, I would say, than a hard and fast rule, as probably anyone on my teams can attest it’s, you know, sometimes the urgent necessarily crowds out the strategic. And, you know, you just have to dive in and go and get the work done. But that’s why I call it a North Star. It’s really what guides us.

Drew: Do you have a Green Glove, like, example of something that you’ve been able to get some focus in your in your marketing?

Kevin: I mean, I think one example, this is a discrete project, not like a branded service, like JD was talking about, but last year we set out we had a variety of different websites that were serving a bunch of different audiences. They were very complex. They were adding a lot of churn to the work, and it wasn’t giving us the ability to get created on top of them. That didn’t set a good foundation. So we set about collapsing all those sites into one, rebuilding our very deep course catalog, which is the centerpiece of our website, and a bunch of other things in there. The trick there was, you know, it was only possible because we made a very conscious decision to pull back from the daily churn of content production and invest our time and resources into a big bet that would really have a long-term impact. So short-term disruption, you know, we slow down kind of the daily output of the team in order to create the space to get really creative for the long-term growth of it, of the marketing function and our business impact, I think, incidentally, a really nice, well, a design goal of this that was in line with that North Star was that we wanted to create a site that had much less content to manage vastly some simpler platform for all of our team owners as content owners to maintain. So that way, the site itself became a good example of less is more, a tighter, focused experience that created a foundation, created more time then for the team to get creative, to try to innovative new approaches on it, to try new content and things like that. So I think it’s a good example where we intentionally picked a strategic goal, picked a strategic project and long-term value, and had to set the conditions for the team to get creatives and to be more strategic and think a bigger picture, and not just, you know, get caught up and slow in the work out the door.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to think of something more important and more central to a company’s business than their website, right? I mean, it is often the thing that is how customers interact with you, how prospects discover you, how employees discover you, and the notion that you consolidated from multiple websites to one, obviously there’s some risk involved in that, but boy, that is just a pure example of focus, the fact that you then took it another step and said, “Oh, wait, we don’t have to have everything on here like we did before and we can also help.” And I think ultimately, simplicity is a service to your customers, right? If you have a complicated website and you make it hard for people to get to where they want to go. Or, you know, it’s not about 1000s of pieces of content. Generally, it’s about a few really good ones that people need and will help them, right? I mean, and that’s so, I guess. I’m wondering one, how did you get the air cover to do that, because often there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in certain parts of the content on a website, in that thing that may or may not be in marketing. How did you sort of get buy-in on that major consolidation of your content?

Kevin: Well, actually, before I get to that, you hit on a great point about simplicity, and I think it’s a hugely challenging point that I think a lot of marketers face, is that outside of marketing, you could look inside the organization and get judged by the output of the team. So how many new pieces of content to create? How many new campaigns did you drop? You know, how deep and rich is the website? Whatever that might be, the hard part is doing less. The hard part is keeping that simplicity, creating a really simple, clean, impactful user experience for the customer. And a lot of times that means just saying no and crowding out that pressure to generate more and instead just get the smaller number of things you are doing and just make them truly elegant and simple and impactful. But in terms of, how did we get the air cover on that, I just had a really good, you know, supportive leadership team around me. We really just made the business case for what the long-term value would be. There was a cost and efficiency value I mentioned at the end. You know, you take multiple websites consolidated to one that really kind of helps in the long run, in terms of how efficient you are going to manage it, how much time it’s going to burn from the team. So there was a raw financial story there, but there was also the articulating the business value and just saying, okay, we could continue doing what we’re doing now, or we can take a short-term pause in order to set us up for a significant step forward. And it was really just selling that internally in terms of what the value is going to be there. And there was partly that too, of telling the team and kind of telling our partners around the organization that, yeah, because our short-term output is going to drop a little bit as a marketing team, that doesn’t mean that’s teeing us up for a negative impact on the business. So that doesn’t mean we’re doing less. Means we’re taking that pause to get really creative and really do something that’s going to make a big, big step forward in the organization.

Drew: There’s so many points that I just want to reaffirm that if you in any way as a CMO in a marketing department are judged by output, you’re in trouble. It is not output, its impact. And there are so many times where one great piece of content can be 80% of the site traffic, and a really good tool replaces 20 blog posts in the fact that you were able to bring that efficiency and change the argument and change the perspective, so that, hey, we’re gonna say no, because that’s just output. What we need is impact. And that’s a big story that you were telling, so that’s awesome. Alright, we are now going to shift gears for a second. I’m going to talk about CMO Huddles.

Launched in 2020 CMO Huddles is a close knit community of over 350 highly effective B2B marketing leaders who share, care, and dare each other to greatness, given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOS, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. JD, Laura, Kevin, come on back. You’re all incredibly busy. I’m wondering if there’s a specific example you could share of how CMO Huddles has helped you?

Laura: So one of the best things about CMO Huddles for me is that I have a phenomenal mentor that I found through CMO Huddles, somebody who had been there, done that before me, and had helped rapidly scale businesses, and it’s been instrumental in shaping my thinking, helping me grow my own self and my own skill sets, and really helping me to get better as a leader. And so that, along with the Huddles and the recap emails, I mean, it’s just been a game changer for me.

Drew: Awesome. I love that. Kevin.

Kevin: At the risk of repeating what I think I said the last time I did this with you, Drew. One of the things I find incredibly valuable, Huddles has got a great Slack channel that’s very active. A lot of times other CMOS will share vendor recommendations, which I have found incredibly valuable. And at Edmentum, we actually have several vendors we use that we found through the Huddles community that have been incredibly helpful. So it’s that kind of, you know, stamp of approval and sharing their personal experiences for that, for best practices and other things that really helps me move faster and find some good quality partners to work with.

Drew: I really appreciate that.

JD: So I come from a hardware background and actually product management background, and when I first started, marketing was a product manager who could actually do the PowerPoints. And as I’ve evolved however, in CMO Huddles, I believe hardware misses the customer success angle that SaaS brings to the table, and I never would have gotten that type of exposure. And when we start hiring again at Tigo, I’m going to start doing customer success-type actions and bring learning from one whole part of the industry into mine, and it’s invaluable.

Drew: Well, we appreciate you. If you’re a senior B2B marketing leader, and need a shortcut to B2B greatness. Take a second and sign up for Cmo Huddles, our free starter program at cmo huddles.com Alright, let’s get back to the need for focus. 

I want to talk about this challenge because I don’t know about you, but I, you know, suffer from ADD and I often see another good idea over there. It’s like, you know, the squirrel syndrome. Oh, look, squirrel. And so I know that there are a lot of folks in organizations, whether it’s the CEO or the salesperson, who go home and think about a problem and come back the next day with a great idea. I have a great idea. You need this focus, and you need to say it. So how do you balance this need for focus with also a requirement to remain agile, given that you know, the market’s changed. JD, help us out here.

JD: One of the ways I stay focused is ROI. Return on Investment has a numerator and a denominator. You can increase the ROI by either decreasing the I or increasing the R, do experiments get a good ROI by doing a little bit of investment and getting a modest amount of return. And if you do a lot of little experiments, number one, you can tell people you’re working on it because you are, but you don’t go all in, and that I find to be very, very useful,

Drew: Right. So you’re not completely saying, no, if you hear an idea that might be worth testing, you go ahead and you test it. Okay. Laura thoughts on on this again, you’re new at the thing, and I’m imagining that there was more than these two programs that you saw that you go, “This looks good.” How do you sort of keep your team and the people around you from saying we need to get beyond the Advisor Influencer Program?

Laura: Yeah, so I mean a lot like what Kevin said, it’s not the power of the output, it’s it’s about the power of the impact. So when I look at what the roadmap has, and I look at what the events calendar looks like, and I look at what the email calendar looks like, you know, you pretty much, you have your roadmap there, you have your quarterly OKRs that you want to hit, and then you have to leave some room in there for wiggle room for testing and learning. So I like to leave maybe 10 to 20% of room and budget for testing and learning because you never know when that next great thing is going to happen.

Drew: Could you just for folks, anybody who doesn’t know OKRs, just explain what they are?

Laura: Yeah. So it’s really it’s setting goals, setting high level goals that are generally stretch goals, and you want them to be SMART goals, so specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time bound. You want to have all those things in your SMART goals, and when you set them, you want to be able to hit 80% so like, if you hit 100% of your goals, you know you set them too low. If you hit 60% you know you set them too high. So you really, you’re going for that 80% Can I hit 80% of my goals? And will this drive the business forward?

Drew: So and then there’s this other question of protecting the budget, but before we get there. Kevin, any more thoughts on that? Or we can move on to strategies that you employ to maintain focus on long-term goals.

Kevin: Actually, Laura, thank you. You credited me for saying something and then rephrased it far more eloquently than I did. So I appreciate that. It’s about balancing the urgent and the now versus the long-term. There’s something that I do with my team when I try to simplify what the marketing strategy is, I try to ladder up every initiative or program we’re doing either under this idea of building the brand, driving the business, or evolving the function. 

The first two are pretty self-explanatory, and that’s where the core of the marketing strategy is, and the output that we’re targeting. That last piece of “evolving the function,” though, that every team that I manage has to have baked into their fiscal year marketing strategy. And that is where those iterative experiments come. That’s where those new investments in new tech is. That’s where we bake in things like staff professional development, or whatever it is, but it’s that idea of like, how every day, week, month, quarter, are we going to get better as a marketing team, even if it’s not directly tied to this year’s fiscal strategies? What’s our plan to evolve, our plan to get better?

Drew: The three were building the brand, driving the business. What was the third?

Kevin: Evolve the function, the marketing function. There’s probably a better way to say that.

Drew: No, that’s fine, and that’s so interesting because that it’s sort of that third goal is continuous improvement, right? How do we as an organization get better at building the brand and driving the business? And in order to do that, we have to sort of look at everything that we’re doing. That’s helpful, but it also probably helps that if it’s not building the brand or driving the business, well, what are you doing?

Kevin: Well, that’s and that’s where the push and pull of the daily challenges comes into play, though, because, yeah, everything we’re doing is that’s why those such broad buckets, you’re building the brand or driving the business in one way, shape or form. At the same time, you have to allow some flexibility within your team to run those experiments that it’s hard to maybe articulate how exactly they slot in, but investment in training that, you know, all the time that I’m sure every one of your organizations is sitting down and saying, “Let’s experiment and learn around Gen AI and all the latest cool tools” – that’s around that idea of every day we should be a better marketing team and a more effective marketing team than we were yesterday, while we’re still working against our fiscal year strategy and goals. So it’s just allowing for that creative space to get better, and kind of making that a team mandate too, that we should always be a little bit better tomorrow than we were yesterday, and how do we just keep that iterative improvement going?

Drew: Yeah, which brings up the whole question of what “better” is and how you’re benchmarking. But I want to get to JD, and just in the last two conversations in terms of the focus and the strategies of getting their long-term versus operation and what you heard and what what you’d like to add to that.

JD: So I have terms I’ve used for what Kevin just articulated. I call it “thunder and lightning.” Thunder is quantifiable noise, which is essentially building the brand. And lightning is what I term as “objective demand generation,” which is driving the business as he called it. I actually like the “building the business,” so I’m going to have to find an analogy on building the business that ties to thunder and lightning. I’ll credit Kevin, when I do so. But those two strategies lead to 13 tactics and 57 metrics. So Kevin also said it very well on laddering – every one of the metrics leads to a tactic that leads to one of those two strategies. And if you can’t make it fit, or you find yourself squinting to make it fit, perhaps you ought to consider following the “just say no” strategy. Just say no.

Drew: And we know that you have seven ways of saying no.

JD: My wife thinks I have 18 ways of saying no.

Drew: Well, you know, anyway, tying a lot of things together. What we learned in our Chris Voss session on, you know, Never Split The Difference. The difference is that saying no in a negotiation and in a good way is important, getting others to say no sometimes can be important. So yeah, it’s not as hard as we think. Anyway, Kevin, you mentioned Gen AI, and it’s hard to – and I when, when you brought that up to me, there’s the potential for it to both be a distraction, because it’s so fun to get in there and play, right? And it’s just another example of, oh, that’s a sandbox. Let’s go get in there and that, yet there, it’s a sandbox that could do phenomenal things. So how are you approaching the use of Gen AI in the context of staying focused?

Kevin: Well, I think it’s a mix of, there are the big picture questions around new tools like that, you know, should we be using it for original image generation? You know, does that create a risk on us from either an IP perspective or from an authenticity perspective? You know, should we be using it in certain scenarios and what does it mean to the business? What does it mean for the long-term staff and model we approach? So those are those big, thorny questions. You have to allow some space for that. And that’s hard to do, but that’s where it’s more intentional. You set aside, you know, once a month or once a quarter, you want to have some time to dig in.

I think the place where it’s much more around the iterative, ongoing improvements. And those are where, like, Gen AI is a good example where you set an ask for challenges to your team of like, “Okay, in your specific role, what are some specific examples you can use where you can take some of those tools to make you a little bit more efficient or a little bit more effective? Can they get you, you know, 60% there on new content creation and then, you know, or can they help with brainstorming and ideation and things like that?” So I think it’s more splitting it out. It and a lot of new tech in marketing can be a very big, imposing topic to have to tackle. But I think it’s those big questions – those are fun ones to tackle, and you do need to allow space for that. But the ongoing ones are much more modest, of like, “How does this help your job, today or tomorrow? What are little things that we could do?” And it’s just that smaller, iterative improvement, I think, that can pay off in the long run, and doesn’t take as much time.

Drew: One of the remarkable things about this technology versus every other technology to date is you can ask it how to use it and guide you. So even if you’ve never done it before, as long as you know that, you can ask it, “I don’t even know what you call the thing that I want to do here.” Right? And then you can say, “Okay, this is what I want to do now. How do you outline it?” And truly, there’s never been an application that would teach you how to use it like that.

Kevin: And you just have to hope that it doesn’t hallucinate.

Drew: Well, yeah but that’s a different thing. I mean, if for example, you want to build an app, and so, JD, I’m going to you, and I’m thinking about you may have seen my post on generative AI, where I think the excitement is about creating apps or widgets or things that bring the big ideas of your brand to life. So now I’m thinking about, okay, what would it mean to create Green Glove as an application, and what would that look like? And, you know, suddenly I go, okay, so I could go play with Gen AI and think about, how would I do that? Anyway, to me, that’s where it starts to get interesting, is that you could build stuff that you could never build before, right? Because I don’t know how to code. I don’t know, do you know how to code, Kevin? I mean, but now it will tell you how to not only what it is, assuming you give it the right input and perhaps your proprietary data, then you can, behind the scenes, create something magical that extends the idea. And this is the part that I’m really excited about, is if you have this focus. So I’m thinking about you, Laura. You’ve got your customers that are really great, your influencers, if you will. And the webinar. Okay, so now, what could you do with all that content? Or could you create it as Is there a way to slice and dice it anyway? This is just me getting excited about this technology in a different way. How do you use it to focus, not to create a lot of stuff, to focus and amplify the things that you’re already doing? Anyway, this is not about me. So I want to talk about the role customer feedback plays in shaping your focus. So I mean, Laura, you already talked about how you went to talk to customers, and you’re using customers. Do you have a way of continuing to get that feedback to sort of reinforce that you’re in the right place?

Laura: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I love this question, because this is something that we do a ton of. So part of the webinar play is polls, right, surveying the audience, asking the audience, listening to the chat in the Q&A, and so one thing that we had been talking about was, should we do a customer-led growth play? Should we do a community-led growth play where we, you know, we have maybe, like a private selection we’ll kind of like CMO Huddles, but for financial advisors, where they can privately come and discuss something that’s not on Reddit. And so we talked about it and kind of bounced it around inside of our leadership team, and we got the green light there. And so during one of our webinars, we posed it as a question, the response just absolutely blew me away. So we had 66% of people who said yes, they would be interested. And then we had 22% said maybe. And so overall, it was like positive sentiment from almost 90% of people. So I love I love that feedback. And then the other thing that we’ve been doing is any type of question that we’re getting in the Q&A section of the webinars, we’re doing follow-up email campaigns with answers to those questions, and those have been some of our highest open-rate emails that we’ve ever sent. And so it just, it’s a way of giving back to our customers and our future customers, and saying, “Hey, we’re listening. Hey, we appreciate you, and hey, we want to help you get an answer to this question.” And so like the return and the engagement has just been, has been really incredible.

Drew: And again, it still connects back to the focused idea that you’re doing. JD, I’m wondering about, you’ve already mentioned a case where a customer gave you feedback in in real time, about it is there, you know, Green Glove 2.0 as a result of the learnings that you have in this process.

JD: Absolutely, last week, I was in Minneapolis meeting with installers, and one of the installers asked me, “What about getting my people green glove certified?” So the way I’ve envisioned the site, the program is the site, the installation is Green Glove, but people wear gloves outside. And he asked, “What about getting my people?” And he said, “I have whatever six crews or something to do installations. How can I get each of them Green Glove certified?” And my short answer was, “I have no idea. I haven’t thought about it that way.” But now we’re going to, so that’s going to evolve the program. I have no idea where it’s going to land, but it’s not just sites, it’s people, and now we’re going to get them trained, etc, etc. So this is customer feedback into what to do with our program for them. Fantastic.

Drew: And you know, again, this is where I go to there’s the opportunities to create Green Glove certification programs, which is an extension of one idea, right? It’s not a new thing. It’s an extension of it. Oh, by the way, if you went on ChatGPT and said, “How do I create a certification program around this and give me the outline for it,” it would probably get you a lot farther than you would have been, you know, three minutes before you did that, but also could ultimately help create it, which is, again, this is where this technology changes the game, because something that you didn’t know how to do, you can suddenly say, “oh, somebody can figure this out, or help me figure it out.” And by the way, the other thing that reminded me of at some point in time, there will be an employee certification where employees are certified on the brand idea of Green Glove. And that’s another cool extension. Well, we’re getting to the end here. So let’s get to some final words of wisdom, and we’ll do this in reverse order, for other CMOs, when it comes to focusing your, first, marketing, but also the organization, because one of the things that marketing can do is get the whole organization focused behind an idea. So Kevin, final words of wisdom. 

Kevin: Maybe reiterate a little what I said before, which was, I think it’s the CMO’s job to intentionally create the headspace to be creative and be strategic for your team, for every single person, from entry-level, fresh out of school, to senior executives within marketing, I think it’s you have to intentionally give them the space to be creative. And part of that is going through that focusing exercise, you know, cutting out the low value, the churn, the raw production that doesn’t add a ton of value or impact on the business, in order to create the headspace. So that’s my big takeaway, is you got to be intentional about it. You have to be, you know, allow for that creativity to really take hold,

Drew: You know. And that’s such a good insight, talking about the entry-level people, because I certainly remember my first job, it was like, people gave me stuff. I got it done. I had no sense of where the pieces fit or what, you know, it was just, oh, there’s a task. Get it off the list. And that’s, you know, hopefully marketing can evolve farther than that, okay. Laura, final words of wisdom.

Laura: Yeah, I love the exercise of what you have to have, and what’s a nice to have, and what can you elevate and delegate, not just for you, but for your teammates, like, what things are they doing that they don’t necessarily need to be doing, that they could maybe delegate to somebody else, or delegate to a consulting agency, or delegate to, you know, a freelancer or something like that. I love freeing up people’s time that way, and so it’s really just, you know, how do we focus on the most important things and just get those things done and everything else? If you don’t get it done, it’s not gonna it’s not gonna break anything. It’s just gonna free you up more time. 

Drew: God, you can’t do everything, and whether you’re the CMO or the entry-level person, so you do need to really think about it. And I love the notion of elevate or delegate, and particularly for CMOs right now, who are really struggling with their time demands, but that if you can have a more focused agenda, it means you have fewer things, both your team coming to you with challenges and you on your plate and what you’re talking about and so forth, and gives you more time to talk to customers and so forth. Okay, JD, bring us home.

JD: Okay, well, I love that, intentionally creative, elevate and delegate, and I will close it with repeat. There we go, repeat, repeat and repeat. I can’t tell you how many times we talk about Green Glove in this company, and sometimes it feels to me like we’re over talking about it, but that’s impossible. It creates a centralized theme that people focus on and move forward. So intentionally be creative, elevate and delegate and repeat and repeat.

Drew: Thank you audience for staying with us.

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!