Marketing to Your CEO + CFO

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time, welcome and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. The flocking awesome leaders in this episode are Kay Moffett, Katrina Klier, and Lakshmi Randall, and we’re entirely focused on how to ensure your CFO will become confident in the marketing investment you’re advising the company to make. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number 1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, 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 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. Over the weekend, I had the chance to see two contrasting multi-acre gardens—stick with me on the metaphor here—one fully realized after 10 years of meticulous care, and one in its infancy, mainly barren with rough outlines of what’s to come. If these gardens were B2B companies, the gardener, aka the CMO, at the first one, need not explain how they got there. They could just focus more on pruning and harvesting. Not so for the CMO at an infant garden, they’d be pleading for patience, reminding me that it takes time to grow a thriving brand that attracts and retains customers. There’s groundwork to be done, pardon the pun, which begs the question, how do you make the impact of marketing something that other executives can relate to so they don’t see the barren field and they don’t just expect the perfect blossoms while managing expectation? Fortunately for you, we have three wonderful marketing leaders who will help answer these questions and more. With that, let’s bring on Kay Moffatt, Chief Marketing and Public Affairs Officer at Amplify, and a returning guest who has previously appeared on the show to discuss ed tech marketing. Hello, Kay, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Kay: Hi, Drew, I am well. I am in New York City as well, but I’m in another borough known as Brooklyn.

Drew: Ah, yes, it’s where all the cool cats are, yeah. You’re far hipper and just basically a better person because you’re living there, I said it. So, okay, so you heard the challenge in this at the top of the hour, and I’m curious, how do you align your marketing executive initiatives with Amplify’s financial goals and overall business strategy, because that feels like the Holy Grail. And I know it sounds easy, but I don’t think it is.

Kay: Yeah, so, I mean, I would say that the first thing is just being very tightly aligned with sales and with the commercial outcomes of the company, you know, so not letting marketing go too far afield of those things, including with brand marketing. We just work really tightly with sales to get them all of the sales enablement they need, and also to make sure the leads we send over are really qualified. So sales is always talking us up. You know, even beyond any metrics, dashboards where we have sales really feels that we are central to their success—so that’s a huge thing. And then, of course, you know, being able to show dashboards of the ways in which our digital marketing, or any kind of performance marketing, is translating into MQLs with a high rate of conversion to SQLs with clear impact on bookings and pipeline. We set targets every year that are aligned to what the company targets are, and then we track how we are doing against that in terms of our contribution to top line. So that, of course, is the easy thing to measure. Digital marketing is easy to measure, but there are things that are much harder to put onto a dashboard, for instance, product marketing and also brand marketing. I will say that the brand marketing we do, we really try to tie it to commercial outcome. So as an example, we have a very successful podcast about reading, and it is often cited as something that has influenced their thinking about which reading programs to choose. And we sell reading programs. And so even though that podcast doesn’t collect any leads—like we can’t trace in clear metrics how the podcast is impacting the business—our CFO has heard over and over again, people talk about how important this podcast has been in state sales and district sales. He’s heard sales talk about it, so he’s a really big believer in all of the kind of brand marketing we’ve done, thought leadership we’ve done, even though it doesn’t have a dashboard like the other stuff he likes to see.

Drew: Yeah, oh my gosh, you just give me so much to unpack. So thank you for that. First of all, I’m going to start at the end, which is the overwhelming power of what someone calls anecdata—panic data. Yeah, anecdata, because it’s the anecdotes from the customer. Hey, heard the podcast talking to the CEO that does it earlier. In you talked about making a friend and super fans with sales, obviously, for any CMO listening, if you can make sales sing your praises, that’s a really good place to be in. And chances are they’re doing that because you set them up for success. And so we got to that, I want to talk a little bit about it’s funny. We talked about this in a huddle just a few minutes ago, about this notion that there is $1 in, $1 out, and you said digital marketing is relatively easy to track, so we’re really, is it such that you can go, “Okay, we spent this amount of dollars on this digital channel, and it resulted in XYZ MQLs” equals this kind of as SQL into opportunities and conversions. And you can just draw through line.

Kay: Pretty much for digital marketing. But that is only a piece of what we do. I mean, it’s a very important piece, in that it’s the primary way that we drive leads to sales, but it is, by far, not the only way that we really help support commercial outcomes. You know, our product marketing and go-to-market team is absolutely essential, and sales would fall apart, or they would be really, really struggling without that team. But it’s very hard to measure what they do—that can be the struggle. But again, what I rely on there, or what has worked, is how much sales is able to testify to. You know, the things that are harder to measure, or brand marketing, those are things that are absolutely essential, especially if you do the right kind of brand marketing, which, again, I said, it’s very tightly aligned to the commercial outcomes, you know, but there you need amic data, essentially, you know, for that kind of thing, because you can’t show your CFO exactly, “All this work my product marketing team did is what helped sales get all these sales.”

Drew: Well, let’s talk a little bit about product marketing, because this one is a vagary to me. Talk a little bit about exactly what it is they do and where you see their contribution, again, on a hypothetical level, with some you know, caveats that it’s hard to draw through line. What do they do?

Kay: They are really the linchpin between our product organization and our sales organization. Ideally, they’re involved very upstream, working with product on market research that helps shape the attributes of the product so that we’re getting a really good product-market fit as much as possible. You want marketing to be helping product build products that fit the market. So we have worked to partner with product further and further upstream. And you know, we’re always bringing the thoughts from sales and bridging connections between product and sales. And I think, you know, there’s a really healthy creative tension between product and sales, and that is what the product marketing team lives—those tensions, you know, wanting to develop a super excellent product and have something that really meets the market. And how do you, you know, do that combination of things? And so they are real kind of brokers and liaisons between these two worlds. And they are what sort of make the magic happen. Take that product that’s a gleam in someone’s eye at some point and help bring it to market, and in our case, a very complex, multi-faceted market, and bring it to all these different parts of the market in an effective way that makes us a successful business, so that we can continue to keep developing these kinds of products.

Drew: So I’ve always had this fantasy that there were product people out there that were so good at reading what the customer wants and needs that and so good at marketing that they could improve the product or enhance the product, or create a line extension based on the need, and bake somehow a marketing idea into it, so that it was just so easy to sell. Right? That’s hard. I mean, because I—there’s a famous case of Dell doing a lot of customer research. They all said, “We want a Linux computer, a Linux laptop.” So they built a Linux laptop. Nobody bought it. So that’s product marketing. Say, hey, they all said we’re gonna do it. This is a hard job, I guess. And I didn’t want to get too far down the way, but I guess I did. How do you point to your product marketer and the team they’re spending money, and say to the CFO, “Here’s the value,” even if we’re talking in general terms, what is the value that a financial person will appreciate?

Kay: I think they will see the product marketing teams have incredible output. So they create, in our case, you know, they create print samples, they create digital samples, they create lots of print and digital collateral. They do webinars. The output is intense. And they do the pricing, or, you know, they make recommendations about pricing. And also, you know, if they’re a really strong team, you know, they can see—the CFO can see that, and they see that in my team—you know. So they see, “Okay, this person is really smart and knows what they’re doing and is toggling between these worlds of the product team and sales.” And as I said, just testimony from sales and other parts of the organization who are saying this person, these people are adding so much value to what we’re doing because they’re helping build that bridge.

Drew: So it’s just they’re smart people. They’re building the bridge, and the CFO goes, “Oh, I get it. Wow.” And it’s based on some of the output they do. All right, well, okay, thank you for that, and we’re going to come back to you, but now let’s bring on Katrina Klier, who wonderfully has stepped in as we had a last-minute cancellation. So thank you for that already. Katrina is the CMO and CEO of Sage Strategy Group and an industry expert who’s graced our stage before to discuss content and leadership strategies. Hello, Katrina. Wonderful to see you again.

Katrina: Hi, Drew, great to be here. Thank you. 

Drew: Just to ground folks, where are you today?

Katrina: I am coming to you from the Greater New York City Metro Area, the lovely Hudson Valley. So those of you steeped in American history will know the area well. It’s nice to be here.

Drew: Awesome. Okay, so what have you seen? And it’s funny, because we just had a huddle, and we were talking about this too. But what have you seen in terms of success and conversations about marketing investments from the CMO to the CEO and/or the CFO? And you can pick one to ensure that there’s some mutual understanding and that they actually support you. So that’s like 10 questions in one go. 

Katrina: If you think about it, everybody has to answer to someone, right? Your CEO has to answer to your investors and your board. Your CFO will have to answer to your CEO, but the CFO also answers very heavily to the investors and the board, and so it’s important to really understand what the board’s or an investor’s expectations of those two people are like, what’s top of mind for them? Where are they worried about risk in the business? Where do they see growth potential that maybe they feel like isn’t coming fast enough or innovation that should be getting further along than maybe it is. So having that as a backdrop, so that way you can align right, you tell them to that bigger picture that they have to kind of answer to is very, very important, in my mind. Don’t make them have to think so hard. Translate how you’re adding value to the business, just directly connect it for them.

Second part to that, then is the blessing and curse of being a CMO today is that you drown in data. I mean, as somebody who’s done digital transformation for longer than that’s been cool, if you throw up lots of data about everything, some more accurate, some less accurate, but drowning in data, but starving for insights. And so do not drown your CEO and your CFO with a million pieces of what is really operational inside the sausage factory of marketing data. Because, number one, they don’t know what it means. Number two, you’re just going to frustrate them, because it’s more numbers that they have to remember that they’re not used to having to talk about and three, they’re just gonna ask you, “So what does it mean?” Don’t ground them in all that stuff, and just cut to the chase and ask, “So what? Who cares?” And give them those couple of numbers that will connect back to the bigger story that they need to tell. Have all of your other operational data and your trend information and everything with you, in case they want to go into more detail, but don’t avalanche them with data—give them the deeper insights instead.

Drew: Yeah, there’s a lot of conversation, you know, watch out for those vanity metrics like website traffic, even though they often correlate to MQLs, SQLs, and opportunities, because the absence of site traffic is a problem. But there’s a couple of things that I want to sort of break down there. One is really understanding that it’s essentially what hammer are they getting hit with? Right? Whether, in most cases, it’s growth, they’re looking for growth of some kind, and it’s, you know, some kind of growth from existing customers and some kind of net new. So you can know that, and that’s going to be true for a CEO or a CFO. It is about allocating resources, right? That’s their job, and so helping them, knowing that they’re making choices. Do we put more in product development? Do we put more in sales? Do we put more in marketing? To the extent that they can understand is what I heard you say, understand what the investments in marketing are doing and not doing based on what you have. You start to get to this sort of common help me deal with the board. So give me what I need.

Now then you get to this issue of the drowning in data and starving for insights. So we had this conversation in the huddle just a few minutes ago, which is, you can show a metrics dashboard, and Kay was talking about this, and you can show that, you know, we have a certain number of MQLs, we have a certain number of SQLs, we have up to have close, but that’s not the whole story. And we can really emphasize these dependable, reliable, predictable, if you will, barely things, and we can get them only to obsess with those because that’s what they can see. So how do you, and is there a way that we can give them those metrics and somehow bundle up these other soft ones that offer the bigger picture, as opposed to, “We spent a million dollars on digital, and we’re generating ten million in pipe as a result”? Maybe they don’t care, but they should.

Katrina: Well, that’s just it. I mean, people care about the things that they know about that relates to specifically their success or pain, right? And they can’t appreciate or understand something if it’s not even on their radar. I’ve built a framework, after slogging through the trenches on this for many years, to come up with a better way to explain all of this that I’ve used many times myself, when I’ve helped some other huddles with this and others as well. And it’s a framework called The Art of Marketing, A.R.T., which is an acronym that stands for Awareness, Recognition, and Traction. The key to this is to start off or come up with some reason to do a pivot into this model early, because you need to stick with this model over time. Because it’s a framework, but it’s also a communication structure around the value of marketing.

Here’s how it goes. So awareness is the first piece. Awareness is really a leading indicator. Awareness gets to your brand value without saying the dreaded B-word that makes every CFO’s eye roll, that every board member goes, “Oh, here we go again.” But awareness is a set of metrics, and you’re going to pick just a couple, not 25—pick like two, maybe three, that answer the questions, “Are we recognizable? Are we known, and are we findable?” Because at the end of the day, that’s really what awareness is all about. So you’re going to pick your couple of metrics there, you’re going to trend them, you’re going to follow them. You’re going to be able to explain why these are important.

The recognition piece is kind of in the middle, the meat in the middle of the sandwich. Again, just pick a couple of metrics here, not 25—just two or three. And your recognition metrics answer the questions, “Are we getting momentum from our awareness efforts?” So are things starting to happen? The big one is, “Are our messages and differentiation points that we’re putting out in the market being echoed back to us?” You know, when we talk to prospects, customers, media influencers, do they use some of the same language that we’ve been putting out there? And lastly, “Are we starting to see more quality inbound activity?” And quality can mean different things. You’ll have to think that through, but recognition is kind of you’re starting to get things going.

Then the T is traction. And these are the metrics that everybody starts with. And this is why you need to back up and do the A and the R of it. Traction answers the questions about, “Do we have qualified leads? Are they converting?” All those things that can get asked all the time, but by the time you have a problem in those metrics, it’s too late, right? Because you’re there, it’s the end game. Yeah, so you need the awareness and the recognition metrics as leading indicators to the lagging metrics of traction.

Traction answers things like, “Is our recognition increasing the quality of our leads?” “Is our number of qualified leads going up?” “Are we helping with the velocity of the sales process?” Are things closing faster and/or more smoothly than they did before? “Are our clients entrusting us with more work?” So I found that if you kind of stay to this A.R.T. framework—awareness, recognition, and traction—just a couple of metrics under each one, the ones you pick will vary by your company’s strategy and the stage you’re at. And every time you talk to the board, every time you talk to your CFO, or every time you talk to your CEO, every time you do an updated QBR or an MBR, you have your A.R.T. dashboard, and this is what you talk to, but don’t drown them in data. Give them a couple things, get them into the habit of leading indicators, and then the lagging indicators.

Drew: And I love that, and it’s so cool. One thing I want to do, what we really need to do together, is build that out as a little model using Google Sheets, and where people can put in numbers and poof out, and we can create some sort of magic formula. It’s something it can do, what Grant Johnson has done. I also think the art of this is selling this before you take the job, because then you really have a chance. Because what I keep hearing over and over in huddles is, “Let’s just start at traction.” And we know it doesn’t work that way. All right, Katrina, we’ll be back. Thank you for that. It’s an art form. That’s what we’re learning. So now let’s welcome Lakshmi Randall, who is the director of industry and partner marketing at Informatica, who’s joining the show for the first time. Hello, how are you? Welcome.

Lakshmi: Hi, Drew. Happy to be here. Doing great.

Drew: Thank you. And so where are we getting you? Where are you? Where’s home?

Lakshmi: I am actually joining from sunny San Diego.

Drew: Nice! Sunny San Diego indeed. Yes, this is when San Diego really shines. Nice, warm, but cool, you know, moderate summer. I’m curious. You’ve heard both what Kay and Katrina had to say as you were thinking about that. What did you hear that made sense, and what new stuff do you want to bring to the table?

Lakshmi: Yeah, a couple of thoughts. When we talked about how to align product marketing efforts to make sense to a CFO, I think one way to do that, just to add additional thoughts to that connection, is if the product marketing efforts are aligned with a campaign, or where content creation efforts are aligned with the campaign, then eventually you can show success in pipeline web plates, and then that way you can align with some of the metrics that you want to showcase to your CFO. So you can actually create the connection through the business outcomes that product marketing can generate. Another thought on sales enablement, I think Katrina or Kay talked about this. So sales enablement, to me, has two different components. There’s an awareness component and there’s an activation component, right? If you’re simply creating awareness with your sales team, but it’s not moving the needle, you really need to investigate, “How do you activate? How do you move the needle? What exactly do they need to really progress the pipeline?” Right? So that piece is extremely important. That’s why, you know, awareness by itself is not sufficient. You have to do awareness plus activation.

Drew: Cool. Okay, so let’s go back deeper for a second and talk about ways of integrating input from the CEO and the CFO, and how that sort of winds up into your marketing strategy for Informatica.

Lakshmi: I mean, great question. They both are catalysts and strategic partners for marketing, right? So the way that we incorporate this building process, I want to provide three different examples. First and foremost is formulation of marketing goals, right, aligning with the top and strategic priorities. And how do we formulate goals for the marketing organization, for various teams, functional teams within the marketing organization, aligning with those strategic priorities, right?

Second, planning our big rocks. This is like sales kickoff, our major pipeline generation events, or major product launches or major partnership initiatives, right? Making sure that their insights and inputs are incorporated. And indeed, we are driving success with some of these big drops.

And the third area is there may be some tweaks in strategy—type marketing strategy, for example, serial planning for lists, or maybe taking the budget from non-growth areas to growth areas, right? Or maybe there are new verticals or industries that we want to target, right? So any minor shifting as strategic components, absolutely, their inputs and insight should be incorporated to make sure everyone is aligned, and we are working towards that non-stop.

Drew: Yes. So there’s a lot of things to break down there, and I love the 1-2-3, so formulation of goals. So funny. I read a post that said growth is not a strategy, but it’s always on the list we want to grow. So how do you make sure that when we talk about formulation of goals, that we are actually doing it on a strategic level, right? So we’re saying we’re going to steal share, and we’re going to steal share because the market isn’t growing, and we’re going to steal share in a very strategic way. Because I often see goals as the problem. They’re sort of pipe dreams. Someone says, “Hey, we should grow 30%” great, based on what, nothing. So I’m curious how that process works when you talked about aligning with goals and formulating goals, how do you make sure that this is one? It’s a stretch, but it’s not just a pipe dream.

Lakshmi: It’s a great point. And I think there needs to be a balanced approach, right? Really unpacking that strategic priority, and what does it mean from a field marketing perspective? What does it mean from product marketing perspective, right? What does it mean from content marketing perspective, right? So it’s really unpacking it and taking it to the next level of metrics that we need to measure that will align with the strategic priority. And it is an exercise that we need to go through to make sure that we have that level of granularity and detail and we are measuring the right things for the right functions, right? So it’s an exercise that we need to go through. To me, it’s really unpacking it to the next level of detail and next level of granularity.

Drew: The second point was about planning with big rocks, and for those—so the notion of rocks, I think, initially came from Franklin Covey. The folks at the Entrepreneurs Operating System use it as a management tool, but the basic idea is that it’s about priorities. You use the term rocks—are you using an operating system that is where rocks are part of your operating system? And I’m talking about that strategic business operating system.

Lakshmi: I don’t think I’m using it from that perspective. As you pointed out, it’s really like critical major marketing activities that marketing needs to support and which actually ties to growth. It’s really important. It’s major pipeline generation, right? Major product launches. These are really important at a strategic level. And that’s really why the word “big rock,” yes.

Drew: I got it. And then the last one that you talked about was budgeting and moving budgeting around. And one of the things that I’ve noticed, and I wonder if you can address this, so there’s leading indicators and lagging indicators, and the problem I see with budget allocation is often the moves are based on lagging indicators versus leading indicators, right? I’m curious how the determination is made when you look at, we’re going to move some budget, and maybe it’s against one product to another, which is a little different. When you do that, how do you determine this one isn’t growing as fast? So we should put more money over there? You know, because there’s two schools of thought, right? One is, if something isn’t working, maybe it’s because it was under-invested, or maybe you just can’t sell it. So how are you sort of weighing that when you talk about budget shifting?

Lakshmi: So my example of really moving from one vertical to another vertical—you know, not all activities are going to perform equally in a given quarter, right? So that doesn’t mean that you immediately start reallocating things, right? So it’s really where we think about short-term goals, then your long-term goals, and also having a perspective on what’s happening in the market. What are some of the macroeconomic trends that we should be paying attention to, right? From a lagging perspective, you don’t necessarily start to fund it because something is lagging, but still understanding, do we even have a demand in the area, right?

And you know, digging deeper into some of those details and making the decision over time—you’re not going to immediately react and say, “You know what? I’m going to move this one from here to there.” So you have to be strategic about it. Perhaps something that’s not performing well this quarter may perform better next quarter, and then maybe reason behind it from a microeconomic transfer setting. It’s really having those insights and granular data to make those decisions. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all type of strategy. From my perspective, it’s really having a good understanding of why we need to move it and what are some of the drivers, how long do we wait, right? So how long is the long term and how short is the short term, right? So you’re integrating some of these things and making sure that you have a balance of growth and a balanced strategy when you are making some shifts in strategy and making sure that you’re continuing to drive growth, right.

Drew: So interesting, fascinating. This first half an hour of the show is really no matter what we talk about when we talk about sort of building tighter relationships where the CEO and CFO, it just comes down to being able to share the right data with them at the right time to show that you are making decisions as rationally as you can, which I think is so fascinating, because purchase decisions are so often irrational. And so anyway, with that, we’re gonna talk for a second about CMO Huddles. So we’ll be back with you, Lakshmi, so CMO Huddles, by the way, was started in 2020. It’s a close-knit community of over 300 highly effective B2B marketing leaders who share, care, and dare to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs these days, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. So Kay, Katrina, come on back. So you’re all really busy. You know, tell me if you feel like it, there’s no pressure here. But if you’d like to share something about CMO Huddles and how it’s helped you, that would be great.

Lakshmi: It’s really connecting with this fantastic group of leaders who are authentic and who bring diverse perspectives, right? It’s extremely valuable to learn from them. And you know, have these thought-provoking discussions, both strategic and tactical. And you know, personally for me, Drew, it’s helping me to build my personal brand. I’m truly happy to be part of this community. Thank you.

Drew: Thank you. Kay, any thoughts?

Kay: Yeah, I mean, I just feel like it’s a wonderful way of having an ongoing education, an ongoing kind of training. You know, doctors are constantly getting new certifications to stay up to date on the latest research and technologies. And it’s the same in marketing—you need that, and we don’t have the same kind of built-in infrastructure that they have in the medical field. So CMO Huddles provides that platform for sort of ongoing learning with colleagues, seasoned colleagues.

Drew: Yes, and we can certify you today on how to be a great guest on a live streaming show. All right, Katrina, any thoughts?

Katrina: Yeah, I agree. I think CMO Huddles has kind of been this, like mastermind group for me, of just, you know, any challenge you face, any situation you find yourself in, there’s probably somebody else in Huddles that’s had to tackle that problem, or at least have some good ideas to help you. And it’s a really generous group, you know, really, really generous. And I’ve benefited from it. I’ve tried to get back to when I think the combination of the Huddles’ conversations, and then the Slack channels, and many of us have gotten to know each other and have a lot of offline conversations, like, “Oh, who was that vendor you used for this?” Or, “Hey, I need to hire somebody for that. Does anybody know anyone?” So it’s a great mastermind group. They’re brilliant people.

Drew: Well, thank you very much. If you are a senior B2B marketing leader, and you need a shortcut to B2B greatness, take a second to sign up for a free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so let’s bring all three of you back. This is really such an interesting conversation, because part of this is translating marketing jargon and KPIs into language that CEOs and CFOs can understand, right? This is you as master communicators, putting it in perspective. And one of the things I’m sort of wondering, again, as a sort of flip-flop on this, it’s wonderful to say that we can predict we’re going to spend this money and we’re going to get this kind of output. But can we really? I mean, can you? What degree of confidence can you say that your marketing spend is going to deliver XYZ return?

Kay: Gosh, I think you can say that about certain things. But I think you also, for instance, at this point, you know, the digital marketing we’ve been doing, we can pretty much say we’re going to bring in this kind of demand and these kinds of results, basically. I always get the question of, “If we spent more, could we do more?” And sometimes that can be hard to answer, because I’m not sure. It sometimes feels like we’ve saturated some of our channels, and I’d have to see, you know, I’d have to really try it out. But we have continued to sort of increase things, and we have continued to increase our outputs. Then, as I was saying before, there’s a lot in marketing that you cannot say that about, and so you also need to socialize—especially, I think, with folks like the CFO—around the fact that some things are longer term, that some things are going to have to show up in the bookings and the pipeline, and sales reports. How important this support is, you do have to sort of socialize folks that it’s not quite that simple, right? So brand marketing, for instance, is a much longer-term play. And I try to tie it quite closely to commercial outcomes so that it’s something we’re going to hear from customers about. But I haven’t found a better way to show it. However, digital marketing is something that’s very easy to measure and kind of say, “Yes, if we put in this much, we’re going to get pretty much this much” based on historicals. With a lot of other things, you have other ways you have to show the value.

Drew: Yeah, there are so many interesting things going on in my mind right now. There are competing interests, and where not interest, because you’ll all want to grow the company, there’s no doubt about it. But the CFO wants it really simple: input, output, boom. The CEO just wants everything to work and work better this year and work better next year. And so the CMO, if they’re lucky enough, and they get the same CEO and CFO that they interview with, can, in theory, say, “Here’s how it works.” Do you buy that? Or you’re with me? Because it’s short term, it’s long term. Some are measurable, some aren’t. And then, because this is what I hear all the time, you put a CEO on the stage, and we’re doing a thing in September in London, and they’ll all say this: “Marketers need to talk the language of finance.” That’s what they’ll say. But really, so how do we walk this dance? How do we walk this dance? Because they need to talk the language of marketing. They need to understand how this works, how reputation matters. Why reputation matters.

Lakshmi: It’s really bidirectional, right? So, like I mentioned on Pier Huddle, the CMOs and CFOs are expanding their role to be strategic partners for marketing. You know, I also think that marketing should also expand the role to be speaking the language of CFO to some extent, right? You don’t have to stretch too much, but at least understand what are two or three metrics that are really important to CFOs, right? So creating that alignment and identifying those metrics and maybe building an executive dashboard around those metrics and showcasing the business value from that perspective is extremely important. I think the alignment and working together on those metrics is going to be the key to success.

Drew: So I totally agree, and now I’m trying to find a place for Kay’s anecdata for her podcast, right? Because that doesn’t fit on a dashboard. Where does that go? Katrina?

Katrina: You know, it doesn’t, but I think it’s that you boil down—a lot of people say, “Speak the language of finance,” and people are like, “Okay, dollars and cents and P and L,” and yes, you need to be able to explain how you’ve added more to the top line than you have subtracted from the bottom line to get there. And it’s really about risk, trade-offs, and opportunity harvesting, if you boil that all down, which is very much an art and a science blend, which is what marketing is. It’s art and science. It’s short cycle and long cycle. It’s trade-offs that you make now and you’ll make them again. You get into something just, you know, nobody has a crystal ball of how it’s going to go. And so I think being able to explain where you’ve placed your bets on go-to-market relative to the company strategy and the risks and upsides of where you’ve placed these bets is really important, because you’re speaking the common language of risk management and opportunity harvesting. And then how do you bring that to life? Can be through some of these anecdotal little tidbits that you drop in to kind of humanize and make real and go from theory to reality in some of your data points. But if you lead with those anecdotes, they’re like, “But that’s just a data point. I care about the trend,” because managing risk and harvesting opportunity is about trends, not data points. You’ve got to strike the balance there.

Drew: Well, and I think you can track trends. And I think that’s such an important point as hard data—it’s sort of like month over month in percentage change and improvements. But I also think it’s so interesting right now. I think if we surveyed our community, they’re spending 75-80% in quote demand gen, or revenue marketing, or whatever you want to call it. And if I go back to your notion of risk, trade-off, and opportunity harvesting, it’s easy to see they’re underspending, they’re overspending on the short term and underspending on the long term. But they can’t make the case that that’s it, because you can’t eat the future, right? Right, sales? Yeah, so I’m curious how you think about that short term, long term, because, let’s face it, I mean, the awareness and the recognition and the interest that the podcast is generating is invaluable.

Kay: Yeah, I mean, I think it has helped that we’ve been really successful with the related products to the podcast. So the podcast is about reading, and the product that is most closely tied to what we’re talking about in the podcast has been on an insane growth trajectory. And it’s not just the podcast, it’s a multi-channel approach we have around reading thought leadership. And I think everybody can see it’s so clear that we have been part of a movement, and we have helped drive that movement through a lot of our content that, frankly, was a risk. We took a risk to do this podcast. Someone on my team, a brilliant person on my team, had an idea. We decided to do it. Then we just started to totally lean into this thing and kind of own it and co-own it, along with a bunch of other thought leaders. And then there’s been this incredible wave of buying for our product, as well as sort of similar products. In this case, it’s so clear that there’s been success, but it’s a little bit hard to tell exactly the role that, for instance, the podcast played. However, you know, it keeps growing. We keep hearing it mentioned in all sorts of places. So it helps that it’s successful. I think when it weren’t, we’d be getting a lot more questions, right?

Drew: Right. So let’s do a mini case on that podcast. So the idea came from someone on your team. What did it really take for you to get off the ground? Is this something you’re doing weekly, monthly? What’s the structure and why? What is, in your mind now, that has helped make it successful?

Drew: Kay, we chose a great person on our team to be the host, very relatable to our customers, educators. It’s very down to earth. There were also macro market trends that were really going in the right direction. We were ahead of our time a bit. We saw something on the horizon, leaned into it, owned it, and happened to have great talent on our staff. She’s now kind of a celebrity in the reading world. It was sort of the opposite of a perfect storm—a perfect mix of things that came together. But it was partly seeing something on the horizon and kind of leaning into it, and then macro market trends sort of helping us rise, along with a lot of other tides, but we were just ahead.

Drew: And then, how long ago did you start this? 2018, 2019? Okay, so you’ve been doing this a while? Yeah, yeah, 2019. That’s great. And it just sort of builds. The thing is, most people get six episodes out and give up, and it’s a long-term snowball you’ve become—as you described it—a movement on something obviously that’s very important to just about everybody. Which is so interesting is getting kids to read. So the stretch there is for other CMOs. Is there something that you could do now that’s somewhat ahead of the game? It wouldn’t have to be a podcast, but some way of getting yourself out there. And what’s great about it, at least in the case of the podcast, is I’m imagining you’re interviewing people, some of whom might be potential customers, or at least experts.

Kay: Sometimes their current or potential, yeah.

Drew: Interesting. Fascinating, Lakshmi. Specifically, any thought initiative that seemed to be working on one level, although we can’t necessarily talk about it on a boom, you know more SQL.

Lakshmi: She’s actually showcasing some early events because it’s been a successful podcast for quite a few months, right? I think the ability to show those events is important. Brand efforts cannot be fully measured, and the maturity is still a work in progress. But can you show some early events? I think that’s going to be important in investing in initiatives like that and figuring out how to show those narratives, right? So it makes it easy. It doesn’t have to be necessarily quantitative. It could be qualitative, but it’s important to show they’re living. So we do know that it’s going in the right trajectory and will yield some revenue or conversion or whatever is important to the organization, right? So I think that’s important.

Drew: Just so you know, our research team has identified that there’s been eight seasons of the Science of Reading. So congratulations on that. All right. Well, now it is time for final words of wisdom for other CMOs and marketing leaders when it comes to relating marketing to your CEO and CFO. Lakshmi, since you were last, you get to go first—final words of wisdom.

Lakshmi: I would say, celebrate the wins and warn of the failures. Think of that as a shared responsibility, and create a plan to address those. Partner together to grow stronger.

Drew: Got it! Okay, Kay, final words of wisdom?

Kay: You want to speak their language, as Katrina talked about. You want to find out what matters to them and show how you’re contributing to those things. In my case, it’s quite different for the CFO versus the CEO. You want to do some education and, as Katrina talked about, show how marketing is more than just putting in $1 million to get SQL out of it. There’s so much you have to do before—so much you have to do to support sales with in-depth product knowledge and that kind of thing. So it’s partly helping them understand what marketing is.

Drew: It’s a perfect transition to Katrina, who laid out the art of marketing. So Katrina, take us home—final words of wisdom when it comes to relating marketing to your CEO and CFO.

Katrina: Well, I like my ART framework, but pick one that works well for you. Make up your own, beg, borrow, and steal from other people’s. I think consistency in how you talk about marketing from a structural standpoint is important. What are your leading and lagging indicators? If you don’t necessarily have all of that, maybe you have milestones that lead to metrics. Certain things have to be in place, and you hit those milestones, and then you get this metric on the other end. But always talk about it that way, because there’s a really big temptation, always by everybody with marketing, to jump to those outcome lagging metrics and indicators. Those are fair questions—like, there’s nothing wrong with those. That’s what we’re accountable for at the end of the day. But it’s not a light switch. You don’t flip the switch and get there. All these other things have to happen for that to be true. So come up with your story arc and your framework so that you can be consistent, because that consistency also builds trust. They don’t feel like they have to figure it out again every time they talk to you. They kind of know where you’re going to go. And I think it’ll serve you well and kind of just calm everybody down, and then you can really have the more meaningful conversations that you want to have, which is, where else can we grow and how can we get there faster?

Drew: Thank you, all three of you. Those are one questions, and what I heard a lot is, okay, we’re gonna speak their language to a point. We’re gonna bring them into our world as well. Because we can’t just get in the trap of any kind of short-term metrics and the lagging metrics. We have to be able to help them understand. And I love the consistency here. What we didn’t talk at all about is the test that you can run and working with your CFO to run tests and experiments. And as Lakshmi said, when they work, celebrate them and look for more investment. And when they don’t, you say, “Hey, we tried this and it didn’t work.” So again, you’re building the trust that Katrina talked about. Thank you, Kay, Katrina, Lakshmi—you’re all amazing sports. 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!