#423: How To Make A Show Out of a Show
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cmos, marketing, cmo, fractional, chief marketing officer, b2b, company, people, months, market, year, listen, talk, ceo, podcast, benchmark, sales, funnel, greg, question
SPEAKERS
Brett (37%), Speaker 4 (18%), Law (16%), Speaker 1 (14%), Speaker 5 (11%), Eric (4%)
1
Speaker 1
0:00
We go sweat equity podcast and streaming show the number one comedy business podcast in the world on Earth. Listen to us on iTunes Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Amazon music. Oh, the places you listen, if you liked this share with a friend loved one. Whoever
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
0:25
please display as well, right? Yeah, really mailing it in. We're big time. I'm sorry.
1
Speaker 1
0:33
We'll look we're gonna we're gonna make this intro short and sweet and get right into it. No sponsors on this one.
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
0:40
Really not even any sponsors. Squarespace are all fine. We're doing sponsors now I get
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
0:48
links, links to the sponsors will be in the episode description. And that's the way you get the hook up. Holler if you hear me. Squarespace call rail Figley sales and LinkedIn premium all get the hook up. Links in the episode description. Let's get it going. Hi. It's cold sweat
1
Speaker 1
1:35
are listening to the sweat equity podcast? Where we were going into Okay, yeah, we're gonna go Yeah, we. So this is more of a peace offering. We had some scheduling snafu is this week. And sometimes that happens.
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
1:52
Yeah, hit a button. Bad. Okay, go keep going. Nor me.
1
Speaker 1
1:58
I didn't know what was going on. I was just making sure we weren't just talking to nothing.
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
2:02
We're not talking to each other at least right? That Yeah, nothing.
1
Speaker 1
2:07
No, that's like my mom with hearing aids when I came over. And she's like, why would I have my hearing aids in if? If no one's here? And I'm like, Mom, I'm here.
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
2:16
Why the AIDS? You know, why aids? Exactly.
1
Speaker 1
2:20
We want to do small piece offerings since we didn't have an episode this week. And we're going to be a little bit later next week on having one. And this is me being a dork on an interview a LinkedIn live have not heard it. By the way. It's, it's by the fractional cmo agency I'm with called Grow powerful. And this was a pilot episode. I said yes. Anything I can do to be a horror for myself. I'll be on it. And so this is a pilot version of what they're trying to do is going to have these LinkedIn lives. You can ask CMOS anything. There's still going on, if you want to ask in the future. But it's about go to market product company. You have any
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
3:03
highlights? Can you just give me the highlights?
1
Speaker 1
3:05
I mean, I fucking crushed it. That's not a highlight such as you saying that? I'll tell you one thing. It's really hard to be funny in these kinds of scenarios. Yeah, you know, and I really tried to not be like, you know, you don't you want to make it interesting. But at the same time, you don't want to like your jokes have to be very broad. We don't want to invalidate yourself, you know, right. And so it's kind of that thing of like, already to funny. Well, I already know what I look like if you're if you're coming into it,
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
3:32
right? You sell valid invalidate yourself. Right circle look.
1
Speaker 1
3:36
Well, yeah. So you have to make sense. So I entered, you know, I got my inner child inner child inner. What am I thinking tube?
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
3:46
I don't know. I,
1
Speaker 1
3:47
I tried to I try to echo smarter people. And what would they say? And just try to follow
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
3:52
their echo? I don't. I don't know really trying to think of I don't know, we're doing this. We can't move on from this. I got to figure it out. My inner inner voice.
1
Speaker 1
4:01
I don't either enter with an Eaton or an island, but I don't know where I was my Interstellar.
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
4:08
Okay. Yeah. Good movie,
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
4:11
great movie, the best movie, my favorite movie. So this is, this will be the it's 20 minutes long, which is good. And hopefully, it's
ER
Eric Readinger, Fractional ...
4:22
a good 20 minutes. I mean, if you really want to learn stuff, you didn't have any moments. I don't, you know, I'm not saying I don't want to watch it or hear it or listen to it or watch it.
1
Speaker 1
4:31
I definitely said I definitely had a question about sales versus marketing teams. How do you get them together? And it's like, oh, I channeled the inviting my inter DK acres is what I did. Yeah. Would you say well, sales teams we're gonna fight with marketing teams, marketing teams, gonna fight with sales teams. That's just how it is. It's always been that way. And you got to start getting the point fingers. It's not that country but
4:56
but also the helpful Yeah, because that's just the way it's gonna be. You have
1
Speaker 1
5:02
to unify them. That's that solution is basically you got to listen to it. Okay? You're not gonna listen to it, I'm gonna get it for free. Why would you? You get all this for free? I'm living it. Yeah. So, without further ado, we'll get right into Okay.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
5:23
All right, we are live. Welcome to the first of many go to market office hours. This is where if you are a CEO, a chief revenue officer and investor or even another chief marketing officer like ourselves, we answer the questions that you have about figuring out, go to market opportunities, solving problems, thinking ahead, thinking behind how to measure how to do all the things go to market. Now, for this focus. For today's show, our goal is to talk about what you should be doing with your go to market motions strategy, plan and attack eight now, because we're about to head into the second half of the of the game, folks, we're about to head into the second half of the year. And that means you've only got six months left, or probably less, to actually get your stuff done. We got summer vacations, that slows things down, we got the the winter breaks, that slows things down. So you probably only have about four, four and a half months of actually legitimate work to get things done. I have brought with me today. And we're going to have different people joining us each week or every other week as we do this. But today we have the guinea pigs of grow. We have the amazing team of what we call a CMOS or interim CMOS here to join us. And we'll just go around the clock here. And we'll start with you, Greg. Greg, why are you here? What makes you worthy of us to listen to your
4
Speaker 4
7:00
i hope i worthy. Yeah. Good morning. Thanks, Brett. Thanks, everyone. I love the craft of marketing, longtime b2b tech CMO, mostly sofware. deep expertise in global marketing, and most recently, Account Based Marketing and SAS metrics. Love to focus on that and excited to hopefully answer all your questions and be part of this great group.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
7:24
Parag. We're lucky and excited to have you here. Just as we are with you, Rusty, talk to us. Who are you? And why should we listen to your ideas about go to market?
5
Speaker 5
7:36
Yeah, Rusty Bishop here, been a touring musician, guitarist behind me. I've been a PhD biochemist, I was a CEO and a founder of a company that had a successful exit. And then I became a CMO of a publicly traded software company. So that's the expertise that I bring to this call today is I've been in the CIO job. I've ran marketing at a publicly traded company and been successful with both and I hope that I can help you answer your questions because I think that CMOS CEOs like me, when I was doing the job, I struggle with marketing. I didn't know what to measure. I didn't know what to do. I don't even know what to think about it. So we can help you.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
8:09
Perfect. Okay. Well, thank you, Rusty. And then last, but clearly not least, we've got law Smith Law. Why are you here? And why should we listen to your insights?
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
8:20
Well, that could be a very existential question, I guess. I'll save that for a different podcast that has more colors in the background, maybe. But I'm a fractional CMO. I have my own small, b2b, Small Business Advisory meets agency. It's called toka baaga. I'm the president of that moonlighting stand up comedian for about 15 years. So that's a second career. But the day job pays the bills a lot better. And, and also, the host of sweat equity podcasts, kind of a blend between the two worlds of entrepreneurship in comedy, and I love going the puzzle of it. I love helping visit Pete Park businesses. You're here when we met, and I got you to hear and that's, there's something very satisfying about that. I think I've improved over 1000 businesses since like, 2012. I'm trying to count some stats, I'm gonna throw it back to you, Brett. Because you did a great job putting a sense of urgency. That's how we know you're good at marketing. You got the rest of the year coming up. You threw that in there? I saw it. Yeah.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
9:26
So just for everybody to know we are all part of an organization called Grow powerful. We are all interim and fractional chief marketing officers that are here to help solve problems. Most of it has to do with go to market motions. It might be new initiatives. It might be rewiring things, fixing things, whatever else. And when you think about needing to get your stuff together, between now and the end of the year, there's never a better time to bring somebody in that knows what they're doing than now. So, let's dive in. We've got our first call. Shouldn't and I'll put it up here on the screen. This is kind of fun where we're doing this for the first time, we're playing around with a lot of features. The first question is, with six months left, how should I prioritize my go to market spend? Who wants to take that one,
4
Speaker 4
10:16
I start. So the first thing I'd say is, if you're, if your goal if you're an emerging brand, and your goal is to show potential valuation and growth to investors, I would focus on demand gen at the top of the funnel. But if you have a revenue number you've committed to your board investors. And clearly it's conversion, the difference would be content and Outreach at the top of the funnel is more about awareness and the provocation of why you are relevant now, versus in the middle of the funnel, where you need to drive conversion, you would want to have much more content focused on the immersive things like a calculator, or something that shows you the ROI or evidence or proof or case study. So there would be two different kinds of approaches from content to how you reach out and engage people. But it really depends on whether you need to show runway and valuation or whether you've got to hit a number which require different things. Okay, I'll stop there.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
11:18
Who else has an as an idea around this six month time clock? The sense of urgency?
5
Speaker 5
11:25
I'll jump in I depends on your sales cycle. I'll tell you that. I mean, if you got to think about sales cycle, you've already spent the money. So you don't if you're a high velocity sales company, then you should be you know, Bob dissing prioritizing top of the funnel, just like Greg said, if you have a six month sales cycle, for me, I like to think of this in terms of compounding assets versus assets that you're paying for in a linear fashion. Compounding assets are things like your email list, like so many people neglect their email list, and that is one of your greatest sources that your company has to go out there and talk to potential customers doing SEO, we've got these awesome general AI tools now that can go and help you figure out exactly who your audiences how they respond to things, create stuff, and literally seconds. So I'll be thinking about how to build those compounding assets that take me into the next year about a six month cycle.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
12:11
Got it? Got it perfect. Okay. Law, anything to add?
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
12:14
Yeah, I would, I would echo what Greg and rusty were saying and to a degree and I'll I'll go kind of six pack Joe style on on philosophically because it's tough. It's tough to answer this question specifically, right? Because we don't know the actual product. But what I have to do is go macro out, pull it back out. And let's reverse engineer it. So let's go three years from now. And then let's go backwards and see what those benchmarks should be to get you back to six months. Because if you plan everything at the six months right now, then what's going to happen? On seven, right? So just like rusty was saying, if you have that plan already set up, get ahead of yourself, see what you can do scrub the email list, scrub the contacts you have and HubSpot or whatever CRM you've got going.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
13:02
Okay, so then what we've heard is the law of law is the longer the hair the longer the planning cycle, there should be.
1
Speaker 1
13:08
I'm just playing the character. Alright, perfect. I know, I know, people think I look like Nicolas Cage and Con Air.
4
Speaker 4
13:17
Right. Can I throw in one more quick thing here? Thanks, Greg. Very passionate about this, you should be persistently running Account Based Marketing. If you're in b2b persistently, you can achieve about a penny and oppression, it's incredibly cost effective, you should have that always on, you should never stop doing that. Because that can with less effort over time, keep the top of the funnel healthy, so that we do have to surge in the middle to surge conversion, you could put more focus there always be running Account Based Marketing for the top of the funnel. It's cost effective, and it's only adding value to your brand.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
13:54
Perfect. I absolutely love that. And I think that's spot on. I don't have anything to add. I'd like to actually head into we got another question that came in from the crowd. And this is kind of a this is a little bit less of a go to market but more of a question about us in our life and mission is is there a difference between IC CMOs and fractional CMOS. And I'd love to take a stab at that in mind. So so here's the deal. There's there's the interim CMOS, fractional CMOs and virtual CMOS, ultimately, in and there's a lot of people that call themselves CMOS, or fractional CMOs are interesting, interim CMOS, and they shouldn't. But there are legitimate people who have truly been chief marketing officers of companies or VP of marketing of companies and have a successful track record. Those people in b2b Tech and SAS grow the company we're part of, we call them ice CMOS. Everybody here is an ice CMO. Now that the commonality between interim cmo fractional CMO, virtual CMO is they They are CMOS that are proven but they prefer gigs, over jobs, they've decided to have a more freelance more open more flexible lifestyle, to where they can choose the type of engagements they can work on to three or four engagements at a time, or one. And the industry as a standard calls it a for the industry as a fractional CMO. Now I'll tell you another angle of difference, which is an interim cmo tends to be somebody that is close to full time, who may be who may be stepping in for someone else for a period of time. And its size larger companies, they lost a chief marketing officer, they need somebody in place. So they can spend their time six months a year to look for the perfect person. The interim is also good if there's a new initiative, there's two companies that are merging together and there needs to be an adult at the table or something like that. A fractional cmo tends to be more for smaller companies that they work on a part time basis, two days a week, you know, one day a week. And it might actually be the first time a company is leveraging a chief marketing officer. And they're kind of dipping their toe in. Other thoughts? Anybody else have some some additions on the definitions?
4
Speaker 4
16:22
One of the things. So one of the things I love about being part of this group is the mindset is that whether you're fractional interim or full time, I think marketing today is so measurable. And you should be running things much more than a set of sprints are solving these five problems, and then moving on to the next. And so whether you're having your tenure is however long, you're going to do it. I think there's a mindset that is also a really embodied in the Grow team, which is what problem are we solving, let's go race to solve it. Be smart about it, be data driven, learn as fast as we can, and then click the right things in place, then move on to the next. But I think that is how marketing is efficacious today is being much more sprint focused, fast, focused, data driven, which is, you could say is born out of the fractional model, but it's how marketing good marketing is run today, in my opinion.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
17:13
Yep, I agree. All right, well, then let's keep diving deeper. One of the next questions we've got coming up. And again, this is the first time we want to keep it fast. We want to keep it short, we want to make this 20 minutes or less. We've got about eight minutes remaining. The next big question that comes up is this interesting one, the question is, during the crunch time, do you usually see sales and marketing working closer together? Or is there more of an infighting take place? Taking place? I'd love to get somebody to provide their their thoughts, maybe what typically happens and what we all know should happen, and maybe give a little bit of flavor as to how to help avoid infighting if there is.
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
17:59
I mean, yeah, painting with broad strokes, it's in funding takes place when it's crunch time between the two departments. It shouldn't your role as a CMO should be to bridge those gaps and have a loop. So they make it and kind of sell it on the those those departments that you guys need to help each other out. You make more money or career advancement by by doing so. But by blaming the other pointing fingers, it's it's Don't be competitive, be cooperative.
4
Speaker 4
18:33
I would add, for me, the key is two parts. One is no one makes their numbers unless everyone makes their numbers. So there's no way that marketing has any celebration or gets rewarded or anything like that. If the numbers missed from the sales side, that is fundamental. Second, focus on opportunity. Because opportunity is more than marketing, qualified lead or sales accepted lead or whatever you want to call it. Opportunity means we found someone who has intention to buy and might likely buy that's the better thing to measure. And there's more by the nature of it. There's more cooperation around opportunity.
5
Speaker 5
19:11
Got it? Yeah, I've seen the same thing. I've been in companies that have had both the crunch time where marketing sales writers throats and I've been in companies where sales and marketing were in lockstep. The thing that that separates those two, in my opinion is as CEO or as CRO you are responsible for owning the message. And I see so many times when there isn't fighting the CEO is talking a different message from sales or a different message from marketing. And if you don't own the message as a CEO, I think it trickles all the way down and that's where you see the employee.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
19:44
Got it. Got it. Well, perfect. Well, I think we've got time for one more question that's come in and this is a boy I don't know this is a good market we can decide we want to answer this or not. This is more of us. Managing the expectations of the world and the Question is, you know, there's no doubt in the first half of 2023. If you're in b2b technology, higher percentage of companies are struggling than succeeding and making their numbers in our minds here, what's the benefit? What's the curse of trying to reset expectations now for what the end of the year would look like versus trying to push hard, invest harder, go more aggressive to try to get the original members in? Who would like to take that one?
4
Speaker 4
20:35
I started very quickly. Yeah. This is why I'm so convicted now about benchmarking. Yes, you should answer this question in the context of how are your peers doing? are they struggling to because you might have the right go to market you might be highly efficient, highly sustainable. And you just need to ride this out. Because it's easy to just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and your competitors aren't, you know what they're going to end up ahead. So I would benchmark and I would specifically look at the magic number. If you can go to your board, or your investors and say, Hey, we are we have a great magic number. We're efficient in sales and marketing. Our peers are at the same spot, you're more likely to win favor and support for staying the course if that's the right thing to do. So benchmark. Look at your peers. magic number. Are you sustainable, long term? Yeah. Okay,
5
Speaker 5
21:23
thanks for the question. There's important is what would happen was in that question, right, what would happen if we did this, and you know, put yourself in this in a situation of your board. Like, if you had to go to your board tomorrow and say, we're going to reset our numbers, you know, how they've put money in your company, most likely, you know, how they're going to react to that. So you know, I think your board is not going to react very well to that. So what Greg is saying is super important. Like, here's why we're doing we've got benchmark data, we know this is what the world looks like, you know, we know we've cut marketing budget, or we've cut had to cut salespeople or whatever we've done, right? So but that's what would happen, your board is going to either be behind you or not behind you. So that's what you want to put yourself in their shoes to figure that out? Yep.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
22:02
All right. Well, we had a couple of good questions coming in law. Any other thoughts on on that last question?
LS
Law Smith, Fractional CMO, ...
22:07
Now, it should be philosophically you should be laying the benchmarks and the goals in your your KPIs, your key performance indicators, I don't want to talk in too many acronyms, because that's kind of our world. It's starting to sound like finance. But I would say, you know, practice cars, and that is the Japanese word for content improved. And so you're when you're making those goals, you need to write out why you set those goals at the time. So when you get to this period, right now, you can look back and okay, this is why these were our benchmarks. But that it's it's always improving, it's always changing. And here's why there's externalities, like we've been talking about what's, what's the market, like? You know, sometimes that does seasonality. Sometimes that comes into play, and especially in b2b Tech, sometimes you don't have the research to stand on. So you have to make you have to reduce the amount of risk as far as making predictions and making forecasting.
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
23:09
Yep. Yep. I love that. You know, the only I think you've all done, great, you know, benchmarking comparisons, managing expectations, et cetera, et cetera. The you know, the other thing I will say is go back about 150 years ago, and that, you know, think of Chrysler think of Lee Iacocca. And for those of you that don't know, he stopped, he was a senior executive at Ford, he became the CEO of Chrysler, Chrysler was about to lose was was about to go bankrupt. He stepped in and he said, we can't think about anything more than 90 days out, we are now going to implement rolling 90 Day plans. And I think that's something that's really important, especially for the b2b tech companies that are getting hit the hardest suffering the hardest, is, don't think about six months out, maybe you can rewire expectations to look at the next 90 days, and they're rolling 90 days, every month, you sort of look at the next 90 days. And maybe that's a little bit of survival, you know, surviving versus thriving kind of mentality. But I think it's also hunkering down and focusing. So just another approach to try another idea to try. Yeah,
5
Speaker 5
24:20
I think that speaks to why CMOS work, right. I mean, there's in our group, there's what 1520 rock solid CMOS had been there, done that, you know, you bring a group like this together, and you get the power of all 20 of them feeding back to your company. And I think, you know, if you're new 90 days, friends, you've been doing that with one person or 15 people that know how to do it. Yep,
BS
Brett Schklar, CEO of Grow ...
24:38
yep, exactly. Well, I think that is it for us for today. We're at about 20 minutes. I wanted to keep this short want to keep it brief. Thank you so much for being a part of our very first ever have many go to market office hours. We will continue doing these every two weeks until we decide to do it every week. And I just want to say thank you to Greg A big thank you to rusty thank you to law and on behalf of these fine people as well as everyone at grow powerful thank you thank you thank you and have a great day Talk soon cheers
