Creating Customer Champions: How to Cultivate Loyalty and Advocacy with Drew Neisser

Randy Wootton (00:04):

Well hello, everybody. This is Randy Wootton, CEO of Maxio, and your host of SaaS Expert Voices, where we’re bring the experts to you to talk about what’s going on in the world of SaaS today and what are some of those trends that we’re seeing unfolding tomorrow.

(00:16):

Today I’m delighted to actually have a special guest join us, a gentleman named Drew Neisser, who I’ve known for years. He’s a leader, a luminary in the B2B marketing space, which I’ll give a little bit of background in a second, but we’re going to have a conversation around CEOs and CMOs. So if you’re an early-stage founder thinking about hiring that first CMO, what to look for, how to think about the role, how to think about the job, and what sets those folks up for success. We’ll also talk a little bit about the CMO and the CFO. So relevant insights for how to think about working across the C-suite for those early-stage founders.

(00:51):

But Drew, I’m really excited to have you here. You have such a great background. From what I could find, you worked in the agency world for 10 years with some of the biggest brands out there, Pepsi, Sara Lee, and Canon, and then you were the founder and CEO of Renegade Marketing for the last 30 years. You’re not that young. You’ve been doing this for a long time, where you’ve interviewed over 600 marketing executives for articles at Fast Company, Ford, Ad Age, MediaPost. You have podcasts. You have two books, one of my favorite books, Renegade Marketing for everybody. You should check it out. We’ll get into the details around that. And your podcast, which is on my must-listen to, Renegade Marketing.

(01:32):

So Drew, welcome.

Drew Neisser (01:35):

Well, thank you. And for all of those kind words, and I’m just glad my wife isn’t listening because she said she’ll probably think my head won’t be able to get out the door, so thank you for those kind thoughts.

Randy Wootton (01:45):

My pleasure. And the last thing I forgot to mention was you’ve actually transitioned to the CMO Huddles for the last four years where you are bringing together CMOs from big small companies, B2B CMOs, and hosting huddles, conversations, and you’re also doing a conference in the coming month or so. Can you talk a little bit more about CMO Huddles and if people are interested in getting their CMOs to attend or CMOs are listening to this, how they might join?

Drew Neisser (02:11):

Absolutely. I’m so lucky that things came together in 2020 where a group of CMOs I could see were really struggling right when the pandemic began. So we kicked off a huddling April 1st, 2020, and they helped me turn it into a business officially October 1st, 2020. We now have over 350 Huddlers, as we like to call them, who come together, as we like to say, to share care and dare each other to greatness, and that’s the focus.

(02:41):

Look, it’s a hard job and it’s wonderful to be around other CMOs who are facing the same challenges, but it’s amazing if you talk to another CMO who has the same challenge, how you two can solve it together. So that’s Huddles. And thank you for mentioning the Super Huddle. It’s our first on November 8th in Palo Alto, and they have an amazing speaker lineup and as we like to say, it’s going to be flocking awesome.

Randy Wootton (03:10):

Well, it’s interesting you talk about communities. One of the things I’ve been writing about, The Eight Secrets to Success for CEOs, and one of the things I talk about is this idea of building your tribe. And for me that includes a couple of components. One is having a mentor, so someone who has directly relevant experience for the situation and context that you’re in, having a coach who’s someone that helps you. Well, I need extra help in terms of emotional intelligence and working interpersonal effectiveness. And for A CEO, I found this super helpful in terms of working with the board and learning that motion because that’s new to anyone who has a first-time CEO gig.

(03:45):

The third element is having a peer group, which sounds like your CMO Huddles satisfies that. For me, there are other groups out there like EO, YPO, Alliance of CEOs. The one that I’ve been involved in most recently was Vistage, and then there’s other ones out there. And to your point, those are really wonderful opportunities and forums for you to just be real, to share, to care and to dare, and I think also to be just to be really transparent.

(04:11):

And then the fourth component, which I always talk about, is build a peer advisory group. And these are people who’ve known you for a bunch of years who know what you really care about, what you’re really motivated by and can call you on your own BS. So when you’re thinking about moving into a different job or thinking some life change, like checking in with your peer advisory board. So I love the CMO Huddles because it feels like it really speaks to a combination of those.

Drew Neisser (04:37):

It does. Boy, I love that lineup and I wish more CMOs invested that much time in having a mentor, having a coach in a peer group and then having the peer advisory group.

(04:52):

I will say I never had an advisory board for Renegade Marketing, but I do have one, and we have seven fantastic CMOs who we meet quarterly, and I can’t tell you how valuable it is. It’s a wonder, both, I can literally say, all right, thinking about doing this, what do you think? Here’s our overall plan, and they’ve just given such great input. So I understand the value of an advisory board and appreciate that.

(05:20):

The peer group thing, this is a funny thing and I want to make this, we also support CMOs in transition. And they have two realizations when they’re out of work. One is, gee, I wish I built my network while I had a job. And two, I wish I built my personal brand while I had a job. And so within CMO Huddles, obviously we make it easy for you to build your network. But two, we also have exclusive PR properties that build a personal brand and we have ways of amplifying it.

(05:49):

So it’s funny, you get a job, you’re head down, I got to just take care of everything, and you forget to give yourself an hour a month, and that’s all we’re talking about here, but it’s really important.

Randy Wootton (06:01):

Right. I think that to sharpen your spear and how do you build your skills? And I talk about also the fact that one of the things that my driving instinct is operating at the edge of my own ignorance. And so it’s what books am I reading, what conversations am I having, which conferences am I going to? It always is hard for a member with Vistage, it’s a full day and it’s once a month. And every time I go to do that, I’m resistant. I’m thinking, gosh, I have so much to do. How can I possibly spend eight hours in a conversation with other CEOs?

(06:33):

But I do there’s also there’s value where you just disconnect and let the subconscious work problems while you’re sitting in a room listening to other smart people talking about their problems. And it provides a perspective that you just don’t, I think most people just don’t create the time for meditating, percolating, stewing in the issues that you’re struggling with. And so the forum itself is you build connections, but it also is just the construct of taking that time out can be really, really valuable.

Drew Neisser (07:05):

I have to tell you, so a funny story about Vistage. I was in it for about four years. And I made the day, like you, dreaded it, then get in there and found it so valuable, particularly when they had outside speakers come in.

Randy Wootton (07:19):

Right.

Drew Neisser (07:19):

And my executive team absolutely dreaded that next day because I was there with five new things that we could do. So if you do Vistage, I strongly encourage you also to have an operating system like EOS or something so that they can say to you, “Drew, that’s not on our quarterly plan. Great idea. Let’s put it in the future.” And so it took me about a year to stop doing that because we’ll call it one of my mentors that was also working with us said, “You got to stop this.”

Randy Wootton (07:52):

Well, I imagine in your role, I mean we can shift to the roles of CEO versus CMO, one of the things we want from CMOs are ideation. The CMOs I think of the person for a CEO is often the thought partner in terms of company strategy, strategic narrative, next new cool idea that you’re going to do in the marketplace. And so you have this rapid ideation and activation that you want. I imagine as a CEO yourself, if you have that tendency, it’s let’s ideate. And your team is like, well, we got to execute on all the things we said we were going to do. I know I have that same challenge is I got lots of ideas and they say, “Randy, it’s great you’re having all these ideas. Not all these ideas are good.”

Drew Neisser (08:33):

Well, and it’s funny, so I love the term thought partner. I published an anonymous interview I did recently with a CEO who I felt just totally was amazing. And one of the things that they look for from their CMO is that they’re a strategy partner. And I wish more CEOs did that because they absolutely should be strategy partners who are thinking more long-term than just how are we going to get this one product out the door this quarter? That’s part one.

(09:08):

Now the other part of your point was about the idea-a-minute CEO. That’s the visionary founder. That’s that person. And so as a visionary founder, you better have an operations person underneath you who’s really good at managing you.

Randy Wootton (09:24):

That’s right. That’s right. That COO or president or chief of staff.

Drew Neisser (09:28):

Exactly.

Randy Wootton (09:28):

Especially as you start to scale and you’re out coming up with all these great ideas.

(09:32):

Well, let’s do that. Let’s bridge to in our pre-brief we talked a little bit about the relationship between CEOs and CMOs and there was three things that lead to success. One is defining what the role should be. Talking a little bit about what is a marketing problem versus a business problem, and then what sort of candidate should they evaluate for the role based on broadly what the role is, what the challenges are. And one of the big things with CMOs is no CMO can cover the full landscape well. They have areas, they spike, and we’ll talk a little bit about that.

(10:03):

But Drew, how do you think about for a CEO thinking about hiring that head of marketing to do marketing but not solve business problems in the same way, like a marketing problem versus a business problem, how have you thought about that and what do you coach your CMOs?

Drew Neisser (10:18):

So I wish I could also coach CEOs. The point I want to make here first and foremost is that less than 20% of all CEOs in B2B have any marketing experience in their career. And so there’s one of two outcomes that could happen with that. One is that they think they know marketing and then they’re really dangerous. Or two, they don’t know marketing and they’re suspicious of it. And so there is a happy medium in there somewhere where they’ve studied it, they’ve learned somehow through osmosis over the years because they’ve seen marketing’s effectiveness, and that’s really the key here. If a CEO has not seen how marketing impacted a business earlier in their career on a B2B level, it’s a problem because that CEO has no way of setting expectations.

Randy Wootton (11:08):

Right. Only thing I’d add to that is I think there’s a lot of VCs out there that think they’re marketers as well. So you end up-

Drew Neisser (11:15):

Oh, god. Don’t get me started. It’s the same thing with PE firms too.

Randy Wootton (11:17):

Right, yeah. No, let me tell you how to do the marketing, and really what they’re thinking about is how do you do demand gen ROI on search, but not broadly thinking about the ways you create demand in addition to capturing demand.

Drew Neisser (11:32):

No, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts. They get their spreadsheets out and they say, “Hey, we noticed in your search bids you were paying a little bit more than you should have for one of these keywords.” It’s like, really? You invested $20 million and we’re going to be having a conversation about which keywords we’re spending money on?

Randy Wootton (11:50):

Yeah. So then how do you, for the people that have experienced marketing experience, what’s the first thing in terms of framing what the role should be and drawing that distinction between the types of problems you’re having the CMO focused on, the marketing problems, versus the business problem that you, the CEO, and the rest of the executive team should be focusing on together because I think those two often get conflated?

Drew Neisser (12:12):

They do, and I think there’s business strategy versus marketing strategy. I often think in a lot of these companies there isn’t a business strategy. There’s a product that has been sold and they’ve gotten to a certain threshold and they can’t go any farther because it’s a product. There’s no business strategy. So they say, “Well, marketing solved,” with an absence of a business strategy, they say, “Marketing, fix it, just create demand.” And so if a marketer truly understands the difference between business strategy and goals, you’ll hear a CEO say, “We want to grow the business 20%.” That’s not a strategy. That’s a goal. And really understanding the difference is important.

(12:58):

Because you can’t just say, “Hey, we’re going to grow 20%.” You have to be able to say, “Okay, we’re going to do that because our current customers are going to buy more and they’re going to churn less and they’re going to recommend us and the analysts are going to promote us and we’re going to have some mind space.” So that’s this real serious challenge is business problem versus business strategy versus marketing strategy.

(13:25):

There’s another thing I want to make a point on, which is about helping them understand the notion of reputation. Because once you use that word versus brand, and we say, “Hey, you know what it takes to build your own personal reputation in your career.” Think about the brands that you love, the car that you just bought, or some other things where reputation really matters. They bought a Lexus instead of a Cadillac because they know Lexus’s reputation for reliability is really strong, or whatever it is. If they can understand that you cannot sell if you have no reputation, they’ll begin to understand what marketing does. If they can’t understand reputation, it’s just go sell the product, darn it, you have a problem.

Randy Wootton (14:16):

Especially in a B2B context where we’ve got so many different vendors and they all seem to be saying the same thing. You could take the logo off of one website and drop it in the other. I faced this my entire career. I think this distinction, I like that the reputation versus brand. For me, there’s this, maybe double clicking on that, having brand awareness and brand preference, and how do you build brand preference through the stories you’re telling, the thought leadership you’re doing, the podcast you’re hosting? There’s a whole set of things that you’re putting out into the ether that you hope is impacting people. Like everyone talks about now 90% of the buyers aren’t in market, but you want to be surrounding them with the brand. And I know how hard this is very directly after we tried to launch Maxio.

(14:59):

So we had two brands, SaaSOptics and Chargify, both of them had a lot of brand equity over 12 years. Good reputation, well known in the industry. I happened to be a customer of one of them, of SaaSOptics, and loved it. The brand names were descriptive of what they did. SaaSOptics gave you SaaS operating metrics. Chargify let you do subscription management charging. And then they brought the two companies together and they debated should we go to SaaSOptics or Chargify or ChargeOptics? And it just was getting convoluted.

(15:30):

And so they decided to come out with a brand Maxio, but there is no brand equity.

Drew Neisser (15:36):

No, no.

Randy Wootton (15:36):

There is no brand equity. And so over the last two years we’ve been trying to build the brand and be careful what you wish for as a CMO in getting the chance to build a new brand. It’s really freaking hard and trying to capture and take the brand equity of legacy brands and have it attached to the new brand isn’t necessarily going to work. And so we end up talking to a lot of people and we say, “Hey, we’re Maxio,” and they go, “Who are you?” And we say, “Oh, we’re legacy SaaSOptics.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, we know you.”

(15:58):

So can you say a little bit because I think we’re absolutely in that chute, that challenge, that gauntlet of trying to build reputation on the foundation of two great brands?

Drew Neisser (16:09):

So there’s a couple of thoughts. So let’s just define marketing as a heroic battle for mind space or mind share.

Randy Wootton (16:17):

Ah, love it.

Drew Neisser (16:18):

So we’re battling for that. It’s so hard. If you think about how hard it is to get something in your own brain about anything, and it gets harder every year, by the way. So you’re trying to own something. And so in order to own something, you need to say the the same thing that hopefully is different from what other people are saying over and over and over again. And if you’re lucky enough to build a brand or build a reputation in some space and then you, poof, walk away from it, it’s a problem.

(16:51):

And I’ve see this over and over again, not from just small companies, but really large companies where there’s this hubris, oh, well, we’re going to take two brands, we’re going to just create a new brand. Most of the time the business will tank.

(17:05):

I’ll give you a quick example. Eloqua was bought by Oracle. And about a year into it, they decided we can just turn the Eloqua website off. Business went down 30%, boom, just boom, like instantly. So the head of marketing for Eloqua said, “Can I turn this back on,” and it came right back on.

Randy Wootton (17:23):

Wow.

Drew Neisser (17:25):

I did a podcast with Jennifer Renaud probably two or three years ago. It’s funny because we recorded in a cap, but she had had the same experience at another company that took $4 billion brands and they merged them together, PE firm, and they renamed it. All $4 billion worth of equity lost in a second.

Randy Wootton (17:45):

Wow.

Drew Neisser (17:45):

And so what we talk about at that moment is you need something called a reverse migration strategy. Normally you would take two years to migrate a brand from one place to another. Think about a trade show. You go to a trade show booth and I see a brand, oh look, there’s the Apple booth. They never go to trade shows. Bad example. There’s the, let’s see, the Microsoft Windows booth, just in case you happen to be a customer. If you’re a customer of there’s, you’re going to stop. But if they suddenly changed their name to White Wall, you’re not going to stop. Those aren’t your people. You’re not a customer. So you need to be thinking about your customers and their ability to their find you at a trade show. They’re not going to do it with a new name unless you spent a zillion dollars.

Randy Wootton (18:34):

That’s brilliant. In fact, that was our big lesson learned. So we, in January of 2023, we did a brand awareness survey and we found we had low brand awareness at Maxio, but SaaSOptics and Chargify still had brand equity. And so then we went back to, hey, SaaSOptics and Chargify becoming Maxio at our trade show. In SaaStr this year, we actually have SaaSOptics and Chargify brands still on the trade show booth, it tied to Maxio hoping to catch those people who remember SaaSOptics and Chargify and come up and say, “Hey, I remember what SaaSOptics was. What’s going on in Maxio?”

(19:06):

But it was so interesting because the tension is it costs money to support three brands and three websites and all the marketing efforts. And so being PE-owned, they’re like, well, “You’re spending all this money on all these brands. Why are you doing that?” I think there’s a real calculus that a CMO needs to work with the CEO on. If you’re going to launch a new brand, what’s the drag that you have to carry forward for some period of time, and how do you determine if the equity of the new brand has outpaced the equity of the old brand? And I think having some battle scars, next time I do this, I’ll be like, look, it might be cool if we want to launch a new brand, but let’s be very clear about the expectations in terms of spend and payoff over time. And it’s not a one-year thing, it’s a five-year thing.

Drew Neisser (19:52):

It is. So if I went to the Maxio website and I saw these other two brands as products and they were a navigational item on your thing, so they would still show up in search, that’s the kind of migration strategy that folks need to think about.

Randy Wootton (20:11):

That’s right.

Drew Neisser (20:12):

It’s all about making it easy for people to find you. And the thing is if they haven’t heard of you, they won’t find you because think about how many times your site traffic is based on people actually typing in your brand name.

Randy Wootton (20:29):

The direct traffic versus the indirect keyword vibe.

Drew Neisser (20:32):

It’s a very simple thing, but I can’t tell you how often this mistake, and I’m so glad that you shared the story about Maxio and had you did the reverse migration because I know it’s worked. I’ve seen it work, but I haven’t recently heard that, so I’m delighted to have that case too. Thank you.

Randy Wootton (20:50):

Well, sure, my pleasure. And so let’s extend back just a little bit on when you were talking about marketing, I love it. It’s the heroic battle for mind share. You’ve written a book about this, Renegade Marketing. In that book, you talk about four different components, and I think there’s 12 steps within those, courageous, artful, thoughtful scientific method. Can you talk a little bit about those again? As we’re thinking about to a CEO, the 80% of CEOs who may not have marketing experience and they’re trying to get their head around marketing, other than buying your book, what’s the crib sheet?

Drew Neisser (21:22):

Yeah, so we start, so CATS. It’s an acronym, CATS, courageous, artful, thoughtful and scientific. And why we start with courageous strategy as the first one is full-stop fail, you don’t get that right, don’t bother with the next steps. And most, when you look at business strategies and then you look at marketing strategies, what you don’t see is differentiation. What you don’t see is some kind of insight that you’re building off of. What you do see is all things to all people in our marketplace and business goals. And so what I talk about in the first section of this book is step number one is to clear away the clutter and just focus and make everything simpler. Than you may be a brilliant engineer or founder who understands how all this stuff works, very few people actually care.

(22:20):

Then the next part of this courage is daring to be distinct. I mean, look, we’re having fun at CMO Huddles because it turns out a group of penguins as a huddle, so penguins are all over this thing. And I wear this penguin hat when I do interviews sometimes, and we have fun and we use the color purple because that helps us stand out, but we have an actual point of difference as well, and we are` prepared to dare to be distinct. That’s the thing. You really have to.

(22:49):

And then finally, you don’t have to, I call it pounce on your purpose. And I don’t want to say Simon Sinek, why this save the world, because I don’t think that’s the thing for most brands and it gets really tiresome. But I do think you need a North Star, you need something, and that’s what this courage is about. I’m going to stop there for a second because strategy is everything. If a good CEO sees a CMO as their strategic partner, this is the formula for the win right there, those first three chapters.

Randy Wootton (23:19):

I think you’re hundred percent correct. In fact, the way I’ve described it is at the end of the day, the marketing team, headed by the CMO and partners with the CEO, need to be able to create a disruptive claim that is rooted in differentiation that allows you to defend this claim in the market. And so you got to work with product to get super clear about what the differentiation is. You got to have your tentacles out in the market to understand what would be a disruptive claim that then would attract prospects to lean in.

(23:53):

I used to be a big fan of, and I still think they’re great, but the CEB that came out with the Challenger method, and they have this idea of a commercial insight. And so in my sales pitch, in our marketing materials, I always want to try to have some commercial insight. So one of the commercial insights at Maxio we talk about is revenue leakage. And so, for example, many analysts and industry folks will say, “Revenue leakage could be from 7 to 9% of your revenue.” You’re like, wait, what is revenue leakage? What does that mean? And 79% after I’ve acquired the customers, I got them up and running, I’m losing money on my invoicing? Well, now all of a sudden you have a distinctive claim in terms of we can address a core issue problem that’s significant and meaningful. How do you do that? That’s through some sort of differentiation, and then how do you create the messages to be able to defend against that?

(24:40):

So I think the marketing strategy being rooted in that clarity about who you serve, what’s the value you offer, how you do it distinctly. And the other thing about marketing is today the price of a word is zero. The price of an email is zero. So the ability to create compelling content, artful arguments, embracing your Aristotle through rhetoric, your ability to write well and have that be compelling and clear and crisp is the magic of a CMO.

Drew Neisser (25:12):

It’s true. It’s funny, you’re taking me back. So one of the things that I like to do when I think about strategy is can you articulate your brand in eight words or less? And I love this notion of revenue leakage. I had the privilege of naming a product for Panasonic, the Toughbook. This is a one-word strategy, and it’s been the same strategy since they launched, I mean, I don’t know, 20 years, years ago or whatever and it grew to a billion-dollar brand. All you had to do is say, “Notebooks die, Toughbook doesn’t.” And it’s a constant, the strategy is, and we literally launched the product by driving a Hummer over the first prototype on live television.

Randy Wootton (26:02):

Wow. I assume you practiced it first.

Drew Neisser (26:05):

We did not because there were only two prototypes. I write about this in my book, the engineers in the Japan, you could see them behind, they are sweating.

Randy Wootton (26:13):

Right, well, put up or shut up, right?

Drew Neisser (26:16):

But yeah, it was a major thing. And look, we quantified how much it costs. This is long before the clouds could protect everything, but quantified what the costs of broken notebooks were to business, it was $750 million. And then there’s the personal cost. Oh my god, when your notebook would die, how you would feel. So anyway, that one-word strategy was the North Star. You can change the execution. You can prove it a million different ways, but if you can get a strategy that is as simple as that, and you can own it, and we would do demos where it’d be in police cars and military and one of them kept running and it was shot through with a bullet.

Randy Wootton (27:05):

Well, that’s awesome. And I think that identifying what the pain is and then just having that be your core DNA, which allows you to have a differentiated claim in the marketplace that you can defend. And so the other producers of the laptops, unless you’re going to spend millions and millions of dollars to come out and try to address that same capability, they weren’t going to be able to compete in that market, that ICP that you were focused on where people needed bulletproof laptops.

(27:30):

And that leads us, I think, into your next category of art-filled ideation, that you have this perfect pithy, which is the eight-word story first. You want to talk a little bit more about the welcome we and the delight by designs, because I think both of those are great.

Drew Neisser (27:43):

Sure. I mean, part of the welcome we is everybody wants to play in the marketing space. Everybody in the company thinks they’re a marketer, so embrace that, involve them. Because the truth is if you are changing the business strategy or changing the marketing strategy, you need to bring employees along with you. So we say, welcome we and bring them in at the beginning. The book has an employee survey. That’s like day one CMO work because it’s easy to do. Oh wait, he cares about what we think or she cares, so that’s what welcome we is.

(28:19):

And then perfecting pithy is finding an eight-word story. I think it helps a lot, and I’ll give you a quick example. A company that we worked with for many, many years, it’s a paper company. It’s $400 plus million, a 80-year-old family owned business, and they literally sell paper to printers.

Randy Wootton (28:37):

Is this like The Office, like TV shows?

Drew Neisser (28:40):

It’s exactly like The Office. And by the way, I was with the current president when he met one of the actors from The Office, so it was hilarious. This ran with a lot of personality, but they distinguished themselves by service. So the three words were, “On the case, CasePaper on the case.” It was a pun. We actually squeezed the, “On the,” on top of the case in the logo, which was heretical. They had a lot of fun. And then they said to employees, “Okay, here’s what that means, reliable, responsive, and resourceful.”

(29:12):

Here’s how you do that. They spent six months retraining employees on how to do that well. They did employee awards about how they were on the case based on being reliable or responsive. Then they rolled it out to current customers, and they gave them awards because printers actually serve another group of people and they need to be on the case, so bestowed those two.

(29:34):

And they still are going with this. This is not something you walk away from. It’s the brand, and then they differentiated with their sense of humor and their design. I mean, they’re a colorful brand, as you would expect printers to appeal to because they are in the color business, but you’d be amazed. Everybody else in the paper business is boring as hell.

(29:56):

So artful ideation, I’ve met a lot of great CMOs who are not particularly creative, but they’re very good at seeing and helping and working with creative people and working with them to recognize big ideas when they’re presented to them.

Randy Wootton (30:14):

That’s great. Two quick thoughts on that. One, in terms of welcome the we, I do think marketing and if you’re trying to build a B2B brand, you have all your employees and they’re brand ambassadors and they’re on LinkedIn. And with social, they can help promote stuff and they can help build your brand for employment. So if on Facebook or whatever you have your Maxio group and people who are looking for jobs see that, it can make a significant impact. And I do also think, just even with this podcast, we would like more people in the back here to be listening to this podcast and sharing it. They have an opportunity to do that. And so I do think how does marketing activate the brand?

(30:54):

I think the other thing that I find sometimes in marketing organizations is they don’t do marketing. They do a lot of activities, but they’re not thinking about the actual campaigns that we’re launching, and how do I call it, marketing doing marketing. Every single marketer should be posting on social and practicing. I don’t care if you’re the campaign coordinator or if you’re the report generator, you have a different skill set. But if you want to be in marketing, you should want to do marketing.

(31:18):

And so one of the things I tell my team at Maxio and I’ve told other organizations is how do you as marketing demonstrate marketing? Every single all hands there should be some splash. How do we celebrate the SaaStr thing that’s going on, get people fired up because you speak to the heart as much as you speak to the head. And I think the brand identity, the brand values that you’re articulating are lived primarily by the brand ambassadors, which is the marketing organization.

Drew Neisser (31:43):

Yeah. Well, I would expand that even to the whole company. They’re the cheapest marketers you have. They’re already on the payroll, and if you added up the reach of every employee in your company, it would shock you. And so in the book I talk about in the next part of thoughtful execution, I talk about reverse how you think about your targets. You usually think about prospects, customers, employees, and in that order because you’re looking for your net new. You will grow, get more net news if every employee understands what you’re doing in business, why are you in business? If they understand why the business exists and the role in it, they will gladly celebrate the brand in any way they can. They will wear your gear. They will share their things, and they’ll participate when you ask them.

(32:41):

Then the next part is cultivating customer champions. And this is all about, I keep thinking about imagine if every single bit of marketing that you created was helpful to your customers, just think about that for a moment. Take your pithy, you talked about creating brilliant content with rhetoric, but imagine all you did was do stuff for your customers and how much more you would sell.

Randy Wootton (33:08):

Yeah, I have found that to be true. So here’s my pithy distinction. Having sold to CMOs and agencies for the last 20 years, 20 something years, and now for the last two years being in CFOs, when I would go to a market and I would invite CMOs to dinner, they would show up if it was a good restaurant. CFOs don’t come to dinner, they could go to McDonald’s. What they want is to know that there are going to be other peers there and somebody smart saying something, and so the idea of creating referenceable customers and reputation in where the CFOs are.

(33:39):

So there’s like the CFO mafia groups out there, like F Suite and Operators Guild. I can’t go sponsor, I can’t get to them, so you have to create brand stewards, brand ambassadors. I think the best proxy for this right now, even though it’s a bit of a pay to play, is G2, where you have people providing reviews on G2. And for companies, mid-sized, middle-market companies, like we’re targeting CFOs, that’s where they go for advice. They go for advice with their VC cohorts. They go to advice from the other CFOs they know, but they’re not coming to conferences. I don’t think they’re going to be many CFOs at SaaStr.

(34:15):

So I think that point of how do you create customer champions, people that want to get their brand tattooed on their arm because you’ve created such a great experience, you’ve been listening to them, you build products for them, and to your last point, you sell through service, you’re helping to answer the questions they have when they need to be addressed, creates these champions that then contribute to that broader reputation.

Drew Neisser (34:39):

Yeah, I mean it really is a wonderful, virtuous circle when you get this right. And I’ve seen it in a number of ways. One company just said their strategy was happy employees equal happy customers, so they put everything into their employees. And they were in the insurance business and it worked like crazy and then they ended up selling and they did very well and that CMO had a nice exit.

(35:04):

I’ve also seen companies that put everything into the customer thing. And so now you have a customer advisory board, you have user conferences, you go out to organizations where you have multiple users, and you get them together to talk about how they’re using it, and suddenly they go, wait, you’re using that product this way. We were using it over here that way, and they’re chatting. There are so many great ways to engage and cultivate your customers that it’s like exhaust that list, do all of those things that you can do, and then if there’s some leftover, go after net new with it.

Randy Wootton (35:45):

Brilliant. So we had a fourth category, scientific method. I actually want to transition, just given the time because I think you have some great insights and recommendations. The top three things to kill CMOs. When CMOs fail and those people, you’ve got Huddles, they’re all sharing without obviously sharing specifics, what are the broad trends of when a CMO fails? They thought it was going to be a great job. They dated, they had a great interview, they understood the product, they had a great vision, what are the dimensions along which they fail?

Drew Neisser (36:16):

So first, second, and third is just a mismatch between expectations of the CMO, the CEO and the board. I have heard this way too many times now where the CEO says, “Yes, I believe in marketing. Yes, you’ll have a budget. Yes, you’ll have a staff, and yes, you won’t have to grow the business 150% in the first week there.” And then the CMO takes the job and said, “Oh, I was just kidding about that. Your budget is 50% less and your growth goal is 50% more.”

Randy Wootton (36:46):

Right.

Drew Neisser (36:47):

And I wrote a post that went viral on LinkedIn that the headline was a quote of a CMO who literally said to their CEO, “I am not a miracle worker. I do not have a magic wand, and I certainly don’t have a magic wand that can bridge the delta between a 50% budget cut and a 50% growth goal.” I want to meet the CMO who could do that. I mean, I have some thoughts for them, but I don’t think they can do it in three months. So there’s the expectation of what marketing can do, and there’s a mismatch there and how long it takes.

Randy Wootton (37:25):

Right, and at what cost.

Drew Neisser (37:27):

And at what cost. And realistically, the CEO has been thinking about this business over and over and over again since they got hired, and they’re thinking about the board and they’re thinking about the pressure to show quarterly revenue to the PE and the VC firm, and you don’t grow businesses by the quarter.

Randy Wootton (37:45):

Right.

Drew Neisser (37:46):

It’s just really hard. There are impossible situations where do we actually have a clear strategy? And I want to go back to this for a second because there is a real misunderstanding, and this is the mistake I think CMOs make. They go in, new job, and they say, “Oh, it’s a brand problem. We need a new website, we need a new logo, we need a new color,” and that’s all they change. And to me, if you understand strategy, if you’re changing your strategy, you’re changing your product. And if you change, say we’re doing a brand refresh and we’re not changing something about the product, why are you bothering?

Randy Wootton (38:22):

Right, right.

Drew Neisser (38:23):

But that’s a huge leap, and it doesn’t happen all the time. But if it did, if we said, “We were going this way. Our promise was, as your promise was there’s-,”

Randy Wootton (38:34):

Revenue linkage.

Drew Neisser (38:35):

“…revenue leakage. We can plug that in, we can help you there.” And then suddenly you decide, “No, we’re really about this,” but you didn’t change the product, what are you doing? You’re just putting paint on an old barn.

Randy Wootton (38:47):

Yep, absolutely. That product market fit, I think, and to your point, defining. But I also think it’s up to the CMO to be able to put that plan together and say, “Look, this is what the bottoms-up build in terms of these types of activities, this type of budget, based on the historical trends, this is what I think we can achieve,” and there’s the tweaking around it.

Drew Neisser (39:08):

Couldn’t agree with you more. Set the agenda for the business strategy because nine out of 10 times the problem is not marketing. The problem is a business problem. You don’t have the right product fit. Your go-to-market strategy is flawed. Your pricing strategy is flawed. Your service isn’t quite where it’s, so set that agenda and drive it and the CEO will thank you.

Randy Wootton (39:30):

I think that was, in our pre-brief, that for me falls into that category of leaders like working with leaders.

Drew Neisser (39:35):

Right.

Randy Wootton (39:36):

And so be a leader. I think to your point, it’s just don’t tune the brand. It’s think about the 10 quick wins to prove value as a CMO. Where can you show that you’re optimizing and point to green shoots where you build credibility.

(39:47):

The other one that you mentioned was vision without an operating system. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I do think there’s different types of marketers along that spectrum, that they’re demand gen folks that know how to drive spreadsheets and then the creatives that build pretty pictures, so help me understand that.

Drew Neisser (40:02):

Well, this is a problem for a lot of I think startups in particular is the CEO doesn’t have an operating system, so they don’t have EOs or OKRs or pick one. And so your visionary CEO is thinking about the business 24/7 and constantly texting the CMO, “Hey, what about this?” And so without an operating system and saying, “Wait, we’ve got our three goals, big goals, our rocks and all the other things,” there’s no way to deflect that.

Randy Wootton (40:32):

Right, right.

Drew Neisser (40:33):

So that’s part one. You got to have to have a business operating system. And I think I’ve lost my train of thought on part two. So you have to rephrase the question.

Randy Wootton (40:42):

Oh, the vision, so the vision without an operating system. CMOs, if they’re not operating within an operating system, a broader operating system, they’re going to get a struggle because there’s so many different levers, but then there’s also this idea of visionary without operating system.

Drew Neisser (40:55):

So I know a few CMOs, among many, who have one way of going, they have a go-to-market strategy that they use, or I’ll call it’s somewhere between a strategy and an executional plan where it’s content, PR and something, or it’s build community and go from there. And those CMOs say to the CEO before they get hired, “This is how I work. This is how we’re going to go to market, and I’ve seen it work four times, hire me to do that and I’ll make it happen for you.” That’s an approach. I don’t know that many CMOs who have that or that many CEOs who would take that.

Randy Wootton (41:39):

Right, that goes-

Drew Neisser (41:40):

That is one sort of unique way that I’ve seen CMOs be very effective because then it’s your playbook done your way, and if it fails, it’s all on you.

Randy Wootton (41:50):

Right, right, right. I think that goes back to the opening of our conversation between the CEO and the CMO is during that interview process, the CEO needs to get clear on what is the strategic context of which they’re operating. Talk to some mentors, some marketing people about framing what is the marketing challenge there, and then finding a CMO or head of marketing who spikes in that specific area. Do you have a brand problem? Do you have a demand gen problem? Do you have a product marketing problem? And I think marketers come up through three or four different disciplines, and that’s what their core capability is, and you want to make sure you’re matching that core capability with what the next stage of growth is that you need. Are you going multi-SKU from a single product? Are you opening up a channel? Do you need channel marketing?

(42:38):

So I think that’s the challenge of marketing. There’s all these different levers that could be pulled. The CEO, the CMO and the board, to your point, have to get aligned on no, no, no, over the next two to three years, this is the thing that needs to be done to unlock the value.

Drew Neisser (42:51):

This gets right back to business strategy versus marketing strategy. Make sure the business strategy is viable.

Randy Wootton (43:00):

That’s great. Well, the in the last minute or two, the second one you mentioned, which I think is a good reminder for all of us who think we’re very smart, is one of the things that kills CMOs is that they want to be the smartest person in the room. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you’ve seen and what your recommendations is for all those want to be CMOs who want to show up as a strategic thinker, so they want to be part of the conversations, how do they temper that so that they show up productively in executive meetings?

Drew Neisser (43:28):

I mean, you want to be a great listener first, a great question asker second. And you don’t want to be the person who’s showing through your questions how smart you are. You are childlike innocent asking the questions that everybody else in the room is thinking about. How are we going to do that? And so you have empathy for all the folks in the room and the challenges that they face. You’re a really good listener, and I’ll give you a little thumbnail on this.

(44:01):

So the biggest complaint with, very few CMOs actually ever get on boards, but when they do, half of them blow it because they think they’re still the CMO. You’re not. You have marketing expertise, but you’re there for your business expertise. So take your marketing hat off, be a student of the business. As one CMO says, “Everybody in my team knows the numbers of the business.”

Randy Wootton (44:31):

That’s great. I talk often about Patrick Lencioni’s book, Five Dysfyunctions of a Team, and that for the executive team you have to have a first team. And the first team, they’re like Maxio first, and then they’re functional leaders. And so how does the CEO and the executive team build the strategy collectively, think about the objectives collectively, have productive conversations about the business challenges? And the expectation is people in the room to be a business leader, not necessarily a functional leader. And often they will give up resources and say, “Hey, what we need to do now is invest more in engineering,” and it doesn’t turn into a, “No, no, no, I can’t give up my marketing spend,” because they recognize the overarching goal is we got to get this thing out the door, so I think that’s great.

Drew Neisser (45:13):

That’s such a great point. It really is. And I want to add one little button to that, one little notion to it, which is you don’t want to be just the marketer.

Randy Wootton (45:22):

That’s right.

Drew Neisser (45:23):

And I hear that, “Well, you’re just the marketer,” and that is the worst place to be. Because when they’re thinking about that, they’re thinking about the person who’s buying ads to generate leads. You want to be the strategic center of the organization, the glue. And so you better understand the difference between business strategy and know how to drive it in an organization, and then own some aspect that isn’t marketing.

Randy Wootton (45:53):

Yeah, that’s good advice. Where can you make an impact as a business leader?

Drew Neisser (45:56):

Right.

Randy Wootton (45:56):

I think you’re right. I think, again, in my experience as three times CEO is I turned to my head of marketing CMO to be my thought partner, to take the ideas of the business strategy, translate them into a narrative that is compelling both for employees and informs what we do as a business broadly that then plays out in our positioning and messaging. And so I think for CEOs, like me and others, you have an opportunity to sit at the table, a very small table, but you got to be able to step up and think broadly, ask good questions, be a good listener and challenge appropriately.

Drew Neisser (46:29):

And talk to a customer before every meeting with the board.

Randy Wootton (46:34):

Well, with that, we’ll leave it. Drew, every time we chat, I learn something. I have a bunch of notes and just really appreciate you sharing and caring and helping us all dare to be the best we can as business leaders and as marketers. Thank you very much.

Drew Neisser (46:51):

Thank you, Randy.