Building a Successful Brand Community
Daniel Rodriguez shares his insights into building a successful brand community, creating a halo effect by having the right investments, and ways to get your target audience to think positively about your brand.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I am joined by a special
guest, Daniel.
How are you?
Hello, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
Great to have you on the show.
Excited to chat marketing.
So let's get into it today.
Starting off, what was your first job in Demand Gen?
So I went to business school, and while I was in business school, I wanted to
get my own
company off the ground.
And even though I didn't really know what the heck I was really attempting to
do, the business
idea was in the marketing technology space.
And when that company failed to get off the ground fully, and I then had to go
out and
actually get hired to work for someone else, I started talking to companies and
they were
like, "Well, what would you do for us?
What do you want to do?"
And I was like, "I mean, I don't really know exactly.
Let me tell you about what we were trying to do with this previous company and
what."
And I was talking to the CEO, and he said, "Oh, that's interesting.
That really sounds like you're a very forward thinking marketing leader."
Well, I haven't really done marketing before, but if you say so.
And when you first get hired to run marketing, you're the first marketing hire
at a pre-funded
company.
I mean, if you're not doing Demand Gen, I don't know what you're doing,
basically,
because the only thing the company cares about is, "Hey, we need to sell some
new customers
here and generate some interest and get some leads."
So I very much unknowingly fell into the kind of school of thought of marketing
, which was
early stage marketing does in many ways equal demand gen.
And then I've had marketing leadership positions where the focus, the primary
focus of what
we're doing is really building out that demand gen function.
Flash forward to today, tell us about your current role.
So I'm the CMO at a startup company called Simpler.
And I'm responsible for the business development function, product marketing,
PR and analyst
strategic communications, design and demand gen.
All of the above sounds like a CMO.
And what does Simpler do?
So Simpler is in the customer experience technology space.
So we help consumers, not all consumers, but most of our customers are consumer
brands.
We help them to engage with their own prospects and customers through their
digital channels.
So if you have a chat on your site and you're looking for engagement with
prospects to help
convert them, we've got both chatbot and people solutions that help people do
that as well
as doing that on other digital channels like email and SMS.
We talk a ton about chat on the show and about how important opening up that to
a communication
is so we're going to get super into that.
And before we get into your marketing strategy, it seems like you have tons of
kind of B2C
type companies like Vans and Decathlon and North Face and Mackewold and all
sorts of amazing
companies like that that you're working with.
Is this something like how many companies are doing stuff like this?
How many are doing it right?
Well, how many are doing it right?
We are as consumers, I think.
We have become increasingly like Varukasalt.
I will blame Amazon for this generally because they have provided such an
amazing customer
centric way of immediacy in the way that we can expect to both engage but also
just respond.
Like hey, my entire purchase can be on my doorstep two hours from now.
I mean that is really solving for that now customer.
So what we see in the market is that the expectations that brands customers
have of them being able
to be readily available to respond to them in a variety of different digital
channels
has somewhat exploded.
There's a segment of the audience that is saying, "What do you mean?
I feel like I've kind of been like that."
Well, maybe you've been part of this kind of core group of millennials that has
already
been leading this pathway but there are now other demographics that are also
going in
this direction which is to say, "Hey, my desire and inclination to use chat on
somebody's
website and I'm a boomer is now something that I'm actually familiar with and
more expecting
to do."
So we're seeing this trend kind of only go in one direction and it's not going
to go
back in the other way.
And companies don't really want it necessarily to go in the other way.
The other way of course being, "Well, I just pick up the phone when things are
wrong because
the phone channel is the single most expensive way that you can engage with the
customer."
And so a lot of companies recognize that there's better ways that they can
provide great service
to their customers, get them to convert, get them to be loyal and you don't
have to have
a phone call.
Let's get to our first segment, the Trust Tree.
This is where we can go and feel honest and trusted and you can share those
deepest, darkest
marketing secrets.
Tell me a little bit more about your customers and who is that buying committee
for Simpler?
Yeah, I mean we're selling to customer experience leaders.
Sometimes these folks are also responsible for running a contact center or
running a customer
service agent team that they would have.
They might be running either internal or external BPOs, relationships that they
have.
And then also on the marketing side.
So we work with marketing leaders that are looking to do digital acquisition.
They're trying to, digital acquisition of people that are actually already on
their own
website, not just the ad dollars that are trying to drive the traffic to the
site.
But we're working with people to say, "Okay, well what happens when somebody's
actually
there between being there and they're actually buying?"
So we work with them to improve those conversion rates.
And we've seen, you spend a dollar, you know, to Kathleen's good example of
that.
You spend a dollar with Simpler and you're bringing in $5 a revenue because
those conversion
rates are so powerful seeing that 44% increase in conversion rates.
So that feels really powerful for a lot of marketing leaders who are craving,
being able
to prove the dollar value of their spend.
Love me some decathlon.
I need to go there and get a badminton set.
I got a new house and I've been itching for badminton.
Yeah, decathlon, it's funny because some American consumers don't know dec
athlon as a brand.
But in Europe, they're much, much larger company as well.
Kind of the predominant, I think, company in France.
Yeah, really cool.
So within this kind of buying committee, how do you structure your organization
to go after
those accounts?
Do you have certain types of accounts that you're going after a certain size
company?
How are you going about figuring out your company to go get them?
Yeah, we do segment the market based on a couple of factors.
One is industry.
So we are focused currently.
I mean, we're in the process of expanding, you know, who we're going after.
But we've been focused a lot on the retail space as well as the Quickserv
restaurant space
and SaaS companies that have a large end user base.
So, you know, Calendly, for instance, is a, we call our customers partners
because we
view it as a deeper partnership.
You have a bit Calendly is a good example of that.
We then also segment by size.
So we do have minimums.
So we focused on the kind of larger and then enterprise side of the market.
And that's based on volume.
That's not just necessarily based on the amount of revenue that a company has.
That's based on the customer service and customer interaction volume that a
brand has.
And that's really the way that we do it.
And then do you, you know, you mentioned that all the stuff that you oversee in
terms of
like your sales process, is it pretty, is it pretty like enterprise level
complex or
is it more kind of, you can just, you can just go to simpler.com and, or
simpler.
Sorry, you could just go to simpler.ai and buy.
Yeah, you do need to, it is, there is complexity in the sense that you cannot
just, you cannot
just buy through through our website.
So we do have, in addition to our business development team that, that I was
mentioning
I'd oversee, I mean, there is, there's a sales team with a sales leader and we
have
our AEs and they are, they are running, they're running sales cycles.
Awesome.
And you mentioned, you know, when back in the day, when you were kind of the,
the first
marketing hire in a previous company, how, you know, you're like, oh, if you're
not doing
demand, you're, you're crazy here.
I'm curious, how do you, how do you think about demand as it fits within your
current
marketing strategy?
Oh, I mean, it's, you know, I think that the way that the way that the demand
generation
team is even defined, I think sometimes is, is like, well, what do, what do
people mean?
What, what, what lives in demand?
And, right, because one could argue that everything that's involved with the
entire content team,
events, design, everything that we're running with ABM marketing automation,
all of that
technology effort and those people and what we're doing on social combined with
our business
development team, that is all demand, Jen.
Because to one level up, you know, to our CEO or to our board, it's like they
don't care
how the sausage is made.
They don't necessarily care about the attribution models that some marketers
are pouring over,
trying to prove spend, right?
Because attribution is tricky.
And the reality is it's much more like a cocktail shaker than it is like a
straight
pour of something, it's, you know, touch it, you know, that where, where does
the website,
you know, have its attribution, where does an event that we run have its
attribution?
Sometimes it's, it's, it's along the way.
Sometimes it's difficult to quantify.
But what people can see is what is the total overall amount that we're spending
on this
and what are we getting out of it?
Meaning, what is the dollar value of the pipeline that we're getting out of it?
So we really align the demand-gen team around the dollar value of pipeline that
's getting
generated.
We have goals around that.
And we do track, you know, hey, which stuff is coming from the business
development team
and which stuff is actually coming from our quote, demand-gen team on the
marketing side,
you know, because you kind of think of BD as more of a sales function, even
though it's
all kind of rules up here.
But I have, you know, told, you know, the, you know, Aisha, our, our demand-gen
leader
and Josh, our business development leader, no one will care where it's all
coming from,
but they will care very much how much that we're getting.
Yeah, it's a total.
And so our job collectively is to make sure that we are not, there's no finger
pointing.
And one of the things I've actually enjoyed about, and I've, because I've now
been, this
is the third startup company I've been at.
It's the first one where we've had the business development team and the demand
-gen team under
the same roof.
Oh, interesting.
Right.
And, and, because this is, this is always like a kind of classic, like question
of, you
know, well, what works better and one of the things I really, what I, I'm
really enjoying
about the way that we have this set up, it just eliminates what is a central
finger pointing
game of, you're not giving me enough high quality leads so that I don't have
enough
of them to work and therefore we're not able to hit our number.
And you're giving me an, an MQL metric on one hand that is, you know, inflated
or weak
or has too many holes in the logic and, or they're just not far enough, you
know, not
far enough down the evaluation process.
They're really just a pulse.
They're not an MQL.
It just takes a lot of that stuff away, right?
Because it's like, no, no, no, we're all on the same team.
So, so, so the way that, so the way that those teams then work together, you
know, is much
more symbiotic and there are, there's no, there's just, there are no fingers to
be pointed.
Let's get to our next segment, the playbook.
This is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help
you win.
You play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
Well, you know what has been really wild here is that over the course of this
pandemic,
this logic for me has even been kind of put to test, right?
I mean, because one of them has been and will continue to be and is, is, you
know, is now
come back, which is doing stuff in person.
So in the, you know, in the enterprise software space, you know, that I've,
that I've been
in now, there are trade shows and there are in person events and there are,
there are just,
you know, dinners that people will have and there's learning opportunities and
all of,
all of that stuff is important.
And the way that, the way that new technology emerges is because people hear
about it, they
see about it and people talk about it.
And to the extent that we are being part of that voice and that we are also
facilitating
some of those interactions is, is critically important.
So, so definitely just, you know, things related to events broadly, not just,
not just attending
trade shows, but, but having events, sponsored events, owned events, co
marketed events, customer
events, prospect dinners, right?
All like all of that stuff, which was all turned completely off for, I've been
at SimpliR.out
for two years for almost the entirety of that two years.
And then so it was a question of, well, what do we do with some of that budget
we previously
had and how do we plan for some of that?
And there's, you know, there's a whole separate conversation to just have, you
know, about,
you know, about some of those contingencies.
But, but I will say that, that, that's, that's definitely one.
You know, another one is the content effort itself.
Well, hold on.
Right.
I mean, really quick before we get into that, I do want to ask a follow up
question on, on
that.
So, so then coming out of all of this, I'm curious, like, where did you?
Say, okay, this is the first type of event or couple, you know, clusters of
events that
we do want to focus on.
Like, what was your first kind of inclination there of like where you wanted to
spend that
money again?
Well, I mean, it's been, the first has just been on some trade shows where we
know we
can actually go out and talk to people.
You know, well, what's been tricky is that the trade show attendance, you know,
I mean,
we even backed out of there was an event in New York.
There was this big event called NRF.
Oh, yeah.
We had been to it a few years ago.
We knew it was going to be good for us.
But you know, the, you know, coronavirus numbers were spiking at that time and
we, we
made a decision, you know, at the 11th hour not to attend and that felt like
the right,
you know, business decision.
But I mean, so much of what we've been working with has really just been, hey,
here, here's
the events we would like to be doing.
And then are they happening?
What's, you know, what's going on?
And when, when, when they're happening in the future, are they going to be in
person?
Are they going to be virtual?
Like, what are the contingencies for how this is going to go?
I'm hoping we're reemerging now into it, into a state of, you know, like we're
going
to be able to then just, you know, just from a planning perspective, we're
going to be
able to expect that we can do events in person so that we can go to them.
And it's going to be a combination of trade shows that we're going to attend
and then
thought leadership style dinners that we are going to be hosting that will be
prospects
and existing customers with some original content that will be, that we'll be
sharing
and, and allowing people, you know, this is the whole rubbing elbows strategy,
right?
And like, we just really want to get our prospects to just hear directly from
our customers
how much of a relief it is basically to have, to have us, to have us working
with them because
it allows them to focus on, you know, things that are, that are, that are going
to be,
you know, much, you know, kind of further looking for them and allow them to
really advance
their own, their own careers and win some awards and stuff like that.
So we want to get out of the way in those situations.
We just need, we just need to facilitate.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And also I think that, you know, going back into a situation where the other
side wants
to listen to, I think that that's a key part of events that people kind of
sometimes forget
is this is contingent on like the other side, understanding what that they're
going to
events to learn, to connect, to learn about new solutions that are out there,
to learn
about new vendors.
Like, that's the other piece.
It's not just like going to events where people are going to be like miserable
if they meet
a vendor, right?
It's like they know that that's part of the experience.
That's right.
Yeah, and people I think are eager to meet their, what is now like a new, peer
set to
them, right?
Like, hey, if you're a CX leader and it's been a few years since you've been
out in
the world, you know, who are the people that are leading CX and maybe live in
my city,
you know?
I'd like to be able to go out and meet folks like that.
So we have a community that we're building and part of the functional area that
I even
failed to mention at the beginning was this CX life community that we have.
And it's a big part of this strategy because we want to grow other people's
careers in
customer experience.
And in order to do that, we want to facilitate them being able to connect with
each other,
figure out what best practices are, get the best jobs as they become available.
Yeah, so can you share more about like that?
Why did you think about that?
How did that come about?
So the playbook around community, I think, has been one that I've noticed at
other companies
where it seems like, hey, they're creating this movement and they're galvan
izing the
market and it doesn't need to just be their customers that are galvanized, that
people
are seeing value and wanting to be part of this thing that allows the company
to basically
have an outsized amount of influence and share of voice and share of mind and
have just
positive, there's this kind of positive effect that people think about this
company in a
certain way.
And HubSpot, I thought, did that really well with HubSpot Academy and just like
the way
they ran their overall event.
So I think that that was probably on the mind of the team here at Simpler
before I arrived
and the idea that, hey, we would have this CX life community and we would have
a big
annual in-person event and people would want to attend this because they want
to learn,
they want to grow their careers, they want to get better and they want to be on
the cutting
edge of what's coming in CX.
And it is not an overt sales pitch or even a veiled sales pitch.
It is other leaders talking about things that have nothing to do with how you
would want
to support chat on your website with Simpler.
And we've tried to keep that going.
It's hard to do that kind of community building when people can't physically
get together.
So I'm really excited about taking that show on the road and continuing to
build this
community.
A couple hundred people, we've got mentors that are very senior roles at big
companies
that are eager to be able to mentor people that are up and coming.
And also one of the things we want to do is give voice to that kind of next
generation
of CX leaders.
And that next generation of CX leaders doesn't look like the previous
generation.
And I'm talking about demographic stuff here.
It's not just bald white guys, basically.
But that's kind of all looks like right now, to be honest.
And I think there's a lot of people out there like who are the people that I am
going to
see myself in?
And giving voice to some of those up and comers that show them, oh, I should be
here.
I do belong in the C-suite.
This is going to be my path.
Yeah, and it's critical to have mentors, right?
That's part of that is if you don't know anyone who's ever been on this path,
and especially
anyone that looks like you or something close to you, it's virtually impossible
to get ahead.
There's no, you have to at least know some people or start to cultivate those
relationships.
And if you're somewhere, especially with the way that work is now, if you work
for a company,
if you're a CX leader and you're in a company, remote company, you're sitting
in whatever
somewhere in Alabama, and you're not around a bunch of other CX leaders, that's
really
hard to develop connections and do that sort of stuff.
So I'm like the biggest fan ever of communities.
I always love hearing about community marketing and how to build a community
and how to do
that stuff the right way.
So I love this stuff, and I think it's super powerful when it's done right.
When it's done wrong, it's a little clunky, but if you're putting your best
foot forward
and you're trying to level everybody up, it usually ends up working even better
than
you thought it was going to.
I'm curious.
How do you feel, I mean, everything gets way late when there's a global pand
emic, but
I'm curious, how are you feeling so far on community building?
What are your tips?
Well, I think, yeah, it is.
Community is an organic process, right?
I mean, you can try to do things to encourage people to then engage, but I
think it's understanding,
I think the first thing that I feel like I'm learning about it is that you
really have
to understand what is it that people are looking to learn, right?
And one of the things that we've realized is that there's a lot around career
definition
stuff because CX is a newer field.
I mean, you can say, "Oh, there's customer support," right?
But CX is purposely, I think, broadening past support.
And so, definitionally, people are like, "Hey, I think I want to do CX.
What is CX?
And how do I understand more about developing skill sets that would allow me to
really
become a CX leader?"
And then there's the, like, "I'm seeking a job in CX.
I want to get that, take that next step from manager to director, from director
to VP."
And I think that there's a lot of people that are really wanting to understand,
"What does
it take to do that?
What are the job descriptions that I should be looking to aspire to, you know,
having
the skill sets?
So what are those job descriptions actually look like?
Are there job boards that I can go look for so I can more easily find a job
that would
maybe fit, you know, my own skill set?
So we've realized, I think, you know, partly by just talking to people, right,
like our
community manager going in, doing a welcome conversation with the new people
that are,
you know, every new person coming in, just having a 15, 20-minute conversation,
like,
"Hey, why are you here?
What are you hoping to learn?"
You know?
So what we have, here's what we have for you, here's what we hope that, you
know, other community
members are going to facilitate for you.
You know, the community manager is an intermediary, but it works best, I think,
when they can
be an evangelist, but not really have to be the one that is directly
facilitating all
of the interactions, the community itself.
And you need kind of...
Every community, I think, hits a somewhat of a tipping point, it seems like,
when you
get around 100 to 200 people, where there's actually enough people engaged in a
community
platform, I mean, you need a platform, you need a place where people are going
to go
and engage.
And when you then have enough people that are then engaging, then it feels like
there's
something going on there.
Like, someone can ask a question, and somebody else will respond within a day,
you know,
and then they're like, "Oh, this is cool, I'm now finding value here."
So I think in so many ways that very beginning phase, just getting enough
people there and
getting it going requires a pretty substantial kind of push by the organization
to just get
people involved.
But then there is a sense of like, what is the main purpose of this, and
listening to
people what they want it to be, and just allowing the community to become that,
and not making
the community be something that maybe you thought it should be, right, when you
were going
into it.
And it's like, well, really, I don't know, maybe I don't know, but what I do is
I want
this community to be these groups of people and a bunch of them, and for them
to find
this to be valuable.
And it's my job to kind of listen to them and figure out how do I make this
valuable
for them.
What do you say when leadership says, "Oh, what's the ROI on community?"
Oh, my gosh, this happens all the time.
And I think it's like a going fear, probably, that I think a lot of community
leaders have,
which is not dissimilar in many ways to the same type of going fear that many
marketing
program managers have.
How do I justify the spend on the thing that I'm doing?
How do I attribute it back to the pipeline?
Now, it's always great, actually, when you can just throw a direct, like, well,
we talked
to this one person, and I introduced them to somebody here because they
actually did
seem like they had some need, and we're not actively selling, but we will kind
of pass
someone along.
So those are always like, everyone loves that.
But I think the real answer is, you need a senior executive to understand the
long-term
value of what it means to do a give first approach, because community in and of
itself
is really about giving to people and shaping maybe the type of conversation
they're having,
maybe the topics are getting influenced a little bit so that you are bending
that conversation
back to things that maybe are part of your overall value that you're trying to
drive
for companies.
But I mean, you have to have, I think, fundamental belief that there is a halo
effect that happens
by having an investment, which is a modest investment, I think, in getting
hundreds of
people from your target audience to then be caring about things that you
generally want
them to be caring about and to know who your company is and have a positive
idea of your
company.
And what does that do for your brand?
And I think that you have to be able, in some ways, to take that long-term view
It's a long, you take the long on it, and then you have to continually remind
the CO/CFO
about why that expense is important.
Yeah, I just think that there's certain, in B2B marketing, there are certain
things that
it always reminds me of the CEO talking to the CFO and the CFO saying, or the C
FO saying,
or about company training, like the CFO saying, "Well, what if we train all the
employees
and they leave and the CEO says, 'Well, what if we don't train them and they
stay?'"
And that's the same way that I always view community marketing, right?
Yeah, you could not do it because maybe you don't have the money or you don't
have whatever.
You could not invest in content marketing, for example.
You can definitely not do those things.
But in terms of how you would build a portfolio, you would always build with
high upside initiatives,
and community is a heavy expenditure on the front end, and it has a high LTV.
Content marketing has an expensive upfront cost, but it has high LTV.
You want to build those things, and I think that if you live month by month or
quarter
by quarter as a marketing leader, that's not your job.
Your job is to be two years out and also understand what needs to happen two
months out, but that's
just how you build a portfolio.
I think it's so funny that it's like, "Oh, well, we'll cut community," and it's
like,
if you can't afford to do community, maybe fold it up.
Maybe business is not right for you.
It's also maybe you're not really trying to create a movement and build a
category.
Sure.
Yeah, exactly right.
I mean, if you're just trying to be a niche player and you just want to kind of
, "Hey,
maybe we're the low cost, we're the value play in the market," and we don't...
You don't know what I mean?
For sure.
There are places, I think, to say, "Okay, but again, I'd put content marketing
in the
bucket as well.
Why are we doing content marketing?
We don't need to educate the market on anything.
We're just kind of showing up where we need to show up.
People are going to buy based on our being the cheapest price.
Let's just have a bunch of ad campaigns and let's just have a bunch of very
clear copy
on the website, and let's just call it a day.
I think that sometimes CEOs and CFOs, if they're just looking at their business
through a
spreadsheet, they can reduce it to that.
Most of the time, and certainly the CEO here, he fully recognizes, "Oh, well,
we have a
movement that we're creating, and we wrote a book.
We have a community.
We are very much attempting to have thousands of people saying, "Oh, this now C
X movement
is absolutely what I'm about."
It shows because this is how I care about our customers, and this is the result
that
it has for our business.
I equate it to if you're standing on the top of a hillside and you want to
knock over
a mailbox, it's like you could throw a rock off the hillside and hope that you
hit the
mailbox, or you could throw a snowball down there.
Hopefully that snowball turns into a gigantic snowball that guarantees that you
're going
to knock down the mailbox.
I just made that up.
That's the sort of thing that building a community does is because it compounds
It builds on itself, and it becomes something that you don't need to manage,
and that continues
to exist with minimal effort to manage that community and to bring more
resources from
it rather than putting it into it.
I think that that's the issue there is that there's that difference.
I know we've talked about this for super long, but it's so interesting to me
because I think
that if you were to go take the cloud 100 or whatever, how many people have a
good community
that if you have their CMO, how good your community, they'd be like, "Yeah,
ours is great.
I mean, what do you think that number is?
It's got to be super low."
I just feel like nobody's out there.
We can point to ones like retroactively that you're like, "Oh, those were great
Marketing Nation was great."
Obviously Salesforce, Ohana, and Trailblazers, that is great.
But easy to look at the successes.
How do you look at them now building it from 200?
I think it's so fascinating.
It is.
It really is.
It's an area that I still want to learn to.
If there's anyone out there that's listening is then, "Hey, I love growing
communities and
I love or I'm a community manager.
I'd love to talk to you."
Yeah, likewise.
We'll do a mini series on it, DGV mini series.
Any other uncutables that you wanted to mention?
Do we talk about content marketing?
We touched on it, but yeah, go ahead.
We kind of talked about it.
I feel like, again, if you're going to be influencing a market and you are
going to be
creating a movement, it's the first hire.
That outside of you have a BDR, you want them to go and reach out to people.
If you're going to actually have anything to say to anybody, you need content
marketing.
That was the first hire I made when I was at seismic.
It was the first hire I made.
My last company, Alice, and then here, we've invested very heavily in content
marketing.
Anything that's not working or stuff that you're maybe hesitant on in the
future?
I'm always jealous of people where they are already in a defined enough market
that paid
search has a very clear, delivers very clear value to their business.
If you're in an earlier stage market, paid is a little bit of a leap of faith
that you're
taking around influence.
It does not have the clean ROI that it can if your business is a little bit
more mature.
It's not easier to do paid than it was in the past, too, because of some of the
algorithmic
changes.
It makes it harder to target.
Lead is always just an area where I'm like, "I wish I could just hand over
buckets of money
and someone would actually give me proper leads."
I don't think it's quite that easy.
People make it seem like it is.
Indeed.
Let's get to our dust up.
This is our segment where we talk about healthy tension.
Whether that's with your board, your sales team, competitors, or anyone else.
Daniel, have you had a memorable dust up in your career?
Oh, my gosh.
Sure.
When I was at Seismic, I got into a pretty...
I've got to appreciate, for those of you who actually know what Seismic is now,
when Seismic
was about $40 million of revenue, Seismic is closer to $400 million of revenue
right
now.
It was quite a bit of a smaller company.
We did not have a very large marketing program budget, and we had never done
anything out
of home.
We had never done any larger scale advertising.
The head of sales was adamant that we show up bigger and that we are more
visible to
people.
I didn't fundamentally disagree that that would be great.
He would see an ad on TV.
It's like S&P partners with Under Armour.
It's like a freaking Super Bowl commercial.
He's like, "Why can't we be that?"
I'm like, "How long do you have for me to explain this to you?"
Because it won't take long.
Does that cost more money than we spend on the entire program budget and people
There's stuff like that.
It all came to a head when he was like, "I really want us to do a billboard
campaign
so that I can see Seismic on my commute on Route 93 North."
I was like, "I don't know.
That sounds like not necessarily it's going to hit a lot of our target buyers.
We know who our target audience is."
I realized that I think I was arguing on a practical level and I think he was
really
arguing on a more visceral emotional level.
At the time, I was like, "I am so right and you're so wrong, but what I really
wished
I would have done is really peeled that back a little bit and understood what
is it that
we feel like we need to be doing to be a bigger company and to be a bigger
brand."
Now, I'm on LinkedIn.
Of course, Seismic's budget to do this kind of stuff is significantly larger
than it was
back then.
Seismic has done now their first official out-of-home marketing campaign.
They have a digital billboard I saw.
I'm going to take a picture of it right on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange right
there in
Times Square, which apparently is all the rage.
I've seen so many tech companies now buying time to just show up in Times
Square so that
people can...
It's maybe one of the most visible places that everyone knows where that is in
the picture.
It's where people are aspiring to be ringing the bell on the New York Stock
Exchange or
the Nasdaq.
I think understanding what could we do that would...
Even if it's more of a guerrilla marketing tactic, what can we do?
To make our company as visible as we can to satisfy whether that's coming from
a place
of ego, whether that's just coming from a place of galvanizing the company.
Whatever it is, it's probably a good idea to try to show up in places that you
feel like
maybe you couldn't show up and get creative about it.
I love it.
All right, let's get to quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how quickly you can talk to somebody with qualified, go to qualified.
com right
now.
It's quick and easy just like these questions.
We love qualified.
They've been with us since the very first episode of this show, go to qualified
.com to
learn more.
Daniel, quick hits.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I'm a musician.
I'm in a band.
I don't think I put that on my resume.
I've got a book, podcast or TV show that you checked out recently.
I'm watching the show Severance right now and I think it has a lot of
implications for
creating the right work culture.
Oh, Melonball or Melonbar?
Melonbar.
Oh, yeah.
Favorite non-marketing hobby that sort of maybe kind of indirectly makes you a
better
marketer?
I love wine and wine is all about stories.
I think that understanding the story behind a wine, I think in many ways can
help things
like telling your elevator pitch.
Any advice that you would give to a first time CMO trying to figure out their
demand
gen strategy?
Read the book, play bigger because we'll go back.
That'll maybe suffice for my also book part of the thing.
It doesn't seem like all I do is watch TV shows.
The book, play bigger I think is great if you're going to be creating a
category because
it will allow you to think about the longer term implications of how you fund
things today.
Daniel, it's been awesome having you on the show.
Thanks so much for joining for our listeners.
Go check out simpler.ai.
We'll link it up in the show notes.
Daniel, any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
No, I am just very appreciative I was able to be here.
Thanks so much.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Bye.
Bye.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
[BLANK_AUDIO]