Prioritizing the Digital Customer Experience
Kevin Sellers shares his insights into prioritzing the digital customer experince, maintaining a singular focus to maximize your productivity, and the power of the accurate brand ambassador.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Fazan, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I'm joined by a special guest,
Kevin,
how are you?
>> I'm doing well, how are you?
>> Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat about ping identity and
all the cool stuff that y'all are doing.
So let's get into it.
What was your first job in demand?
>> Good question, because, so I have a little bit of a different philosophy,
because I actually think all marketing services demand, right?
We kind of parse marketing out, well, we have a brand person or
we have somebody that does communications or something.
But really all of those disciplines in the end are about building your business
about acquiring customers, and ultimately therefore about generating demand.
Now, I know your question is specifically, what was your first job
really driving demand specifically?
And it was probably my previous company.
Prior to that, I was at Intel doing a lot of different roles in brand and
regional marketing and product marketing and comms and so forth.
But none of them had a direct demand title, but in my previous role at a
company
called Abnap, we definitely had a demand general.
And then obviously here, ping identity, we spend a lot of time on that function
But I do want to make that pitch.
All marketing is about customer acquisition and improving the business.
So I think everything we do really ultimately is about improving the business
outlook and generating demand for companies.
I love it. It's like the thesis for our show.
And we didn't even practice that.
I wasn't even cute.
So there you go.
That's right.
That's why we interview CMOs on demand-gen visioners because we're all demand
people.
Can you tell us a little bit about what it means to be CMO of ping identity?
It's very stimulating and challenging because there's no prescriptive,
perfect way to be a chief marketing officer.
And for ping identity specifically, we're in a very important market of
identity and
access management.
It's growing a lot of money coming into the space as the world's move digital
first.
Everyone needs to have secure identity to transact, to protect their data,
to have access to the right tools and applications,
whether it's at work or whether it's through your normal day to day life,
doing things digitally.
So it's an important and growing part of what we view as a mission critical or
level zero IT infrastructure investment.
And so that is interesting because we're in the center of this shift to
everything digital.
And yet there's a lot of big competitors and money's coming into this space
from
the likes of Microsoft all the way down to startups and every flavor in between
So competition is fierce.
There's too many players in the industry at this point.
So there's a lot of consolidation that's both happening and will yet happen.
And so we're kind of stuck in the middle of that.
And so it's an opportunity to, hey, how do you help drive growth?
But also how do you help recognize what's going on in the market broadly to be
sure
you're positioning the company for its best path for success?
So there's no shortage of both tactical and strategic ways to spend your time
in
energy, which is ultimately why I think we do these jobs.
Let's get to our first segment.
The trust tree is where you go and feel honest and trusted and share those
deepest
darkest, demand, gen secrets, Kevin.
What is your company ping identity do and who are your customers?
Ping identity is about securing the digital identities of all individuals,
whether they're employees at a company or consumers engaging with and
transacting with businesses digitally.
Everyone needs to have secure identity and secure data in order to work and
live and operate in a very digital first world.
So we focus on balancing good experiences online that are also hiding secure
and
built around securing the identity of the individual.
And that really enables the blossoming of the digital economy that we now
firmly
live in, but our customers are enterprises of all shapes and sizes.
Now we don't typically go after or spend a lot of time on small business,
but we're commercial marketing up and we have a specialty in large enterprise.
Specifically we service 12 out of the largest 14 banks in the United States and
six out of the seven largest healthcare firms.
You can go on down the list, but we're very good at supporting and managing
large enterprise.
That's kind of our sweet spot.
>> Yeah, and tell me like who are the personas?
What does your buying committee look like?
>> Yeah, the buying committee is very interesting because for our business,
we're actually shifting.
We kind of have two major parts of our business.
One is servicing the enterprise itself where they provide security for
their employees to be able to access the networks and the applications and
tools they need in their jobs.
So the personas for that market are pretty straightforward.
It's the IT practitioners, it's the CISO, in some cases the CIO.
But a fairly narrow buying group that has authority across most of the
companies
we engage.
And so that motion of how you engage that audience and
how you can drive demand generation is fairly, I would say, straightforward.
The problem is we're not growing in that business because the likes of
Microsoft
and some others that are Microsoft playing along the same game that they played
years ago in the PC industry where they're consolidating functionality and
their Azure enterprise platform.
And so what we're finding is, and we're shifting into the customer use case,
which is consumers engaging digitally with businesses to transact, right?
And they want to be able to be secure both in their identity as well as
their data, but they also want low friction ease of use digitally.
So we're spending a lot more energy there, but the personas we have to target
and
the buyers, it has completely changed the way we go to market because there's
not a lot of consistency company to company.
In some companies, it might be a CMO or it might be a line of business leader.
It might be a chief digital officer.
It might even be the CEO because now you're talking customers.
You're talking about providing experience for
customers that creates loyalty, that gives you expansion opportunities and so
forth.
So there's a lot of sensitivity to C-suite when anything touches a customer
directly.
So what we've seen is our buying committee has grown.
It's larger than it is on the employee side of our business.
And it's more diverse and it's less consistent.
So we've got some challenges around how do you target and
go after the right personas given that there's more of them and
it's not the same company to company.
That's our big challenge.
>> Again, I think that's what's so interesting about selling SaaS at this point
in time, right?
>> Yeah.
>> Is the CIO, if it's tech, it's going to look at it or the CTO or
however they structure their organization.
And then you have like shadow IT and all sorts of other things that go on.
But at the end of the day, now because IT is so
closely related to the customer experience, you either have the CIO who
thinks about their customer experience, especially if they're a tech platform
usually, and if you don't, then you need to be selling quote unquote around IT.
And the thing that's so funny is back in the day when you sold around IT,
you got in trouble.
Whereas now IT is like, we see all this stuff anyways.
Of course, we're going to need to see this thing too.
>> And even in some cases,
developers have become a much more potent, important voice within companies.
Because they're developing internally some of the experiences and
even some of the capabilities upon which the applications or
the actual website itself might entail.
And so that's another very diverse audience that we've typically not
targeted in the past on the employee side that have an increasingly powerful
voice in these decision makers.
But again, the biggest challenge for a company like ours is the diversity now
that we see in the buyer committee that is not existent in the previous
sort of instantiation of what we did.
So that's caused us to hit your efficiency, right?
And you got a guess right and hopefully it's not a guess.
Hopefully it's a data driven decision, but you can't spread your dollars
across everything because then you can't pretty much know how that'll end.
>> And how do you structure your organizations to go after your key accounts?
>> We're actually moving to a model where we find in our Europe and
APAC regions, we're very aligned with our sales teams and how that's structured
And we're finding that to be a really important way of going to market.
We're actually moving to a model that's very VDM centric.
And there's a lot of reasons why for us at this point, it's the right decision.
I don't stand up here and say ABM is the end all and be all and
everyone should adopt it.
But for where we are and all the things happening around us,
we're actually going to move to a pretty field centric ABM centric,
regional, sub-regional centric model, where we're going to be really
focusing a little bit less of our time and energy on the top of funnel,
which we've done I think a really good job over the last couple years.
And really focusing on conversion and how can we help drive a better and
higher conversion rate, so spending a little more of our dollar and
emphasis on in-pipe opportunities and helping to lubricate and
move through that pipeline at a more efficient pace.
Things that we previously really hadn't done in the past.
We're going to kind of balance our investments across the funnel more than we
have in the path.
And again, a lot of the reasons we did what we did and what we're doing going
forward
are based on our own trajectory and the market we're in and the dynamics of our
competition and all that.
And so it wasn't that we necessarily did it blindly, but
we're definitely pivoting this year to be much more field centric and ABM cent
ric across all regions.
You mentioned your unique circumstances, but I think that there's definitely
from the conversations we've had
an extra focus on demand for 2023, for sure.
So curious like, how does your demand-gen strategy shift or change in that
environment?
I think for us, it's really leveraging the data, probably even more
aggressively than in the past.
We have enough data now to know, where's the magic?
What really works?
What really drives interest and what really moves things forward in ways that
other things can't?
So we're going to be keep seeking missiles this year around focusing our
investments towards the things that we know generate real impact.
So in many ways, it'll be a little more practical.
So we've approached the market in the past where we've had an umbrella campaign
What was really people call it awareness?
Yes, I think it's awareness, but it wasn't just talking about paying.
We did it around specific use cases, but nonetheless, it offered us as kind of
an awareness building umbrella campaign
upon under which we would run some other tactical plays to really hit key
personas and connect all of that tissue.
We're going to be doing a lot less of that umbrella and being a lot more
focused on the things that help drive and capture in market demand.
One of the things I've learned over the years too is if you think about the
market you serve,
you may have 100% of your market that you're going after.
And at any point in time, again, in B2B where we operate, it's probably 5% to
10% of that given market might be in the market at that moment looking for a
solution,
actively seeking to engage a vendor in solving a problem.
The rest of it is something that will come later on.
And so true demand generation tends to go after that 90% plus percent, whereas
demand capture is a very tactical.
Again, given some decisions we had to make around our trajectory for 23, we're
going to be a little more focused on the tactical demand capture aspect than I
would normally do.
And I think it'll hit our efficiency a bit, but ultimately it'll drive some
short-term results.
Again, I'm not that I recommend it as the right approach, but it's the right
one for us at the moment.
We're going to be very focused on capturing in market demand.
And so that'll change a lot of our tactics and our messaging.
We were talking to Jason from metadata a handful of episodes ago about this
idea of him using Google ads as a wedge for building content,
where it's like, "Hey, we can't rank for all this stuff yet, so we've got to
pay for all the terms as we build out our content."
And then eventually spend goes down and then the content continues to perform.
I almost look at this as kind of like a reverse wedge, right?
It's like, "Hey, you were doing all of those "brand-gen" activities, and now
you're just focusing on closing the deals.
And hopefully, like you said, that 100% of people know who you are, know your
value prop, know all that stuff, and then now focusing in on those 5% moments
that when they're in those 5% moments that you can go win it, that makes sense
to me.
And I totally understand.
Yeah, a little bit of a harvesting process, I think, right?
And it's more of a temporary focus and approach.
I think I'd mentioned before, we're a company that's not just been taken
private after being public, and there's a lot of things happening in our space.
And so this is just, again, really helping to drive as much near-term growth as
we can as our process for this year.
I love it.
It's so helpful for our listeners who are in the same sort of scenario.
So let's get into 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.
Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget items?
And I'll add to this that clearly you're cutting a lot of budget items.
But you also had some really successful campaigns in the past.
So feel free, uncutable budget items.
What are they?
Yeah.
So I think for us, I would call these the three uncutable.
We're going to be laser focused on one go-to-market motion, which is around our
customer use case, right?
In the past, we've had multiple of those.
So we're essentially folding a lot of that effort away and being incredibly
targeted and focused.
So uncutable number one is that focus around the singular go-to-market motion
that we're going to put in market.
Rather than having multiple go-to-market kind of motions, we're going to be
essentially singular focus,
which will give us the ability to invest at the level we need to.
But also keeps us simplified and focused on a single message or a single
platform.
I would call that uncutable, but it's really a strategy that's uncutable.
But the other two are really important.
The second one is what I call our digital land, recognizing that businesses
like ours,
three quarters or more, depending on what you read, of the customer journey is
now done fully digitally and on the customer's timeline.
We have yet to have, I think, what I would call an exceptional digital land,
or the ability to provide complete self-service from initial connection to
actually fulfilling an order.
And so we've been investing in that in 2023, 2023 is the year that we bring
that to life fully,
so that we can serve that digital-centered customer.
We'll still have reps, we still have hand-touch, we still have things that, you
know, for large enterprise, never go away.
But we've invested heavily and will continue to do so to ensure that our
digital journey is exceptional.
So that's uncutable number two.
And then the next one would be our channel partner.
So we've got a number of programs underway to help us scale our business
through and with our channel partners.
So those would be the three things there that I say our must haves for 2023.
Awesome. I love it.
Any tactical things that you're excited about doing or trying for next year?
It's funny because we did some, I think, pretty innovative things in 21 and 22.
We kind of took a different approach in the market that we're in,
because a lot of companies in cybersecurity, kind of the core messages for lack
of a better way to do this.
I'll just say it is we're the trusted platform.
You should trust us.
Trust us. We're great.
Tends to be a me-centered and it's a little bit generic in its messaging.
So cybersecurity has never been known for, I think, great or breakthrough
marketing.
That's just nature and the beast.
It's sensitive, it's security.
It's all those things and people tend to take a little bit of a safe approach.
Of course, we don't spend as much as a Microsoft or some of the other
competitors we deal with.
So we went after and tried a different approach.
We leveraged a pretty smart influencer that really helped create some
breakthrough in our own story,
telling us Terry Crews. Terry has been an amazing ambassador for us and has
opened a lot of doors
and had people, it engaged people in ways that it just a traditional message,
I think, would have just gone over their head.
We took some very differentiated approaches to break through and create some
emotion
and some character and some context to what it is we do and why it's important
in a very engaging and in storytelling fashion.
I think for us, as we look ahead,
recognizing and continuing to invest in the digital side of things,
it's still a place where search matters.
Both organic and paid, it's both incredibly essential and we've got work to do
to shore that up.
So we're going to be a little more, probably less sexy next year
and a little more hyper-targeted and hyper-focused.
On fewer things, but exquisite execution and more personalization.
It's hyper-targeted, more personalized, very digital.
So it feels like that kind of a basic cookbook for a lot of companies.
But for us, it's about simplification and being very focused on most few areas
that I just described.
Yeah, so for the Terry Crews campaign, obviously, he's super famous,
everyone, when they see his face, they know.
So why him?
I guess I kind of said why it's obvious, but why him?
It's really a great question, if you think about it, because influencer
marketing is a thing.
We all know it's a thing.
It's almost like sponsorships.
To me, influencer marketing and sponsorships can be very hit or very miss.
How do you get something that's a hit versus a miss?
A lot of it is finding someone who authentically can represent what it is you
stand for
and the message you're trying to get across to the market.
So it's one thing to just hire a pretty face that's famous and has a lot of
followers.
I think that's where you get a lot of the misses
when it comes to influencer marketing.
But when you bring somebody in, whether it's an expert in the area,
Terry's not necessarily an expert in security, but his strength character
embodies this notion of the strength and the robustness of our platform
in terms of providing security for every identity.
Right?
His unbridled optimism and energy are something that we highly valued.
Right?
That played right into the message we wanted to provide.
So ultimately, we were trying to leverage an influencer that could help us
tell the story of highly secure, very engaging, human and emotion based.
And all of that really came through.
We looked at dozens of potential influencers and we just everybody just
universally said,
man, this guy seems to be the right guy.
And then as soon as we started engaging him, he has just been such a perfect
fit for us.
It was a glove right on the hand.
It's fit so perfectly.
So I feel like we got a hit out of that one because I hear it field people,
salespeople all the time saying, you know, we got out of a call.
They called us because they want to talk.
They saw the Terry Crew stuff.
They thought it was great.
They wanted to include us in the bid.
That's exactly the whole point of it.
Marketing to me is about renting a little bit of space in the minds of your
target audience.
And that's really hard to do.
Right?
So whatever tools you can do it and Terry's helped us just rent a little bit
more space
than I think we could have on our own.
So that's the whole point of it.
We talk about being remarkable on this show, which means you have to actually
remark about it to someone else and say, Oh my gosh, that's not a thing.
That was pretty cool.
Yeah, that was pretty clever.
And this is like one of the tangible examples, right?
It's like Apple uses celebrities in their marketing.
Nike uses celebrities in their marketing and B2B companies, we just generally
don't.
It's just not something that we do.
But I was thinking about it before this episode.
If someone's still my identity, I think Terry Crews would be one of the first
people I'd call
to go steal it back.
I know that's not how the platform works, but I like the mental image.
He's really embodied it well.
And like I said, it's not that influence or marketing necessarily is the end
all be all.
It may not be for everybody.
And I suppose everybody's situation is unique, but it can be effective.
And to make it effective, it's one of those things where the matching and the
pairing
and the authenticity of it all really plays it.
If you get it right, we've all seen examples where you're like, man, that pitch
man or that pitch person for that brand is just so good.
It just works.
And in other cases, you've seen it as like, that seems kind of odd.
That person seems like an odd choice.
It's not just about fame.
It's about the embodiment of the message that you're trying to get across.
It reminds me of the PC and Mac commercials back in the day with Apple, where
in five
seconds, you knew exactly what they were trying to say, right?
Like, PC is old and weird and nerdy and Mac is like cool and young and hip,
right?
These type of things that these are B2C lessons, right?
Is how do you tell a story in five seconds or in 30 seconds or B2B?
We're so far away from that that we don't even try.
And I found it's very obvious to me that the buyers we engage, the B2B buyers
we engage,
are increasingly expecting a B2C experience, which is why, you know, your
website and your
digital journey that you provide, the content you create and use to engage that
audience,
how you inform them and educate them and engage them across a range of
experiences.
Increasingly needs to be more thought of a B2C exercise because that's the
experience
that they expect.
And if you keep it at a very informal and almost lecture-like fashion in the
way you engage
in them, I think that's a problem.
Again, it's not about being slocky or cute.
You want to be authentic and real and it needs to provide value because, of
course, they're
in a journey.
But if you think about it, B2B purchases are far more emotional than B2C
purchases are.
Other than a house or maybe an expensive car, like you and I decide from an ad
that we
want to go try some fast food restaurant because the ad looked good and we go
there
and we find out that food's not any good.
Have we lost anything?
Oh, maybe we lost $10 but that's not a big thing, right?
B2B buyers, they get their decision or own, they get fired.
They lose their job, they lose their livelihood.
So the level of emotion that's a part of that process is far greater than we
give credit
for.
And so engaging people with a little bit of emotion or not recognizing the
seriousness
of the decision that's at stake here, but still, they're human beings.
And so the way to engage them and just if they can laugh a little bit or they
can certainly
see the problems and challenges they have come to life in your content, that is
a great
way to get people to engage and connect on an emotional level.
And I think we have to not forget that.
It's not just about the facts, it's not just about claiming to have the best
solution or
spouting off features and capabilities.
It really is about creating that connection and that trust.
And I think that's where marketers like us that are in B2B, we do have to think
more
alike B2C marketers because we need to be thinking about what kinds of
experiences we're
actually offering our customers.
And you mentioned it, why is Apple so great, why is Nike so great?
They do that across the spectrum of what they do and how they communicate.
It's really good.
Why can't we be the same way?
Yeah, Tyler from Vidyard, when we had him on the show, he said, keep him
laughing, keep
him learning.
Exactly.
And I love that.
We call it edutainment.
But it's important because in a world that's so full of pressure, none of us,
we're all
looking at the world of 2022 going, man, things are complicated out there.
You've got political division, you've got wars, you've got inflation.
There's so much bad news from a cyber security perspective.
I also think that if I just started using fear as my marketing tool, I'm kind
of creating
more anxiety and stress in my buyer.
And I don't want to do that, right?
What I want to do is help them see the solution and how the problems can be
solved and turned
into opportunities.
And if I can get him to laugh a little bit, have a little emotion, feel good.
Yeah, you're just playing right onto that.
Yeah.
And what's cool about that campaign too, you said that your website traffic was
up nearly
a thousand percent.
There's benefits to this stuff that I think is just so cool.
I'm curious, how do you view your website?
It's all prospect first engages you.
This is the first kind of real experience they get to have with you.
How you view it is.
It is the single most important piece of communication or the communication
device that happens in
a B2B world.
So any buyer and we've done the mapping, right, you can see a buyer that has
come through.
They've been on our website multiple times.
They've downloaded multiple pieces of content or viewed multiple pieces of
content.
And it's now multiple buyers at one company doing that, right?
So we view it as look.
It needs to be simple and easy to navigate.
It needs to be a very consistent and simple experience.
It needs to have the right level of information.
You don't want to overwhelm them, but you can't just underwhelming either.
So there's that fine middle ground you got to find.
So it's one of those things that you never get it right.
It's never right.
It's just, is it better today than it was yesterday?
Are we continuously improving?
Are we finding the friction points and eliminating those friction points?
It's all of that because you can see the buyer journey and we do some research
and we find
out what's working and what isn't working.
So I think we've made good improvements, but I wouldn't call it done by any
means.
We still have a lot of work to do to get to where I want it to be.
All right, let's get to our next segment, The Dust Up.
This is where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your board or
sales teams,
your competitors or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable dust up in your career, Kevin?
Oh, man.
If somebody says they haven't had a memorable dust up, then they're not being
honest.
Sure, I've had a memorable dust up across probably every one of those
constituents.
I remember my very first board presentation when I started here as a CMO.
I went in and presented.
I'd been here about six or eight months.
We had really worked through and I think we'd done a pretty good job of
determining.
Marketing was where I needed to change some of the things we wanted to
implement and got
great reception from the leadership team and really felt like we were on a
great path.
Walk into a board meeting and it went South quick because there was a
particular board
member that just decided, "Oh, this is the new guy."
So let me just see how well he can handle the skewering.
So he just went after every data point I had.
Back at one point just to give you a sense of how frustrating it was.
In my head, I was having this conversation, but of course externally, I was
trying to
be very poised and acknowledge the question and answer the benefit.
He even said at one point, "I showed some data about the buyer journey and some
things
that mattered and why we were recommending some changes to try to address the
updated
buyer journeys that we were seeing."
He said, "Where'd you get that data?"
And we shared the data and he's a lot of believing.
I knew I was going to get it.
At that point, I didn't even know how to respond to that if you don't believe
it.
But the point is that was a tough meeting for me and I remember walking out of
it feeling
pretty beat up.
It came back again later.
The next quarter, maybe it was two quarters later, we had another review and it
went great.
It just went awesome and they were super common merit because we had even more
progress to
show.
The relationship with the board is very important and investing time and
finding a champion
or two can also be super helpful, which I did.
Turns out that this particular individual was not just somebody who picked on
marketing.
He liked to do that kind of thing with a lot of people.
Anyway, that was a dust up that could have been really seriously negative to
the career
path that I had here, but it turned out not to be, thankfully.
There's other dust ups.
That was probably the most memorable and the most difficult one for me, at
least initially.
Prove the haters wrong, Kevin, that's yours.
Definitely a hater.
I found out later this was a guy that didn't believe much in bar.
He felt like if you want to grow revenue, you'll hire more sales people.
Saw that coming.
You don't need marketing.
I'm like, "Oh."
When you look at a buyer journey, you look at all the touches in that journey,
you realize
how many things that the marketing team actually connects with that buyer.
It's your own peril, man.
Invest less in marketing is what I said.
Go for it.
I was talking to sales leader the other day.
I asked a question about marketing.
They're like, "Yeah, I think that there's a real need for marketing now these
days."
It was like, "Wait a minute.
Play your flag on that one."
Risky.
Way to go out on the limb there, yeah.
It's like an arrest to development when they go from a sell to a don't buy.
Like, "We made it to don't buy."
It's like, "Congrats, marketing.
We do deserve to have a job."
Okay, let's get to quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster, tap into your
greatest asset,
your website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly start sales
conversations.
Quick and easy, just like these questions, go to qualified.com to learn more.
That is the best.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
Kevin, are you ready?
Hit me.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
When I was young, I remember as a kid looking up in my classroom at these plac
ards around
the room that had the letter A in the alphabet and below the number one and
then B had the
number two all the way down through Z, which was 26.
And I remember just staring at that and getting bored.
To the point where now when I see letters, I see numbers and vice versa.
So what I do, my family just cracks up because I do it all the time.
I can look at a word.
If I took the word E in, which is your first name, simple three letter word, I
am, right?
I is nine, A is one and is 14.
I see that in my head immediately.
So what I do now is I've taken it to the point where I add it up and I can tell
you,
for example, E in equals 24 because nine plus one plus 14 equals 24.
But what I do now is if I look at a word, I can tell you that last digit, like
in this
case, E in equals 24.
I can tell you four.
I can tell you an attempt of a second.
I can look at a word that I can say, oh, that word ends in two.
So it's a stupid human trick.
It's like I should have been on David Letterman years ago.
It's this stupid human trick, but I can literally look at a word and go, oh,
that's three.
That's five or that's 12.
Or man, that's a two.
And it's this weird thing now that I just, because I just see the numbers, I
see the
letters and I can add them up.
It takes a little longer to add up the full number, but I can get because I've
memorized
patterns now.
So I can just get, I can get to the last digit almost instantly.
So a meaningless talent.
It will never be on my resume, but it's a talent.
There you go.
I love it.
That is truly a hidden talent.
A useless hidden talent.
Yeah.
I don't know how you could make money on that.
Maybe we could get you to like a carnival, perhaps freak show.
Yeah.
We'll work on something.
And what's your favorite podcast book TV show that you've been checking out
recently?
My favorite podcast is Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history.
Throughout that podcast, I've read basically everything Malcolm's written.
It's fascinating podcast because he talks about things that are overlooked or
under-appreciated
in history and tells these amazing stories about things that you would never
have heard
of, but they're pretty amazing outcomes.
Yeah.
Revisionist history is my favorite podcast.
So good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that maybe makes you a better market
er?
Cooking.
I've taken up cooking, especially from COVID.
And I don't know if it makes me a better marketer, but I follow different chefs
online
and I tried lots of different dishes.
And I found one that I follow.
His name is Chef Billy Parisi.
What I like about him is it comes back to marketing in a sense of he has such a
simple
way of teaching complex cooking techniques, but he breaks it down in ways that
makes it
easy and it makes it interesting to do.
I think he's as good a marketer and communicator as he is a chef, which is why
I've gravitated
to him versus a lot of other online chefs that you can follow, including Gordon
Ramsay,
who I've followed for a long time and I think he's great, but this guy is the
best teacher
of cooking that I've seen and again, it comes down to marketing.
How do you communicate the things that you can do in ways that are compelling,
engaging
and create an audience?
This guy's done a great job of that.
If you weren't in marketing, what do you think you'd be doing?
I'd be teaching.
What subject?
I'd either be teaching at the college level or the high school level.
In fact, when I retire from this job at some point, I'll probably go teach high
school.
I've always wanted to do that.
I may teach at the college level.
If I had taken this on as a profession earlier, I probably would have gone on
to get a PhD
and therefore would have ended up probably teaching at the college level.
Subject might have been marketing.
Teach marketing to high school students.
They need to know this stuff.
Look, I believe in it.
You may have heard this, but one of my favorite quotes of all time as it
relates to business
was Peter Drucker many years ago, decades ago.
But he said, and this is fascinating if you think about it, right?
He said, in business, there are only two functions that matter.
Marketing and innovation.
Marketing and innovation produce results.
All the rest are costs.
What he means by that, I know.
I think he means marketing in the capital M sense, not just the discipline of
marketing,
but really go to market, sales and marketing.
Because sales and marketing together, we go to market and we generate revenue.
You got to have an innovation, a product, a service or something, and then you
have to
have the ability to communicate and therefore engage your customers.
Everything else?
Do we have to have lawyers?
Of course.
Do we need finance people?
Yes.
Do we need HR?
Of course.
But those two functions drive a business forward.
And so it's center to the success of all businesses.
So I do think it's a bit of an under appreciated art and craft that I quite
enjoy.
Yeah.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received, I got out of the army and
someone said,
was get as close to product as you can get or get as close to sales as you can
get.
Everything else in the middle is expendable and everything is supporting those
two things.
And I think if you look at where marketing is now currently with self serve and
all this
other stuff, marketing is driving revenue.
They always have, but it is 100% attributable.
And there's no ifsans or buts about it anymore.
It's like, hey, this is the number.
This is what's happening.
This is what's being hit.
Doesn't matter how good the sales person is if you have that sort of stuff.
So I think it's a really exciting time to be a marketer.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
It's so unique and different and digital has changed the rules of everything.
And but it has made the job such an intellectually stimulating and challenging
thing that that's
why I get excited.
It's not the same old thing now.
We've had to change and learn and grow new skills all along the way.
And I mean, I grew up in fundamentals of it all are relatively the same, but
the execution
and the understanding you need and the strategies you have to deploy are very
different.
So that keeps it fresh, exciting.
And I do agree with you.
I think marketing now is as interesting as it's ever been.
What advice would you give to a first time CMO trying to figure out their
demand strategy?
Don't be afraid to ask for help.
There's a lot of help out there.
There's a lot of people that have gone through the motions you have.
So one of the things I didn't do when I first became a CMO was reach out to
peers as well
as I should have.
Like I do now much more than I did then.
So I would say reach out for help.
There's great networks available, CMO groups that you can work with.
So I would say do that first, but then specifically within the company, it's
really understand
there's probably two things I would say going upward, I would say, make sure
you're connected
well, both to the CEO and to the CFO and the company strategy overall.
Make sure that what you do is really tightly connected around building out that
strategy
and demonstrating that that how you're going to take that to market in a way
where they
get a chance to see it.
So the more connected you are to that C level, the more integral you will be to
the company's
direction and future.
And then working with it, I'd say the same thing would be working with your
product peers
as well.
Really understanding the uniqueness and the differentiation, the service or
product that
you have to enable you to create that.
Because at the end of the day, if you're not differentiating or unique, you're
just going
to become noise.
For listeners, you can go to PingIdentity.com to learn more about your company
and they help
you protect users at every digital interaction.
We'll make an experience frictionless.
Check out PingIdentity.
Kevin, thanks again.
We really appreciate it and we'll talk soon.
Thanks again.
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