The Revenue-Driven CMO

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute Marketing, where we interview the world's top growth marketing leaders and distill their knowledge and insights into binge-able, bite-sized content for your listening pleasure.

Today I'm joined by Jeanniey Walden, an impressive marketing executive who is currently CMO and Head of Innovation at DailyPay. DailyPay is a really disruptive fintech financial services brand that helps employees get paid closer to real-time as they're earning.

Jeanniey has been on the agency side and the client side in her career, so she has an interesting perspective. My question for her was, "What are your top 5 rules for marketing success?".

Show notes:

1. Rule #1: Be authentic in your approach when you're working with a team and creating marketing programs. Really try and understand what's happening, use words that everyone else knows, and focus on being your authentic self. Brands that try to be something they're not always get caught.

2. Rule #2: Be inspirational. Everything that you're doing should drive your consumer or end-user to want to aspire to something better. It doesn't have to be directly correlated: if you're showing them to see how much money they've earned, the aspiration may be to work harder and earn more money.

3. Rule #3: Be relatable. Always understand your audience segments and find a way to relate to them on a one-to-one level.

4. Rule #4: Know your data. If you can follow the data, you can uncover hidden gems that will make you more successful in your role.

5. Rule #5: Be nice. People don't realize the impact that they have on others when they're working, or the impact that their marketing message has on others when you put it out to market.

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute-Marketing, the world's only podcast for easily-digestible tips and insights from the world's top growth marketing leaders. In other words, binge-able 3 minute TED talks you can listen to on the go.

Today we're joined by Melissa Puls, SVP and CMO at Ivanti, an advanced IT automation firm that's on a mission to bring the "everywhere work environment" to life. What's unique about Melissa is that she's operated mostly remotely throughout her career, including in leadership roles.

Melissa has mastered the art of building a team remotely. So I had to ask her, "How do you lead and optimize your marketing team in the 'Everywhere Workplace'?".

Show notes:

1. The workplace is everywhere these days. At times, that can leave us without a sense of belonging or a purpose that aligns us all.

2. From a marketing perspective, if your brand is lacking a purpose, it's marketing's job to create one in today's "Everywhere Workplace" world.

3. The goal of your brand should be to help unify employees, customers, and investors for a common purpose that everyone can rally around.

4. Marketers need to provide a more humanized experience for buyers. The concept of "personas" is dead and people expect to be marketed to as humans.

5. It's about B2H (business to humans).

6. Marketing has earned the right to have a profound impact on business success. To that end, marketers shouldn't claim victory until they've met their revenue goals.

7. Today, when everyone's working from everywhere, it gives marketing a sense of purpose that "we're here to help the company achieve their goals".

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute-Marketing, where we sit down with the world's top growth marketing leaders and they provide actionable tips and insights in bite-sized 3-minute segments for your listening pleasure.

Today's guest is the very impressive Amy Barzdukas. Amy is CMO of WiTricity, an electronic vehicle charging startup. Previously, Amy was a longtime executive at Microsoft and HP.

As a direct response marketer at heart, I've always felt that "branding" is a bit fluffy. But brand is really important to Amy. So my question for her is, "How can companies build a brand that drives demand?".

Show notes:

1. Too often brand is not central to either the marketing efforts or to the business strategy. It's seen as something that takes whatever it's given and makes it pretty. That's a big mistake.

2. There's a lot of branding work that people see as pedantic, but words and authenticity matter.

3. Having an authentic brand point of view is a signal to your customers and potential customers that they know what they're signing up for.

4. When you have a great brand, you're also defining the criteria for whether or not a particular product or price point is something that's authentic to you.

5. Customers can smell authenticity (or a lack thereof) from a mile away. When you're not being authentic to who you are as a brand, it will backfire.

6. If you're trying to build a brand by consensus, it won't work. Great brands are usually polarizing.

7. Are you growing in market share and revenue? That's a great way to measure your brand.

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute-Marketing, where we interview the world's top growth marketing leaders and they provide actionable, bite-sized insights. Think of them as 3-minute micro TED talks for your listening pleasure.

I'm super excited to have Don Bush, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Neuro-ID, on the podcast this week. Don is a veteran marketer with an impressive resume, and Neuro-ID is a really interesting company that just raised a large amount of money in Series B.

As your organization grows, it's important for your marketing to grow with it. So my question for Don is, "How should marketing evolve as organizations grow and mature?".

Show notes:

1. It's typical for a smaller company to want exponential growth. In order to do that, they've got to change their marketing and sales motion.

2. Smaller companies will often prove the value of their model, software, or widget by going to early adopters, innovators, and friends and family. But that's not going to get you to where you want to be in terms of exponential growth.

3. The potential customers you have to market to may not give you the benefit of the doubt or understand hiccups.

4. "Who is my ICP? Who is my audience? What are the best industries and how do I reach them? Are we a sales-led company or a product-led company?" The answers to these questions fundamentally change how you present yourself to the market.

5. You've got to make sure that your message and position in the market is crystal clear.

6. Why does your customer care about what you're presenting to them and how does it help them?

7. Crystal clarity of message, position, and value take on a whole new role as you grow than it did when you were calling up people you worked with two jobs ago.

8. What got you there may not get you where you want to go. Look at everything to make sure the clarity of vision is there.

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute-Marketing, the only podcast where you can find binge-able tips and insights from the world's top growth marketing leaders broken down into easy-to-digest 3-minute segments.

I'm honored to have Arjun Pillai, SVP of Products and Growth at ZoomInfo, on the podcast this week. Arjun has a deep background in data and is an engineer by training, but he made the switch and became a very impressive B2B marketer. Previously he was the Founder and CEO of Insent.ai, a top conversational marketing platform which was acquired by ZoomInfo.

We live in a busy, noisy world with so many different ideas flying around. So my question for Arjun is, "How can marketers, companies, and brands prioritize their marketing initiatives to ensure success?".

Show notes:

1. Marketers should always start with the data quality that they have in their Salesforce. If you have bad data there, clean it up first. 2. Some marketers get aspirations to focus on things like videos and podcasts, which are good. But you have to cover your basics first. You can't fail to hit your MQL target and say you're building a branding podcast. 3. Doing something swanky or more strategic is important, but not until you're hitting your numbers. 4. Do the basics. Make sure you have a product marketer who's good at talking about your product. Have a G2 or Capterra with at least ten reviews even if your product is new. Start doing outbound emails. Get a couple of SDRs and work with them to write copy so they can get emails out to potential customers. 5. Run some simple B2B ads on Facebook and LinkedIn. 6. How can you align super closely with your sales? Forget the mindset of "handing-off" to sales. Don't generate something, hand it off to sales, and let them run with it. Make sure you're working off of the same targeted list. Use as much data as possible to make sure the targeted list is targeted enough. 7. Practice opportunity acceleration. Reach out to opportunities that haven't yet closed on Salesforce. Help your sales team prioritize their accounts. You know intent data, ICP data, and targeting better, use it to prioritize for the SDRs.

Welcome to another episode of 3-Minute-Marketing, the internet's most binge-able marketing podcast. We interview the world's top growth marketing leaders and distill their knowledge into actionable, bite-sized insights.

This week we're kicking off 2022 with Enrique Hoyos, Head of Marketing for Pexels. Enrique is the epitome of the type of guest we like to have on our show. A T-shaped marketer and a unicorn with experience in start-ups, he's someone who knows how to move the needle.

I'm in awe of Enrique's ability to grow businesses and teams. So I asked Enrique, "What skillsets do you think are the most important for startup and scaleup marketers?"

Show notes:

1. The foundation of marketing is understanding your customer and the problem that they have. How does that problem play a role in their life and what is the connection between that and how you solve that problem? Whether it be your product, service, etc. 2. To do that well you have to be good at data analytics, but you also have to be good at combining that with qualitative data that explains why something is happening. That becomes the foundation of any strategy. Know what you're selling and what you're telling people. 3. The most important marketing skill is adaptability. 4. First-time marketers may join a start-up after coming from an agency and have a deep understanding of one aspect of marketing. But that doesn't mean that skill is the most important tool to use for the start-up. Take a step back to look at the start-up and find the lever of growth you can use to move the needle instead of focusing on what you're good at. 5. When gauging candidates' adaptability in interviews, ask them how they've tackled problems in the past. 6. Don't come into a scenario thinking of yourself as just one thing. Survey the field and think more broadly about what tools you have and how you can most effectively move the needle, regardless of whether or not it's in your area of expertise. 7. Focus on wherever the growth will give you the most value.