The Revenue-Driven CMO

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s best and brightest growth marketers across different channels.

I’m super excited to be joined by Lisa Sharapata, an impressive marketer. She’s currently VP of Marketing at MindTickle, a platform that helps revenue leaders accelerate ramp time and improve performance using data-driven readiness to develop winning sales teams. Before that, she was running best of breed teams at Teradata, Aprimo, and most recently 6sense.

My question for her is, “How do you think about the difference between brand and performance in your mind? How did you make the transition from brand to user acquisition? Tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to be the ninja that you are.”

Show Notes:

* Brand is much more than the colors, logo, or font.

* You have to think about the whole customer experience, including what they say about you when you’re not around and the follow-up process after they purchase to make sure they’re satisfied, continue to buy, and tell others about you.

* Often, changing the font or the picture isn’t going to fix the business problem. She likes to think about the business more holistically. You need to know various factors, like who your target audience is and the problem you’re trying to solve.

* It doesn’t work well if you’re not thinking about the entire experience you’re building and how it affects growth.

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s best and brightest growth marketers across different channels.

Today, I’m super excited to have Rico Andrade from Celigo, a really cool integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Rico is optimistic that this platform will one day become a household name. Rico used to work on the agency side. He was with Transvideo Studios doing work with many of the biggest tech players, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Intuit, eBay, and the likes.

I have a few questions for him: “I talked to lots of brands. The biggest brands are ahead of the game and leveraging AI and automation to their fullest extent, but the vast majority of marketers are still in a manual and analog kind of data entry phase. For that spreadsheet marketer right now, what kinds of possibilities can an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) like Celigo open up? What are some things that they can do with Celigo that they couldn’t before? And what are things going to look like five years from now?”

Show Notes:

* iPaaS can easily integrate your marketing systems (especially if your CRM is not Salesforce &/or has limited native integrations.)

* Tools like Zapier operate at the “user” level. iPaaS operates at the business level (so it can integrate the underlying data across all your business units.)

* Still love your spreadsheets & want to keep them? No problem, iPaaS can push from any data source directly into Google Sheets or Excel.

* Ninja hack alert: You can use iPaaS tools to integrate conversion data & set up data postback to ad platforms with non-native integrations to your CRM (e.g. platforms like Taboola & Outbrain.)

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s best and brightest growth marketers across different channels where revenue and growth is the true North.

Today, I’m excited to welcome Jaime Punishill, the CMO of Lionbridge, a leading translation and localization platform. I’d love to talk to him for a whole hour, but of course, we have just three minutes.

My question for Jaime is: “I know you work with many of the largest and most sophisticated brands in the world. Most companies are interested in growing globally faster, better, cheaper, and more effectively. So what advice would you give a brand that’s looking to go global or operate more effectively on a global scale?”

Show Notes:

* If you’re not thinking globally, you will be left behind.

* 90% of websites are written in English, yet 90%+ of countries don’t speak English. Every time you’re not looking at things at a global view and adjusting things for each locality, you’re leaving money on the table.

* You need to get prepared to support the entire world upon product releases. If not, you’re behind the leaders.

* The “market by market” or “locality by locality” mentality is outdated and from the Industrial era. Products no longer roll out city by city anymore. They announce, launch, and open across the world at the same time.

Bonus discussion after the recording:

* Last year, Lionbridge re-platformed onto Adobe and tried a new ABM platform. This year, it’s all about doubling down on what’s working.

* Lionbridge’s industry is typically a multi-vendor universe. They know there are dollars they’re spending elsewhere.

* Most B2B companies are more concerned with “net new leads.”

* A large part of the goal for Jaime is just letting people know that Lionbridge exists or reminding existing customers of their services. Some aren’t even aware that localization solutions exist. Part of the goal is “category establishment.” Their organization needs to convince CMOs to consider and understand localization.

* They’ve had to build a real map of the customer lifecycle and customer segments because they don’t think the industry really has a firm grasp of these concepts.

* Not every CMS is global, yet many don’t think about that when they choose a CMS. For example, Adobe doesn’t offer a multi-lingual data schema out of the box, so Lionbridge built the only one in the Adobe app store.

* In B2C, they offer incentivized sharing (e.g., free credit when you get someone else to signup) to get referral sales. B2B should learn from that and use that to get referrals.

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we talk to some of the leading growth marketing experts from around the world and condense our discussions into three-minute micro-interviews.

We’re super excited about marketing in today’s world—now’s a great time to be a marketer. And we’ve got a really exciting guest for you today: Tim Schmidt of USCCA.

Tim’s background isn’t like your ordinary marketer’s—he was a mechanical engineer by training and ran an entrepreneurial side hustle. It took several years for that to gain traction, but now, his organization is growing rapidly and has an impressive market presence.

He is exactly the kind of unicorn entrepreneur growth marketer that we love to have on this show. And so, I have a great question for him: “What are your top seven rules for sales and or marketing success?”

Show Notes:

* The copy you use is more important than anything else. Sure, imagery and colors are important, but words matter the most.

* Tell great stories because they sell better than anything. The power of storytelling dates all the way to the era of the caveman.

* What’s in it for the customer? Focus on answering that. Nobody cares about your business.

* Keep it simple.

* Measure, track, and test. Otherwise, you can’t improve. Make bold tests that have big impact.

* Function beats form. Principles beat flash. If you haven’t read Eugene Schwartz in the last six months, you’re doing it wrong. Re-inventing is a fool’s game.

* Slow execution is the kiss of death.

Bonus discussion after the recording:

* There are only two things that will never change: analytics and copy. Study them well.

* Partnering with brick-and-mortar locations (by offering commissions) and selling for them in person has a much higher close rate than you’d get trying to sell things online.

Tim’s company has a sophisticated marketing and tracking process that allows them to see just how many members they obtain and lose every day and week.

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s best and brightest growth marketers, usually across different channels.

I’m super excited today to have Casey Carey here with us. Casey is the CMO of Kazoo HR, a disruptive HR and recruiting platform. Before, in his previous lifetime, he had a long career leading marketing initiatives for some of the biggest brands in tech, including DoubleClick, Google, Marketo, and Adobe. So basically, Casey is an absolute badass.

Many B2B brands are hot on using intent data. Many are just dabbling and it’s not a major influencer, but I asked Casey if he could tell us about how he’s been using intent data so far and the impact that it’s having currently on his marketing programs.

Show Notes:

* Intent data is not an incremental approach; it’s disruptive to B2B.

* First, his company started by bringing data in and getting into a rules-based lead scoring model.

This helped Casey inform outbound SDR sequences.

His company saw a 3x bigger response and connect rate with this approach.

* Casey saw the value of lead scoring, but he also realized that anything incremental isn’t scalable.

* He came across 6Sense, a great tool that helps reorient your business around an account-based model that asks you to consider the buying stage of the account as it relates to the buying stage of the individual. This helps you to create more focused marketing campaigns.

* Kazoo uses a swarm strategy: reaching out in display; activating that data in LinkedIn, email, outbound sequences; and pushing that data into Google Ads.

* If you’re dabbling in or considering intent data, pick just one or two use cases. If it works, scale it up.

Bonus discussion after recording:

* Casey sells multiple products, so having intent data keywords allows his company to customize outreach.

* Intent data is about categorizing your site’s content. When a prospect consumes content, it shows up as intent data under that category.

* Third-party data can be very informative in lead scoring.

* Once a prospect racks up a certain number of points, they get routed to the business development rep.

* They usually look at data in the last 30 days.

* Casey sees 15 to 30% account view-through rates on average.

* You can take all that data and put it in a predictive model to see what opportunities are most likely to open in the next 90 days.

* You can use 6Sense to build custom segments and activate those segments on other ad platforms, like Google Display.

Welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s leading experts in growth marketing. We talk about search, social media, and analytics and bring it all together in crystallized, three-minute, value-bomb, interview-style pieces.

I’m Chris Mechanic, your co-host. Here with me today is Casey Armstrong, whom I’m super excited to have. Casey is a growth marketer. He’s a Swiss army knife. He started out on the agency side as an entrepreneur and then moved into his own information product company that got acquired. After that, he moved on to consult with some very impressive brands like Pantheon and currently works with ShipBob, a leader in third-party logistics that helps e-commerce companies to earn more margin by shipping more effectively.

Show Notes:

* Casey knows someone who needed to market the first online B2B notary, so he modeled the Yelp directory in B2B and generated hundreds of thousands of visits.

* Understanding multiple channels is paramount to doing well. Casey looks for that when hiring. PPC data, for example, can inform SEO.

* Where are you most likely to have success? Most people fail to double down in this area and spread themselves too thin. Too many people chase the latest shiny object.

* Find a channel with a high floor and a high ceiling.

Bonus discussion after the recording:

* Chris thinks B2B is lagging behind how advanced B2C is.

* E-commerce brands are better than B2B at focusing on the add-to-cart process. B2B could learn something from them. They could use that as a similar micro-conversion (a simple one-click download to signal intent) to feed data to marketers.

* Casey believes that Chris underestimates B2B. B2B already does a lot of micro-conversion stuff, but traffic volumes are lower. ShipBob ranks high for e-commerce RFP terms and uses visits to those pages as a lead scoring mechanism for leads routing to sales.

When people went to the free trial, they would use the pricing page/checkout in a similar fashion as an indication to inform their email marketing and other marketing.

But he admits that some of this was neglected for a while.

* B2B under-utilizes the thank-you page.

* Generating awareness is the toughest part of the process for ShipBob.

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we interview some of the world’s leading growth marketing minds and condense it into three-minute value bombs.

Today, I’m super excited because we have Stephanie Moritz, currently the Chief Marketing Officer at the American Dental Association. She has had a long career in PR and marketing, transforming brands including Disney, Jim Beam, Hershey, Conagra, and now, the ADA.

My question for her is, “You openly say that curiosity is one of your secrets to success. Talk to us a little bit about curiosity. What does it mean to you, and how can others tap into the power of it?”

Show Notes:

* Curiosity can be a tool to disrupt and change the culture and thinking of an old, established business or brand.

* She flipped the script by using curiosity with internal employees (instead of externally) to get people thinking in new ways.

* The ADA is ripe for innovation since it’s been around for 160+ years.

Welcome to the second episode of Three Minute Marketing, where we do micro interviews with some of the world’s leading growth experts and condense it all into value bomb-style content. Today, I’m super-duper excited to have Peep Laja on the show.

He’s best known for CXL.com, which started as the top namesake CRO blog and evolved into an agency. He’s the ultimate entrepreneur and unicorn.

I modeled my question for him after a book called The One Big Thing by the guy that started Keller Williams Realty.

What is the one big thing that brands can do to make everything else easier (or even unnecessary) when it comes to conversion optimization?

Show Notes:

* A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered.

* Most companies have poor value propositions that make them commodities rather than unique. Don’t choose a value proposition that everyone else is using (e.g., “We build WordPress websites” makes you a commodity.)

* Focus on positioning yourself in a unique way to solve problems that users are struggling with.

Bonus discussion after the recording:

* Ask yourself what you can do that others can’t easily replicate.

* Rather than describing yourself in a vanilla fashion, you can build a brand with a strong personality or something quirky about yourself.

* If you describe yourself by your job, you’re a commodity. For example, if you say you’re an SEO consultant, you become replaceable. But if you say you’re the best in the world, that’s hard to replace.

* Peep followed this branding approach to become the best in the world at CRO. He spoke at every conference and podcast. You couldn’t miss him.

* Write ten different value propositions and show them to your friends and family to find out what is best. If you have money, pay for a service like Wynter.com to get professional feedback from your ideal personas.

Welcome to the first episode of Three Minute Marketing with a guest. I’m your host and veteran growth junkie, Chris Mechanic. In our podcast, we micro-interview the world’s thought leaders about growth marketing.

I’m joined by the one and only Ms. Lynne Capozzi. Lynne has experience across the entire spectrum of marketing, from brand building to growth, direct response, and demand gen. She comes from IBM and is currently the CMO at Acquia, a leading provider of hosting and related services for Drupal.

Show Notes:

* Messaging often changes during a site redesign.

* Whether you’re merging brands, going through an acquisition, creating a category, or pursuing your CMO’s new vision, these are always opportunities where you can change messaging.

* If you haven’t revisited your messaging for many years, it’s probably outdated given the pace of change.

* Messaging is a process. Define your target audience and personas, and create custom messages tailored to each one.

* Most messaging is too broad. Make sure your messaging supports your products and the researcher journey.

* Nowadays, most people do their research online. And that journey is different depending on the persona. For example, someone in B2B doesn’t just want to hear your messaging—they want to be evangelized to!

* One good thing that’s happened over the years is that companies have stripped out some of their jargon from messaging to make it more accessible or clear.

Bonus discussion after recording:

* B2B companies often have boring copy that’s too technical.

* Many assets, like testimonials and case studies, help support that research journey.