Podcast Archives - Act-On

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 17: Tejas Manohar

Galen Ettlin — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 12:11:00 +0000

^{Tejas Manohar is an engineer, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch. In this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast, he shares perspective about the future of martech and how companies can better harness data to their marketing advantage.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software. Today is all about data and empowering marketers, and our guest today is Tejas Manohar, her co-founder and CEO of Hightouch. He’s got a background in software engineering and his company helps businesses better harness their customer data. Notable brands that have taken advantage of this are Spotify, GameStop, the NBA, Autotrader and many more. Looking forward to our conversation today, TASS, thank you so much for being here.

Tejas Manohar:
Thanks for having me on the show. Really appreciate it, Galen.

Galen Ettlin:
Yeah, no, of course. I mean, you’ve got some really interesting perspective and I want to know all about your career journey up till now since it sounds kind of like a whirlwind adventure. But first, let’s talk about your company Hightouch. You’ve earned top marks in G2 as a leader in the reverse ETL space. And for those unfamiliar, what does that mean about the service you provide?

Tejas Manohar:
There’s a process in data technology, data engineering. Data analytics called ETL basically means putting data into the warehouse into a data warehouse. So data warehouses are databases that companies like to put all their information into from marketing, sales, finance, product data, put all the data into it so that you can analyze all your data in one place and tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And ETL is just the process of extracting data from sources, transforming it into something that makes sense for the warehouse and loading it into the warehouse. And it’s just a 20, 30 year old term ETL data into your warehouse, reverse ETL. It’s the opposite of that. So it’s this new idea that we brought to the market, which is like you have all this data you’re using in reporting tools and BI tools and the data warehouse, but there’s people who want that data outside of BI tools and analytics tools and reporting tools.

They want to use that data to personalize a marketing campaign or they want to use it to adjust ad targeting, or they want to use that data to power conversion events inside of an advertising network like Facebook or Google so that your ads can be optimized. And all of those processes I mentioned happen outside of BI tools and the typical tools you use a data warehouse for. So reverse ETL, pretty simple concept we brought to the market. You don’t even need to know why it’s called that, but really all it is is taking data from the warehouse and putting it into all the systems of action and systems of engagement that are used around the company like Salesforce or Marketo or Facebook ads or Google Ads. So you can actually act on the data and operationalize it and use it for personalization versus just stare at it in a report or a dashboard.

Galen Ettlin:
So let’s dive into that a little bit more. I know the theme in this economy now more than ever is for marketers to do more with less. And that data is, as you’ve mentioned, critically valuable in reaching those goals. How can companies turn that existing data warehouse that you mentioned into a more potent marketing engine?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, great question. So honestly, for the average marketer, data warehouse often wasn’t looked at as a tool for them before high touch and before reverse ETL. It’s a tool that you would use just for reporting, but it’s never a tool that people thought of when it actually came to running marketing campaigns except for one use case, which is a lot of marketers would download CSPs from the warehouse, upload them into different systems, and effectively the whole theme of doing more with less is a big part of what we think about at Hightouch. And I would say that in a couple aspects. One, it’s like doing more with the data you have. I have a belief personally sales hat off, which is that there is tremendous value that companies can do in their marketing and execute on that can be driven from data that they already have and reports they already have.

I’ll give you an example pretty regularly walk into large enterprises. I’m not going to name any names here, but you mentioned some of our customers from our website earlier. We find that at some of these really large companies, they’re spending tens of millions or hundreds of millions on advertising campaigns, but they’re showing a lot of those ads to customers. They already have customers that have already purchased their product in the last few months, are seeing an ad on Facebook or Google, and you don’t have to be a performance marketer to know that that can be a waste of money if you’re allocating budget evenly to customers who’ve already purchased the product and customers you should purchase it. So one of the simplest use cases when you think of doing more with what you have is everyone has a list of their customers in a data warehouse, people who purchased something from their brand recently.

And we have this philosophy at Hightouch, which is like just start with a suppression campaign. If you’re not propagating that list of customers that have recently bought your product to all the different ad networks, like all of them like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat line, whatever it is already in a real time way, then that’s a first use case that you can do with your existing data through a platform like Hightouch. And it can be set up in about five to 10 minutes. It’s really that easy. So when I think about doing more with what we have, yeah, I really have this philosophy that everyone has some sort of operational uplift that they can provide to their company that meaningfully moves metrics by just using data better or activating their data better in quite a straightforward way.

Galen Ettlin:
I think that real world example really does hit home. I’ve definitely bought something and then seen the advertisement for it later where I’m like, am I really the target audience?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, I saw an ad for our own product at some point. I was like, we’ve got to fix that. We’re in this space. So contacted our dimension team to adjust our suppression list and get that corrected. But yeah, that’s an example of clear business impact from just using data you already have.

Galen Ettlin:
Moving along to the next topic here, but kind of in that same vein of how we’re seeing everything trend now in this economy. Curious for your perspective as MarTech stacks get consolidated and reduced in a lot of companies. How do you feel about the future of the industry and what changes do you anticipate ahead of us to adapt to this landscape?

Tejas Manohar:
I do expect MarTech stacks to have a significant amount of both consolidation, so not needing to buy as many tools in the future as well as simplification. I think a lot of MarTech vendors today, we’re probably at fault to this somewhere in our marketing too, talk about really big promises and how they’re going to totally change your marketing or the name of the game from personalization customer experiences. But then you look at what the actual products do and how people actually use them. And a lot of them are pretty similar, even though the claims are quite different or the product is actually quite simple from a surface area perspective, but people are paying a lot of big money for these products due to the promises and stuff like that that they expose online. So personally, I believe that over the next few years we’re going to see a lot more clarity brought to the MarTech market where vendors need to stop, we’ll have to be forced by the economy to actually stop just promising huge things and being able to charge a lot of money for that and lots to get down to the details of what do you actually offer and how does that impact my business and how do you do that in a way that’s best for me from a cost perspective as a company versus alternative solutions I could use.

And I think we’re seeing that in the CDP space, customer data platforms space. I’m very familiar with, I was one of the first 10 engineers and product folks at Segment, the leader of that category now acquired by Twilio, before founding Hightouch. And that gave me a lot of inspiration to produce high touch. And I see so many companies that are buying a CDP and spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and going through all this implementation work, but at the end of the day, their use cases could be accomplished in a much simpler way, like activating data they already have inside of their data warehouse and using a tool like Hightouch that can do a little bit of identity stitching and do a little bit of audience building and then start activating that data you have right away versus a huge platform like a CDP that takes six to 12 months to set up.

And I think a few years ago when the mindset of companies is growth, growth, growth, buy as much as I can to produce growth, maybe you didn’t care, just bought a CDP anyways and you maybe bought a reverse CTL on top of that and buy whatever comes out next the ultimate data platform. But in this day and age, I think people are putting their thinking caps on and then saying, what am I actually buying and is there a simpler approach to solution? And I think that’ll just change how MarTech companies bring themselves to market. And even before that fully changes, that’s our approach at Hightouch. That’s been my approach from the beginning, like, no, no, no, we’re keeping things simple. We’re bringing clarity to this market. And you can see that on the website, the title is Sync Customer Data to Your Tools versus something crazy. And I think that’ll be a differentiator in the longterm in this market and the new standard,

Galen Ettlin:
Having a really well-defined specific role that is easy to grasp and creates that actionable content for people who use your product.

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then just on the homepage itself, clarity on what your product solves and what it looks like to solve that. What does the actual product do versus just stuff like, I think I looked at the Salesforce website recently. I’ll pull it up and read something like ‘calling trailblazers like data plus AI plus customer equals outcomes’ or something like that. I don’t really think that’s the future of software. I think that’s probably still the future of Salesforce, but I don’t think it’s the future of software and MarTech personally,

Galen Ettlin:
That is a big conversation at Act-On Software. We’re marketing automation solution. And when we’re looking at our product and our competitors just in the grand scheme of things, it is that same conversation of how can we not make this too complicated? How can we be something that adds value to marketers lives? How can we make this not just another all-in-one going to try to do too much for you and be overwhelming for any person who dives into it. So that conversation is definitely one that’s top of mind for all of us in the industry right now.

Tejas Manohar:
No, I mean you guys are doing it right. You have a feature section on the homepage, you have actual product screenshots, this is marketing that will work. We’re good.

Galen Ettlin:
Glad to hear that. Haha!

Tejas Manohar:
You tell me, but I personally think so. That’s been a big part of how we got where we are as a business.

Galen Ettlin:
Let’s take a step back now and dive into how you got here. Co-founding a tech company in San Francisco is no small feat. I know you’re also joining us right now from your new office in New York City, also very exciting. What led you on this journey to where you are now?

Tejas Manohar:
I really started my journey when it comes to both MarTech and the startup space. Worked at a couple of smaller startups before that, but real introduction to Silicon Valley and the startup space and MarTech at Segment. So I was an early engineer at Segment, one of the first 10 at the company and a couple years before that, I had actually used the Segment product at an internship of mine. So I was so and excited by both the product and the blog posts they were putting out and the product direction and the funding that I reached out to the founders cold emailed them and said, I want to join the team in any role I could. And when I joined Segment, the CDP space was not called the CDP space. That term hadn’t really come about. I think anyone who’s been in MarTech in data for a while knows that the ideas of single source of truth activating your data, audience building, all these things have existed forever, decades actually at this point.

But the term CDP really only caught traction in the last five, six years. And our growth at Segment was phenomenal, super phenomenal. We really became the hottest tool amongst the tech stacks of budding startups and stuff like that. But I realized that that later became big companies, DoorDash, famous example of it, Instacart, all these things. But one thing I realized is that we were having trouble as these small companies became large enterprises and also having trouble for just more complex businesses and enterprise businesses in general at Segment. And what was that trouble? It was what Gartner’s written a lot about actually. Yeah, Gartner is sometimes easy to read, sometimes not easy to read, but they’ve written a lot about CDPs and it’s actually pretty good. One of the things they talked about is that how 60% of people who bought a CDP in the enterprise can’t actually get value from it.

They’ve literally are not using it for their marketing use cases. And the reason for that is because they sound great in theory. Get all your data in one place, have a single source truth and be able to activate across all your channels. Great in theory, but it’s really hard to actually execute on that when you’re in a complicated company. That one already has a ton of data across the business coming from every which angle, from product, from sales, from your store, et cetera. There’s two reasons why it’s really, really hard to implement a CDP. And one of them is that you have to get all your data into the CDP to be able to activate it. And two is that you have to make your data fit the CDPs format. So companies like Segment, while they’re great, have an idea of what your user should be represented as or what a product added to cart event should look like or a checkout event should look like, et cetera.

And this is okay for a small company that’s a Shopify store or a 500 person startup with very specific focused products. But when you’re a large enterprise like the NBA or PetSmart or GameStop and you have all these different facets of your business and decades of data, it’s a huge process to go set up something like at traditional customer data platform. So with Hightouch, we have a different approach, which is that we allow companies to use the data they already have that’s sitting in these data warehouses today and do more with less and then also have a new level of flexibility when it comes to being used all types of data in your business. So companies like PetSmart use us so that they can tap into their loyalty system which tracks pets and not just use users or checkout data like they would in a typical CDP. And that’s possible with our architecture of using all the tables in your data warehouse. So overall, I had an amazing entryway into technology and customer data and the MarTech space at Segment, but my time there showed me some of the problems that we were seeing as we were scaling up market that eventually led me to found high touch and realized that there was a different approach that can be brought to the market

Galen Ettlin:
That’s really cool, that inspired you to make your own solutions from the problems that you were seeing that were not necessarily being met.
Now we haven’t had a whole lot of people on this podcast with roots on the engineering side of things within MarTech. I’m really curious, how has that experience contributed to your approach now as co-CEO?

Tejas Manohar:
My background is in engineering. I’ve never been the MarTech person or the marketer myself, I guess until founding Hightouch. That was my introduction into marketing, sales, partnerships, finance, all the other parts of the business that me and my co-founders had to learn in starting this business. As a founder, I’ve always still gravitated towards the product side of things. Where is the market heading? What can we do as a company that provides outsized value to our customers, whereas differentiation possible at a product level. I have a belief that in the long term these products we’re putting on the market have to be differentiated to provide outsized impact to our customers to be sustained in the short term. We can get away with sales and marketing and all those things, but the long-term product does shine and ultimately will matter. So that’s something I brought to every aspect of the business here at Hightouch.

But being from the engineering side of things, I think it’s never easy to start a startup. You always going to learn, it’s a few more skills whether you come from the business side, you’ll have to learn product skills that you come from the product side, you’ll have to learn business skills. It’s been a fantastic learning experience on learning how to do category creation from a marketing perspective with reverse CTL and this new idea of composable CDPs or how to build out a marketing and sales and partnerships teams and these teams we’d never built before. And it’s just honestly been continuous learning. I can say the only thing the job changes every six months. We’ve been scaling pretty rapidly over the last few years. We’ve gone to now over 500 enterprise customers and some of the biggest brands in the world and Fortune 100 and 500, but it wasn’t like that from the beginning. So I’d say every six months the role of a co-CEO has been changing dramatically. And the only thing that the same is continuous learning and iteration.

Galen Ettlin:
Jumping off of that, do you have an approach to when things are kind of cascading like that? I mean in a good way for you, it sounds like the ball just keeps rolling and maybe is snowballing bigger and bigger. How do you handle that added trajectory as you go?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, great question. So there’s two things to balance as a startup founder. One is just keeping up an immense pace of execution. They say this in every matter startup incubator or investor blog post or post about founding a startup. Talk about founding a startup online that ideas are great, but execution is everything and it’s really true. And a lot of execution comes down to speed, speed of iteration. That’s what differentiates the great startup from an okay startup or from a failed startup in a lot of ways. How quickly do you take new things to market? How quickly do you make changes based on what you’re seeing? How quickly and efficiently can you act like a big company when in reality you’re only 10, 20, 50 now a hundred around a hundred employee company? And that’s been a core strength of ours from the beginning. As a founding team, we built the product just the three of us initially, and we onboard our first enterprise customers when we just had a dozen people at the company.

But one thing I’ve had to always remind myself that been a bit harder for me is that speed isn’t everything. Speed is a lot. It needs to be continued, but reflecting and making sure you’re going down the right path strategically is also really important. And you in the seat of the founder role or the c e o role in the company are the only person who’s really responsible for taking that step back and making sure that we’re guiding the ship in the right direction. So I guess a tip or a trick that I would say that’s really helped me and I continuously have to push myself to do this, is just making sure there’s space and time to reflect on what’s going well, what needs to continue, what needs to stop.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, I think we’ve heard how you are a rebel in your work life in terms of thinking outside the box, really creative, creating your own solutions and finding that guiding light, if you will. Since this is the Rebel Instinct Podcast though, we want to know how you’re a rebel in your non-work life and you can interpret that any way you like.

Tejas Manohar:
Great question. Interesting one. I’ve never gotten this before. The most rebellious thing I can say about myself is probably that very impromptu person. I find joy in not having plans. Ironically, I have so much plans all the time with work nine to five every day. That’s just the core business hours is always completely planned. So when the weekend comes about, I want to have no plans, just let it go with the flow and try something new, which is sometimes you see and sometimes hard when you’re coordinating with other people as anyone would know. And then the other thing I would say is that I bring the intensity that I have from a business perspective to my very jack of all trades hobby, lifestyle perspective. So I love being really intense about things, but as you know, a startup founder. But I like doing those in short stints of like, okay, I’m going to play a lot of table tennis and get a table tennis coach for the next three months. Okay, I’m going to go really into power lifting for the next few months. Okay, I’m going to get really into music and I’m going to buy a harmonica for the next few months. So trying to keep the intensity that brings me joy, but obviously I can’t actually get insanely good at anything with the startup job taking up so much time. So I’ll have to jump for how to try different things at the same time.

Galen Ettlin:
But hey, I mean at least you’re jumping in and trying everything feet first. That’s pretty cool. Most people would never even want to start.

Tejas Manohar:
That’s fair.

Galen Ettlin:
Alright, so in that vein as well, maybe who’s a rebel that inspires you, one that you think needs to be celebrated and why?

Tejas Manohar:
One thing that I think is pretty common advice in the startup space, and sorry to keep this somewhat work centric, but I think one thing that’s pretty common advice is founders don’t need to obsess over every little product detail. You need to be directionally correct and then you need to work really fast, move fast, ship things left and right, et cetera. But then there are some companies where I think that that’s just pure obsession that they have in product details and every little detail of everything is their differentiator in a way. I’ve always been fascinated by Steve Jobs – Apple in this way. I read his biography back when I was in school and I was super, super inspired by it. And I mean he’s definitely a rebel in multiple walks of life from his Rotarian behavior too to the way he breaks his energy to work.
But I think another person that really inspires me, who brings the same level of like, I have conviction, this is the future. I am going to just be obsessive about the details and make the differentiation that everything about our company and product is going to be the right way is Guillermo Rash at Versal, the CEO of Versal. And I really look up to him as well. He has this maniacal focus on the product and the customer and every little detail when it comes to the marketing and design and product and everything, which is somewhat against the typical service advice of move fast break things. But it’s great and I really respect that and it’s something that I aspire to be able to do still at a really high pace. And I’m continuously pushing myself to work on and harness my inner Steve Jobs or Guillermo.

Galen Ettlin:
There’s no right or wrong answer to that one. We’ve had so many great answers to it and it sounds like that one’s really fitting to your personality and your goals. The fact that you’re able to juggle so much, you’re taking that step back, looking at the high level of everything that’s going on in your company, the minute details makes sense for that to be your inspiration.

Now it is time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment looking at something that maybe is annoying you lately and that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. I’m going to give you 60 seconds, so whenever you’re ready, just let me know and I’ll time you down.

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that annoys me in the MarTech space that I’ve already brought up multiple times is products need to tell you what they actually do. It’s only getting worse with AI in my opinion. I go to the segment website, the company I used to work at, I used to love their website, I used to love it as a customer. And now it’s the tagline is saying, power your AI with our best data infrastructure. What do you do to actually help me power my AI with the best data infrastructure? I go to mParticle website and now it’s amplify your customer data with ai. I think there’s been radical shift in these company’s websites over the last six months with questionable amounts of changes in the company’s products over the last six months. And that discrepancy just bothers me deeply as a product person. So tell us what you do.

Galen Ettlin:
Alright, so Tejas, where can people find you?

Tejas Manohar:
Yeah, so I’m actually quite easy to find. Our company’s domain is high touch.com, so it’s like hi, like high five, and then touch like the word touch.com. And my email address is my first name, so tejas (at) hightouch (dot) com. And then my username on every platform is just my full name. But you can probably just Google ‘Tejas Hightouch Twitter’, or Tejas Hightouch LinkedIn, and that might be easier than to spell out my last name here.

Galen Ettlin:
We’ll be sure to link to your LinkedIn as well on this episode. So for people watching on YouTube, you’ll be able to see it in the description and people listening, go ahead and click on that description and you’ll see ’em. But in the meantime, again, Tejas, thank you so much for being here. We’ll see you next time.

Tejas Manohar:
Thanks for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 16: Esther Flammer

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 12:42:00 +0000

^{Esther Flammer heads up marketing at Wrike, a multibillion dollar tech company. She shares perspective about changes in martech, advice to marketers to adapt and prove value, and what needs to change in the industry.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I am your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, and our guest today is Esther Flammer, CMO for Wrike, which is a work management platform. Esther is an award-winning marketer with 20 years of experience spanning B2B tech and nonprofits alike. And I know it’s not everything Esther, but I got to welcome and applaud the fellow summa cum laudes in the building. Thank you so much for being here.

Esther Flammer:
Thank you. Happy to be here and happy to be on the podcast.

Galen Ettlin:
Yes. I have so much I want to talk to you about, so I’m just going to jump right into it. I want to start with where you are right now. I know Wrike is pretty big. It’s a really cool platform. Act-On is actually a client. We use it for our project management. Tell me a little bit about your journey to heading up the marketing efforts there. Probably an exciting rollercoaster the last couple of years.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in marketing for about 20 years. Most of my experience has been in high growth SaaS companies. I love to build foundations and revenue generating programs that can scale basically. And so the last few companies really built out kind of a lot of the, I would say the infrastructure, the frameworks, the campaigns, the programs, building revenue, generating engines and customer lifecycle programs that allowed for high growth within those companies and eventually acquisitions. And then when I joined Wrike, you’re right, it has been quite a roller coaster. I joined shortly after the acquisition by Citrix, so Wrike became part of the Citrix family, and then last year Citrix actually was acquired and was taken private and we spun off essentially and became a separate entity at the end of last year. So it’s been quite the rollercoaster, but we’ve been really focused on driving, again, high growth, taking market share within a really competitive industry. So it’s been a fun but wild ride.

Galen Ettlin:
So yeah, like you said, lots of transition and a lot of companies, especially in tech are experiencing those transitions because of the economy, job changes, the acquisitions as you have gone through, as someone in leadership working through and navigating some of that right now, what is one of your big takeaways for success when trying to get that high growth?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, good question. It’s not really been new. I know it’s kind of a crazy market right now, but especially at high growth companies, change is inevitable and there’s acquisitions and there’s mergers and there’s spinoffs and there’s just constant pivots on business strategy. So I guess a couple of my secrets that have allowed for me to navigate a lot of change and just varying environments, for me it’s about very quickly establishing a reputation and building value within your organization. And so for me, I have built out my career by focusing on looking at building solutions for major gaps in the organization. What are those core problems that are holding the business back that are not allowing the business to move forward that maybe have never been built? And then how do you tie all of your work to those business drivers and then at the same time grow in the breadth and depth of your experience and skillset? It allows for you to be able to prove value to the organization to make an impact and to honestly have a level of marketability and job security because you’ve shown a lot of, you’ve proven a lot of that value, but also you’re able to adapt in very quickly changing environments. And so that’s how I’ve really built out a lot of my career and that would be, I guess a top tip on how to navigate this specific crazy market that we’re in.

Galen Ettlin:
Connecting to that a little bit, company tech stacks are also pretty tall these days. A lot of competition out there on the market for any various service, and I know marketing budgets are often slashed in tough times like these. How do you and your teams work to stand out to both win new business and maintain existing customer loyalty so that you stay on the roster through this?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, this is top of mind. I would say tech consolidation for sure is top of mind for literally every business leader out there who’s trying to potentially look at how do we save some budget and put it elsewhere, which then makes it top of mind for every marketer in tech. In a down market, you typically tend to see companies that shift their focus from new customer acquisition, which is really, really costly, sometimes hard to scale, and obviously that cost of acquisition continues to go up and they start to shift more towards our customer base, which is how do you get better net retention? How do you retain and expand the customers that you already have that are happy that are adopting and that could potentially buy more? And that’s absolutely a trend that we’re seeing in the industry. I would say that a couple of things that as I think through kind of customer loyalty, as I think through how to balance new business acquisition with customer expansion, there’s a couple of things that we’ve been doing at Wrike.
So number one, we focus a lot on positioning and differentiation. So that messaging strategy, which is as a work management platform, we’re actually very well positioned when budgets are slashed because when you have less budget and resources, you want to maximize every single dollar. You want to maximize every single person on your team. And so focused alignment and execution is absolutely critical to be able to do more with less. And so we’re focusing a lot on really driving home the value of not only our platform for new customers, but also existing customers and really focusing on how is our platform helping deliver business outcomes, helping your business stay stable in an unstable environment or continue to grow even in a down market. And then that differentiation piece and a really competitive market is important because we’re the only platform that can help you scale and align those teams.

When ROI is key, so that’s one thing is really that messaging, the positioning, the differentiation. A second key piece for us is just being smarter about company or customer acquisition. And so when you think about who you have limited dollars, limited resources, you have to be very selective about who are you trying to target and what are the types of customers and prospects that are most important for the business. And so for us, it’s not necessarily about volume, even though that’s that’s important, but for us, we actually can do a level of predictive expected lifetime value of these are the types of customers, these are the types of companies, the types of buyers where we know not only will they buy, but they will potentially expand. And so that’s where we target a lot of our advertising dollars and a lot of our new business acquisitions, just being smarter with the acquisition dollars that you have.

Then the third is really around, again, the customer loyalty piece. I would say the companies that have always invested in really great customer experience and customer lifecycle obviously have a leg up in a downmarket when everyone started starting to turn their attention over to their existing base, but really thinking again strategically about where are they in the customer lifecycle, how do we get them to see value as quickly as possible within the platform? How do we get them adopting, integrating, and really loving the product? And then how do you start to build out really, really explicit paths for them on here’s kind of your upgrade path, here’s your upsell path, here’s your cross-sell path of here’s kind of the next best thing that you should be doing to actually get more value out of the product that you have. And so those are just some of the things that we’re doing to make sure that we can continue to grow even when times are hard and budgets are being slashed.

Galen Ettlin:
You’ve been talking about how marketers are really trying to prove and demonstrate value right now. How do you feel marketers can strategically steer organizations toward revenue based on those industry insights?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, absolutely. I think one reason why I love being in marketing is because to me, marketing is at the center of business strategy. Companies cannot thrive and survive and grow unless they understand the market that they’re in, understand how do they shape the market, where should they be going after, what are the markets that they can dominate that they can be differentiated in? And then how do you actually then go and deliver on a go-to-market strategy? So I think marketing is huge and should be part of pretty much every discussion in every functional group and every core, I would say overall strategy for the business, whether it’s what does product development look like, where should we be innovating next? What’s the next market we should be going after? Is there a new market that we should maybe be disrupting or maybe there’s a level of product innovation that we could start to build out that would disrupt our current market.

There’s obviously the go-to-market with sales, which is how do we better deliver the right buyers? How do we go after the right buyers and what’s the right approach? The messaging strategy, the channel mix, sales enablement and what we should put in the sales toolkit, it should all be aligned. Customer strategy is another one where, again, marketing should be at the core of a lot of what’s happening within those customer cohorts. Where are they in their customer lifecycle? What’s the next best product or next thing that they should be doing? How do we showcase value? There’s hr, how do we continue to market ourselves as an employee brand to capture the best talent out there? So there’s so many aspects. I think that marketing can help drive strategically of an organization, and it’s, again, it’s what I love about being marketing, that it’s not just like, here’s the leads, here’s the brand, but it’s actually everything that really moves the business forward.

Galen Ettlin:
And what you’re saying, I’m hearing a lot of sales driven, results driven marketing campaigns, and I think that brings us to a good question of how sales and marketing get along and can really collaborate to bring those deals across the finish line. And I know in a lot of companies that’s the age old give and take. It’s hard to get sales and marketing often on the same page and delivering that same message and getting the results that ultimately you both need and want to achieve to prove that value in your job. What is your approach to cross-functionality and how those two separate teams can better do that business together?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, I think it starts with being aligned to the same targets and goals. You have to incentivize people in the same way. And sales is a department that is very used to incentives. I mean, pretty much most of their comp is based off of quota, and if marketing is not aligned to the same targets, that’s where the misalignment starts. If marketing is like, well, we just care about leads, we’re always in green, we’ve delivered the leads, we’re good, we’re getting paid, our jobs are safe, we’re celebrating, and meanwhile sales targets are not being hit or overall company bookings are not being hit. That’s a huge misalignment. So I think a lot of it honestly starts with making sure that you have the same goals as a company. Actually marketing being tied to bookings, essentially bookings and revenue, but also pipeline. I care way more about pipeline of what’s actually happening from the leads that we’re generating.

Are we actually creating predictable pipeline and making sure that that can close into revenue? Those are a lot of the conversations I have both with marketing and with sales and just aligning goals. We’ll get sales very much aligned to what marketing is doing. I think the other piece that we always talk about is kind of taking it back to ROI and being able to, again, showcase that we’re driving bookings and driving pipeline from the campaigns that we’re doing. And then you get better alignment with sales of if you want us to invest more in these field events, if you want us to invest more in a b m or in the advertising that’s driving a lot of these leads that you love and that is essentially filling your book of business, then you need to work with us and here’s the ask. So those are just some of the things that I think are really critical to sales and marketing alignment.

Galen Ettlin:
Taking a step back and looking at your success personally, you’ve accomplished a lot heading up marketing for a multi-billion dollar tech company. That’s no small feat, and I think a lot of people are really trying to figure out how can I align myself to reach that peak, that level, not a peak. I’m sure you’re going to do even more, but for those marketers out there listening, they want to know the secret sauce. What was maybe a defining moment in your journey toward these marketing leadership positions?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, it’s a good question and it was absolutely a journey. It’s been a journey and I’m still on that journey because I’m still growing and learning. But I think as I think through back at my journey, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, where finding your sweet spot, finding specifically some of those core competencies and those unique skills that you bring to the table and that is your unique perspective and the solutions that you drive from them, and then actually the output of delivering on results, the more that you can hone that and own it and build that brand, not just for yourself of this is my sweet spot and this is where I really thrive, is building these foundations and really connecting the dots to larger business strategy, but then starting to build, I would say a reputation or your own brand within your organization with your team of being that person that can go in and fill in a gap and be able to build solutions that can drive business growth.

Those are things that really make you valuable and it also gives you that ability to be able to add on more experience and that breadth of experience that is really critical as you continue to drive forward in your career. So for example, we didn’t have customer marketing at one of my early companies and it was a gap that the company just hadn’t really thought through it. And so me thinking through what is the customer lifecycle? How can we build out a longer standing kind of the longevity program that can essentially onboard everyone but get to, again, showcasing value, showcasing tips and tricks to get better adoption, but also showing those customers where they can start to drive the value from that product and potentially uplevel themselves or uplevel themselves in their career and starting to build out those types of programs. It allowed for me to expand my skillset and it allowed for me to think more in a customer’s shoes of what would they care about and how do I help them in their careers or in their day-to-day responsibility.

And then being able to apply that, whether that’s partner marketing and thinking through from a partner standpoint of how do we engage our partners or grow or acquire more partners or grow and acquire more business through our partners, or whether that’s demand gen of I’m trying to get in front of new prospects or whether that’s product marketing, just really thinking through some of that approach to how do I drive value for them? What would they care about and how do I start to bring a message of what we can do for them and help them better understand the product better, understand how they can do better in their roles. So those are things that I think are really critical that have been critical for me in terms of expanding my breadth and depth of just general marketing that I’ve also utilized as I’ve gone up in my career as well.

Galen Ettlin:
This may be along those lines, but we always like to ask this question of people on the Rebel Instinct podcast. What would you say is one of the most out of the box projects that you worked on or something that you are really proud of and how did it perform?

Esther Flammer:
I mean, again, that’s one reason why I think we’re in marketing is because the art and the science of it, and I guess some of the innovations and fun campaign ideas that have happened over the years, there’s plenty, but at one of my last companies, we supported basically our target audience was essentially Salesforce users. And so one of our biggest events of the whole year was around Dreamforce, and it was actually in 2020 when everything went virtual, and instead of doing our multimillion dollar headquarters outside of Moscone and doing a silent disco that we were very well-known for, because we had done it for the three or four years that I’d been there, it was the party of the year, we actually did the virtual element of it, and we did a virtual 5K as part of our Dreamforce road to Dreamforce and driving a lot of the buzz around our event alongside Dreamforce, and that was just super fun.

I feel like the pandemic and having to switch everything to virtual made everyone actually a little bit more creative and really, I feel like it was kind of a shining moment for marketers on what can we do when we don’t have an in-person experience? And it was actually super cool. We went from driving a big party in person to doing actually a 5K event that people could do wherever they were. They could go on a walk outside and still be essentially six feet apart from other people, but we made it super fun where people could win awards and they could kind of cheer each other on During that. We had dance parties in between, and so it was very out of the box where I feel like a B2B tech marketer

Galen Ettlin:
Way to flex those creative muscles when you really needed to in a way that was safe as well. So that’s really fun. Well, for you, Esther, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Esther Flammer:
I feel like people, when they hear what we do with our family, people are like, I feel like people probably think it’s pretty rebellious, but we’ve been traveling with our kids internationally since they were babies. So when my first son was one, we did a one month trip to Asia, so we spent a month in Asia, in Korea, Japan, with a stop in Hawaii and took him on that 14 hour flight, which was pretty crazy. But we really love traveling and we love to take our kids. When our kids were, gosh, I’m thinking I think four, two and four, no, sorry, four and six, we rented a camper van and went all around New Zealand. We love to explore the world with our kids even when they’re two young to travel according to probably most standards, but they’ve grown up going to really, really cool places and having really fun experiences. So I guess that’s a way that I rebel.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s great. And it’s what a cool opportunity for them too, to grow up feeling like that’s normal. I get to see the world and learn about everything outside my bubble.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, speaking of other places, other cultures, our culture, whatever you want, what rebel do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Esther Flammer:
Where we are as a world and a society today is there is more of a push for work-life balance for people where people want to, I think especially with remote work, hybrid work, being able to work from everywhere, there’s absolutely a push for work is not everything I say a lot of times to my team, we’re not saving lives here. It’s important. And you had mentioned a give and take earlier with sales and marketing. I think everything is a give and take. I think work-life balances is a give and take, and I think the relationship with your company is very much a give and a take where again, I’ve built out a lot of value for my company and I give a lot to my company and I’m an asset, and a lot of our people are our employees. They’re assets to the company and they give a lot.

And so I think that it’s fair to take some as well, but again, it needs to be a balance. You can’t be all about taking of like, I’m just going to work whenever I want and not really sign in and not be available or let my team down. You can’t just take, because then you probably won’t have a job anymore. But if you are really producing and you are a business critical person and you’re really showcasing the value, and again, driving and tying to business outcomes, I think it’s fair for you to set boundaries around. I’m going to take PTO and I’m going to try and be off the grid here, right? So I’m going to set things up. I’m not going to leave my team hanging. I’m going to deliver on everything that I need to before I go, but I am, I’m going to go unplug. So I do love that rebellious, and it’s sad that that’s rebellious.

Galen Ettlin:
I hear ya.

Esther Flammer:
But I think, again, when there’s that give and take, I think that that can absolutely work for both the company and for the employee.

Galen Ettlin:
We, I think could all take a leaf from your ‘put more stamps on the passport’ advice.

Esther Flammer:
Take your kids. Take your kids.

Galen Ettlin:
There you go. Yeah, don’t hold back. Just do it.

Esther Flammer:
Yes.

Galen Ettlin:
It’s time for a fun segment we like to call ‘Honey, I don’t think so.’ I’m going to give you 60 seconds for you to tell me something that’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. So whenever you’re ready, let me know.

Esther Flammer:
And I was thinking about this. I get way too many emails and I can never find the unsubscribe button, or I feel like it doesn’t work half the time, or I never know if I’m unsubscribed, but I just think email is a channel. There needs to be a strategy and it needs to be utilized in a really thoughtful and intentional way. I think especially now, it’s hugely overused, especially because budgets are tight and it’s a free channel, but the pressure is on. People are starting to try and I think prioritize activity over strategy, and email is just one of those where it’s too much. And I get that you have goals to hit, but if you’re not being thoughtful and intentional and really showcasing the value of why am I reaching out? What does this look like? It’s just going to be a one-sided conversation. You’re going to get unsubscribed. You’re not going to engage with your audience. So that’s my thing. That’s annoying me. I think I get too many and I just ignore email now. So that’s I think my soapbox.

Galen Ettlin:
Amen. I’m there with you, and we’re a marketing automation company that specializes in email, but it really comes down to deliverability and making sure it’s something that’s worth someone’s time and what they actually need or want. Right? Otherwise, it’s just clutter.

Esther Flammer:
Agreed.

Galen Ettlin:
We’re there with you.

Esther Flammer:
More to delete.

Galen Ettlin:
Exactly. Well, Esther, thank you so much for joining us here today on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. It has been a joy. Where can people find you?

Esther Flammer:
So they can find me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best. And our company is wrike.com.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. Well, thanks again.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, thanks, Galen.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast, featuring Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 15: Justin Keller

Galen Ettlin — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:16:18 +0000

^{Justin Keller says many marketers are bogged down by metrics, losing sight of compelling and creative storytelling. He shares how marketers can better deliver and grab attention for their brands in this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, and today I’m joined by a special co-host Suzy Balk, who is Act-On Software’s Senior Marketing Campaigns Manager. Suzy, So looking forward to having some innovative marketing conversations with you. Thanks for joining.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
And as our YouTube viewers can see, our guest today is Justin Keller, Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Drift. Justin is an award-winning B2B marketer who prides himself in disrupting the B2B marketing status quo. So we’re going to get all of his hot takes on branding, digital marketing, account based marketing, and hopefully if we’ve got time, a little glimpse into his music producer experience and at home chef aspirations. Thank you so much for being here, Justin.

Justin Keller:
Thank you guys so much for letting me hang out with you. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.

Suzy Balk:
So Justin, I know you’re passionate about storytelling. Same for me. I love that creative piece of marketing. How are you seeing styles change with evolving marketing strategies and what are marketers missing out on?

Justin Keller:
That’s a good question. I think there was maybe a bit of a heyday during COVID where people – it was like one of those things where once the dust settled – we were all at home, but once marketers had adjusted to the new reality, they felt a little bit of creative latitude. They’re starting a little edgy and do some bold things. And then coming back out of COVID where we’re now across the board, everyone I talked to, their budgets are getting pinched. Their goals and expectations aren’t changing, but the resources they have to get there are. And so now I’m seeing a lot of trends away from storytelling and being creative and going back to a place of safety where it’s like, let’s just invest things that are in things that are highly measurable that we can defend our jobs with saying, ‘Hey, look, we’re being very smart, pragmatic spreadsheet marketers,’ and I’m not so sure that’s the thing to do. I think when everyone’s zigging, you’ve gotta zag, and I think now more than ever, it’s the time to start telling really big stories because if we’re all in the same position, we all have limited resources. The only advantage we have is our ability to be creative and to tell really good stories and to get people thinking differently and paying attention to whatever’s going on when we all implemented resources to get people to pay attention with.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, I love that ‘spreadsheet marketers.’ That’s definitely something it’s hard to get away from, but it’s really important that you do.

Galen Ettlin:
And especially, as you’re mentioning, if you move that direction for fear of your job, you’re really also devaluing what you’re contributing as a part of your job anyway, so it’s kind of a counterintuitive thing, but yeah.

Justin Keller:
It’s really true, and it’s one of those things where I get it. When people operate out of a place of fear, you do things that you think are safe, and I think that is not what the point of a marketer is. I mean, sure there’s times and places to be safe, but marketers are there at the end of the day to get people to pay attention, and you can’t do that by running a really smart performance marketing program. You can make your dollar go a little further, but that’s not going to deliver outsize results that your board and your CEO want to see from you.

Galen Ettlin:
Now, Justin, looking at some of your experience personally, you’ve worked across a bunch of B2B and tech companies. What was a defining moment for you would you say, on your journey toward these VP of marketing roles?

Justin Keller:
Quick obligatory shoutout to all the marketing leaders I’ve had in the past. I’ve been so lucky to have bosses who were willing to let me push the envelope. I think I’ve always naturally been one of those. When I got into marketing, when I got into B2B marketing, I should say, I had no idea that that was different from marketing – “Capital M marketing,” where it’s more like B2C, where you’re out there running really audacious campaigns and getting people to raise an eyebrow – didn’t realize a B2B was completely different. And it’s all about putting a lot of navy blue on your website, making sure you have stock photos of multicultural people shaking hands. And I’ve been really fortunate to have bosses that felt the same way, that that’s not B2B doesn’t need to be like that. You can be a marketer and do outrageous things. And so really grateful to the leaders I’ve had that set the tone for me there.

I think one specific example I had was I had a CEO, one of my first jobs in San Francisco who would every day at the office wear a bow tie. That was his, just his trademark thing for himself. And it became such an inside joke that it became part of our marketing campaigns. We’d go to a trade show and we’d hand out bow ties to people. We’d have him come to our booth, we tie a bow tie on them, and what ended up happening was we’d go into marketing meetings and we do campaign planning or think about what are we going to do with this webinar that’s going to be different. And we’ve started to say to each other, ‘how do we put a bow tie on this?’ And it didn’t mean literally put a bow tie on it, but what’s that weird different thing that can become synonymous with our brand that definitely has our stamp on it? And that is something that I’ve carried with me. So it’s like, what’s the one thing, we only have so many different activities that we marketers can do, but we have different ways of expressing ourselves in them. And so what is that one thing that we can do that is distinctly ours that makes people pay attention and think that’s a little left of center and stress to build a little brand equity that’s consistent across all the programs we run.

Suzy Balk:
That bow tie thing is so cool. We actually just ran a webinar where our presenters wore capes because we were doing a superhero themed webinar. So I was like, what a great way to just have a stand out a little bit and put a little fun behind our brand, and I think hopefully it becomes a thing going forward. We’re not just people with corporate backdrops. We add some more personality to our campaigns.

Justin Keller:
I think that’s so important. People want that. People don’t identify with a B2B brand and be like, yeah, that’s cool. That’s who I am. People identify with a weird little quirk or people that are unafraid to be themselves, and that’s what builds the affinity.

Suzy Balk:
MarTech is a really saturated space tech stacks running pretty deep. What does it take for a company to stand out and win that business, especially now in a tough economy?

Justin Keller:
This is what’s really hard for a marketer. We can be creative all day, but we can’t tell stories that are orthogonal to our product promise. We have to root everything back to the company’s value propositions, to what the product offering is. And so being able to have really good big, bold ideas is one thing, but having big old ideas that align to a company’s promise is really tough. And so that’s where it’s as a marketer becomes a little tough because then you start having to work. You need to work with your product leaders and your product marketing leaders and say, okay, what are the things that are coming up? How can I align the message to that? You need to start aligning to your sales team because at some point the campaign you’re running is going to end up in a salesperson’s lap, making sure that they feel okay about talking about how this person ended up on the phone with them.

And that can be really, really challenging. Earning that trust and buy-in across the board is difficult. And so I think to answer the question, you have to be a zealot for yourself and your own ideas, finding a big bold idea that does mesh with those things I just mentioned, and then just owning outright and not letting go. That can be so hard to do. It’s so easy to do doubt yourself, especially like you said, it’s a tough economy and people are looking at marketing. It’s a huge cost center, making sure that everything they do is going to help the bottom line. And marketing budgets are big and you’re effectively playing with lots of people’s salaries at that point. And so it’s so easy to get frightened, and every time you get frightened of what you’re doing, you are losing the potential impact of the story you’re trying to tell. And you need to just believe as hard as you can that what you’re saying is the right thing for the company and other people will start to fall in line.

Suzy Balk:
I think that’s why it’s so important to find leaders in your work that support you. Part of your value to your company is your creativity and your ideas. So there should be a certain level of trust that if you have a big bold idea that you’re going to deliver on it.

Galen Ettlin:
Speaking to that creativity, you mentioned putting the bow tie on it as an example. Justin, what was maybe another out of the box or a big project that stuck out for you that you’ve contributed to and how did it perform?

Justin Keller:
I was at B2B MX a few weeks ago, and this campaign I ran, showed up on stage that I had nothing to do with. It was just like someone was like, this is such an outrageous thing that it’s still carrying weight.

I was at a company called Terminus and we were running, this was right towards the end of Covid, right? So people had lost all of their attention span. Webinars were performing like garbage because people were sick of sitting in their computer, and we still have to do it though. And so I wanted to do something that was highly consumable, that was highly provocative, that was ultimately something that people would be willing to suffer staring at the screen for another few hours for. So we ran an event that was all about just breaking up with the way that traditional B2B marketing should be done.

Just stop doing, I mean, almost what we’re talking about here. And so we didn’t want to have it. We went all the way. We were like, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it big. So we called the event break. Shit, we had a bad word in the name of the program. We formatted it in a way where we got, I think it was 10 very influential marketers, and we got them to speak for five minutes a piece, or maybe it was 10 minutes a piece, very short. So it’s kind of micro content. And we got these big name influencers to participate. We didn’t pay them. We just said, you guys are competing. We will donate $10,000 to a charity of your choice. So they got bought in on that, but we didn’t stop there. Really provocative name, really great speakers talking about how do we break the status quo of marketing. We also hired, again, I think he’s actually from your neck of the woods, we found a guy called Sax Scotch. He’s a saxophone playing Sasquatch. We hired him to do musical interludes between every presenter, so he would be out in the woods playing saxophone. We got him to play Careless Whisper by George Michael, a bunch of stuff that was really awesome.

Galen Ettlin:
Very Pacific Northwest.

Justin Keller:
Exactly, exactly. And was I think to this day, still the highest performing pipeline campaign that the company had ever run because it was way out there. But everyone that was involved with this, we did really crazy promotional videos. So me and the team got together in a field somewhere. We brought a bunch of fruits and baseball bats and just videotaped us blowing stuff up, honestly, and had nothing to do with the campaign except for that we were breaking stuff. And so we just bought into the message so wholeheartedly that we had like 4,500 people register for it, eight figures worth of pipeline driven. And this is just to go to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be, like I said, navy blue and people shaking hands on your website. You can do really off the wall stuff. My sales team did not love this at all. They did not having to invite people to an event called Break Shit, but did not let go and push, push, push and ended up being just one of the biggest campaigns I’ve ever been responsible for in my career.

Suzy Balk:
That’s so cool. So many cool elements about that.

Galen Ettlin:
Definitely fits the brief of out the box.

Suzy Balk:
You get that guy’s number, Galen, we’ll have to have it.

Justin Keller:
I can make an intro, Galen, if you need more woodland creatures that play saxophone, I got a line…

Galen Ettlin:
I mean, when do we not need that? Always.

Suzy Balk:
It seems you feel really comfortable being out of the box and doing and executing these ideas. What advice would you give to people listening to this to be more rebellious, to take those risks, whether they pay off in the way that yours did or maybe not?

Justin Keller:
I’ve done really out of the box things. I’ve proven that they can work and still I’m afraid all the time of doing it. It’s not a comfortable place to be when you’re trying to be out on a limb as a marketer. And every time I have doubted myself, bad things have happened. It’s all of a sudden you lose the ability to lead as well as you could. All of a sudden your ideas start to get diluted and watered down and they lose that magic that once existed in them. And it is much easier said than done. I mean, I know how cliche this sounds, honestly, I’m just saying believe in yourself, which is just the dumbest after school message I could possibly be saying here. But if you’re a marketer and you really want to make an impact, especially if you’ve got a smaller budget, especially if you’re in a very noisy, crowded marketplace, there’s no other option than to believe in yourself and believe that your big idea is what will separate you from the pack. So there it is. Believing in yourself is just about the most prosaic thing I could. I want to vomit a little bit, having said this out loud now, but I think it’s true and it’s very easy to not believe in yourself. It’s easy to doubt yourself and catch yourself, stay mindful of it.

Galen Ettlin:
Always an important reminder. In the words of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, there can be miracles when you believe.

So Justin, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Justin Keller:
Oh, good question. I am, you guys mentioned a musician. I like to, and I think this kind of bleeds into my work life too. I like to try to do weird stuff that hasn’t been done before. So I’m not a musician that’s trying to get thousands of listens on Spotify. I’m trying to make music that I would want to listen to, which is usually a little bit weird. It’s definitely not top 40 stuff. I am also kind of an avid artist, so I channel a lot of my creativity into other ways that just shows up in awkward places. So I like most of the paintings in my house, not the one that’s behind me, I don’t think. No, none of these are mine. But a lot of the things on the walls of my house are things that I’ve painted just for whatever reason or for my wife. You mentioned I’m a cook. I’ve got a lot of creative energy that just needs to find an outlet. And so I don’t stop it. I kind of just always leave the spigot running and try to just make things happen. It’s nothing that I’m necessarily super proud of that I want to share with the world, but I’m always making it just because I feel like I just need to keep that circulation going of my creativity.

Galen Ettlin:
I know it is kind of a sidebar, but on that music side of things, just because I think it’s an interesting piece that we don’t get to hear from executives a whole lot of “here’s something really creative and different that I do, that’s nothing to do with my work at my company.” How did you get into that and what does it look like for you now?

Justin Keller:
So I have always really just been a fan of music and wanted to make things, and I moved around as a lot, so I never really had a chance to form a garage band with friends or whatever. So what ended up happening is I learned to play a lot of different instruments. I learned how to record myself and how to build tracks on tracks, on tracks and things, and ultimately write songs all by myself in my bedroom. And so that continues to this day. I started when I was 16 and I was recording to a literal cassette tape and skip to today, right here on my desk is work, and then right here is a bunch of music stuff, different monitoring. So I go from work mode, I turn 90 degrees to the right and I can get into fun mode. So yeah, I’m honestly always just trying to… I’ll work on a song for a year before I feel like it’s done, but it’s just a little bit here and there and it’s just, it’s almost like it’s gardening for me. You do a little bit of time. I get to watch it grow and then at some point it’s ready to be picked

Galen Ettlin:
Such a skill. Very cool.

Suzy Balk:
What rebel in our culture do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Justin Keller:
get asked a lot, where do you go for ideas for work, for marketing, and I always say I’ve read enough business books. I don’t read business books anymore. I don’t go to the obvious marketing blogs or LinkedIn. I go where everyone else, right? So I try to find a lot of countercultural touchstones, different artists like meme culture even what is just kind of the bleeding edge of culture right now and what are they doing that’s making people resonate with it and trying to figure out how to apply that. So it’s almost like, I don’t know. So the answer is, yeah, all the rebels is who I want to celebrate, but at the same time, if you celebrate a rebel too much, all of a sudden they’re not a rebel anymore. And it’s kind of like, I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock when I was a kid. And the thing is with punk rock, as soon as they’re a popular band anymore, they’re not really punk anymore. They kind of sell out. And so that’s where I, when I think of a rebel, I’m like, who’s doing things that are new and original or they’re unafraid and have not yet broken through into the mainstream?

Galen Ettlin:
Okay, well finally here it is. Time for our “honey, I don’t think so” Segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. I’m going to give you 60 seconds to make your case. So whenever you’re ready, go for it.

Justin Keller:
Okay. There’s a thing going on on LinkedIn that’s driving me crazy. And this has been a couple years now. LinkedIn is already, I think, in my opinion, a little bit of a toxic place. The amount of bro tree and just kind of like the hustle culture I just am not on board with. But there’s one thing in particular that drives me absolutely bananas. And that’s this trend where there’s one line space, one line space, one line space on a LinkedIn post where people are just very short sentences and then they do all these hard line breaks and it’s just impossible to read. And I just can’t stand it. But that’s what’s really annoying me right now.

Galen Ettlin:
Well within time, that was about 30 seconds and I know exactly the types of posts you’re talking about. And broach tree is a new term I think. Yeah, we should use that as well. Well, Justin, I want to thank you so much for taking time to join us here today. It has been so much fun catching up with you and learning all about your skills and your music and everything else that you bring to the MarTech table. Thanks again for joining us.

Justin Keller:
Thank you, Galen and Suzy, this was a hoot. I appreciate you guys letting me join here.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Wrike CMO Esther Flammer, sharing how marketers can demonstrate their work’s value, even in a tough economy.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 14: Jamie Roberts

Galen Ettlin — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 14:34:00 +0000

^{Jamie Roberts of Rock That Creative Job helps creatives navigate marketing themselves and finding the best roles in a tricky economy.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Thank you so much everybody for joining the Rebel Instinct podcast. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software and our guest today is Jamie Roberts, an award-winning designer, turned life coach and career guru. She is CEO of Rock That Creative Job and host of the Rock That Creative Job podcast. She works to help people get better jobs, get better pay, and take full advantage of their creative mojo. She speaks from a couple decades of experience working as creative director and many other roles at a bunch of places, including KinderCare here in Portland, Oregon, and many more. Thank you so much for being here, Jamie.

Jamie Roberts:
Thank you. It’s so exciting to be here and chat with you.

Galen Ettlin:
I think you lend a lot of expertise to things that people are going through right now, so I want to really jump into the creative side first because I know that’s really fun. I love that. It’s something that I know you really rock as your company name says. You work to empower people in their creative truths, if you will, and get them out of that imposter syndrome rut. What inspired that shift for you to leave your corporate roles to now do this as a career coach?

Jamie Roberts:
I think it, honestly, there’s two parts to it. So it goes back to my experience in my own career where I never really found the right advice as I was going through transitions, like layoffs or just wanting to move up, wanting to know how to get promoted, wanting to know how to get to the next level. And there were a lot of struggles and I could never really find someone who understood the space I was in and how to give me that guidance and advice. It all felt very generic. So in 2020 when I saw so many people really struggling because we had just entered into the pandemic and people were either furloughed or laid off permanently, and I had a lot of creatives that I had worked with or had worked for me reaching out to me, asking me, “can you look at my resume? Can you look at my portfolio and tell me if it looks okay? I haven’t done this in a long time, I want to put myself out there. I don’t know how to do it.” It really kind of sparked something in me and it reminded me of what I really loved most about a lot of my creative leadership positions, which was that mentorship and just guidance and helping people feel comfortable selling their ideas and pitching new concepts and learning how to be a better manager or how to move up to the management level or just how to work into a new position. And so I thought maybe there’s a space for this. I sort of put it out there for the broader audience, this is something that I do, does anyone need this? And they did. My experience, plus what was happening in 2020 as the world was changing. I felt like I wanted to be of service and really help people move forward and feel less stressed and less paralyzed by what was going on. Because if you haven’t interviewed or applied for a job in a decade and you were in a job that you thought you would have maybe forever and you’re suddenly doing this, it can feel really, really stressful. So that was my catalyst.

Galen Ettlin:
Even if it’s not been a decade, I think it’s really scary. It could be six months and the landscape will have totally changed with what we’re going through right now. I think your experience, it’s also kind of a scary leap, you know, you took a risk to do something totally new. You talked about the inspiration for you with all the people who needed help, but what was that like for you? I would imagine that was one of those things where you probably had a lot of, “should I do this?” Maybe some of that imposter syndrome creeped in a little bit for you?

Jamie Roberts:
Oh yeah. So I was furloughed for several months, maybe four or five months not knowing really where things were going to land. And during that time I thought, okay, I want to be prepared in case this role is permanently canceled. And my position at the time was to kind of create the vision for the brand and it was to think a couple years down the road, where do we want to go? How do we want to get there? And if you are just worried about the day-to-day in an organization and there’s really no room for that vision because you’re trying to keep the lights on. And so I kind of understood that maybe my role, it wouldn’t make sense anymore just from a business perspective. So I really wanted to think about what else do I want to do? Do I want to do this somewhere else?

And it was absolutely scary. I’ve had a freelance business on the side so I’ve run my own business, but never full-time. And I started out right after college. I got hired the summer after I graduated and I have not stopped working since. And so it was a scary leap. People might say I have an entrepreneurial spirit, but even if you have the spirit, you still don’t know all the details on how you’re going to manage things and do the sort of day-to-day and figure this out. So yeah, I had a lot of imposter syndrome, could I do this? Can I run a business by myself at first and figure out how to connect with people, how to create those meaningful relationships, how to market myself appropriately, how to do all the financial things.

Generally, designers are not great mathematicians, so that’s why we’re in design. But what really was reinforced the positive side of this was the fact that there were so many people in need and I felt like I was providing this service that people, it would provide them with this relief of “someone gets me and someone can help me and I don’t know what to do.” And so having that experience of being able to help people, it just felt so empowering. And so I was emotionally invested immediately. So it was like, well, there’s no turning back because to turn back means that you’re leaving these people behind that need you. And so I thought, I’m going to figure this out and even though we’re in a pandemic, I’m still going to start a business and this is how it’s going to go.

And now I still work through the imposter syndrome. There’s always a new day and a new thing to learn and a new tool and a new approach and the new algorithm. So you work within what you have, but it’s been amazing.

Galen Ettlin:
You mentioned how a lot of those stressors can really stifle creativity, but it sounds like you’ve found your spark through that inspiration of others. “I’ve got a purpose, a mission, so I can get through some of these stressors.” For people who are maybe already in a role where they’re experiencing some of those stressors – I just kind of glancing at your resume, something that I related to you on was that I saw you didn’t necessarily spend forever at one company. You made moves, it looked like pretty deliberately as you wanted to find that creative outlet. Again, I’m assuming, but maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong. For me, I was one of those people that if something did not spark joy or if the place was toxic or if the managers were toxic, I found outlets to leave pretty soon. Within a year or two. I was not going to spend energy and time at a place that wasn’t going to value that creative spark. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of different experiences, but how have you really channeled your journey into now helping people navigate that process and find their own creative light again elsewhere?

Jamie Roberts:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. And honestly, a lot of the advice I give is based off the mistakes I made. One of the things I talk a lot with my clients about is alignments and you can feel totally aligned with the mission and vision of an organization and your role and the team you’re on and all of that. And that changes. And so you have to be ready for that. You have to be aware of when you are misaligned because that is when the job starts to eat you. It dulls your creative spark. And as a creative person, you are expected to come up with new and innovative ideas. And if you are feeling those anxious feelings every day, that’s going to be really hard to do. So the efficacy of your work is not going to be great if you are in a position where you just don’t feel aligned to what’s happening.

And just recognizing that, and I think that was one of the things I recognized in my career at certain points, it was like, okay, you know what? I used to love this, but do I still love this? Do I still like where the organization’s going or how the team structure is or what we’re working on or the client mix, it’s going to change. And a lot of people, they’re caught off guard by this and the old sort of way that the past generations have looked at getting a job, and you’re there for 30 years and then you retire and you get the gold watch. No one does that anymore. And so we have to be prepared, but we also have to recognize that there’s an intuition there and to not be afraid to say, this doesn’t work for me anymore, and there’s probably a place that does, and that’s okay, you can opt out. It’s really hard for us to do that, but it really is that alignment because you’re not going to have that joy without it.

Galen Ettlin:
In seeking that alignment, are there strategies that you coach people through? Because I would imagine for some people they might just feel kind of lost. Maybe they’ve worked so hard to get to a certain point and then realize they’ve hit that wall. What direction do you go? Is it something like you storyboard it? Do you go take a walk and talk to your mom on the phone? I don’t know what it is. What is kind of the baseline strategy that maybe you approached this with when you were facing this same challenge?

Jamie Roberts:
So there’s a lot of questions that you need to ask yourself, and one of which is, “do I actually like this?” You need to be honest and think about is this company doing the things that I enjoy? Are they going forward in a direction that I want to go? And I think a lot of what people are afraid to do is to look at other job postings and they’re afraid to look beyond where they are because it’s like it’s the “devil you know. You’re somewhere and it’s comfortable and you’re okay. I could put up with it. It’s fine. I mean, I’m stressed out all the time and I have stomach aches when I go to work, but it’s probably better than anywhere else.” And that’s not true. And so I always encourage people to just start looking. It doesn’t even need to be in your town, in your city, it can be anywhere, but just start looking at different jobs to kind of spark like, “oh, I would love to do that, or that sounds interesting.”

And it will remind you of why you do what you do and the creativity that you enjoy. Just seeing that those things exist out there in the world and you realize, “oh, I don’t have to be stuck here doing this work that I find creatively mind numbing” or just uninteresting or it’s just below your skillset at a certain point. It doesn’t even need to be a new job posting. Sometimes, they’re not accepting new applications, but the idea is that you’re seeing what you’re looking for somewhere else and you can move yourself out of where you are because you recognize that there’s opportunity

Galen Ettlin:
Really seeking out the inspiration if you’re not feeling it at the moment.

Jamie Roberts:
Yes, you have to because if you get stuck in that, well, you’re not going to climb out. You just keep going further down. And so you need to see the light of day at certain points. It’s similar to how business is, assessing where they are in the market and then they pivot. We need to do that for ourselves. And I don’t think a lot of people consider their own career as a business, but it’s like if it doesn’t work for you, your customer, your customers are not responding to what you have to offer. It’s time to find different customers. It’s how it works. And that’s okay to think about your career that way because I think you get more out of it, especially as a creative.

Galen Ettlin:
Yeah. Well, I mean you mentioned, too, how a lot of our culture is not really teaching us to think that way. The whole idea of you’re going to get the gold watch after 30 years really doesn’t play into that. “Oh, I need to make a change” kind of mentality.

Jamie Roberts:
Yes, absolutely. And another, just to make a further point there, part of the hustle culture, it teaches us that we can deal with things we don’t like and we’re supposed to. And if you “don’t like your job, then you’re doing it right.” It’s like, no, that’s actually not right. It teaches you that you’re not supposed to look for something better. That’s what you’re supposed to have. And a lot of people don’t agree with that. They want to move on, but they feel like, “oh, am I quitting? Am I a quitter? Am I too weak to deal with this?” That’s not really it. We’re not supposed to work like that. We’re supposed to work in a way that makes us feel excited to contribute what we have.

Galen Ettlin:
So on your podcast Rock That Creative Job, you have an episode called “Career lies we tell ourselves.” What are some of the big lies that you catch people in?

Jamie Roberts:
Oh my gosh, well, I’ve caught myself in a lot of these.

One of the main things people say when I begin to work with them is: any place is likely better than where I’m at, even if they are absolutely miserable in a job, they have a boss that they don’t necessarily agree with or work well with. They have a team that’s dysfunctional, they work for a corporation that they don’t really believe in the mission. They have this idea that there’s nowhere better.

Another thing that people usually tell themselves is, no one else can do this. “I’m the only one who knows this brand. I’m the only one who knows the clients. I’m the only one who knows the workflow processes and the tools, and no one could do this. And so I have to be here to keep the wheel cranking.” And that’s just an excuse because it’s scary to put yourself out there.

I get a lot of people who are like, but “what’s going to happen to X, Y, Z?” It’s like, well, they’re going to replace you just like you’re going to replace someone else who probably left a job when you move on. So just recognizing that it’s okay, you can be amazing at what you do, but you’re not the only one that can do it, and you could probably do it better somewhere that maybe appreciates you more.

There’s also the social component where people are like, “but I have friends here and I don’t want to leave my friends.” And that is very hard because as humans, we want to belong and we want to fit in, and we want to feel like we have our group and they get us and we get them. And you don’t want to leave your friends because if it’s a toxic situation, sometimes you feel guilty that you’re the one that got out and they’re still there dealing with that difficult boss or difficult clients. But that’s how it works. I mean, you have to move on. You can’t just stay. The truth is you’ll make friends at the next job. You’ll have more friends the more jobs you have, and that’s also been my experience. And so there is a benefit to just looking at it from another perspective. You’ll still have those friends, you’ll just have more of them.

Galen Ettlin:
The one that you mentioned about feeling like you’re abandoning or that, “oh yeah, you’re the only one that can do this – what’s going to happen if you leave?” – and you’re a hundred percent right, they’re just going to move on.

Jamie Roberts:
Exactly. And it’s not to say everyone’s replaceable. Everyone has a unique perspective, but your perspective might be better suited for a different place just like someone else’s might be better suited for the role you’re currently in. So it is a game of musical chairs, and it’s okay. I mean, how you get great experience and you learn new things and you get to see the range of your talents and how to actually contribute to different organizations.

Galen Ettlin:
I mean, you definitely summed up the biggest lies I told myself the last decade of me working in journalism, so I understand completely what you’re talking about.

Once you get over those lies though, then you find yourself, like you said, in a better place where you’re more appreciated or your skills are being applied better – or both.

Jamie Roberts:
Exactly. I mean, it’s the best case scenario. You want to be appreciated and you want to be able to do the work that you love to do, and I help people figure out where does that exist and let’s go after that.

Galen Ettlin:
To that point, talking about where these jobs exist, you’ve touched on in your podcast about how tricky it is for creatives to find stable jobs where their work is respected, especially right now, I think is pretty tricky when it comes to the economy and all of that. Do you feel that there is a compromise that people have to make between say, just getting a job and that creative identity?

Jamie Roberts:
I think it’s difficult for creatives because of a lot of us, myself included, ended up in this commercial field because we loved art, we loved making art, we loved making things, we loved creating. And that’s how I found myself in graphic design, and I realized that really resonated because it was a series of problem-solving exercises and where art is a little more free, free-flow thinking, there’s not as many constraints.

So I try to help people remember that that’s the commercial pursuit is about constraints. And so you’re solving problems, and if that doesn’t fulfill your need to just have that free flow creative outlet, then you should do other things outside of work that build that up. And most creatives have a secondary pursuit. There’s a lot of people who are designers and also illustrators, or they do photography on the side, or they do video, or they build things, or they do sculpture or ceramics or make jewelry, whatever it is, you’re always an outlet.

But being able to have two different types where you have your sort of commercial [role], where you’re working within the constraints of your job, what you’re selling, what you’re doing, what the client needs are, requests and the feedback you have to take. And you might not agree with all of those things you’re still doing, you’re still solving a problem, you’re still creatively approaching the work, but having something outside that, it allows you to balance that out so you don’t feel like, “wow, I’m putting everything into this and I’m not getting enough out,” because you never will because it is commercial and there’s always going to be constraints, and there’s always going to be a problem to solve. And sometimes it’s going to be frustrating, but at the end of the day, knowing that you’re using your creative brain to solve business problems like that, that is how you should feel fulfilled.

And if you need to go home and do some pottery to feel like, “okay, I can open myself up and I don’t have to deal with feedback and client revisions and a workflow process,” great. Do that. So it is a balance, and I think it’s getting people away from feeling design is art or whatever creative pursuit they’re in is the art. Because as you know, you went to school for journalism – that’s not writing a novel. It’s very different. The goal is different. You might love to write, and so you want to do that on the side because that’s more of a creative flow for you. I think it’s hard when creatives can’t get into a flow in their job, but they want that, but it’s not necessarily accessible. So you have to find ways to do that outside and it will energize you for your day job. Yeah, because you won’t feel like you’re trying to squeeze everything out of that.

Galen Ettlin:
When we’re talking about maybe the opposite of constraints – maybe people put some of the constraints on themselves. You were talking about earlier, the lies we tell ourselves, the ways that people hold back or don’t want to take that plunge the leap like you did. What advice do you give to clients whom you feel need a little bit more rebellious or maybe risk taking, either in their jobs or their personal branding?

Jamie Roberts:
Yeah, I think one of the things that I really try and help people understand is who they are and what their authentic story is. Because a lot of people try to put something out there that they think someone’s going to like, right? It’s like, “oh, I have to do it a certain way because this is how it’s done,” or “I want to do it the way that someone will respond to it.” But a lot of times what happens is that starts to look very generic because you’re looking at other people’s and you’re copying their approaches. And so the goal is to put yourself out there and to showcase your uniqueness. And that may come off as being rebellious, having a different perspective, making, doing things totally differently than someone else has seen. But that’s what makes you memorable, and that’s what makes you a great creative.

It’s like, “wow, this person approached this project in a way that’s totally different than I would’ve.” Unless that’s an authentic story of who you are and what your motivations are, it’s going to be hard to do that because you’re trying to fit it into a mold. I get a lot of people who switch from other careers to go into creative because they just have that need. But it’s all about that authenticity because it allows you to tell a story in a way that no one else can because it’s yours, and there’s transparency and there’s vulnerability, and people tune up to that. They really like to see that because there’s so much generic content out in the world where people are just playing off each other and hoping that mine is slightly better, and it shouldn’t be that way. It’s like everyone has a voice and they should share that.

Galen Ettlin:
Breaking out of the mold that we put ourselves in simply by observing everything else around us.

Jamie Roberts:
Yes. I mean, comparison is what is it, the thief of joy, right? It absolutely is. You’re just going to look at someone else and think, “ah, I could never get there. Oh, maybe I could do it a little better, or maybe I do it the same way because it looked like it worked for them.” But if it’s their unique story, it’s just, you’re going to be copying. You’re not going to be authentically sharing.

Galen Ettlin:
For you personally, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Jamie Roberts:
I am the person who will wear the fringe jacket to karaoke, sing Elvis songs. I will wear the six inch platform shoes on stage at a speaking event, the brightest colors, the sparkliest, the shiniest, all of that. And I don’t know that I never thought of it as rebellious. I think it’s just more I’m comfortable with that level of self-expression and it feels unique and authentic to me. But I know other people see it as like, “oh my goodness, have a full sequin suit, what’s happening?”

Galen Ettlin:
Yes! Break out the sequin suit! Yes!

Jamie Roberts:
I love that because I feel like it just goes a level beyond the normal expectation of what someone might do or wear or how they would show up. I mean, I am a Halloween fan, I go down the rabbit hole of every possible detail for Halloween. Costumes, events, same thing. I love to do a theme event, and it’s really just kind of fun to show up in that way. And I feel like people enjoy that. They enjoy the sort of surprise of, “oh my gosh, I never thought you would go there. I never thought you would wear that. And that looks crazy. And I could never wear that.”

I get a lot of people saying, I could never pull that off. And truthfully, everyone can pull it off. It’s just what feels comfortable to you. But I do feel like that’s one of the things that people recognize about me. They’re like, there she is.

I ran the Shamrock Run in Portland, and everyone wears green. Everyone. There’s 30,000 people running this race. Everyone wears green. And there’s a race photo that I saw online. It was the crowd, and I was wearing a hot pink running jacket, and I was like a flamingo –

Galen Ettlin:
In the sea of green.

Jamie Roberts:
And I was like, wow. And it never occurred to me that I was doing something different. I thought, well, I don’t have any green. I like this color. I usually wear a very vibrant jacket so people can see me when I’m running in the evening or whatever. But it was like, oh, kind of solidified the fact that, yeah, I don’t really do what other people do. I see what’s happening now. But I never saw that as a kid. My mom always said that You’re so unique with your clothes. Okay, .

Because you’re just doing what feels good to you, and everybody has the thing that they feel like is their sort of brand thing. And I think the personal brand thing is a little overhyped, but honestly, it just is that authentic? What makes you and what makes you memorable? And that’s kind of the rebellious part.

Galen Ettlin:
Living as yourself fearlessly.

Jamie Roberts:
Yes, right, totally. And I definitely always have, I was a very shy child, very shy. And I had absolute anxiety. I wouldn’t even answer the phone. I wouldn’t look at people, I wouldn’t look at adults. When they would talk to me, I’d put my head down. I was really terrified. You’d never know that now because I never stopped talking. But it was very, my parents were like this. They were both very extroverted and they couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get there. And that really didn’t change until high school, until I started having to figure out what the rest of my life’s going to look like. Where am I going to go to college? What classes am I going to take? You know, get to make your own decisions. And it started to get more comfortable with being who I was, and that just kind of took off. And then after college, just the working world I think solidified that even more .

Galen Ettlin:
This next question is one of my favorites because it gets so many different types of answers from very serious to very funny. What rebel do you think needs to be celebrated and why? Any answer can apply. It doesn’t have to be a real person. We’ve had fictional characters used as an example. We’ve had real leaders used as an example, all sorts of things, no limits here.

Jamie Roberts:
There are a few people whom I really look up to in the business space and kind of the entrepreneurial space. And as I was doing research on how do you build a company with not a huge business plan or a bunch of investors and a team, it’s just me trying to develop this. I actually started reading about Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. She’s worth a lot now, and she started this company. She used to sell fax machines door to door when she had the idea for her company, for the product of Spanx. And I just found that really inspiring because a lot of times you look at leaders and you think, oh, they probably had someone help them or they’re super successful and they might have had an easy road, or they knew someone or they took over some family business or there was some leg up somewhere, and she literally had a couple thousand dollars in her savings account and a job that she hated.

And what I think made her more rebellious is she went into it knowing that what she wanted to do, what she wanted to accomplish, which was to make women feel confident about their bodies and her advice was pay attention to what others don’t. And the way she sold that product was really authentic and wasn’t the way other business leaders were advising her to do it. They wanted her to take these straightforward approaches and what’s your business plan? And she was like, I’m just going to listen to the universe and listen to myself and I’m going to do this how I want. And she went individually, person to person, and explained what she was trying to do. And I really found that inspiring because she could have listened to these business advisors, these people who were running Fortune 500 companies, but she thought, “I don’t want to do that way. That’s not interesting to me. I want to market it how I want to market it, and I want it to feel authentic to who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish here.” And so I always felt like that was amazing. She has this story where she’s first selling these products and she made her own patent. She did everything herself because she didn’t have any money, and she would go and fly around the country and talk to all these buyers at these high end stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. And there’s one story where she literally – the woman had no time for her, wasn’t interested – and she made the woman go into the bathroom with her so she could try on the product and show her the difference of what it does for your look in certain clothing, and to drag a buyer into the bathroom at one of these stores…

It’s like she knew that she had something, and I just love that she kind of followed that intuitive path and just followed her heart. I kind of took a little bit of that into the way I do business as well, because I feel like I don’t want to just sell something that feels like some sort of commodity or some flash in the pan. I want people to feel comfortable and they feel like they can be vulnerable with me and that I’m helping them, and they recognize that. She didn’t take a conventional path, and I thought that was pretty awesome because she just sold the majority of her company and she built such an empire, but she didn’t do it the textbook way.

Galen Ettlin:
I think that’s a great answer. And the fact that it’s a brand too, that regardless of gender and demographic, I feel like everybody knows what that product is. She did the thing!

Jamie Roberts:
Exactly Yeah, she accomplished her goal and she probably didn’t even realize how big it was going to get, but she just knew I have a thing that people want. It’s going to help them and great. I mean, if you feel like it, that’s the best way to market it. You have to have passion around it. And she did.

Galen Ettlin:
It is time for our “Honey! I don’t think so!” segment talking about what’s annoying you lately or something that needs to stop in the marketing space. I’m going to give you about 60 seconds to make your case, so whenever you’re ready, let me know.

Jamie Roberts:
The overt targeting over-marketing with the personalized approach with automation, and that is specifically location data, scraping content from emails that you write in your personal account and then sending you ads relating to them, having pop-ups that say, “oh, I saw you were right by my store and did you want to come in?” That feels so invasive. We need to understand the balance between targeting and trust because targeting is finding someone who needs what you are offering, but not to the point where you feel like a stalker. And I think that people get a little overzealous because they have all these tools that can do these hyper-targeted things, but you are eroding the trust before you even had a chance to build it. I feel like we need to just reassess how we use those tools and to be more strategic around it because creating that fear or that anxiety with someone of how do they know I’m right here? How did they know what I said to my mom in that email? That is not a great way to sell any product or service.

Galen Ettlin:
Especially in the AI world, too. People are just like, Uh-uh, keep that away [from my personal info].

Jamie Roberts:
It’s like, no, thank you. How did you know? People need to come to you when they’re ready, and if you’re constantly just barraging them with information that feels like they know a little too much about you, you’re going to ignore that brand because you’re going to feel like they’re invasive and they’re not respecting your space. So yeah, the targeting versus trust is like, it’s a huge thing. And that’s, I think about that with my business, too. I want people to know, but I don’t want to scare the hell out of ’em.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, I gave you more than 60 seconds, but we break rules here on the Rebel Instinct podcast. So it doesn’t matter. It was a good answer. I think it’s one that a lot of people can relate to anyway.

So Jamie, please tell our listeners where they can find you.

Jamie Roberts:
I have a lot of free resources on my website, rockthatcreativejob.com. I have articles, I have freebies you can download to help you with interviews. There are 20 free videos that can help you with things like resumes, portfolios, interviews. I also have my Rock That Creative Job podcast that focuses on creative career support and mindset guidance. You can email me directly at RockThatCreativeJob @ Gmail. You can LinkedIn DM me, you can follow me on Instagram, @RockThatCreativeJob. I am all over the socials. Please reach out if you need anything. I would love to hear your story and love to figure out how we can work together and I can help you. I love making friends in the creative space. It’s really fun.

Galen Ettlin:
And I’ve loved this conversation. I think it will add a lot of spark to many people’s lives, and I hope that they’ll follow up with you too, because I think what you’re doing is much needed and a great conversation to be had, and it needs to be a louder conversation too. So thank you for bringing it here.

Jamie Roberts:
Yeah, it was great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast here, featuring Justin Keller of Drift. He encourages marketers to get out of the metric weeds and focus on delivering compelling stories and content.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 13: Gessica Tortolano

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 16:09:00 +0000

^{Gessica Tortolano sits down with the Rebel Instinct crew to talk about how she’s helped brands hone their user experience.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
It is the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody, thank you so much for being here. I’m Galen Ettlin with my VP of marketing here at Act-On Software, Casey Munck. And Casey, I know we’ve got a friend here on the show today. I’m going to go through my spiel. Gessica Tortolano, a director of Slalom, a global technology consulting company with more than 13,000 team members and partnerships with companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, Tableau, so many more. And Gessica also has experience serving clients like Google, ESPN, Samsung, Carnival, Gap, Facebook, Burger King, Coca-Cola, the list goes on. She’s an experienced design and user experience evangelist. Casey, talk about exciting.

Casey Munck:
She is that girl. So it’s so good to see you, Gessica, after all of our years working together and all the fun times that we had as friends in Miami many of which are not podcast appropriate. So we’re going to keep it professional today. So obviously I know everything about you, a lot about you, but tell our listeners a little bit about your passion for experience design and user experience and what inspired you on that path.

Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, thanks everyone. Thanks so much for inviting me. So my journey in user experience started really when the discipline first started out in the industry. I would say back in the nineties, and I’ve been doing this a while, where the really, this is starting to become the norm in companies and industry where people need to understand what their users or their customers or their guests need and what they want and even what their pain points are because once we understand that, we can make the experience better for them. So that’s kind of like the buzzwords distilled down. That’s what we do. We make better experiences for humans not computers. And I’ve been doing this a long time and I learn just as much as all of us do every year. Things change all the time between working at agencies and also teaching. I’ve taken that on to be the evangelist of good experiences out there

Casey Munck:
And she’s damn good at it too.

Galen Ettlin:
The reviews are in. Speaking of those, Gessica stalking your LinkedIn profile as a podcast host does, I did see reviews from people over and over talking about that passion that we’re talking about spirit and joy that you bring to UX and UI education. What sort of trends in that space are you seeing that really get you excited?

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So it’s true. Over the time that I’ve been working in this career, I’ve seen different trends come up. And I would say that right now we’re seeing a lot of trends in the vision space. So a lot of large companies that, let’s say they got in quotes online maybe 10 or 15 years ago, they had their first website or two, and now they’re starting to look back and say, where am I going from here? Now that I have something out there, and maybe it’s okay, maybe it needs some revisions but what are we like? What’s our North star? So I’d say that a big trend is large enterprise companies looking to set a vision for the future of their digital, and not just digital, but their overall customer experience. So we’re starting to see less of the division between digital and physical spaces. So if you think of a company like a cruise line or a car rental company, it isn’t just the thing you do on the app when you get there, it’s when you drop the car off, it’s when you check into your cruise. What is that like? So the trend is starting to move toward, let’s think beyond just the product or the device, but the overall customer journey.

Casey Munck:
I think you gave some good examples, but anything else that companies or marketers are doing that is just really mixed up from a user experience that you’re saying needs to end now

Gessica Tortolano:
Working in silos? So a lot of companies are separated. They separate the customer journey. They’re physical office spaces are literally separated. So if you think of a company, I’ll just use an example, before you buy a product, that group is in one building. After you buy the product, that group is in another building and just foundationally or operationally it, it’s difficult to create a good experience when your own company is divided. So now put that on the customer or the user and you start to see that there’s divisions and it doesn’t feel like a connected experience. And that’s because it’s not even from within the organization.

Casey Munck:
Well, so you lived and worked in at least 17 cities around the world. For brands that are trying to be more global, is there a universal formula or do we need to be thinking more culturally specific for user experience?

Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah, absolutely the latter. So when you think of a global brand, and I’ll use we have a lot of local brands here and I love to talk about them, but like a cruise line or even a Q S R, a quick service restaurant like a Burger King, both of them are global companies like a Royal Caribbean or a carnival. Their audiences or their customer base is completely different. In fact, even the experiences in, let’s say, for example, a McDonald’s or a Chick-fil-A or a Burger King here in America versus let’s say Holland. So when you go to Holland and you go to a Burger King or a fast food chain, it’s a bigger much different experience than here. And same with the cruising industry. So it’s really important that you don’t just create a blanket solution for everyone. So just within one culture, you’re going to have differences across your customer base, and then you bring it to another country and then you have even more.

And that’s even just a country that maybe reads the same format that we do left to whereas think about if you go to an Arabic speaking country, now all your layouts are in reverse. And that’s something to consider too. Even the use of iconography in illustrations, you have to be careful. It’s just super important to know what the culture is, who the audience is because different symbols that maybe for us mean peace, somebody putting up the peace sign, it means something else. It might not be bad, it just means something else to another culture. So one, you want to make sure you’re not offending anyone but number two, you want to play on the strengths. So if going to eat at a McDonald’s in Holland is high end that’s a different way that you’re going to treat that customer.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Casey Munck:
Great points. Although I think there are some cross culture treats that McDonald’s should bring over from Japan. I was just noticing yesterday they do these little mini pancakes and they have these packets with butter and syrup together that you just squeeze. It’s like, we need that over here.

Gessica Tortolano:
Yeah. Well, I mean it’s all learning from each other I think is the best thing that a company can do is whatever you’re learning or what’s happening over there. It’s like how do you take that learning or even things to improve on maybe things that didn’t work. How do you leverage that from different offices, different departments, and even different countries. But yeah, I love the idea of an international brand because you get to learn so much about just our world even. Yes. And how people interact with it.

Casey Munck:
Oh, you’re so smart, so true. I remember when I first got job at Amadeus, which is a global company, my world just exploded because there were so many different cultures I was getting to in interact with for the first time in my life. So great points.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, I know this is something that Casey has personally helped me with a lot. So I’m curious, Gessica, to get your perspective coming from local news, being a news anchor, very buttoned up, kind of uptight and formal to now trying to shift to be a little bit more human in our communication, if you will. What kind of advice do you give your clients and other leaders to be more rebellious in their marketing and leadership?

Gessica Tortolano:
There are a lot of industry standards out there when it comes to, let’s say, for example, design or even the way you approach design, a lot of industry standard out there. But I would say being rebellious would be putting, I would say your own spin on it. So I kind of over my career have collected, let’s call ’em the greatest hits, and I’ve put them all together. And so one of the things that I would say might be feel a little rebellious would be the way that I approach design. It’s from a very lean scrappy, almost going back to the early days where we still print. In some cases, this is probably not a good rebellious because we’re paper and paper comes from trees. But the idea is that we externalize our process. So if we print out our inspiration, we print out, call it the Wall of Awesome.

And what it does is when clients see everything, their own product all up on the wall, and they look at, for example, if it’s a cruise line, we might pull in something totally out of category like an innovation around rental cars or a restaurant, something interesting that we saw in the restaurant space. And it’s completely out of category. But what it allows them to do is kind of like it’s pointalism, it reveals themes when you can see it all up on the wall. And I would say it’s rebellious because it doesn’t fit within a corporate way of doing things like slides. They’re used to, you give me a bunch of slides, I want to be wowed by the shiny end product but this is more valuable is to really just see almost the scrappiness, the homework that goes behind it.

Casey Munck:
So Gessica, what’s the most rebellious or outside of the box thing that you tried with your work and how did it go?

Gessica Tortolano:
Thinking about pushing a vision or a North Star, it’s like what does that mean to companies? And I would say that right now it feels rebellious because it puts companies maybe in an uncomfortable position where they have to think beyond just how much money are we going to make this month, or how much money are we going to save next month? So it’s a little bit uncomfortable. And I think that’s why it’s a little bit rebellious is we’re trying to think of things like, what if the product could come to you or the service could come to you and not you go to them. So let’s take a rental car company for an example. We’re so used to just the way it is. And I’d say rebelling is part of the innovation process, is looking at disrupting what we know it to be right now. And that feels normal to me, but probably pretty rebellious to some of our clients is to say, what if the car just came to you? What if someone could deliver it to you? What if you could pick it up in your garage instead of going to the airport and waiting or wasting an hour and a half in line?

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Galen Ettlin:
All right. So Gessica, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Gessica Tortolano:
I’m sure Casey has some stories about that too. Again, probably tell to share in a different podcast, but I tend to, I don’t know, I guess just not maybe make people feel uncomfortable because that’s not the best thing to do always. But it’s like you pose questions, whether it’s at my daughter’s school or at a store. I mean, unfortunately I kind of live and breathe experience design. So no matter where I am, I’m trying to improve some sort of experience. And so that’s probably where I’m kind of get blended between my professional life and my personal life. I start to try to improve the world around me.

Casey Munck:
Where did you flow at the store? Gessica?

Gessica Tortolano:
I, I’ll often give feedback about the process of checking out or the way that the physical space is set up. Oh no, you Whole foods just started to put in a bunch of self-checkout kiosk, but there’s not enough space in between for people to put their bags. And so that’s so annoying. And so it’s just those little things where I’m like, this is not the best experience. And so funny. I always try and I’ll be on with a customer service representative, and I’m telling them how they should improve their website or their process of returning an item. And it’s some call center person, but even within our city, Casey, you lived in Miami, and it’s like, how could we improve the city? And so any moment I get, if I’m at Bayfront, I’m talking to the guys driving around in the golf cart telling them what they should do to make this experience better for the citizens of Miami.

Casey Munck:
If you were president, I mean, come on, the world would be a better place. But no, I love that. I love that. And you do it in a way, you have a vibe that it’s not like, can I speak to a manager kind of personality. It’s always just comes with the wonderful sort of energy that you exude as a person. So I think that’s why it works so well

Galen Ettlin:
And genuinely trying to improve an experience, not just for you, but for everybody. That’s what you’re thinking about that the broader audience. Yeah.

Gessica Tortolano:
Yes. Our world.

Galen Ettlin:
If we’re looking at an example of maybe somebody else who’s living your rebel dream, what rebel do you think in our culture needs to be celebrated and why?

Gessica Tortolano:
There is a guy out there, his name is Luke W, well, he goes by Luke W in my field. His full name is Luke Robowski, and it’s W r o Luki. And he is someone that I always, I feel like I’ve taken on his cause and his cause is making forms easier to use online. And it sounds really maybe even boring a little bit, but if you’ve ever filled out a form online, whether it’s desktop or especially mobile, have you ever started to fill out a form on your phone and you’re like, no, I’m going to take this to the desktop or my laptop, or just give up? Well, yeah, or you just give up. And so lately what I found myself doing is looking for easier because forms come into play when you check out or buy something. So if I want to buy something and I’ve never bought there before, I can already anticipate that I’m going to take me a long time because I don’t have all my information in there.

So I’ve started to abandon any purchasing that doesn’t use Apple Pay or allow me to just quickly check out. So Luke W, he wrote a white paper in, I think it was before the mobile device even came on the scene and it was like 2008 and it’s called Forums Best Practices. And he took a look at eye tracking, heat mapping, and it found some really interesting, fascinating, best practices that have started to become really industry standard. And mobile has actually supported his view back then before Mobil really existed. So I’d say I, he’s kind of like my rebel guy. I don’t really know him, but I follow him around on Twitter. He’s fascinating. He works for Google. He’ll go back and show you screenshots of the way Google Maps used to look when it first came out. And you may not even notice that shift, but then you start to see each screenshot, you’re like, oh, we used to use that. Yeah, that really evolved.

Casey Munck:
That’s cool though. It’s actually, marketers deal with forums a lot because we have our gated content, which I sometimes absolutely just wish we could get rid of that whole experience overall and just let the content be free. So Gessica, now it’s time for our honey. I don’t think so. Segment talking about what needs to stop now in marketing or the MarTech space. So what’s been annoying you like with Gessica, are you ready for your honey? I don’t think so.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Gessica Tortolano:
Centered text , like what? So I like alignment is a really important thing. When you read anywhere online or out in the physical world, it’s like how do left alignment? It just allows you to be able to, cause don’t, people don’t really read everything anymore. They scan. And so when you left align things it’s easier to scan, it’s easier for your brain to process and say, can I actually consume this content? So I would say one or two words centered on a slide is okay. But everything else I would say, please stop centering everything on every confrontation.

Casey Munck:
I love it. That is just sheer magic that things you wouldn’t even think to think about, but it’s like that makes sense. That makes a heck full of sense. Well Gessica, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute delight to catch up and let’s catch up offline as well.

Gessica Tortolano:
Thank you so much Casey and Galen. This is awesome. Thanks for inviting me.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time!

Check out the next episode with Jamie Roberts of Rock That Creative Job here. She works to help creatives better market themselves and find fulfilling jobs in a tough economy.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 12: Roshni Wijayasinha

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 15:04:00 +0000

^{She’s a street artist, CEO of her own agency, and a fractional CMO helping startups break the mold! Roshni Wijayasinha knows it can take risk to get visibility in branding and marketing, especially when no one has heard of your company yet.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Hey everybody. Thank you so much for being part of the Rebel Instinct Podcast. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software here with my co-host and VP of marketing, Casey Munck. Our guest today is Roshni Wijayasinha, CEO of Rosh Marketing. She’s also a fractional CMO, helping companies get into shape with their marketing. She has tons of experience across the board in MarTech, including at Microsoft, Sony and more. Thank you so much for joining us, Roshni.

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Thank you so much for having me.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, Roshni, it’s great to have a fellow Forbes Communication Council member with us today. Let’s just go ahead and get into the nitty gritty. As a fractional CMO, you’re called in when teams really need help. And it’s a rollercoaster these days in marketing as you know. What are some of the standard challenges that you’re helping people get through?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
So in the fractional CMO space, we really look at helping companies that can’t afford a full-time head of marketing or don’t necessarily need a full-time head of marketing to get where they’re going because they’ve got limited resources to spend. So some of the challenges we’re looking at – is how do we get further with less? So how do we stretch our dollars to make more out of limited budget? We’re also looking at how do we aggressively grow and grab attention from venture capitalists and investors? And so it’s a marketing plan towards end users, but it’s also a marketing plan towards investors as well, which is a challenge for marketing teams that have maybe one person on a team.

Galen Ettlin:
Now looking through your LinkedIn, it really feels like there is not a marketing space that you’ve left untouched. You’ve really done a lot. You now help other companies in these niche areas of marketing communications. What brought you to the point of deciding to run your own agency to maximize other companies and leaders’ potentials?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Yeah, great question. I was working as a full-time head of marketing and a number of different startups, and so my experience there was you got to make an impact and it was really great to see these companies grow, but I wanted to be able to help more companies. And so I wanted to take the lessons I’d learned from helping two big companies exit and then take them to everyday companies, people who didn’t have huge budgets but could afford a little bit and who could really benefit from some of these learnings. And so I also wanted to have the opportunity to pick my own portfolio, have a mix of different clients that I was working on so that I could learn from different industries and then pull in best practices and also find ways for these companies to work together and have synergies.

Casey Munck:
You’re a woman in MarTech, which can be a very tech bro centric environment. How do you go about making sure that diverse opinions are. Was there a defining moment like that for you that you’ve had?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
I think it’s important that we look at teams holistically from a gender perspective as well as from an age perspective, as well as from a number of different ways that we can bring in diverse thought. And I think in our startup world, there’s a huge opportunity to bring in people with creative ideas, especially cause we’re limited budget. So I haven’t necessarily faced immediate challenges being a female within the tech environment. However, I have been oftentimes the only female in the room. And so being the only female in the room sometimes might feel a little intimidating. For me, I’m just am who I am, so if you like me or you don’t like me, it doesn’t totally affect me. But I do feel that confidence enough that I know my stuff and I care about what I’m doing, that I can speak my mind and see what I need to.

But coming into a room with a whole bunch of people who are different than you can also be intimidating too. And so things that I do to kind of gear up for that is just kind of research everyone in the room, learn about what they’re saying and what they’re doing and what their platforms are. And if I’m able to connect with them on a personal level first and then understand where they’re coming from, I feel that I’m better able to communicate with them. But I really see it changing in the technology space, especially in Canada. They’re more and more females coming up in the space and more and more technology female leaders, which is awesome to see as well.

Casey Munck:
That’s great to hear. Go Canada. So what advice would do you give your clients to be more rebellious in their marketing careers and their leadership? A lot of brands, they tend to stay sort of buttoned up, but how do you help people get out of their shell and do rebellious things?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Especially in the startup world, if there’s no risks, there’s no rewards. So it’s pretty easy to convince these startup founders to take these risks because they firstly don’t have a ton of budget to spend on normal traditional marketing. So they have to do things that are out of the box and some of these things won’t work, some of these things will fail. And that’s part of startup marketing – testing and learning and kind of growing and leveraging your data set and kind of figuring out what’s working and what’s not and optimizing. So a lot of the times we don’t know if it’s going to work and it is a big risk. And so you have to take that risk without hesitation because if you don’t take a risk, you’re never going to have that reward and that growth in the upside. And so businesses can either grow steadily and grow incrementally, or they can grow on a huge exponential growth trajectory. And so taking those risks allow those opportunities as well. So I think it’s just talking about that risk reward balance.

Galen Ettlin:
I imagine if companies are hiring you to help them through that process, that they’re probably on board to take some of those risks and hear your thoughts and direction. Are there any times that you encounter people that are like, no, I don’t want to do that, but you just know you got to take a plunge?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
A hundred percent. Actually, in the startup world specifically, everyone really wants to focus on the bottom of the marketing funnel. So the bottom of the funnel is easier to track because you’ve got more tracking capabilities on things like digital ads versus, for example, the top of the funnel like public relations. So it’s harder to track. There’s no direct ROI. And so I get a lot of clients who push back and don’t want to do any top of the funnel marketing at all, zero brand marketing. They only want to focus on Google ads or the bottom end of the funnel. And so this is a challenge for me to educate them on the importance of diversifying their funnel, bringing people in on the top end, and so they can nurture that pool and eventually convert them, and the long-term benefits of doing brand and top of the funnel marketing, because ultimately it drives your cost down over time. But a lot of these founders are very shortsighted and they only see the immediate return. So that can be a challenge convincing them to invest in things like brand, but especially as a startup, no one’s heard a you because you’re brand new to the market, so if no one’s heard of you, why would they even want you or purchase from you? So you’ve got to start with that awareness level, and it’s harder to track. There’s less direct ROI, so it makes it less attractive for them. But it is so important.

Casey Munck:
That struggle is so real in the marketing arena, especially when you’re the only marketer in the room that understands how these things work, right?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Yeah. Even McKinsey put out an article, so I have facts and figures to prove it, but gut feels from CEOs and from entrepreneurs can be very hard to adjust because they’ve got these gut feels and they feel like they’ve gotten so far because of these gut feels. So ultimately you’ve got to go back to research. And even this research, it’s current research that shows the benefits or case studies and that kind of stuff really helps convince them.

Galen Ettlin:
Looking at some examples, say from your background and maybe working with some of your clients, what’s one of the most rebellious things or out of the box things that you’ve tried and how would you say it performed?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Yeah, so I was working at an InsureTech company as the head of marketing, and we were looking to launch in the US and we had a really, really limited budget limited. When I say limited, it’s like less than 10 grand. So launching in a whole country with less than 10 grand was a feat in itself. One of the most rebellious things that we suggested was hiring some street artists to go take over spaces. And instead of paying for billboards, we would pay for these artists to go up and make murals. And these murals would involve some of our potential customers. So we got to do some lead gen, and it’s a B2B company, B2B InsureTech. So they would create these murals and they would tag all of these local businesses who are prospects. And then they would, the businesses now had great advertising for themselves. We showed that we were a great supporter of the small business community, and we were able to attract their attention within a cost effective way. And I garnered a ton of PR, but it was a little bit different.

Casey Munck:
That sounds so cool. I’d love to see some of those illustrations. So how are you rebel in your non-work life?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
So to that note, I’m actually a street artist, so that’s where that idea came from. And so you can check out my art on Instagram @RoshnisArt, but I’m also a traditional artist. But I got into the street art game around five to seven years ago. I really fell in love with the ability to cross my marketing expertise with street Art. I found a lot of the theories similar. You’re looking for a space where people are going to see same way that you scope out your channels of distribution, and then you want to check out the audience who’s walking by, what kind of people are you targeting, and what kind of content would really resonate with them in the same way that you do for marketing. And then I’ve always loved art, so I love to create something that grabs attention. And so being a street artist has been quite an interesting journey, and it’s also kind of fun.

Casey Munck:
What a renaissance woman, and this is amazing.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s a skill too that I don’t feel like you just pick up.

I love this next question because we get so many diverse answers, from funny and entertaining to very serious and meaningful – poignant. What rebel do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
When you say what rebel, what do you mean?

Galen Ettlin:
We’ve had someone give Ferris Bueller as an example saying he just lives his best life and he shows everyone how to throw a party and live that life to the fullest. And then there’s other people who say, “here’s this religious leader who knows how to reach people across all beliefs.” There’s all sorts of different answers. So whatever your take is, we are open to it.

Roshni Wijayasinha:
The biggest rebel that I think needs to be celebrated is I think the rebel inside all of the little children who are taught that they have to do a traditional career path. And I think we need to celebrate the rebels inside of people and inside children to allow them to take their own career path. I know that for myself, everyone said that my parents were very focused on a business career, and I really loved art, and I found a way to marry both of them. But if people just kind of do what they’re told or what society tells them to do, I feel like it’s tough for them to really enjoy their lives and fully experience it to the maximum. And so I would say for especially at the start, if children can be celebrated and celebrate their rebel sense to do things that are different or things that appeal to them as opposed to things that their parents maybe want them to do or things that society wants them to do, I think that would be amazing.

Casey Munck:
Spoken like a true rebel herself. That’s beautiful. Okay, so now it’s time for our “honey, I don’t think so” segment, where you’re going to tell us what’s annoying you in marketing or MarTech, you’ve got 60 seconds to state your case. Are you ready, Roshni?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
I am.

Casey Munck:
Go for it, girl.

Roshni Wijayasinha:
All right, honey, I don’t think so. My pitch is for brand marketing, and so as we mentioned earlier, I see so many businesses really focusing on the bottom end of the funnel because they can track results and they know that’s where the money is, but they’re ignoring the top end of the marketing funnel and they’re ignoring brand awareness. And it’s so important to build that audience pool that you can eventually market to, because eventually you’ll run out of people within your funnel. And so marketing to them will just get more and more expensive. So it’s really, really so important and I’m so passionate about the fact that people need to invest in top of the funnel marketing initiatives, even if you find it difficult to track and even if it doesn’t provide immediate ROI.

Casey Munck:
Preach, Roshni , can I bring you into a couple of meetings?

Roshni Wijayasinha:
I have a ton of documentation about this too, so if you need backup.

Casey Munck:
Let’s go. Let’s go. Listen, it’s been so great having a conversation with you. Thank you so much for chatting with us today.

Roshni Wijayasinha:
Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow act on software for updates and upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode with Gessica Tortolano, a director of Slalom and UX/UI guru, focused on helping big brands reshape user design and experience.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 11: Nancy Poznoff

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 15:00:00 +0000

^{When a man falsely made viral claims that Starbucks was anti-Christmas, former VP of marketing Nancy Poznoff took quick action to flip the narrative. She helped lead the charge during the “Red Cup” incident.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Act-On Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box.

Thanks for getting rebellious with us everybody. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, here again with my VP of marketing, Casey Munck, and of course our guest today, Nancy Poznoff, CEO and co-founder of the Kingston Marketing Group and former VP of Marketing at both Zillow and Starbucks for a while. Casey – you know she’s a boss.

Casey Munck:
Oh yeah, boss lady, for sure. Nancy, thank you so much for being here. We’ve worked with your agency, Kingston Marketing Group with Act-On and have loved absolutely everything that they’ve done for us, and I’ve always been curious about you. So excited to have a conversation and find out more about you as a boss lady.

Nancy Poznoff:
It’s so nice to meet both of you and thanks for the time today.

Galen Ettlin:
Of course. Diving into what you’re doing right now, let’s talk about that. You’ve got quite the agency, a lot of different services to help elevate companies in areas of branding, social media, PR content, and so many other things in addition to that. What made you decide to start a marketing agency? Something that’s pretty different than your big roles at places like Zillow, Starbucks, and even T-Mobile?

Nancy Poznoff:
Yeah, it was a big right turn for sure, after more years than I like to say out loud, but 20 years in corporate environments. I was at Starbucks for the bulk of my career, went to Zillow. Zillow after about two years was going through major strategic shift, which typically is something that’s really super energizing to me. And I would have been really motivated and kind of ready to roll, and I wasn’t at all. I was just like, eh, I don’t want to do this. And so that was really important information for me. And I kind of took a step back and examined what is it that’s going on? And I realized it was just time for me to just chart a different course. I think I was pretty, being a VP of marketing in any organization, as you well know, it’s a grind. It can be really hard and intense.

And I think I was just ready to get on a different track. And so I had coffee with my coworker, Katie. We had gotten pretty close at Zillow. We were both thinking about leaving and we went and met in Kingston, Washington, which is the midpoint between our houses. And I said, I’m thinking about consulting. And she said, oh, so am I. And we were like, well, hey, we love working together at Zillow. Why don’t we give this a shot? And a couple weeks later, we had a business license. We had our first client signed up and we were off to the races. So really, I think we were deliberate about the kind of agency we wanted to build, the kind of services we wanted to offer. But at the end of the day, it was really about that integrated approach between the disciplines of marketing and communications that got us most excited to work together. So here we are three years later. We’ve served probably 75 clients at this point. We’ve got a lot of really phenomenal relationships and ongoing clients, repeat clients, and it’s just been such a great move for both of us.

Casey Munck:
That takes a lot of courage. Where did that come from? And who was your first client, if you don’t mind sharing?

Nancy Poznoff:
Yeah, it’s funny. I get a lot of people, especially over the last couple years, been a little disruptive out there in the world and a lot of people are looking at making moves. And I think for me it never felt unattainable. It felt like the right time. And so that made it less scary. I think the other thing is I had been, before I left Starbucks, I started to think I just need a break. I just want to take a year or something. So I had been squiring away a lot of money with the goal of “I need to be able to live for a while without an income.” And so that having that if even early in career, I strongly recommend to people just squirrel away as much as you can because it just gives you the freedom to make choices and have that you cash sitting around.

So if you need to make a hard pivot, you don’t have that as something that’s holding you back. And that can be a really, really hard thing to accomplish, especially early in career. But whenever you have that extra to sock away, I think that’s really important. And then having a business partner was also really helpful because it can feel really overwhelming. I’ve never run an agency, I’ve always been in-house. Katie had always been in-house. And so it was just nice to have that thought partner and know that we have completely complimentary skills and it just felt really safe to have someone who I knew rounded out my blind spots and along the journey.

Casey Munck:
Great advice. So you don’t have to make those desperate moves.

Nancy Poznoff:
Exactly.

Casey Munck:
Strategy is a big part of what you do, what you coach companies with. What are some of the common red flags that you work to fix?

Nancy Poznoff:
Yes. The big one is “we have a brand,” and what companies mean when they say that is “we have a logo” and maybe some brand guidelines. And so we focus a lot on helping companies really unearth the core DNA of their brand. At KMG, we define brand as the contract you make with your customer. So how are you engaging your customer? Every single touchpoint, whether that’s in the digital space, in the physical space between human connection with your product experience, whatever it might be, that is collectively the sum of all those parts is your brand. So we love to work with companies who are early in that journey or are looking to reposition their brand to really shore up their brand and kind of what I like to call fill the vessel. They may have a logo, they may have a beautiful voice and tone and color palette, but there’s empty.

They don’t know who they are, they don’t know what they stand for.And it’s easy to get to that place, especially when you are in startup mode and you just want to get something out in the world. And then suddenly a couple years later you’re like, who are we? What do we mean? And then I’d say the second one is especially on B2B, I think a lot of companies don’t recognize that it’s still a human interaction. They think it’s a business to business, but it’s not robots talking to robots yet. It’s people talking to people. And so we like to remind, especially our B2B clients and help them think about the fact that that is a human transaction. You still have a thinking, feeling, person making a decision about buying your product or your service. So how do you really unearth where their head is and where their heart is and meet them where they are?

So it’s very, people always ask, are you B2B? Are you consumer? And I don’t really see a distinction in terms of how you develop a brand. There may be different tactical elements, but at the end of the day, there are people selling something to people.

And the third I would say that we hear a lot lately, especially when marketing budgets get tight, is, well, I just want PR – go get me the front page of the New York Times and then my brand will just take off. And there’s no such thing as just PR, right? It is really how do you take a really integrated approach to build your brand? And it’s a long game and that can be really hard, but you have to make continuous deposits in the bank of people’s consumers minds in order for that to pay dividends.

Casey Munck:
Great answer. Yeah, I really resonate with what you’re talking about on the why, the mission, the purpose of the brand. And you see that time and time again at companies on engagement surveys. If your staff doesn’t understand what the common mission is, those are your representatives. So everyone has to be on board and understand what that’s about and sign up people who believe in that as well.

Nancy Poznoff:
Absolutely. I mean, it should be part of your hiring practice. What kinds of values are you looking for, things like that, all matter at every single touchpoint.

Casey Munck:
I love that you’re helping companies with that. Well, we’ve had some amazing women on the podcast who’ve had to go through some battles to get through success, and I was wondering if there was a defining moment in your journey that you had to go through.

Nancy Poznoff:
Yeah, I think the biggest one would be what I call the Great Red Cup drama of 2015, 2016. So I worked for Starbucks and I was the director of basically the holiday window. And we had a controversy where we launched a red cup. And the red cup is kind of the kickoff to the holiday season for a lot of consumers. And it was just an ombre red tone. So people saw it as kind of a blank red cup. And there was person who basically called for a boycott of Starbucks because he was claiming that was anti Christmas and we “had taken all the Christmas symbols off the cup,” which by the way, we had never had symbols of Christmas on the Red Cup. But he basically had this brilliant idea to boycott Starbucks by going to Starbucks, buying a drink, and having people say their name was Merry Christmas, so that the barista would have to call out Merry Christmas.

So at first we were like, we’re not going to worry about this guy who’s a lunatic. But then it got picked up by the media, it got picked up by Donald Trump. He was calling for people to boycott Starbucks. And it turned into this huge drama. The head of our creative studio was getting death threats. It was bad. And I was at that point a director. I was like, what are we going to do to help turn this situation around? There were a couple moments in time that were really defining and really shaped how I think about brand.

The first was the way our consumers came to our defense. So in social media, there’s a lot of negative chatter, but so many people came to our defense. They were explaining on our behalf, which was really phenomenal. And I was thinking about that, wow, we’ve got this groundswell of people who really care about our brand, who really feel a sense of ownership. We’ve got a blank canvas here in this red cup. Why don’t we pull those two things together? And so about mid December, I went to my leadership and I said, I think we need to fill this cup with some images for next year. So let’s think about how we can do that. And we ended up doing a contest in social media and Instagram and did a call for content. We asked our customers to draw on the Red cup and submit their drawings to us. And so we got over 1200 submissions in five days from all over the globe. We went through with our creative studio and we selected the top 12 I think designs, and those became the Red cups for the following year.

And then we all went to New York, we flew all the artists and we had a big event and kind of unveiled the red cup together. And it was a really powerful moment to bring to life the way that everyone celebrates differently in this cup became a canvas for people to express how they celebrate the holidays. And it was just this moment, a sense of real community and kind of global community during the 2016 election. So it was a really nice moment as a marketer, because you could just feel the power of the brand and the impact that people’s daily coffee ritual has and the love that they had for the Starbucks brand and was palpable. And so it was just a really, really humbling moment, but also a really defining moment for my career.

Casey Munck:
That’s incredible. The fans came through for y’all. And you know what? It’s so amazing as well, the haters who are trying to not make this holiday inclusive. Y’all were able to come back with a story where everyone can celebrate the holidays or the tradition that makes sense and that they love. So I love that. Really cool.

Nancy Poznoff:
And not any brand could pull that off. I don’t see McDonald’s being able to pull that off.

Casey Munck:
No, no, no.

Nancy Poznoff:
So it was a really stressful time, but also very really magical time.

Casey Munck:
You should feel proud of that. That’s awesome.

Galen Ettlin:
Absolutely. It really speaks to what you do now too, where that was a crossover of messy PR and then you spun it into a way that really reflected your brand voice and what you were trying to do, which was be inclusive. And then also you just got people to contribute from all over the world. And that’s really, really interesting.

Nancy Poznoff:
And I think that’s a great point, Galen, being able to have that tight brand strategy really know who you are and what you stand for as an organization is paramount in those moments. Because every brand at some point is going to have some kind of a controversy. And being able to stick to your mission and your values and your brand positioning is huge. Those are the moments where it will pay for itself. And it’s sometimes hard to connect all those dots or understand, especially as you’re early in your development, what is this really going to do for me? Why am I spending so much money? And I would say, you got to sweat the brief. You got to think really, really hard and study yourself and do the hard work upfront because it will just make all those moments where you have that test of your brand so much easier in terms of decision making and how you move forward because it gives you that north star to anchor all your decisions too.

Galen Ettlin:
Especially in a pinch like that, you had to really turn around quickly.

Nancy Poznoff:
You don’t have time. Yeah. You got to know who you are and what you stand for so you can pivot quickly.

Casey Munck:
Yeah. Cause I think consumers are watching brands as well and seeing how they react when things go wrong, and you have an opportunity to really continue to gain their trust and respect in how you respond in hard times like that. So that’s great.

Nancy Poznoff:
And I think that transparency and just being, you know, talk about being authentic and rebellious as a brand. And I think that’s really important to not sugarcoat it. Just be like, we’ve got a problem and here’s how we’re going to solve it. Here’s our plan. And every brand will make a mistake. And so at some point you just have to own up to it and be clear about how you’re going to move forward.

Casey Munck:
So Nancy, your agency actually helped Act-On step into our brand archetype as a rebel or outlaw in our space. What traits do you look for in a company as you’re helping them brand themselves that you felt really qualify that company as being a rebel or an outlaw?

Nancy Poznoff:
Yes. I think probably every company would like to believe they’re the rebel or the outlaw because it feels cool. But there are a handful of brands I think that really demonstrate that archetype while so like Virgin Airlines or Harley Davidson, but brands that are really, the traits that they have are that kind of disruptive nature. They see the status quo, they don’t like it, they want to break it and they want to rebuild it. And they’re actually doing that. And I think brands that do that have a little bit more, I guess latitude to be a little more aggressive in how they communicate. So potentially have a little bit more attitude or they’re very bold in their communication and they’re kind of pushing the envelope, not just in their product offering and not just how they’re positioning, but really how they’re communicating their brand as well. So they’re the people that you’re in awe of as if your brand was a person. They’re the people that really inspire you because they found this problem, they’ve fixed it and they’re unapologetic about it.

Casey Munck:
Cool. You got to walk the walk, not just the talk. I mean the talk’s part of it too, but you got to really own it down in your blood.

Nancy Poznoff:
And I think it needs to be a part of your culture as an organization too.

Casey Munck:
So Nancy, how are your revel in your non-work life?

Nancy Poznoff:
Yeah, so similar to how I kind of just hopped off the track that I was on in my professional life, I think I took a similar approach to my personal life. So got divorced, kind of moved out of the city. I was on definitely a very certain path. I’m not married, I live with my partner. We have a blended family and we have two teenagers. So they think we’re super boring and not rebellious at all. But I think for a long time was a single mom working a VP job. That definitely had its challenges and people can be a little shy around single mom in the workplace. It is no joke. But everything that it’s forced me to just design my life, I think in a way that feels really authentic to me. And going through those journeys and being on, I’m classic Gen X, you get on the path and then you rebel really hard against it. And that’s kind of where I am. And then the other thing that always surprises people, because I look like just your average soccer mom, but I love to sing karaoke

Casey Munck:
Watch’s your go-to?

Nancy Poznoff:
I don’t have a go-to cause I will sing anything, but I definitely like, my eighties jams are definitely a sweet spot for me. All the sad songs. But I have a group of friends that we’ve been singing together for 10 years at least to the point where one of my friends has built a state-of-the-art karaoke room in his home.

Galen Ettlin:
Can I be your friends, haha!

Casey Munck:
Take me under your wing. I want to be your karaoke protégé.

Nancy Poznoff:
People always think I must be a good singer and that is not required. The people I sing with are brilliant singers and I just kind of fill it out. But yeah, it’s a ton of fun. It’s so funny because people think it’s really strange.

Galen Ettlin:
Uh-uh. No, it’s amazing!

Nancy Poznoff:
But it’s kind of, everyone needs a creative outlet. And for a long time mine was making PowerPoint slides. That doesn’t work for me. So it’s, it’s just been cathartic.

Casey Munck:
I love someone who could belt out a good karaoke with confidence. It’s the confidence for me. That’s great.

Galen Ettlin:
Yeah. I love karaoke.

Casey Munck:
Oh, what’s your go-to karaoke song, Galen?

Galen Ettlin:
“Something’s Got a Hold on Me” by Etta James. But the Christina Aguilera version, cause I love her.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, I knew Christina would be involved.

Galen Ettlin:
Always. Lady Marmalade is another one.

Nancy Poznoff:
Oh man, that’s a vocal challenge.

Galen Ettlin:
Maybe one day you’ll hear it.

Nancy Poznoff:
I know. I’ll have to invite you guys next time.

Galen Ettlin:
Yes please!

Casey Munck:
That would be incredible.

So what rebel do you feel needs to be celebrated in our culture and why?

Nancy Poznoff:
One that’s on my mind lately, and this may feel obvious, but Ryan Reynolds last week, I think it was, he came out with the Mint mobile ad. Did you see that?

Ryan Reynolds soundbite:
“…an ad that I created using chatGPT, the AI technology…”

Nancy Poznoff:
I just think he’s, first of all, he’s a great actor and adorable, but the way he markets is just so brilliant. He takes a cultural moment or cultural truth. I wouldn’t want to work for ’em because they must work so hard to turn these campaigns literally within days. But I really appreciate the way that he just squarely comes out, whatever the current dialogue is. If he had been around during the Red Cup drama… The way that he responded with Aviation Gin to the Peloton crisis a few years ago, and he had the woman from the ad that kind of went sideways drinking gin in the bar, and then this Mint Mobile ad, like going squarely at chatCPT, which there’s a lot of chatter around, is this going to replace the need for content marketing or marketers in general? And he just went straight at it. And so I really appreciate that about him. And I’m sure there’s a crew of people, rebellious people behind him, and he’s really the face of it. But there is something pretty magical I think, in the work that he’s doing. I think a great example of the rebel archetype, right? Just goes straight at a controversy with humor and intelligence and just isn’t afraid to stare it down.

Casey Munck:
Absolutely. Deadpool. Hello? Oh, ultimate rebel. Marvel Rebel. Love him too. He’s adorable.

Okay, so now it’s time for our “honey, I don’t think so” segment, where you’re going to call out something that needs to stop now in marketing or MarTech. Are you ready?

Nancy Poznoff:
I’m ready.

Casey Munck:
Galen’s going to give you 60 seconds. He’s going to be counting down on the clock. So Nancy, okay. It’s time for your honey. I don’t think so.

Nancy Poznoff:
So I don’t usually get annoyed by marketing trends because I’m a marketer and I’m like, Hey, try it. See what works. Get out there and experiment. But one thing in social media that makes me insane is the voice to speech feature in TikTok. So the TikTok voice, and there’s a lot of TikTok happening in my house of a 15 year old, a 13 year old, and a 46 year old who are all constantly scrolling through TikTok. And the sound of that voice – that robotic cadence just grates on me. And I think it’s because it sounds so unnatural and I’m all about human connection. That’s what I do for a living. That’s how I approach the world. And those kind of artificial voices just make my skin crawl and have actually are the reason I no longer use TikTok. So get

Casey Munck:
Get out here, artificial voices!

Thank you so much, Nancy. You’re a true delight. And just all the best for the new year for you and the Kingston Group.

Nancy Poznoff:
Thank you Back at you. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time today.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Roshni Wijayasinha, a street artist, agency CEO, and a fractional CMO helping startups break the mold with their marketing.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 10: HERS

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:00:00 +0000

^{HERS (HERStech.org) is a nonprofit marketing agency in India that works to uplift women who are sometimes oppressed or disenfranchised from achieving career growth.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box.

Hey everybody, I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software. I’m here again with my VP of marketing, Casey Munck, on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. And Casey today is full circle. Our guests today are Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva and Mannan Shaikh with HERS, a B2B demand generation firm based in India that works to empower women and boost access to careers in tech while providing amazing marketing services. And Casey, I know you were on their podcast called Her Story and you talked about a great rebellious cause. I just think it’s so cool to have this come around again and get to exchange podcast genius.

Casey Munck:
Yes, it was such a delight and I was so honored that y’all asked me to be on the podcast with such an amazing organization and effort that y’all are doing. So Mannan – marketing and empowering women are two of my favorite subjects. How in the world were you able to combine them with the work that you’re doing?

Mannan Shaikh:
Well, when I was in my college, I was studying, and marketing was one field that really intrigued me and I always wanted to be there. I always wanted to explore the world. I always wanted to put my head in the right place and help companies. First of all, help myself because I knew that I’m good at it cause I can think out of the box. And then as in when my career started, I was in marketing and sales and I was just running back and forth and I was good at it. And only after March that I started around in 2016 and last year at my daughter’s birthday, she asked me, so I have a daughter and I’m a single parent and I always teach her about how good the world is and how good people are. The world is a better place to live in and she should not be about that.

And women are the strong agenda. Women are the wise agenda as a matter of fact be it emotionally, mentally, in every aspect. And one day just out of the blue she said you so she calls me Abuji, which in Arabic means father, my beloved father. And she said that, Abuji, why don’t you do something for women in your own field and why don’t you just hire women and not just hire women from the team there, the women who are in distress. So she told me there are women who are widows and there are red light areas and there’s a lot of human trafficking in this world. We live in a bad world. And she also had her questions and that’s when I decided, oh okay, actually I have to do something for my daughter. And that’s when HERS started. And HERS, the name comes from hers – that was her idea. So that’s it. That was HERS.

Casey Munck:
What an awesome origin story and I would love to meet your daughter. She sounds like a really amazing young lady. So Arzuv, when we spoke on the podcast, you mentioned that culturally Indian women are meant to be submissive in all facets. So how do you encourage the women of HERS to take risks and be aggressive when necessary at work?

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
The basic concept of HERS is of course women empowerment. And then speaking from my experience, I have been living in India for the last six years and I’ve been in different kind of situations where women have to face many different situations where they have to be submissive in some areas of their life. And then taking them, talking about the risk is for us advising women to talk about empowerment or to join our organization regardless of their experience, personal, professional experience. It’s already a huge risk for them. So what we here are trying to do is create a platform where they can grow professionally without any pressurizing, without putting labels onto them. “She does not have a background experience. I don’t think she will sit in this responsibility or in this position.” Rather, we take anyone who needs help, who wants to have to build this career.

And then we start giving them training education because I know they already have their mindsets. And the one thing which is always difficult is to unlearn many things that you have been learning while growing up. And then for us, that’s the one thing is giving them as much space as they want and then taking things slowly, not putting any deadlines or targets to them so that they can see that there’s another way as well. And this was one of the purposes why we reach out to marketing leaders like yourself to show them, for them to get inspired. That there is another way too. She could do itm so you can do as well.

Casey Munck:
That’s wonderful. It sounds like for many of these women you need to be gentle with them because need that sort of safe space to feel like I don’t have to be perfect at this. And that sort of naturally builds that confidence when they’re able to grow in a safe place like that. That’s great.

Mannan Shaikh:
Well Absolutely

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
Yeah.

Galen Ettlin:
Along those lines, especially when you’re working with people who are coming from a place of oppression and the culture around it doesn’t always accept that effort on your part. What sort of pushback, if any, have you received and how do you handle that? Mannan, maybe we’ll start with you with that one.

Mannan Shaikh:
Well to be honest, there’s a lot of pressure from identifying such women and talking to them, especially the first batch when I went to a camp where women were rescued and did not have shelter, they did not have home just pitching the idea of working and having a career for them, they were really scared and they were like, we have never done this. We do not have the confidence. So it just starts right there. The first barrier is meeting them and trying to convince them to come and work and to have a steady life and to have a good life. Cause they go by their past experiences as to what the world has done to them and has and how the world has been to them. So our first battle starts right there, like meeting them and talking to them and convincing them to have a better life.

So after that it’s quite smooth. And then sometimes you get a lot of pressure from the world and people who have gone back to them, they see, they call us up, they try to put roadblocks, but I mean you just got to be strong. It’s a cause. And God is always with the good and they could always win. So yeah, we are not scared. We are not going to worry about it and we’re still going to do what we got to do, and we are going to try and make this world a better place.

Galen Ettlin:
Arzuv – turning to you with that one. We have some questions that we do like to ask everyone on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. And it may be related to what we were just talking about there, but would you say one of the most rebellious or out of the box things that you’ve tried and how did it perform?

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
The HERS initiative that we started, this was a huge thing for me. And then taking the interviews, talking to the great women and then learning about their stories and their struggles, sharing it to the public, to our target audience. And this was the huge thing for me. And this, I guess this was one of the big out of the box things for me.

Galen Ettlin:
Certainly against the grain for what you’re facing.

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
Yeah.

Casey Munck:
So Mannan, what advice do you give to the women that work at HERS or your clients to be more rebellious in their careers?

Mannan Shaikh:
Well one thing that I teach my daughter, my kids and all my employees and all my colleagues is that smart work might make it successful, but hard work in the right direction does make it successful. And identifying that begins from identifying the job that you want to do, the field that you want to go into and the vendors on the client side. The vendors that you choose and how they promote and how much feedback we as vendors give to our clients. So which asset is working? Identifying and being at the right place in the right time and just working hard along with working smart on it. Working hard is really, really, really necessary. Cause it does give you success. You go at it, you go at it, you go at it. My father has always taught me that discipline never fails. Luck might, but the discipline will always keep you going in your you will be successful somebody. Yeah.

Casey Munck:
Absolutely. I’m a big fan of discipline too and structure and putting in the work as you mentioned. And it does pay off. It really does. You don’t have to have an Ivy League degree. If you work really hard and you do the right thing, the universe rewards you. I’ve spent time and time again.
So Arzuv, I know you said that you’re pretty straight lace, but as you know Galen mentioned, just the whole place that you work at is pretty dang rebellious. But how would you say you’re a rebel in your non-work life in any way? Is there any ounce of that?

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
I mean it makes me think a lot actually. But I mean what I would call out to be a rebel in my non-work life would be like whenever I tend to go out and all this stuff, I can easily jam in whatever the vibes they have because for people have always this idea that I’m a very composed and the calm person. But then if I’m outside, if I’m in a public place, if I hear a good music, I can go ahead and then you’re going to start wing into the music and then create that atmosphere and go along with whatever they have.

Casey Munck:
You can be a dancing queen or dancing machine if you want to. I love it.

Galen Ettlin:
All right. Well Mannan, we love asking this question because we get so many interesting answers – from movie characters to authors, to politicians – whoever inspires our guests. For you, what rebel do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Mannan Shaikh:
I get inspired very easily and there’s this human being that I’m really inspired by. So he is actually a rebel. And me being a Muslim, I’d be very open and honest about it. I get a lot of things, I get a lot of comments and a lot of statements, especially about HERS, about religious aspects, about being a man, hiring only women and working towards that cause. And I think rather than rather being critical about it, it should be celebrated more. And me being a rebel is just like, I just do not put my ears over there. I do not put my mind over there and do not put my heart with that. I’m pretty focused on, I know what I’m got to do. And for me that is being rebellious and I’m really happy about it.

And the person who I really admire, Shah Rukh Khan, I don’t know if y’all have heard about him. He an Indian actor and I take inspiration in my life from him cause he came from nothing. I came from nothing. I came from slums. I have really followed him, I’ve really followed his words. I’ve really, I’ve read his books, I’ve followed his life and I really knew that he has to, I have to make it. Also, he has a foundation called the Meer Foundation where he supports women and women empowerment. They support acid attack survivors. Cause in India acid attack was a big thing back in the days and women still struggle with that. They’ve had 30, 40 surgeries. I’ve met such women and hired such women. And yeah, that’s an inspiration, and I think that needs to be celebrated.

Casey Munck:
And now we’re going to have a little bit more fun and we’re going to do ladies first. It’s time for our “honey, I don’t think so” Segment talking about what’s been annoying you lately that needs to stop now in marketing or MarTech, you’ve got 60 seconds to make your case. Are you ready Arzuv for your “honey, I don’t think so?”

Arzuv Nurgeldiyeva:
Would be I guess copy pasting a lot of stuff and information – content. I would love to have more customized and a personalized content towards your target audience so that it’ll cast their attention with some fun. Maybe no need to be so professional. Maybe something more personalized [with research] about your audience, who he or she is doing, what she would be interested in. And then maybe according to those details, to create a content and then work on that.

Casey Munck:
Okay. Mannan, are you ready for your honey? I don’t think so. You’ve got 60 seconds.

Mannan Shaikh:
Absolutely. Yes I am. So think that’s really annoying me lately in the MarTech and the marketing industry is that people really prefer quantity over quality nowadays, be it in lead generation, be it programmatic, cause they just want impression, they just want leads. We are not looking for quality leads. They just want to fill their numbers in. They just want to deliver numbers. They do not want to deliver quality. Whereas the whole the marketing industry is about sales pipeline. You cannot just fill in indeed. You not just fill in information, you can just not run through a call or just put emailers and downloads. Whereas, so where we concentrate is if anybody has downloaded an asset from our client, we do not use that particular contact in the next four to five months. Cause that’s a warm lead to another company. And what today MarTech companies and IT companies will outsource their lead generation to other vendors. They just want quantity. And that’s what the vendors are doing also. The clients are pressuring them about quantity and not quality.

Casey Munck:
Preach. Preach to the people. I’m with you. Well, thank you so both so much for being on the Rebel Instinct today. Y’all are both an inspiration to me and I’m sure the listeners, so keep fighting the good goodbye and let’s stay in touch.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct.

Check out episode 11, featuring Nancy Poznoff. When a man falsely made viral claims that Starbucks was anti-Christmas, the former VP of marketing took quick action to flip the narrative. Poznoff helped lead the charge during the so-called “Red Cup” incident.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 9: Marc Liu

Galen Ettlin — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:14:00 +0000

^{What does it mean to be a rebel? To Marc Liu, it means challenging the status quo, but also knowing when to let someone else take the reins. As chief revenue officer of the startup E-bike company, Civilized Cycle, he has fought through COVID-19 production issues to launch a green product people ACTUALLY want. It’s not a TESLA, but the bike creates an experience riders haven’t felt before}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box. Let’s shake it up everybody. I’m gay Atland with Act-On Software. My co-host today is Bob Garcia, head of product marketing here at Act-On. Good to have you here, Bob. I know you’ve got 30 years of experience in the software, so your experience will definitely lend to this conversation.

Bob Garcia:
Hey all, it’s great to be here. Looking forward to talking with Marc and Galen today.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. And of course, as he just mentioned, our guest today is Marc Liu, Chief Revenue Officer for Civilized Cycles, a sleek e-bike company. Marc also has extensive agency experience spanning the globe, having helped market from major brands like Pizza Hut, Bud Light, Southeast Asia Tourism, and many, many, many, many more. So we’re going to have a lot to talk about, and maybe put your rebel instinct stamp on your passport. Marc, thanks so much for joining us.

Marc Liu:
Thanks for having me. That’s quite the intro.

Bob Garcia:
So Marc, you co-founded an agency Elemental that sold just recently and now you’ve pivoted into working for a really exciting up and coming e-cycle brand. How are you managing that transition from working with multiple brands across multiple verticals to now just being committed to one vertical with one really cool product in an emerging market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, yeah, it is quite the change for me. I founded Elemental and ran it for 13 years, and so that’s a long time to be doing anything. And in the agency world, bouncing back and forth between different brands is a very different experience to being committed and focused on one brand. I will say first and foremost, it’s quite refreshing to be able to put all of my energies into one brand and really kind of dig deep into the details versus kind of bouncing back and forth. So I’m very grateful for that opportunity, a welcome change to the pace of work. And now obviously I am responsible for a lot more things, so I have to live up to the words that I put out there. I think what’s helped me a lot in that transition has been the fact that I’m first and foremost an entrepreneur at heart. And so my area of expertise is sales and marketing, and I’ve done that on the agency side for a very long time. But what I really love to do is solve problems and tell stories. And whether you’re doing that for lots of brands or one brand, fundamentally the approach is the same. You just get to do a little bit more of it when you are inside of the brand. So I’m pretty happy where I am and it’s a nice new challenge for me.

Bob Garcia:
In terms of the category, it seems like it’s so dynamic. There’s so many different types of products coming in to the market and you’re seeing, you’re really leading with creating a very elegant, high-end vibe and you’re being rebellious in how you approach that. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re starting to differentiate in such a crowded, nascent market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, and thanks for the kind words about the bike and what we do. We are trying to do something very different for the e-bike market, which is a very exciting market to be in, especially right now in the US. I think everybody has seen during the pandemic, people started buying bikes, and e-bikes were certainly a huge part of that. And although bike sales have kind of plateaued, E-bike sales continue to remain strong because people have realized what a profound change it can make in their lives. The difference in approach that we bring is there are lots of other great bike brands out there, but by and large the way we approach it is making the best bicycle possible and then putting a motor and adding all of this electrified capability to that basic bicycle platform, which is a tried and tested model.

We are trying to do things a little bit in reverse where we’re trying to figure out what is it that people want to get out of a two-wheel experience that currently they’re only really getting from a car, and how we build that into the two wheel experience into what we can still call an e-bike, but providing car-like features, like amazing ride quality, the ability to transport people, adult passengers and large amounts of cargo. And through solving those problems, getting people who are interested in riding bikes but haven’t pulled the trigger on it yet because there hasn’t been anything in the market for them to come over to this side and really get to experience everything that an e-bike can offer. So we are trying to lead also by design and elegance because at our heart we have a sustainability mission. We want to get people out of cars and onto bikes, but we also want people to look good and feel good when they’re doing it as well. That’s a huge part of it. We saw that that was kind of the model that Tesla had established leading with their Model S and the sports car, making that kind of lifestyle desirable first and then bringing additional kind of mass market products to the consumer.

Galen Ettlin:
For you, you’re the revenue and money guy, how are you balancing that creativity with the KPI you’re measuring?

Marc Liu:
Sure, yeah. I mean revenue and let’s call it creativity or the creative aspects of the business are inseparable, especially since we’re a startup. And so every startup, our big challenge is lack of resources relative newcomer to the market. So we have to go out there and tell our story in a way that immediately makes an impact and differentiates us from the pack. And so we start with the hard KPIs that we know we have to hit in order to survive and thrive and also attract investors. And that kind of gives us the shell or the box within, we have to then deliver. And that’s really where the creativity comes from, is from those constraints knowing that we only have X amount of dollars or X amount of personnel and we have to tell this story to as many people as possible, that drives the creativity. So I think they go hand in hand and one really helps the other.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s an interesting point too. We recently had Jascha Kaykas-Wolff from Linux here, and he said a very similar thing along the lines of – the constraints are what lead to the best creativity. If you’ve got some structure, it really leads to better outcomes when it comes to that creative process. So that’s interesting that you also touched on that.

Bob Garcia:
One of the things I’m wondering about, Marc, is just how COVID has possibly evolved or impacted your approach to going to market with the new brand and such a dynamic market?

Marc Liu:
COVID has obviously impacted our business tremendously, both positively and negatively. So on the positive side, as I previously mentioned, it really spurred the demand for two wheelers as people were staying at home and now working from home more often, that kind of lifestyle becomes much more accessible and attractive. But there were also the negative repercussions of huge supply chain issues. We were actually ready to go to market in January, 2020, and we had pre-orders of the bikes that we were only able to fulfill a few months ago because we physically could not get the product out of Taiwan where we manufacture into the US. That forced us to really take the time and lay the groundwork for when we would be able to go to market. So things like making sure that we had all of our sourcing buttoned up, all of the components, so that when the demand hit we would be able to fulfill rapidly. It forced us to take the time to build the strategic partnerships and alliances that would allow us to quickly go to market, and that has borne a lot of fruit. So we’re an omnichannel brand, we sell direct to consumer, but we also sell through select retailers around the country, and we were able to access all of those retailers through the relationships that we built in our kind of furloughed period during COVID. So that’s how we made the most of the time and it’s helped us hit the ground running.

Galen Ettlin:
All right. So Marc, we’ve got some questions we like to ask all of our guests on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. What’s the most rebellious or out-of-the-box thing you’ve done and how would you say it performed?

Marc Liu:
Oh, that is a very good question. One of the things that has been a blessing in my career is that I’ve entered into markets at the beginning of their growth. And so for example, when we started Elemental, the agency, this was back in 2009, and social media and digital marketing as a whole were really just starting to take off as the primary channels of marketing for brands. We had the same learning curve as the established agencies. They didn’t know more than us and we just had to learn a little bit faster in order to compete with them for clients. And so literally when we started the agency, our initial clients were restaurants. I used to live in New York for about seven years and we acquired those clients by walking up and down Broadway, knocking on doors at restaurants, finding the ones that had the most empty seats and going in saying, looks like you need some customers.

We think that we can help you with website design, social media, maybe some Google ads, some Facebook ads. How about we do this for you for free, and if you make money, hire us and make us your agency. And the next question was usually, what’s an agency? And they’re like, okay, we will help you make money and fill these seats for you. And we did that for the first year just knocking on doors. And in a similar period in the throes of the financial crisis, people were having a really tough time financially, but they were also more open to trying new things because obviously what they were doing up until then was not working. And so I don’t know if you would characterize that as being rebellious, but certainly it was a novel approach to group building an agency, and fortunately for us it worked.

Galen Ettlin:
I’d say that’s rebellious with the door knock. That’s scary. It’s a risk. You never know if someone’s going to yell in your face or say, thank you so much for showing up here.

Marc Liu:
Oh definitely had people yell at us and tell us to leave. That happened more than once.

Bob Garcia:
So what advice would you give to marketers to be more rebellious or creative in their work coming out of that creativity that you use to drive business?

Marc Liu:
Creativity is such an interesting thing because we all know people who seem kind of naturally predisposed to out of the box thinking. And so there’s certainly a part of it that seems like it’s innate that’s born with us, but… I don’t believe that it’s a thing that can’t be taught or at least can’t be nurtured. I firmly believe that all endeavors in life require a certain amount of creativity, especially if you want to get ahead of the competition and there are muscles you can train and work on. My wife is a neuroscientist and she does research on children with autism. So in our household we talk a lot about neuroplasticity and concepts like that, concepts that really kind of fly over my head, but she knows a lot about. But because of that, I get to learn about a lot of these different concepts, including divergent and convergent thinking.

Things that have been very helpful for me. But I would say in terms of a simple approach to rebellious and more creative thinking for marketers is to take a look at what is being done in industries that are not yours or those of your client. And so for example, one of the things that we would often do as kind of a creativity hack for our restaurant clients will be to see, what are people in doing in consumer and fashion and spirits and that sort of thing. There seems to be certain repeated patterns or ways that people market those products and can we take those ideas and apply them to our industry? Can we take them wholesale or can we modify them slightly? And we all get kind of trapped in our familiar patterns and that makes us stale and is the enemy of creativity. So taking that step out and seeing what are people doing in completely different fields and asking yourself, can I make this work in my industry? That’s been a pretty good shortcut to generating some creative ideas for us, and I think it’s something that pretty much anyone can pick up and run with.

Bob Garcia:
That’s super helpful. I mean, it’s inspiring because as we work as a company to differentiate our market, it’s super important for us to not get stuck in our box and really look for inspiration externally and pull those kind of thoughts in to challenge our conventions.

Marc Liu:
That is really the trap of expertise. The better you get at something, the more you have repeated practices or patterns that work, the more tempting it is to just fall back on those because they’ve been successful in the past and that really kind of dulls the blade in terms of creativity. So building in mechanisms within your daily practices or your company’s kind of regular practices to force yourself out of that kind of familiar knowledge, I think is essential.

Bob Garcia:
I couldn’t agree with you more.

Galen Ettlin:
We’ve gotten a lot of interesting answers on this one when we’ve asked other guests this, so Marc, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Marc Liu:
That’s so funny because I think of myself as being a very kind of ordinary, bland, vanilla type person. I have a daughter who’s a year and a half old. Most of my time outside of work is spent with her, and we also have a dog I cook at home. It’s a very domesticated life. I do make sure that I have time for exercise. I’m a lifelong martial artist and I practice jujitsu. I have a black belt and I also practice other martial arts. I also think of myself as being very ambitious, not just kind of financially or professionally, but I think striving to have happiness in all these different aspects of my life, professionally, personally, health, spiritually. For me that’s very ambitious because I find it very difficult. I find it difficult to try to find that balance between all the different areas. Balance is one of the tricky words. There really never is perfect balance, and so you’re constantly juggling these things and negotiating between different parts of your life that are competing for your attention. And so for me, that for me is the height of ambition to really have it all in a way where I can feel satisfied that I’m not missing out on these things that are truly important to me.

Galen Ettlin:
I always love that question because people will often say like, ‘oh, I’m not that rebellious,’ and then be like, ‘oh, I’m actually a black belt’ and I think it’s a great answer. Thank you for indulging.

Bob Garcia:
That is a really great answer, and balance is so important in life because it’s so easy to get sucked into any one direction and pulled out a whack. In terms of culture and rebel rebell in our culture, what characteristics, what type of persona or attributes do we need more of to rebel from the current constraints of our culture?

Marc Liu:
The idea of a rebel is quite an interesting one for me because I didn’t grow up in America, and it definitely has different connotations here than in many other countries because of the history, because of the culture that’s been built on the backs of that history. Rebel is an important characteristics to have because the world is very fluid. None of us know all the answers to everything. Having a healthy questioning of the status quo or what we’re being told and that sort of thing is the way that we collectively solve those problems or at least start to ask the right questions to get to a place where we can solve those problems. The tricky part becomes how do you know when to question things, when to push knowing that you don’t have all the answers? And I think for me it is the confidence to question things really comes down to critical thinking.

Having the ability to honestly break down issues or problems that I’m seeing and know the limitations of my knowledge and then seek out counsel and ask people who I know have been there before, done it before, and whether it’s in business or politics or anything else, just engaging with people who might have a different perspective and a little bit more knowledge than me. By being very frank about that and not being satisfied with my own kind of initial idea of things, I think that’s where I then get the confidence to then question. Okay, what I’m seeing in front of me doesn’t seem quite right. Everybody says that this is the way that things should be done, but things don’t seem to add up, and so maybe we should look a little bit deeper.

Bob Garcia:
So humility and curiosity and the willingness to lean in and challenge convention sounds like great advice for all of us to think more about as we engage with our day.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, I mean you really need both sides of it. You need the humility to understand what you don’t know and to seek out counsel, but you need the confidence to push when you need to push. And again, trying to find that balance is that’s the name of the game.

Galen Ettlin:
Along those lines, Marc, I’m curious for you, is there a rebellious figure either here in this culture or elsewhere that you look up to or that you think is someone worth celebrating?

Marc Liu:
I’ve become a big fan of Andrew Yang and ever since I discovered him during his presidential candidacy, and regardless of whether you agree with his approach or not his politics, you cannot deny that he is promoting a different perspective on what this country needs to be doing to advance and move forward and improve things for the people. He ran as a democratic candidate initially and did not get a ton of support from the party and now has launched his own party, the forward party. So again, there are policies that I think have a lot of merit. There are other approaches that I would need to dig into a little bit further, but by and large, if you’re looking for a rebel within the state of American politics, you don’t have to look very far – pretty rebellious.

Galen Ettlin:
Makes sense. Outside the box, against the grain, however you want to put it, but not the conventional.

Marc Liu:
Exactly.

Galen Ettlin:
Okay. Well Marc, finally here it is. Time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or martex space. You have 60 seconds to make your case.

Marc Liu:
My pet peeve, and I’ve had this for a little bit of time, is the tendency for marketing people, whether it’s marketing agencies or marketing tech companies, to promote this idea that we can track and measure everything and we’ve kind of shot ourselves in the foot because technology improved and we have so access to so much data and analytics. And so we’ve gone out there and told brands clients that everything has a straight line between what you do and the ROI and it’s just not true. There are still huge gaps in the data, but even more than that, fundamentally there are things that we do as marketing and salespeople, not because they have a 10x or 20x return, but just because they’re the right thing to do. And I use the example of restaurants. If you don’t know what the ROI of sweeping the floor is, but you do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. And so especially when it comes down to branding and storytelling, we need to make sure that brands know that those are things that you may not be able to measure but are very important

Galen Ettlin:
Right on time. Maybe one second over, but I’ll give it to you.

Marc Liu:
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

Bob Garcia:
I love the wisdom I’ve picked up this morning. Thank you so much for sharing, Marc.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been a really fun shot.

Galen Ettlin:
All right, Marc, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. We’re going to link to all of your socials in our description here of the podcast episode. So thanks again.

Marc Liu:
Appreciate it.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast episode 8: Ben Kiker

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 12:19:00 +0000

^{With years of executive marketing experience, Ben Kiker says it’s time for professionals to be more authentic to themselves to better succeed in life and work. He shares how personal struggles led him to his success today.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Act-On Software, for all the marketing innovators living outside the box, breaking molds, taking names. Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software. Here again with my VP of marketing, Casey Munck and our guest today, Ben Kiker, with CMO and VP of Marketing experience across the board at places like DocuSign, Jive, Interwoven Siebel, and many more, and he’s now a performance coach helping teams crush their defining moments. He’s a rebel for a living, Casey.

Casey Munck:
Excellent. Well thanks for being here, Ben.

Ben Kiker:
You bet. Happy to be here.

Casey Munck:
Awesome. Well, after all that corporate experience that Galen just rattled off about your amazing resume, you decided to start your own coaching business. So what inspired that shift?

Ben Kiker:
The best way to describe it, Casey, is it was just a calling that I had. It was about eight years ago, and I was in transition from leaving a company in a CMO gig and I’d been interviewing for other CMO gigs and nothing was just grabbing my soul. Nothing was just going, oh, I got to go do that. And I’m from Texas, I was in Texas with my family over the holidays and I felt this internal tug to go coach. It’s one of the things that I always love to do. I have a great background, love, good experience in building and leading high performance teams and folks have always sought me out, both professionally and personally for feedback. And so I came back on January the first of 2015 and literally had a blank sheet of paper and said, I’m going to start my coaching practice. And that’s how it began eight years ago.

Galen Ettlin:
Now you talk about pushing people through those defining moments as I mentioned. What sort of things does that entail? What do you help them with? Just

Ben Kiker:
Helping people and teams enter 2023 with intention. And I’m sure that y’all have spent time thinking about that, both a business perspective, personal perspective, but what are those, I don’t know, three or four, maybe five big rocks that are the big things to go tackle and do in 2023. So definitely that’s a big defining moment. A lot of defining moments during the pandemic around transitions. People were wondering, is it time for me to go? And if I go, what does that look like and where do I go? Other defining moments could be stepping into a big new role and wanting to really maximize your opportunity for success of that role. It also could be, Hey, I’m in a big role and I’m struggling and I need help. Right? Otherwise I’m going to be looking for another role if I don’t get help. And then finally, just strategic decisions that any team faces. I just did a two day offsite with a marketing team, and you all appreciate this. They’re in the middle of their fiscal year. So doing a very quick look back to the first half of the year, but then more importantly going, what do we need to do? What are the adjustments that we need to make going into the back half of the year to really make sure that we crush it?

Casey Munck:
And what about you personally, Ben? What have been some of the defining moments that you said like, this is just not for me. Something has got to change in my life and how I’m doing things, what have you? Can any come to mind for you?

Ben Kiker:
For sure. I think probably one of the big ones for me was realizing that I had a pretty growing and serious substance abuse problem and that it was really getting in the way, in the way of my life on all levels that work at home relationships. And that definitely was a defining moment and being able to take action at that defining moment. So that’s probably the big one that comes to mind as front and center for sure. And look, we all have those, right? I mean, I call them these ‘hitting the wall’ moments and you don’t get to this point here in ‘Earth School’ without having hit the wall at some point over something, whatever that thing is.

Casey Munck:
That’s great. No, it always gets better after you’ve hit the wall, fell down and started to pick yourself back up, things start to make sense so many ways.

Ben Kiker:
And that’s where the work starts, right, is the picking back up. And I always approach it and I encourage other people to approach it as how do you learn and grow, right? Because if I can figure out a way to learn and grow from this experience, then I have an opportunity to help other people learn and go as well. Galen, you were going to jump in?

Galen Ettlin:
No, no, that’s fine. I was just going to say that is a really big one too that you mentioned and one that takes a lot of strength and vulnerability to tackle. And so I just appreciate you sharing that. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that can relate even if they’re not at that same step yet.

Ben Kiker:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.

Galen Ettlin:
Now, we do have some general questions that we’d like to ask our guests on the Rebel Instinct podcast. And so some of them may apply to what you’ve talked about. We can expand upon it as well. What’s the most rebellious thing you’d say or out of the box thing that you’ve tried and how did it perform?

Ben Kiker:
I did hear this question on a couple of other podcasts that y’all recorded that I went and listened to before. Today I’m actually going to go back to something fairly rebellious that I did as a young marketer. So my very first marketing gig, and I didn’t plan, by the way, for going into marketing. It just sort of happened and here I am, but I thought I want to figure out a way to make a career out it. And so I remember talking to my then marketing director saying, Hey, I’d really like to know what do I need to do so that I can get to the role that you have right now? And the answer I got was, it’s going to be really tough. It’s going to be really tough. All of our marketing directors here have an MBA from Stanford or Harvard, and you don’t have an MBA from one of those two schools. And in that moment I thought, screw the marketing director role. I’m going to figure out a way how to become A CMO, and that set me on my path. So I consider that to be fairly rebellious and not taking the answer of, you just need to stay in your swim lane and stay in your box,

Galen Ettlin:
Or you have to go to this school, otherwise you won’t be successful.

Ben Kiker:
Or you have to leave and go to school and then come back and then try again, right? Exit the game, go try to do that and then come back and no, I’m not going to take that path.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, I had a similar background as well coming up with the Harvard kids and the Stanford kids, and I went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but you can get there if you have hustle and heart for sure.

Ben Kiker:
My brother-in-law would love you because he is a big Razorback fan.

Casey Munck:
So nice.

Ben Kiker:
There you go.

Casey Munck:
Excellent. Yeah, we got to call the hogs a couple times a year. So what advice would you give to marketers on being more rebellious in their jobs, Ben?

Ben Kiker:
Whatever amount of time that you’re spending with customers and prospective customers today, take that and multiply that by 10. I’m always surprised at how little, say it a different way, how easy it is for marketers, for all the reasons that you all know, and many of the folks that are listening to this podcast know to get pulled away from the revenue line, to get pulled away from the frontline and just to rebel against all that pulls you away and get close to customers, get close to the market. That’s an incredibly rebellious thing to do. The other thing that I also recommend, and I really wish I would’ve done this early on in my career is find the one hour for yourself every day. That is that magic golden hour for you. When it just flows all of the ideas and the creativity and the magic and all of your strengths come to life in a big way, block that time out in your schedule. And do not let anyone take that time. Do not let anyone take that time. Keep that time and decline more meetings. Five people are all in the same meeting from marketing. At least two or three of them can exit.

Casey Munck:
I completely agree. And yes, so many of us today let other people control our schedules. And so I’m a big proponent of blocking out that time, several chunks throughout the day to do your work to think.

Ben Kiker:
And lemme just add back real quick on that kissing. I love you do that. And that is a practice. I want to be clear. That is absolutely a practice that takes a while to do it, but this is what I remind clients, listen, if you block it out five times a week every day of the week, and you only do it three times a week, that’s still three more times than you were doing it before you blocked it out. So I just want to recognize that the practice of blocking that out, how important it is because it sets the intention for you to actually get it done.

Casey Munck:
How are you rebel in your non-work life?

Ben Kiker:
I’ve always been pretty open and just authentically me. I mean, just talking about, for example, my journey with addiction and then recovery. I came out super early in my career back during the era of don’t ask, don’t tell when a lot of people didn’t do that. And I was very open about my life and who I loved and what I did. And then I also talk a lot about my insane thought generator, that crazy voice in my head that comes up with all kinds of unhelpful stories, none of which are true by the way, and how it really works to keep me out of fluent off my game. So I think just trying to come from a place of just being super open and authentic.

Casey Munck:
Thank you for doing that honestly, because it’s been really awesome to see the trend of the full battle shield come down from leaders and how inspiring that can be to staff to be like, you can have a bad mental health day. You can be open about being in recovery or who you love or what have you. And that’s what makes us all stronger together. I think we tell those stories to one another.

Ben Kiker:
I completely agree. And Brene Brown has this awesome quote about vulnerability. She’s like, it’s the first thing that I want to see in you, and it’s the last thing that I want you to see in me. So when we model that for each other, then it melts that. It makes that a little bit easier.

Galen Ettlin:
And I think living authentically too is really a difficult thing to achieve in your own authentic self because a lot of society discourages that. When we ask, how are you, the answer we want to hear is good. And I think that’s kind of how we’re programmed. It’s not so much like, I’m having a really tough time because of this, or let me tell you about what I’m going through. I think a lot of people will kind of be taken aback by that, but we really do have to retrain ourselves to have the other mindset of let’s step in and be supportive, or let’s give this person that space

Ben Kiker:
Again. I would really challenge you to when somebody goes, how are you doing? Don’t say fine or good. I mean, just really say, you know what? I’m, the dial is set to negative right now. I’m working to turn it to positive, but it’s set to negative. Just really let people know kind of where you are and what’s going on. Because I find when I do that, it generally elicits a more authentic, real response from the other person on what’s going on in their world today.
I love this conversation. God, this is so good!

Galen Ettlin:
That’s the goal!

Ben Kiker:
There you go. Hold on, wait a minute. [DING] There we go!

Galen Ettlin:
We get a dinging from you. [laughs]

Ben Kiker:
My desk bell for good, positive moments.

Casey Munck:
I need one of those. I’m steal that.

Galen Ettlin:
I’m honored that we get to be a part of that moment.

Casey Munck:
Yes same.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, apart from us, what rebel in our culture do you think needs to be celebrated and why?

Ben Kiker:
This is, I think a little people crazy when they listen to this. I am going to acknowledge a Franciscan priest by the name of Richard Rohr, who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation and Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I went to a conference in Albuquerque and heard him speak and he said, and I love this line among many lines. I can’t think of a single Christian religion that has a human view, that has a healthy view on human sexuality. It’s either fear-based, shame-based, or both. And this is from a 70 something person inside of an institution saying, we just don’t do this well, we just don’t do this well. So I’m a huge fan of him and his work around developing one’s spirituality, internal center self, and really enjoy listening to what he does and love to highlight him when I can.

Casey Munck:
He sounds really interesting. I’ll have to look him up after that. He sounds like a true rebel in his space for sure.

Ben Kiker:
He is absolutely rebel long before all of us were around and little rebels in training.

Casey Munck:
Okay, so now Ben, it’s time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment, talking about what’s annoying you in marketing or MarTech lately, that needs to stop right now. You’ve got 60 seconds to plead your case. Galen will be counting you down. We hold this very firm to the time limits. Are you ready, Ben, for your ‘honey, I don’t think so.’

Ben Kiker:
I am ready.

Casey Munck:
Okay, take it away.

Ben Kiker:
Alright, let me start with three words, Elon Musk, Twitter.

Now that we’ve moved beyond that, emails that begin with, ‘Hey, I’m just putting this back to the top of your email in case you may have overlooked it or seen it before.’ I’m done with those emails. Just resend the email to me. I saw it the first time. I ignored it the first time. I’m going to ignore it the second time. I’m done.

Casey Munck:
Honey, I don’t think so with the passive aggressive bubble ups.

Ben Kiker:
I love that passive aggressive. Can we make that a little acronym? PABOs.

Casey Munck:
PABO. Yes, we can. It starts now.

Ben Kiker:
By the way, if you lead the Twitter Elon Musk thing in, I mean, we can end up getting really, there could be a lot of Twitter bots that come after your podcast, so you’ve got that going for

Galen Ettlin:
You. Oh, that’s my dream. I live for this.

Ben Kiker:
That’s what I’m wanting. I’m wanting the people to come after us.

Casey Munck:
I dare you. I dare you. Twitter bots.

Ben Kiker:
If you’re a marketer, it’s got to make you crazy right now because he just is sucking up all of the oxygen in the room, right? So if you’re a marketer, you’re coming up with incredible creative campaigns and ideas and stories and messages, and then Elon goes, I want to do a poll today. And then there goes the world. Okay. I think I’m way beyond 60 seconds with that. But you got me started. You got me started. You asked the question,

Galen Ettlin:
You finished the main thought in the 30 seconds, actually, so I just stopped counting at that point. This is all extra.

Casey Munck:
It is. Well, thank you so much, Ben. You’re such an inspiring person to me, especially with how authentic that you are. I think that’s really, really beautiful. So I just, thanks again for being on the podcast. Thank you. Ben.

Ben Kiker:
Yeah, thank you both.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, if you need some coaching, reach out to Ben. His information will be in the description on this. So yeah, keep on rocking Ben. Thanks so much.

Ben Kiker:
Have a great, great kick ass 2023.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, you too.

Galen Ettlin:
You too. Bye. Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow act on software for updates in upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Marc Liu, chief revenue officer of e-bike company Civilized Cycle.