Peter: [00:00:00] Hey, Scott. 

Scott: Hey, Peter, how are you?

Peter: good. Good. I'm so excited to talk to you about this topic. The 2022 external planning considerations for CMOs. That sounds very fancy. Doesn't it?

Scott: That it does. And it is an exciting topic. 

Peter: It is you way. You didn't sound very excited 

Scott: no, no, I'm, I'm being, I'm being, it's exciting in a dangerous kind of way. I think.

Peter: It is. And, and you, I know, you know, our listeners may or may not know that I wrote a blog post about this. Back a few weeks ago as we're heading toward the end of 2022. And I think by the time this actually gets published in the, in the world, that'll be sometime in early 20, 22. And we've got a lot of great engagement and feedback on this.

So I thought we'd spend a few minutes chatting about these considerations a little bit more. One of the reasons I wanted to write this blog [00:01:00] originally is that, is that you and I spend a lot of time, of course, thinking about the planning process and planning in general. And one of the things that we both have been advocating a lot is for people to think beyond their introspective four walls and look more broadly at the world to see what's going on because there are great opportunities when you think.

That way. and you can avoid some potential threats. So I tend to think.

that way, and I know you're pretty aligned with that too. 

Scott: All right.

Peter: Yeah, So here's what I'm going to do. I think I'm going to share my screen with you. And if you're, if you're listening to this on a podcast you will see none of this, but picture in your mind's eye. Some of these things, this is just my little cheat sheet along the way so that we can make sure we cover all these topics for 2022.

So in, in the blog, the. The first point, the first consideration for [00:02:00] planning is sort of a big meta point that I wanted to make that the only certainty is uncertainty. And I think we've all experienced that within, within the last couple of years. And it's, it's, a, it's a huge challenge. And, and I know actually, Scott, you, you just did something in our current plan that I thought was really interesting Talk a little bit about kind of the contingency plan and you're building into, into, into our marketing plan for 2022.

Scott: Yeah, it's, it's interesting because, you know scenario planning is an incredibly important thing because of the level of uncertainty. I couldn't agree with you more about the direction that marketing's going in. And I know the blog posts that you wrote. I remember you talking about all of the thrash that's coming up, you know, from a number of different topics, I'm sure we'll cover today.

So you have to be fairly agile. And so when we building our, our plan, you know, we built out a best and worst-case scenario. You know, [00:03:00] where a company that has lots of options we're early stage. So we grow pretty quickly. And so things change pretty quickly. We were adding lots of functionalities to the.

But we also have, you know, investments and, and other dynamics around, you know, potential around the pandemic. And as a result, it just creates a tremendous amount of flux. You know, we still don't know, you know, how certain marketing programs is going to work as far as digital goes. So you need to really start to rank the campaigns that you're going to be doing over the course of the year.

Right. And really start to align those campaigns to the goals. And then as you know, your funding increases, you know, those ranked campaigns, you have, you can add those to your portfolio and start to do more. If things start going in the wrong direction, you have to do budget cuts, then you have them ranked.

So you're still doing the most important campaigns and then the least important campaign to you jettison until things [00:04:00] turn around. And so this gives you the opportunity to clearly look and see exactly where your plans at and have a good understanding of what's going to give you the best result based on historicals.

And you can start to reorder a lot of the campaigns that you're doing based on what you see coming in over the course of the year. What are those metrics that you're tracking and what is that ROI you're getting on each one of those.

Peter: Yeah, And the big meta point that you brought up Scott was that you just need agility in your plan. You need to instrument agility into your plan because. The world is always uncertain. It's in a particularly uncertain place right now. And making sure that there is that ability to be nimble, I think is incredibly important.

So this, the second consideration that I thought we should bring into these plans is, is the idea that the shift to digital no big shock here is, is accelerating. [00:05:00] And in that's been really interesting. And I know a few things that, that we saw. We're one, there was a, as all these people that we saw in our customer base sort of had to fly away from their, their physical events or even direct mail that couldn't go to an office anymore.

So there's a lot of redistribution of funds from physical campaigns into, into digital campaigns. So a lot of budget came in. And in that had some really interesting effects on, on what was going on. So first there was a, a huge amount of incremental competition in the marketplace models, which starts to drive up bids for you know, the, the required bid to, to clear an ad.

So that was an important thing, but I, I think that it's also. Taught people that, wow, you can do a lot with digital in there. A [00:06:00] whole bunch of people out there that weren't still doing a ton with digital. And I think that that continuation of shifting more and more resources into digital was happening anyway, but it just took a big step function.

And I'm sure you've, you've seen that with the people that you talk to. Right. Scott.

Scott: Yeah, there's no doubt. And you know, we, we work with a lot of our customers. Obviously, they're building up these plans and we've seen in their budgets that a lot of the money has been moving towards digital. You know, 'cause there's just no real physical events to do anything. On the B2C side, there's still doing direct mail.

It's just, unfortunately on the B2B side, you know, you don't have that office to send it to and you know, it could be considered a little bit intrusive if you're sending it to their home address. So you know, that's kind of an area that, you know, we, we're starting to see a huge. A huge kind of blocker right now for success.

But digital, I mean, I think that the key thing that you said earlier in this was that the digital channels are getting [00:07:00] clogged and you know, that is, it's a little frightening because if this is the best way to reach people and you know, we have certain scenarios now where privacy is kicking in. And I know we'll probably talk about that more in a minute.

It really puts a lot of stress. On how you approach digital and making sure that you're, you're controlling your costs here, because, you know, if you use any of the digital channels for advertising because that will help you reach those audiences, it can add up pretty quick. And so you have to start looking at things like your cost per outcome, and because it can start to spiral out of control.

The great thing about digital is you also have the ability to bring those costs down by using things like social and email. And you should be thinking about how you balance out advertising with those other channels. And so, but you know, at the end of the day, anything you do in digital is really gonna come down to understanding your target audience and making sure you [00:08:00] have the right message for them.

It doesn't really matter what channel you use. If you connect the right people with the right audience, you know, then you'll be good. Now the question is, are we going to be able to connect with the right audiences? Privacy starts to squeeze us. That's still a little bit unknown right now.

Peter: Yeah. And it's interesting, something that you brought up reminded me of this other issue related to digital, and it's that there's a pretty broad distribution of expertise and comfort with the channel and what. We're advocating, of course is to think more broadly, you want to blend your activities and have a more comprehensive approach to digital, not just blast a hundred percent of things on, you know, a few key words or or some very, you know, some specific targets with specific creative.

You want to think more broadly about it. And, and the people who are going to do really well in this environment are the people who think holistically. They think about broad campaigns and they broadly. Integrate [00:09:00] digital across their activities versus just, you know, slap on a standalone tactical digital effort, which, which isn't really going to give them what they're looking for.

So there's going to be a ton of spend and the people who are providers of digital media in advertising opportunities, you're going to feel pretty good. That being said, I think overall performance in digital may suffer because I don't think people are. Equally adept at taking advantage of the media the right way.

So we'll see. So another major thing that should be totally unshocking to, to everyone is that we all went to virtual and hybrid events, and I think they're here to see. For a bunch of reasons. One is that I think people it out, oh, wait a minute. I don't have to travel to do that thing anymore. Now, some people like to travel, I totally get it.

But it's a pain in the neck. [00:10:00] You reach a more limited audience if you require people to go to some physical space, but there are trade-offs. So if you have a lower. Barrier to entry, then people are making a lower commitment and maybe they're not really going to be president or they're going to drop out or whatever it is, but it's pretty clear that any kind of event strategy has to include in a minimum, a hybrid option.

And in, in many cases should have the ability to, to flip, to purely virtual, to make sure that if there is another spike of, of cases in a pandemic or another pandemic heaven forbid, then then obviously things would shut down pretty quickly. But I think. I think that's going to happen.

You know, you're reasonably quickly. So w w what are you seeing around how people are thinking about hybrid events these days? Scott? 

Scott: Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a lot of new technologies that have come out to really help you with the virtual component [00:11:00] hybrid. I just went to an event recently that had the hybrid going on. So they add a camera shooting on you while you are presenting in a physical environment. I will say the interesting thing about the physical environment is that there are people that are willing to still travel to these.

They just don't wear any masks. So if you're terrified of that phenomenon, you, you will find it very quickly. But that being said, the other thing that there's actually one more component to this is that there are people are starting to record things and making them on demand, right? I mean, we've seen this happen with TV now, Netflix and other things along those lines, people want to watch it in their timeframe.

So what people are doing is recording these events, you know, cause sometimes people can. You know, once the schedule start moving around virtual versus physical, because let's face it. I mean, you still have to have time slots for people to do things they're recording more and more, and then making that available.

And for these companies that are running these events, they're finding that they can still get people. To [00:12:00] pay top dollar and watch it on their own timeframe. So, you know, it's not just about doing it live and, you know, having people there to answer questions, which obviously is an important component of these virtual events.

But you know, we're finding that even recording these things in advance and then just making them on demand is, is something that is attractive to a lot of the people because they can watch it in their own timeframe. Because we know that people get distracted. And if you aren't sitting there in front of your computer, You know, the emails come in from the other parts of the organization.

And we'll usually within five minutes, you're already like dealing with some fire and you're gone from the learning component of that particular event. So yeah, I mean that you're spot on Peter, you know, this, this is going to continue to go in this direction. I think let fewer and fewer people like getting on planes and you know, so you have to have a good solid strategy.

I think the hybrid strategy, if you are getting. Physical events has to be a key component. And that, that is going to drive down your numbers that you're going to get for the physical location. You gotta be. Okay.[00:13:00]

Peter: Yeah.

And just like the digital advertising. We were on a minute ago, it's pretty clear that people need to increase their skills in this area. You were bringing up some more advanced thinking around we're used to content and the way to create great production experiences is really going to matter when you want to attract people in.

So that means you as a marketing leader, need to make sure that your organization is really capable. Of, of producing very high-quality hybrid and virtual experiences that may mean new technologies, you know, platforms like hop in as a great example, or we just had on the podcast a few months ago Adam from surreal events that has a really cool virtual reality-based system.

So really understanding what some of those new platforms are, and then making sure that your event team that may be. A team that's used to producing [00:14:00] physical events. They have to figure out how to rescale to make sure that they can really take advantage of these new kinds of capabilities. So the next topic is about third party cookie tracking limitations and through the updates in iOS and the, the changes going on in Google Chrome, basically what this means is that it is going to become increasingly difficult.

To use third-party cookies to track and in target advertisement. And in my mind, the most important thing as a marketer in this area is, is to find alternative approach. And that, that don't especially leverage this. I think in a lot of cases we, we may have, and I know we've, we've used in our marketing some some retargeting strategies as an example that historically use third-party cookie tracking, but we've gone to things like communities as an example that are sort of another way to get people to come back.

[00:15:00] And re-engage with your brand. W w what other tactics are you seeing? Marketing leaders, employees, Scott, when it comes to. To attracting their audience to come back and re-engage without using a third-party cookie tracking. 

Scott: Well, I'm going to tell you what I'm seeing. I don't know if this is absolutely the right way to do it, but you know, we're, we're seeing that on the B2C side that the marketers are going back to mass marketing. We love that. Right. You know, back to the old days, let's use some TV, let's use some radio.

And we'll spray and somebody in there will like our product. Right. And that's not exactly what we want to see us go back to. That's not ideal. You know, there are other things that you can do for targeting people. And, you know, we, you know, obviously you want to do some direct from time to time and, you know, there's all kinds of ways that you can communicate and get information on people and, and reach out to them directly.

And then there's, you know, the companies out there like revenue base that, you know, can help you [00:16:00] start to segment your audience a little bit better and reach out to them directly, which is great. And then there's, you know, a whole bunch of other things that you can do to create good quality content.

If you, on the B2B side and you have you know, product that is, you know, fairly technical or involved you know, it's great to be able to put out lots of thought leadership content and draw people in There's nothing. There's no substitute for that, right. Because you're giving something of value and we're going to have to go back to the old permission marketing.

I hate to bring that out from like 2001, you know, Seth, Godin's turning over in his grave right now, but you know, but that's what we're going to be at. Right. We're going to have to ask for permission by providing value. To our target audience and we're going to have to make it accessible. So it's easy for them to find.

And, you know, Peter mentioned communities, absolutely critical that you start to build those in and that's not just, and I know a lot of people say, oh, well, that that's primarily used in B2B. You know, these communities are tech, but I'm part of the big green [00:17:00] egg community. And I'll tell you that is suck me in you know, I'm there all the time trying to find out some new BBQ.

You know, if you have good content that's related to it and you can get enthusiasm about what you're doing or connect with pain, the people are having they'll they'll come. And when you, when you, when you win that over, we win them over on that, on that element. Then you off you have earned the right to sell your products to them.

Peter: Yep. Absolutely. So w w we're going to now shift to some factors that may seem a little bit distant from marketing directly, but I think they have a massive impact on us as marketing leaders. So the first one in this area is the great resignation and the great resignation is, is creating some really interesting challenges.

On two sides of the coin, obviously from a, from your customer perspective, your customers are changing all the time faster than ever. And depending on [00:18:00] the segment that you target, some of them are moving even faster. So tech is moving over very quickly. Healthcare is a lot of people, unfortunately are getting burned out in healthcare.

So that's moving very quickly. Financial services is having huge amount of resignation. So there's a ton of turnover, which makes it difficult. The other thing though, that I find really scary is the impact that's going to have on your own internal organization. We all have to plan on losing. A sizeable amount of, of our staff and making sure that we have built the coping mechanisms to make sure that we can deal with that.

And in one of the things that I've been really advocating is making sure that you have just really good. Solid well-documented process. And it seems boring, but it's incredibly important to make sure that you you know, how to do things. So how, how, how do you how do you know what your plan is looking like?

And who's committed to doing [00:19:00] what, making sure that there are there there's a standardized way. And in good knowledge sharing is a really. Critical point in, in this area. I'm not sure if you're, if you have other thoughts on that. Scott's 

Scott: Well, I, I think I, yeah, I think you put in some really good coping mechanisms there. Mine is usually. So it's you know, the, this is a tough one, right? I mean, you, you have to inspire the people that are on your team to stay. And, you know, I think people need to understand that marketers are very transient.

You know, the people that are on your team, a transient, even at the head of marketing last one year, nine months on average. And so if the head of marketing is leaving, he's hired a lot of those people they're going to leave to loyalty is not. Loyalty to companies is not there. So, you know, I think the key thing that organizations need to do, and I, I agree, we have to set aside additional salary, recruiting fees, other things along those lines, if people do decide to leave, but I think we [00:20:00] have to be even more cognizant of what the people on our team want to do and give them an app, give them an opportunity to do that.

Because it's really the work at the end of the day, you salary goes away everything, and then you're just there for eight hours. Cranking out work is the work interesting to you. And so you need to understand the people on your team, you know, pretty intimately, you know, find out what makes them tick and give them access to do work and growth.

That way they don't feel like they have to go somewhere else to grow. And so, you know, and that doesn't cost you anything that is just understood. Putting the time in to understand the individually. And then motivate them and then hopefully the, you know, the money and other things don't come into play, but if they do then, like Peter said, you have to have some contingencies there in order to make that.

Peter: Yeah, that's great. Scott. And interestingly, we have seen a lot of this at plana and Scott's done a great job in helping his, his team. Find really [00:21:00] interesting ways to grow their careers, whether it's going from a BDR job to a marketing job or a customer success job, or a marketing job to broader a different responsibility.

And, and I think really acknowledging that that generically there's this. There's this increased turbulence in employment. That's going on in, especially if you hire people who are in the earlier stages of their careers. I think it's really important for them to, to see that. mobility. And, and one of the things that I love about this generation is they want impact.

They want to actually do things that are meaningful and, and that's, that's one of the superpowers of, of the upcoming generation. That is, is pretty amazing. So you have to figure out ways to satisfy that, to help them stay on. But super important too, to consider in your, in your planning is, [00:22:00] is the idea that a higher than expected voluntary turnover is just absolutely going to happen in, in this coming year in expect to see that continue in just because the whole idea of this next topic, virtual workforces is now permanent.

And another thing just like virtual events are permanent. Virtual workforces are permanent, and this is one of the things that's really leading into and contributing to this idea of the great resignation, because now all of a sudden, you know, if, if I'm in, you know, small-town USA, and there are three companies there, all of a sudden there are a million places I can go because I have a good internet connection can work.

And in that's really contributing to the mobility that's going on, but virtual workforces really is making a, we have to really factor that into the way that we think about our marketing. Again, from the both perspectives from the internal side and from the external side [00:23:00] externally, you, it makes planning different all of a sudden, so that the whole idea that I'm going to have a regional seminar series based on where my customers are.

That may be the mailbox where the headquarters. But the real decision-makers, who knows where they are these days, they don't, they're not even in a fixed address in a lot of cases where they may be going from Airbnb to VRVO to whatever for a month at a time. So you can't really rely on, on that proximity anymore.

Even time zone, you don't know where people are. And then the same thing internally. Where you have to be able to deal with the fact that your, your team and you just need to make sure you have really solid virtual collaboration tools built into the way that you operate because you can't huddle around a conference room anymore in expect to do that.

It's just not going to be a thing for, for the foreseeable future. Or do [00:24:00] you think we'll ever go back Scott to the same way? 

Scott: Never, I, I don't think it ever will. And it's funny if you're on the sales side, you know, they've been working virtually for years and they're like, what's the big deal? Why are you marketers complaining about all this stuff? But you know, the reality is that marketers have to work together. It's a very collaborative job.

It's just kind of the way it is. And this is, you know, you brought up planning, Peter, and I think this is absolutely critical. You know, when we start talking about creating a plan and communicating that plan, You know, when you're sitting right next to somebody, it, you know, it kind of happens by osmosis when you're not in front of people.

It just doesn't happen. People don't look back at the planets in a PowerPoint deck, it's in a spreadsheet somewhere, and people not looking at it day in, day out. They're not looking at their goals. They're not referring to their goals. They're not collaborating on campaigns the way they used to everything slows down.

And so you need to figure out ways to aggregate this and build processing so that you're [00:25:00] always evaluating your goals. You're always looking at your campaigns. You're able to collaborate on those campaigns as a team and do it virtually. And if you can't do that, then I think you're going to find yourself in a world of hurt.

Even budgeting is absolutely a critical component of having visibility. You know? Cause as people are starting to utilize. You need to see where the spend is gone. You're going to need to be able to reallocate that and you need to do it in a collaborative fashion because you may want to move that to other marketing functions or other campaigns.

And it goes back to that agility that we talked about at the beginning, you know, if you don't have processes in place and B to be able to do this as you keep getting these hits over the course of the year, you're going to find yourself doing a bunch of busy work marketing and not really focused on really the goals of the company and achieve.

Peter: Absolutely. And that alignment to the key objectives and making sure you're tracking along the plan is something you're right. It, that comes from you feel it when you're in [00:26:00] the office and working with people and you can see their stress level or otherwise. And you don't really. See that the same way. So it's really heightening the need to make sure that there's better alignment with with the plan and making sure that people are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing to drive the outcomes you need.

So there, there, there are a couple other things here that I'll hit on pretty quickly, just because I think they, they may not impact everyone, but there are some surprising ways that. They may one is the idea of supply chain in certainties. I think they're just going to continue for all the reasons that we just went through because people are now living in different places and working differently.

I think the, the global supply chain has not yet learned this new set of behaviors. And when you put on, on top of that, a whole bunch of sort of spikes of needs for different kinds of products that, that need to get certain places. And people who are going to be dealing with shorter and shorter timeframes, because they're not sure [00:27:00] if an event's going to happen and they need to ship a booth somewhere, or they need to get more promotional things or you sell physical goods and you need to be able to get them to certain retail outlets.

It's just going to be a big factor for for people I think for, for a while. I think that is something that ultimately. There's a lot of really interesting technology going on in supply chain optimization, which is probably meant for a different podcast. But I suspect that this will settle down over time.

So that area, that the next one is about inflation and financial uncertainty. And I think, I just think we're going to be in an uncertain world right now because of everything that is. Is going on there's you know, everything from political unrest around the globe to to, you know, the, an unknown impacts of the pandemic in the short.

And long-term, I think we just have to have to plan for, for that in that. That if certainly inflation is something we should expect is going to happen. [00:28:00] And in that matters for marketers, because that may mean you want, you may want to think about securing and contracting things as early as you can, to make sure that you can lock in prices because.

Inflation of packs, all sorts of different things. That means you need to have a plan and good visibility in sort of mixing that with agility to make sure that, Hey, I can do things in a long-term and advance at the same time. I need to, with the ability to change that, that's just going to be an important ethic for, for people that, that we're going to continue to see. 

Scott: no, no, no doubt about that. And, and, you know, your marketing dollar just, isn't going to go as far, you just have, you've got to accept the fact that, you know, it's going to, the things you buy are gonna take awhile. You know, you buy those promotional items. They're going to take probably an extra two weeks to get to you.

You know, these are the types of things that slow down marketing teams and you know, it really creates a lot of errors. So you need to start plan effectively. And start looking at ways to alert yourself [00:29:00] to starting these things in advance. So you don't have to pay late fees on top of all of the other additional costs that are going to them.

They're going to Jack up over time. It's going to be a frustrating situation, you know, as to how far your budget dollar will go. And you really have to look at a lot of optimization from the.

Peter: it's interesting Scott, because we were talking earlier about digital and more competition. That's another factor too. So they're all these things that are going to drive. the.

cost per outcome and cost per outcome. We mean like what's the cost for a lead or an opportunity or a new customer or whatever that is.

And we're going to have to expect that if you don't do anything differently, that's going to go. Now, there are ways of course, to focus and optimize, to try to get some improvement, but I'd expect that without intervention, your cost per X is for whatever your marketing outcome that you're optimizing for is absolutely going to go up, which brings [00:30:00] us to my wordiest topic.

And I think one of the, the other broader points is that we're going to see increased expectations on the CMO, by the way for financial accountability and operational rigor across the whole marketing function. But especially. With leadership in marketing. And, and we've seen this more and more. And Scott and I of course work with lots of marketers and lots of financial executives and corporate executives who are sort of working on operational improvements.

So we see this a lot, but we're seeing more and more and more a drive for accountability in the way this comes out is in asking people for. Things like what, what is the return on that investment that you're asking to make? And and you know, what why are we doing these things you're telling me to do?

Does it, does it actually make business sense? How does it impact the bottom line? And, and I'd expect that. That this is going to [00:31:00] continue to to, to tighten. And, and I know this is something that's been near and dear to your heart for many years, Scott is just getting better financial IQ for for marketers.

But I, I, I suspect that you see this continuing for for the longterm too, right? 

Scott: Yeah. I'm actually gonna flip the script on this one, Peter, because you know, usually you're the positive one and I'm bringing the. I think you started with the fear. I'm going to flip the script on this and talk about the positive of doing this. You know, how would you like to have a wonderful relationship with your CFO and CEO?

Right? How would you like to be able to speak the same language that they're speaking? And we are, as marketers have been failing over and over again to, you know, to report on the right things, you know, we're still stuck in leads or maybe we're getting to opportunities. Maybe we're reporting on rev. But we're not really speaking the language because of the CFO and the CFO, because they're kind of thinking about, well, I gave you money now, [00:32:00] what did I get back for it?

There look always looking for return on investment. So you bring that point up. But if you get it, if you're able to show return on investment, you know, and you can go to that CFO and say, this is what we got. We've got five X on this particular campaign. I can guarantee you that CFO's going to write you a bigger.

Because what type of CFO doesn't take a bet like that, right? That's what they're looking for. They're looking for certainty and that you'll, then you'll start having this great relationship with these audiences. Right now, I saw a stat about a year ago, only 24% of CEOs trust their CMO 24%. I mean, that is a frightening stat.

So if you can talk the language of business with the rest of the organization, the rest of the executives, You're going to find yourself moving to the head of the table, because what you're doing, you can actually put your finger on what that return is. So the point you brought up, Peter are spot on, but [00:33:00] think of it, not only as a pain reliever, but think of it as a liberator for yourself.

If you go to that level of measurement and truly understand what your spend is actually delivering for the organism.

Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because this topic inspired of course one of the new chapters in our second edition of our book, which is about how to present marketing results to your CEO or your board. And, and it's really interesting having been in the position, Scott and I have both seen lots and lots and lots of Of executive and board presentations of marketing material.

And it often is communicated in sort of marketing gobbledygook. That does not really clearly understood by the, the senior leadership, if, if they're more financial or operational or product or sales related, they may not understand all the detail. And it really is up to the marketing the marketing executive to make sure that they can connect those dots and make sure it's [00:34:00] clear what they're actually what they mean.

What, what is the actual financial. Business benefit to the marketing activity and you should absolutely be able to connect anything that you do to some point on the P and L. And if you can't, you should really question why you're doing it is, is, is the big thing. And that kind of brings us to the last part, which is the, the, this last external consideration is, is that ultimately we're going to see the digitization of marketing leadership.

So marketing leadership is the, the, the process of leading and running and optimizing a marketing function. Is is done with rocks and sticks today. It's, it's pretty amazing. And obviously we may be a little bit biased here, but we think that there's a move of foot as we've seen, I mean, we've seen huge growth in our business and a lot of it is coming from that the drive to actually digitize and automate the marketing [00:35:00] leader.

Function because it's just been done in, in too manual of a way. And if you need to adapt the way that you have to adapt to live in in, in 2022 and beyond you, you need to have some kind of more agile marketing capability that requires digitization versus. Chiseling all of your things and stone tablets, which is probably not a long-term strategy.

So I, I think we're running up to the end of our time, Scott, in, in one of the questions that is, you know, because you're a regular listener to the podcast. You know, we ask people that I'll turn the tables and ask you about this time is that, what advice would you give to current or aspiring CMS? 

Scott: Yeah, I, the key thing that, that I always try to convey to CMOs is please, for the love of God, do not focus all of your time and [00:36:00] energy just on doing really demand generation. My biggest concern right now is that a lot of marketers have been pushed in the direction. That they need to create leads.

They get bullied by the sales team. And as a result of it, they scramble the jets to try to, you know, get leads, but they don't really understand the business. And so any of you that are taking a new job, or even if you're in the middle of a new job or you're getting ready to plan for next year, please think about the business as a whole, start with your company goals, build your market clear marketing goals to achieve those company goals, because you're going to have responsible.

For a good number of them and then make sure that you build a solid plan and get your team rallied around the plan to execute it and be thinking about your plan holistically, starting with the target audiences and how you're going to communicate with them. We can, we, if for those of you that are doing channel-based activities, you're gonna need to stop because [00:37:00] you're not really thinking about driving the business.

You don't fully understand. Your target audience and the marketers are moving further and further away from understanding those target audiences. And it's, it's scary, to be honest with you, marketers are getting too much feedback from the sales team. You need to do your own analysis and your own research to truly understand the buyer.

And if you understand the buyer and you build a plan around that buyer to achieve your goals and you're measuring them, and you're being honest with you. We don't. I mean, we do a lot of activity and we sit there and we want to justify it by single well look, I created all these leads. I did my job. No, you didn't.

Right. You need to really look at it at a deeper level. What was that return that I got as a result of it and you know what it's okay. If your programs don't always have. A good return. It's okay. You can go back at any given time and change your plan and [00:38:00] modify based on your learnings and you know what?

You're going to have more credibility with the executive team. If you say, Hey, look, we ran these 10 campaigns, we got great returns. We ran these five, they didn't, and we're not going to do them again. Right. It's okay. But now, you know, you know what that return is and you're going to make better decisions in the.

Don't be afraid if your marketing isn't performing, it'll force you to think through things more deeply, but you know, don't jump into just trying to generate a bunch of leads and focus on channels and then try to back solve it with your target audience and throw some messaging in. It's just not going to get you where you need to go.

So think about that, starting with your goals.

Peter: I had a feeling you might have some thoughts for to share with with people's Scots. So Thank you for, for that as usual, I know that you spend a lot of time coaching CMOs and and so that advice is fantastic. Well, I really appreciated you being here as my special guest on this special [00:39:00] episode of the next CMO podcast, it's been a lot of fun.

And I look forward to having.

a fantastic 20, 22 with all this great context that we have now, as we think about not only our plan, but operationalizing it and refining it as we get going along. And, and with that if you if you have ideas in the audience for topics you'd like us to cover in the future please let us know, just send us a note@thenextcmoatplanet.com and make sure you check out our next CMO community.

We'll put a link in the show description so you can join it. There there's been some really great discussion we've had there. We've invited some people on the podcast from people we met in that community. So really great community of current and aspiring CMOs. And thanks again for listening and have a great. 

Scott: Thank you, Peter.