Episode notes

In this episode, we hear from the authors of a great new book called "The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence." The title probably sounds familiar because it was written by our co-host, Peter Mahoney - along with two other co-authors and Plannuh executives Scott Todaro and Dan Faulkner.

Peter, Dan, and Scott discuss the key points of the book, which is designed to be a guide for marketing executives to help them lead operationally excellent marketing teams. The book should be read by CMOs as well as marketers who are earlier in their careers.

While supplies last, you can get a free copy of the book at the link below:

https://info.plannuh.com/the-next-cmo-a-guide-to-operational-marketing-excellence

Full transcript

Kelsey Krapf 0:00
Welcome to the official podcast of the next cmo hosted by Plannuh. The next cmo is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS or want to become one. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I'm the senior marketing manager and this is the next cmo podcast.

For this week, we have the executive team here at Plannuh - Peter, Dan, and Scott who just so happened to publish a book pretty cool guys if I say so myself. The book is the next cmo a guide to operational marketing excellence. It offers a best practices approach performing your goals, strategy plan and campaigns while optimizing budgetary spending and tracking the new marketing ROI. collectively they have experience running marketing teams from startups through multibillion dollar public companies teaching and mentoring generation To marketers, and now building the platform that codifies our thinking into a scalable SaaS platform. How are you good doing today guys?

Peter Mahoney 1:08
Couldn't be better. That was excellent.

Kelsey Krapf 1:13
Well, let's, let's dive in here. Why did you guys decide to write a book in the first place?

Peter Mahoney 1:18
It was Scott's fault. So this is Peter, for those of you who are following along. And let me just start and tee this up and say that one, this has been an amazing project for us. And Scott and I have been talking about this, this, these concepts that became this company now for years. So we, you've heard the, the, the same before, I think you had a book and you I think we've had this book in us for for a number of years. And what we found in starting to build plan as a company is that there there was a real need out there. As marketing has become more complex, more sophisticated. There's been a real need out there for people to add some some more operational rigor to the way that the marketing function operates. Because it's just hard to manage these days. And we saw an opportunity to take our decades, many decades in some of our cases of experience. And write that down so that we can share it with other people. And that was really the inspiration for the book that I get that right, Scott.

Scott Todaro 2:29
And you nailed it, but thanks for calling us out for being old.

Peter Mahoney 2:32
Well, some of us older than others, but we won't tell too many tales.

Kelsey Krapf 2:39
What do you want? readers see no take away from reading this book, especially in the marketing field.

Peter Mahoney 2:46
So I have my views and I'll ask Scott Dan to weigh in too, because they they take some slightly different perspectives on this. I think I have the right perspective and they have other ones. So they're there. There are a few things I think we're all aligned. In fact, most of the senior marketing execs that I speak to are pretty aligned around the concept that you should build your marketing plans based on a set of strategic goals or a okrs, whatever you use whatever terminology. And you should align your efforts toward that. And in, but the point is that, that that's not enough. Beyond that, you need to make sure that you have a clear system, a framework, a plan, a process to actually make it happen in to make it happen part is really about injecting the operational capability into marketing and operations is this combination of this analytical approach. You need to take sort of a scientific view of the world you need to measure things you need to in an unbiased way you need to assess what you see from these measurements and then make decisions based on data, and you also need to have your entire plan built on financial outcomes, because at the end of the day, you're going to be measured by some series of outcomes that can be distilled down to a set of financials. And if you're adding, contributing to the profitability of your company over time, or improving its its growth or a combination of those things, you're going to have a successful career in your field, your your function is going to work well. And, and, and walking away with an understanding of the system's the processes you need to do to make that happen. So that you can actually achieve your goals is really the most important thing in my mind. What do you think, Scott?

Scott Todaro 4:46
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, you know, because I think, well, first of all, I agree with everything you said. So this is not going to start all that dynamic. But what I'll add is really the human element to this a little bit is that you have a situation where in overtime marketing was pretty much art. Nobody can really justify any of their spend, you know, you just knew that if you shut off the marketing, everything went kind of South and so you had to keep doing it. But, you know, over time, it's really created a friction point between other executives and the head of marketing. And this is primarily why, you know, the head of marketing as the shortest lifespan of anybody in the C suite. So, you know, in order to be able to hopefully you mean career lifespan. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. So, yeah, well, maybe, who knows, maybe we should do some research and see if

Dan Faulkner 5:43
I'm related.

Scott Todaro 5:44
Yeah, this just dropped me take a toll on you. It's maybe your lifespan to is greatly reduced. But, but you know, that the ultimate thing is that you'll be able to validate what you're doing that is making a huge impact is is really critical to the Head of Marketing, because marketing is a very strategic position in many organizations is become much more tactical. And so one of the things that Peter, when he came up with the idea around plan and as we started to build out the book here, it's really that it's trying to help, you know, leaders of marketing, get that voice, understand their marketing at a very detailed level, build plans and be able to make their teams understand the goals they're trying to accomplish, and work towards those goals. Get those goals accomplished, people measure them, so that they're they're seeing the fruits of their labor and can validate that spend, because it's a large discretionary spend. So I don't know if Dan, you may have a different viewpoint on this, but that's where I see from top line.

Dan Faulkner 6:49
Yeah, I mean, what I like about the approach that we took in a book is that by people we will we've tried to close the gap between the very broad agreement about What marketers and CMOS want. They want to do goals based marketing, they want to understand the ROI. And there's very broad based agreement that most marketing organizations can't actually get the outcomes that they want a clear understanding of what have I spent and when am I spending it in the right places? And am I achieving my metrics? And am I achieving the right ROI? So what we're trying to do is give a very practical Reference Guide, kind of a cookbook. So you can go into the kind of any section of the book if there's a particular thing you need to do. And there's likely to be a chapter or a paragraph in there that says, Yeah, when you have problem x, here's the solution.

Peter Mahoney 7:46
Yeah, I think that's a really important point then, and we deliberately called it a guide because we meant for the book to be, hopefully consumed voraciously and quickly And and have people be excited about it. But at the same time, we meant it to be useful as a reference for people to go back to. And it's funny, we all took different roles. And I you know, for for those listeners who may not know us personally, I Hi people, the we should just explain that this is Peter and I'm I'm the CEO and of planner. Scott is the CMO of planet and Scott and I both spent many years as, as chief marketing officers for companies of different sizes. In Dan, the guy with a fancy British accent is our CTO. And so we all take a slightly different view at at the content and I think it's actually been been really helpful for us to look at it, Dan tends to take it take a look at a very data driven, you know, analytical, mathematical kind of approach to things as an example. So we all took Slightly different view into the content. And in hopefully, you'll find that it'll be interesting to see if people recognize who wrote each chapter. Because we each we split up the chapters, we each contributed some things, maybe we'll have a contest after the fact to see if someone can do like a map a chapter to the, to the to the planet executive.

Kelsey Krapf 9:22
One thing that you mentioned too, obviously, it's a guide, but it has examples. It has, you know, templates, it has ways to really set up your campaigns, your strategy, so that you can put this into real time work. And that's something that I love about the book. So you mentioned obviously, you I know you guys are all on the executive team of planner, do you have to be a planner user to take advantage of this book.

Peter Mahoney 9:48
So you know, you don't have to be in fact, one of the things that we did on purpose was, we only use the word planner in the BIOS The author's it's literally nowhere else in the book and and obviously our philosophy in our approach we which we think is you know a well grounded well researched approach to strong operational marketing disciplines is is deeply ingrained in the book and deeply ingrained of course as we build the product so if you want to execute marketing and and have great results, then then a planner can help you do that. But you can also use sticky notes and PowerPoint decks and whatever you want it The point is that it it's about the the framework, the approach the methodologies that are really independent of technology, although we did a podcast with the head of marketing for drift the other day and she had a great thing she said, so you're either a planet customer or a future planet customer anyway, so you know, it all depends on the time, I guess, but No, you don't. To You don't need to be a planet customer to take advantage of the content in the book.

Kelsey Krapf 11:06
You brought up operational marketing and operational marketing excellence is part of the title of the book a little bit of a mouthful, I'ma say, but why is there such a disarray and a need of revamping the term operational marketing?

Scott Todaro 11:23
Well, you know, it's interesting, because I think, you know, marketers tend to get very tactical, and there are a lot of things that funnel into being able to execute a marketing plan. Well, right. So I mean, there's, there's the planning stage in it, it's tying two strategies to it. It's tying your goals in to, you know, with those strategies, and those are the things that, if you've done right up front, will guide you all the way through the tactical execution. And I think we've seen with far too many marketing organizations and we've all been part of And before where people just doing random acts of marketing, right, they, they get there's a problem. There's no leads and Toledo and the next thing you know, you know, we're whipping up campaigns, you know, these are like emails we're sending out, there's no target audience we're going after, there's no thought to what we're ultimately trying to achieve as a marketing organization and those corporate goals that we set. And so, you know, operational marketing is a discipline. It's a discipline and a commitment to achieving a set of goals at the beginning, and then working through the operations to make sure that you have visibility to everything that's going on through your campaigns and being able to measure them, right. And that's really important because you can keep doing stuff, and it's not working and you say, well, we need to do more stuff. And there's just way too many marketing organizations out there and I know Peter and Dan and you guys probably can comment more because we talk to a lot of companies, you know, These days that are just struggling with this, they just, we want to do more. We just don't know how to do it and we're in the flow and we're getting beaten up, forget not having enough leads. And so we jump to whatever that need is, and that's just not going to help you achieve what you really are setting out to do.

Peter Mahoney 13:19
Yeah, I think Scott, the, the point that we wanted to make with the operational side is is related to the fact that I think the future of senior marketing executives will be that that future talent pool will be fuelled with people who have real broad general management kind of experience. And that's one of the things that Dan we make fun of for being the technical guy, but but Dan actually has an MBA in marketing. And he doesn't like to tell people because that that takes away his credibility with CTO Cray, exactly. In and he also spent up as I did, Several, many years, in my case, because I'm old, as as a general manager responsible for, you know, the full p&l of businesses in, in when you take that approach and i think i think i more and more CMOS are going to be responsible for the business outcomes and have to take that that kind of general management approach to to the marketing problem. And I suspect then you've seen that too in your world.

Dan Faulkner 14:30
100% And to me, it's the operational marketing is the skill of converting your goals and your strategy into the outcomes at the end of the plan. It's the bridge from from what you hope is going to happen to what actually happens. And it's, it's a system, it's a full system that requires a combination of skills, you've got to have the execution of the campaigns. You've got to have some financial acumen, you've got to have some data analytical skills, and it just all needs to be drawn together into a coherent model. And I think the analogy with general management is, is right on because if you're the general manager of a business, you have an overall budget, you have an overall strategy, you have an overall set of outcomes, and you've got to apply the capital at your disposal in the most effective way to achieve those outcomes. That's exactly what you should be doing as an operational marketing leader.

Kelsey Krapf 15:35
Love it. And yeah, I think each chapter the book adds value to every part of what a marketer is, I mean, as a marketer, you have to have some some understanding of a financial background. I know you talked about that in your chapter. You have to talk about, you know, the strategy and the goals, but you also have to be extremely tactical as the marketer can't really just focus on one Um, how did you guys, you know, start the process of writing the book and actually dividing up these chapters because I know you did mention that.

Peter Mahoney 16:09
Scott, you should walk through this because this isn't your first rodeo either. We did Moscato, we exactly that our approach was listen to Scott and do whatever he says. So what you might want to expand on that a bit, Scott?

Scott Todaro 16:21
Yeah, I don't think there's anything revolutionary to what we did, we created an outline, right? We started with what we wanted to accomplish, as with a book with a goal, just like you would with any marketing activity you're going to be doing, we started with that goal. We started with a target audience that we wanted to, you know, to write to, and really try to meet what their needs are. We've listed out what we thought the key pain points were. And then we started to put down you know, what we thought the future of our marketing was going to look like based on our experience, and so, you know, once we were able to start to pull in all of the inputs We had created the outline, and then we divided up the chapters and we went at, it's really that simple. So, of course, writing the book wasn't exactly as simple because it's long.

Peter Mahoney 17:12
Well, the advantage that we had, and because it actually didn't take as long as I expected, and in some of that is that one Scott and I have been working on a lot of these concepts. For many years, Dan has been codifying these concepts into product and extending our thinking. So it's not like we had to come up with new stuff, we had to organize and make it coherent, and and get it there. In fact, we should probably do a whole other a whole other podcast on on how to create a book because it really is a fascinating marketing program. You know, it is a thought leadership content program in it and it's very effective, of course, because if you right, genuinely, genuinely thought well researched content that is interesting to your target audience, then I think you're gonna get people to engage with your content, which is what we want to do at the end of the day.

Kelsey Krapf 18:14
Absolutely. And there's a big focus on, you know, finance of this book. And I know I just brought that up a little bit of that chapter, you know, ROI budgets, um, what is the difference between you know, the ROI and cost per outcome.

Dan Faulkner 18:30
So, the, the cost per outcome is essentially, if you've defined a metric like I want a lead, and I'm investing a certain amount of money to get 100 leads, then the cost per outcome is 1% of your budget. That's your target cost per outcome and then your actual cost per outcome is 1%. If you get to 100 leads of everything you really spent. So if you spend 100% of your budget, it will Match the target. And if you didn't, it will be above or below. So your cost per outcome is a good indicator of First of all, digital Targeted Investment yield the expected outcome, and did it yield it at the expected investment level. The our cost per outcome becomes ROI when the marketing team can actually specify a value per outcome. If you can't specify a value per outcome, then you you can only talk in terms of the abstract notion of the metric. So for example, I could say I have a lead. Fine, I can tell you how much you've invested to generate that lead. But if I can say I have a lead and on average that lead is worth 100 bucks. And I know that because when I have 10 leads, I typically get one $1,000 deal out of it. Now I've got a financial value that I can To play out across my metrics, and as soon as I have a financial representation of the return, I already have the investment so I can calculate a true ROI.

Peter Mahoney 20:10
Yeah, I think it's a really important discipline, to have a broad organizational understanding of what a target cost per outcome is for all the kinds of outcomes that matter for you in your company. And it's, it's something that typically you find the senior people in an organization would understand. And in metric driven, focused companies people do I mean, Kelsey tells me every day are we above or below the waterline in in our cost per lead in some of our top of the funnel activities because she's very focused on it, because that's what we talk about all the time. And I think having a discipline for defining what good is in the context of your business is incredibly important as as a marketing executive and I think It's also really important to understand that there are different kinds of value measurements that we talked about here that are important to understand and to differentiate. So cost per outcome i think is is a is a good indicator to say Am I generally on track for what I'm expecting to spend, and I've got in my mind, in a cost per outcome, what the ultimate outcome is in meaning, revenue and ultimately margin contribution. And in that is how I'm going to drive ultimately an ROI but a cost per outcome is a leading indicator to say that, assuming this is going to convert at the rate that I expect things to do, I my target cost per outcome is kind of relevant. The other thing that I think is discussed a lot these days, especially in SAS companies, is is CAC and and I heard someone the other day mentioned they said that Well, I I actually don't talk about about Cost Per outcome cost per lead, we really focus on CAC, and in CAC is a really CAC is your customer acquisition cost. It's a really important metric to understand for for your company. But of course, customer acquisition costs includes not only the programmatic marketing marketing spend, it also includes the labor, so the people in your organization and all their related overhead, but also the selling cost that's required to acquire a new customer. So it's critically important to understand what an appropriate customer acquisition cost is. But some of those things are beyond the control of a marketing organization. So you need to take the piece of that that is most relevant for you. And obviously, you shouldn't be spending more than 100% of your CAC target on acquiring a customer. So understanding the context is important but also understanding the difference between what is a cost per an opportunity How should that relate to your cost for customer acquisition? And how should those things factor into the measurement of your return on investment? Because all all of those things are slightly different measures important to understand, to get a true sense of the effectiveness of your marketing plan and investment.

Dan Faulkner 23:19
I think that's true, but it's also true, Peter, that CAC is an outcome. Yes, requisition is the outcome. It's just you're incorporating more than you're just your marketing program spend. So understanding that the flow of your marketing investments into the Kathy's, as you said, really important to understand absolutely

Peter Mahoney 23:39
a really valid metric is is to say, my marketing cost to acquire a customer is $1,000. And that would be something that is a critically important thing to understand, but don't confuse it with the SAS metric that people look at of customer acquisition cost because That is much more inclusive it it takes into account additional components that are important to understand basically the the over overall likelihood of profitability of your business over time.

Kelsey Krapf 24:18
So, for the ROI chapter in particular, I wanted to talk about this because marketers are constantly trying to tie, you know, any sort of their tactical efforts or campaigns back to the marketing ROI, to really understand, you know, we have these measures now the cost per outcome cost per lead, but what exactly is the revenue that marketing is generating for the business? And I know, this chapter in particular, we talk about, you know, the meaningful metrics and then and one of the other chapters we talked about, you know, qualitative and qualitative, quantitative goals. So, how does this all really tie together?

Dan Faulkner 24:58
So, maybe I can start With speaking to the true ROI, meaningful metrics topic and then and then, you know, we should open up because this is it's hugely important. It's kind of the the it's the end point of your operational marketing processes. What was the return I got for my investment? The notion of a meaningful metric is one that really reflects business value. It's very, very easy to get trapped into measuring what you can because it's easy to measure versus measuring what's really important to your business. And so I have written about did we do it metrics, which of which feel really good? publish the blog recorded the podcast it's like okay, great. Why and and peace Or often will sort of ask the question to why. And you asked that recursively enough, you should end up with a financial outcome. The financial outcome is the meaningful metric. I'm doing thought leadership pieces to make people aware of us so that they might come into the top of our funnel, and then we'll merge into the final, and then end so that they may become a customer. That's the end. And then if you can work your way back from that, you can start to apply financial estimates about what is the average one of these outcomes worth in my marketing funnel? And then you can figure out how much should I therefore be investing to fill the various stages of the funnel. And so that's really what that chapter is all about is saying. Really try and have a discipline up front about identifying the metrics that you can measure that will play into good financial outcomes for your business. That really enable you to calculate ROI. Once you've done that you've got a system that's going to reflect real value and really try and avoid the stuff that's easy, but doesn't really speak to true business value.

Peter Mahoney 27:16
In Dan, I think there are a couple important concepts that we should bring up here that are necessary to understand when you're trying to measure this kind of performance, because ultimately, every marketing leader wants to be able to measure not only the return on investment for their campaigns, but also their entire marketing organization, right? Am I delivering value that is incremental to the investment that you're putting into me as an organization. That's what you should be focused on. There are a couple of things that are really critical to understand when you're doing that. One is that you need to measure ROI at the right level because it's fool's errand to try to to calculate the ROI of an individual podcast as an example. Now that podcast is a tactic that might be part of a broader thematic set of programs that are part of a broad campaign in that campaign is probably the right thing to look at as the the collection of activities in the that are that are in service of a strategic objective and an outcome that you can measure. Now, what what makes it tricky to do and the reason why people are often measuring at the wrong level, is that it's very difficult to measure in most organizations, what the true costs are for a campaign. And because there's no financial system, there's no there's no system of record for campaign costs, and it ends up being a very manual process. So that's, that's one of the things that we try to focus on focus on is make it possible To really accurately measure what their true cost is, for, for a campaign, not only the media spend that may feel obvious, but also any other related things, I buy professional services for an agency, I have production costs, I have lots of other related costs that I need to factor in to the total cost of my campaign, in being able to attribute all as much of those costs as possible to to a campaign is necessary to have a really accurate view of the return on investment. So I think those those are important factors to understand when you talk about ROI.

Scott Todaro 29:38
And just as far as the you know, the goals when you're starting set those goals so you can do the accurate measurement downstream. You know, I think that marketers overcomplicate a lot of the measurement and the goals associated with the work that they're doing. The ultimate thing is that there are three primary goals that you're going to be doing at the beginning of the year. You're going to be Doing something to drive sales. And this is your lead generation, your opportunities, your revenue, you're going to be doing something to create awareness, right. So it'll be your PR activities. It'll be something like a podcast or something along those lines, your social activities. And you'll be doing something to drive perception and those of your branding activities. And so you know, when you start with those fundamental three primary core goals that you're looking to accomplish every year, that's when you can start to start segment them out. And that's when you can start to create strategies that map directly to those goals, and then your campaigns to leverage those strategies to achieve those goals. And downstream as, as Peter talked about, and Dan did, that's when the metrics start to funnel in, you can start to get and get accuracy on exactly where your spend went, and how it actually dovetails into those activities you're doing. And, you know, over time, you know, I think one of the things that we've been trying to think about is, you know, how do we assign Since the measurement is always dollars, how do you assign $1 value to a branding change? What is that metric? How can we look at that and say, well, we make these changes to our brand, we clean it up, we create the perception, we change some of the language reposition, what does that actually mean? $1 value for what we spend to what we're going to get on the other side of it. And that's kind of that holy grail when you can look at everything you're doing in marketing and assign $1 value to it and really see what it's what it's going to do to impact your overarching revenue.

Peter Mahoney 31:33
And in the trick is just measuring at the right level. And by the way, it may sound like Scott is jumping on a pogo stick while he's talking in a true virtual pandemic kind of world recording. He's recording from his basement or something while they're using a nail gun upstairs. Hopefully for not, you know, some ill pursuit, but we don't think so. So, so yes. It in understanding that, in fact, one of the concepts that we talk about a lot is that tries to incorporate a lot of the high level kinds of activities is what we we affectionately call romp, the return on your entire marketing plan. And in that's a really good way to think about it is what what is the, the sum of all the investments in the sum of all of the outcomes? And how do those things relate. And that's a that's at the highest level, a really good way to look at some of those broader initiatives. But you also have to, to Scott's point about making a brand name change, asked the question that Dan brought up a couple of minutes ago to what end, you're going to make a brand name change why you're going to do that because maybe you want two people to think differently about your brand. Why? Because they want to you want to attract a different audience. Who you may be reaching today. And you want to increase the effectiveness of your marketing by making people understand that you're a different kind of or more valuable or more interesting kind of company, etc. So those are the those are the questions that you need to continue to ask to, to sort out why you're making those kinds of investments.

Dan Faulkner 33:22
And there's an interesting side effects and beneficial side effects that comes from doing that, from asking that to what end question about something that can initially feel a bit of theory or like the rebranding question Is it really highlights that the timeframe of your marketing investments doesn't have to line up with the timeframe of your fiscal year. So you you should if you go through that process, well still be able to stay here. I'm doing this rebranding now. It's really going to bring us financial investments, you know, in the next fiscal year, but I've really asked myself to what end to what end to what end. And here's why there's a good financial case to make that investment now. And if you don't do that, if you can't do that it's those long term projects that those very, very top of the tunnel projects that to people outside of marketing who maybe have a say in how much budget you get, starts to feel fuzzy and starts to feel like something that maybe we don't need to do this year.

Peter Mahoney 34:36
Yeah, and Dan, you do a really good job covering that in in part of the book and one of the chapters that you wrote up covering that idea that there there's a lag that goes sometimes beyond your short term planning horizon, between investment and benefit, and it's one of the things that's really important to keep in mind. As for for marketing in general where marketing needs to take a strategic Quick timeframe in mind when they're building their plants because some things take a long time to to build, we were just talking about our SEO investments the other day as an example, you can make an SEO investment, and it might take 912 1824 months for it to really take off and accumulate benefit. So understanding that there's a long lag, or if you're dealing with a complex product that has a lengthy sales cycle, getting something into the pipeline and filling the top of the pipeline, where you may have a 2436 month for a giant thing, sales cycle, it's really important work to do. And if you don't have the discipline, and the diagnostic in mind, and we talk about the end to end marketing system as a piece of that, you know, are you fully servicing each piece of the system in your marketing plan, and that's one of the things that's that's important to take into consideration as you're as you're building out a plan.

Kelsey Krapf 36:02
We have time for one last question here, guys. Peter knows this is my favorite question of all time. And I would like each of you to kind of give your input, but what advice would you give to marketers or, you know, those marketers that want to become CMOS? Someday besides obviously read the book, what advice would you give them?

Peter Mahoney 36:24
Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Todaro 36:27
Well, you know, I think, Well, it depends on where you're coming from. But I would say the, you know, the primary primary advice I would give somebody that was a director level person today is make sure that you learn as many different disciplines and marketing as you possibly can. I think that if you try to do the job, just knowing one discipline, you'll find yourself weak in a lot of the other areas. So if you're a product marketing person, be great to do some lead gen. You may want to get in some partner marketing Want to get into some digital marketing to fully understand the new direction for marketing, you definitely want to do some operations work to fully understand measurements and things along those lines. And once you get a cross section of those different disciplines, you'll be ready to to make that next meet because you'll understand how everything works together. Now, I would also recommend that you go in dabble in sales and you down a little bit in product. So you understand, you know, how the products products are being built and brought to market and then also on the sales side, that your customer you know, really understand what their needs are and feel their pain day in and day out, I can promise you it will make you a much better marketer.

Dan Faulkner 37:46
Pizza should obviously bring us home here so I'll jump in second. Also, I'm trying to give him a very short list of things to talk about. So in addition to Everything that Scott just said, I would say, it's really important to get a baseline kind of level of comfort and acumen in finance, and understand what I mean by that. Because not just I'm good with numbers, I mean, understand what your finance team does with your budget, how they actually account for things. Get to know the people who do it. So you actually have a relationship with them, that's going to make your life tremendously easier. The other thing that I would say, if you want to be a CMO is getting appreciation for the importance of culture and leadership. And you know that that's going to start with culture. But you really have to be proactive about establishing a team culture. And you will know intuitively from people who you've worked with in your career, who's good at it, and who's not And it's worth going and trying, you know, spending some time with those people. Not not just observing them, but spend some time with them to understand what it is that they try and do to engender a successful thing.

Peter Mahoney 39:13
Yep. Great. Great point, Stan. I think the only thing that I'll add to those suggestions is to tell the truth. So I'm a big believer in this. in marketing people are often in this position where they feel like they have to spin and when it comes to being an operational leader, if you're running the function, the most important thing that you do is clearly and effectively communicate the honest outcomes, even if they're bad, because you learn things from bad results. And the best leaders understand when something doesn't work, and instead of saying it worked, okay, or it was pretty good or Look over there. Don't focus On this thing, they say, Hey, I did eight things, six of them worked really well. These two didn't. This is why and this is what we're going to change or we're just not going to do them again. And having that discipline and having the confidence to be able to tell that truth is, I think essential to be a an executive in in marketing or an executive in general in any company.

Kelsey Krapf 40:25
I'm just not promoters. Right. Well, thanks so much. You know, Peter Dunn and Scott, it was so great. How

Peter Mahoney 40:32
do we get the book if we're interested in it?

Kelsey Krapf 40:34
Chelsea podcast? Yes, definitely. I highly suggest everyone listening to the podcast reads this book. You can find the book on the website AT PLANNUH.com or in the show notes below. Make sure to follow the next cmo and plan on how much it cost Kelsey and if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to thenextcmo@plannuh.com Have a great day, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai