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Episode Summary

TheNextCMO’s latest podcast is with Rachael Champagne and Frank Days. Rachael is the Marketing Campaign Manager and Frank is the Senior VP of Marketing at EnterpriseDB. Rachael has been with EnterpriseDB for 2 years working in ABM, demand gen, and events. Frank joined the company leading product marketing and now heads the entire marketing department. 

Rachael and Frank joined us to talk about transitioning their annual physical user conference Postgresvision to a virtual event due to the changing market conditions. In this episode we cover the massive undertaking of shifting a physical event to virtual, the pros/cons of a digital event, advice to marketers who are going through these changes, and some potential roadblocks you may come across and how to navigate through them.  Frank and Rachael leveraged Intrado’s virtual event solution and have been very happy with the tools and support leading up to the event.

EnterpriseDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com/

Postgresvision 2020 - https://www.postgresvision.com/

Intrado Virtual Events: https://www.inxpo.com/virtual-events/

Rachael Champagne - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachaelchampagne/

Frank Days - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tangyslice/

Transcript

Kelsey Krapf 0:10
Welcome to the official podcast of The Next CMO hosted by Plannuh. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I am the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:20
And I'm Peter Mahoney. I'm the founder and CEO of planner.

Kelsey Krapf 0:24
For this week we have Rachel Champagne and Frank Days as our guests. Rachel is the marketing campaign manager and Frank is the Senior VP of Marketing at enterprise. Happy to have you guys on board.

Frank Days 0:36
Thanks for having me here.

Peter Mahoney 0:38
Yeah, welcome, guys. And this by the way, this conversation was inspired by a great discussion that I had with Rachel and Frank on a part of a marketing networking group we call any excuse that brings together a whole bunch of marketing execs around the Massachusetts area and they talked about a Interesting thing they just went through where they had to transition their their physical user conference, which is a big Keystone event for them for enterprise DB to to a virtual one with everything going on with limited travel with pandemic going on at this point. And they responded amazingly, we learned a ton from that discussion. So I thought it'd be great to have Frank and Rachel, come on board and talk about their experience and a little bit more detail. So that's, that's what we decided to do. So maybe the start, it would be helpful. Frank and Rachel, let's, let's ladies first, Rachel, give me a little bit of a sense of what you do with enterprise DB and just a little bit about your background.

Rachael Champagne 1:44
Yeah, for sure. Sounds good. Um, I've actually been with enterprise DB for a little over two years now, working both on events and on demand generation and ABM Pacific campaigns. But really, within the last year, I've transitioned predominantly out of event and into purely demand Gen, with the exception of helping produce our annual conference, Postgres vision. I worked actually in print direct mail at vistaprint for a few years prior to this, and then a smaller healthcare IQ startup after graduating from Bentley University in 2013. with a degree in marketing,

Peter Mahoney 2:20
great, excellent. Well, welcome again in in Frank, you know, you don't have to start from birth. But and I know you've been you've been around like me for a little while, but give us a sense of, of what what you've been up to for the last several decades.

Frank Days 2:36
Yeah, no problem. And I lead the marketing team at enterprise dB, and it's been two and a half years ago that I joined the company. I joke with people I started really as an individual contributor leading the product Mart, what was what was all of product marketing and then over the past two years, kind of slowly picked up a little bit of responsibility here, a little bit of responsibility there. The cmo departed and then over the last year So kind of picked up the rest of the marketing team. We are, again a global team. We've got 18 people scattered across Europe as well as a handful of people in the Asia Pacific region. So I was on the phone last night at 10 o'clock and then this morning at 7am all the hazards of working with a global team. Prior to joining the team at EDB, I was with a series of venture funded software companies a couple of small assets after a couple small exits and one running last one running out of capital kind of realized I wanted to look at something a little bit bigger and a little bit different ship size and shape. Being in a private equity owned company was a different adventure. We went through a transaction a year ago which was kind of nice for the company got sold to one group of private equity firms to another I still need to work so can tells you how that worked out for me but it's been a great overall a great opportunity and an excellent team and I've been lucky really. Rachel joined the team a little bit after I did in the in a different part of marketing and we've all kind of got the band together over last summer and kind of merged it all together. And it's been pretty awesome to kind of put together a team out in the suburbs, which I think rivals most of the kind of cool hip teams that my friends have been people in the city. We've been pretty fortunate that way.

That's kind of that's gives you a quick snapshot what we're up to great.

Unknown Speaker 4:18
Yeah, what, um, what does enterprise

Frank Days 4:19
DB do? Sure. So we are a company that's focused on a an open source database called Postgres. And our business is about, we sell software, professional services and technical support for people who are using this open source database are kind of positioning is that we help companies get more out of Postgres. And we don't we while we are a software company, and we do license and advanced version of the product where we add some enterprise class enhancements to it. The core thing is, again, it's since it's an open source, open core product. Many people including enterprise DB contribute to it. So there we have a number of competitors, including some of the Large tech companies like Microsoft and, and AWS that are a part of the project and we collaborate our business we've got 375 people worldwide. And it's a it's a growing business this past year, we grew over 50%. year over year and key. Wow, that's great. And it's, you know, still a strong business. You know, I think that, despite, you know, going off on a quick tangent, I mean, despite all the challenges, the pandemic pandemic that everyone's facing, our business still continues to be strong knock on wood, and we're enthusiastic about the future.

Peter Mahoney 5:33
Yeah. And obviously, being in the world of open source, open source is all about community. And in so I imagine that this is a pretty important kind of kind of event for you guys.

Frank Days 5:45
Yeah, and for us, historically, this is our fifth year doing it. And you know, I joined the company in 2017. So this would be the third one I've been involved with. And it's been it's always been a challenge because to be honest with you, it's been an event where we Last year was the biggest year ever, but we got to 350 people. So, on the one hand, we did it as a very did it as a very detailed, a very high, high end, high touch, you know, really we spent a lot of money on the event. It's not a breakeven endeavor, you know, but it's true. It's while it's a open source, community oriented event, it plays a little bit more like our enterprise DB customer user conference.

Peter Mahoney 6:27
Yeah. And I'd imagine event of the scale because maybe not everyone who's listening understands what goes into this, but I imagine this is probably a seven figure kind of gross investment to produce something of this scale, right?

Frank Days 6:42
Not quite that high. But But you know, approaching

Peter Mahoney 6:45
it feels like it though to the to the participants, right.

Frank Days 6:49
And you know, it there's real business benefits in doing this kind of conference because they're obviously you have your customer base that comes back and participates and we do a lot of you know, ask the experts meet the experts meet the pros. We The key contributors to the open source project is a lot of press in the flesh and meeting people and meeting the famous people in person. But then there's also a lot of thing that I kind of underestimate is how many prospective customers came to the conference to figure out where we for real, we had a number of people who became customers. And when I look at my attribution model, this event is of all the events that we've historically done is one of the only ones that had a strongly positive ROI, like two to $3 of new AR attributed for every dollar spent on the companies. So it's been it's a no doubter for us and, you know, our CEO, it's a no doubter for him because he I think he feels like he really wanted it as something were positioning it as an opportunity for us to represent maybe look a little bit bigger than we are and to in to do that. So. You know, when people walk into the room and it's lit up, like Fenway Park and his writing is like loud, blaring rock and roll music coming in. Yeah, just really provides a feeling to your customer base and to prospective customers that you're really looking for.

Rachael Champagne 8:05
Really, the intimacy kind of event makes people feel important as Frank reference, like meeting experts and things like that people come to the event and no, it's not as big as a Microsoft or an Amazon event. But what they do get the opportunity to do is to meet with some of the key contributors of PostgreSQL, Bruce, Mangia. And they've paid Robert Haas are our big names that these people know they're like the celebrities of the open source world, and they get to sit down and talk one on one with with them. And that's something that our conference offers, but I don't think is necessarily present at a lot of the larger scale conferences.

Peter Mahoney 8:43
Well, that's great. So they get to rub elbows with sort of the star power in in the enterprise, open source database world in Postgres world, which is which is exciting. And just to give us a little bit of census, that is a multi day event, typically that you do, right Single Day. Does that work?

Rachael Champagne 9:01
Yep, it is a multi day event. We've always started it with a training day, which is on the Monday, it's only to about 50 people. People can sign up for that in advance. But But the main conference is usually the Tuesday, Wednesday, full days of keynotes and lightning talk breakout session networking event panels. So it's a full two days.

Peter Mahoney 9:26
So this is a big thing. And I think a lot of us have been faced in the marketing world with rejiggering our plans and canceling events here and in there, but it's often you know, a little customer seminar or something like this. This is a huge undertaking. So I imagine that a couple of things one, how long in advance did you have to deal with this? And then what were some of the things that you needed to consider when you went from a relatively short period of time from planning a pretty big imperson, multi day event to converting it to something that was digital.

Rachael Champagne 10:06
Yeah, we had to pivot pretty quickly. The good thing is, I started reaching out to platforms, as soon as we were kind of sitting down to, like write this, or there's a pretty good possibility that that this event may not be able to happen in person. So started reaching out to some platform. And and one of their questions was, what's your event? And when I said, you know, June 22, to 24th, they were like, Oh, that's awesome. How much time they were, they were like, this is a dream for us, because they're getting people that are coming to like our events and to our events in a month. And so thankfully, we have the time to pivot. It was kind of a process as well. I mean, we committed to using a hotel in downtown Boston, and we signed a contract. So it gotten to two that we were working on, you know, scheduling different parties and all these things that we had big ideas for, for our in person conference. So it really took kind of a pivot And then once the decision was officially made, the contract was signed with the platform. It was kind of all hands on deck. Let's, let's go and all the app promotion we've done before. We hadn't done a ton, but we've done some, we've had to kind of make sure that we were letting everyone, all of our databases globally know that, you know, we are still having our conference that is still going to be on the same date, but we're taking it virtual.

Peter Mahoney 11:24
Yeah. And give us a sense for Frank or Rachel, that sort of the you talk about these platforms, what what are the what type of platform are you're dealing with, when you're when you're trying to host an event like this, I assume it's not just sign up for FaceTime or zoom and go. It's it's something that's much more sophisticated.

Frank Days 11:43
It really varies in terms of what you're looking for. And you could do it. I've seen it, you've seen examples, and we were evaluating where people would build their own web page and kind of put up all the content of it. We picked apart form when it comes to content tronto which is is as you would imagine, It's a trade show trade show in a browser, basically. And it's got. And I joke with Rachel about this, like every time we ask them a question, how do you do birds of a feather? How do you do lightning talk? How do you would ask him all these things that you do in the real world? And he answered pretty much every question right? Me. Who's free, it was incredible. So I give them a ton of credit. And they've been very consultative, and they really are on top of all the details. So the point that Rachel was making is they were, they were like, thrilled. And we told them we had we started this, I think in late February, it became pretty apparent that we were going to be in a bad way. In terms of the timing and I, as I think I mentioned to you, Peter, last time, we talked, we didn't we don't have a choice. This year, we had to do this event, we're doing a rebrand and we're doing launching a couple of new products. So we had, I had a new website, we have a few I have a couple of forcing functions of things that my board is expecting us to deliver upon. And you know, that's why we were kind of like, Okay, this is going to happen no matter what. So we were all in And we were lucky when we shopped around at these platforms that, you know, the other part of it was very interesting. And Rachel was just trying to get people on the phone with some of these companies. And they're all getting bombed, I think I think they're all getting crushed with the flow of everyone trying to do what we did. So

Kelsey Krapf 13:18
yeah, with that being said, you know, with all the changes you had to make from in person to digital, did you change the pricing for, you know, these users and sponsors that are taking a massive hit from this?

Rachael Champagne 13:31
Yeah, we did. We actually were offering the conference to users completely free. So that's a that's going to be a driver that we think we're really excited to do, because there's no, there's no, there's no reason why these people shouldn't sign up. If they have any interest in participating in any of the sessions. It's free, they can come join us at any point throughout the conference. And on top of that, the amount of registrants that we're going to be seeing For our free virtual conference where you don't have to travel anywhere, or you know, stay at a hotel or anything like that, versus paying 300 or 400 or $500 plus travel and committing to being in Boston for a couple days, we're expecting a huge jump in registrants and attendees. And from a sponsor standpoint, we kind of looked around we looked at got asked in Toronto for some different samples of sponsorship prospectuses that they've seen from companies they've worked with, and tried to find a middle ground route looking to, to charge sponsors an arm and a leg for this, it is great visibility, but they are still a little hesitant and we assumed they would be. So we really did cut our sponsorship fees by about 60 to 70% for our three levels.

Peter Mahoney 14:50
Yeah, but you're giving them a ton of value. Right, Frank? I mean, you've got it sounds like Yeah, you've got a much bigger audience, which is great for your brand launch. You're talking about And I assume you can do some pretty cool immersive stuff for sponsors too. So it seems like it's probably a pretty good deal for them.

Frank Days 15:07
It's an interesting, you know, it's still we still be salad. I mean, look, we had a handful of sponsors, who are we had one top level sponsor was about to hit the check for a lot of money. And we, you know, he was about to sign the contract, and we told him not to, and they held it now we're trying to reach you know, we've got to resell the value. In retrospect, maybe we should, you know, maybe my honesty, my honest approach is, is was not to my advantage, but we basically resell it, we have to resell the value a little bit with that, but unfortunately, that's an important partner of ours and they're not going away. It's just trying to sell them on the top sponsorship then rather than maybe a different but, yeah, it's a different thing. And you had to, you know, reach out. I got, we had one person who sent us a contract and they signed for, you know, I think it was a 10 grand one. And they're getting on the phone with him tomorrow morning to kind of reach salad in their irony is that there was a bit of a swap with someone else's doing a conference and they took their slides as well. So we may compare notes with them and kind of figure out what's, what we can learn from it. So,

Peter Mahoney 16:10
but that's great. So and I think you're doing the right thing by, which is not surprising, knowing you a little bit Frank that you're going to, you're going to do the right thing for the long term relationship with the partners, which is, which is a smart thing to do.

Frank Days 16:24
Our sponsors are all business partners. We have long term relationships with it's just much easier to do that I think they're gonna end up better off better off in the long run. It's just, it needs to be really clear. And you know, it's the challenge. Like, for example, the question we got this morning with our partner team, because our partner teams going out to try and help us partner marketing teams trying to help us bring in some partners to be sponsors. Do we have pictures of what the booths are going to look like? Do we have you know, what are the details of what I'm going to get? We've got to Rachel did a good job on the prospectus. But there's still you know, it's a whole different thing like people know what a trade show is. They know going to conferences. It's pretty clear like when you say it's a live event, here are some pictures from last year's event great. We're trying to put together like a sizzle reel for this year's event. What do you do? Like you? Can you can't take last year's a picture of our CEO, are you picturing me on stage at the at that event talking? Or you know, those in context pictures don't mean anything. So we're trying to really, if you think about it as a unit, it's such a different animal that it really changes a lot of things you do.

Peter Mahoney 17:28
Yeah, it's interesting, Frank. And one of the things we talked about with when we had that discussion back a couple of weeks ago with this group, for the first time about this topic, was do you make it look exactly like the physical event except digital? Or Or do you do things that are different? because like you said, everyone's used to a physical event, they have that sizzle reel, they have those lights and gobos on the stage and they do all that stuff. In, in this is different. It's a digital world and I imagined There might be some advantages that you'd see from a digital conference if you try to sort of integrate things into the conference experience for the attendees that might be enhanced because it happens to be digital.

Rachael Champagne 18:16
Yeah, there's definitely some some things that we're trying to implement. We haven't nothing's been completed right now. But we have our list of needs that we actually ran through with the vendor before we even chose them. A big thing is on making it interactive, like very interacting for the people that are attending, we're going to be having polls, they can participate in q&a with the speakers, trivia surveys, they can actually go up to different fonts or booths have communications download handouts. And so we think basically, what we're trying to do to encourage the attendees to participate in the polls and the QA and the trivia is that when they participate They're going to be getting points towards badges. And so at the end of the conference, or maybe at the end of each conference day, the top leaders on the board, and everyone's gonna be able to see the board also. So you'll be able to see where you are, and see who's in first place, second place. Third place, we're going to be doing prizes for those people. So I know people come to conferences, and all they want is their swag bag. I've already gotten email requests from people. And so we're like, no, we're not going to do swag. It's going to be crazy expensive. We have such a global audience, shipping, anything would be crazy. We'll probably consider some, you know, little gifts, and things like that that can be sent digitally. But on top of that, we'll do some larger prizes for people that are really interactive in our conference. And all the while we're getting that analytics in the background. We're understanding the questions that they're asking, who's asking the questions, what they're interested in, and we're getting all that information

Peter Mahoney 19:59
in Did you try to find a way to incorporate either networking or fun into into the event as a digital event?

Rachael Champagne 20:09
We're still working on that. Attendees 10, or they have the ability to interact, that group chat so they can interact with one another in the exhibit hall. And throughout the time of the conference, we one part that we really will miss from the impressive event is like we do we have, you know, a kickoff party and then a party at the end of day one in the exhibit hall with fun food and drinks and games. And that really is something that we're going to miss this year. We're trying to find a way to maybe bring some of that to this virtual conference. So it's a work in progress. At the very least, they're going to be able to interact with each other on that level. But I do think that that's something that a virtual conference will somewhat lack when comparing it to an in person conference.

Peter Mahoney 21:01
Makes sense. It when you looked at the when, when you were planning this? Are there? Are there things that you learned? Are there? Are there traps that you encountered that you hadn't thought about before? because, one, this may be the pretty big scale conference like this that you've done, and you had a super short period of time. So for other people who are looking to do this, any any key points of advice that you have?

Rachael Champagne 21:34
I think I just make sure that you're looking at a number of different platforms. Don't just go with the first one you're looking at. Know what's important to your conference, what features you need. Do you need the interactive exhibit hall? Like where people are actually walking around? Do you need a big theater stage for the keynote? What's important and make sure you're asking all of those questions to the different vendors. You're talking to? When figuring out who to go with, so that you're on the same page, they know what your priorities are, and they can help you create each of those features throughout your conference.

Frank Days 22:10
Yeah, I mean, your how you, whoever you work with is going to be a partner in your conference. You know, we, there are a couple of different approaches, we could have gone to the vendor we chose and we ended up, we were thinking about hiring an external Event Manager, and then we ended up using a lot of the project we hired, we bought a bunch of ours from the platform vendor for project management, and that's so far he has been great, right? I mean, they've been really good. So and they feel like a real partner in the process. You know, it's like any good sales process we had. We got it down to two vendors, and I don't want to disparage the other vendor, but it's a well known the other one was a well known vendor and the sales rep was difficult, set a polite way of saying it.

Rachael Champagne 22:50
Very nice way of saying it

Frank Days 22:51
difficult is a polite way of seeing it as a really generous way of saying it and then the sales cycle was painful and Really bad mannered. And then after we closed with the other vendor, they came back and started talking smack and really no trying to continue to disparage the vendor we chose and like, Okay, great. I feel really good about the decision I made. Because I don't want to work with people like that. I'm just not interested.

Kelsey Krapf 23:17
Yeah, I've come to see that a lot of people are either, you know, on one side of completely cooperating or just trying to make your life difficult. So you got to go with the ones that are trying to make your life easy.

Frank Days 23:27
Yeah, well, it was, you know, it's the coup was the classic. In the in this world, the margins are really good. Some people are trying to position themselves upmarket. And you know, they started at you know, three x what we wanted to pay and then when we they found out who we were working with, all of a sudden their price came down to about the same and it was just, you know, we're not buying a used car here. Yes. Looking for a business partner to do a meet an important event for us. I don't want to get into like those jokes about the government that this rocket ship was built by the The lowest bidder, you know, I don't want to get in. I don't want to get in late in the process and find out that I don't trust the person I'm doing business with.

Kelsey Krapf 24:07
Yeah, is there anything, you know, fundamentally different that you're planning since it's become a digital event?

Rachael Champagne 24:15
Um, I don't think there's a ton different, we've actually decided to not do the training day as part of the conference. And that's going to be separate and run by the training team, probably on a different platform. Fundamentally, I think

predominantly the same frank, I don't know if you have anything else to add to that

Frank Days 24:34
big, big addition is we decided to add a few tracks based upon geography, so we're going to have an immediate track where we're going to be trying to put a few talks, maybe a couple of German talks, a couple of French talks and put it on their timezone. And the same thing in the Asia Pacific region, we've done historically really well drawing crowds from from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea. So we are planning right now to try and get Some tracks over in that part of the world as well, that's going to be a little more work because we got to find the speaker. So we want to try and put it on their timezone with a couple of local language speakers going to be a little more work, but we think it'll help us draw a better global audience.

Peter Mahoney 25:12
Yeah. And you'll also have great evergreen localized content that you can use, which is, that's one of the huge advantages of doing an event this way, of course, is that you often have literally by doing the event because it streams through all the servers that's capturing it, right so that there's nothing extra to try to produce stuff if it's already just part of the system. And I assume that the, the event side is even live for for a while, right is as long as you want. So you still have access

Rachael Champagne 25:44
the contract right now is for a year, but that can be always extended different companies can choose to have their contract contract for as long as they'd like with their vendor. And yes, the event remains live on the site, and data is still getting collected. So not only did in previous years, we recorded our keynote, but breakout sessions were not recorded. And that was what made up a lot of the content in our conference. Additionally, we didn't find a really good way to track who was attending each session. The keynotes are the breakout sessions. And so we didn't know who was interested in what topics the most, which talks got the most attendance. And, and so going virtually, we're able to track who's attending each session, how many people are attending each session and kind of put together the pieces of Alright, this is what they're interested in. And and not just at the physical event on June 23, and 24th. But for the next year, we're able to see who comes in and watches that that's really exciting. I hadn't thought about the second part about that. trackability is much I know I experienced that that first thing where I can't tell you how many conferences that my teams have run over the year. Where

Peter Mahoney 27:00
you have to make those tough decisions about do you want to send a production crew in recording equipment to every breakout? Little do you know, like you said, that's often the most relevant stuff that they do in these breakout sessions. It's very product specific kind of technical stuff sometimes. But it's the kind of thing that is is sometimes the most valuable content that you get into. I was all

Rachael Champagne 27:24
stable for us and also for the all the attendees that are asking for it after the conference. And we're like, we can share the slides with you. But like, we don't have the recording.

Peter Mahoney 27:33
Yeah, and we have the fancy video from the the keynote speaker. Right, but we don't have the the other stuff typically. I'm thinking Rachel that after this experience, especially. Especially because my view and i'd love your view on this to Frank is that is that this method of running events like this is going to kind of stick right I think you're going to see more and more digital events just because people are are getting used to it. And people are developing deeper expertise. And it sounds like you signed on a really great partner to help produce the event with with the platform all integrated. But that the nice benefit is that you're going to have someone in Rachel, who just totally gets this and has a lot of experience of running events at this scale. So do you expect you're going to continue to do events in this mode more, Frank? And do you think sort of the world writ large is going to do the same?

Frank Days 28:28
I guess, you know, we have to actually do the first one to see how it goes. But we we have if you think of this as sort of like an oversized webinar, we have a legacy of doing quite well on from that standpoint. Any given random webinar for a company we can get between 800 and 1000 people. We have a really strong house list and there's a lot of interest in the Postgres community. Going forward. Yeah, I've had some I've been having some conversations with my team in the Asia Pacific region about like, I was in Singapore last October doing a partner day. There's no reason why we can't Do a partner day, I think they prefer to do it in person, which I would prefer to do it in person as well, because I like to find a reason to get over there and meet everyone. Because as you know, when you go to those faraway regions, you meet people and you learn things you couldn't possibly learn by being here in the US sitting behind your desk. But as I was trying to convince them to think really hard about we had a partner day that we were planning for India, for example. And we were originally planning it was going to be an in person event, probably in brown in about the May, June timeframe. Obviously, that's not going to happen in person. I've been trying to get the team to think a little bit more critically about it and ask if we can, in fact, do this as a as a virtual event. So, you know, right now, it's a change of mindset. Some regions, I've been told some regions in Southeast Asia, they don't like webinars, so that this is what I'm hearing from my Asia Pacific team. I don't know if that's in fact true, or if that's the partners because the partners want to control the situation, but the fact of the matter is that it's It's becoming the standard, it's going to be something that, you know, this event that we're doing is gonna cost about a quarter of what it would have cost us to do it. And as an in person event, even you know, we were fortunate with the hotel, we didn't lose much we lose really lose any money on that hotel contract, which is pretty, pretty great, because we had signed up pretty substantial contract with them. And if this goes well, and we get a good audience, and it works, well, it's going to probably be a hard sell to say, let's go back to the old way of doing it, where it's going to cost us 10% of my annual marketing budget on one for one two day event. So

Peter Mahoney 30:35
absolutely. So I think one of the things I like to wrap up with in in these podcasts is we call this the next cmo for a couple of reasons. One is that we like to think that we talk about topics that the CMO or the future is interested in. But the other thing that we think we like is the idea that some of our audiences, people who are not quite as easy demo yet but wannabe. And I'd love your input Frank on, what's your advice for those people who are earlier on their careers, any pearls of wisdom around what someone who's earlier in their career should think about if they want to be a CMO sometime in the future,

Frank Days 31:18
I tend to be more, you know, more the ELA and authentic flavor of marketing, if you look at my back, MBA from MIT, so I'm kind of an unusual MIT guy, and then I have a liberal arts undergrad degree. But the fact of the matter is that that the new marketer at least, is being held way more accountable than ever before to the numbers and the performance of their team. So for me in my career has often been, the success in my career has often been correlated with having a boss or a co CEO who is really appreciative and respectful of the numbers and the ability to be able to connect the dots between activity and results. And that's been pretty important. The other part is to hire good people. You know, I got great people like Rachel on my team, which has been, I've had a good track record of hiring smart people and kind of keep trying to keep them motivated and keep them focused and help them develop, you know, that's always been a key pitch that I have to the team, because we tend to hire a little bit under in terms of experience and skill level, and try to grow them into the people that we want them to be. And I think that's a really valuable thing as it provides a tremendous opportunity to people on your team and it does engender a certain amount of loyalty in terms of if they feel like they have a real opportunity, they're going to stick around if they don't, they're going to fly away. So I don't know if that answers your question, clearly, but it does. That's fantastic advice. I agree. 100%. In what you're saying, I always like to hire people smarter than me. And the good news is that that's a pretty big set of people. There a big difference when you hire people, like, you know, this, this event here. This is Rachel's first year as the quote unquote, executive producer, but, you know, she checks me on stuff, but most of the stuff just happens and that's a tribute to her and the rest of the folks on having good people on the team who you make decisions and can work on the fly and are always pushing the action. And I really am really grateful for that. Great, great

Kelsey Krapf 33:07
to hear that last question, you know, before we wrap this up so enterprise DB customers or potential customers, you know, listening to this podcast, can they still sign up for the event?

Frank Days 33:17
Yes, it's open. So you want to go the website is postgresvision.com you can register right there.

Kelsey Krapf 33:27
Perfect. Well, that's gonna wrap it up for today's episode. Thank you so much, Rachel and Frank, it was such a pleasure talking to you today. Make sure to follow the next cmo and plan out on Twitter and LinkedIn. 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