Driving Amazing Customer Experiences

- I think the big question for this panel is, are any of the men gonna get a chance to talk?

- That's all right, we're good.

- Are you? Say something intelligent.

- Oh my god, I don't think I can do that. Anybody know any good jokes?

- On cue? What is your opening line from your presentation?

- Yeah.

- I don't remember the quote, 'cause I gotta read it, 'cause I didn't memorize it, but it's a quote from Kathy Acker, the author. She's talking about how there's no I, and so, she should invent multiple I's. The I, as in my identity,

- Oh right.

- So there's no singular identity, so why not create multiple identities? And so the framing of that is, when you're looking at your brand or product or whatever it is, there's no sort of natural truth to it. But instead, there's manifestations, connected to the sort of flat reality of your prospect, and you and the middle ground in between, and that's were you create your I, or your themes for your content, right? So, in my case, I limit it to, I don't know, three or four, usually, but I have smaller scope companies, you know? We're a one-product company so it's a little easier. But I create three I's right? And these are the ones that I run through for ad infinitum, keep on hitting the same themes over and over again. To me, it's boring, at a certain point, like after a year of writing about say, medication adherence, it gets boring to me.

- I can imagine that would get boring.

- I really love it but it gets boring.

- Medication adherence just inherently sounds, not so exciting.

- It's fascinating.

- [Douglas] Medication probably helps.

- Yes, it does! If you take it, right?

- If you take it, if you take it.

- [Jessica] And therein lies the joke.

- Yes, but I mean, there's only so much you can say from my perspective, but the audience has only engaged with what? Two out of the 15 of the pieces of content I've developed.

- That's right.

- Right.

- Just 'cause I'm bored with it doesn't mean they are.

- I say that to people all the time about email marketing, actually, I don't think we need to send six emails about this one thing.

- [Andrea] Right.

- I'm like listen, what's your open rate? On a good day your open rate's 25%. That means 75% of your audience had no chance to read the content that you're already tired of. I think as content marketers, we totally, we think we have to make new, fresh, all the time,

- [Vishal] Mm hmm.

- And we forget to get the life out of the stuff that we've already made.

- [Andrea] Yeah, yeah.

- I don't have any problem at all with sending something, not the exact same email, because you do have 25% that read it, but you can send something a couple of times before it's tired to other people.

- Well, what about just cutting out the folks who opened it and sending it to the unopened ones?

- So, I actually did that for years, and now frankly, I find that those people that opened it but still didn't take the action that I wanted, are the folks I probably wanna go back to,

- [Vishal] I didn't think about that.

- [Jessica] So I don't cut anybody that opened out, because they're probably my most engaged audience for that topic.

- Do you target those, that smaller group of people more specifically? In other words, would you take the initial email that they opened but didn't take action on, and would you tack a little thing at the beginning and say, "Hey, I know you read this."

- I'm watching.

- Come on, click a link!

- A little freaky, yeah.

- I mean, not that, but you know.

- You know, I should.

- Something that might engage them to go through it again

- [Jessica] Right.

- And maybe, again, you're reusing your content, the bulk of the content, but something that might hook them in again, and get them to potentially engage more and click the link.

- The answer is, I should.

- Oh, okay, so it's not a dumb idea. I'm not an email marketer so.

- No, no, it's not a dumb idea, and actually, if we make it concrete, this is let's say, a webinar, and I want you to register. So you've opened the email, you've maybe even clicked, but you haven't registered yet. So now I have a group of people that has engaged with the email but not taken the action, audience number one. A group of people that never opened the first email, try a different subject line, a different tactic, a different value proposition,

- [Andrea] Right.

- Whatever, email number two. And then a group of people that has registered, audience number three slash they've moved down the funnel and now I need different on it.

- [Vishal] Right.

- I need different material for them in general.

- Right, right.

- Yeah, so yes, I should. Probably I spend most of my day just resending to the entire group of people.

- But there's still a core, if you will, of reusable stuff,

- [Jessica] Yes.

- At least across the first two audiences for sure.

- And maybe even the third audience because again, they've registered for a webinar about that topic, so it's probably okay to send them more information about that topic.

- [Vishal] Right.

- You just may wanna deprioritize the article or the webinar they've already registered for.

- [Andrea] Right, right.

- So, if you think like a newsletter or something.

- [Andrea] Yeah.

- Great, just switch up the content, give them something they haven't clicked on, or a deeper link to something they have clicked on. That's actually a good one. I will admit, give myself a little credit here, we do have a client that we have. Their welcome email goes out, and you can click on the benefits throughout the email in email one, email two, whatever you clicked on in email one goes deeper onto that topic.

- Yeah, okay.

- That's nice.

- So that's nice right? And it's all automated, I didn't have to, thank god.

- It's got that little branching thing going on.

- That's right. So I used dynamic content in the second email based on whatever your last clicked area of interest is,

- [Andrea] Right.

- And all this is possible thanks to the wonders of marketing automation software right?

- [Andrea] Right.

- So I don't have to actually make those segments, it's literally the same email for everybody, and then we swap out that body of content.

- Well, the geek in me loves that whole reusable thing.

- Yeah.

- Coming from a post product content background.

- Yeah.

- And that's my bread and butter, right, is figuring out how to create modular content, and get it reused and so on, and I think a lot of people's perception is, marketing is totally different, and it's totally creative. I mean, that's clearly to me, when I attend conferences like this and I see so many people talking about, you can just take, in fact, I watched Lee Odden's session yesterday

- Yeah.

- About influencer marketing.

- Yup.

- He's doing it in a spreadsheet. He has all these, he has these little quotes and things that different people have talked about, and so when he wants to make a point about a particular topic, he can go to this spreadsheet, he can search it,

- Yeah.

- He can find you know, Amy Quarterfield talked about whatever, and he's got it in a spreadsheet. And I was there with another person who also comes from a post sales content background and I'm like, "They're getting geeky! "He's talking about modular content." Like we've been doing this for 20 years.

- [Vishal] Mm hmm.

- But yes, modular content! And I said, "He's in a spreadsheet but baby steps.

- Yeah.

- "Baby steps, right?"

- He's not the only person using a spreadsheet to keep track.

- Oh yeah, there are actually a lot of post sales content people too.

- Totally.

- We'll get to CMS' at some point, but I love that it's not all magic, and paintbrushes and unicorns and rainbows and creativity. Because when you're on the other side of that wall, we're told no, we would never reuse anything, so what you're telling us is useless right?

- Yeah, it's interesting, yesterday, I saw Garrett Moon from Coschedule give a talk about B to B demand gen and lead generation, that type of thing, and he was talking about, he put words to something that I have been thinking about, and that I know a lot of companies struggle with as it relates to their marketers, and it is that marketers are perhaps a little too focused on attention-based metrics, rather than business result metrics.

- Amen to that.

- He even gave an example. In complete candor, he said, he gave an example of a blog post they had done which was really, really successful, about the use of color in marketing. And got shared quite a bit, and just really, really great. But he had, if I'm not mistaken, a conversion rate of .003 on it,

- [Vishal] Wow.

- and the reason why was because their tool, Coschedule, has nothing to do with color.

- [Group] Mm hmm.

- And so they said, "Well, it was great. "We got a lot of traffic without using a cat video, "but we got this, "but it wasn't related to what we can help people with." So then he talked later about other issues that are of great interest to people like us, like scheduling and,

- Right.

- Best times to post and all that type of thing, and much better conversion rate.

- Mm hmm.

- So, I think that that is an underlying problem that a lot of companies have with marketers and I think, I don't wanna get pulled off the stage here as I often do, but marketers have a real image problem. The main reason I think of that is because there are too many studies I've read that talk about how the C-suite or other departments think of marketers as the arts and crafts party planners who work in the make-it-pretty department.

- [Andrea] Yes!

- Huh!

- And they talk about these types of things that people, right or wrong, just don't think are that important. But when they're able to get into the revenue camp,

- You bet.

- And talk about business results, the skies open for them.

- I think that's where you gotta be located now.

- 100%.

- Yes, 500%.

- Aligned with sales. I would even argue that we think about marketing and sales as being sort of this way right? Where marketing gives sales the tools to close deals, engage their prospects. I would argue that if you can figure out a way to make sales a channel of marketing, maybe not the sort of latter part of sales that really demand human relationships and that unique sort of skillset that great salespeople have, but all the earlier parts of sales, if that can become a marketing channel, just like trade shows,

- Mm hmm.

- Just like email, just like everything else, I think there's a value in that. And it's a value derived from pushing towards that big pile of cash at the end of the pipeline.

- Yeah, the marketers are owning, whether they want to or not, more of the buyer journey,

- Right.

- And for a lot of companies that are able to get marketing and sales aligned or collaborating, or working towards a common revenue goal, you're starting to see a few companies where there's nobody that's a VP of Marketing and Sales. It's a VP of Revenue.

- [Vishal] Right.

- And then the marketing and salespeople, how are we gonna achieve that revenue?

- [Andrea] Right.

- They're approaching it that way.

- You know, it's interesting, Michael Brenner. In Michael Brenner's workshop on Tuesday, he put up a slide that said, I think it was either 80% or 90% of CEOs hate their CMO.

- What?

- Oh my god.

- That might have been the Fournaise Group.

- Yes, Fournaise, yes, yes.

- They don't trust 80%--

- Don't trust their--

- Don't trust their CMOs in that they don't think that they understand how revenue happens.

- Exact, well that and I think, I was talking to a couple of different--

- That might be different than hates their CMOs.

- [Group] Yeah, yeah.

- I'm sure they're nice people.

- They're nice people, right, but I think they are just, are not connecting with that C-seat.

- And whether that's true or not, that's the perception.

- That's the perception, exactly. And they were saying, and 10% of CEOs have any issues with any of the other C-seats, which I thought was really interesting, like they're fine with their COOs and they're fine with all the other C-people.

- [Douglas] Finance, HR.

- So, I will tell you, that surprises me because as a CMO or the marketing arm, I feel like we have that. So sales and marketing have their partnership opportunity,

- [Andrea] Right.

- and marketing and IT have had a huge bridge to build in the last few years.

- [Vishal] Mm hmm.

- So I'm surprised to hear that there are no CMOs that like, my CIO's a real case.

- I suspect there may be CMOs that have issues with other C's, but the CEO has issues, it was just a CEO study, and it was just the CMOs that they had issues with. And I was talking about this with a couple of folks who are marketing people. I am a marketing person for my own business, but I'm not a professional marketer. And one of the things that they were saying, that we were talking about, was the fact that marketing is finally getting to be much more data-based. Like, it's a huge, huge theme here at the conference.

- [Jessica] I love it.

- More data, more metrics, like really understanding how to communicate what your business value is and having more business-focused impact results, value, than smoke and mirrors and party planning and whatever.

- [Vishal] Right, yeah.

- Than social media audience size, or even engagement metrics, which are not even vanity metrics.

- Right, exactly.

- They can be leading indicators, but they're probably not what you need to show your CEO.

- Exactly.

- Right.

- But I think the history--

- Well, not first yeah.

- Right.

- I think the history in marketing has been, we got this, we know how to do it, the perception of the history in marketing is, we know what we're doing, we know how to do it. Nobody else really knows what's happening in that little black box of marketing. Sometimes stuff comes out of it, sometimes stuff doesn't. We're throwing money in and hoping something happens.

- Well, it's the old, so, coming from a traditional agency, it's the TV model. We know that TV works because when we run it, we sell things and when we don't run it, we don't sell things.

- Right.

- That's not good enough.

- [Andrea] Yes.

- We're just in a post-awareness world.

- Those were the good old days.

- [Andrea] Those were the good old days!

- That's right, we did--

- [Andrea] TV and radio.

- TV and radio because we knew that advertising worked.

- [Andrea] Right.

- We could see it in the presence of and in the absence of, it works. How much? Don't know.

- You could average it, or that's what they do at least.

- Right

- I sell into forma and they love TV.

- [Jessica] You bet.

- And they do it because they know that they can write a big check and get a 2x return.

- [Jessica] Yes.

- And to them that's better than writing 20 small checks and getting a 5x return.

- So I understand that. How are they tracking their return? Are we still doing individualized phone numbers on a TV show that's in direct response?

- No, they don't, from my understanding, they're not even measuring it. They just default to a 2x.

- No, stop.

- What are they looking at, sales numbers?

- [Vishal] I may be wrong.

- [Douglas] They're just looking at sales numbers?

- They're looking at sales of course but you're presupposing that's gonna be your output and that's your justification for doing it.

- For focusing on that one outlet. So I for a long time, I came from the digital side, measurable, trackable, variable everything.

- [Andrea] Yes!

- Came over to the Barclay side, the traditional plus emerging side.

- [Vishal] Right.

- And there's a thing called a brand tracker that I didn't realize existed which is, have you heard of this brand before you run the TV and after you run the TV or any awareness-based campaign.

- [Vishal] Uh huh.

- Do you have a preference for this brand before and after in the markets where you are running, and then in some cases, you can actually say, have you purchased. Now this is all self reported so of course, digital metrics Jessica's like, "I'm not having it, I don't recognize it--"

- [Vishal] Right, right.

- But in that, we look at your overarching performance map, there's a stage for awareness because there's not a lot of conversion if you don't know if something exists.

- Right.

- So the awareness funnel is measured by this $200,000 dollar a year brand tracker and that's one way to do it.

- Sure, unless that's most of your budget.

- It's not my favorite.

- I would kind of question and it is all self reported, but being a left brain geek, it's pretty yes or no did you know about me before or after. It's pretty even did you you buy or not buy, but do you prefer me?

- [Jessica] Would you consider is maybe the wording.

- Maybe at this moment I would prefer you because I'm staring at your question and I don't want to let you down you know what I mean? I think it's gonna be culturally dependent. There's so much that goes into that. It's so, so subjective.

- Well, that's 100% true no matter what right? If I run television spots and I spend a lot of money but my brand has an oops in the media, doesn't matter how much I spent in TV, I'm not making money this week.

- Right, right.

- [Vishal] Sure.

- So there's a ton, or the market is down right? I have a ton of clients that are, if not seasonal, fully cyclical. I mean we're talking when the market is good, they're good and when the market is bad, they are directly correlatively bad.

- [Vishal] Right.

- So in that case, you can spend money on those years in TV or you can put it in the bank and wait until the market's back up. And that's the type of thing that your 2X gut checkstub, that's the stuff that makes me nuts right?

- [Vishal] Right.

- Oh yeah, TV works for sure. 'Cause you market through a recession right? Most brands were down, we gotta market our way back up again

- Yeah.

- So go ahead and get it back up. Well, I gotta client that's learned, when it's a recession we're out. We gotta go low.

- Interesting.

- It is interesting. It's kinda like buy low, sell high.

- It's a housing market model.

- Well, you know in my case, we have buyer's seasons right? And it starts next week actually, so I went to--

- [Jessica] Next week?

- Yeah next week

- Like flu season or?

- They took vacation for all of August.

- Oh.

- And they're just getting back into the groove this week and then you know, next week is when they start actively engaging with potential vendors. And so because of that, my summertime, I bought my AdWords spend, my LinkedIn spend, all of my spends went to a bare bones level.

- [Jessica] Yup. And it was just a building season for me.

- [Jessica] Yup.

- You know, building my plan for September to December. I mean that's a micro sort of example of that, but it works right?

- [Jessica] Yeah.

- I'm not gonna succeed during that time anyways,

- Right.

- So I might as well do something more useful with my time and pocket that budget and spend it a couple months later.

- Sounds to me though what it really comes down to is really understanding who are these people, and what are they doing?

- Yes, absolutely.

- The people on the other end of the--

- Yeah, you totally know them.

- Right.

- So have you ever looked at Google Ad trends? For like a, name a buzzword in the marketing industry.

- Content marketing?

- Content marketing. Go look at Google AdWords for content marketing. Mark the tape the week between Christmas and New Year's. Silence.

- [Vishal] Oh yeah, of course.

- Like oh my god, we're an industry. We the advertising agency community are, we are so in a jar with our own words and our own seasons, but that week between Christmas and New Year's everybody sort of agrees, it's gonna be quiet this week. So even just the search terms for that, content marketing or millennial marketing

- [Vishal] Mm hmm.

- Or return on ad spend, whatever it is right? If you choose, especially agencies, something that an agency buzzword would really grab onto, silence. It's fascinating. It is the most pronounced trend I have, my team had so much fun doing this. What is that? And somebody looked at the actual dates. I was like, "Oh! We're not in the office, "I wonder how many agencies or clients are planning "to be in the office during that time." And year over year, every year you can see the dip. We looked up as many words as we can find to find the most buzzword-y . I don't even remember one now but it was a fun exercise.

- Looking for buzzword-free slots in the calendar.

- Yes.

- You gotta be careful mentioning that because we can spend the next 90 minutes coming up with all our marketing buzzwords.

- Right.

- That's true. Actually.

- Which makes it worse for marketers I think.

- It does, well and typically, as a speaker you try to have a way to at least the jargon-y stuff, but buzzwords seem to almost force their way into titles, you go through the program and it's like buzzword bingo. We actually had an event in Kansas City, I'm in Kansas City full time. I had an event in Kansas City where the conference organizers' had a bingo card with buzzwords, so every time a speaker said one or somebody at your table said one you got to--

- [Vishal] That's great.

- I love it.

- There's one here, I saw it yesterday.

- We totally need one of those.

- Is it? I would spend all day doing that.

- The middle square is a picture of Joe Polizzi and it's the free square.

- Yes

- Everybody gets Joe.

- There's Joe Polizzi right there.

- I was gonna say.

- Everybody gets Joe.

- We're talking buzzword bingo and you're the free square in the center of the buzzword bingo.

- [Joe] I feel like there's poker going on or something.

- There is, that would be way cooler. We're talking about marketing buzzwords.

- [Joe] Are you on the air right now?

- [Together] Yeah, we are.

- Hi Joe!

- At least see the orange boots.

- It's a conversation.

- Throw your shoes up there.

- Your shoes look good.

- It's Joe Polizzi.

- Hi, I'll be back in a little bit.

- I would totally do that though, you think about

- Sorry Joe.

- He can edit that. You think about how much time people spend coming up with their booth ideas? So yesterday, I smelled popcorn walking down the expo floor. I was like, "Oh popcorn, okay. "I wouldn't have thought of that." They brought a popcorn machine right? Two different booths thought of that. There were two booths that thought of a popcorn machine. I'm like, "Okay, maybe we're out of ideas."

- Tip for vendors for next year, chocolate chip cookies.

- Oh.

- Yes.

- It's actually if you can figure out how to warm them up or bake them

- Bake them on the show floor.

- I think in some of the DoubleTree hotels

- Oh I love it, that's good.

- Hey, DoubleTree hotels, we're talking about them.

- That's right is it a sponsor for this podcast?

- They're mentioned in the--

- DoubleTree hotel cookies.

- From Jay Baer's new book, he talks a lot about a talk trigger. Hey, wait, we're talking about them.

- That's right.

- And they didn't run an ad.

- And we actually made DoubleTree cookies at home once. They're terrible.

- Oh really?

- They tasted the same but I think it's the context thing because they just didn't taste good.

- [Douglas] Oh, they're not the best in the world but who else is offering warm ones when you show up.

- [Vishal] Exactly.

- And yet there's people who will say, "I only go to DoubleTree 'cause I get that cookie." they're making big decisions based on that experience.

- Wow, that's impressive.

- Right, right.

- So that's fascinating to me. So I also sit next to the customer experience department and I would say while the cookie is a note-worthy add, I have had a consistently poor experience at the last three DoubleTree's I've stayed in. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on camera or not.

- [Vishal] Course you are.

- [Andrea] She's gonna cut us anyway I'm thinking. Did you cut us? No? Oh okay. Well, there you are.

- So, I would not stay at a DoubleTree and I would buy a warm cookie.

- Right.

- At like a coffee shop or something because A, the last couple of times they haven't warmed up my cookie and I was a little rusty about that.

- [Andrea] Well, there you go.

- But they had a brand new DoubleTree in Arvada, Colorado outside of Denver, that was three years old. It was an incredible experience. But most of the DoubleTree's are so old, they just haven't kept up

- [Vishal] Right.

- with the customer experience.

- [Andrea And Vishal] Oh.

- The actual experience of staying in a hotel, if you're gonna stay in a lot of hotels, three nights in a bad hotel is not worth it.

- Okay, so that is a perfect example of my rant.

- Is it the experience of getting stale?

- Oh no.

- No, not that but that's good. That idea that we worked so hard to get to the sale, it's kind of like we got 'em into the hotel.

- Right.

- We gave them a cookie! That's like my little gift for buying your thing, and then I get to the room and it's like . The sheets aren't clean or whatever.

- Yeah.

- But the delivery is a very poor experience and what happens? No case study. No testimonial. No referral. No reference. Being talked about in a negative way.

- [Jessica] Yeah.

- Right? And there's so much, I think in the marketing space, as a non-marketer there's so much in the marketing space about that whole pre-sale, the buyer journey. I'm like, when I'm no longer the person you're trying to get to buy, what are you doing for me? What have you done for me lately? It's for me it's all about retention and advocacy.

- Right, why does that experience change? We've talked about it already.

- Which experience, the post?

- The post.

- The post sales experience? It shouldn't change.

- It shouldn't, it changes because marketing owns you, then sales owns you, then customer service.

- Right.

- Exactly. And that should be completely visible.

- That's not how we work anymore.

- It should be complete, companies out there listen to me. It's one contiguous journey. It needs to be consistent. You need a clean hand off. You need people talking to each other so that journey is a beautiful thing from beginning to end. Otherwise, when I was in corporate, we used to call it pushing them off the buy cliff.

- Yeah.

- They buy, boom okay. See you later, we don't care about you. And then the post sales people have no idea what the promise was, aren't going to deliver on your promise.

- Yeah.

- If I don't know what it was, how am I gonna deliver on it?

- Even just thinking of your experiences as part of your marketing. When customer experience isn't included in the marketing department.

- Right.

- You're always marketing. Even if you don't think you are. Even if it's not something that you're focused on consciously. How people are receiving, using, being transformed to buy or not your product, that's also marketing because that's gonna get you to the advocacy.

- And if you're not focusing on it, I would guess that your marketing it in a not good way.

- Probably.

- It requires almost a concierge experience right?

- Absolutely.

- From beginning to death.

- Beginning to death.

- Of your relationship right?

- Yeah.

- I think it's a challenge though. In my case at least, and I'm an exception in that I'm the only marketer in my company. I have no scope or scale for that. I can't even take it past a certain level in sales, I'm done. It's all on your guys.

- Yup.

- You close it or you don't. And so scaling even further into the customer experience is an absolute impossibility.

- Yeah.

- There's no way. I thought about it, I thought about maybe talking to my project managers that deal with the customers, but I almost don't want to open the door because I can't deliver.

- Yeah.

- On the promise that you actually need.

- [Jessica] Yeah.

- So what do you do if you don't have a system to actually have the capability to actually take care of these things. Is there a trick or a methodology that at least gets a little bit of it covered?

- Yeah, I mean I think it starts with relationships within your teams.

- Mm hmm.

- And having, so I did in my corporate experience and work with my clients to do a lot of reach out from the post sales side back into marketing. And try to figure out what's win win for both of you. So I was on a team that had one and a half marketing people for 20 products.

- [Jessica] Yup.

- And they had 40 technical writers doing documentation that said,

- Right.

- Type your name in the name field.

- [Jessica] Oh boy.

- And I was like, okay, seriously low value output over here. Potentially high value impact over here but no time to create content. And we got together and the marketing woman said, "Oh, I don't have any time. "In fact, my VP just came to me today and said, "We need a demo tomorrow. "My ad budget is maxed out and it's me and this other person "and we've got all these deadlines, "I don't have time to do this." And I said, "So, here's this technical writer who knows the product "really well, who has no idea what kind of story "you're trying to sell, "doesn't understand how you're doing you're positioning,

- Right.

- "But this guy has to create a product overview "and do you know what that's gonna look like "without you insight?" Here's the file menu, type your name in the name field. Click okay, I mean that's gonna be a video of how to login.

- Right. I said, "You two get together, "you give this guy the story, the framework, "the messages, the positioning, "who's this market, "what's their pain and he will create for you, "this amazing demo and then use it in both places." And then what happens there,

- That's right.

- Is not only the win win internally, but you get this beautiful consistency between this is the story they told me in the marketing and this is the story they're telling me in the product.

- [Jessica] Yup.

- Wow, this company they actually talk to each other.

- Right, right.

- So I think that kind of thing can go such a long way.

- That's a good point.

- You get so much higher value content on both ends of the equation, you get help, your technical content people, post sales content people, how much are you gonna pay for them? They're already being paid. Why don't you give them the insights they need to be able to create higher value content that can be used in more places?

- So I'll tell you that was, because of a small team, I came from a SaaS company where I was marketing, hand off to sales, I don't have the time for that,

- [Vishal] Right.

- but I also oversaw somewhat unofficially, the customer service and support team, so all the demos were me, all of the onboarding instructions were me, all of the cross selling and upsell was me so what you call retention marketing. Because I was a one and a half person department, it was me. This is not a business plan, don't write this down. But it was consistent because I was the only one writing it.

- Right.

- [Andrea] It doesn't have to be a one person show.

- It doesn't have to be a one person show but again, that goes back to let's roll up to the same leader so that our mission all goes up, we are all graded by the same executive.

- Yes. Well, and that's usually the biggest problem right? So if you're trying to reach out to your post sales content people and you report to two different people and where you meet is the CEO,

- Right.

- And you're in a big company like some of it, I mean I worked at IBM right? We often would not be in the same organization until we got to the general manager of the business unit.

- [Jessica] Yup.

- And these guys all have their own agenda, they have their own business goals, and so you and I could get together and talk, we love each other, we've got a plan, we're gonna do this and as soon as my VP comes down and says, "What are you spending your time on that for? "Go do this."

- Right.

- I'm off right?

- Yeah.

- I'm being evaluated on these other things.

- Exactly.

- And so a lot of it is culture right? You've gotta have the right incentives to collaborate, there's so much in the process and the culture that will derail a really well intentioned effort right? So that can be huge.

- All of that is goal setting, so everything we've kind of touched on is all goal setting. It's all, what are your business goals?

- [Andrea] Yeah.

- What are your marketing team goals? Check those, do they match? I had a company literally tell me

- [Andrea] Yes.

- That they wanted to open 20 new stores as their business goal and they wanted same store sales in those markets to go up by 20% and I go, "You're gonna have a hard time."

- Yup.

- When you open, your revenue's gonna go up, but same store sales is gonna have a hard time.

- Well and you've really gotta question the business goals of two organizations within one product business unit. One pre-sales and one post sales that don't align.

- Well, that's what I'm saying. And I'm drawing my little performance framework, you've got your big, hairy, audacious business goals, the marketing goals that mean we, the marketing team across everybody, are going to help achieve those goals and then we go down into each stage of the customer journey or customer lifecycle or it's really a funnel, we're not talking customer journey at this point. I want to move people through that funnel to hit that goal. What are my markers? I need awareness to be on track. I need my conversion rate to be on track. I need my revenue to be on track. What does that mean? Does that mean I care about audience size? Some, yes.

- [Vishal] Right.

- In fairness. Because there's an audience there to place media against. How about conversion? If I care about hitting a 10% close rate, do I care about the open rate on my emails? No? Just use that as your guiding light. If you put your goal post out, out front, everybody's going towards the same end zone. That's all the sports metaphors I got.

- I like it.

- That's as far as I can take it, my husband would be so disappointed right now.

- Using cooking as a metaphor,

- This is better for me, let's go cooking okay.

- You've gotta cut the fat out, or enable the fat to be cut out.

- Right.

- So if you have these really strict goals that you're going toward, everything that's outside of those goals should be you know, non-required work basically.

- [Jessica] Right, right.

- You don't need to do that.

- Not important, not urgent.

- [Andrea And Vishal] Right.

- It is neither important nor urgent.

- [Andrea And Vishal] Right.

- Whether somebody comes and says, we should do this, in front of you, you'll now have a grid by which to say, not thinking--

- How does that really fit into the priorities.

- Yeah.