Mastering B2B Marketing with Penguin in Chief Drew Neisser | Ep 18

In this episode, Drew Neisser, founder of CMO Huddles and Renegade, shares his journey in the marketing industry and provides insights into building a personal brand, creating revolutionary ideas for clients, and navigating the changing landscape of marketing. He emphasizes the importance of experience, expertise, and building a strong network. Drew also discusses the challenges of differentiating in an oversaturated market and the need for creativity and a unique selling proposition. He highlights the value of community-led growth and the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Drew concludes by sharing advice for aspiring CMOs and the importance of making the most of every opportunity. In this conversation, Drew Neisser and Harvey Bracken-Smith discuss various topics related to career paths, successful CMOs, building networks, building a good team, personal branding, and the importance of lifelong learning.

Personable is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners become the best they can be by learning from the world’s best in their respective fields. This mission is inspired by my mother, Louise, who encouraged me to become the best version of myself before she passed away from cancer in 2023.

Connect with Harvey:
Harvey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveybracken-smith/ 
Harvey's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmith/
Personable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmithpodcast_/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7JOTYDER6m2FDrlhop4api

My dad's startup: https://www.thedraft.io/
Donate to the charity we have founded in memory of my mum: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LouLouRacefoiundation?utm_term=PvByaxmdn

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to episode 18 of Parsonable. Today, I'm honored to be joined by Drew Nizer. Did I say that right? You did Amazing, enabling you to learn from the world's best to enable you to become the best that you can be. I feel hugely honored to be joined by someone like Drew today. Drew is the epitome of being an expert within your field. He founded CMO Huddles in 2020, helping B2B marketers. He's a coach for a handful of CMOs that he takes every quarter. He is also the host of his own podcast called Renegade Marksters Unite, and it is someone that I look up to and hopefully getting my podcast to somewhat his size one day. He has also hosted an adage column for 10 plus years. He's the author of two books and has done a huge amount in the field, so thank you so much, drew, for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 0:54

I can't believe we didn't mention the one thing that we have directly in common, which, in addition to being part, we're both dookies.

Speaker 1: 1:03

I know, I wanted that to come in later on, but every past, you guessed, I've been naming that as the first thing, so I wanted to save it.

Speaker 2: 1:10

But thank you very much for that. All right, well, I've already blown the surprise. Thanks for doing it.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Yeah, you're also on the New York board for Duke and on tons of other boards of Duke, so, on top of that, the cherry on the top right there. But, drew, I wanted to get started off. You've got a huge list of accomplishments, many of which I've already missed, and I was wondering if you could describe who you are, what you're doing.

Speaker 2: 1:34

Yeah, yeah, so my current title is Penguin in Chief of CMO Huddles, and that is a story in and of itself. Let's start with the fact that a group of penguins is a huddle Two, that is, b2b marketing, which is my field, tends to be pretty boring, so I wanted to sort of lead by example in this community. So we have a lot of fun with penguins in CMO Huddles because a group of penguins is a huddle Get it.

Speaker 2: 2:04

There's a connection. We give 1% of our revenue to the Global Penguin Society. By the way, you could, even if you were a member of our community. Oh no, you would also get your very own penguin stress ball. I need one of those. Yes, you do, of course. And wait, wait, wait, wait. And when I record our Tuesday tips, I also don my penguin hat. And when you have a really good answer, you get this oh wow, right, I must be asking great questions, right?

Speaker 2: 2:38

Yes, exactly so anyway so the story is I spend all my time thinking about how CMOs can be better and inspiring B2B greatness, whether it's in our community or coaching, or in the content that I create. So that's sort of that's me.

Speaker 1: 2:55

But sort of being this figure that so many people now look up to, particularly within your field. I was wondering if you could take me on the journey of how you even thought about this, how you even got to this point. Was it your childhood? Was it university? Did you study this sort of thing? How did this even come about?

Speaker 2: 3:11

Okay, well, if we went back to Duke for a second, I was really involved in all the. Everything that I thought I might want to do. I did at Duke did photography for the Chronicle, I shot videos for the cable station, I ran a film series, I wrote a little bit. What I really enjoyed was running films, this series, and advertising for them, and I produced a lot of ads and that was really fun. So when I graduated from Duke, I decided it was either going to be in the film business or in advertising.

Speaker 2: 3:43

And I had a relative actually, my grandfather owned an advertising agency in the 30s. So, oh God, that's almost 100 years ago, anyway. So I thought the profession might be a good match and that's where I started my career. I ended up running an agency that I started within. Denso got for 30 years and that whole thing was simply having done. Worked at big agencies was. I didn't want to do another agency that was traditional and I had been trying to find non-traditional marketing for a long, long time. So anyway, renegade existed because there was a big traditional agency called Gray and I said we wanted to be the anti-Gray. So that was sort of how Renegade got started. Now I can tell you a connection from Renegade to CMO Hotels, if you want.

Speaker 1: 4:33

How's that? Yeah, I love that. I love that.

Speaker 2: 4:35

So one of our clients at Renegade, a guy by the name of Pete Krainik, started something called the CMO Club and he said hey, drew, can you help us out? So we designed the logo and we built their first website. This was probably 15, 16 years ago and I needed a way to participate in the CMO Hotels I mean the CMO Club and I was running an agency I'm a vendor so I decided that I could be of service to the CMOs by starting to write about them. I had no idea where this would lead, but I just started to become almost like their press agents. I did 100 of those interviews and someone actually a Duke connection said Drew, there's a book in there. Sure enough, there was. That was the CMO's periodic table, did a lot of public speaking for that book. After the second hundred interviews and I'd written for Fast Company and ad age, someone said Drew, why the hell aren't you doing a podcast? And that's when it started the podcast.

Speaker 2: 5:39

And then in March on March 2nd 2020, my friend, pete Krainik, sold the CMO Club to Salesforce, which is big you know most people have heard of Salesforce and the light bulb went off for me because I had invested cash 12 plus years in the CMO Club. I built all these relationships. I built all this knowledge and thought you know what it's not going to work at Salesforce. I could just see it. The club was never as good as it should have been for B2B. I could see that too, because I was running the B2B curriculum. I said, all right, let's do it, let's start it. I'd already started one company, why not start another? And it's a fulfillment. At this point in time, I'm on sort of you know in soccer when there's extra time put on at the end.

Speaker 2: 6:25

I'm kind of in that moment in my career and so this feels like a really extended what they call it red time. What are they Extended?

Speaker 1: 6:32

Yeah, extended time yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:34

So that's what the that's what CMO Huttles is for me.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Extra time I sort of had two thoughts there, the first being you know you've got this idea to speak to all these CMOs in the first place, prior to you writing that book. But if you know, if their minds and other ideas is what gives them the role in the first place, that's what makes them a CEO. That's what makes them valuable within a business. Why do you think they're so open in sharing their tactics and strategies to you and allowing other people to also use the same ideas?

Speaker 2: 7:05

It's a good question and there's there's several motivations, but one of the things that CMOs really do need to do is a lot of them do is. And, by the way, for your audience, if they don't know what a CMO is, it's a chief marketing officer and they are the people who are responsible not just for the ads but the whole, often go-to-market, strategy for a company. And in B2B there's a lot. You could end up having sales, some aspect of sales reporting to you. You could have some aspect of internal comms reporting. It can be a very, very big job, okay. So back to the question of why would they share? You know, often they're sharing because their company wants the publicity, so it's a way of extending the value, because they're not necessarily sharing anything that you couldn't have figured out on your own. They're not sharing any secrets and, at least in the case of my interviews, I never am the guy who breaks news.

Speaker 2: 8:05

I'm the one who's doing case history. So it's a year, two years after the fact and we have results that we can share. And that's the big thing for me is everything we do. I have this it's a really almost mean expression which is I don't care about your opinions, I only care about your experience, and so then we're just talking about you did this and this is what happened, good or bad, and if you, as long as you, stick with that sort of focus, you'll learn so much about it and from each other, and so that's sort of that. One of the things that's ingrained into CMO Huttles is that you don't conjecture, you don't say I believe in blah blah, blah blah, no, no, no, no. You did something and it worked or it didn't, sure, but let's break it down. And why did it work? Or why didn't it work? And what was the sort of the jazz? How did you sell it? Those kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 8:59

If you sort of had all these insights, was there any part of you, or did anyone ever try and poach you and make you their CMO within their business? Was that ever a potential route for you?

Speaker 2: 9:09

You know I couldn't have done it and, honestly, I have a pretty wicked ADD and I get bored with. One simple thing, as Raya always wanted to be on the agency side, is that I needed multiple challenges and I could really dig in for three months and focus, and then I need to do something else and with Huttles it's an endless supply of different challenges. Never do I never have the same conversation twice.

Speaker 1: 9:41

You know what. You've worked with some incredible people, including HSBC, and sorry groups, including HSBC and Panasonic. I'd be curious on your process. I haven't actually described what you did with them, so if you could describe what you did and also your sort of process for coming up with such revolutionary and incredible ideas.

Speaker 2: 10:03

So let me pause on that one for a second. So HSBC was a client of Renegades and we got to know the one of the heads of marketing for one of the divisions, and this individual was had hired us for some gorilla ideas and they wanted, they had, a very specific challenge. Hsbc, which some people know as Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, wanted to have this thing campaign as the world's local bank and they wanted to sort of put some New York into the brand. That was our challenge and initially they had some ideas about how to do this, like handing out, you know, things on the street or something like that. And so we went through this process of really getting in the side the head of the customer and what sort of what would be a service. And this was a mentality that we had, or philosophy they still have, which is called marketing as service. The idea is marketing doesn't have to be pollution or noise or irritating. It can actually be valuable like a podcast, right, you can deliver information. In the process, you can build a brand.

Speaker 2: 11:13

So we were thinking about what service could we do? That would be remarkable and surprising, and that's how we came up with the HSBC bank cab, because cabs are very much of a New York iconic thing. We found a checker cab, which is the ultimate icon of New York City, and found a driver. We did a search for the most knowledgeable cab driver in New York, which many people thought was an oxymoron at the time. It's not like London cab drivers where they actually are tested. So we had a lot of fun with that.

Speaker 2: 11:44

But that program ran for 13 years and every single time it won all sorts of awards for Gila marketing and every time someone got in that cab they had an incredible experience and they were like they called five people and said you wouldn't believe it and something as simple as a free cab ride, but in an old fashioned cab with a knowledgeable cab driver or something, and we built on that Anyway. So that was an example of a program that wasn't a one-off. That became very much and ended up in their annual report and magazine, talked about it and got PR and all these good things. The process was always about knowing the customer and then I got to say it's serendipitous. A lot of the ideas over the years that we had at Renegade were a combination of things. You know we had a process, but you have to allow for serendipity. They'll just be that moment.

Speaker 1: 12:39

Would you ever go to people with these ideas Like how would you get your clientele? Was it word of mouth? Would you come up with your own marketing strategies to get clients? No, we.

Speaker 2: 12:47

How did that sort of process work? We didn't like to do that, and it's interesting. There are some who would approach you and say, hey, we have an idea. Like someone would say, hey, we want to do this, can you find a client for it? We never like to do it Like it was much better if the client had a problem or a challenge, then we could come up with a sort of a non-traditional way of solving it. It's much better and you're doing something that ends up being very bespoke, and that's what. If you're an agency, that's what you should be doing.

Speaker 1: 13:24

So, as you find that you end up getting referrals to other businesses or just things that the awards would end up bringing in a lot more yeah, we got a lot of press.

Speaker 2: 13:32

In our heyday as a gorilla marketing agency we got tremendous amount of press. I mean we were working with really cool clients IBM and Nike and Panasonic and H so we get press and that business. Certainly at that time if you got ink, you got more clients.

Speaker 1: 13:51

What's your view on how Because I'm only 19 years old and the marketing, even in the past year, it keeps changing every single day. How have you sort of noticed the main sort of general marketing techniques have changed with the advent of social media and AI and all of that? What's your sort of views on how it's changed over the years?

Speaker 2: 14:13

So it's changed dramatically in so many different ways, and one of the things that's very cool about running CMO Huddles is that we get to help CMO stay on top of all the change, and so we do Huddles almost every other month on a latest application of Gen AI and it means I have to play with the tools and I have to stay on top of it. But I want to say as much as it has changed. The interesting thing is that more digital, more artificial intelligence where you end up is the same place we did 20 years ago. Do you have a big idea at the core of this thing and can you execute in a unique way? And it doesn't matter what channel we're talking about?

Speaker 2: 15:04

I mean, let's face it, you look at the, you look at TikTok if that's your feed and you go, oh, interesting, cool, right, something magical happened and it caught your attention. It's creative. That's still at the heart of this thing and it's the X factor that so many, for so many years. The goal has always been to program out the X factor. We could just do better digital targeting and we could win, and it's coming back to no. It looks like the creative is about the only real, true leverage that you have. So to me that's one bit of optimism that exists in our in a business that has changed and gotten really small.

Speaker 1: 15:52

Yeah, how like I see what you're saying at the creative side, but I think, with everyone now having social media, everyone is now a creative. But I think marketing everyone's sort of got their own brand pages. It's becoming very saturated. So how could a small business or an entrepreneur or a CMO in perhaps a smaller company that's trying to break through into a market, how do they differentiate themselves in this over saturated, over marketed, over social media used, while Well, we don't have enough time to answer that completely.

Speaker 2: 16:26

Okay, but I will say a couple of things. My book addresses it. I was just reading this book called Standout Startups. That I think is pretty good sort of basic no, I think it's a very good how to differentiate your startup, but to me it always comes down to is there's an old expression unique selling proposition. What's your one little kernel? That's that you've neaking you can hang your head on, and obviously penguins are not that thing, but penguins are part of our brand and we're the only CMO community that has penguins right Now. That's no one is going to get that initially, but it's one element. We're also the only one focused on B2B and we're also the only ones that talk about inspiring B2B greatness.

Speaker 2: 17:18

So there's certain things that we've tried to own. And then it's about consistency and repetitiveness and multi-channel, and that's sort of the kind of the way marketing has always worked. And now it becomes a question of is it primarily PR? Is it primarily one social channel? Is it in? Look, it's not easy to build a brand. It never has been easy to build a brand. Now it's because everybody's a brand, it's even harder, right?

Speaker 1: 17:50

Sure, it's very hard.

Speaker 2: 17:51

You just have a lot of little ones. Now it's even harder to build a big one.

Speaker 1: 17:57

Yeah, I think there's also a thing of the social media. I mean fake news and things like that. It's quite. There's a lot of distrust as well in brands. I mean a while ago, when someone would say something, you'd be more inclined to believe them. But now that there's so many people saying so much, it's quite hard to figure out what's true and what's not.

Speaker 2: 18:16

So one of the things another thought that occurred to me is there's something called community-led growth and that is a marketing strategy In the end. In other words, you get a small group of people to use your product or service or whatever it is and rally behind you and you enable them to help your business grow because you're again remember that idea of marketing a service. You're helping these folks, you're bringing them together, you're making them better at whatever the problem is, your product or service solves. So if you're Tableau, 15 years ago you got a small group of data visualizers together. Literally, their first meeting was 100. By about six years later, they had 10,000 people at their user conference. But those 100 people were so enthusiastic and so committed that they were able to bring other people in.

Speaker 2: 19:09

It's not running a billboard on the freeway. That's gonna build a brand. It's people who are gonna say God, I like working with Harvey or I like working with whatever. You're right that they feel confident and you're right. In fake news it gets even harder. So word of mouth is gonna matter even more and I do think there will be a few trusted sources and being there will matter.

Speaker 1: 19:37

Yeah, I mean I can't even remotely pretend that I'm an expert in this field, because I'm not at all. But one thing I found is a big differentiator, which you kind of just said, is there's a difference between 10,000 people that see something or 10,000 users that are unenthusiastic, that don't really care about product They've seen it just for an advertisement versus having 100 people who care deeply about it. And in a lot of books that people like Peter Thiel have mentioned this in the past about having that first thousand users that are enthusiastic, they're gonna show up to five friends and help improve it. But I'd be curious, with your sort of business expertise, if you have found that you sort of build your product and then those sort of people come, or you build your product according to those thousand people and sort of how that dynamic changes over time.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Yes is the answer. Either way will work. It really sort of depends. You know that what you find in startup world is that there's this thing called product market fit and you never really quite know that you have it. You might go with two directions. I was talking to literally a guy at a startup the other day and he had two products in the portfolio. One which had was a category, new kind of thing, kind of like a new category, and the other was just a better widget, if you will. And they had to make the decision. And growing a category on your own is really expensive and it takes a lot longer. But just having a better widget is hard to sustain. So you start to sort of test your way in from a product standpoint and from a resonance standpoint. The harder part is keeping your ears open so that you really see where the passion lies or lay I don't know I need a grammar in here, but that's.

Speaker 2: 21:26

There used to be these things called focus groups. You gather a group of 10 people and you'd ask them for opinion on an ad or a product or service, and my attitude was I only care about the two people who really get into this.

Speaker 1: 21:37

Yeah, not 10 random people. Yeah, how did you? I'm particularly curious about when you started building your podcast. How many sort of episodes into it was it that you found this community or did those sort of transfer across from your business? How did you find building community in the sort of social media landscape?

Speaker 2: 21:57

It's such a great question and one I'm not sure I have a perfect answer for. I started doing a podcast just because I was doing interviews. Anyway, that was my reason I was gonna. I was already interviewing these CMOs because I knew I wanted to get them into ad age or wherever, but I was recording the interviews. So first thing I did was I recorded 30 episodes of interviews and I found five that I actually liked, that I thought were worthy of launching a podcast for. I eventually used the other 25, but the five were really good and they started it.

Speaker 1: 22:38

I'm gonna have to do 10 more before I post this one.

Speaker 2: 22:40

then that's fine, whatever works for you. I mean, by the way, most people stop at eight. They do eight podcasts and they never get beyond that. So you're well on your way.

Speaker 2: 22:54

Part of that when I saw, I mean I literally didn't have an objective and I've sort of let the podcast take me. I didn't, I wouldn't say there was a community. And then yet I'm talking on the phone with CMO and they said, oh, I was listening to your episode today. It's like, yes, and what I get a sense of is when they're listening and what resonates with them. And there's somewhat of a brute force to this in that I've been doing it so long. I mean episode I don't know, 380 comes out or just came out, and that's a lot of years of episodes, right, and Eventually someone looks and goes well, he's done 380 episodes. I mean must be something interesting in there. Yeah, so, and I don't know. I've been on lots of lists. That's really important when CMOs make lists or senior marketers make lists and they mention the podcast. That's really how you find an audience. But it's not like I run an episode and I get 500 comments on that was a great episode.

Speaker 1: 24:05

Thanks.

Speaker 2: 24:05

Drew, it doesn't really work that way.

Speaker 1: 24:09

Yeah, I'd sort of echo a lot of those things Because I think in the world of YouTube and things like that, it's best thumbnail, most catch video, changing every few seconds, changing the title to make people as hooked as possible.

Speaker 1: 24:22

But I was listening to a guy called Ali Abdaal, based in the UK.

Speaker 1: 24:26

He's built up, I think, like 5 million subscribers.

Speaker 1: 24:29

He was a medical student at Cambridge University, basically posting study techniques and he's basically built he's now built a YouTube business with 15 people in his team, a very successful podcast, and one of the things he was saying on the podcast and why he does it and why it's so valuable even though it gets a tenth of the views, as his YouTube videos is, he says, the people that listen to those podcast episodes. He finds a 50, if not 100 times more valuable than the people that will just watch a singular YouTube video, Because instead of them going watching a 10 minute clip and then running off to something else, you are in their ear for an hour and in that hour they feel like you're almost a god, like figured them, in the sense that you are what is playing in their mind. And I'm not saying I'm trying to have control over people in any way. In fact, it's the opposite. But I think the connectivity to a community and to an audience to really be able to teach them things while also learn from them, I think is unbelievably invaluable.

Speaker 2: 25:26

Well, I will say two things for you to think about is today. It is a little bit about your niche, and I have a very small niche of. I mean, there are only 4,000 B2B CMOs in. I don't know the US to begin with, and yes, there are a lot of other marketers, but that's my target is this group of folks. I think the real joy of this is how much you get to learn and the privilege of learning.

Speaker 2: 25:56

Now, the one thing that I've sort of come to realize that a podcast host does and I think you're doing that very well too is my job is to help the listener digest what he's hearing from the other guest. So sometimes that means just repeating what they said, right, because remember, they're listening while they're walking around, they're exercising, they're on their treadmill, whatever it is, so be the person to digest it. And one thing that CMOs have told me that they like is I challenge and, based on what I've heard from somebody else, and I try to put it into context that I think others will be able to understand, and that's an art form that you can bring to it again. I don't think I did that in the first five or 10 episodes, but as I've gotten better at this. I think again. I don't know. I seem to be able to help the listener digest better and put it into a framework.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Sure, have you found this podcast? I know you didn't initially have a goal from this. You were talking about being an extra time. I don't think you're an extra time yet I think you've still got some game time but have you found that this has been an extremely helpful pipeline into the coaching business and the community business that you're building alongside it?

Speaker 2: 27:18

The answer is yes, unequivocally. But that's again not where I started. It was a night and, by the way, the first 100 or so, maybe even 200 episodes, I don't think we. Maybe I got one client out of it for Renegade. Now for CMO Hotels, it's a great pipeline. It's a great pipeline Because part of one of the pillars of CMO Hotels.

Speaker 2: 27:46

I mean, we have three core tenants. One is that will give you control on your job through the content, and it's a job that's very hard to have any control. So the content and the way it's all designed is to help the CMO do their job as well as they possibly can. That's control. Another thing that is connectivity is to connect with everybody and connect with the community, and that's another benefit. But that's pretty standard for communities.

Speaker 2: 28:11

Our secret sauce is coverage in the PR that we generate. So if someone comes in the door and their press person says, hey, our CMO wants to be on your show, they've come to me to talk about what they've been doing and at that moment I've earned the right to say, hey, by the way, cmo Hotels and because they are interested in publicity and we build that in. And I wanted to tell you one other thing that was kind of fun that we didn't do right away. As part of CMO Hotels, we came up with these Tuesday tips that we recorded at the end of CMO. Those are now standalone podcast episodes within Renegade Marketers Unites. So every Tuesday there's like a three-minute podcast that comes out within our series and that's proved to be great for expanding our audience because it's bite-sized.

Speaker 1: 29:04

Bite-sized digestible.

Speaker 2: 29:07

Sampling of that. It hasn't hurt our downloads, or of the whole episodes, and because they're not snippets of the whole thing, they're their own thing, and so there's an expectation. Oh, if I'm listening to a Tuesday tip on Renegade Marketers Unites, that's what it's going to be.

Speaker 1: 29:27

This might sound like a very ludicrous question, because I think for me, from my point of view again not an expert it seems that being a marketer, you're successful if you're able to convert the impression that basically the person's seeing something and convert them into a user or to like a post, whatever. That's success from my point of view. But do you see any danger in the way that it's going? As you said, something being very successful is increasingly smaller, increasingly bite-sized pieces of information and consumers are starting to get things in an instant. Tiktok videos are only 10 seconds long, Bite-sized content. People aren't listening to five-hour-long TV series or movies or whatever anymore. People are now trying to get 10-second little clips. Do you think there's any danger in the eyes of someone, a CMO or a marketer, or is that not something you think needs to even be thought about?

Speaker 2: 30:23

Well, we had a video expert, a guy, tyler Lassard, from one of the vidyard, and he did talk about the need to get attention quickly, like getting right into this particular to video. I don't think it's a case with audio. I don't think there's any proof that a short episode is a long episode. Look, if it's boring, it's boring period, but if it's interesting, it's interesting. So with video itself, again, it depends on where you are.

Speaker 2: 30:59

But look, if you're looking for a training video on how to use HubSpot better, you're not going to watch a five-second video, you're going to dive in. So what we're really talking about is you're competing against entertainment and everything that you do. And so if you're business to business and you're trying to educate, you got to figure out a way to and this is just better communication, this is designing your. Maybe you have to have a better hook than you did before. But again, I don't think that just because everybody's watching five-second videos on YouTube or TikTok, that it's the death of long for media at all. I disagree with that premise. I mean, you look at long from television still doing fine, series are still doing fine, movies are still doing fine, audiobooks are doing great.

Speaker 1: 32:00

So I think what I'm saying more is in how we're feeding people content. I'm more asking just more of a general question in terms of brands constantly feeding people short-term content because it's working well, and whether that presents a danger in feeding them the content or just because it's working well, we should continue doing it. That's more what I'm. I don't know.

Speaker 2: 32:21

I think it really depends on the situation. Look, your first role of marketing you have to get someone's attention. You're competing for mind space and you're competing for mind space against everything, not just your message versus your competitor's message, it's everything. So you have to know right now, you really have to understand where you are, the context of where you are and how you're presenting. In order to do it, I think if you're asking, are there metrics like plays or views or something that are misleading because you have these bite-sized ones, yeah, probably that could be very misleading information because you get this much. But I will tell you that if you create a video on your website and you're selling a $50,000 enterprise system and someone watches it to the end, you know damn well that person is interested in buying your product or service.

Speaker 1: 33:31

I wanted to go even deeper into the topic of marketing. Well, perhaps this isn't that much deeper, but looking back on your career and speaking to younger people, people in my generation, that want to become a CEO or want to get into marketing, what do you think are the best steps for them to reach the role of a CMO? Is it about getting the experience, these skills you acquire? Is this just being a genius and being able to come up with these incredible ideas like yourself? What's the sort of pathway for something like that? Born or made?

Speaker 2: 34:05

Yeah. So what's so interesting about this? I have a good friend, alan Hard, who has another podcast called Marketing Today. He's another guy who's got close to 400 episodes and interviewed mainly CMOs, but he does both B2B and B2C, and he and I were talking the other day and I said so is there one path to being a CMO? And it's like it's a joke because no, there isn't. It's not like med school and that's a strength and a weakness. I mean because people come up through product engineering, sales, some come up through marketing, and so that part again, it's a good and a bad, because they don't all know the same aspects of marketing when they finally get up to the top and so they're always going to have holes in their experience for the most part. So one is there is no path per se. I will say that generally, the CMO role at a larger company is a leadership role, not a marketing role. So that means you've established yourself as a leader of folks.

Speaker 2: 35:15

I can't recommend the book Impact Players Enough. This woman, liz Weissman, wrote it. I'd read it in college for sure, so you understand what it means to be, and what's so great about that book is it doesn't matter what you do. This woman starts as a receptionist at Hill Holiday and ends up being the president, because the president of Hill Holiday at the time it's a Boston based agency said to her you are the CEO of our office entryway, own it. And she got it. She did, she made something of the job, and I think that that notion is so profound right now, as I know, so many folks, including my kids, want to live a purpose driven life, purposeful life, and I think there's a lot to be said for taking advantage of whatever opportunity you have and doing the best you can at that. And things just happen.

Speaker 2: 36:14

And there was another story in her book that I loved. It's about a young lady who wanted to be an actress but couldn't get work. So she ended up working for another actress and was like, ended up being her assistant and then taking care of their house, got to know her husband. Next thing, you know they're doing a podcast and she's become one of the top podcasters in the world Talking about an indirect path. But everything she did was just to the max. She committed, and I think that that route will lead you to a leadership role a lot faster than planning. I need to do this. I need to do this. I need to do this. You need to kill it. Kill it wherever you go.

Speaker 1: 37:00

Yeah, I think that can. I particularly to myself and in my family. I always like to plan well in advance, but I think the sort of system is quite tough as well. I mean, in the UK you take these things with GCSEs which being the equivalent of your sophomore year in high school, and you take maybe 11 subjects. So that's very rigid. And then you take a levels which be three or four in your senior year and then you'd go to university and, unlike in the US where it's liberal arts and gets explore, you're going in for one subject. So there's almost this view in the work world as well that you've got something else to work up to. You've got into a good school, you've got into a good university, you get into a good job what's next? What's next, what's next? Whereas now what I'm sort of seeing is that people are starting to change jobs every two to three years. Everything's sort of changing. So it's this sort of you know, massive contrast in our minds of this stable path which may not actually even exist anymore.

Speaker 2: 37:57

Yeah, I don't think there is a stable path, so I'm not saying do anything and stay anywhere because of that. I think the difference, though, is I see people at a company that's doing something interesting, that is being successful, and not pushing whatever it was they were to be the best, whatever that was they were supposed to be, to see where that'll go. Because if you think about a career, it's you are assembling a group of cheerleaders or not, you are assembling a group of mentors or not, and if you don't take advantage of every job and say, oh my gosh, I'm going to help these people that they were nice enough to give me a job, I'm going to help these folks as much as I can and figure it out, and I am honestly saying I did not get this early in my career. I did not understand this. This is on the list of books I wish somebody had handed me at 22, because I could have really, and maybe I simply wasn't ready for it at that time.

Speaker 2: 39:01

But it's just getting beyond your what you think you need and getting to. I'm here and I'm just going to really make the most of it and see where it goes, and so I think that that job hopping and I've seen it a lot where they hop to. For example, I'm going to go work for a nonprofit because that sounds right, but they don't do their diligence on the nonprofit. It finds out that it's just as political as a for-profit organization but no money and ultimately what you really want to do is just work for really accomplished individuals who know what they're doing. And I was really lucky at J Walder Thompson when early in my career to work for some just incredibly effective leaders and people who really taught me tremendously and that was time well spent.

Speaker 1: 39:56

How do you and what do you tell your kids? How do you even go about finding these people? Because there's difference in people's reputation and how good people say they are, versus actually working for them and how good they are.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Again, I think you sort of you Look, you're going to pursue things that you think you're interested in. We know that right, you're going to just do it. You're going to say I'm going to try, like in my case, I wanted to get into unless you go to law school or business school or whatever a graduate or something. You're going to narrow it down to a couple of areas and then you're going to throw out as many try to get it into the door for job number one. Once you're in job number one, you start to see I'm good at this, I'm not good at that, but I can fix those things. I like this, I'm inspired by this. I like what that person is doing over there. You figure out how to get there, how to help them. Your generation is all about a side hustle, side hustle at work. Find a side hustle there that inspires you.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Could you elaborate on that a little bit more, about what you mean about, because a lot of people would just do the job go home. What do you mean about making it? Yeah, what do you mean?

Speaker 2: 41:10

Part of it is and again, this is with. I've been out of school and worked a long, long time, and so there's more perspective than I would have had at 22,. But had I could have had this perspective, it was like how does the business make money? How can I help the business? What are the purpose of this business, whatever it is, how does my job connect to that? Almost every business is about acquiring customers and keeping them. You're on one of those two things. Now, if you're in the keeping the customer business, what does that look like? How do you measure it? How do you impact that? How do you get better at it? Who in the organization is better at it? Getting to know your customers and going oh, I'm the only guy talking to the customer right now. I could be a feedback loop or there's a disconnect from here to here. You see a problem in the organization and has nothing to do with your job, but it's If you go to someone and say you know what? I'd love to help you on this project.

Speaker 1: 42:12

Sure, I see what you're saying, because it's more about double downing on connectivity to the business, not even so that other people can see that you're doing the work. That's a bonus, right About gaining the skills that you need to hopefully get the role that you want laid down. The line.

Speaker 2: 42:26

Yeah, and you don't even know what that role is necessarily. That's the thing that's so interesting and there's a little bit of it's a leap of faith, because you're basically saying I don't know where this is going to go, but I do know that if I do an extraordinary job in this role and add a little bit more here, something good is going to happen. And that is the leap of faith and it almost doesn't matter. You know, I mean in law you go to law school and then you try to build 2,000 hours and then you hope you don't piss off a partner and that's seven years or nine years. You become a partner. I don't know if that's a career path that a lot of people want, and there aren't other career paths that are very well-defined anymore. Everything else is you got to go make it, and it's exciting because you don't have to worry about it. You just have to do a great job wherever you are.

Speaker 1: 43:21

With these sort of skills that you've mentioned. Obviously a lot of different jobs, a lot of different roles. I'd be curious if you found if there are any common characteristics or categories of CMOs, especially those that are successful versus not successful.

Speaker 2: 43:40

Funny enough. That's exactly what my book is about.

Speaker 1: 43:45

You didn't do that, thank you. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2: 43:48

So different animal. The acronym is CATS and it stands for courageous, thoughtful, thoughtful and scientific, and I sort of again, when I drilled it down and looked at what were the components of a successful, cheap marketing officer, they had the courage to sort of focus. They had the courage to be distinct because most companies sort of say, oh, what's our competitor doing? Okay, we'll do that. You have to dare to be different. It takes courage to stand out because it's just, and to stand up and try to get an organization to be green when everybody in the category is yellow, it's just hard and that takes courage and it is absolutely a number one characteristic that I have seen among successful marketers.

Speaker 2: 44:33

The next part is artful, and what artful is about is not that you're necessarily individually creative, but that you are able to assemble a group of people and bring them together and help the ideas come to fruition and you don't get in the way of it. There's a certain amount of empathy that goes into that, certain listing skills and that you recognize. This is where the skill of marketing, that you understand how brand works and color works and design works and all of that. That's in this artfulness.

Speaker 2: 45:10

Thoughtful is this notion that the whole marketing and service this whole idea that marketing can be a force of good and do good things for customers', prospects and employees. Because if your employees don't believe in a brand, no one will. And then scientific is the last the S, and this is the key thing in all of this. You can be courageous, you can be artful, you can be thoughtful and still fall flat on your face because you don't have basic math and science behind you supporting what it is that you're doing. Because marketing is not just, oh, pretty pictures and oh, it's nice, a new logo. It's about doing something for the business right and keeping customers pretty much that and employees and all those other good things. So those are the four characteristics, cats.

Speaker 1: 46:00

Stunning Ta-da. The particular reason I wanted to speak to you and what I find incredibly interesting is, I think, in today's world. I've mentioned social media quite a lot, but I think everything nowadays is marketable, including yourself and your own brand. But one thing in terms of building up my own knowledge, just like you with the podcast, and whether that's the least front thing or not is the ability to create an incredible network, not just to say I've met or spoken to someone, but in enabling myself to learn from, as I call it, the world's best people in their given fields. What experience have you had in building a network? What do you find is the importance of it and how can others, without a podcast or with, go about doing the same?

Speaker 2: 46:44

Yeah, it's a give-to-get thing and this is the thing. If you are always saying what can this person do for me, your network is going to stay pretty small. But if you think about what can I do for them, and the thing that you have to remember, you have currency, you have social currency and that you, for example, you and I are having this conversation and you want to keep that relationship going with me. Every once in a while you go on LinkedIn because you know that's my dominant channel and say, hey, Drew, great post, Really enjoyed it. Boom, You're stayed top of mind.

Speaker 1: 47:14

Every post, check on it, every single one.

Speaker 2: 47:16

Every post and not just a like, leave a comment. So you can't do that against a thousand people, but you could do it in a thoughtful way and then you could say, huh, is there another student? Or I know Drew started Demon at Duke. I wonder if there's a Duke student that he would talk to, for example. Now you're paying it forward, you've just connected somebody to me and I'm going to help them. So this is where you're proactively looking at the network you build and you're maintaining it. It takes work, but it is a great investment, and for you to be thinking that at 18 is incredible to me. It blows me away.

Speaker 1: 47:56

Thank you. Yeah, I found that particularly helpful from the school, from school and university, and I find myself very fortunate it'd be able to access and talk to some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, and I can't deny that there is a strong amount of privilege being at a university like Duke, but I also don't think it's exclusive to people from good schools. In order to build a great network, have you got any advice for people that haven't gone to these big name schools and how they could also go about approaching people even if they aren't on their own school's alumni?

Speaker 2: 48:31

Yeah, I mean, you've got to try and you build off a success. Right, it takes the courage to figure out what's important to that individual, but the good news is almost everybody that you're looking for is on social somewhere, right, and that's the difference, then, from 40 years ago, where you'd have to write someone a letter, you'd have to find their address and write them a letter or a cold column. Now you can engage with their content and if you do it enough and you do it thoughtfully and you focus it enough and you say these are the 10 people that I want to meet right now and you're a student anywhere in this country, I guarantee you at least five of those people that you want to meet will respond in one way or another.

Speaker 1: 49:16

Now, if you're trying to, meet Taylor Swift.

Speaker 2: 49:18

it might be hard. It might be hard, but maybe not you know, she supports her people too. She's all about community.

Speaker 1: 49:28

Quite a few of them have said no. I've reached out to the president of the United States. They can have responses from them. I've had responses from past prime ministers of different countries. So even if I had a response from Jeff Bezos, so even if they didn't come on, I appreciate at least you know the ability that they've seen it and had Harvey Brack and Smith and their email for at least five seconds of their lifetime.

Speaker 2: 49:51

And, by the way, this long term game. Let's assume you're going to keep doing this You'll say you could always say I understand. You know that this is a. You don't know who I am, so who is it that you would like to see on my show that would convince you to come?

Speaker 1: 50:06

It's a very smart idea. So you just say and by the way.

Speaker 2: 50:09

I promise to come back to you. Perseverance pays. I mean, I know it's a cliche, but it does.

Speaker 1: 50:17

Yeah, that's, I'll use that one. I've got a few other ones like those sort of names that potentially said yes, I'm not going to expose them just yet. I had another question I found from my experience within student organizations I presume this would also transfer to the business world but your business is only really as good as the people working there. Have you got any general thoughts or advice for CEOs, cmos, on building a good team of people, what to look for and how that sort of intertwines with your business and with your message?

Speaker 2: 50:52

Yeah, it's a great question and the truth is that when I look at who I think are some of the most effective CMOs in our community, their building a team is their number one priority. And they come in to a job and there's a certain number of people and inevitably they need to bring in somebody else and there's so many demands on a CMO's time that if you don't have strong leaders that you can count on running your various departments and initiatives, you're in trouble. You're going to be too busy doing the work to run it, and I know there are a lot of people who like to do the marketing and are less interested in the leadership aspect. Fine, but recognize the limitation that that will have on your career. So, in terms of hiring, there are a lot smarter, better people who have better advice on that.

Speaker 2: 51:51

It's a complicated everything from interviewing to building a well-rounded team, not hiring yourself. There's so many other little things that go into it. But one thing is for sure is that you don't want to make snap decisions on hiring, because if you make a bad hire, it's so difficult to correct that. So the old expression hire slowly, fire quickly is still relevant, but how to hire effectively, it is remarkable to me, given all the science that we have out there, that it is still a very subjective and ineffective process right now.

Speaker 1: 52:42

Yeah, I think my podcast is going to need a new host soon.

Speaker 2: 52:45

I'm kidding, how much is getting a new producer?

Speaker 1: 52:49

Yeah, Maybe I'll steal yours. I'll give them $5 a year. My final question what is one thing that you wish a lesson of this podcast to take away from this that you feel like you said or didn't say, and for them to know about you moving forward?

Speaker 2: 53:08

I think that the thing that would be nice to take away is that there's this concept of personal brand. It is something that you as an individual have an opportunity. I think today everybody needs to have some awareness of what it means to be a personal brand, and that's marketing and that's understanding who you are, what gets you excited, what doesn't get you excited and what can people count on you for. And the sooner you get a handle on that, the more likely you can build into your personal brand and grow your personal brand. By doing that, you're growing yourself. So it's a journey and it's a wonderful journey. I guess the last part of this is this concept that Duke called forever learning, and it's the biggest blessing that I think anybody can have in life is just to recognize that you read every book in one room. You open up the door and there's another room that has more books and more things. So life is just a learning adventure.

Speaker 1: 54:19

Well, thank you so much, Drew. I feel like I've learned an unbelievably large amount from you today. I think it's truly fascinating to learn both your journey and from someone that's not only just being a CMO within one business. You're actually speaking to, interacting with, helping and winning awards for your incredible coaching and help with lots of different people, and I think that advice is invaluable. I thoroughly enjoy your podcast and it's something that's going to continue motivating me. Hopefully, one day I'll reach my 386th or whatever episode, and if I take anything away from this podcast, I will make sure to like all your LinkedIn posts. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 55:01

No, no, no. Don't like them. Celebrate them or say that you're inspired. A like is very low currency. All right, Harvey, I appreciate you and I appreciate what you're doing. It's amazing. I know how much work it takes to do a podcast, so kudos to you in Forever Duke.