TOP CMO: Amy Baker, Security Journey - 'Turning Wants into Growth'

Amy Baker  0:00  

Keeping it simple is one of my primary principles from a marketing perspective. How do we keep it simple with the things that we think really drive the most value to the business that are really helping it grow. And I think there's a lot to be said for clear communication.

Ben Kaplan  0:13  

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies, and most disruptive startups, great ideas after a certain wave want to spread, they want to be told us someone else's simple, surprising, and significant data to unlocking viral creativity is to make it rapidly scalable. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. Today, I'm chatting with Amy Baker, Chief Marketing Officer at security journey. That's the platform that helps companies build a security first development culture. Amy is a true marketing Maven with over 15 years of experience heading up marketing functions for some of the biggest names in the business, including Proofpoint, a large cybersecurity and compliance company and Eris, another IP Goliath based in Stockholm. What sets me apart? Is their a creative approach to marketing. Whether it's guerilla marketing, experiential campaigns, or digital marketing tactics, Amy knows how to make an impact. How do you go from marketing nice to haves to essential drivers of business growth? Let's find out with Amy Baker. Just talking to you about marketing, one of the things that stands out is that you are a believer in practical marketing rather than idealistic marketing, or real world marketing rather than a marketing theory. What do you mean by that? And how does that affect your day to day work?

Amy Baker  1:43  

Great question. I would say that a lot of people will come into marketing, or or I would say almost all people think they know how to do marketing. So there's that. And then people have their own idea about what marketing should be doing. But what I find is sometimes that can drive people to take actions and have marketing activities that may or may not be driving what's best for the business. And so, for me, what's most important is understanding exactly what leads to new business, and supporting that and being a head of sales so that they are getting everything that they need to be successful. Sometimes people will chase concepts that are maybe trendy, that may or may not be a fit for their business. So we hear a lot these days about Account Based Marketing, about product lead growth, about a lot of buzzwords that if people chase them without understanding the importance of them or where they might be a fit for the organization, then they might be going down the wrong path for meeting their company's objectives.

Ben Kaplan  2:41  

So your background, you've worked at a number of technology based startups or scale ups where growth and fast growth and Wayne Gretzky hockey stick like curve is the goal in those kinds of situations. Let's talk about some of the trendy marketing techniques or approaches, methodologies that you mentioned, how are they useful? And how are they problematic? Let's say for a company that's fairly early stage trying to grow fast trying to scale let's start with Account Based Marketing? Where is Account Based Marketing gone? Right? And where has it gone wrong?

Amy Baker  3:11  

Well, so what I think is Account Based Marketing can be terrific if you are going after a really small industry segment. And you know that that if you capture the top 10 companies in that market segment, then you could be successful. And so maybe if you're going after really large enterprise accounts, and they're in a one narrow industry segment, then Account Based Marketing might make the most sense, because casting a wider net may or may not be a good solution there in my might result in some wasted money. Whereas if you're trying to do something that's cross verticals, it's really horizontal in nature, then you want a wider net, and then you want to be going after a bunch of potential industry segments, all at the same time, in which case, Account Based Marketing probably wouldn't be ideal, because you're really trying to grow broad awareness and you're trying to grow volume. And high quality leads both at the same time.

Ben Kaplan  4:01  

For everyone listening and Account Based Marketing really is don't cast a wide net focus on individual accounts, the people you really want to win want to get that matter most to you and focus on them. And it's interesting, because there's conflicting things here. On one hand, power of focus is great, you're spread too thin, you're doing too many things. It's like why not? In the words of Stephen Covey put first things first, right? If these are the most important companies, let's put them first makes sense. The flip side though, and one of the challenges on a startup though, is that that assumes that one you really know who should be first that you have a clear product market fit in that segment and that all of that is there. And of course that comes with company maturity, right? When okay, this isn't our first rodeo. We've been around the block a few times we know exactly what's the kind of client we can close. We're gonna focus on that client where we can add the most value when you're early stage. You might still be grasping for things you might have a theory but you don't know. And then the problem is Account Based Marketing doesn't put the numbers in your favor, right, you got to convert at a higher rate?

Amy Baker  5:03  

Well, that's a great point. This is a conversation I was having with an incredibly academic founder that I had worked with, and I was trying to talk to him about increasing the n, right, you have to increase that denominator in order to make sure that you've got more wins. And so if you're gonna do the work, that marketing is required to do it for Account Based Marketing, why not send it to more people, why limit the number of potential respondents to set just a handful, when you could send it to 200 300 500 1000. And see baby, you're gonna find out your ideal customer profile is different than you think, because you're casting a brighter, broader net. And you might realize, well, there are businesses that are of a different makeup that are interested in my solution as well. And then you've got a total addressable market that's bigger. And by the way, now, you're going to attract investors that you might not have drafted before.

Ben Kaplan  5:49  

And so the other factor with a lot of startups, they're trying to get to the next investment round, and what a savvy investor does. So here's the dynamic, and I used to be a pitch Coach and an accelerator that would help people do pitch decks and get investors interested. So really, what you try to do is that you try to have a large addressable market, you want to say, look at all these customers, you'd be foolish not to invest in us look how many customers we can get, you make it really big. And then what the investor does is they take the red pen, and these are crossed this, I was like, okay, theoretically, you could be in Asia, but I see no evidence that you've made any inroads in Asia, and so I'm just gonna cross that one off. And theoretically, yes, you could go out for Fortune 50. But, you know, they have certain sales cycles and certain needs, and you haven't shown that you can give them the kind of support they need to, so they're not worried about that you're gonna go out of business and not do it. So I'm gonna cross it off. So there's this dynamic there. So it can also mean for startups, if you can show more credible addressable markets that can be valuable to get you to the next investment stage. Usually, what founders will like is at a valuation that you'd like on favorable terms,

Amy Baker  6:55  

of course, multiples that you're looking at, right? So I there, I guess there's two ways to look at it. Sometimes I've seen startups who will try to do too many things. And they'll try to be all things to all people. And they go in a whole bunch of different directions with maybe even multiple product sets, and multiple industries. And it's like, Oh, my goodness, to your point on focus, if you start going down that path number one, you probably don't have enough money or enough people to actually execute on it. And in number two, you're almost insuring your failure, because then you're spread too thin. So I think there's a fine balance between picking the product and solution fit and understanding how big your market is, and giving it a chance to flourish. And maybe going after a bunch of product sets and a bunch of product solution sets. That could mean, there's no chance of anything flourishing, because you're spread too thin. So there's definitely a balance there. But I think we started this conversation with what are the right tools? And what are the right approaches to ensure success. And I think it does take a good look at data, and where you're winning, and where you're losing and to your point, enough depth of data to draw some conclusions. And so it's important to stick with one particular approach long enough to get enough data to draw conclusions. What I sometimes see people doing is they'll pivot really quickly. And you haven't even given an approach enough time to be effective, especially in b2b, which sales cycles can be fairly long.

Ben Kaplan  8:13  

What about product lead growth? I'll define that quickly. Here's my definition product lead growth is that your product has built in a way that will enable you to grow the product itself in a more classical viral marketing sense, like Hotmail is the classic example where Hotmail remember back in the day, you send out a message in your at the bottom message, say, Hey, Mike got free mail, do you want one too, and he would do that in more a more modern sense. It's not necessarily like you're emailing everyone in the product, but the product is structured in a way that enables people to invest more in it, get more seats, connect to other departments, it just naturally wants you to grow. So what are the benefits? And what are some of the challenges of that?

Amy Baker  8:52  

One, I think what's interesting is like the curtain business that I'm in right now, because of the purchasing patterns, product, lead growth might not be right for us, because there are people involved in the purchase, who perhaps wouldn't really be interested in moving forward. But it's the admin or administrators who are saying, yes, the business needs this, even if the people consuming the product might not be in favor of it. So for example, what security journey does is we actually teach developers how to write secure code. And so developers don't always love being taught how to do new things, they're pretty sure they know how to do things really well to begin with. And so if a developer were to take advantage of the training, and we were to do product lead growth there, and they might be able to get to try it, they might be like, Oh, I don't need that. And therefore it wouldn't really become viral. But other people in the business might say, Yes, you absolutely do not need this. We need this for compliance purposes. We need this to read to improve application security, and in which case, yes, we're purchasing it. So some of it depends on the people who are going to consume the product and how the decision is being made. Sometimes developers are a part of the decision because people like them to test First, whereas I am aware of a colleague who actually has a product that's focused on product managers. And they get their product managers to try the product, full featured, and then they start to peel back features over time. And then eventually, the product managers come back and say, Wait, I want all those features, we're going to purchase the product. Because they became enamored with it, they loved it. And they came back and said, I need more. So some of it needs depends upon the problem that the product is solving, and the people consuming it, and whether they have the power to move forward with a purchase, based on the fact that they've tried it, and they think it solves a problem for the

Ben Kaplan  10:36  

product lead growth, it really got it started out of software companies, basically saying that the features the performance, the virality eight sells itself. And when you have good product market fit, it can do that. The issue is that sometimes things are not as apparent. And so in this case, he gave the example of multiple stakeholders involved in this that may have differing opinions on that. But other times, it's the value of a product or a service comes over time you experience it over time. And the problem is people aren't going to be around in the product enough to experience it unless you go really deep, very common would be like more of a platform type product where you get a lot of value, and you get all your data in it. But until you get all your data in it, you don't understand what it's for what it's doing, and you got people around to experience the value later on. If you enjoy this show your love. Top CEO, top CEO is a business school case study telling the story behind the story and what you can learn from it from those who have faced the fire and come out the other side.

Anne-Marie  11:45  

That was the challenge the team was faced 25% of it was gone, like found myself $282,000 in debt, how would

Ben Kaplan  11:52  

you navigate through these trials and transform them into opportunities for growth and success? How do you build back up the business and get out of debt and get

Anne-Marie  11:59  

anything in, nobody can come to work right in any of our factory in any of the factories. This is top CEO available wherever you get your podcast.

Ben Kaplan  12:19  

The funny thing about product lead growth is that many people assume that if the product is all of the selling marketing isn't needed. But product lead growth doesn't typically happen at the exact speed that a company needs to grow. So marketing's role is not only to feel product trial, but also to smooth out some of the rough spots. To add predictability to a growth process that investors and key stakeholders want to see as a company matures.

Amy Baker  12:48  

Well, of course, the other piece of that from a software perspective is the user interface of the software has to be phenomenal, it has to be so easy to use that people just immediately adopt it and move forward with it. And more complex enterprise products tend to not be in that camp. So I feel like it's far more interesting for a more consumer based approach where you've probably built a rock solid UI, it does one simple thing really well. And it's easy for people to pass along. But when you get into an enterprise kind of situation, you may or may not have that, because maybe it's coming, it's affecting a business process or some other things that need to change in the organization, in which case, it's just not that simple to get the results from it. As you're suggesting.

Ben Kaplan  13:28  

One of the things that is underlying this whole discussion is this notion of Simplicity vs complexity and how you go about it. And the problem is a marketing plan, you can have a brilliant marketing plan. But if it's complex, but brilliance will be worse than a less brilliant, but more simple plan that is executable. So how do you think about Simplicity vs complexity and how that influences your marketing approach? Well, one

Amy Baker  13:57  

of the things I would say that's most important now, because the marketing technology stack can be incredibly complex. You could throw 115 20 different marketing technologies, and never understand what's happening with your marketing effectiveness. Sure, you might have been using the latest and greatest of everything, but you probably can't leave them all together so that they work so well. You have visibility. So that scenario sounds complexity to work against me, because it's so complex. Number one, it takes a lot to manage. It's incredibly expensive to buy all that software. And then how are you actually ensuring it's all working the way you're it's supposed to and then how does it scale? And so that's just one example from a complexity and simplicity. I've inherited businesses or walked into businesses that had incredibly complex technology stacks that could not track and a lead to revenue. And if you can't do that, I don't know how you scale your business. I don't know how you grow your business. I don't know how you understand what's working. So in that case, technology in My opinion, better technology is simpler technology, something where I'm using maybe what two or three pieces of technology versus five to 10. That's just one example that I've seen, really be important, especially when it comes to there's so the cost of that skews away at your marketing budget and your ability to actually drive more ads

Ben Kaplan  15:18  

is there three parts of your marketing software stack that you consider essential,

Amy Baker  15:23  

you certainly can't live without a CRM and marketing automation. So if you get if you're lucky enough to have marketing automation built into the CRM, then you're in a great place. But those two parts definitely have to be there. And of course, you can't really live without Google Analytics and understanding exactly how any digital traffic is coming to you. So I'd say those three are really the key. What do you cut from your marketing stack, some of the things I was cutting were things that were and I guess part of this comes to, to your point, the sophistication and maturity of the department itself, I came into some place where we were trialing AI. On serving up ads, I've come into locations where we were using external landing pages, instead of using the landing pages built into the website. I mean, there are places where you can say, look, let's just keep this all in one place, so we can really see the data. And so I'd say I'm cutting out things that are overlapping. From a functionality perspective, I've watched people add technology over technology, when they were not utilizing what they had already purchased. And they will really overspending and then increasing the complexity and thus, the cost. And they'll talk about chewing through a budget software can chew through a budget faster than anything. So managing it is no small task either. So I'd say those are the areas where I would say remove any overlapping features. Try and pick a best in class solution. Of course, for CRM, that's either Salesforce or HubSpot, but you know, who knows, everyone's got their personal opinions about those things.

Ben Kaplan  16:50  

To kind of generalize that a little bit, I once interviewed the inventor of a $400 million toothbrush, he invented it was now known as the crest Spinbrush, which you ever see like CVS or Walgreens, it's become a $5 $10, little inexpensive toothbrush. And one of the things that he talked about was that his skill was not so much knowing what product to make, it was knowing what not to make, and knowing all the things and was getting rid of all the other stuff, which you've talked about in your marketing stack, how there's power in that. But what else for a marketer is a nice to have, but not, you know, the main thing that you ought to get rid of, or you ought to save it for a rainy day or on the roadmap, but should not be part of what we're doing now. What else should we get rid of if we're a great CMO or a great marketer?

Amy Baker  17:39  

Oh, great question. I mean, I think there's a time and place for some things, I guess I'm going to answer this in two ways. I think there's a must have, that I didn't talk about yet, which is public relations, from a brand awareness and growth perspective. And then there's a nice to have when you get bigger and more mature, which is I think, sort of buyers intent and intent data, I find too few sales organizations actually understand what to do with intent data, or and or leads that come from buyer's intent, in which case it gets fumbled a lot. And then you're overspending and you're actually not getting great conversions from

Ben Kaplan  18:10  

it. What do you mean by buyer's intent data and how it's kind of mishandled, then we'll come back and we'll circle back to PR after that.

Amy Baker  18:16  

So buyer's intent is when an organization there's a person or organization that is searching for a solution that might meet your keywords, they're searching for a solution, you actually don't know what person at that organization is searching. But you know that from the IP address and from the domain that somebody in that business is searching, so then a salesperson could be delivered a lead and say, hey, somebody from this organization is searching for something, what do they do with it, they're left then having to prospect basically, they're effectively cold prospecting, saying, well, there might be a person at this company who's interested in this, what are the key titles that I should be going after? And how do I approach them? And you have to do that in a very gentle way. Because you want to come in with it without saying, Hey, I saw you were searching for this. Yeah, you

Ben Kaplan  18:56  

want to be more like it's serendipity. I just happen to reach out and oh, my gosh, I was just looking for that solution is funny. You You should message me, yes, that's what you want.

Amy Baker  19:05  

There's a subtlety there that needs to be applied, right, which says, like, you know, I find other companies like yours that relief to have found great value in the solution. Here's a case study that's very similar to a company like yours have really saw some great results that you might be interested. And then it's subtle, but you can tell it brings some value. But I find that it takes a very sophisticated sales organization and or maybe a few of sophisticated people within the organization to actually read really be able to take advantage of that and understand what to do with it. And I think you can overspend on that, and not have enough conversions to make that math work. So that's one area where I think you it's a time in place, and maybe you're using that as a reward for some of your best salespeople who really are more sophisticated and understand how to handle it. I do find that sales sophistication is really lacking these days. I'm finding that there are not enough people with real art involved in how do you influence A buyer and help them appreciate the value that you bring. There's a lot of people that are showing up, and really just informing. And assuming that someone's gonna, of course, think you're the best because you spoke to them. Okay, so I do think I'm probably leaning to the point of keeping it simple. I'm leaning towards what do I know people can execute on regardless of their skill set. From a sales arena perspective, that is just really easy for them to start that conversation.

Ben Kaplan  20:26  

PR can either be the lowest return or highest return part of your marketing stack. While an ad will stop delivering return on investment, the minute you stop spending on it, a perfectly placed PR story to your ideal audience will continue to drive ROI indefinitely. PR is also closely connected to raising more investments, how an investor perceives your company, especially based on your industry positioning and size of potential addressable market has a huge impact on the perception of your potential value, the more valuable your perceived to be, the better the deal terms you'll get.

Amy Baker  21:03  

So there are so many reasons why think is incredibly valuable. I've been in businesses where PR, to your point on driving data was delivering 20% of my leads, very established PR approach was given me 20% of white leads because of the credibility that comes with strong public relations. Because you're being you're positioning your business and the people in your business as experts in a particular area. And therefore people are seeking your advice. They're seeking your contents, they're seeking any, maybe any solutions you might have. And so what I find is it's so important to build awareness, using public relations. So building awareness of your company and thought leadership and expertise, that sadly, so often, in tough budgetary times, it's one of the first things to get cut to your point because people too often can't see the results of it. And it's like so many other things used to be as Oh, well, people just knew you did advertising, whether you could track it or not. Because it was an important part. People don't buy into that anymore, they need to see the results. But with public relations, what I tend to measure is things like share voice against my competitors. I measure engagement with articles, I measure social media from reposting those articles, there are ways to measure the importance of PR to understand exactly what value it's delivering to the business. But it definitely is an area where especially in a an earlier stage company where there's not a lot of awareness of a particular company, you really need it in order to achieve some good sort of recognition for the sales targets that your sales team is going after.

Ben Kaplan  22:39  

And PR done poorly has no ROI or return on investment PR done well. It's the most scalable thing you have. Because unlike buying an ad where, okay, you buy the ad from Google or you buy the ad from Facebook or LinkedIn, whoever, you know, you spend the dollar, you get a dollars worth of ad exposure, the minute you stop spending the dollar, it goes away. But PR done incredibly well. That one I don't know if you've had articles like this, we've had many for our clients where it's that one's driving leads or sales for like 10 years or placement almost made the whole business long after you spent another dollar on PR. If you get those right,

Amy Baker  23:16  

no, you're absolutely right, because of the legs that it does give you you're so right, as you know, you get the article published, you republish it on your site, right, and you link back to it, other people see it, you maybe link back to it from a blog post, I mean, there's so much you can do with it, of course, you're linking to it from social media, your sales teams resharing, there's an awful lot that can happen with that to drive credibility. And then people references especially one of the best areas for PR we do is primary research studies. So we'll use the data in our software, in any aggregate form to create a research study on a particular topic. We, you know, summarize the study, it's usually got something quantifiable in it. And then, of course, editors and reporters. And journalists love that kind of data, something quantifiable, and then it gets referenced, and it gets sourced, and it gets used over and over again. And to your point, it just goes on for a long time. And it's also can be a great source of lead gen in addition to PR and so we tried to combine those two, of course most people do, try to combine those things together as much as you can.

Ben Kaplan  24:17  

One thing that's coming my opinion is the confluence of PR with SEO. And the reason for that. And in particularly in regard to data studies, we have a division called Top data that just creates these market research studies with a PR and SEO focus in mind. And it's because of two qualities of a data study used for this thought leadership you're talking about. One is that usually a dataset is no somewhat expensive. There's many facets to it. So it has to be summarized. So that quality of it means that usually immediate was going to summarize it and then it's where do I give you want to get more? If I'm serving the reader, I'm going to show you where to go. That leads to a link and second quality about data is that you have to cite where it's from. You can't just say 72 per sense of for for your business, I'll make up the staff 70% of E commerce related code is insecure, you can just throw it out there, you have to say, oh, based on this study, we took a look at this, we surveyed that we examined why we looked at z because it has to be cited that also lends itself

Amy Baker  25:16  

to a link above a surprising number of people will quote data without citing the source, which, of course, has no credibility whatsoever. If you're just doing that, you're not going to build any credibility or leadership, if you're just throwing out data without any sources, in my opinion, well,

Ben Kaplan  25:30  

the other thing about using data is that not only does it people summarizes, they kind of tend to link to you for the full report, not only do they if it's a citation, hopefully they cite it, they're gonna cite and connect to you. But it also doesn't have to be all ownable original data by you. So you can pull from all these different sources, all these different things. And then usually you have at least one piece that is a unique original to you. But then you combine that all together and suddenly have this new thing. And so for that reason, we've just seen a lot where it's like, okay, if you do a traditional SEO link building program, you're happy for getting 10 or 15 links a month trying to like place articles, or do link trades or things like that, but you start doing a really valuable data study, suddenly you get 250 links like that from that study. And so it's incredibly powerful. So I think that's another way that more SEO metrics, like what is the domain authority of the site linking to us? are we tracking in Google Analytics and Adobe analytics where people come in from a PR source, an article a placement, what are they doing on the site, can we see them reach a goal in that can we kind of measure the value and then once that not just share a voice, but share of mind share of voices, like here's the pie of all the conversation around, here's our slice, the pie share of mind is different. It says that, let's say those 400 reporters and journalists that make a difference in in our industry and our perception, how many of those can recognize our names, say what we do with accuracy, actually say something positive about us. And you might start out and you're a startup, you have very low share of voice, but also share of mind, people don't know who you are. But what's nice about share of mind is it's a leading indicator rather than a lagging indicator. So you have high share of mind, people know who you are, what you do, what you stand for, why you're valuable. A lot of articles follow, a lot of other things follow. And you can measure that early on, by just like how many these reporters Let's track, these are the 400. And let's track what inroads were making and getting into their share of mind regardless if they published an article or not.

Amy Baker  27:22  

Now it's a great point. Because if you become known as a source for those reporters, and especially in today's PR environment, where no publications actually have writers on staff, and if they know you can come to them with great content that they can then republish, because content is so valuable and so hard to come by these days, then I think you're right, I think the following from a reporter journalist perspective, is even greater than maybe it might have been in the past when PR really did have a lot more full time people working for these publications, which now I just, it's unfortunate, but writers are just all shared.

Ben Kaplan  27:59  

And I think your job as a PR person or running a PR program are is make it easy for the reporter to have a great story. And there's two parts of it. So you've got to one make it easy, because why Busy, busy people lots of things. I mean, you're the most important thing to you, but you're not the most important thing to them. And then the other part is, you actually got to give them a great story. So it's a story worth doing. So if you can make easy, great stories if you're in that business. And then for us, it's the rule of three, which is one way that let's say one example of you helping a Reporter Out or giving them a great quote or give them a great story idea. That's maybe a fluke, two examples, you do it twice with the same reporter. It's a coincidence, okay, maybe lightning strikes twice, you do it three times. That's a trend. It's the rule of three. And now you're a go to person, if it's you've done it three times, then you're part of the Rolodex, you're part of the people I go to for quotes and all that. So if you can get to three, then once you get to three, now you're at 20, you're a 30.

Amy Baker  28:56  

It's equally as important to be responsive to their needs, right? I find too often, organizations don't appreciate the importance of responsiveness. Everybody is on a deadline. If you are not in PR comms first drop everything mode, you will fail at PR, because when the opportunity comes to you, it does not Ah, well,

Ben Kaplan  29:14  

I think the other one is in the industry, you're in cybersecurity, there's just a lot of and we've created a lot of these rapid response programs, where there's a breach someone's going to be quoted, there's gonna be some expertise needed. There's some commentary and if you're the first and not only that, if you're consistently the first I can count on you, you're gonna get back to me in half an hour, then you're just gonna be mentioned. So some of it is being smart and being thoughtful and having a good story. And there's some of that it's just like being fast. And you're the one and maybe actually your point isn't that great, but it's fast. And I need it because I need a counterbalancing point to put in my story. Or I need an insight about this. And I know I can depend on you, or you've given

Amy Baker  29:51  

me something pre written that's actually I don't have to rewrite because it's not badly written. Right. So the other part of it is sometimes so many responses now are written responses people have time for have found interviews. So I'm going to ask you three questions, you're going to answer the three questions. If I look at this insight, this is a mess. I have to start over with these answers. It's passive voice. It doesn't fit what I was trying to do. But if you come back to something that's well written and thoughtful and maybe has a fresh angle you're in. I mean, there's so much to be said for the care you take with responses. Well,

Ben Kaplan  30:20  

I'm going to give you a Star Wars reference price even know this reference. I'm not like a super fan or the zoo be destroyed. But in Star Wars, I remember this part because they they're talking about do you have a general knowledge of stars above I say, like a Jedi. You know what a Jedi is like that the Jedi gave the impression of having lightning fast reflexes, but it was because they anticipated what would come. And so they were anticipating. And so they looked like they were like had amazing fast reflexes. But it was just because of that anticipation. Arrogance light. And so one of the little secrets of rapid response progress for PR is that you can anticipate the types of if you're in cybersecurity, the types of breaches that are going to come up what's going to be relevant for that. And you can pre write answers to that and then tweak them a little bit. And you're thoughtful answer pre written a month before this breach happens is usually better than the one that happens in the moment where you're trying to get like someone to approve it. And I need this and all that you can do that. But great anticipation leads to the appearance that you're incredibly responsive and fast

Amy Baker  31:26  

to Great point. That's an excellent point, because getting to the bank have answers for things that are common questions that come up. And I think too few people use what we consider to be almost a PR Knowledge Base, where, hey, you've answered this question 12 times already, we're just going to create this really well synthesized answer. And we're going to make sure we're ready with it. And it's going to be a unique perspective, or something that most people are going to pick up because it's well written, then it's a unique angle. So I'm gonna do think. And it's, of course, then surprisingly on message with the rest of your marketing message.

Ben Kaplan  32:00  

You had a chance to think it through a little bit. And also, it's actually new life to that data report you did, because the issue is that data report, you can go pitch and say, here's a great data report. But better than that is here's a situation, here's a scenario, here's a story that's breaking and look, my data report has insights to make sense of this cybersecurity breach, suddenly it has a new life. Suddenly, your data report that you did six months ago is incredibly timely, right now, because of this insecure code breach that caused I don't know, target to lose all their credit card information, or whatever it is. So it's actually PR data reports, SEO links. Now we're actually talking about rapid response, giving it a new life. All of those things work together.

Amy Baker  32:44  

Absolutely. To your point, one of the questions you asked us, What do you let go of and what do you prioritize? And I think there are a few key things that I always prioritize. When I get into start working with a new business. It's what does PR look like? Do we have really interesting data that we can utilize? Do we have results we can utilize? So forget even an aggregate report that we do we have customer results that we can do something with? Because buying audiences are far? How do I want to put that, especially technical buying audiences incredibly suspicious, they want to know that there's something behind this, they're going to believe about half of what you tell them, so you better have some data to back it up. And so I do think there are some critical things to building a successful business, especially when it comes to SAS businesses that I come in and look for all the time, the building blocks are spokespeople and data and things that cause people to look at this and say, wow, there's something behind this. This is not just fluff. This is not just a marketing statement. There's real results here.

Ben Kaplan  33:42  

To be a great marketer, be open minded to trying out different marketing channels, but be impatient with seeing results. How do you know when you need to cut a marketing channel? Ask yourself this? Can this marketing channel delivers something that I can't do anywhere else? If the answer to that is no. And the performance of the channel isn't consistently improving, that in a resource constrained world, it's time to focus your attention elsewhere. What's the stuff you're always cutting? I know you said essential stuff like CRM, marketing automation. You said Google Analytics you put in PR in there as well. What is the stuff that is the top of your red pen list that you're like, Oh, I see it. I'm cutting it. Oh, that

Amy Baker  34:26  

newsletter that runs together? 12 different articles. That's the first thing I cut. Okay. Why is that? Number one, it's probably first of all, people only read one or two things. If they get some sort of email. If they're lucky, it should only really have one call to action. In my opinion, it should be about one topic. Yes, people don't have time for this long form stuff. So get rid of the thing that's trying to encapsulate until I tell you every single message that's important. Do one thing do it well give one call to action. So I cut out these things that are compilations of things because I can't figure out which audience it's serving. I can't figure out which point it's going To make, and it's probably not going to convert, because there's probably too many calls to action.

Ben Kaplan  35:03  

I call them a multi topic combo meal to say like, here's the meal I'm giving you. Here's some Chinese food. And here's some Italian food. And here's a steak. And I also got some vegan food for you here and all that you're like, What is this meal? I don't understand what I'm eating. And it doesn't seem very appetizing. It's like going

Amy Baker  35:19  

to the international buffet. You're confused when you get there. Yeah, even though

Ben Kaplan  35:23  

you the food's just Italian, or just Chinese or just this, you might be like, oh, like, that's quite tasty. Okay, so you cut the newsletter, what else would you cut? What else is next thing you're cutting?

Amy Baker  35:32  

Oh, great question. Collateral, I cut collateral left and right. Number one is can be a huge burden on the organization. People do this now in webpage on websites. So what used to be I have 20 pieces of collateral about every single feature that I've ever written, or every single piece of product I've ever written. And so that's difficult to maintain. People are not doing this with website to try and drive SEO. So they might repeat a particular web page and change it slightly. That is also a disaster waiting to happen. Number one, it's too much burden on the organization, how do you maintain it? And does it even have accurate information? And what problem is it really solving for the person that's reaching their website, how's it really helping the buyers journey to have somewhat similar content with just a slightly different angle? So I cut back on I want to get to meaningful content that's actually going to guide the buyers journey, both on something that might be a PDF, but especially on the website,

Ben Kaplan  36:26  

you like to cut things that have names and things that have names. And you you said that founders like to name things, God bless them? What do you mean by that? Like, what are the things they like to name? And why do you feel that naming too many things adds unnecessary complexity,

Amy Baker  36:41  

what I would say is, when you give something a name, that's not a descriptive name, and it comes up with something maybe you've made up on your own, then first, you have to explain to your audience what the name means, then you have to tell them why it's important to them. And what the benefit of it is. That's an awful lot of communication about one small thing, if you could have just given a descriptive name, and then explained what the value of it was, people first of all, would have great context, because the name is descriptive probably tells you what it is. And then you can really just focus on the benefit to them. And they don't have to go through this roller coaster of oh, here's this thing. It's an acronym. Here's what the acronym means. By the way, here's what this actually does. And then here's the benefit to you. Wow, you've lost them. You've lost them. There's no way no one's paying attention to that it's too much. It's too much to take in, I'm gonna move on,

Ben Kaplan  37:26  

is the ability to plainly and simply communicate. Is that an underrated attribute?

Amy Baker  37:32  

Yes, people tried to get so overly and I don't want to use don't mean that creativity is a bad thing. But sometimes there's a time in place for it to be creative. And when it comes to clear communication, sometimes people get overly creative on this piece, this naming of things, and therefore they've lost their audience. And I do think keeping it simple is one of my primary principles from a marketing perspective. As you might have seen, this is a running theme, I think through a conversation, right? How do we keep it simple with the things that we think really drive the most value to the business that are really helping it grow? And so I think, Dad, there's a lot to be said, for clear communication.

Ben Kaplan  38:09  

I'm gonna give you a simplicity want you have a magic simplicity one all the places you just like, Go and take any kind of jargon and complexity, marketing, stack complexity, it can be whatever it is, you just like, simplify it. What are the things that you just think the CMOS listening now should just simplify tomorrow? Don't wait, and it's probably too complex. Wow, great

Amy Baker  38:30  

question messaging. overall messaging, I find too often people don't create what I would consider to be a core messaging document, which is, here's the value we bring. Here's like the overall statement, value proposition. And here are the four supporting points that differentiate us, and you use them religiously for a really long time. People tweak so often, and they've not really given their chance, or their message a chance to really resonate with their audience. Any business is sick of the message long before your audiences even heard it three times. And so I think the simplicity pieces get to one set of core messaging that you use repetitively, and ensure that it's resonating. Of course, I'm not saying ignore any of the data, but ensure it's resonating but don't feel obligated to tweak it every two weeks because that is the antithesis of success.

Ben Kaplan  39:21  

According to Amy Baker, it's crucial for marketers to understand their audience and tailor messaging to fit their needs. Invest the time and resources necessary to gather data, and insights that can help you understand your audience better, then it's time to scale. PR can be an incredible weapon in your marketing stack, specifically because it's your biggest lever to influence how others see your fundamental value. Be open minded, yet impatient. Create a marketing mix that accomplishes everything you need to do and avoid duplication of functions to make your budget work more. For top CMO,  I'm Ben Kaplan

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