Dorian Kendal - Netlify 00:01
The fun job we get to be creative that feeling of actually seeing very quickly the results of your work, we have the fun job. It's tough. Not easy. Often marketers is our a great target for blame.
Tom Cain 00:12
This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. This is TOP CMO.
Jackson Carpenter 00:32
Today I'm speaking with Dorian Kendal CMO of Netlify, a platform for hosting and deploying websites and web applications. Dorian has more than 14 years of experience in marketing technology and operations.
Anne-Marie 00:43
No matter how your team builds for the web Netlify just worked.
Jackson Carpenter 00:47
He previously served as vice president of publishing at Unity Technologies, the company behind one of the most widely used engines for creating 2d and 3d games. He's held leadership roles at technology oriented companies like Practice Fusion and Trulia. And he's worked as a consultant for Facebook, Google and Twitter. On today's episode, we'll ask could webinars be the secret weapon in marketing? What role does empathy and humanity play in today's market? And what is dark social? And how does it force companies to focus on building communities? Let's find out with Dorian Kendal. Dorian Kendal, thank you so much for joining us today on the TOP CMO podcast really appreciate it good to be here with us. And for those who are not familiar. Could you just give us the quick elevator pitch on what Netlify is?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 01:39
Yeah, absolutely. So Netlify is a composable development platform companies who want to sort of adopt a more modern approach to web development, would use to bring together the solutions and services into their architecture into their tech stack so they can deliver amazing digital experiences for their customers.
Jackson Carpenter 01:54
And for those who are not familiar in the audience, tell us a little bit about what composable architecture is. Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 02:00
absolutely. So composable architecture, at really the the sort of the theory behind is that you take different services and solutions that meet the needs of your business, right. So your sort of unique needs, and you bring them together, you orchestrate them so that you can develop a tech stack that really meets again, where you want to bring together to bring to your customers to bring them unique digital experiences. So really, is the idea of instead of this sort of, you know, out of the box, one size fits all approach composability allows you to sort of like Lego put together the pieces to make the greatest, the greatest outcome for your business. And
Jackson Carpenter 02:35
tell me a little bit about who that target audience is for a product like this, who's who are you as a marketer trying to reach? Yeah, so
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 02:42
really, it's, it's one of those interesting cases where it's very expensive. So if you are doing any sort of development for the web, for sites, or stores or apps, it can be applicable to you. What we do find, though, is it really just finds more of a market as you get into sort of larger organizations who have more complexity. So if you have multiple content sources that you want to work with, if you have multiple projects, you're working on multiple sites, as we often see, in large enterprises, or mid market companies, they're really composable architecture is just the way to go. On the smaller end, if your more simplistic use case, probably not as applicable, although we do see a lot of smaller organizations at
Jackson Carpenter 03:20
the end. So you're you're talking a lot about reaching these big enterprise companies. And I'd love to hear a little bit about how you're identifying the right people to reach within those organizations. You know, how do you figure out who it is you need to be reaching in these big companies? And then how do you go about reaching them?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 03:37
That's a really interesting question you we find a product is very technical in nature, right. And so there's an overall committee that's often involved in the process. So we have the business owner, or someone who has actually feeling that pain and the problem. Typically, for us, that's actually the marketer, or sometimes the CIO or CTO, maybe there's issues to the architecture, oftentimes, site speed is a challenge, getting experiences to customers fast enough, conversions are obviously problematic, and campaigns launched, updated, really optimize, so often the pain is felt by the marketer. And that pressure is really put on the technical resources to go and deliver the more appropriate tech stack for the business to reach organizational goals. And so it really is a multi pronged approach. So deal with the like, also the influencing buyer, which is, again, often your marketer, and then your technical buyer, which is the person that's going to actually go through, do the technical betting, talk to the development team and actually make the final decision to go with our solution. So
Jackson Carpenter 04:36
you're a marketer, marketing to marketers, largely, what did that what are the pain points that you're driving home for these for these marketers? Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 04:44
well, it's really just because I'm in this unique position where I am my own ICP for the first time in my career. So previous to Netlify was a company called Unity Technologies, which was a game development platform. So for about five and a half years, and while I was there, I I actually had the global web team underneath me. So oftentimes you see a split, where you have campaign management under marketing, often the tech resources might sit under the IT organization at Unity action, both. So where you often have, you know, the campaign managers are upset because the tech won't meet the needs. And the tech people are mad because the campaign managers want things, I feel the pain of both sides. And you're when I was at Unity, we were using this platform called triple. triple seven was the one that we were on. And it was painful, it was very, very difficult to get campaigns live, massive amount of prep time to go into it, once we actually committed to getting something live, it was live. And that was pretty much it, we deployed a couple times a week. So it was very sort of low levels of iteration that was possible because we had our DevOps team that was in Copenhagen, and they were responsible for doing the bi weekly pushes. And so really, it felt, you know, the pain is we will go live with the campaign and ecommerce store and subscription business. If the campaign was not performing up to expectations, or if we saw leading indicators that there was some adjustments that would be really impactful for the campaign itself. So hard to make changes. And of course, that created frustration on both sides in my organization, the tech side is still constrained by the tech that they inherited. But this, they were the ones who made the original decision. And then my campaign managers who of course, were frustrated, because they had been evaluated on performance and feeling that they were just hamstrung and shackled, unable to actually make changes to really optimize their work. And so for me, when I when you ask the question of like, how do I actually deal with the pain? And how do I market that to marketers, it's because I've lived it, and I can speak the language. I've recount the story of you know, wanting one day, I wanted to make a change of button, want to change the call to action on it, and let's change the color. Even though I own the team, it was underneath me, I had the most possible power to make that change. I had to go by on processes, right didn't want to disappoint my team and go outside of process. So I had to file a JIRA ticket. And that JIRA ticket was near the starting the sprint that already been planned. So I had to wait for the next sprint two weeks later, then that ticket had to be prioritized. Then other stuff did come up, because things come up. And like most marketers, we find ourselves deprioritize. And so my ticket was moved down, and it wasn't worked on immediately. So mumble. In the end, it took almost five weeks to make that change, just because of the way that the sort of monolithic structure of having this sort of one size fits all, you know, one solution out of the box really just puts you into this, this sort of linear waterfall flow. And you're expressing that and just recounting that story to other marketers, you could just sort of see the lights go on and like well, I I've been there and I felt that poo.
Jackson Carpenter 07:39
Yeah, now that absolutely, that absolutely makes sense to getting kind of caught up in the bureaucracy of it makes it hard to run intelligent experiments makes it hard to to ideate. As a marketer, one of the things I'd be interested to hear from you is you talk about how your customers are often part of a committee making decisions within the organization, you sort of have an advocate, who you're having to arm then to potentially persuade a team. And I'm interested to hear what you as a marketer are doing to put them in the best possible position to actually carry your message forward and be an advocate within these big enterprise organizations you're selling to?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 08:17
Yeah, it's interesting. I was actually recently at a Gartner event here at the Gartner that the analyst organization, and they were saying that years ago, when he was on average, about five people in an organization were involved in the buying decision for tech, tech solutions. Today, it's 14 people. And so it's been just this massive increase. And we see this we have our champions, we have our influencers. We have our executives, we procurement and legal you have all these different rules that are involved. So really, what our objective is, from a marketing perspective is to look at each of those rules, look at sort of what their pain points are, but look also at sort of what what would be possible, what could they do if they adopted our solution, I'm really lean into that. So for someone like the marketer to be able to say, Hey, listen, to give your your marketers independence, so they can make changes on pages, we have a visual editing portion of our platform, which allows you to to truly get marketers the ability to make changes on the page in visual context, we're moving what we think is about 30% of developer time, right. And we know developers don't love spending their time doing marketing tickets. And so you know, being able to remove that giving that independence. So leading into that pieces, we mark it to the marketer to make that case, hey, go to your tech team, telling you ask them what they would feel like if they can get back 30% of their time, but there's they're not doing marketing tasks. The CIO or the CTO, we talked about security, governance, roles and responsibilities through our yard overall security program. And that's really important for them because a lot of these bigger companies, as we know are public. And so the CIO or CTO has to sign off on internal controls and say that they can actually certify that the controls that are in place are sound. So giving them the ammunition they need to go to their team and say hey, listen The governance that I can have on this will help us feel more comfortable that our tech stack delivered our solution to our customers will meet these internal control requirements that are being put upon us because Republic, and then from a front end developer standpoint, helping them to see how their life could be so much better collaboration tools, with developing and shipping at the edge. And also, like, I always joke about web development seems like you just don't want to be yelled at anymore, right. And so we're gonna get to that helped us make your life better, by giving you again, this sort of more rapid iteration process, removing such a reliance on your DevOps teams, you can do more and faster. And so again, it's really just, you know, answer your questions. It's really looking at each of those rules and saying, you know, what could be possible that's not possible today? What would the impact on the business be? What would the impact be on that person? And then really just, you know, equipping them with collateral and conversations that help push that forward? And
Jackson Carpenter 10:56
really at a rubber meets the road level? You're talking about collateral? But how do you think about and practically, how do you go about actually breaking those personas out and making sure the right people are getting the right information? Is that something that's very manual? Are you working with your sales team and saying, Hey, here's a big folder of assets and make sure this gets the right people? Do you have, you know, different email lists that you're sending, sending content to people through? How are you going about actually making sure the right information gets in the right people's hands across these big complex organizations? Yeah, and
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 11:31
I think so it's sort of two prong there. So there's one on the marketing side directly where we were, we're the ones that are actually doing the distribution. And so there, we really look at the actual titles being sort of the major starting point for us. So we look at the titles I'm saying is this seem to fall on the technical side, or more on this with the business owner business problems side? And that really sort of helps us sort of figure out okay, when we're looking at the phone, we're looking at sort of education do we assume most technical people out them Do you know, a composability is they note headless is, as a marketer, you to be honest, coming into Netlify, I didn't know what composability was, before, I just knew that I had a very painful painful text EQ that I dealt with. And so for me, you know, we have more top of funnel content more educational around the concepts of E commerce and a composable. From a composable perspective, really a lot of education, again, of sort of what's possible, and very much non technical, really sort of erring on the side of business outcomes and business possibilities. But then if you look at sort of more the technical roles, the content of it produces more, kind of more mid funnel, and more technical. And so really, we're talking to you more about some of the features and solutions and the performance that they can bring with them. And we're looking at, we look at case studies, more than we're talking about, again, sort of specific results, that are, again, more technical in nature. So we kind of bifurcate those on our side, from a marketing perspective, using role as sort of the guide, as we're kind of establishing which cloud wants to distribute the money. It's actually very interesting that we had the other day and SVP of it of a big organization downloaded a marketing guide. And we sat back, we said, well, we would never have a pin this person, SVP of it, like a marketers guide to e commerce and composable made no sense to us. But we sat back and we thought about a we said, hey, probably what's happening here is that the head of marketing is upset because maybe their site is slow, or they can't make changes. And so this SVP by T is trying to get up to speed on what the new concepts are, to be able to have an educated conversation with the head of marketing. And so it is funny, we do bifurcate people, but we we find a lot of crossover, that happens just naturally. And then in the sales side, we work with our sales organization, when they're doing discovery, a lot of their follow up in their nurturing, they will start to sub what that right piece of collateral is to distribute, really just lead by their conversations that they're having with these organizations.
Jackson Carpenter 13:54
That makes perfect sense. Well, you came into if I'm not mistaken, you came into Netlify, right after massive raise, I think $105 million, series D, which is fantastic. And you can correct my chronology here if you need to. But I'm curious how coming into an organization that's just had a big successful raise, how does that transform the marketing department and what changes? Did you see happen immediately after that? Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 14:26
it's an interesting question. I think we were we're, I believe we did a really good job as we did over over inflate our marketing department. So one of the things that I've seen in my career, the AI, it is a blessing and a curse sometimes to raise a lot of money, as you know. And so you raise that lunch raise $100 million, but more. And there's sort of one of a couple of ways you can go. One is to spend a lot of money recklessly or do what we did, which I think is we're very prudent about how we spend our money looking at sort of more efficient spending. And so we didn't take that money and say, hey, now we have all this. Let's just like blow this up in Spend as much as possible. We said like, how do we spend this in a smart way. And so we really can change a ton of our behaviors. And actually, we've actually reduced a lot of our spend to be smarter since we raised that money, which is kind of ironic, since we raised all this cash and then actually have been using less of it in marketing, because we figured out there are better ways to do things. I'm curious,
Jackson Carpenter 15:20
as you're finding better ways of doing things. What have you found that's worked really, really well for you and for your team? And what did you expect to work that turned out to actually underperform and got cut?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 15:32
To really? That is a great question. In terms of what actually has worked very well, while attribution is the greatest challenge in my mind, and marketing, and it's just so difficult to to really, truly understand, like, where you can attribute revenue pipeline, especially these days, I hear the word pipeline now more than I have in my entire career, it's actually were completely gone from the days of random acts of marketing. I think now it's all how does this tie to pipeline, it's, it's very interesting, we really do try to measure the efficacy of anything that we do, what we found is that webinars have continued to be a big driver of the overall buying pattern. So they're rarely ever the last touch. And so we look at attribution, they looked like they underperform. But when we did an analysis of webinars in the context of the overall buying process, we found actually, that that was they've performed really, really well, again, not in isolation based on last touch attribution, but more as a corrected part of the process. So those were interesting. We also found we did a state of web development surveying, last year in December, we anticipated with UL did a lot better than we thought, just as a general sort of piece of of lead generation, but also just a resource that people could look at as they were looking at investing their own web development team. So that one didn't, it didn't surprise us as more of it just pleased us that it did better than we could have expected.
Jackson Carpenter 16:56
That tracks as well, with what we see we do a lot of we do a lot of polling, we do a lot of surveys, we do a lot of big data reports for clients. And consistently, we find that they perform very, very well, in terms of both creating content, of course, which just sounds like what you were doing, but also for arming PR, or a media relations team to go out and get media and coverage for business. So yeah, that's that. That's fantastic. Yeah, it is, it
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 17:23
really gets down to just that exchanging value. And I think to me that those reports, it's the ultimate exchange of value, we go off and do all the work surveying, in this case was close to 1000 studios that we interviewed, and we got data around, or police and AI platforms that were using services they were using, hosting the reusing. So that exchange of value in itself just brings with that really just great opportunity for a lot of organizations that are just trying to find out this information. It's so, so hard to locate. So we love doing that. I've done in the past few companies that I've worked at, really just find that that again, it's the ultimate exchange of value. When you ask the question about what what has surprised me. I haven't been incredibly surprised. by anything. I mean, there's been areas that I think have, I wouldn't say disappointing, but have been interesting. So email, you know, you email, it's one of those things where always says like, you know, death to email, and long leave email, right, like it's email continues to be our cheapest channel, and are most readily available. I will say engagement with emails, right initial engagement, good, pretty strong. The rhythm once we actually get into the so the component pieces, I think, does that engagement, it's a little bit surprising. But then I think about and I think about who our audiences traditionally been developers, I found in my experience, that developers don't always tend to engage really well emails, right? They don't tend to be to click, they tend to read, and that's about it. So really, it was a little disappointing. Maybe that, you know, you're seeing overall as the trend. emails have gone down in terms of engagement. I know myself every morning, I probably delete 30 to 40 emails that I don't read. And so I think that's, we're just so flooded constantly, that I think that a channel is kind of losing a little bit of its shine.
Jackson Carpenter 19:16
And do you think that has to do with just users being more inundated than ever with email? Or do you think there's something else at play that?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 19:22
Yeah, I think we just it's not just email. I think there's just so many different channels now, right? So it's before you might have just had email, they have email, you have slack, and probably WhatsApp. If you have international teams. And you have iMessage. I joke that I did like the multi channel approach, trying to keep in touch with some of the other executives of the company where I try sending a slack and fiddle, get a response or send a text that doesn't work I do what's that that's just goes and goes and goes and I think we're so inundated and then layer on top of this, you know, this whole idea of remote work and being at home. And so it's now it's not even just See the work channels that are there. But it's our view of the family, or children or delivery people that come to my door, it seems endlessly hot during the day in the middle of meetings. So I think we just there's just so much noise. And it just so easy with email, because the, you don't have the same expectation of response that you wouldn't have the slack. Or say a WhatsApp message, it's very easy, because it's not as personal to be able to just delete and move on. If you enjoy
Tom Cain 20:28
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Anne-Marie 20:43
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21:05
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Jackson Carpenter 21:14
Dorian, what are the things that I'm thinking a lot about to shift gears a little bit here is AI has potential to be the most disruptive force in marketing. And I'm curious what AI trends you think marketers should be paying more attention to?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 21:30
Yeah, absolutely actually just gave a talk on this week ago. So this is fresh in my brain? I think you the I truly believe that AI is becoming this forcing function that is really just fundamentally transforming what expectations consumers have your other experiences with brands, we're seeing with this with augmented reality, we'll see that continue to change over time, devices, delivery, all that the expectations really are changing. I think with that, we're really sort of looking at the transition from what I call personalization to personal. So we've had personalization for a very long time, like your email. It's like, Hey, Jackson, great. There's your personalization, maybe some recommendations for you. Because they said, Oh Jackson did these things I'm gonna put him in this cohort. And from that cohort, there's these recommendations. And that's personalization. That over time with AI, that's just not going to it's not going to stand, we need to move more to worlds of personal experiences. And I think that that's where it's interesting is AI is the forcing function. But I also think it's going to be the solution. So
Jackson Carpenter 22:33
how do you think just practically speaking, marketers can better integrate AI into their workflows? What can we be doing today? Understanding lots of evolution coming in the future. But what could we be doing today? Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 22:47
it's funny, by the way, I just said I was remind my team that chat GPT, launched on November 30 2022. And so if you look at the world, and you look at the acceleration that we've seen in the world from Ai, it's only been a year and a half, which is treason, saying, but yeah. So the way that I look at AI, organizationally, is there's the productivity path, and then there's the outcomes path. So we look at those kind of separately, but some of them intertwine. So productivity wise, so for my marketing team, you know, we use chat GPT to to finesse our content, right. So we'll write a piece of content, often, we'll put it through Chad GPT or another LLM, try to sort of clean it up a bit, go back and forth, it's a really great tool for helping with editing, looking at your tone of voice, making sure that things are sort of landing. And so we do spend quite a bit of time running things through AI. And then our one of our final steps that we take is we run it through for for search optimization. So that's where chat GT is great, right? A lot of times, we've had people that have spent so much time and energy, figuring out how to optimize pages, we take a lot of content, and we just run it through as a final check, just to make sure that we're search optimized. And so again, that's sort of more on the productivity side. So there is quite a bit there. On the outcome side, I think this is where, from a marketing perspective more as we tend towards e commerce where that sort of personal experience can really be really beneficial. So when we look at things like understanding your customer, so you know, we look at, in previously of running an E commerce business, we'd look at sales, and we looked sort of in arrears. Right, so this one item sold really, really well. What are we going to do about that? What should the forward looking Plan B, that was so isolated, and the amount of data and the sources of data we could get? We sort of talked about this whole idea of the dark social. So I don't know if you're super familiar with that term. But this idea that most things happen these days in places that we we don't really track from a marketing standpoint. So I know myself when I'm thinking about a new piece of marketing technology. I reached out to a person that I know who's kind of an expert, ask him what his thoughts are. He gives me recommendations. That's all part of the sort of dark social world Whereas a marketing team, like my company couldn't track that I went to this person and asked the question, but we know that I showed up one day and maybe I asked for a demo, right? Download some content. And so I think there with, with AI, I mean, now can take all these disparate pieces of information, and bring them together to get answers that we could never have had before. Right, looking at things like public reviews of your product, looking at comments that people are making on different boards, direct engagement with you in terms of reviews, and your sales data plus, plus plus. Right. And so I think when you bring that together, I think AI is going to unlock for marketers, so much insight and information and to where we should be investing our time and our energy, whether it's on a campaign itself, or even in our product catalogs.
Jackson Carpenter 25:43
I'm curious, this idea of dark social is really intriguing. And I've heard it tossed around before, one of the questions I'd ask is, you're talking a lot about attribution earlier in our conversation? How do you how do you learn to kind of embrace the unknown and make a case for the value of interactions that can't be tracked within a marketing team? Or is that the wrong answer? Should you be looking to say, hey, let's, let's figure out a way to shine a light into into dark social and really identify interactions that are happening that we haven't been able to track in the past?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 26:16
Yeah, I think yeah, I think on that side of that. So this is where again, I think AI will be really, really helpful because it actually expands kind of your reach into those areas. And again, back to the comment about attribution, it is always the most challenging thing. So this sort of idea of like, be everywhere, or be as many places as possible. And this is where, honestly, the where I think the emphasis on community is so much more important than it was years ago, right? So I kind of look at, we talked about product led growth, I talked about advocacy, led growth. So this idea that if you make people, your advocates, in this world of Dark Social, they will be your voice, right, this person that I reached out to for recommendations, he's an ambassador, he's an advocate on behalf of those brands, and they have no idea. And so really, whereas before community was oftentimes kind of a nice thing to have, I think now becomes such a critical part of any marketing strategy. Because you need people to be excited you need to be you need them talking about you. And you see people surface when you ask them, How did you get to us? When you have that opportunity in the sales process? And our sales, people always ask, how did you hear of Natla phi? What was your path to get to us? Really, just to confirm sort of, where did they come from? Was there a dark social element here, which to be honest, in most cases, there is. Most cases, they say they got it as a recommendation from someone they know, doing that as part of the process, but really leaning into this community element so that, again, you're creating 1000s of mouthpieces on your behalf, when you can't be in the room. And when you don't even know the conversations happening.
Jackson Carpenter 27:46
It's fantastic. One other thing on the topic of AI wanted to ask you about is how is it that composable architecture really relates to and enables AI for marketers? Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 27:58
so it's really interesting. So if you think about what we talked about the start of this, which was you as a business, you find what solutions and services are right for you to deliver the experiences you want to deliver to your customer, what's best for your tech stack to make that happen. So you think about now AI so again, chat GPT, a year and a half ago watches. Now we have this massive ecosystem of services and solutions that are a I mean, most of them honestly wrapped around chat GBT. But regardless, there's still 1000s and 1000s of they're coming every day, sort of the crazy exponential rate. And so you think about it and think of the ability to try those things, the flexibility and freedom to try. In a monolithic world, how could you do that? Right? How could you bring something and you can't bring it into your tech stack without doing a ton of API work? 10 of connection work? Oftentimes, it's very hard to connect these things to something like an Adobe, or something like a Salesforce commerce cloud. So what composability does, it actually allows you to bring these pieces and without disrupting your overall tech stack? Give them a try and see if you like them. If you don't, you don't use it. If you do, you keep it in that stack. But the good news is, again, you're not disrupting your business, you don't have to replatform to do it. But it keeps you can this freedom and the flexibility. And it really is something that only composability can do. Because what it does is you know, beyond being able to try by bringing into your textbook, you're not looking at the solutions in a silo, right? It's not in a corner, you're actually doing it in the context of your actual data and the context of your workflows. And again, you can bring them in, swap them in, swap them out. And it's really just something that's that's where the connection comes it actually Gartner back to them because it's been won a ton of Gartner stuff. recently. They say that by 2027 80% of companies that are really invested in generative AI will be on composable architecture, tech stacks. I
Jackson Carpenter 29:45
love what you're saying here because I think the smartest marketers, I know are really running a series of controlled experiments, right? They have a hypothesis. They're testing and seeing what the numbers do what the analytics do. And then They're they're making a decision based upon that data. And what I'm hearing from you is that it's sort of difficult to do that unless you have the ability to sort of rapidly implement and then potentially remove different solutions. And I love that for sort of filling out a new a new technology like AI. One of the things I'd be curious about from you is, if for Netlify, you could look at just one piece of data, just one metric to plan your marketing around, you got just one, what would it be? conversion rate? So ultimately, it's just end to the end of the funnel? You It's
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 30:38
because ultimately, everything ends up in that place, right? So couple companies go that I was at, we have real problems, we'd sell some marketing, right, the classic case of marketing leads suck. And then there's on the marketing side, salespeople can't convert the leads. But that's the endpoint. Right? And so what is the greatest measure of the quality of the things that you've done as a marketing team? It's to lead convert, right? Like, are they a high quality was everything you're doing? Let's go back to that comment of random acts of marketing. I think we've all been there, where you just like do stuff for the sake of doing stuff. And it's something that needs to be fun. But in this in this economy, right where we are today, it really does come down to revenue and pipelining. That's, that's sort of where so much of the focus is and rightfully so. And so if you think about conversion rates, the ultimate measure of was what we did effective, right? Did it did it actually resonate. And, again, if you look at conversion rate, because it can be shared, if you share it with sales, then you actually be much more judicious about getting quality, your rating system, your scoring system becomes better because you want that better conversion rate, because you've measured on it. And then on the sales side, you're being much more disciplined about how you actually disposition those leads, because you want a higher conversion rate also. So sharing that metric, just to me the ultimate sign of did what we do. Was it effective? Was it quality? And then did we partner with sales to really help push this through the funnel?
Jackson Carpenter 32:04
I hear in this answer, maybe some sort of hints of your your background. Now you weren't always a marketer, right? Prior to prior to Netlify. Prior to unity, you were an operations guy, I believe. And you worked even as a consultant with big companies like Google Twitter, Mehta. Tell me a little bit about that career shift. And how lessons from your early career have impacted you as a marketer?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 32:32
Yes, it's interesting, you know, I, I've always been fascinated with social psychology and linguistics. So how we communicate has always been super fascinating. And always doing side project, I used to write a lot, I was the editor in chief of my college newspaper, business newspaper, which I will say this my favorite job ever. But always been really big on linguistics and psychology, how we use language, but did find myself starting my career at Anderson Consulting. So huge consulting firm, just doing business operations consulting, and so sort of worked through that that got us some really interesting projects. But along the way, I met marketers, one company partnered with the head of marketing, really to look at their distribution plan. So again, more operational, but I dipped my toes a little bit in the marketing side. And then really was when I got to Google, that it was very interesting. And my own consulting business, I was working with them actually, in their network engineering team of all places, and started working on some projects where they did a lot of internal development. So at that time, I don't know what it's like today. But at that time, most of what most of the tools that Google use internally were actually built by themselves. They weren't purchased off the shelf. And again, I don't know what it's like today, that was well over a decade ago, which is kind of crazy. But well being then, you know, one of the challenges like anything is, you know, adoption. So whenever you buy a new tool or implement a new tool, getting people to use it, that's a challenge in itself. And so we started like having that sort of a market inside joke very interesting for me, just from an internal standpoint of getting people to actually use the tools that the company built internally. And so that was really fascinating, traveled around the world working on that seeing different perspectives. And it just got this itch going. Sort of HA with a certain sort of loving it did a little bit of work with, again, like you said, it's Twitter, I guess, no X and Facebook. And then sort of found myself at Trulia. And it was there that really I got deeper into the marketing side of things. And part of that was implementing parva, which is, of course, one of the marketing automation systems. And really just sort of that entering more into that world in a formal manner. It just got me super excited. And that was the impetus for the switch. I think, the good news, I have to tell people I got a lot of young people that work on my teams or previous teams is the craziness is you're never locked in. And so we often think that what we do now is the complete determinant of her absolute future forever. Perfect examples that not being the case. Good shift. It
Jackson Carpenter 34:56
sounds like
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 35:02
Now we have to do the fun job. Like we're, we get to be creative when we get to see it's the greatest piece of instant gratification or disappointment. Not strife gives you also disappointment, but that feeling of actually seeing very quickly the results of your work and again, to infuse it with creativity and be able to it's me, I tell them on some of the guests that we have the fun job, it's tough, not easy. Often marketers as you know, we're a great target for blame. And Bronwyn says if we only did more marketing, but it is it is the fun job. And it's really it's just flexing your creative muscles. Just to me at this point in my career. I love it. Okay, so here's what I'm thinking.
Tom Cain 35:48
It's a Western. But with a sci fi twist. But there's also a film noir plot running in the background. And dinosaurs because why not right? Take the dinosaurs down a little bit. Okay, no dinosaurs. But a little bit of romance is always welcome.
Tom Cain 36:21
And zombies? Yeah, we have to throw some zombies in there. Your vision, our craft, topthoughtleader.com. Listen to the first draft again, back to the show.
Jackson Carpenter 36:39
How do you think about you talked a lot about flexing your creative muscles. How do you think about the balance between creativity? And kind of the analytical mind? Right. I think that there's a sense I'll preface this by saying I think that there's a sense in some quarters of marketing, that really this is just one, one big constant AB test with the you know, one word copy tweaks here and there. And it's just a race to conversion. How do you think that creativity fits into that?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 37:12
Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it is a fallacy. I think that it's just a matter of pretty pages and nice words. So I think there's a lot when you think about creativity, it's your thing about how do I resonate with someone and, and going back to the earlier part of this conversation around noise, right? We're surrounded by so much noise in our life. And I, when I talk with my team, I like what kind of mindset marketing, right? Like get in someone's mindset when they're engaging with what you're creating. So I can put together a beautiful page with beautiful words, but I need to actually connect with someone. And so I imagine you're in the morning with an email, I'll tell my team, hey, imagine this is the situation. Someone just got up for work. They're going their kids out of the house, they're working in their home office, they have their cup of coffee, it's been chaos for the first hour of their day, they're sitting down, they open your their email, they see your subject line, do you think they're going to click on it? Would they? Would they ignore it? Would you ignored in that mindset, when you open it up? What would actually engage them? What would turn them away? Right. And so I think that understanding the motivations of the people that you're trying to reach, and sort of where they are at the moment that they're engaging with what you're killing together. That is the part of the creativity, that's fascinating. Because certain words, certain words land differently based on the time of day and what you're doing, and where you are, right. When the holidays kids are off from school, it's chaos at home. Right. So what's actually gonna get their attention. I think that's, that's a part of the creativity that I find is just truly fascinating. I'm
Jackson Carpenter 38:42
hearing really empathetic approach, right? Being able to, to apply creativity to an empathetic understanding of where people are at, and then test to see if you are right.
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 38:52
Yeah, and I will say, it's so funny. This, this might be a controversial comment, but I don't like marketing. I like talk when, right and so I always say to my team, like stop marketing have, have a conversation, but just start talking with people who don't use like a huge aversion to sound like the most incredibly unique experience and these flowery words that people often put in, like, just just talk to someone like their person. But it's to your point, empathy matters, and we're busy in life. There's so much going on. And so being empathetic with someone's time, but getting to the point quickly and just talking to them like they're a person versus, you know, meaning into the flowery pieces, which again, is where it's not just about words, and colors.
Jackson Carpenter 39:37
What advice do you have for an up and coming market? Or maybe someone who wants your job one day? Yeah,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 39:42
I mean, I think multiple pieces of advice. One is be a sponge. Just learn ask questions, right? Don't so many people today are so free to ask questions that they might be perceived to be unintelligent, or uninformed. And it really just kills me because when I look at my own trajectory, My career happened because I, I asked questions I asked to join on projects that wouldn't necessarily have been in my purview. But I asked, I got put in that extra effort just so I can be exposed to these things. So, one, expose yourself to as many things as possible within the marketing world. Another one is just really sort of measured, define throughout what success looks like, when you start any any endeavor, right? Meet with if it's your manager, or someone else on your team to understand what success looks like so that you can reflect at the end on West, did you do the right thing? Right? Did it did it work or not work? You're getting back to your comment about analytics, your analytics and creativity. Know, without the analytic side, do you even know if your creativity was was anywhere effective? Right. And so I think that's another big thing is measure, measure, measure, and understand what you're measuring so that you can really understand did it work? And then believe the last one is what we've been talking about, which is, just think about the other person on the other side, right? Think about sort of what they're doing get in their head. And don't market to them, just just talk to them. Dorian,
Jackson Carpenter 41:05
I'd love to ask a couple of rapid fire questions to you here if you're alright with it. Well, we were talking like, you know, one sentence answers if we can, okay, all right, right on what's the most important trait a CMO needs to have? Empathy? If you could mark it any brand other than Netlify? What would it be?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 41:24
I do love apple. But they've kind of nailed it at this point. So I'll pass on that.
Jackson Carpenter 41:29
Fair enough. What's your favorite marketing book or podcast besides this one, of course,
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 41:35
so there's a book about category creation by this is pirates, Reuben, if you've ever heard of them, it's great.
Jackson Carpenter 41:40
Where outside of marketing? Do you look for inspiration on my son? What's your favorite marketing campaign of all time?
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 41:47
I mean, it sounds cliche, but the 1984 Apple campaign,
Jackson Carpenter 41:50
what's your favorite video game
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 41:51
and the olden days Mike Tyson's Punch out or supermario. I think today these days, Monument Valley, anything
Jackson Carpenter 41:58
we didn't ask you that? We should have? No, I
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 42:02
mean, I think this has been great. This has been been really, really enjoyable. One plus.
Jackson Carpenter 42:06
Excellent. Well, Dorian Kendal, thank you so much for coming on TOP CMO.
Dorian Kendal - Netlify 42:10
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Tom Cain 42:15
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