TOP CMO: Tracy Eiler, Alation - 'Marketing Meets Sales Success'

Tracy Eiler  00:01

Great marketers take the lead responsibility and forcing alignment between sales, marketing and customer success. This

‍

Ben Kaplan  00:08

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.

‍

00:18

I am a TOP CMO

‍

Ben Kaplan  00:23

this is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan. Today I'm speaking with Tracy Eiler former CMO of Alation, a software company that specializes in data intelligence solutions to help organizations manage their data assets more effectively. Tracy is a veteran of marketing with more than 25 years of experience in the B2B enterprise technology sector. She has been named one of the top 15 most influential women in B2B marketing, and a B2B demand generation game changer. Tracy is also a best selling author on sales and marketing alignment. And a founding member of women in revenue, nonprofit organization helping women succeed in revenue generating rules across sales and marketing. So how important is it to be flexible in your marketing, from your content to your spokespeople? And how can sales experience boost marketers to maximize their abilities and knowledge? Let's find out with Tracy Eiler. You're at a company that is on the cutting edge of using data and democratizing data within organizations. It's very popular now to talk about building a data culture. What does that mean? And how do you market and empower your customers to try to build that?

‍

Tracy Eiler  01:37

That's such a great question, Ben. You know, I think data culture is on the minds, even at the board level of some big businesses, if you think about financial services, healthcare, retail companies, they are drowning in data from every source in the world, and are really trying to figure out how to put the power of insight into the hands of their end users, their business people across the organization. And deriving the belief that having a data culture that is a belief system in an organization that you're going to make better decisions, faster decision with the right data, at the level of the decision making is really a growing trend. And executive in a lot of our customers are looking to partner not only technology, which is going to of course, help them empower it, but to get in the minds of their employees to get kind of a sea change going internally, to get people to add it to that around making data driven decisions.

‍

Ben Kaplan  02:37

I know you've spoken in the past about this, like companies want to do is they want to increase access to data. But they also want to control data, as well. And sometimes that's there. It's either that's their lifeblood, or it's their trade secret, or it's their secret sauce or and they're protected over it. So first of all, just from a messaging point of view, and then we'll start talking about marketing the cancer like how do you message this, when you're trying to help companies empower their people through data? They they believe they probably are receptive to the idea. But then practicality, they're a little bit concerned about that, how this is implemented, how do you start messaging, what you're offering and how to think about what Alicia can provide? That's such

‍

Tracy Eiler  03:19

a great question. And you know, when you talk about companies being conservative about sharing their data, in some cases, their data is on lockdown, like in highly regulated industries, do you think about things like vaccine trials or banking or anything like that? So I would say companies kind of fall into a range that on one far side is complete lockdown data governance, where everything is command and control. And the other far side is democratized. Everybody can get everything, right. And depending on how highly regulated you are, and what the data is, and so on, you're gonna fall somewhere along in that range. The way that we're trying to guide the conversation as marketing kind of through that is to acknowledge the reality of, you know, what the precious asset is of the data that you've got to make sure it doesn't get in the wrong hands, if there's not a security problem, and so on, we have to acknowledge that otherwise, you know, we'll never be successful, at the same time showing the business value of truly having a data culture. And we've been doing research, you know, we were talking about thought leadership. We have been doing research twice a year now on the state of data culture, where we go out and ask companies worldwide. Tell us about your revenue performance. Tell us about the state of data culture in your companies and time and again, we can see that the highest performing companies are well on their way to democratizing data. It's very interesting.

‍

Ben Kaplan  04:48

It raises an interesting question when we talk about culture. Culture is something that in the context of a company permeates the company, right. It can't be cultures like this division, this departments This, it has to permeate the whole thing. And so I'm interested in how you do that. Because for people to sort of get the full value for what Alation provide, you need this in every department, in every, in every sector in every office. So how do you do that as a marketer, where the goal is, whoever you're selling this through initially, might not just be the purpose or the company, we're gonna, you know, onboard our company, this, you need them, ideally, to become your champion. And you've got to get them to spread that and get other departments to adopt this. Otherwise, your impact of your product or your value is limited. How do you approach finding those champions and then empowering them? Because your work is not over? When they just sign up for Alation,

‍

Tracy Eiler  05:42

you have to hit with kind of three key things. I think the first one is just pure old logic, like, why is this a good reason to do it, but more heavily. Number two is work on the emotional side of the equation, you know, as well as the entertainment side of the equation, and I'd like to talk about each one of those for a second, logic is absolutely easy to figure out what I'm trying to say it's business value, that's the Jane ROI and stuff like that, I find that what the secret sauce really adds to it is so appealing to the emotion of why that champion is going to be a winner, why their company is going to do so much better, how it's great for their personal brand, it's great for their department, it's great for all of their colleagues, for them to move forward with, with whatever the initiative may be recognizing

‍

Ben Kaplan  06:31

them as they're a person within the context of all this and they're a person that has needs and desires and wants and ambitions and, and all of that. And then how do you actually implement that though? Because like you get me you said, like, all your dreams come true. But if you're gonna promotion are rare. Like how do you do that in a way that has some meaning to to communicate with them emotionally and make it authentic.

‍

Tracy Eiler  06:54

The way that we do it, Ben is, first of all, through personal rAlationship, it starts there with sales and see us and then the marketing team will get involved. And we're working with big global brands. Typically, that champion needs to get the word out internally in their company, they might be a chief data officer, for example, or head of data and analytic. They're not a marketer, they don't know how to get the word out. So we help explain to them how we can help them spread the word internally, and we'll give them some very specific tools and techniques. For example, you're gonna laugh, but we have a comic strip that we've built. We're

‍

Ben Kaplan  07:32

talking to Tom and peanuts, here, we're talking about whatever

‍

Tracy Eiler  07:35

the word story, we're not that fancy it stick figures. But it's clever, right? And we give them a series of comic strips that they can easily plot in people's names, names of projects, things like that, that are based on the storyline is very much based on democratizing data, making better decisions with data, and so on. And our champions, then use that digital, internally to capture the imagination. And remember, I talked about entertainment a minute ago, we have to entertain as part of what we're doing. People are being bombarded. We know the cliches, right? What do you pay attention to? The things that make you laugh, the things that capture your imagination, the things that make you feel good, right? So we're really trying to appeal to both of those in using this comic strip. And, you know, we built it in a way that you can actually scale it a bit. It's not custom every time, right? It's kind of a classic story. templates,

‍

Ben Kaplan  08:28

you can fill this Yeah, personalize it, you can use that as part of your role is actually to do that. Absolutely. And an interesting way to think about is actually, that you need to use principles of viral marketing. Even in this B2B setting, we tend to think about B2C, right? It's this new thing, we want to be a fad, spread it on tick tock, you know, discovered on Reddit, but you're actually saying within an organization you need, you need a way for this data culture or just like willingness to adopt a new tool or a solution to go viral by and usually, we would think about going viral, it's like refix, simple, surprising, and significance got to be simple, mostly to be communicate surprising, because it's got to get someone's attention. We're calling it entertainment. Or maybe that's, that's snackable

‍

Tracy Eiler  09:14

I like to think of it snackable. Right? Like, it's like a really great snack that you're, you know, you just want to keep coming back to so you know, you're you're absolutely right. So

‍

Ben Kaplan  09:23

there's a comic strip, what else do you do to help things spread in organizations where it may be someone, you know, maybe a listener, they're marketers and, you know, maybe spreading the organization doesn't help them sell more this year, but next year on the renewal, and next year, something else it could be Hi.

‍

Tracy Eiler  09:42

So you got to keep engaging and I'm so glad you talked about that existing customer, you know, so many of us marketers are thinking about that first land deal, the first new logo, but there is an annuity, especially in subscription economy where your customers again and again buying more and sticking with you is super key. There are variety of things we do to stay engaged with our customers, there's the whole business side of it, where our customer success manager is going to be making sure they're happy. But from a marketing perspective, we are going to continually be reaching out to our champion and their colleagues, you know, inviting them to meet up, informing them of new things that are coming and entertaining them with new information told in an interesting way. I'll give you one example, which I would highly recommend people do. Six months ago, we hired a new content marketing manager, who's a rapper, okay. And we did not have rap in the job description at all right. But the candidate that we hired the spoken word poetry on this side, write raps on the side position on the side, and we said, Oh, my God, yesterday, you need to start writing some of these for our customers. And they're just like, little 15, second, rap sense of stock music, with, you know, stock photography, little goofy emojis and pictures and a little tiny video that the customer can then use to spread the word internally. And they'll customize them based on what he knows their business is about and things like that. That sort of thing is really notable, and now we've taken it externally. So we talked about thought leadership, you know, we are regularly regularly on social media and on our website, you know, posting different short raps about business topics. And you know, it's really getting a lot of engagement. It's the first time I've ever had the opportunity to do something like this, and I highly recommend people try

‍

Ben Kaplan  11:33

and how do you think both the comp strap or the wrap is an example of, you know, I think maybe being willing to experiment, and try things and sort of see and do that. And so how do you think about like, sort of, within the marketing department within your team, the culture of experimentation, how much you experiment, I think there's different types of working organizations where one hand, you know, like, we need to be above 90% In our successes, right? That's one type of marketing, another type that says, you know, typically, it's more assists with growth marketing, which is like, you know, what we'll try 20 Things will be wrong 19 times to find the one thing to our business, and we're okay, so how do you balance those things? What is the culture in your marketing departments? In terms of experimentation? And trying? Yeah,

‍

Tracy Eiler  12:19

I would say accountable and agile. And what do I mean by that? So marketing in our company is responsible for delivering 77 0% of new pipeline, which is extremely high for an enterprise software company. So I gotta be accountable with that I can't screw that up. You say, Oh, you're just

‍

Ben Kaplan  12:37

doing the wraps? And then we've absolutely got absolutely

‍

Tracy Eiler  12:41

not. So the way I tell my team to think about this is let's take 70 75% of our marketing muscle, and our money and put it on the tried and true stuff that we absolutely know is going to help us deliver this big number. But the rest of it, we're going to flex on, and we are going to be experimental and rapidly iterate, and I'm willing to try anything as long as it's in brand. And that was something I'd be proud to show my grandmother sure isn't off collar, you know, that kind of thing. Grandma, your

‍

Ben Kaplan  13:10

grandmother, maybe a tough audience, but okay, but yes,

‍

Tracy Eiler  13:12

you're gonna get it? Yeah,

‍

13:13

you will I mean, right? Like you can,

‍

Tracy Eiler  13:15

you can get pretty naughty pretty fast. And so like, we're not going to do that. But let's take 25% of our energy and experiment. And the only requirements I have the CMO to my team is the things I just that plus, I need to know that you're going to rapidly iterate like watch like a hawk, what's happening with engagement and conversion, you know, kind of classic growth, marketing, but also, you know, our more customers coming to our website, as an example, they might not actually do anything, but are they actually showing more interest? And then there's that thought pulse measure, which is like, what are our sales reps saying? are they complaining that nobody knows who we are? Or are they saying, you know, we're the hottest person in the club, which one of them told me do it, you know, so I think that's the really key part is you gotta have some reservation or reserves. Otherwise, you will only do the things that you must do when you're in a really busy, high growth environment. And I think, you know, marketers are creative people. So for them to know that they gotta deliver this big chunk over here that no is predictable, but they have some room to flex and try stuff. It's a great place to work and a great place to build a team. If

‍

14:21

you enjoy this show, you'll love TOP CEO. TOP CEO

‍

Ben Kaplan  14:26

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.

‍

14:37

That was the challenge the team was faced 25%

‍

14:39

of it was gone. I found myself $282,000 in debt, how

‍

14:44

would you navigate through these trials and transform them into opportunities for growth and

‍

Ben Kaplan  14:47

success? How do you build back up the business and get out of debt and

‍

14:51

get anything in? Nobody can come to work right in any of our factory in any of the factories.

‍

14:59

This is TOP CEO available wherever you get your podcast?

‍

Ben Kaplan  15:08

You mentioned sales team. You mentioned in part of your answer customer success team, I'd love you to comment on somebody that really you you've done a lot of writing, in fact that someone's writing, you've written a book on it, which it was that your book is called aligned to achieve. And it's about a widening and uniting the sales team and the marketing team. And here's a common maybe scenario, which is Mark marketing team says, you know, this is this is misalignment, you know, but marketing team says, you know, sales team, they couldn't close a sales for their life. Look, I gave him all this great stuff. He's always great leads, sales team Zensah, look at the marketing team. Like, why are they giving us these kinds of leads? What are they doing? That's not useful to me? And then customer success team comes in, says, What are all these people do what they're promising so much? We've got to deliver this. Now what do we do, everyone's misaligned? So how do you think about your piece marketing in the context of everyone else to achieve alignment?

‍

Tracy Eiler  16:03

I think that great marketers take the lead responsibility and forcing alignment between sales, marketing and customer success. And what do I mean by that, it's very easy to say it's a two way street, my chief revenue officer is just as accountable as I am to make sure our teams are aligned. But that person has a big quota and a big revenue promise to deliver. And I'm the one that's got to be out in front, you know, projecting what's going to happen next. So I've just naturally fallen into the role of forcing my way into their meetings, the way they were seeking to understand in fact, my favorite thing to do and I take a new job is to just go on a listening tour for at least a month, and you know, sit on sales calls, sit in the sales, forecast, meaning understand what's really going on, so that we can figure out where the alignment points need to be. And maybe employee you were giving earlier, you know, there are tons of stereotypes. In fact, part of my studies, when I was working on my book was literally to measure what are the stereotypes of each other, there's, it's hilarious, that's exactly what you'd expect. Marketing Plans, parties and events, sales are bullies, they only pay attention to what's in front of them, you know, that kind of thing. Seeking to understand what's going on in the sales cycle and what's going on postale allowed the marketing team to paint a whole journey from lead to revenue to repeatable revenue, and then figure out the integration points. And I think one really important thing that any team should do that's listening. If you're not accountable for pipeline today, as a marketing team, you're not aligned on the right metric, you know, marketing often will sign up for lead numbers, brand awareness, numbers, things of that nature. But I find that as soon as I say to our sales team, Hey, your marketing team is actually 100% accountable for this amount of pipeline, which are all those opportunities that aren't customers yet, but that we're handing off between marketing and sales, I immediately am establishing credibility, and it eliminates a barrier. And then it allows marketing to really focus on the things that we know are going to be the most effective. And sales then have much higher trust and in what we're giving them as quality. They want something that's like concrete they want while like warm and fuzzy, or where can stand it. How does this actually give me and help me get to my number that I totally think how salespeople are wired, right? Like they're going to close that thing that's right in front of them and eliminate the noise and the best ones are ruthless and doing so my husband's a chief revenue officer, and I see him do it. It's like the knob clicks in his head. And you know, he just gets ruthless. And if something's noisy or too fluffy or not accountable, he just like shove it away and won't even listen. So marketing has really got to learn to speak the language and make ourselves relevant to the sales organization really at every

‍

Ben Kaplan  18:49

stage. Well, one thing I heard about you and correct me if this is wrong, but I heard that I mean, one you have experience, you know, early in your career very early, as an SDR or a sales development rep. I do at age like 16. And how important is that for a marketer to have some experience with sales, they understand, you know, what that dynamic was like, What the what maybe your partner in this should be goes,

‍

Tracy Eiler  19:19

oh, gosh, I think the best marketers have carried a bag at one point or another. They've been a sales development rep. They've been actually been an E with a quota. It's kind of rare though. Because if you're if you're an account executive with a couple million dollar quota, and you're good, you're like, you're not going to walk away from that income and that experience. But great marketers that I know, have had either adjacent roles. She's failed or been in sales. I know the experience that I had, and it's true. I was 16 years old. I was in high school I worked at an enterprise software company in sales development, which essentially was lead processing. This was you know, it started there the summer that the Purple Rain album came out from print, this tells the ad, you know, it was very primitive, like one 800 Number on adverts at print advertising and trade rags, that was a big lead generator and so on. But in that job, I really learned kind of the numbers game, the, you know, the funnel, the process that a buyer goes through the interaction point with sales, I got to see the rhythm of the quarter. And that just really, really stuck with me. The only thing that doesn't stuck with me, it hasn't stuck with me is we all had the same name in that department. In that job. We were all called Chris Kelly. So you know, Oh, yeah. Why have you been asked

‍

Ben Kaplan  20:41

external communications? You were totally

‍

Tracy Eiler  20:44

were the react on Eric. Yeah, so there were like four or five of us at any one time. And you know, you think about it, like Chris Kelly is just a nice, easy to pronounce, you know, generic name, could be, you know, any gender whatsoever. And Chris never gets sick. Chris never goes off to college, like Chris is just. So always

‍

Ben Kaplan  21:03

they never leaves the company, you'd ever not ever, never as gambling issues that needs to take a lead

‍

Tracy Eiler  21:09

is Chris is always there. So anyway, we were all Chris. And you know, and that was lots of fun. So we had a one 800 Number hotline, like literally on their, you know, on our desks, and the phone would ring and the red button would light up. And we knew that that was a lead from our one 800 number that was on our print ads and trade rags. So goes like this. Come share marketing. This is Chris Kelly, how may I help you? So that was the stick, right? And typically, somebody would say, Oh, I'm calling to learn about products called system W sold to finance people, you know, and then you'd kind of get on the stick of words in your about it and what's your address and all that stuff. And then we would like literally process the letter stuffing envelope full of brochure collateral and mail it

‍

Ben Kaplan  21:51

out. There you go. Okay. So that's good. And you're about 10 years later, you still you still could do it. Excellent. Well, so tell me about something very on trend right now is sort of the interaction between sort of B2C marketing and B2B. And there's a couple different types. There's one, lots of companies will come to us and say, you know, we're a B2B company, when a market like a B2C company, right, we want to, we want to think like that. That's one type. Second type is just expectations about what the kind of service dynamic will be, because you buy things in the sort of B2C way that has to be very sort of customer sort of centric, and then you bring that over to B2B. Third Way is a bunch of companies, whether that's a zoom or a slack that were our B2B companies, but they're getting a whole bunch of consumer users because of circumstance. So talk about how you think about that, and sort of the dynamic in B2C and what it means for B2B marketers.

‍

Tracy Eiler  22:50

I think it's better it's all about the buyer, you know, what kind of experience is that buyer looking for. And the only way to know that is to do research and put yourself in their shoes. And you know, and really map a journey. It's not that hard to figure out, right? Like the experience you and I have going on Nikes website, buying sneakers for my kid, you know, that is a smooth experience, there's a lot of choice, I can control where I go, I can execute the transaction easily. They push me offers and keep in touch with me, in all of that is, I think I'm in the driver's seat of and, you know, buyers today and B2B, very much want to self service experience. You think about the agony that a lot of B2B marketers to tout for years on? Do I get my greatest content, that's just one example. And if I gated behind a form that I'm going to generate leads, right. But you think about as the buyer, unless they're really ready to engage with that company. I don't want to give you my information. So I'm going to just put something bogus in the lead form. Anyway, what I want is that white paper buyer guide or demo, or whatever the thing is, so I think we have to really think about what is the buyer backed and then really examine carefully all your interaction points and make some really good decisions. There's an exercise I'd love to recommend to folks, which I called secret shopper. And I actually read about this in a book by a guy named Paco Underhill called Why We Buy and it's very much a consumer products and retail kind of book. But in it, it really gave me the idea of pretending to be the buyer and then just shopping right, start searching on adjacent terms, see who pops up, go to that company's website, go through all the lead flows, the what happens, see how easy it is to navigate to content, how helpful it was, how fast it was, you know, is anybody reaching out to me? If so, how quickly things like that, and that was one of the first big projects we did when I came to Alation. And it was fascinating. We did it not only for ourselves, but for key competitors. And we learned an awful lot. And from that interaction, we really saw that the highest performing companies are just making it super, super easy for the buyer to get what they want in the form. if they want it, you know, on the device that they want it without having to really do much not provide much information, and so on. In addition to that, we've put chat on our website. And yes, it is a robotic chat product, right that you can program. But what it also allows us human interaction. And the thing that I'm really excited about is our sales development rep. Today, we used a product called qualified. Our sales development reps today can go in and into a console and see literally who's visiting our website, what accounts they're coming from. If a person has been to our website before and Ben cookies, then it'll pull along that cookie data. If we already knew who they are like they're an existing customer will understand that. And that allows the field development rep to then interject into the visit, much like a Nordstrom salesperson would walk over to you, you know, in the shoe department and say give me sir Do you want to try on those Ferragamo is right? We can do that in the website and interject and say hey, you know, welcome acne, you know, welcome back to our website, would you like more information, we can even serve up personalized content for that, for example, we happen to know that it's coming from an account, that's the health care account, we can serve them up to health care for you right away. So that kind of thing, I think is really it feels much more like a consumer type experience. Right. And that's what buyers expect. I think we really got to pay attention to it. And you know, in our industry,

‍

Ben Kaplan  26:25

well, what is the answer to to the question you posed about the gate? The special report, especially Yeah, we're not what do you do? What Where do you where do you end up on that question? Are you making someone sign up or not?

‍

Tracy Eiler  26:39

We make people sign up, but only for the highest highest value content. And after they've been able to get a whole bunch of other stuff for free air quotes for free, right? You know, we want them to be there's

‍

Ben Kaplan  26:51

like a lower friction point to get other stuff, we're not going to make and do that. But if it's like the ultimate thing that we want to like, we want your treaty match.

‍

Tracy Eiler  26:59

I mean, basically, we're not requiring you to tell us anything unless you are asking for a personalized demo. But if all you're doing is going and looking at all the recorded content, and you know, reading a bunch of white papers and listening to recorded, you know, webinars and reading case studies, like you can just go to town and do that all day long for free for free air quotes, right? Without giving me any information. If you want a personal interaction, that you know, very high touch, we're going to ask you who you are, you want a trial theme thing, you know, and then you kind of go from there.

‍

27:33

Okay, so here's what I'm thinking. It's a Western 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. Little bit of romance is always welcome.

‍

28:09

And zombies. Yeah, we just heard from zombies in there. Your vision, our craft, topthoughtleader.com. can listen to the first draft again, back to the show.

‍

Ben Kaplan  28:26

How do you balance out? And I think this is another part of like, any kind of business qualifies lead? How do you balance between desire, desire to kind of put people through your process, meaning he wants to spend your time on the right foot, right? Want to understand who they are, you don't want to put your best, you know, wrapped talk into them. So yeah, I'm

‍

Tracy Eiler  28:47

not all about volume, right?

‍

Ben Kaplan  28:48

Like all this. So you have these needs. But then it's you know, and I understand, but it's also when I'm a buyer. So they I'm also frustrated by that, because I don't want to go through a process that's designed for the company to maximize, you know, their time, it's like, I want to, I don't care about that. I want to maximize my time. And I don't want to talk to 10 minutes for a junior person to be pre qualified, who's going to ask me what my needs are and try to you're kind of talking about scoring, the heart of scoring. Yeah, right. How do you balance that like the needs of our company versus the needs of the end, you know, kind of person and finding a balance?

‍

Tracy Eiler  29:24

Right? I think this is where technology and your tech stack and your and your own marketing data can really, really make a big difference. Starting with assuming that you have done the work of knowing your ideal customer profile. And that will give you not only you know, who's the target buyer persona, who's the human typically, but what kind of account is the best type of account. And in our business, large enterprises, they have a certain tech stack, there's particular industries that are relevant and so on. And so people need to think about an account score not only just the lead score for some individual, but an count score, and then prioritize using that account score, and also serve the very best ties touch experience to people that are coming from those key accounts that match your ICP. Everybody else, like give them an experience, they can just go find information that they want, you know, but you're not really prioritizing interacting with that much sure, you'll put them into a nurture email campaign, it's an example. But I'm not going to spend my precious sales development resources, following up on those people. Now, if those folks over time come back and say, Oh, my God, like I'm really, really interested in excited, absolutely, we'll

‍

Ben Kaplan  30:38

talk to them. But we're going to put our most high touch and best experiences, right in front of the ideal customer, when you are cultivating a team. And you're thinking about your marketing team. And you're trying to get people to do all the things you say, how do you build a team? How do you think who's on it? I know you're passionate about, you know, sort of encouraging, for instance, women in revenue related positions. And in fact, you start a nonprofit about that, how do you think about your team? Who's on that team? And do you have the right composition, skill set? Representation? Per Smith, I'm glad

‍

Tracy Eiler  31:15

you've asked me this question. What I'm trying to do is create what I like to refer to as the capital T shaped marker, which is somebody who has great expertise in a particular domain, like let's call it, maybe it's Search Engine Optimization, or competitive analysis, or email marketing. And traditionally, that person would just kind of stay like a lowercase t where they would do their thing. And they'd look kind of a little to the right and the left that at the functions around them, but not really get involved or understand if

‍

Ben Kaplan  31:49

they're the best one at this. And so that's it like Why Why should

‍

Tracy Eiler  31:53

the search engine optimization person even know what that competitive person does? Like? Like, what does that have to do with one another one to lead gen fade when the sales enablement thing, but if you're a capital T shaped marketer, Hadassah is running my SEO program, and Scott and he's running the competitive program are absolutely working together. And they thought about doing that themselves. She wants to input into pop the most popular search terms in our market. He wants information on what's happening in the digital universe, around competition. And because they're T capital T shaped marketers, they are thinking to reach out to each other by themselves. Now, you might ask, Well, how do you find these people? Like what do you do? And you know, Jim Collins, great book, Good to Great, he talks about get the right people on the bus and not have them worry about their seat. That's kind of part of the philosophy, where, you know, I really want marketers who have done a variety of marketing disciplines ranging from, you know, products and positioning to digital marketing to PR, you want folks to kind of are well rounded, but yet have a point of view and an anchor or anchor DNA, I like to call it my anchor DNA is demand and brand. There's many product marketers out there. And that's the preliminary DNA of CMO in particular, the way I like to think about that. But first is the skill set, the willingness to be on the bus, and a real deep curiosity. And you know, Ben, when you think about interviewing people, I think anybody that's got a deep curiosity, growth mindset, lifelong learner, whatever you want the term to be, they really make the best long term marketers and the best kind of generalist broad vision marketers, because they're just always wanting to try and learn new things. And they really want to know what's going on. What if they're not,

‍

Ben Kaplan  33:37

not from tech? And you're in tech? How do ya, how do you think about that? I know you're involved with an organization related to that. But But man, without folks that maybe have a broad skill set, there's just not in the way that sort of Silicon Valley expects you to have a career path in a certain way,

‍

Tracy Eiler  33:52

right. Silicon Valley is very insular, and we tend to hire people exactly like ourselves. And so you end up with, you know, MIT, Stanford grad school, classic brand, and we sort of recycle and recycle. And that does not help you with any kind of diversity at all diversity of person, diversity of thought, and, or any of that. And, you know, at this stage of my career, I'm really want to help create the next generation of great marketers. And so I'm putting my energy into a couple different organizations outside my day job does a nonprofit called Women in revenue, your listeners can go to women and revenue.org Join for free, there's 6000 members now. And it's an organization that I helped found four years ago, to provide networking and education and mentorship for women in revenue roles, like sales and marketing and customer success. And, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, amazing community work and mentor program that people can sign up for. And the reason that that's important is you know, Tech is a very male dominated industry. We all know that. We know that engineering, you know, statistics, but in sales, it's almost worse depending on the size of company. And you know, in My existing organization, we had about 18% of our employees were female, when I joined that we're up to 35, which is so great, because you just think about balance of all of that. And there's all sorts of studies, Harvard Business Review, and McKinsey are two that I can think of. And I can send you the link, if you're interested, for your show notes later, that essentially have measured how having more women in your sales organization, watch the increased revenue. And, you know, so that's, that's one piece. The other piece is do you think about non traditional tech backgrounds, there are hundreds of 1000s of people in the United States, and in every country, who have been in industries that got really hit with COVID. And some of them are not going back to work yet. Hospitality is an example. You know, retail is an example restaurants are an example. How do you tap into the brainpower in that community and get them into tech, there's got to be some sort of path. And unfortunately, there just isn't. And if you think about the diversity of people that you're going to find in many of those jobs, and the fact that you want to get those types of tech, what do you do? So there's an organization called as the V Academy, Silicon Valley Academy. You can find them at SD academy.com. And their founder, Rahim Fazal has a dream of hiring a million people into technology companies, but from non tech backgrounds. So what's the path to that sales development? My Chris Kelly job, right? How do you train a bunch of Chris Kelly's in all of the standards that a B2B company would want, and what could be the path to fail. So as the academy trains these folks over the course of a 10 week program, they get applicants from all over the country, a lot of them are from the profiles of jobs that we've just talked about. And then companies like Alation, and others can hire them. And that works out fantastically well, because you get somebody that comes into the company with a very different point of view on life experience, but yet, they've got a foundation of training on how to do a job. That is that Chris Kelly, kind of front door to the company job. And assuming they do well, 18 months or so later, there's often a path and to other parts of the company, customer success, failed, and so on. And all of a sudden, years later, you've got a million people in tech from diverse backgrounds that never would have found a path any other way. So I'm pretty excited about that.

‍

Ben Kaplan  37:26

So to wrap up, I'd love to ask you, maybe a spin on the classic desert island question, right? Okay, here's the situation, you're stranded on a desert island with your markings. And you can only give one training session, one topic, good not an hour, it's one thing to enable your team to do the most important thing you can do, and you're just gonna be able to train them on this one thing. If you had to prioritize all the stuff you have to do and what they have to know. And you need a high performing marketing team, you will need to have some good deputies on your marketing team. What do you do? What do you train them on? What do you try to empower them on

‍

Tracy Eiler  38:07

how to get inside the mind of the buyer and motivate them to act? If you think about marketing, I think it all boils down exactly to that. And there's a lot of other things I could talk about. But that would be the one that I would,

‍

Ben Kaplan  38:24

why is it so important to get into the mind of the buyer not just understand, I mean, certainly, you know you're in a competitive space, there's other things are certain products and features you can offer, you can compete on price, you can compete better service, you could do all of those things. Why do you actually need to get into the mind of the buyer, when

‍

Tracy Eiler  38:45

I was listening to your podcast episode with Andy Cunningham, she was talking about how brand is owning a piece of real estate in the brain of your customer or prospect. And it's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to own some real estate in someone's mind, to get them to act, to reach out and do research on your organization to even consider you and a deal cycle. And then to eventually champion you in your company internally. So if I don't have a little spot in the brain of the buyer, and I don't understand how they want to go about doing their work, what's the point, like, I haven't delivered any value to the company, I'm not going to motivate that person to act. And you know, there's a bunch of pieces around that, you know, if you're gonna motivate a human being, you really have to understand emotion, and how people respond to things you have to understand how they like to consume information. Not everyone learns or retains information in the same way and so on. But I think all of those things are boiled down to the, you know, owning a piece of the brain of the person and getting inside the brain to the buyer. And

‍

Ben Kaplan  39:51

so finally lightning round, overrated or underrated, thought leadership,

‍

Tracy Eiler  39:57

underrated. I think it's underrated. because it's very hard to prove scientifically that your thought leadership is working. So people in my position often won't fund it. They get nervous about putting out a podcast or writing a book. They're not exactly sure how that's going to drive revenues. So they don't bother. And they just think, oh my gosh, I'll do things that are more predictable. And so therefore, I think it's underrated. In that way. I got to put some money into thought leadership, trade

‍

Ben Kaplan  40:28

shows, both in person or digital, overrated or underrated.

‍

Tracy Eiler  40:33

I would have said overrated prior to COVID. But underrated now. You know, prior to COVID, there were so many events of so many different types, they were all kind of the same, you'd have the same experience or exhausting. You know, they're things that were being delivered online. Were kind of cookie cutter webinar format.

‍

Ben Kaplan  40:56

Like why would if I could watch a webinar like this? Why would I go watch it? Yeah, it's just

‍

Tracy Eiler  41:00

like yet again, another thing, rinse, repeat, you know, fold my laundry while I'm listening kind of thing. COVID lockdown forced us marketers to get really creative on the digital experience, and the entertainment value at an income component, so on. And now we're in a situation where in real life events are coming back. And you know, I think least for the next year, there's a longing and an appetite for humans to interact in person. So you know, investing in good experiences that are going to follow health and safety protocols, you know, as it become necessary, hopefully not again, but if it did, and really being able to tie the digital world and the in real life world together, because a lot of folks are not traveling all the time, like they used to and so on. The boys got to have that option to interact in a digital way in addition to an enroll, Lifeway

‍

Ben Kaplan  41:53

final one is demand generation, overrated or underrated, focus on demand generation,

‍

Tracy Eiler  42:03

I think you have to focus on demand generation as a CFO, if you don't, you'll lose your job, eventually, you know, our average lifespan, or tenure at a company, it's around 18 months. And if we come in and demand gen is broken, and we don't fix it, then you're gonna get churned out of there. If you can keep demand gen working really well, then you've kind of earn the right to double down on brand awareness as an example or thought leadership or other things. But if we don't have the fundamentals, right, man, if we're not, you know, generating pipeline for the company, forget it.

‍

Ben Kaplan  42:36

Okay, so it's table stakes and everything else kind of blows from that. Well, Tracy, so nice to chat with you. Really interesting in terms of your experience with sales, how that connects to marketing. You're a champion for a lot of different people, groups, organizations, you have a lot of experience and so it's a true pleasure chatting.

‍

Tracy Eiler  43:00

Thank you for the invitation then congratulations on the podcast. Thanks, Ben.

‍

43:08

This amazing episode was brought to you by TOP Thought Leader don't forget to rate review and subscribe.

‍