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CMO Confidential
Jean English | Big Tech & B2B Marketing-What You Need to Know | Juniper Networks | CMO Confidential
00:33:35
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- [00:00]
Mike Linton
The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest Gene English. Today's topic big tech and B2B marketing what you need to know now. Gene is currently the CMO of Juniper Networks, a global leader in AI native networking solutions that powers the connections and secure infrastructure of enterprises, service providers and cloud operators. She previously served as the CMO of Armis, Palo Alto Networks and NetApp, and also spent over 10 years in marketing at IBM, including Asia and the cloud business. In summary, if you're looking for directions at the intersection of B2B and tech infrastructure, Gene is your person. Welcome Gene.
- [01:49]
Gene English
Thanks Mike. Glad to be here.
- [01:51]
Mike Linton
Glad to have you. So, first question, why don't you just give us an overview? Give our listeners an overview of the lay of the land in B2B technology, the big trend. And I know you weave AI into this, but AI and everything else, try and add a little bit on everything else.
- [02:11]
Gene English
Yeah, well, it's hard to even say anything without mentioning AI, but I'll start back even to a trend that's continuing right now, which is digital transformation. We're all talking about it, we've been talking about it, but you know, it's really reshaping economies. And the thing is, is that you have to adopt these new technologies to be able to manage the data and the clouds and how you think about operations and applications. And so digital transformation still super, super top of mind. I think that when you think about just the networks themselves, I'm at Juniper Networks, so this is top of mind for us for sure. But it's all about these connections and it's all about the complexity of those connections and the ability to be able to connect anywhere to any device, any application, any user and now they're becoming more and more on the edge and the more and more dispersed, even in remote workforces. And so that becomes a bigger, bigger opportunity for everyone. That's in tech we talk about AI, you can't say it without something else. It's also security. Security is something where everyone has to feel safe and they have to feel secure. And so it's a critical trend. But I think it's more than a trend. I think that it's really about how you make sure that every single connection that you have and, and that attack surface that keeps growing is protected and you can plan, you can stay ahead, you can be proactive. And there's ways to even use AI in order to do that as well. Now with all this technology coming on board, talent is still a scarce resource. And the ability to get talent in the right places and in the right opportunities and to make sure that you're leveraging the different new technologies are coming out. Talent is definitely a resource that is very, very scarce today. And I would say that fundamentally though, sustainability is now a non negotiable. There's so many companies that are now even starting to put in their RFPs and what they require for us to be more sustainable. And so that's also a top trend that I see that carries throughout the years.
- [03:59]
Mike Linton
Hey, I want to thank you for that. That was a great overview. Can I double down on this first question and say, we've been in a digital transforming world for a long time now. If I'm sitting out there listening this show, how do I know where I am in my digital transformation journey? Like, how do I gauge if I'm, I mean, I know it's a never ending thing. As AI comes on, there's more stuff, but how do I even gauge where I am versus where I should be in this transformation?
- [04:30]
Gene English
I think so much of it is about whether you're thriving or surviving. You know, like if you're just barely able to get the basics of getting people connected remotely. If you're looking at how do you serve customers more online, how do you actually harness the power of like AI to do your jobs even better? And how do you ensure that you can actually see holistic views of your customer? There are basics out there and the ones that are doing it well are really, really thriving. And they're seeing it in bottom lines and they're seeing it impacting what they do for business as well as they do for customer loyalty. The ones that are not, they start to see in the results. And so the Ones that are digitally transforming a few years ago are definitely ahead of the scale.
- [05:11]
Mike Linton
So you should be looking out, if I'm shorthanding this for our listeners, they should be looking out at a broad landscape of companies that are embracing transformation or not, and then tearing apart what they've actually done. Because this is a long term journey where investments are paying out years later. Often, yeah.
- [05:33]
Gene English
And it's hard to bolt it on. You have to do it from the ground up. And so a lot of times companies can't afford to just rip it up. They have to figure out how to do projects, how they have to get the data layer figured out and getting all the data connected, how did they get systems to where they're talking to each other? And that's just some of the basics of things that have to happen. And then they can build what they need to do in terms of what's customer facing.
- [05:55]
Mike Linton
And you see a lot of companies doing this part way and not finishing. And that is. I want to talk about that. I want to move into what I guess, for lack of a better interviewing question, I'm going to call it the infrastructure layer, which is, I think we talked about it in the beginning here you got all this infrastructure and people sometimes have a hard time changing the infrastructure layer. Can you tell our listeners what is the infrastructure layer really? And then I want to write some shorthand for marketers and how to use it. So let's talk infrastructure layer.
- [06:28]
Gene English
Infrastructure layer. I mean, I've been in the infrastructure layer now for 25 years and I never planned to be focused all in this layer. But the thing is, it's really the backbone of how businesses operate. I mean, it's the backbone to compute, it's backbone to your network, it's security, it's the workplace, it's data platforms. And if you're wanting digital experiences, you got to have what's the back end of that infrastructure to make it work. And you know, if you think about something as simple as this, we're on a zoom meeting and you want to make sure there's no glitches. We don't want to get disconnected, we don't want to have a hang up, we don't have to have a pause. That's all the infrastructure. And so these applications have to run seamlessly and smoothly. And whether it's an operator trying to figure out how to fix it or if it's someone like us who's having a conversation, we don't want it to get disrupted. You want that infrastructure layer to really Work.
- [07:15]
Mike Linton
We definitely don't want this conversation interrupted. But when I think infrastructure layer, then I'm talking about all the data. Anything that moves the data around, whether it's the hardware, it's the cloud, and that, everything that touches that layer, which would be all the apps, my website, everything else, and then all the security that is hanging out in that. Is that a fair look at infrastructure.
- [07:39]
Gene English
A fair look at it? You know, I think you can change the world with data.
- [07:43]
Mike Linton
I agree with that.
- [07:45]
Gene English
Yeah. And the ability to get access to that data. Know that data is secure, know that it can get to any application, it can get to any experience you have. You want that data to flow seamlessly.
- [07:55]
Mike Linton
And you know that it's also the right data and it's not the wrong data. But if I'm a marketer and I'm sitting here, some marketers, you know, that we talked to on the show, they're like, God, I just count on my IT department or my tech, my cto, everybody to get this right, tell marketers what they should actually be doing, versus just counting on it to be right.
- [08:16]
Gene English
I think the thing is, you want to make sure all your applications are connected in the right way. You know, as marketers, we have these more tech stacks where, you know, we're responsible either for the data, that's customer data. It could be transactional data, it could be customer experience data, it could be firmographics, demographics, all of this. You want to be the source code of what that customer looks like. And in marketing departments, if you can have a stronger view of how to think about the customer and that customer data, the more likely you are to be able to really have a. Have a loyal customer, the more you're able to have better experiences with that customer, and the more you can start to predict that customer may want and need. But as a marketer, like, you have to, you've got to grasp that notion that you are like the queen, king of the data.
- [09:00]
Mike Linton
Yes. And I've talked to some in our show, we end up talking to some CTOs and CIOs a lot. And one of the things it will say is a lot of times marketing gets sloppy with the data, or they will go rogue and then import a bunch of data that doesn't work. Can you talk to marketers about that and why they shouldn't do that or should do it?
- [09:23]
Gene English
Well, I think. I mean, I don't know if marketers are sloppy. Like, I don't. I mean, maybe the IT department said that. I'm not sure, but I think the best friend for marketing has to be not only your product side as well as your sales counterparts. Your new best friend should be the cio. And so the ability for your new best friend to be the CIO to where you cannot be seen as just bringing in data that gets collapsed or input or imported into a database. But that that data is important. And then how do you get that data real time? It can't be in batches. Like you have to have it instantaneously. And then that data's got to be served up to customers instantaneously. And so the ability to go beyond the list upload to like, you know, data in real time is something that you have to establish a really good relationship with the CIO to make sure happens.
- [10:10]
Mike Linton
We, we actually did a show on this called why IT and Marketing Should Be BFFs where if marketing is not one of the, it's not the heaviest user of it, it should really think about it because it's probably not using the data enough.
- [10:26]
Gene English
I do, I get many peddies with my cio. So people got to get their new best friend in place for sure.
- [10:32]
Mike Linton
I'm with you there, hb bffs. All right, I've held back on AI until now. Tell us about, you know, which is really a long time for us on the show because you always have to talk about AI. How does AI affect this infrastructure layer? And then while you're answering this, write marketers into this, into this story, how they should be thinking about this.
- [10:56]
Gene English
Yeah, I look at AI in a couple of different facets. I mean, from our business itself, you can look at AI for networking and what do you use AI ops for? So that you understand every single connection point. You understand all the experiences on the applications, you understand how to operate, you know, all of the different experiences and devices and assets and users around the world. And even if no one's even on the network, how do you do that so that things can get instantaneously fixed? You want to understand, like how to create the absolute best experience, operator, end user best experience. And right now we've been taking that across not only wired and wireless domains, to think about all your wifi when you go to work or in your home, or no matter where you are around the world, but also no matter whatever application you want to access, no matter where you want to be. And then if you think about the flip side of that, which is what we've talked about with networks for AI, how do you ensure that any company can be able to build a large language model and create their own AI instances and how they can go through and be able to train AI and get smarter and smarter with AI. And so large, large, big companies like social media companies and big cloud providers, they're all looking at how do they actually build these large language models? And we help them all the time. So everything about AI for networking and networking for AI, like, that's our business.
- [12:13]
Mike Linton
Can you give us any examples of either business situations or companies or both that are doing this well and how people could learn from them?
- [12:24]
Gene English
All right, let's take the Gap.
- [12:27]
Mike Linton
All right, let's take the Gap. Coming back. The Gap is coming back out here.
- [12:31]
Gene English
We've all shopped at the Gap. Yeah, at the Gap, when we've been working with them to ensure that they can understand every single connection inside of all of their stores, at their headquarters. And we make sure that anytime that they need to be up and running to run a transaction, that it's seamless. It happens. It happens right away. And by doing that, they're not. They don't have to have people come out and help them to solve the problems. If something breaks, they don't have to have a truck literally drive out to the Gap store and go fix the problem. That doesn't happen. We actually reduce those truck rolls, we call them, by 85% by doing that.
- [13:03]
Mike Linton
What's an example of when you have to do a truck roll now you don't have to do it anymore?
- [13:07]
Gene English
Well, before truck roll might be, you know, a store was up and running. They get ready to open for the day, and all of a sudden they can't get their registry working. And then they can't. They can't, or they couldn't be able to send out, you know, real to customers coming through the door. They get an alert on that and they say, how do we fix this right away? Then you have to, like, figure out how to do something manually. You enter in credit cards, you know, by hand. You know, you're doing things in a manual way. And now with, with Juniper, what we do is we fix that problem before it even starts. We actually see that something is down. We proactively go out and figure out what it is. It could be anything. It could be a wire. It could be something happening in the network that's, you know, on the ground and the, in the area. It could be an outage. We don't always know. But by having what we call more of us, which is our virtual network assistant, it goes out and figures it out before it even starts. Which is fantastic.
- [14:00]
Mike Linton
That's a great example. And coming from retail, when that happens, it does just comes up the entire day. Hey, when you look at this, are there any big differences you would call out for marketers or all the people listening the show in B2B and B2C and how to use this?
- [14:20]
Gene English
Yeah, I mean, I was embracing AI very, very early on. It was one of the questions I had my first day here at Juniper. I had a big town hall and one of the questions that came up was, you know, what is your thoughts on AI? And I was like, we're going to embrace it. Every single person should know how to use AI. And I think most marketers started quite simply with thinking about content and can you create the right content and scalable content and long form content goes in. Can you create short form content? But that's a blog or if it's a social post or it's a webcast reminder or a thank you note, whatever that might be. And so we all started in this content creation phase. And so we started to do that early on and we had to learn from that because at first the team was like, yeah, but I'm not getting what I really need. It's not as strong as if I wrote it myself. How do I get it to be better? And it comes with like time and practice and inputting. And I think it also taught us that maybe our messaging wasn't as succinct.
- [15:20]
Mike Linton
Right.
- [15:21]
Gene English
Maybe we weren't as clear on what the value prop was. Maybe we have to actually go back and get more evidence about why the solution does work. More use cases, we have to get more customer testimonials, more endorsements of why something would work better. And so by refining and learning and you know, it's like good grapes make good wine, good data and good inputs make great AI. And so like, how do you ensure that what's going into the AI is what's what you want to come out of the AI at scale? And so that's where we started. I think the thing that I've been really working on with our team is how do we take it from content creation to personalization? And so that's like the very next step. So can what we send out be more personalized? Whether it's a pain point, it's a customer need, it's an industry, it happens to be a use case. Whatever the situation is can make it just a little more personalized. Then from that step we took it to the next level, which was how do we get it real time. So real time engagement, personalization. And that became a big factor for us when we started seeing real results. So content creation at scale, you know, we can do 2-3x more content than we did before, more launches, more innovation going on in the market, then we could start to personalize it. We saw, I started to see 10x of what people would open in an email because it was personalized. And now what we're seeing is that, that real time engagement is what's getting us to start to see the cliff of what we're seeing with 5x of our returns on our demand gen. And of course it's not just AI. There's a lot of things that are behind that. But I do think that for everyone to be employable in the future, we all want to embrace AI and for certain use cases in order to go and be amazing with what our skills are and having a really great companion too.
- [17:04]
Mike Linton
Yeah. And if, look, if you don't do this, you'll be so behind on the cost curve, you just won't be able to catch up and be slipped behind.
- [17:12]
Gene English
And I really do believe that. I mean I actually gave every single person in our organization and a license to whatever AI solutions so that everyone could start to use AI.
- [17:22]
Mike Linton
Yeah, look, we had the code in theory CEO on and he was saying he's having everybody write his job, their job descriptions with AI in them so that they are taking on AI as a partner versus some kind of project which we thought was super interesting. Let's, let's flip over to cyber. Always in the news, but not really understood. What should our audience be thinking about cybersecurity?
- [17:49]
Gene English
Cybersecurity. You know, I was in cyber for quite a while, deep, deep in cyber for a couple of years. And you know, cyber is so critical. I mean, you know, when you talk about this notion of zero trust and like you can't trust anything to come in, like you, you have to validate like what's coming through any type of any kind of entry point into any space, into any application, your data, your users. And right now with AI going a little bit back on AI, but AI is what I think the attackers are using. So if attackers are using it. And right now it's not even just attackers, like they've got machines on machine on machine that are using AI to figure out how to get into someone's environment or into someone through a phishing, using ransomware, even extortion. There's lots of ways these attackers are using AI right now. And I think that the ability to accurately understand, like what is the actual attack and not just what's the noise is critical. And so you got to detect these threats coming in. You've got to understand how to remediate these. Either it's a vulnerability if it's an attack itself. I mean, a lot of times attackers can get into an environment for quite a while and no one even knows. And they're just offering intel and they're figuring out entry points and normally they come in through one way, but it's just trying to get way, way, way deep into the data. And so the ability to figure those signals out really early and understand the anomalies of what's happening in the environment is key. It is so, so, so key.
- [19:18]
Mike Linton
And is it true that marketers are a lot on the front lines here because they are at the customer interface and sometimes can have hundreds, if not thousands or millions of touch points with customers that are our vulnerabilities or not?
- [19:32]
Gene English
Well, if it's a phishing attack, it can seem like they're sending something that might be from that company, but it may not be. And so I think the more consistency that marketers can have and how they communicate with customers and like what your brand shows up, making sure that you have the consistency of how and what you're communicating is incredibly important. But I'll tell you, if people are receiving emails or they're receiving communications or they're interacting with and like you have to, everyone's got to be responsible. This again is like a zero trust environment. And you've got every user of any kind of data has got to be on top of what they're going to do to be protected.
- [20:08]
Mike Linton
Got it. I want to flip over and talk about careers. You've been in tech, I guess, your entire career. Tech doesn't always have the best reputation for valuing marketing. Give us your take and then tell marketers who want to have a career in tech, how should they be thinking about it?
- [20:28]
Gene English
You know, I love being in tech. You know, I'm from Raleigh, Durham area here in North Carolina.
- [20:34]
Mike Linton
Go, Duke.
- [20:37]
Gene English
There's always a debate on that, isn't there, Duke?
- [20:39]
Mike Linton
Not with me.
- [20:43]
Gene English
Always the big debate. But yeah, this is a, this is a hub for technology. And so I started very, very early on in my career in technology. You know, I mean, my first product I was marketing was ThinkPads, you know, and the devices that so many people use today. And then I grew from that into how do you build solutions for smaller companies and how do you ensure you've got software that, where you can run any application to technology services and what that looks like for cloud services, when that started emerging over 10 years ago. And so this idea of tech for me has been just like the foundation of every single touch point of what customers experience today. And I don't know any company that's not using technology to make this world, you know, even better. And so I always love being in technology. I don't know that it's always had this reputation for like, you know, innovation, but I think a lot of things are happening in innovation and technology companies. You know, I think of every customer as a customer. They're a person. It's not like I just market to a company, I market to an individual. I have to see Personas so I can see collective groups and how they behave so that we can understand more about their buying behaviors. But I think, you know, technology is running the world. I think an ability to make sure that you can use technology for good is important. And I love that working in a technology company, you have access to knowing like what, what new technology is coming out and then the ability to connect that with people who really could take advantage of it for their own good and for their company is good.
- [22:09]
Mike Linton
So I love some good. Thank you for that. What are some good interview questions you should ask to see if marketing will be valued when you are interviewing with a tech company?
- [22:21]
Gene English
So I usually ask, are you clear on our purpose? Do our customers know why we matter? Do, do, do prospects understand what good we do in the world for them, for their companies and for their own reputations? And are we clear about how we're differentiated? And does every single person in the company know how to articulate that? And if you can get. And how much is marketing helping to drive the bottom line? And what's the dependency on marketing to ensure that you can either create a really great customer relationship or you can create really good revenue sources, you can create good profit and that you can create expandability and growth. And so if I understand the growth aspect, I understand the importance, I understand, are we clear and differentiated and can we communicate that and are we clear on our purpose? I know that marketing is valued.
- [23:14]
Mike Linton
I think that's a good way to look at it. And the way I distilled that is, look, this is market positioning strategy and how you're going to win the game. And if you don't have that, you're just going to give me some tech to sell without any framework around it. And that may not be a great job.
- [23:29]
Gene English
It Is I think that if you get pigeonholed into, you know, this article came out years ago and it was like, are you a, a product marketer? Are you a demand engine? Are you a communicator? Are you a brand marketer? You know, are you a sales driven marketer? And I'm like, if you could only pull one of those levers, you're dead in the water. Like, you have to know how to pull levers that where companies need to grow and what they need to accomplish. And there's a mix of all the elements of marketing, of what that does in connection back with Brandon, with the product itself, definitely in connection with the sales team and connections and how clear you are about who your customers or who are and where you want to grow. And so I just say, don't fall into the trap of only being able to do like one function or one dimension of marketing. You really want to get a cross section to be able to have an impact.
- [24:19]
Mike Linton
Got it. Hey, there has been a lot of consolidation and acquisition in the industry. Who's buying what or who and why. And then we can also talk about you being acquired. So let's talk about it.
- [24:33]
Gene English
Yeah, I mean, I think that more and more companies are looking for more platform solutions. I think that the ability to consolidate and again get back to that data, of being able to take data across a lot of different architecture solution, touchpoint applications is important. If you just think about like, you know, meta with Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, that data can flow through seamlessly and what you do and how you use it. And I think that more companies, whether it's in cybersecurity, it's in networking, you know, it's of the technology, it could even be in other industries, they're looking to gather more of the data, they're looking to gather more of how they help customers with, you know, more platform and solutions. And so you see that consolidation happening and that's been happening for quite some time.
- [25:22]
Mike Linton
And so that says bigger is going to be in many cases a winner because some of this is so big and so expensive and so broad that bigger is maybe going to win a lot of these games. Is that kind of a good way to take it?
- [25:41]
Gene English
I think the key is I wouldn't say bigger as much as I would just say how do you have a better platform to help being to give more solutions and use cases to customers who are looking for that. If things are maybe not bigger but broader, then broader, more comprehensive. So trying to stitch all these things together on Your own is like so hard. We know this as marketers. I mean, you know, if you operate in tech. Yeah, we're getting, you know, hit every day with a new solution that's coming out. And how do you weave it together? It's not about the latest tool or tech, it's about how integrated is it together so that you can see the data across and you can have a better customer experience. Like we don't buy tech for tech. Like we buy technology. So we create better customer experience.
- [26:22]
Mike Linton
And if it doesn't integrate with itself, it's a nightmare because then all that blows up on the customer.
- [26:28]
Gene English
That's right. And I don't do anything on my own without it in the boat because we've got to get it integrated and we have to have the data flowing through it. And so that is just paramount. So I think you will see more acquisitions because of that and for that purpose. And I think that if you have companies who are doing things that are best of breed top of capability that add real customer value, the more companies are going to want to use that technology to better have their own customer loyalty and value as well.
- [26:55]
Mike Linton
Thanks. And you've been acquired. Tell us about what it's like to be acquired and then moving from a small company to a large one and or vice versa. Because I think you've seen all of it.
- [27:06]
Gene English
I have seen all of it. I was in a division at IBM where we acquired 100 companies in 10 years. And so the ability to think about just the sheer number of acquisitions that came in, it built a business. I've been at other companies. We're acquiring a company every quarter and to do that we were building out platforms and new products, we were adding capabilities and enhancements and so that created more of a platform approach. If I look at what's happening with Juniper. Yeah, we have an intent to be acquired. It happened last January and sometime in Q4 or Q1 on that transaction will be complete based on all the regulatory requirements we're going through right now. So it's very interesting. I've been the acquirer for many, many, many companies, many companies being acquired and now being on the acquired side, it's actually very interesting to go through the process.
- [27:56]
Mike Linton
Any tips for our listeners on either side of the being acquired or being acquiree?
- [28:03]
Gene English
I think there's so much advantage to acquisitions. I mean, I think the ability to give better and broader solutions to customers is a good thing. I think shareholder value, number one, is amazing. And if you can add shareholder value to all key stakeholders that's also positive for everyone. I think the career opportunities are tremendous. I mean, for anyone coming into an acquisition, and whether you're coming in or you're in the primary company, how do you start to look at talent that comes into the company and what do you do to harness that talent and career growth? So I think all those factors are really positive, and it's a positive for customers, partners, employees as well.
- [28:43]
Mike Linton
Thank you for that. Now, you've been in B2B marketing for a long time. What are the biggest blind spots? And you've sold. So you've sold to a ton of marketers or marketed to a lot of marketers. What are the biggest blind spots for B2B marketers when they look at tech?
- [29:02]
Gene English
Well, I've definitely been sold to a lot as a CMO and as a leader in marketing for quite some time. And I think so many times I get, you know, I Open up my LinkedIn in the morning and I've got, you know, a fresh new set of, like, network connections that want to connect. And then what do I fear the most? Is the message coming through the box. You know, it's like, I connect and then the next thing it's like, I want to sell you something.
- [29:25]
Mike Linton
Exactly.
- [29:26]
Gene English
And then I'm like, do I keep the connection or do I not? You know, it's like, you know, is this. What value are we getting? And so I think the key is that being sold to or being marketed to or what do you do? As a cmo, I don't need all the latest tools. I need them to work well and I need them to work together. And I'm always evaluating new tools, especially in AI Right now, there's a, There's a constant test, experimentation that's happening with AI. But I think that at the foundation of it, it's. It's not about the number of tools or the how, how advanced the technology is. Like, getting the most out of the tools that you buy is key. And in so many cases, we buy something and we use it for like, one use case and it's like, why do we do that? Does this expensive? You're adding a ton of tech debt. And like, why not just, you know, try to get something that's more seamless and that's connected together. So as a, you know, someone who's marketed too, I, you know, I would say, you know, first think about, like, what problem I'm really trying to solve. Kind of the fundamentals of marketing, you know, what pain point may I have right now? And don't lean in with my first network connection being like, here, let me tell you something. Let me get you to a demo.
- [30:36]
Mike Linton
You get an awful lot of people that want to, want to make CMO Confidential a bigger podcast. So. So. And that all comes into LinkedIn. So. So we're running towards the end of the show. We have a traditional last question. It's a two parter. You can take one or both, but you have to take at least one. So funny story you can tell on the air and. Or practical advice to our listeners. We haven't discussed yet. Yours to pick one or both of those.
- [31:08]
Gene English
Okay, well, I don't have a story. I don't know if I have a story that's ready for arable content. So I will.
- [31:13]
Mike Linton
You can take a risk with us. We're good with it. Gene.
- [31:16]
Gene English
I like that. You know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with advice because there's something we haven't talked about that's extremely important to me. I have a mantra that no matter where I go, everyone knows me for this. This is not something that's a secret at all. But my mantra is be bold. Like, you know, if I'm not pulling you back, we're not going far enough. And so whether that's boldness and what we say in our message and what we claim, bold and experience that we're providing. Boldness and what we want to do for an innovation, boldness for how far we want to go. I'm in positioning a company, you know, it's going to feel slightly uncomfortable. It always does. It always like feels like, is that too far? And I'm like, we're going to work our way into it. But if we have a belief, we've got credibility, we've got a roadmap that can be influenced and created, we've got partnerships that can be developed. You can be bold. Now, I have a second part that I've added and I've added it over the years. It hasn't always been my mantra, but I've added over the years and that's be bold and be kind. And I do think this notion of like being kind to each other and having respect, being open for new ideas, opinions is so incredibly important. You know, I can recall that when, you know, it was a pandemic and, you know, we're all working from home and my kid's bedroom is only a few feet away from my office and, you know, and I would think, how do I want him to hear me when I'm interacting at work because that matters. And having respect for each other and having him hear how people treat me or how I treat others, you know, really makes a difference. And so I think that you can be really, really bold and you can open up so much space for new ideas and thinking. But if we're kind to each other, that kind of culture, you can do anything together. So that's my advice, is be bold, be kind.
- [33:05]
Mike Linton
Thank you for that. I think a great way to end the show. Thank you for joining us, Gene, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please, like, share and subscribe. Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and the I Hear Everything network, which include the battle between believers and non believers. Parts 1, 2 and 3 Secrets from a CFO the digital ad industry is built on the wrong principles and things that make you go. And a marketer turned tech exec talks about big data, mainframes and AI. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential.