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Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
447: Measuring Your Marketing Impact with Andrew Bennett, CMO of Conga
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- [00:00]
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- [01:06]
Andrew Bennett
For all of us. It's about predicting where the consumer is going and getting half of it right.
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Alan Hart
One of the things we want to do is create ads that don't suck.
- [01:18]
Andrew Bennett
Embracing change creates great possibility.
- [01:22]
Alan Hart
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today. Today on the show, I've got Andrew Bennett. He's Conga's chief marketing officer. Andrew's focused on building awareness and generating demand for Conga's suite of products and offerings. Prior to joining Conga, he held leadership positions in marketing and sales at Smartsheet, which is the enterprise work management platform. While he was there, he built their digital marketing and demand generation capabilities, leading commercial sales and ultimately serving as their chief marketing officer. On the show today, we talk about his role at Conga, how he's driving sales and marketing alignment, martech stacks and how to think about prioritizing those investments or rationalizing those investments and how to get to real dollar impact of the marketing that you're doing and when it maybe, maybe you can't, but how to do it when you can. That and much more with Andrew Bennett. Andrew, welcome to the show.
- [02:32]
Andrew Bennett
Thanks a lot. Really happy to be here today.
- [02:34]
Alan Hart
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about you and the company and all the things that you guys do. Before we get into that though, I think this is the most unique merging of two things I've ever heard about and we have to talk about it. How in the world did you merge fly fishing and Martech together.
- [02:55]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah. I've had a couple of different stints in technology, but in between those I spent about nine years running a small business that operated remote fly fishing lodges. So basically destinations spread all across the world where people would go and typically spend a week fishing all day. A few years into my time running that business, I basically got to a point where operations were running pretty smoothly, people were having a great time, and I basically realized that the most important thing for me to go do was sell every last trip. This was in, oh, it was about 2004, 2005, which was a time that online marketing was very new to that industry. That's not the most progressive industry in the world from a technology standpoint. And so I really threw myself into marketing and selling trips and I found that it was a great time to try to really get in front of people online. So I personally dove right in and did a lot of foundational work in that world. I rebuilt the website, I started a blog, I started a social presence, started a newsletter, started doing some online advertising, started. I bought HubSpot, did some landing page optimization, and then I also had a pretty heavy role in selling the trip. So I had a kind of unique position of not only generating the demand, but following up on the demand. So I got a pretty good view into where quality was coming from and I had a ton of success. I was really focused on understanding where I was getting impact from the marketing that I was doing and tried to invest more in the areas that were working and less in the areas that weren't. And it had a really big impact on the business.
- [04:52]
Alan Hart
I love it, I love it. And you're like a one man show almost.
- [04:56]
Andrew Bennett
It sounds like I was on the marketing front. Yeah. I eventually added somebody to help with the selling and there were, oh, 60 or 70 people involved in actually delivering the trips. But yes, I was, I was a one man band in marketing and that.
- [05:13]
Alan Hart
And a marketer that, that spent their own money, it sounds like too, and needed to work.
- [05:17]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, yeah. And that was one of the things that I took away from that experience that wound up being foundational to how I think about marketing. And yeah, as we talked a little bit about when we got to know each other, my, my sort of punchline from that is, yeah, if you want to get really good at attribution, spend your own money. That that was a small company and it was at a time where pretty literally, if I didn't get good return on my marketing investment, I couldn't pay my mortgage. And that made Me extremely focused on understanding the impact of the dollars that I was spending.
- [05:52]
Alan Hart
I love it. I don't know exactly the time horizon of when that experience fits into your career, but like where did you get your career start and then how did you end up where you are now? You're a CMO or chief marketing officer at Conga.
- [06:07]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah. I started my career in technology. I worked for a company called Onyx Software Corporation that was a mid market CRM company that really had the majority of its growth right before Salesforce came along. And I ran. I had a few different roles in services and wound up running the professional services, the implementation team for America at Onyx. Really cool experience. I did that for nine years right out of college. And when it was time to do something different, I was just at a place where I had always wanted to run a small business. I grew up in Alaska, so I've always liked to do things outside. I personally am passionate about fly fishing. And so I made a pretty clean break and went and ran fly fishing lodges for again nine years. And then I was ready to get back into technology. And honestly one of the reasons for that was because I saw the impact of the work that I had done in marketing that business online and I came to understand that all that same approach applies in a lot bigger industries as well. And so I wanted to try to do it on a bigger scale. And one of the founders of Onyx, Brent Fry, was also one of the founders of Smartsheet. Also the CEO of Smartsheet, Mark Mater, is someone who I worked closely with at Onyx. When I decided to get back into technology, I put my feelers out and did some consulting engagements. One of those consulting engagements was with Smartsheet when it was at a fairly early stage in building out its digital marketing. So I joined as a consultant, quickly decided to join full time and that was a good decision. I wound up spending 10 years at Smartsheet, first two really building out a lot of the foundations in digital marketing. Then I had an unusual role, at least unusual at the time. I took on building and leading the commercial sales team at Smartsheet, but I also kept Demand Gen. And that was because we wanted to make sure that Demand Gen was really tightly aligned with the sales team. I did that for about five years at Smartsheet and then for the last three years of my time at Smartsheet we decided to really continue our move up market. We needed to have a real fully integrated marketing org. So I took on the CMO role for those last three years. At Smartsheet with all the components you would normally expect to find in marketing, brand demand gen, product marketing, comms, marketing ops, et cetera. And then just about six months ago, I moved from Smartsheet to be CMO at Conga.
- [08:50]
Alan Hart
Awesome. Congrats on the move.
- [08:52]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, thanks. It's been fantastic.
- [08:54]
Alan Hart
Let's talk a little bit about Conga itself. What's the scope of the business and the types of solutions that you guys provide?
- [09:02]
Andrew Bennett
Conga is the leader in revenue lifecycle management. It's about a $500 million business revenue life cycle. Management is basically what it sounds like, everything that businesses do to manage their revenue. And there are really three main product pillars with inside revenue lifecycle management. And generally people tend to be more familiar with the separate pillars, maybe in the umbrella term. So we have a configure price point quote offering, cpq, we do contract lifecycle management or clm. And then we have a document automation business that includes a product called Conga Composer that's used to generate documents. And then we also have a signature product. One of the things that makes Conga really different though, is that all of those products sit together on a single unified platform. Excuse me. And the big launch of that single unified platform that also supports any CRM system, any ERP system, and has a bunch of open APIs. That big product launch that brings it all together is actually next week. So it's a really important time in Conga's history.
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Alan Hart
Yeah, it sounds like everything's coming together, so to speak, and very soon.
- [10:23]
Andrew Bennett
Yes, exactly. Yeah, it means a lot to us as a business and it means a ton to our customers because a lot of like, a lot of IT systems and a lot of business focused IT systems. When companies run those three components on separate systems in silos, it doesn't work very well. And we have a lot of great stories from our customers around the fact that when they bring it all together on a single platform, they get a ton more value in the business. Things work much more smoothly operationally, there's better visibility. And then really importantly, given what's going on in the market today, by having not only all those systems but all that data in one platform, it really opens up a huge range of possibilities for AI.
- [11:09]
Alan Hart
Andrew, you've talked about all of your experiences. You've worked at the CRM company, Implementation consulting. You've done marketing both as a consulting and as a executive. You also had the commercial sales function and demand gen. So I'm thinking about, like, how do you approach bringing marketing and sales Together and getting them really aligned.
- [11:33]
Andrew Bennett
I think there are two really important principles that I think about a lot. One is on the marketing side of the house, really making sure that everyone across the team understands how their role fits in with the entire go to market. Meaning that our job is not done when we generate a lead and hand it over to sales. And so we need to understand what's actually happening to the lead once it gets into the hands of sales, what's working well, what's not working well. And then really importantly, even though in a lot of marketing programs, KPIs tend to be focused on lead gen and pipeline generation, none of that matters if we don't understand the dollars that are coming out the back end. And so I really try to make sure that my teams are really aware. And whether and aware might mean looking at data, it might mean having conversations with people in sales, but understanding or having a high degree of awareness of the business that's actually coming out the back end ultimately. So that's one principle is getting the marketers really connected to the ultimate outcome for the business. And not just on KPIs that that maybe seem marketing focused, but in a lot of ways for the business are more leading indicators. That's one real principle. And then the other thing that I've found inside marketing teams, inside sales teams, and certainly across the combination of the two, is that even when these teams work closely together, they often don't actually understand the reality of a day in the life of the other people who they're working with. And so both formally and formally, I really work to try to build that understanding. And so a couple examples might be if you're running a demand gen program and you're not seeing the leads convert the way you expect, don't just look at a report and get mad at the sales rep, call them up or call up the sales manager and ask what their experience is and ask how the conversation went, ask what assets they wanted that they didn't have. But really try to get into the meat of how that program is working and get an understanding of how the person on the other team sees the program. That's an informal example. A more formal example that I've actually done a few times now in different lives is actually have teams present to each other in a fair amount of detail on what their job is, what their day in the life is, and how the programs impact them. So at Conga, for example, we've just done a series of meetings. We do them in our marketing all hands meetings. We Started with having a BDR come in and present to the marketing team on all those things, quite literally like what's my comp plan? How am I incented? What does a day in the life look like? Not only in principle, but literally have them pull up their calendar and show how they're spending their time. Give a view into what lead sources they like working. Give a view into what do the actual conversations sound like. Often including listening to call recordings together. And we've done that for three of the selling roles at Conga now and we've got another three to go. So really trying to drive just a better understanding of like in detail what is the other person's job. I think too often we, we have a program and we envision, okay, the output of this. In marketing's case, that's often a lead. A lead's going to a certain team but they don't really know what that lead means to that person who receives the lead. And I just think the better understanding we can drive together, the better.
- [15:28]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no, honestly I've never heard of that approach before but I really like it and it almost. It helps as I am listening to you describe the BDR presentation, it helps you understand what the. What marketing needs to do to get the lead into the best place possible to make it a little easier downstream. Right?
- [15:49]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, exactly. And it, and it just gives context, right. And I remember when I got to Conga specifically with the BDR team, one of the things that was an aha in marketing, we had a case where there was a program in place that generated leads and the follow up rate on the leads was really low. And the person who ran that program in marketing was very frustrated by that, which is very understandable. But then you talk to a BDR and they say yeah, this was, I think it was one of 13 types of leads that that BDR was expected to follow up on. And you can, you can give them a talk track and you can give them a bunch of resources and a report and tell them to look person up in LinkedIn. But it's not that simple. Right? The person has a job, they're doing a lot of other things. And I just think often the asks or the expectation from marketing isn't necessarily realistic in the context of that person's job.
- [16:41]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no, makes sense. On the. We talked about sales and marketing aligning Martech stacks. Feel like they've just been exploding. And curious about your thoughts about both. How do you get the best most out of those investments but when you need to what do you need to think about in terms of rationalizing those investments as well?
- [17:01]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah. And I think in 2024, a lot of Martech stacks are exploding. A lot of Martech stacks are also consolidating for a lot of good reasons. Some financial, some due to complexity. So I'll go back to one of the, one of the, again, really foundational principles that we'll probably talk about a few more times, which is you got to understand the ultimate impact on the business and you need to get past leading indicators. Right. And if it's a new ad platform or it's a new intent signal, Intent signals are a great example, right. You can buy intent data from at least dozens of providers today in a silo. When you think about, okay, here's a new intent signal, it all sounds great and it's easy to hear a pitch and envision how it's going to all work out and buy it and implement it. But again, if you're not actually following through to understand how is this turning into real impact for the business, like bookings as an example, you don't have a full picture of the impact of that new intent signal. And when you start to do that, what I've found repeatedly is that systems that seemed really compelling and really important might ultimately be having 1/10 the impact that you thought or 1/100 the impact that you thought. Or maybe in some cases, if you actually look down the pipe, you realize, Gosh, all those MQLs that you were generating actually turned into zero closed one opportunities. And so just trying to be really relentless in understanding the impact and then recognize that even if you have a system, even if you own a system, even if you've paid for a subscription, there's a pretty heavy load to carry a Martech system into the future. Whether that's actual admin, whether that's a burden on reporting, whether that's a burden on integration with other systems. And so when you know, if you have a system that you can't really be convicted is adding a ton of value, stop. Because there is a heavy load. And then the other thing that I would say is that there's a huge amount of technology that we can buy. At the end of the day, if your prospects and customers are having a really great experience when they engage with your company, they're going to be more likely to buy and they're going to be more likely to stay. And so I tend to index a little bit more heavily on systems that are actually impacting customer experience and maybe a little less on systems that are very internally focused, we're very back office focused.
- [19:40]
Alan Hart
Interesting.
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Andrew Bennett
Interesting.
- [19:43]
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- [20:47]
Alan Hart
I know you've talked about this a couple of times. You've got a passion for measurement and attribution and really understanding. I think you said the ultimate measure of success or the ultimate outcome. You've taken a pretty relentless approach to this. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about the approach and what you how you would advise other people.
- [21:08]
Andrew Bennett
I guess the first thing that I would say is maybe even backing up a step. There are some programs in marketing, like most demand gen programs where you do have an ability if you try hard enough to attribute revenue or bookings through to leads. And it's not, it's never perfect. There are multiple touches there. There are all different ways that you can assign value. But for some programs you can measure impact through to things like bookings there. There are other marketing programs that are very worthwhile that you really can't in a in any defensible way have a direct tie to revenue, right? I've run campaigns where we used out of home advertising, right? Billboards. Like you could never look at your CFO and say that billboard on 4th Avenue south led to this close one opportunity. However, I do believe really strongly that everything that we do in marketing needs to have some sort of expected measurable outcome. And before we start, we need to say what we expect. And we need to be really diligent about then running that program and then measuring and looking back and understanding how we did compared to what we expected and learning from that. And I think it's really important culturally to be totally fine when a program falls short. That's not the important part. The important part is that we know the impact we understand and we've learned and that's going to inform our investment decisions going forward. So if you run a brand campaign, maybe you're thinking about, I'm going to try to move aided awareness. And there are ways that you can measure aided awareness. So you need to do that and you need to do everything you can to assess was it effective or was it not. I find that in some marketers I've observed an approach that seems to be a little bit more, I'm going to run a program because I want to run it, and then afterwards I'm going to try to cherry pick stats that show that it worked. And I'm never going to say, you know what, that great idea that I had, that didn't work. And to me, that is not a great approach. So for anybody, if it's a product marketer saying, I'm going to produce case studies, you can come up with a goal. You can say, I want to get a certain number of visits to that webpage, or I want to make sure that a certain number of reps show up to my enablement session. Or if I have a PowerPoint template that I expect the field to use, I can measure how many times it's going to be downloaded for any program, no matter what part of the funnel it impacts, say in advance what you think you're going to accomplish. Have a way to measure it, run the program, measure it, and try to draw conclusions about how you did. So that that again is even broader than try to get revenue. But then since especially today, a lot of our program dollars tend to be invested in programs that do have measurable impact, basically the mantra is measure as far down the funnel as possible. And so in a SaaS business, to me the lowest bar that's acceptable is a bookings number. Am I actually getting closed one business out of the program? And then you can even take it further in a subscription business because what we know in SaaS, excuse me, is that even that if you land a deal and it's worth $1, that's a subscription and that dollar is going to change over time, probably that plan might expand, it might contract, it might full churn you might be able to cross sell based on it. And if I can understand, for example, okay, bookings from one source have a certain net dollar retention rate, then I'm going to be willing to invest more in that source than another source that might generate the same dollars at bookings, but then churn really quickly. So to me, a measure like net dollar retention rate is even further down the funnel than bookings. But that's a mantra is measure as far down the funnel as you can because that's where you see the most actual impact to the business.
- [25:36]
Alan Hart
And just because I don't know that I've heard the net dollar retention rate before, I'm assuming that could be like if you've got churn, then it'd be less than one, right? So like 80, 80 cents on the dollar. If you've got cross sell upsell opportunities, it could be more than one. So $1.50.
- [25:54]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, exactly. Right, yeah. In a SaaS business, the standard description of net dollar retention rate is exactly that. If I, if a company is spending, if a company buys today for $1, you look 12 months later. And if on average that company is spending 90 cents 12 months later, that's a 90% net dollar retention rate.
- [26:16]
Alan Hart
Gotcha. Gotcha.
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Andrew Bennett
Right. And so when you flow out those rates over years, there actually is a huge difference between a 90% net dollar retention rate and even 110% net dollar retention rate. And so those numbers, when you can get to them, and when net dollar retention rates are predictable within a certain segment, it should have a pretty big impact on where you invest.
- [26:40]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. I want to talk maybe about those things that are a little harder to measure because before you were focused on conga and getting everything settled and where you wanted to be there in your Smartsheet days, you oversaw some pretty interesting brand sponsorships, things like the McLaren Racing Group. And I was curious, how can those types of investments be leveraged for brand and to support your general demand gen effort as well?
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Andrew Bennett
Yeah, yeah, There were a few years at smartsheet where the business got to pretty significant scale. At the time that I left, we had just crossed a billion dollars in ARR. And at the time that was a relatively new market. And so pretty pure awareness building was quite important to us. And so we ran some, we ran some large scale brand awareness campaigns including fairly traditional channels like out of home and broadcast TV as well as some more targeted digital channels. And yeah, one of the things that we decided to do is we sponsored the McLaren Formula One team. And Formula One, even if you see it from a distance, you can probably see that it's a place where a lot of money goes. It's very expensive to run an F1 team, and it's a gigantic global audience. And so companies spend a lot of money sponsoring F1 teams. And when we looked at how to leverage that sponsorship, one of the things that we landed on really quickly is that we were not like a title sponsor. Being a title sponsor in Formula One is extraordinarily expensive. I'll just say many tens of millions of dollars in that order. So we were a mid tier sponsor. And you get benefits from a sponsorship like that. You get your logo on the car, you get to bring people to races. If you just do the math on pure brand impressions from having your logo on an F1 car, different people measure it in different ways. But it would be pretty hard to justify that spend and to really imagine, okay, there's 40 log on this car and it's going by it 230 miles an hour. It would be pretty hard to justify that in and of itself as a reason to spend those dollars. And so one of the things that we did is we tried to get, get pretty creative and use the sponsorship more as a platform to tell a bigger story@smartsheet. Work management platform. And there are a lot of, there are a lot of organizations using smartsheet to do really impactful work. And so we landed on a message which was basically that people are doing work that matters on Smartsheet. And so what we're going to do with this McLaren sponsorship is we're going to use it as a platform to tell the world about other organizations who are doing work that matters. Okay, So I know this seems like it's really far afield. Bear with me when I tell you what we actually did. So we decided that at a handful of races, you spend all this money to get your logo on an F1 car. What we did is we actually took our logo off the car. And what in the world does that mean? We went, we F1 races happen all over the world. So for example, at a race in Australia, we picked an Australian nonprofit, a nonprofit called Deadly Science was the first time we did this program is called Sponsor X. And we basically donated our sponsorship to them. So they got their logo on the McLaren F1 car, they got all the social coverage, and we produced some really beautiful assets that were about the work that Deadly Science does, which is amazing work. They do STEM education, resourcing for underfunded aboriginal schools. And because that's such an unusual thing to do with an F1 sponsorship, it got a ton of interest. And so whether that was actual pure traditional pr, where we got a lot of articles written about that, or whether that was social engagement or whether it was internal engagement, we used the platform to tell the world about Deadly science. They got more funding, they got a deal with the Australian Postal service. And when we netted it all out, when we measured the impact of the PR and like the reach of the campaign, all of a sudden it looked fabulous relative to other places that you would spend your brand dollars. So it really was about think beyond just like the terms of what you get in a brand partnership and think about how you can tell a story in a much broader way and in a much more compelling way.
- [31:21]
Alan Hart
You basically growth hacked the F1.
- [31:25]
Andrew Bennett
Exactly. Yeah. And it was like I said, it was a great program from a business standpoint because we such broad reach. And it also was just a tremendous thing internally. How can you not feel good if you work at smartsheet about the fact that you just gave a global platform to a small nonprofit that's doing great work?
- [31:45]
Alan Hart
Of course I still stand by the growth hack though. That's amazing. Basically, I'm sure a pretty still sizable investment and you magnified it out the wazoo.
- [31:56]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, exactly.
- [31:57]
Alan Hart
It's amazing. Awesome. It's been good getting to know you in the business. I love to talk about get to know you a little bit better. And my favorite question I ask everyone that comes on the show is, has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?
- [32:12]
Andrew Bennett
I would certainly say that that experience running a small business changed a lot about how I thought about the world and how I thought about business. When you're the. And I wasn't quite a sole proprietor, right. I had a team and I had investors. But needing to actually be heavily involved in everything from payroll to maintenance to call it HR to sales to delivery to that business happened to have a really logistical component, heavy logistics in remote areas. And I feel like you just get a much more well rounded appreciation of what happens in any business that you can apply. Another thing that I took away from that is that I still have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who runs a small business. It's hard and it certainly makes me extremely grateful to work in a bigger org where I have a lot more resources and a lot more support.
- [33:11]
Alan Hart
If you were starting this path or this journey all over again, what advice would you give your younger Self.
- [33:17]
Andrew Bennett
I would give my younger self a piece of advice that I actually received early in my career that I wish I had received earlier. In my early 20s, I got a really great leadership opportunity inside Onyx. I got to start an office and build a team and do a lot of work with the sales team. And sometimes the relationship between services teams and sales teams can be pretty tough. You're sometimes working towards different goals. And I found myself as a very inexperienced manager in a position where some of the relationships that I had with the sales team were not great. There were just a lot of ways that we could have different opinions and try to take things in different directions. And I just had some pretty challenged relationships. And a guy who was an early mentor to me, who still is a great mentor, was the one who. And some people have heard this analogy, but he gave me the analogy of the social bank account. And the basic idea is that you have to imagine that every person that you have a relationship with, imagine that there's a bank account, and every interaction you have with that person, you're either making a deposit or you're making a withdrawal, right? So if you're. If you're being positive, if you're helping them, if you're coming to them with good news, that's a deposit. If you're asking for something, if you're criticizing them, whatever, that's a withdrawal. And the basic idea of that metaphor is never let any balance go below zero. And so it was a really good way for me to think about, okay, if there are people who are important that I have a strong relationship with, make sure that you're making deposits. Right? It's simple, but it actually changed pretty significantly how I thought about people that I work with. And actually, it influences how I think about personal relationships, too.
- [35:07]
Alan Hart
That's awesome. I had a buddy. It's related, I promise, but I had a buddy that used to always talk about the tax, like the spouse tax. Every time he wanted to go. He was a big golfer. Every time he wanted to go golf, it was like, I gotta pay the tax. So it's a similar concept, but maybe a different use. Yes, I think that makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about right now, or you think marketers in general need to be learning more about?
- [35:35]
Andrew Bennett
I'm gonna come back to one of the points that I've made a few times today. I think that as a marketer, you cannot learn too much about sales. That's where your demand turns into something real. For the company. And that's not at all to say that one is more important than the other. That's not the point at all. But I pretty constantly try to learn what's happening in a sales team. Right. And so at Conga, I've only been here for six months, and I understand the principles of how those jobs work. I was responsible for a bunch of them for quite a while at Smartsheet. But it's different wherever you go, and organizations are different and products are different, and your place in the market is different. And the better you can understand what's actually happening inside the team that's fulfilling on your demand, the more effective you're going to be and also the better relationships you're going to have For a sales team to hear from somebody in marketing saying, hey, I want to listen to the call, or I want to get your feedback on what's working well and what's not working well. I just think that you are constantly benefited the more you learn about sales. And there are some principles that you can learn in a class. You can learn how comp plans work, you can list. You can learn how org structures work. You can learn about sales methodologies. You can learn about qualifying criteria. And also, even though I've learned a fair amount about those things, the specifics of what's happening on my sales team today, that's just something that I try to at least every week, learn more about what's happening in sales.
- [37:09]
Alan Hart
Yeah. Awesome. Are there any trends or subcultures that you follow or you think other people should take notice of?
- [37:17]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah. The most important subculture of all is the fly fishing subculture.
- [37:23]
Alan Hart
Tell me about that. All I think about, when I think about. I've never been fly fishing. I've seen it from a distance on the, like, riverbanks. But all I think about it is there's a little tiny, like the flies themselves, like the actual lures, I guess, and they're so ornate and, like, small. So tell me about it.
- [37:42]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, I mean, it's a. And I guess it's anybody who knows something about one topic that there is so much more to know than you, than you realize. But I couldn't talk to you in a very nuanced way about the ballet. And yet there are people who spend their whole lives learning more about the ballet. Fly fishing, first of all, it's an incredibly broad sport. So, yes, standing in a river with a lightweight rod, casting a tiny little thing made of fur and feathers that looks like an insect to a trout, is one way to fly fish. You can also fly fish in saltwater. I do a trip to Florida every year where I fly fish for tarpon, which range from 50 to 150 pounds. And when you hook a tarpon, it is anything but delicate. It is violent. It's an incredibly broad way to fish. But to me especially having done it in a fairly deep way for a while, it's just a really. It's a really deep way to experience the outdoors. And the lodges that I ran were in western Alaska, northern British Columbia, the Bahamas, and southern Chile. Those are places with incredible natural beauty, really rich local cultures. Understanding those places and how they change over the course of a season, not only what that means for the fishing, but what that means for the people that live there. There's this whole subculture of fly tying. Right. People who actually create the flies. So yeah, and. And like I said, I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors. People who are into fly fishing tend to be really into the outdoors. And the people who are really into that sport and who go to those places and do those things are just really interesting. People come from a lot of different walks of life. They're typically good with adversity. Right. Whether that means the weather's bad or the fishing is tough or something. Didn't work out with your travel. So, yeah, it's a wonderful group of people doing really gratifying things in incredibly beautiful places.
- [39:38]
Alan Hart
I love it. I love it. I can hear the passion. I can hear the passion. Last question for you. Back to marketing. What do you feel like is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
- [39:50]
Andrew Bennett
I think the biggest opportunity is to really think of yourself and act in a way that you're a key partner in the go to market. Of course, there's a sort of tired adage that marketing is not generating great leads and sales isn't following up on the leads. And to me, that those attitudes are not helpful at all. And what I find is that when you actually think of yourself as a partner and act like a partner, whether that's understanding the perspective of the others on your team, even in an executive board meeting thinking of your head of sales as your partner, they feel that they treat you better. Everyone has more credibility with a CEO and a CFO and a board when they can see that you really are a team. And I think that just any negative feelings about one team, the other team not doing their part are just not helpful. They don't help your business, they don't help you professionally, they don't help you lead your team and I think that the more that marketers can believe that they are and act like they are partners in the go to market, the better the business and the better for you.
- [40:56]
Alan Hart
Love it. Well said. I'll short phrase what you said is know you're a key part but act like it.
- [41:04]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
- [41:06]
Alan Hart
So I love it. I love it. Andrew, thank you for coming on the show and sharing all your insight, knowledge, experience. It's been enlightening.
- [41:14]
Andrew Bennett
Yeah, thank you Alan. Really enjoyed the conversation.
- [41:17]
Alan Hart
Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Today was created and produced by me with post production support from Sam Robertson. If you're new to Marketing Today, please feel free to write us a review on itunes or your favorite listening platform. Don't forget to subscribe on marketingtodaypodcast.com and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. I love hearing from listeners. You can contact me@marketingtodaypodcast.com there. You'll also find complete show notes and links to what was discussed in the episode today and you can search our archives. I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today.
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