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AI and the Future of Marketing: How to Embrace Change Without Losing Control
00:50:00
Is the reliance on AI in marketing a double-edged sword? Join Carilu Dietrich as she discusses the potential pitfalls and benefits of AI in today's marketing landscape. What should leaders be wary of, and how can they harness AI's power without losing the human touch? Plus, Carilu shares proven strategies that she used to help propel Atlassian to success and how you can apply these lessons to your own marketing efforts.
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- [00:00]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
With AI, if you don't ask the question right, you don't get the answer. I use ChatGPT and Claude every day, personally and professionally, and I still find that they're not always so helpful or accurate as a final draft for sure. And then when I look out at the landscape, I almost wanted to call my blog, like, show me your templates. Because I've gotten so much advice over the years and you're like, great, I hear what you're saying. Show me, show me how that works. You should track the most important metrics. Great. What are they? What is this chart looked like? You should have a clear budget allocation model. Okay, great. What does budget allocation model really look like? And so the smartest experts get the best results out of AI. So trying to figure out like you didn't ask this question and you don't know that this is how you should do it, but here's what you really want would be a cool part of the agent.
- [00:55]
Jeremy Bergeron
Welcome back. Marketing trends. You know how we do it. This is your host, Jeremy Bergeron, as always, and I am super energized about who we have in the virtual studio today. Let me tell you about Carrie Lou Dietrich. Carrie Lou Dietrich is a powerhouse marketing leader, former CMO, best known for steering Atlassian through its IPO. She's now a trusted advisor to CEOs and CMOs of hyper growth companies. We're talking several, by the way, anywhere from six to 10 companies she's advising actively. And Carrie Lou really is the go to expert for operationalizing the chaos of scale and driving next level marketing and business performance. Carrie Liu, welcome to the show.
- [01:51]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
So happy to be here. You're making me blush. I'm not sure I'm going to have to deliver.
- [01:55]
Jeremy Bergeron
Oh my gosh. Well, I had some time to check out some of your past interviews. I mean you've done a lot of really cool stuff. I was watching one of you did recently. I think on Transaction was what it was. Transaction was a recent one. Phenomenal. I don't know who those two gentlemen are, but that was a cool, some cool context and convo there. I am. Look, we get a lot of people on the show that are awesome and you know, you're the first person that's come on the show that is advising as many companies as you're advising. So I actually want to just get into that for a second because we've had a few that are advising, you know, two to three and maybe doing some consulting. But like you're advising several businesses and they're all, all moving and grooving. So I just want to understand how, how are you advising this many and you also have a family, you also have a life. I just want to double click into the just tell us how you actually advise that many fast growth businesses.
- [02:51]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Part of my dream I guess is to be the person that I needed when I was at Atlassian. So I before Atlassian I ran awareness advertising for Oracle. I had a really big budget, I did sports marketing, movie marketing, I wrote ads for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the back page of the Economist. It was a big job and a high profile but the company wasn't changing so quickly. My team went from 2 to 5 to 7 internally and then we had this massive advertising agency and 50, 100, 150 people that we were orchestrating and were implementing a lot of the things I was working on. But I became very good at building processes and improving processes in a more static environment. But then when I went to Atlassian, we were an early stage startup, an unknown developer tools company, founders out of Australia and there were no processes. The CEOs had never worked at any other company. They were first time founders who have worked their entire lives at Atlassian now. And everything was constantly changing so quickly. And I was a young leader. I didn't really have a strong network of experienced CMOs. I didn't have all the experience I would need to run all departments. Having come from running advertising, having done product marketing, having done demand generation, but never being the leader over all of them at this really rapid scale. And we were innovating in our go to market. We were one of the first product led growth companies. So when I would go to talk to people, their tactics, their budgets, their approaches were very different from what we were doing. And I just felt very alone and confused. And of course you fake it till you make it and you know, you invent as you go and you use first principles to come up with the best solutions and you hire the best people you can. You know, I used every business book and strategy I could but I really wanted someone who could help me on a day to day basis with best practices, help me organize my thoughts to have more conviction and help me make decisions when there's no right answer. And so come full circle. Now I partner with CEOs and CMOs of these hyper scaling companies to help the CEO get the most out of the marketing leader and the marketing leader get conviction and knowledge to do a really exceptional job. So how do I have seven clients? You know, almost all of my advisory comes from referrals from people I've worked for before or with before or clients. Actually, some of my CEOs, CEO coaches refer me other clients. So it's an exciting spot to be in right now.
- [05:35]
Jeremy Bergeron
So, Carrie, Lou, I just got to ask out the jump here. Do you have any space for any more clients? Because you got, you know, you're doing six to 10 right now. I'm figuring there. I mean, you may. Are you tapped out? What's going on here? Is there space for anything new?
- [05:47]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I always take on one or two a year, so, yes. And especially in the AI space, there's so much changing and happening. I'm really excited about it. So for the right exciting opportunity. Yes.
- [05:57]
Jeremy Bergeron
Okay. Well, you said my favorite word. I had a second follow up, but because you said AI, now I have to ask you this one question, maybe more, but this one specifically, because AI and B2B marketing are like bread and butter right now. How do you help companies avoid becoming too reliant on AI while still embracing its full potential?
- [06:19]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I think it's pretty difficult to become too reliant right this second. It feels like we're in the middle of a major shift. Is it the most major shift we've ever been through? I don't know, but I've been through the shift of the Internet. You know, I had dial up when I was a kid. I didn't have let's go Internet in college until my sophomore year or something. I think they installed it. I had one of the very first phones because I worked for a phone company and I could text on my beeper, and that was the best technology ever. So, you know, I've been through the Internet. I've been through mobile. You know, it was the year of mobile. For many years while we were adapting software to mobile phones, I've been through the cloud transition. And all of those massive transitions have kind of led us here today to this moment where AI can be all it is. So I think it's changing everything in B2B. It's changing all of our products. Trying to figure out how to really use AI to make people more productive in the context of an application they're already using. I actually think that's the killer app because getting people to imagine how they could use it has a barrier to entry. At the same time, every single marketing department that I work with and company is trying to figure out how you retool all of your employees to be more productive. And there's probably a future where there's Fewer of some types of jobs than we have now. Right. There's far fewer saddle makers and elevator operators than there were in the history of the world. But I also think it's being used to make everyone smarter and more efficient. So I don't think you can over rely on it yet. I do think there's a lot of hallucination we really need to double check. We're just going to start to see that tip of the iceberg on lawsuits of companies being held accountable for mistakes that their AI chatbot on their website makes. I know there was one where an airline promised. Airline's AI chatbot promised someone a bereavement fare that later the airline didn't want to honor because it wasn't truly in their policy. And the lawsuit went in the favor of the customer who was told by an AI chatbot what the policy was. So, you know, I think there's a ton that's gonna happen around privacy, around security, around trustworthiness. But we're starting to see, you know, massive gains in the companies that provide that, like Claude from Anthropic, I think is one with the lowest number of hallucinations. And then they say part of that is the way they've trained it around values and social good thinking. But everyone's gonna have to retool here.
- [09:08]
Jeremy Bergeron
Is there an example that you can think of where AI helped you or someone that you're working with solve a marketing challenge that you couldn't solve before?
- [09:17]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Yes, I think it's mostly in the scale and personalization right now. So marketing teams have always wanted to personalize as much as possible at mass scale, but there's just limitations of time and resources to write thousand landing pages with accurate customized information. So a number of companies I know of are doing long tail SEO content around super highly personalized topics and topics that include a keyword with a customized ad and a customized landing page. So I mean, I think there are some things that we've never done before, but I think even more than that is just moving faster on analyzing. You know, I'm seeing people use AI from product marketing to assimilate customer interviews that would have taken you a really long time to listen to every customer interview, to take notes in customer advisory boards and send updates, you know, around strategy options that you could pursue and trade offs, around goals, around translation. You know, I think every aspect of marketing, people are experimenting with it. But still, I think that the real breakthroughs are going to be the products that we use, making it easy to use in the flow of our normal work.
- [10:40]
Jeremy Bergeron
Has anyone made a Carrie Lou Dietrich custom GPT yet?
- [10:43]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
That would be pretty cool. Not yet.
- [10:45]
Jeremy Bergeron
I mean, Carrie Lou, I could take every interview you've ever given. I could take every epic blog post. By the way, shout out to Carrie Lou's blog like she writes a very consistent blog. I see it on LinkedIn all the time. But I could take every piece that you've ever written. I could take every interview you've ever given. I could take any kind of commentary that's available online. I can literally train GPT to be the Carrie Lou GPT. And now I've got Carrie Lou Dietrich in my pocket and I can ask her about hyper growth, bootstrap growth, all the things. And so if no one's done that yet, you better hurry because I will.
- [11:24]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
But here's the problem, right? What's the compensation model for that? So my current compensation model is one on one work with CEOs and CMOs where I really understand and give them custom feedback based on their context, some group types of coaching. So a colleague and I are going to start a CMO AI working group where every other month some elite CMOs talk together about what they're trying to approach in AI. So some group coaching. You know, I'm thinking about having some online courses potentially. I have this blog which I request people to pay for. If you can just take all of it and have a custom GPT and it's free for everyone. How do we compensate people to keep creating content? Because time is money and it's difficult. So I do think there's a lot of issues there which the media landscape has pointed out. I think the New York Times has been the most litigious to try to protect some of their their content. But it's a real issue if AI can take information from creators and just repopulate it themselves all the time.
- [12:30]
Jeremy Bergeron
Yeah, I agree. I think it's super interesting to consider and someone's got to do it. There's a lot of talk around AI agents a lot. And I think there's a really epic thought leader that I've been connecting with more. This guy Danny Kitchian I think is his last name and his concept is some of his ideas around, you know, like taking someone like Carrie Lou and then having them spend some time training an AI agent. And then every time that AI agent gets used, Carrie Lou gets compensated. Right. And so at scale, you've got a hundred marketing leaders using Carrie Lou's. Carrie Lou's actual trained AI agent by Carrie Lou. Well, now all of a sudden, Carrie Lou's got this, you know, this compensation model where she's getting one, she's getting compensated to maintain it and make sure it's good, you know, and then other people, you know, get the benefit of using it. So I think there could be some things swaying that way. But you're right. I mean, now it's like wild, wild west. I have a ton of custom GPTs that I've made because it's the acceleration it gives me, the utility it gives me is. I mean, it's wild. I can create a knowledge base based on one person, and I can go incredibly deep, and that person is not getting compensated in the way that they could. So I love that you brought that up.
- [13:44]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
It's a tricky world of a lot of transition, I think. I also, I use. I use ChatGPT and Claude every day, personally and professionally. You know, it's part of my job to try to get as deep as I can. And I still find that they're not always so helpful or accurate as a final draft.
- [14:05]
Jeremy Bergeron
For sure. For sure.
- [14:07]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Great. Concepting partner, organizing partner, and editing partner. And then when I look out at the landscape, I mean, part of what drives me in my blog, I almost wanted to call my blog, like, show me your templates. Because I've gotten so much advice over the years, and you're like, great, I hear what you're saying. Show me. Show me how that works. And so a number of my blogs, I try to go and collect people's templates and say, like, okay, you should track the most important metrics. Great. What are they? What does this chart look like? You know, you should have a clear budget allocation model. Okay, great. What does the budget allocation model really look like? And so sometimes with AI, if you don't ask the question right, you don't get the answer right. And so I do think there's also this. Like, the smartest experts get the best results out of AI still. And so trying to figure out, like, you didn't ask this question and you don't know that this is how you should do it, but here's what you really want would be a cool part of the agent or GPT.
- [15:07]
Jeremy Bergeron
So you said, you said you use CLAUDE and GPT, which is very similar. I have like, you know, my daily flow is like email calendar, GPT. See, Claude, those are the tabs that are open every day. What are you using Claude for? Are you kind of testing each to kind of see what answers you're getting for more accuracy or you're like, hey, Claude's more creative flow GPT, more strategy. How are you kind of pulling those tools out right now?
- [15:31]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
So one person I follow in marketing is Marcel Santilli, who is the CMO of Deepgram and now has his own Scale X SEO AI consulting company of sorts. And part of I went to one of his trainings where he trains you about the long tail of SEO using AI. And I got into it and I realized totally a CMO thing, that I actually don't know enough depth of SEO in today's land to do every step that he's doing. I think, oh, I just want to hire him for all my clients. Like, I don't have to learn everything he knows, but I have to know that he's out there and make sure that we're using it to get the competitive advantage. And part of his process is using the two AI LLMs together, getting different answers out of both of them for different steps of the process and asking each other about them. So I've used them in concert for a number of things. I mean, primarily I use it around my blog. So I've used Mid Journey for images and I've used ChatGPT for images. I hope that Claude gets images. That would be nice because I don't love what I get from ChatGPT on images.
- [16:48]
Jeremy Bergeron
Yeah, me neither.
- [16:49]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
And then, then I've started using Canva and I've been like playing around with Adobe's Creative Suite and their AI. Okay. And then I use it to concept ideas, to think about the SEO, to edit some of the blogs. I find that the most effective use is for titles coming up with a whole bunch of different titles that would have better click through rates. And then I use it for different things. I did a blog a while back about where I wanted to look at venture capitalists get rated in this Forbes Midas list which shows the most successful venture capitalists of the year.
- [17:23]
Jeremy Bergeron
Okay.
- [17:23]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
The venture capitalists investment timeline is actually much longer. Right. Most funds are seven to 10 years.
- [17:29]
Jeremy Bergeron
Right.
- [17:30]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
And so I wanted to look at the which venture capitalist had won the most Midas mentions both as individuals and as firms. And so I wanted to do this big data analysis where I took 13 years of data and I plugged it in, I got some tables and they made some charts and man, I worked with ChatGPT for days on it and couldn't get it to work and ended up calling a friend who's like an Excel spreadsheet hacker and then he ended up using ChatGPT to do some of the data input in, some of the unique steps. But generally he drove the process. So I don't know. I also used it to create the perfect variety of meals for my guinea pig to get it enough vitamin C and calories. So I would like to say that I go high and low.
- [18:18]
Jeremy Bergeron
That's fantastic. I mean, one of my favorite use cases personally is, you know, we have, we have children, we have little, little children in our house. And so for, for story time and you can steal this one if you want. For story time, I'll ask all four of our kids. I'll say, okay, give me a character. So each kid is like turtle, lion, you know, whatever, ninja. And so I'll say, give me a character. And then I'll say, what are their superpowers? And they'll say, you know, whatever. This could be anything, literally. And then I'll say, okay, cool. And then I'll go to chat GPT and I'll say, okay, here, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a bedtime story to my kids. Write a story from these characters. And I also want you to weave in emotional intelligence, leadership conscious relationship, all the things I want you to also weave in like telling the truth or whatever thing I want to teach that day. Because lying is a big thing when you have toddlers, like telling the truth. And then GPT will tell an amazing story. And at the end of that story I'll say, okay, now create an image of the characters. And so then it creates this image of the characters and all the kids are like, oh my God. So it's cultivating their imagination. While I'm reading it, they're just, you know, they're just listening and then they look at the picture and it's, it's the highlight. Now they're like, papa, please listen to the story. Let me tell you. It's the most amazing thing. It's the funnest hack for stories.
- [19:37]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I love it so much, especially because I had this whole series that I told as a, as to my kids. I'd like my made up series about this seagull named Benny that lived in Manhattan beach where I grew up and was like at the beach where I grew up. And basically the story is like little vignettes from my childhood that I remember about snorkeling and Catalina and running on the beach. And Benny really loves Cheetos. Because if you go in the water and you're at the beach and you leave your backpack open, Benny will open your Backpack and eat the Cheetos, which is true story of my favorite food taken by evil seagulls that have now been memorialized as cute children's stories. But I will say that my creativity in getting the Hero's ark could use some help between 9 and 10:30 at night when you're totally fried. So I don't know, you're about seven years too late to reinvent my life. But I love it so much.
- [20:33]
Jeremy Bergeron
I love it. It's really been awesome. We are having a tale of a time at our house for sure. There is an AI benchmark test called the MMLU Pro. Have you heard of this one? It's the massive multitask language understanding. MMLU was the original one. It was basically a bunch of, you know, rigorously curated questions that were asked. And so ChatGPT, Gra, Claude, all of them were, you know, taking this test to see where they are on the benchmark. Okay. Then the MMO Pro came out, which is even more enhanced. And so it's, you know, 12,000 questions it's across like biology, business, chemistry, comsc, economics, engineering, health, history, law, math, all these things. And so I've been paying attention to this benchmark and I know just to, just to put this in your garden to plant the seed at the top of this test, at the top of the model, which by the way, this, I don't know much about this company because if you search for them, there's not much there. But at the very top, above Claude, above Grok, above GP, above GPT4O is this model called ARCS ARX 0.3. And so what that tells me is, and this is measuring across all these different subject matters, removing hallucination even more. And so we're getting to the point where, you know, it's not at a hundred percent. I think the overall score is, I have it pulled up. It's like 0.7824. That's the top overall score. So we're at 78% essentially in terms of accuracy. And so it's getting there. But eventually you'll have these models that are going to be 100% accurate or really close to it. And then it becomes really interesting of like, now you can start to rely on these tools. And I don't know who this arc 0, you know, arcs 0.3 is because there's not a tool you can use yet. But they are clearly beating know the multi billion Claude and Grok and GPT4O. And so that's interesting in and of itself. And so if you hear of arcs, let me know, please. But I've been seeing like they. They've not moved off of the leaderboard for two months. They've been beating all of them for at least two months.
- [22:34]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Hmm. I'll have to keep an eye on it. It's interesting coming from Atlassian and a developer marketing background. The consumer side is really important and ChatGPT seems to have kind of an early lead there, of course. But also the embedded API aspect of the LLM is really important. And Anthropic is beating chatgpt there. And we'll see. I mean, is beating cloud from a revenue perspective, I think. But it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Right. Netscape isn't really around anymore. Google's hit the market. That's right. Like Lyft and Uber separated substantially. It does feel like it's still early Wild west and there's the opportunity for a lot of different technologies, you know, to weave their ways. The difficulty though seems in this wave how much money and compute power you need. You know, the affiliation with Microsoft and Google being a back and aws, being a backbone of the leaders makes it harder to imagine disruption by tiny entrance. But we'll see.
- [23:46]
Jeremy Bergeron
Yeah, you're nailing it. This is the stuff that I'm like, up thinking about of, like, because like you said, it takes a lot of capacity to move these things to power these systems and models. And so is someone going to come in with a different way to do that? Is it going to keep just being more money, more capacity is the winner? Okay, I love it.
- [24:06]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I think from a marketing perspective, what's terrifying, I don't know. I have this funnel of energies that I just printed out yesterday. It's like the funnel of energy, fear. Fear and grief and depression are on the bottom and enthusiasm and optimism are on the top. And I would say AI really makes you take the whole journey. Right. Because are we all going to lose our jobs? What are people going to do? I'm going to kill a taxi. And I've taken a Waymo now. And I was like, oh gosh, I don't know if waymos are everywhere, am I gonna be employing Lyft riders? Like, there's some scary stuff like what are my kids gonna do for their job? But the flip side, you know, and what I was getting at was for micro marketing, we used to market on radio and in newspapers, and then there was this small job on a team when you were the digital person. Now an entire marketing team is the digital person. Right. And newspapers and radio are still useful as part of a portfolio, but they're certainly not what they were to our parents or grandparents. And you look at this last decade and Atlassian's growth was really on the back of SEO. I mean, 80% of our leads were inbound SEO. We owned SEO for agile and for developers. Wow, I didn't know that you had a question. You went to Google, you ended up on our website. We educated you, we had this whole philosophy around no forms, no gated content, just like, get as educated as you want. And when you're ready, we're here, start using the product, use the product for free for 7 days, 30 days. We tried all sorts of different day limits and then the product was so good that you used it. But the whole marketing model was based around Internet searches that went to pages. And in a world of AI where your agent goes on the Internet and maybe you never see ads and your agent populates content and you don't even go to a website to build trust with the vendor who's providing you that information, it kind of comes full circle back to the Carylou GPT as a company. So Carta, for instance, does this really great social media data content that's really fascinating, that answers all these questions and you might say, oh, that's so interesting. Let me go to Carta's site and learn some more. Oh, Carta isn't just a cap table anymore. Now it's also helping investors manage their entire portfolio. Oh, now I've learned something else. It's kind of like the fear. When I was little and I had a question, my dad would make me go to an encyclopedia and you'd find your answer in the encyclopedia, but you'd get to read some stuff that was around it and learn that next to trees were typhoons. And all of a sudden we got typhoons. And that you lost that on the Internet, but then we replaced it because now you can go really deep. But from a marketing perspective, it's going to be a whole new wild frontier of how we get to consumers and associate with them through AI. And perhaps AI will start having ads, you know, ads in the answers. Right. That would be the easiest obvious choice. But we'll see how this plays out.
- [27:24]
Jeremy Bergeron
I mean, my six year old says, she doesn't say, hey, hey, hey dad, go to Google. She says, hey dad, pull up GPT. Ask GPT. I mean, that's what they're asking. And I know for myself, I'm curious for you as well. I spent three years working At Google. I love Google. I had a great time there. I learned how to move fast and break things and I'll always cherish my time at the big googs. And I just don't use it much anymore. I might pull Google up on my phone. I mean, maybe once a week. Like truly, I'm just not using it as a resource and a tool because I have access, because I can. And GPT is getting better and Claude's getting better. And so it's like I can get what I need in the way that I want to receive it. And so I'm just not even. I'm not even searching on Google. I'm using it to find like on my Google Maps, shout out gmaps. But that's really about it. How about you?
- [28:16]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I find so many problematic hallucinations in my work interactions that I'm reticent to trust it completely. I guess if you come full circle back to what we teach our kids about the Internet, you know, you teach your kids about the Internet, if you make a search, don't believe every site, like, what is that person's motivation for sharing that information and can they be trustworthy? Can you go to a site that you believe has the accurate information and can you be sure that they're not leading you astray? And I still don't trust, you know, what did you say 78% was the answer?
- [28:53]
Jeremy Bergeron
Yeah, 78%.
- [28:54]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I just held on my doctor to have a 78% success rate. Good point. Rare disease that I have, right. I was researching some medication for one of my kids this weekend and I was asking Claude about the medication and different medications. And then I had this moment where I was like, if it's hallucinating on this, is that worth it to me? I'd rather go to WebMD or the Mayo Clinic and see what they say. So I think that the consumers have to be really smart. And as we see more agents come up, I think agents are not going to have our best interest in mind unless we pay for them. And even then there's a question about that, right? Because it's going to be some vendor who wants to collect all the information about you. And I don't know, what if you ask questions that you don't want shared and they retarget you? I mean, the most offensive ad I've ever had retarget me was when my mom died and my aunt died and I had written two obituaries in a couple weeks and I had kicked something off on some site that a life insurance company Had a child kneeling by a grave saying, is your family protected?
- [30:04]
Jeremy Bergeron
Wow.
- [30:04]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
And it was bottom feeding. That I'm sure is really effective. But I should have some right to privacy.
- [30:12]
Jeremy Bergeron
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:13]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Like, you know, what if someone is having mental health issues and says, like, what is alcoholism? What if you have thoughts of suicide? Like, you know what, what are the searches and the experiences that people should be allowed to have privately separate from advertisers and maybe separate also from like their healthcare providers or a life insurance company that could buy information to associate and put you in a different buying category. I mean, there's a lot. Again, I try to go back to my energy map and be like, okay, I'm in fear. That's good. How can I protect myself? And how can I also kind of come up to hopefulness and optimism, you know, and so I get excited by things like, again, anthropic really intrigues me and their commitments. They published in the last couple weeks some new commitments and treaties to privacy and protection and election. It was specific to the election, preventing false information around political agendas. And I think we need to be really smart about the intent that technology has for the, the advertiser, the company, or for the individual.
- [31:28]
Jeremy Bergeron
I totally agree. I think that's like, this is the. These are the conversations. I think they're just. They have to be. They have to be happening with you and your executive people that you're working. They have to be happening like, you know, a lot across industries, across segments, because you have this race of technology, this race of AI, who's the most accurate, who you know, who's got the most utility, who's got the best agent at scale. And then you've got this very real reality of these examples that you gave of, like, well, yes, and like, let's be conscious of what we as human beings actually need and can appreciate and can really use versus being overtaken by it. So I hope that, you know, behind closed doors and in the boardrooms, you know, you're having these conversations because I agree, it's like, this is what's going to shape it is having these sort. This sort of dialogue. One thing I love that you really emphasize on your LinkedIn, you emphasize it in your writing, is the relationship between the CEO and the cmo. And I love this topic. I love this. It's such a critical relationship, obviously. And I've talked to many marketing leaders that don't necessarily focus on this. Some do and some don't. But one I want to understand kind of how you think about those Two, those two executive leaders, how you can have these two reach across the aisle and really build trust. And really, again, if we're in a hyper growth rollercoaster ride like this, there's a lot happening internally. And so talk about how you sit with these two leaders and the things that you notice, the things you pay attention to, how you bring them closer together, what's working, that sort of stuff.
- [33:00]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
When I first started advising, I was advising only CMOs, but I found that a lot of the problems that the marketers had weren't actually marketing problems. They were company strategy problems. And a company strategy problem that shows up in marketing is not enough leads. And not enough leads could be the product's not differentiated, it's just not winning in the market. So people aren't turning into leads. You're trying to go after too many markets at the same time. Maybe you have a horizontal product and you're trying to go after government and financial services and high tech, and you don't have enough money to really get known in any of them. So that's a prioritization issue across the company, not just in marketing. Or perhaps you've planned so much substantial growth that you've overhiered in sales. So there's not enough pipeline because the amount of pipeline you need is so far in excess of the organic pipeline you have and the budget that you have available. And so it was really critical to work with CEOs to say, hey, you know, your marketing person is doing a good job. You, there's a lot of fantastic marketing people out there. There's things we can tweak and that I can help them. But really what we need to do is set these company goals more effectively or revisit the plan numbers across all of the silos. And so often the CEO can't hear that from a marketer who's missing their number because it sounds defensive. So someone trusted coming in and analyzing and trying to provide perspective on what's going on across the C suite is really valuable.
- [34:34]
Jeremy Bergeron
What do you do when you, you get called in to advise a CMO that doesn't have a great relationship with the CEO? Let's say the business is doing well. I assume maybe you've faced this before. Let's say the business on paper is doing well. There's growth, they have the right X's and O's. The marketing strategy looks great, but yet you have this kind of interpersonal tension. And maybe you, I'm just curious if you face that. You don't have to name names. But what do you do in that scenario now? Cause you know how important, important that relationship is. It's so critical. So how do you, how do you get in kind of, you know, belly to belly with these people? And you're like, okay, wow, this isn't a strategy problem, this is a trust or relationship issue. How do you navigate that? And what are some, some of the things that you've done to. Yeah. To help these two leaders get really close.
- [35:18]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
One of the challenges is that day to day, the CEO and CMO have so many fires they're fighting that are really tactical, but sometimes they're not having the conversation behind the conversation. So sometimes I have an unfair advantage coming in and saying to the CEO, so how do you think the CMO is doing? And then they say like, well, I'm really frustrated about this or that or this. And then I say, have you told them? And they'll be often say, well, kind of, I provided some feedback on this, I'll tell them. But it's difficult. There's a number of CEOs who are conflict averse, some that, that aren't and that hurts. You know, sometimes feedback is a gift, even though it doesn't feel like it. And some CEOs are conflict averse and they won't really deliver the hard message about what challenges they see holding the CMO back. And so I think that's the first and most important thing is to get it on the table. I think the second thing is giving the CMO some air cover. And this isn't for all clients. As I told you before, sometimes I'm advising a really accomplished CMO that has strong relationships across different silos and different departments. But sometimes the up and coming Vice President or first time CMO might not have as close a connection to the CFO or the CRO or the Chief Financial, Chief Revenue or Chief Product Officer. And so sometimes I'll call those leaders as well just to hear about their priorities, hear about their frustrations. And so from my perspective as an advisor, what I can offer is some interconnectivity with perspective that doesn't have as much emotional tension. You know, it's hard when a Chief Revenue officer isn't making their number and feels like marketing's not supporting them. And when marketing feels like the sales team isn't really run that well and isn't using the leads sufficiently, isn't following up on them fast enough or cohesively, and there can be a lot of interpersonal relationship tension. And on top of that, there's Some process issues that we could put on the table and work through. I mean, really the biggest problem with a lot of these leaders isn't that they don't know what to do, it's that there's so many options, there's no right answer, there's such a lack of time and there's so much pressure. And so again, if I come full circle, I think the advantage of an advisor is someone who can have much more context to help you work through your thoughts and hear your intuition to make the best choice you can in a difficult situation.
- [38:09]
Jeremy Bergeron
When you're partnered up with an experienced cmo, right? When you're pulled in to help someone who's got the, they've got the background, the perspective, the pedigree, right. You look at the scoreboard like they're doing well. What sort of, yeah, what sort of air cover, what sort of support are you giving someone who's already got a lot of experience in that role?
- [38:27]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
One of the most important things that I bring to the table is just knowledge of a lot of different patterns. So I worked at Oracle, which is a Fortune 100. I've had a significant role in every single department of marketing. I was product marketing leader for one of the fastest growing products at a company. Before Oracle that was more than 150 million in revenue. I've run a demand generation team. I've run public relations for a public company, including investor relations. Obviously I've took Atlassian public. Now I've worked, you know, over the last five years of advising, I've probably spoken to a hundred CEOs. I've probably advised 25, 30 different companies in different capacities. So I know a lot about all the different patterns. And at first I thought people wanted me to tell them the patterns, but really what my job is is to hear the context of their current situation and help them think through different alternatives and think through the pros and cons of those alternatives. So even the top leaders, it's lonely at the top. You can't share some of your problems with the teams. Especially the financial market we're coming out of right now included a lot of different choices about org design and about spend that you can't necessarily talk to your team about because it affects them sometimes in negative ways and you don't want to look uncertain as you talk to the CEO. You know, when you're at a C suite level, you don't just get to walk in and talk through all the different alternatives without a recommendation or hypothesis. So having someone who knows patterns can Help you organize your thoughts and come with conviction is really helpful in some of these lonely top jobs.
- [40:16]
Jeremy Bergeron
You say often that hypergrowth is driven by an amazing product rather than marketing alone. You know, I meet a lot of executives that are like, just come on, we need marketing, we need to fuel more growth. Like we just need more leads, you know, more all the things, more revenue. So how do you help these sorts of executives adjust their expectations when they're relying too heavily on marketing to fuel growth? Especially when maybe product market fit isn't really there yet.
- [40:44]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Marketing is a megaphone, not a magic wand. And, and there were a number of years where cheaper cash allowed us to spend a lot of money on inefficient marketing. And those years have not, you know, have gone away in the last couple of years. So a lot of executives have been forced to realize that marketing is not a magic wand. The highest growth companies are the companies who have inbound interest either from word of mouth or from online virality. Right? Like OpenAI took off and got massive adoption without a marketing department, they didn't hire a marketing leader for another six or eight months. And that marketing leader is a vice president of marketing who's mostly focused on developers and their developer business, not even their consumer business. So even just a case in point. But Atlassian as well. Our growth was driven 80 to 85% by inbound organic interest in this SEO and content and education. So there's a lot of things that you can do to stoke that, right? Like having fantastic content, being a thought leader, publishing really innovative data, being in a market category that's growing. Again, Atlassian's was develop Our software is eating the world. Like if software is going to massively change the world, you need developers in every company to create software for every company. And those developers need tools to be more effective. And Atlassian really rode that wave. So I think of marketing as a dartboard and that the inside is people who come to you and farther out is people who kind of have heard about you and are in market for something and you have a chance at reaching. And then farthest out is like they don't know about you, they don't really know they have the problem. And marketing can hit all of those. Advertising is often reaching people that know less about you or are maybe less in market. They're not coming to your website or searching for you on a competitive like on a G2 summer rating site or something. And so those outer rings are really expensive. So you just need to test your way into are we targeting the right people with the right message and does this spend support the lifetime value? And sometimes, you know, if you have customers that last three or five years, you could spend up to two years of a lifetime value to get them and grow that revenue over time. But for a lot of companies, really broad paid advertising is not as good a use of money as putting more money into having a better product that really meets needs and gets users to talk about it, take it with them to the next job and tell their friends.
- [43:26]
Jeremy Bergeron
Prioritization is another major challenge. I'll say challenge for marketers, right. And I know you're advising companies that they're already in. Most, if not all of them are already in this hypergrowth stage. So here comes Carrie Lou parachuting in. How do you guide them in deciding, you know, which marketing initiatives to focus on versus which ones to cut to ensure that long term success? Because I imagine you've got some venture backed folks that have this aggressive goals, aggressive targets. Right. How do you. Yeah, so many options, as you said earlier. Right. How are you actually guiding the people you're working with? Hey, what should we be focusing on right now? What should we cut?
- [44:04]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
The biggest mistake to come full circle is that the company itself doesn't have its prioritization clear. Because if a marketing team prioritizes some things and then the sales org prioritizes some other things and the product team prioritizes some other things and then they all try to get each other to support them, you end up in this peanut butter spread where there's a little bit of effort on everything. So the biggest mistake I see companies making is is that at the corporate level, their goals aren't clear and prioritized enough. And for some smaller companies that I advise, they just don't have a lot of structure and diligence around an okr process. And like a quarterly business review process, that is what bigger companies use to talk about, the trade offs of prioritizing something versus the other. So for a lot of marketers, I recommend they help drive the corporate planning process because marketing is the one that gets pulled in the most directions. And marketing can be the voice of the customer to say it's not about what we care about necessarily, it's what's going to get us more customers and more revenue. And so I think it starts with the financial plan and the okrs to get those right and then to make sure marketing is aligning to that and then to having really consistent metrics that you're tracking to see are you getting a return on Investment on the whole, or at least you have conviction that you're spending money on the right audience with the right message. Now all this sounds so cliche, which again is why I started this blog, carielu.com to kind of provide some really specific examples. And one of the most specific examples that's the most referenced blog is one about a bi weekly marketing dashboard that aligns sales objectives and marketing objectives and is kind of the core tracking metric to say, you know, is everything together working? If not, which things should we do more of or do you prioritize?
- [46:08]
Jeremy Bergeron
As a side note, if you're a CMO and you don't want to get fired, one of Carrie Lou's like most popular articles I think is like the top, I think it was like the top five reasons CMOs get fired. Something like that is like one of your Most popular articles.
- [46:20]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
CMOs have a really hard job. It's the art and the science, it's the product marketing strategy and it's the financial discipline of filling a pipeline and converting all that pipeline to revenue. And it's very difficult for CMOs to do both or have learned to do both. So yes, I think that the top five reasons, one of them included not knowing the data and not being close enough to the actual revenue levers and another one included not knowing the market and not really thinking forward about the growth levers for the company, but just kind of executing what comes to you. You know, I think a third is really around trust. Even if the company's not performing, if a leader has has a trusted relationship with their chief revenue officer and CEO and CFO that they've got a hypothesis about why they have a clear plan of action to address it. They have a timeline and they show progress and are proactive about reporting on that timeline. You know, there's a lot that you can do around trust along the way that's not just winning. You know, we don't have to have all the answers, but we have to have a really strong plan that looks like it's headed in the right direction. And so I think those are three of the big highlights that it's hard to be strategic and tactical at the same time. But that's part of the magic of the best CMOs.
- [47:53]
Jeremy Bergeron
Final question. What is a piece of advice, something you'd want every marketing leader to hear you say today? What would you say?
- [48:04]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
I think it's not just for marketing leaders, I think it's also for CEOs, but in the end it's to trust their intuition. A lot of the work that I do with people is reflect back to them what they're telling me, but that they're debating themselves. This person on the team isn't really working. We're falling behind. I don't feel like we're taking the right tactics. So you say, oh, so this isn't working, you're falling behind. What tactics do you think you should be taking? You know, and more often than not, I mean, it's difficult, right? Because if I have something that's written on my tombstone or if I get a tattoo, it will be a yin and a yang. It's the combination of being open minded. You have to be open minded to constantly be learning and thinking and hearing and also trusting your intuition. Because often you really know and you need to gather the information to get closer to it. But when I look back at Atlassian, I spent a lot of time worried and in the end a lot of the things I, I could have, should have, would have done, I knew it just takes a lot of courage because these leadership positions are really hard. And so one step at a time with your intuition as a guide.
- [49:25]
Jeremy Bergeron
I love it. Carrie Liu, thank you so much for being here. Seriously, you're dope. I'm paying a full attention to what you're up to. You are not getting rid of me. I'm in your inbox, I'm watching your blog, I'm doing all the things and I know a lot of people that listen to this show are soon going to be doing the same thing. So thank you for making time today. Truly.
- [49:44]
Carrie Lou Dietrich
Thanks. I really appreciate it. I enjoy the show. You have great folks and I'm lucky to be a part of it.
- [50:00]
Jeremy Bergeron
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