AI Strategy x Marketing Disruption, with Lisa Cole | Sponsored by Adverity

Summary

Marketing x Analytics Episode Summary: AI Strategy x Marketing Disruption, with Lisa Cole Released on November 18, 2024

Host: Alexander Sofronas
Guest: Lisa Cole, CMO of a global B2B marketing managed services firm and AI Advisor

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1. Introduction

In this insightful episode of Marketing x Analytics, host Alexander Sofronas engages in a deep conversation with Lisa Cole, a seasoned Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and AI advisor. Lisa shares her extensive experience in transforming marketing functions into robust revenue engines and explores the profound impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the future of marketing.

2. Measurement in Marketing

Balancing Measurable and Non-Measurable Metrics

Lisa introduces the ATM Measurement Framework, which stands for Audience Growth, Trust and Engagement, and Monetization. She emphasizes the importance of balancing metrics that can be directly tied to revenue with those that are essential for long-term brand building.

“Marketing, when done really well, can serve as an ATM for their organizations... I have a framework called the ATM Measurement Framework, which enables marketers to think about their marketing function in terms of audience growth, trust and engagement, and monetization.”
— Lisa Cole [03:20]

Educating Stakeholders

Lisa highlights how the ATM framework helps in educating non-marketing executives about the necessity of investing in brand-building activities that may not immediately translate to revenue but are crucial for sustainable growth.

“If you're doing really well at attracting new audiences, then you have someone to drive engagement with and then you have people to monetize.”
— Lisa Cole [05:16]

3. AI's Impact on Marketing: Present and Future

Current Transformations

AI is revolutionizing marketing by automating tasks, enhancing strategy development, and optimizing campaign execution. Lisa points out that AI's value extends beyond content creation to strategic planning and market research.

“AI is transforming the way that we do everything from forming an idea all the way up through getting it out to market, measuring the performance of that.”
— Lisa Cole [05:25]

Future Predictions

Looking ahead, Lisa predicts that within the next five years, AI will not only automate individual tasks but also entire workflows, enabling marketers to manage complex campaigns with minimal human intervention.

“In the next 12 to 18 months, we will have the ability to leverage AI to complete a series of tasks without human intervention. In three to five years, AI agents could manage multiple workflows, effectively reducing the need for large marketing teams.”
— Lisa Cole [07:00]

Autonomous Marketing

Both Lisa and Alexander foresee a future where AI orchestrates marketing strategies autonomously, similar to the evolution of autonomous vehicles. This advancement will require marketers to adapt by focusing more on strategic oversight and management of AI-driven processes.

“We're moving towards orchestrating multiple series of tasks across multiple workflows that might feel like the job of an individual within a marketing organization.”
— Lisa Cole [07:00]

4. The Need for Standardization in Marketing

Current Lack of Structure

Lisa agrees with Alexander's observation that marketing lacks standardization compared to fields like medicine. She attributes this to the longstanding belief that marketing is more of an art than a science.

“Marketing is very scientific... The primary reason why it's not been codified is because that belief has been persistent.”
— Lisa Cole [13:35]

Moving Towards a Scientific Approach

With advancements in data and technology, Lisa anticipates a shift towards a more structured and scientific approach in marketing. This will involve codifying processes to streamline workflows and enhance scalability.

“There's a real opportunity in front of us to codify marketing, streamline workflows, and eliminate friction to accelerate speed to market.”
— Lisa Cole [16:58]

5. B2B vs. B2C Marketing: Challenges and Differences

Complexity in B2B Marketing

Lisa explains that B2B marketing is inherently more complex due to longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders involved in purchasing decisions.

“The big difference between B2B and B2C is just the complexity... It’s hard for B2B marketers to orchestrate a campaign that reaches 11 different participants from four different functional groups.”
— Lisa Cole [20:04]

Common Pitfalls in B2B Marketing

She identifies several pitfalls that B2B companies often encounter, such as overcomplicating sales processes with excessive forms, poor data management, and lack of alignment with sales teams.

“B2B marketers are so worried about proving their impact that they introduce forms on everything, making it difficult for potential customers to progress in their evaluation.”
— Lisa Cole [23:39]

6. Attribution and ROI in Marketing

Challenges in Attribution

Attributing marketing efforts to revenue is a significant challenge, especially in B2B contexts where sales cycles are lengthy and involve numerous touchpoints.

“Marketing needs an attribution model that isn’t based on a singular view... It has to assign credit across multiple models based on the questions being asked.”
— Lisa Cole [27:09]

Recommended Approaches

Lisa advocates for a weighted attribution model that tracks all marketing and sales touchpoints, ensuring that marketing investments are accountable for their impact on revenue.

“You need the infrastructure and the plumbing to track all touchpoints. CRM integrated with MAP helps assign credit across those points to understand their contribution to closing deals.”
— Lisa Cole [27:09]

7. Budgeting and Accountability in Marketing

Avoiding Budget Manipulation

Lisa warns against the misuse of marketing budgets for personal gain, emphasizing the importance of responsible budgeting and accountability to prevent misallocation of resources.

“Over allocating to certain tactics without understanding their impact can ruin a marketing organization by misallocating resources.”
— Alexander Sofronas [34:10]

Ensuring Sustainable Growth

She stresses the need for marketers to align their budgetary decisions with sustainable growth objectives, advocating for iterative budget increases based on tested and proven strategies.

“Responsible marketers take small steps to increase budgets, test new baselines, and adapt based on the cost per sale and overall impact.”
— Alexander Sofronas [34:50]

8. Marketing Leadership and C-suite Dynamics

The 'Kid Seat' Metaphor

Lisa describes the often marginal role of marketing leaders in the C-suite as the "kid seat," where they struggle to demonstrate their strategic value beyond budget management.

“Marketing leaders often talk about the size of their budget and organization because they haven’t earned their place as true business leaders in the C-suite.”
— Lisa Cole [36:53]

Earning Respect and Influence

To move out of the "kid seat," Lisa advises marketing leaders to adopt a business-centric approach, focusing on profitability and sustainability while collaborating closely with other departments like sales.

“The way to earn out of the kid seat is to position yourself as a business leader who cares about accelerating growth profitably and sustainably, rather than just increasing spend.”
— Lisa Cole [41:12]

9. Conclusion

The episode concludes with both Alexander and Lisa expressing optimism about the evolving role of marketing in the business landscape. Lisa encourages marketers to embrace AI and adopt more structured, accountable approaches to drive sustainable growth and secure their place as strategic leaders within their organizations.

“I’m waiting for the day that we start to see marketing leaders lean in and own the conversation about sustainable growth and profitability.”
— Lisa Cole [40:18]

Takeaways:

• Adopt Balanced Measurement Frameworks: Utilize models like the ATM framework to balance immediate revenue metrics with long-term brand building.
• Embrace AI Strategically: Leverage AI to automate workflows and enhance strategic decision-making, preparing for increasingly autonomous marketing processes.
• Standardize Marketing Processes: Move towards a more scientific and codified approach to marketing to improve scalability and efficiency.
• Navigate B2B Complexity: Understand the intricate dynamics of B2B marketing, focusing on data accuracy, personalization, and alignment with sales teams.
• Implement Robust Attribution Models: Develop comprehensive attribution strategies to accurately link marketing activities to revenue outcomes.
• Ensure Responsible Budgeting: Maintain accountability in budgeting to prevent resource misallocation and support sustainable business growth.
• Strengthen C-suite Influence: Position marketing as a strategic business function by focusing on profitability and collaboration, moving beyond traditional budgetary discussions.

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This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between AI strategy and marketing disruption, providing valuable insights for marketing professionals aiming to navigate and thrive in an evolving landscape.

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Times analytics podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sofranis, and today we're on with Lisa Cole. Lisa, would you like to introduce yourself?

[B]

Hi, my name is Lisa Cole and I am a CMO of a global B2B marketing managed services firm. And I also serve as an AI advisor for our clients.

[A]

Oh, that's really interesting. Tell us how you got to that position.

[B]

Sure. When I think about my career Journey now, about 24 years in, I spent the first 16 years serving as a marketing strategist and a CMO advisor for some of the leading B2B marketing agencies in the world. Many of the clients that I had worked with effectively were trying to transform their marketing functions from the doers of things to revenue engines for their growth. The thing I specialized in was helping those CMOs go on the hook for a number. And anyone that has tried to reinvent or reposition marketing to be a growth driver in their companies know that the work it takes both from a people process and technology standpoint to go on the hook for a number and then be able to prove your impact is fairly significant. After 16 years, I wanted to practice what I preached, and so I moved to the brand side. And this is now my fourth CMO role. The first three CMO roles, I was hired to transform the functions. And so I had an opportunity to practice what I preach, perfect my frameworks, and this I'm actually building marketing for this marketing firm that had grown through word of mouth.

[A]

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[B]

It might help to start with the fact that I think marketing, when done really well, can serve as an ATM for their organizations in the sense that the organization invests money in marketing. And if marketing is done really well, more money can be taken out of that atm and that informs the way I think about measurement. I have a framework that I had learned about like five, six years ago called the ATM Measurement Framework, which effectively enables marketers to think about their marketing function in terms of audience growth, trust and engagement and monetization. The way I tend to think about it, audience growth, brand building, brand awareness, earning media coverage. When you think about intentionally working on gaining your share, voice on a variety of channels, channels that you don't own, and then building a subscriber or follower base, these are not tactics that you could tie to revenue. But if you don't do those things, you don't have a captive audience to build and drive engagement with topics. I use that framework and that framework works really well in educating non marketers, CEOs, boards and other executives to have that dangerous point of view that everything must be tied to a pipeline opportunity or to a revenue number. They start to understand, oh, you've got to make investment in attracting new audiences, but you can actually show connective tissue between. If you're doing really well at attracting new audiences, then you have someone to drive engagement with and then you have people to monetize. So that framework has served me well and served other marketers really well when they're under pressure to try to tie everything that they do to a revenue number which inevitably leads to cutting the really important things. It's not everything's easily tied.

[A]

I'm also curious how to switch gears a little bit. You mentioned that you are an AI advisor. How is AI changing marketing?

[B]

Well, it's changing and impacting marketing in ways big and small. So when I think about all that it takes to do marketing in such a way that it will enable the company's growth, everything from brainstorming marketing strategies that will solve different business challenges through refining your positioning and messaging and doing market research all the way. Look, I think most People think about copywriting, I think where AI is most valuable is that earlier stage where what are you trying to accomplish? What are the various strategies that I can leverage? How do I refine that? How does that inform what I actually do? You can of course use Gen AI to produce the assets, whether that's imagery or copywriting. And then from there there are some native tools that have been developed to help marketers to very quickly analyze how things are working, whether they're working well or not, and then optimize that and create versioning for testing and learning at scale and doing that within seconds. AI is effectively transforming the way that we do everything from forming an idea all the way up through getting it out to market, measuring the performance of that. And for the 5% of marketers that are paying attention right now, it's going to be a real creative, competitive differentiator for them in the next two to three years.

[A]

If we were to fast forward, let's say 10 or 20 years, how will AI play a part in marketing?

[B]

Wow. In the context of marketing, I think. I don't know that I could envision 10 years. But let me offer what I think is going to happen on our journey for the next five years. I think in the next 12 to 18 months we will have not just the ability to leverage AI to complete a task, it will automate a series of tasks and it will have enough reasoning capability to execute that without human intervention or prompting from one task to another. The way to think about this is it probably takes 21 steps to develop and execute or deploy an email in HubSpot within the next 12 to 18 months. All 21 of those steps. Steps won't require a human in the loop to prompt it from one task to another. The second piece is that next evolution from 18 to maybe 24 months later. The ability to tie multiple series of tasks together across a whole workflow that will probably, and I think most people refer to that as more agentic advancements. Automating an entire workflow without intervention will likely be accomplished. And we're already seeing hints and signs of that now where there are some leaders that are developing these AI agents. Salesforce just came out and talked about how they're reinventing their business model around that. And in about three to five years, I think you will have an AI agent that's capable of managing and directing sub agents. And so imagine, if you will, the orchestration of multiple series of tasks across multiple workflows that might feel like the job of an individual within a marketing organization. And at that point, those marketers that will be successful will be the ones that know how to manage AI that's serving as the agent, managing multiple sub agents. And so you still need the understanding of marketing as a discipline. You still need to be able to develop strategy, positioning, messaging, but the execution and production work will be very scalable. You could potentially have a marketing organization of one in three to five years that could effectively do what might take 20 to 30 marketers today. I don't know what this looks like. And the reason I have been so passionate about AI over the last two years has been I likely my thought was I was going to retire in about 12 to 15 years. And I started looking at the signs and say, what am I going to do in five years when marketing looks like a really smart marketer that manages multiple agents, what am I going to do then? And so, rather than let AI disrupt my career journey, I think I should probably start reinventing myself now so that I have really fun stuff to do over the next decade and a half.

[A]

Yeah, and I think you gave it away. What comes next? And I think it's that one marketer and building that into its own AI and really achieving what could be autonomous marketing, similar to how cars have gotten to the point of total autonomy. They started with assistance. They started with giving us indicators and warning signs of things that could be wrong, then slowly adding features that could be helpful, but not fully owning the driving experience. And now we're seeing this burgeoning autonomous capability. And I think that's where we're going with marketing too, because the AI can give the marketing strategy pretty easily. Here's some ideas on what you should do and so forth. But then when it comes to the execution, the pieces are not all connected for it to access everything it needs to access. So I think you're absolutely right that we're moving towards solving that piece and having all of the different marketing tactics and data points connected. And then the natural next step is an orchestration AI that puts it all together and optimizes. So I could see that happening.

[B]

I think it might happen faster if things accelerate. Right. Inevitably, two weeks down the road, Sam Altman or one of the other leaders will come out and, and announce an advancement. And you go and actually try these new capabilities and you realize, I thought that was going to be a couple quarters down the road if it continues to accelerate, that five years might be two years. I'm not quite sure. That's why I'm a little worried about 10 years, because it's just hard to see out that far.

[A]

Yeah, I totally agree. I'm very excited to see what happens with marketing. I think marketing is in the same boat as most other industries that there is this sort of question of what's going to happen if we can distill 30 marketers into one. I think you're right that a lot of people, if they can adapt to it, become the orchestrators in the interim, even in a world of totally autonomous AI. The difference being that the autonomous marketing would optimize itself. That would be the sort of pinnacle that it's running tests in market. It's optimizing, it's figuring out what strategies work, just like what we do. And I think there will always be an individual monitoring that, relaying the insights to the team, being responsible and accountable for what happens with it. I definitely think that just like with autonomous cars, there's still always somebody who is somewhat liable for the technology. Yeah, I'm excited to see what happens with it. And it's in the same boat as all the other industries. Legal is going to go through the same thing. Medicine will probably go through the same thing, albeit longer because of the red tape and everything. But I did want to ask something. When it comes to marketing processes, I'm curious if you agree with this. There's not a lot of standardization in marketing when it comes to every business. They all seem to approach marketing almost from zero. And that we had a lot of marketing strategies 40, 50 years ago. And I feel like those books haven't been rewritten for the digital age. I feel like we're all figuring it out. What do you think about that and how do you think that's going to change? Do you think marketing will be more codified in the future? We have a doctorate for different types of careers. Why isn't there a more professional, structured version of marketing that you know, like a marketing doctor that can come in and fix something?

[B]

The first thing I just want to offer is I agree with your assessment of marketing. And I think the why behind it is that at the end of the day, there are a lot of marketers that believe marketing is art and magic. It's something that somebody is whether they are born with this ability to master this art or maybe they've developed it through education and experience. I'm more of a believer that marketing is very scientific. And I do think that there's some art and it really. I think it has a lot to do with understanding the market and the buyer and being able to translate that into what would be most relevant to them. But as it relates to, I think that the primary reason why it's not been codified is because that belief has been persistent. When you think about it, that seems very artistic, that seems very magical. But they also didn't have access to the data and technology that we have today. And the way people bought back then very much relied on some other human to help them buy it. Today's world, we are very engaged on social media platforms. We have different expectations than to not just say advancements that came through with the Internet, but also smartphone. The reality is we do a lot of our research and evaluation and make decisions about our purchasing before we ever talk to a human. And for some reason, somewhere along the line, we decided if we could avoid the human, we would have more enjoyable experience. I think that's what's going to drive the shift to maybe the desire to want to codify marketing so that you could do that at scale and also really candidly better meet the expectations of the customer. So my first 16 years as an advisor, and then when I decided to move to the brand side and I wanted to practice what I preached through those transformations, you had to actually figure out how the business and marketing gets done day to day, and you had to actually go through and streamline those workflows and processes. If for no other reason the members of your team knows who does what, when and how do we actually eliminate the friction so we can get to market faster and less painful and be able to measure it? And those organizations that invest that time doing their best to codify that operating model for marketing, the easier it becomes for them to accelerate their speed to market, the easier it becomes to be able to shift. As the market rapidly evolves around them to make pivots so that they can compete more effectively, the easier it becomes to scale marketing. Right? Whether that's do more or be more impactful, that same critical piece. When marketing leaders ask me what should I be doing from an AI standpoint today? My take on this is you have to be really clear about how marketing gets done, who does what, exactly how, streamline that and then think about how could you use various large language models or technologies to do the things across the workflow. What's fascinating to me is that these companies where marketing has been able to pivot to being a strategic growth driver more than just the people that make things pretty branded and production house those same companies, those same marketing leaders are going to be the ones that are better positioned to use AI to compete.

[A]

Yeah, totally agree. And I think that there's a lot to be said about those processes. If we think back to maybe the early days of medicine, it was probably more art than science. Right. Even if you fast forward to the cutting edge of medicine, if you were to ask the best surgeon on earth how much of their job is science versus art, I think the best surgeon on earth would say there's a little bit of art to it, maybe with the way the stitching is symmetrical and everything. They are an artist, so I don't think the art will ever go away. But I think that marketing is woefully lacking in that structure. When doctors go to medical school, they don't just learn, here are the tools, here's how you put a syringe in an arm. They learn that. Right. But they also learn when you see these metrics falling, look at these numbers, and do this intervention to fix it. Right. And they learn how all of that works. We don't have that in marketing yet, but I think that's coming especially as we continue to study consumer behavior, collect more data about input, exposure to different ads, results from consumers. I think that we'll be able to have more of this scientific approach where we can then teach marketers, this is how you solve some of those problems you might run into, and let's teach them structured processes for how to fix things rather than treating it like that art, where you just treat every incident almost in isolation. And it's not in isolation. There's a lot of commonalities between the way businesses work and the struggles that different businesses have. I think this is part of the reason we have so many marketing agencies right now, because so many entrepreneurs see that, they see that there's commonalities and challenges, and so they pick one commonality and solve it. It's emblematic of a larger problem in the marketing industry, I think. Do you agree?

[B]

I think that's why you see the marketing organization as really a collection of specialists at this point. Because those specialists unique expertise in diagnosing what's happening on TikTok or YouTube, maybe they might be able to aggregate it across social media platforms. But that's where their, their limits lie. Within that discipline or within that specialty, within the marketing engine, it's because they've had to. It's the only way that they've been able to train themselves is by digging in and becoming that specialist. I agree with you. I think advancements in technology and AI will of course also accelerate our ability to diagnose.

[A]

Yeah. I want to switch gears and ask you about B2B and specifically how marketing differs between B2B and B2C. I've heard the term B2B2C. What is your general take on B2B versus B2C? How has that changed over time? Because in my opinion, they've converged in many ways. And the way we treat B2B is similar to B2C in terms of technology because of that personalization that's coming to B2C. So I'm curious to hear your take on it.

[B]

I have a long held belief that companies don't buy anything the people within the companies buy. And so you still have to be very relevant and valuable in what your messaging and your offer strategy is for the person where B2B comes in. And the big difference between B2B and B2C is just the complexity, what it takes to reach, engage and be relevant to all of the people that might participate in a buying decision. At the end of the day, companies are a little bit more risk adverse and so definitely require or they incentivize and encourage decisions by committees. And when that happens, that buying committee rather large and today this could easily be over 11 or 12 different participants in this buying decision. And they come in and out of that buying decision a number of times across an 11 to 12 month period. And each one of those participants in that buying committee have the thing that they care about related to that purchasing decision. The challenge for the B2B marketer is figuring out who are all these people that participate in different times. Why is it that I'm seeing this person in this role on our site, engaging with this content in this way? They go in and out and I'll see them maybe in month one and they'll come back in month six and they're downloading this stuff. Meanwhile, these other seven people have all been engaged around this asset that I published in this particular channel. What's happening there? And so how do you actually find them, reach them, engage them, bring them to one of your own properties, get them consuming, stay in their orbit long enough so that they keep you front of mind. The complexity there is hard. And the challenge for a B2C marketer that moves to a B2B marketer is they're used to thinking singularly. There's this person that has these needs and wants. These are all the watering holes that they're in. These are the questions they're asking. How do you actually orchestrate a campaign that's actually reaching 11 people? And they're probably from four different functional groups that care about wildly different things. How do you get them all stay in their orbit long enough so that you don't get forgotten as they're making this evaluation. And at the end of the day, that's a data and technology challenge. Right? And you also have to care and recognize that those people are different. For the B2C marketer that's moving to B2B, recognize that you will have those data and technology challenges. For the B2B marketer never lose the fact that companies don't buy, people do. And so you could learn a lot from a B2C marketer that has mastered the art about being relevant and value add and supporting their purchasing decision in such a way that aligns and makes that easy. B2C marketers are awesome at eliminating friction from business decision. B2B marketers love throwing friction into the purchasing decision. Let's add a form to everything. Smart B2C marketers do their best to put out valuable information, make that buying decision easy, and get out of their way. So I think they have a lot to learn from each other, but they're different.

[A]

So speaking about B2B, what are some of the more common pitfalls that businesses will run into when they're doing. You mentioned forms and maybe excessive friction. What are some other things that B2B companies may be missing in marketing?

[B]

I think the biggest challenge is it starts with the data and rolls downhill from there. Are you very clear on the companies that are in your ideal customer profile? And then within those companies, have you identified all of the people that are in the relevant roles for the purchasing decision? So many companies undermine or don't invest enough in the data to inform their messaging positioning, offer strategy. That's number one. Number two, as it relates to the execution piece, marketers love batch and blast, one size fits all messaging, treating everyone as if they're the same and then wondering why nothing resonates and why a campaign is not going to perform. Then beyond that, we are increasingly learning about those friction points. B2B marketers are so worried about being able to prove their impact that they introduce forms on everything. They don't want to make it easy for someone to get further along in their evaluation process because they feel this need to measure and demonstrate everything and tie everything to a number which goes back to the original problem we talked about a couple of minutes ago. And then from there they tend to operate in a silo and they don't recognize in the B2B environment, when you're selling something that's more complex, there's no buy now button. They don't spend enough time getting in line with sales in terms of who does what at every critical stage across that buying journey. And as such, they love to take premature leads and throw them over the fence to sales. And not necessarily taking into consideration what the buyer would expect at that point, what sales knows what to do with that record. And so a whole bunch of waste, right? If you don't get the data right, nothing's going to land. If you don't personalize and make sure that your messaging and offers are relevant for the different people you're trying to sell sell to, nothing's going to land. You gate everything you're producing. People don't want to complete forms, right? And so they're going to sit out there and not utilize. And your competitor, that's not introducing friction. They're going to win. And then you take something that's premature and you throw it over to sales and sales thinks it's not yet ready for their pursuit, it's going to be wasted. So all of this waste is where I see a lot of B2B marketers have missteps. So I could probably go on, but those are the biggest ones.

[A]

I think that's interesting. It's almost like marketing may be over complicating the sales process by trying to collect too much data.

[B]

At times they're under pressure from a number of different directions and usually underfunded, under resourced and don't have access to the data technologies that would make their job easier. We do like to overcomplicate things. So again, I think it's probably back to that art and specialist thing.

[A]

I'm curious, when you are evaluating the overall marketing sourced revenue from a business in a B2B context, how do you attribute marketing cost or marketing activity to revenue coming in from a deal that might take a year to close?

[B]

I think when you think about marketing source and marketing influence revenue that was introduced because people had so many reactions to marketing trying to attribute a sale to something that they have done. And then people reacted in such a way that forced them to then complicate it further and say this stuff we really sourced and this stuff we've influenced everyone that's not a marketer that's turning to marketing and asking what have you done for me lately? What's the impact of the money I'm giving you to spend on marketing? That question in and of itself is forcing marketing to be in a position where they have to take credit for things. So here's what I would offer marketing should have an attribution model, number one, and that model should not be based off of any singular view. So you can't assign all the credit for something to a first touch or a last touch. It's got to be some sort of. You have to have access to different models based on the question you're trying to ask. Number two, those outside marketing have to recognize that marketing is not trying to take credit for something. Marketing is trying to hold the money that they spend on behalf of the company accountable for having an impact. And if they can't close the feedback loop to see what things might have influenced an opportunity or sale, they should stop doing it. Period. There needs to be some sort of connective tissue so we could start attributing multiple things to an opportunity sale. And so that's a critical piece is stop thinking about marketing trying to take credit as it relates to sourced and influenced. There are a variety of ways to think about it. Sometimes it's as simplistic as was the person in our marketable database before that thing. Did it source an entirely new record that got added to our captive audience? If it was in the database, it's not sourced. They were known to us before and then as it relates to influence, we knew who they were, they knew who we were. But some things that we put out to market prompted them to engage with us and that means that's a potential selling conversation. We introduce sales into the equation, they advance the discussion and it led to a sale. That means that those tactics and assets that I put out helped. So we should keep doing more things like that rather than saying, oh, marketing's taking credit for a sale. Neither one is about taking credit. So if you are using sourced and influence, it should be thought of as did it identify or attract a new audience? If yes, awesome. If it just drove engagement back to that ATM framework within somebody that was already known to us, great. Let's actually look at the revenue associated with those things and keep doing more of it. I tend to try to avoid sourced and influence because it leads to bad behaviors and it tends to lead to sales having a negative reaction to marketing up taking credit for my sale. Again, it lends itself to marketing. Stop doing the things that aren't sourcing new people and that's not going to help a company to drive sustainable growth. It's just dangerous. Overall, I love working with sales leaders, Sierra and heads of sales and we both go on the hook for pipeline coverage. Do we have enough opportunities in the pipeline if we don't let's work on that together. In the context of that, I'm going to make some investments. You'll have visibility to those investments. Did they help source and grow the pipeline? Great. Was it with new people, existing people? Either way, if I'm asking you questions about closing the feedback loop, it's because I want to stop doing the things that aren't contributing to that engagement that lent itself to a potential selling conversation that got in the pipeline. And they tend to respond quite well to that. When they realize I'm not looking for credit and we should go on the hook together, they start actually thinking about the marketing budget the way I do. Oh yeah. That actually didn't give us any lift in the pipeline. It didn't contribute or accelerate a conversation. Let's not do that one again.

[A]

So it's a reframing and it's like a step back from credit and you're talking about. It's like an accountability thing, Accountability over credit. So how would you calculate a CAC to LTV in that mindset where you're both on the hook for pipeline generation? But then you want to know CAC to ltv. How do you do that?

[B]

At the end of the day, a company can only afford to spend so much between its collective marketing and selling activities to acquire a new customer. Right. What did it take to actually close this deal and acquire this customer? So when I think about cost to acquire the combined investment in marketing and sales and being able to have a model in place that kind of tracks those records all the way through the pipeline. It's a weighted approach, but it assigns across all of those touch points. And it could very well be that it's 157 touch points between marketing and sales that lent itself to closing the customer. That's the first thing, is that you do need the infrastructure and the plumbing. You do need to be able to track all of those touch points. This is where CRM integrated with MAP actually helps. Right. And you do need to know and understand, did it take 157 touch points between these two to close the deal and is that worth it as it relates to the LTV and where that comes into play? I think increasingly companies are, particularly software companies, they're willing to pay more to acquire the customer because those customers will stay longer. Right. And let's say it could be of $100,000 over five years. Great. Is that worth spending $50,000 to acquire that customer between marketing and sales, all those touch points? Absolutely. What I think is dangerous is that we're beginning to see cost of sales and marketing skyrocket and people aren't actually calculating. Many marketers don't even know how to answer the question, like, how much does it actually take to acquire a customer? How much did marketing and sales invest to close that deal? They will go into a budgeting cycle and say, not only do I want the $10 million I had last year to spend on marketing, I feel like I need $2 million more to do the same thing with the same targets. You do need to invest in the infrastructure. You do need to think about a weighted attribution model. It's not just across marketing touch points. You need to consider all the touch points across your organization that go to market engine. And then you do need to care about what's the LTV and think about how much can you afford and then use that to inform your marketing plan to help.

[A]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of marketers or at least some bad apples that really abuse the power that marketing has for their own gain. For big budgets to have the appearance of increased sales, perhaps to steal attribution, there's a lot of trickery that can happen. If you really understand how marketing attribution works, you can game it. You can play around with how targeting works. You can cannibalize other tactics. A marketer with the wrong intentions can ruin a whole marketing organization by misallocating, by over allocating.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I totally agree with you. I think responsibility is paramount when it comes to budgets. Because it's true that if you increase spend in marketing, you can get more revenue for the business and stake your customers and all of that. But that doesn't always. That's an ideal case that, that takes a lot of experimentation. If you as an organization have a marketer who's coming in and saying, we should spend 10 times more money, I'll generate 20 times more revenue. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And these things take a lot of iteration and very small improvements. No marketer would ever say to 10x a budget because there's no way to know what that difference in demand would be. So like a responsible marketer would take small steps to increase the budget, to test new baselines how the cost per sale is going to change and adapt because we don't typically know where that ceiling is. So yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a interesting layer where you need to be very careful with how marketing is advertised to the business. And there could be people who are in it for their own gain because it's possible to look like you're helping the business and not actually be helping the business. There's an example I have of an old co worker who they basically bankrupted their old company by overextending offers. And then the payback period was way too long. So it would take five years to pay back the offer that they delivered. But it took a long time for the business to realize that. And in the meantime, they were going gangbusters with their sales because they were giving away the product basically for free, and they were giving a loan to the individual who was receiving the offer that would take several years to pay back. The business ran out of cash because they were giving so much away and people weren't paying it back enough. So the system breaks. So marketing, I think, is really fascinating from that perspective in how the mechanics work behind the scenes.

[B]

But on that point, I'm glad you brought that up. Right. Inherently, one of the things that I have been fascinated by. Whenever you meet CMO from let's say a B2B enterprise organization, you can even go out on LinkedIn and look at their profiles. They tend to talk most about the size of the budget they manage, the size of the organization that they manage. And I was recently on a different podcast and we had talked about why do we think that is? Like, why does the marketing leader think the flex is or think that the way that they can contribute like that they've made it to the role that they are. Let's say they're rock stars. Right. Like, why is it that they lean in on size of budget and size of organization? And if marketing gets a seat at the table, the doers of things, oh, that's marketing. They take care of the brand. There are these things that we really can't measure. It's a whole bunch of magic. And they have a kid seat at the table. They don't have the same seat as a CRO. And so the way they tend to show up there is look at the size of the budget that I have that I'm managing. Look at the size of the organization. I have to keep up with the needs to support the business to hit these numbers. And so that's why we tend to see those behaviors. Because a marketer still has this imposter syndrome in the C suite. If the organization's revenue number needs to increase, and it should year over year, there's a revenue and a profitability target that should be increasing as the company grows. By design, the marketer believes reports numbers shouldn't our budget also increase? I think the really smart marketer is the one that say, not only can I help enable the organization to drive that growth, I can also help the organization do that more profitably, more sustainably. Here's how I'm going to think about investing my budget differently this year. But I'm going to need everyone else's support because I'm going to stop doing some things and I'm going to start doing other things that will enable us to scale with the business. That conversation, that's like heresy, Like a marketing leader showing up and saying, I don't think I actually need this, I think I need CRO. I need your help in stopping with all these random acts of support that's got us scattered too thinly. Let's lean in on the market, this audience, this profile of company, and let's really have higher impact so that we don't have to spend as much to actually drive that number. I'm waiting for the day that we start to see that become the standard conversation that's happening with the marketer. And what's interesting is I think we have made a shift from growth at all costs to sustainable growth. Certainly the PE firms and investors are forcing companies to think like that. If that isn't enough to drive the marketer's behavior in that room, AI will. Every single CEO and board right now is asking, how are you using AI? How are you using strategic outsourcing? How are you thinking differently about where you're investing your dollars to drive productivity so that we can lower our cost of sales because we're under pressure to drive growth more sustainably? And you are part of that equation. Either going to happen because the smart marketer is going to lean in and say, I want to be a business leader, or AI is going to force that. I don't know about you, but I would rather actually lean in and own that conversation, that shift and have something done to me.

[A]

Totally. I really like what you said about the marketing, having the kids seat at the C suite table. I've never heard that before, but it makes sense. I just have to think about that. I have to let that marinate. It's interesting because you see the CROs coming in and all of a sudden some of the marketers get a little stiff in the neck and they're a little worried. And I don't think that should be the case. There shouldn't be this natural competition. It's really teamwork. And the CRO coming is like the antidote to the marketers that came in and were like, no, we can't tie it and we shouldn't tie it to revenue. That's what happens. When you do that for long enough, the businesses wake up and they're like, no, we're not going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and not track it. It's just not responsible. And that's how business works, right? You have to be responsible with the money of the business.

[B]

I will offer some empathy here. Look, I've been in that kid seat before. It doesn't necessarily mean that you've earned the kids seat. It means that you arrived on the roll, you get in the room, you get to sit at the table, and then all of a sudden you realize you're in the kid seat. It could have been because of somebody's preconceived notions about marketing's role in the business. It could have been because of bad behaviors of the previous CMO or marketing leader. But the way to earn your way out of the kids seat is not to double down on those same I need to spend more to make more behaviors. The way you earn out is to say, I'm a business leader and I care about accelerating the growth of this business, but doing it profitably, doing it sustainably, how can I help? What's my role in solving that problem? That's usually the thing that will change the temperature with the CEO and the CFO and the board, they're not used to marketing showing up that way. So if you want out of the kits, I would suggest doing the opposite of what feels is the way it's always been done.

[A]

I really like that. Thank you, Lisa. This has been such an amazing conversation. I've learned so much and it's really refreshing to have a high level strategic conversation about marketing leadership and how marketing is evolving. I really appreciate you coming on and chatting about this.

[B]

I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope we stay connected and if anyone has any questions or they need support in changing that conversation, or even just how they're thinking about navigating this next phase of their career, please reach out to me. I'm findable on LinkedIn. I do care deeply about marketing as a discipline and I think there's a real opportunity in front of us. So thanks again for the invite.

[A]

Thank you, Lisa, and thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you soon.