← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
Inside Atlassian’s Product Marketing Strategy: Team Structure, Metrics, and Execution with Matt De Vincentis
00:54:55
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- [00:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love knack here at exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance, forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5. That's us. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
- [01:21]
Matt Divincentis
1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.
- [01:26]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, Matt, good to have you on the podcast. How do I say your last name, by the way?
- [01:29]
Matt Divincentis
Oh, yeah, it's good to be here, Dave. My last name is Divincentis. At least that's the way I say it. That's not how Italians would say it.
- [01:35]
Dave Gerhardt
Even sent us. Yeah, that's. That's fine. I mean, this is. When I saw your name, I didn't expect an Italian guy. Where's your accent from? Where are you from?
- [01:43]
Matt Divincentis
Where I'm from. That's a difficult question.
- [01:45]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay.
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Matt Divincentis
That all the time I'm like, where's your voice from? Yeah, exactly. So grew up in Australia. Have lived in the States for the last 12 years, so.
- [01:53]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, cool. And are you. Do you play golf at all?
- [01:57]
Matt Divincentis
I don't play golf.
- [01:59]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay. All right. It's all good. Australia is supposed to be like one of the best golf destinations on earth and, you know, try to make a gap there one day. I'd love. I'd love to get there, but I.
- [02:07]
Matt Divincentis
Mean, honestly, everything in Australia is good. The beach, the wine, the golf. I mean, it's all good there, man. It's a great place.
- [02:13]
Dave Gerhardt
Love that. Okay. What a clip right there. Let's clip that for the Australia tourism. That's an awesome pitch. So. So you're in the Bay Area now, and right now you're VP of Product Marketing at Atlassian. Tell me what you did before that. What brought you here in your career to this? You know, running product marketing at one of the greatest SaaS companies there is out there. I think Atlassian's been a great story. Obviously, there's been a bunch of interesting things, the things that have happened over the years, but I was looking you up before. I'm like, man, this guy was VP of marketing at Palo Alto Networks. He was at VMware. So you've had a great run in marketing with a background that a lot of listeners I think will understand. So I'd love to just kind of get your quick career story. How'd you become a marketing geek like the rest of us?
- [02:53]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, that's a great question. And straight off the bat, hopefully it's not too controversial. But this was never my plan. I never planned to be a marketer, never thought I would be a marketer. This was an absolute just accident. I fell into it. So to give you a little bit of background, I started my career in IT as an engineer. Like, first 10 years of my career, I was heavily technical on the tools, deploying softwares and servers and all of that sort of stuff. And then I went to business school, got an mba. And I think, like a lot of folks when they go to business school, it's like your eyes just open up. Right? There's a whole wide world out there. And then one thing led to another, and, yeah, here I am now in product marketing in Silicon Valley, like 12 or 13 years later.
- [03:38]
Dave Gerhardt
You know what? I don't have, like, a perfect tally of it, but I do feel like over the years, I've done dozens of interviews with product marketing leaders, and there's kind of some. There seems to be, like a technical bent for some of the people who end up in product marketing in tech. And I'm curious if. I wonder, like, how that's been an advantage for you as a former, you know, engineer and someone on the technical side of things, like how that's translated into the. The product marketing. There seems to be some overlap there. I feel like.
- [04:06]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think from my experience, product marketers often come from all walks of life. I actually think that we're perhaps the misfits that have maybe tried a bunch of things. Some of us have technical backgrounds, some of us certainly don't. I think the. Probably the best product marketer I've ever met. Actually had a background in neuroscience and philosophy and was just a master of understanding how people think and why they, you know, behave in certain ways and make decisions and things like that. But yeah, certainly a lot of product marketers are technical. I personally think that's both a blessing and a curse. So what I mean by that is it is a blessing in the sense that, yeah, it's relatively easy for me or someone with a technical background to understand the technology, the problem that it solves, the customers, etc. But the curse of knowledge is a real thing as well. Right. And so sometimes I and others that I know have technical backgrounds in product marketing can sometimes bias a little bit too much towards the features and the functions and the bits and the bytes. And I think we all know all those of us that have been in the game, you know, understand that that's not why customers buy things. And so sometimes pulling myself back from the love of the technology is a hard thing. So I don't know, man. I think it's both a blessing and a curse, but it certainly helped me to get.
- [05:20]
Dave Gerhardt
It goes both ways. I think the positive of it is I do think that like, I think to be great at product marketing, you can't fake your way around the product that you're, you're working on. You, you really gotta know it. And so I think if you're, if you're just a great storyteller on that side, but you don't have the technical chops of like really knowing how to, how things work, I think that shows up. And if you can do both, though, if you can really understand how something works and you're great at explaining it in a way that people care about, that's the, the dream scenario.
- [05:46]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, I think that's right. I think for me, more important is having that, that passion or interest in understanding the technology as well. I think that's important. I don't think every product marketer has to have a techn background, but you have to want to understand the products and learn and have that kind of propensity to be a learner and want to understand how stuff works. If you don't have that, I think it's, it's difficult.
- [06:08]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, so you, you spent a bit of, a bit of time in a director product marketing role at VMware. What's the main lesson or two? I don't even mean specific to the company, but just you as, as building your career. Like when you look at your, you know, couple of years at VMware in the product marketing Role. What's a lesson that you, you've taken with you to what you're doing now?
- [06:27]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, it's a great question and maybe just to place that period of time for the listeners as well. So I was at VMware in what I think was probably like a Golden Era for VMware. Unfortunately, more recently it's been a bit of a challenge for those folks, but for me I was there for what it was probably like 2015 to 2019, like something around that period of time where, you know, virtualization was exploding. It was all about the software defined data center. Not everything was public cloud just yet. Pat Gelsinger was the CEO, by the way, one of the most amazing CEOs certainly that I've had the pleasure to work with. But I think, you know, across Silicon Valley, just an amazing leader, an amazing human being. And I think, you know, what I probably took away from that experience most was so I was working in the network virtualization part of VMware, which started out as a small acquisition, ended up being a multibillion dollar business and learning how to grow and scale a product from very, very small to large within a large organization that already was doing, you know, 5 to 10 billion a year in revenue was an interesting experience and I learned a lot doing that. Lessons that I've applied at Palo Alto Networks and now applying at Atlassian. It is a difficult thing to do, but an exciting thing to do. Grow something from small to big.
- [07:46]
Dave Gerhardt
Take us into the role of, what role does product marketing play at a company of, of that size? I think on the startup, smaller scale, startup side of it, it's like product marketing is, you know, making the website copy, making the decks, helping sales close deals. Ideally you measure something like that through conversion rate down the funnel, like you know, win rate. But I always wonder when I see a huge company like that, like how do you, what's your focus? How do you move the needle? What should product marketing be doing as a company gets bigger.
- [08:14]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, as it gets bigger and sort of at that scale. And again, just to place this, you know, the end where from like 5 to 10 billion in revenue. I think, you know, during that time we went from like, I don't know, 15,000 employees to 25,000, something like that. Someone will fact check me and I'll have that slightly wrong, but that kind of a scale and I think at that point, you know, the go to market strategy side of things is probably the most important role as product marketer. You know, typically at that scale you've got Folks run the website, copy or whatever. You've got people figuring out your email, nurture campaigns, all that sort of stuff. You don't have to do everything. But I think you do have to be an expert in understanding who your customers are, why they would be interested in your products or why they buy your products, how you should sell your products, and then bringing that together, I think is from a very high level, like the fundamentals of product marketing in an organization at that scale. So, yeah, understanding your customers, understanding your selling model and how you'll reach those customers and optimizing that I think is the most important role of product marketing at that scale.
- [09:15]
Dave Gerhardt
How are you measured as a, as a product marketer? Let's talk about VMware.
- [09:19]
Matt Divincentis
So this is probably another big takeaway that I had from VMware and that experience there. We very much looked at, you know, ultimately the, the outcome that we were trying to drive, which at the end of the day is revenue and revenue growth and, you know, working backwards from there. And so, you know, one of the sort of mottos we had at that point I got from one of my mentors, I can't remember exactly who, but it was on the outcome, not the task. In other words, as a product marketer, on any given day, you know, what you might be doing is, I don't know, I'm making it up, building a slide deck, writing a messaging doc, whatever it is, that's the task. But you have to hold yourself accountable and own the outcome which is ultimately driving revenue. Working backwards from that pipeline, whatever it is. In other words, success for product marketing or marketing more broadly can't just be, you know, whatever the marketing metrics may be that you're tracking on a day to day basis, you have to care about the business outcomes and ultimately what's driving the business. In other words, like, you can't celebrate success in high five if you're hitting your marketing goals. If your sales people are missing their numbers, they're getting laid off. You know, the stock price is tanking. At the end of the day, you have one stock price and love that.
- [10:30]
Dave Gerhardt
By the way, we did this event a couple months ago and we had Kim Storen on and, and she at the time, she was the CMO of this company called Zayo Group. Now she's a CMO at Zoom. And she had this, the exact thing, same thing that you said. It became this little pithy little sound bite. And she said it, sometimes I mess it up. But she said marketing can never be in the green when the Company's in the red and it's like, damn. And what you just said there even is just like, yes, we have this amazing community, and so we try to help answer questions and help people. And it's like, it almost does always come back to, like, the way you simplified it there. It's kind of like, it kind of always does come back to revenue. It kind of always does come back to business outcomes. And I've been in that position where we're like, talking about, hey, look at the podcast downloads and LinkedIn impressions. And then it's like, well, we haven't hit our sales goal in, you know, 90 days. And so nobody on that side of the house wants to feel that. So I love that framing from you.
- [11:18]
Matt Divincentis
I think this is an interesting topic. Let's pick this apart a little bit because, like, yeah, oftentimes I feel this tension even within my team and how I measure success on my team. You know, for example, product marketers I felt over my journey are often uncomfortable measuring themselves, their own performance based on pipeline or pipeline numbers, because they'll always say, well, you know, product marketing, you don't create pipeline. Salespeople create pipeline. You know, if our pipeline numbers aren't doing well, it's because our salespeople don't know how to sell or they're not very good or whatever else. Like, okay, but we have a role.
- [11:51]
Dave Gerhardt
People on your team say that. They would never. We would never say things like that. What are you talking about?
- [11:55]
Matt Divincentis
Certainly not Atlassian, maybe at other places over my career, but I've certainly heard it where, like, the tension is like, well, I don't directly control that, therefore, how can you measure me against that? Yeah, but maybe you don't directly control it, but you certainly influence it. You know, as a product marketer, you're. You're building sales content, you're training and enabling. You have a role to play there. So you have to care about the outcome, not the task or the input. And I think the other thing that's really important about this and advice that I always give people as they're coming up in their product marketing career is if you embrace that sort of a mindset, you then start to get a seat at the table with the broader business. In other words, like the CEO or the GM or whatever, even the VP of products, whoever it is, I don't care about leads and website visits or whatever. They care about revenue growth. They care about, like, whatever other business metric it is they're trying to move. Care about those things, and you lean in and you speak that language, you get to see the table in those business conversations and it will help you grow and elevate in your product marketing career.
- [12:57]
Dave Gerhardt
So, okay, I'll keep, I'll keep, I'll, I'll, you know, I'll volley back with you. That was a, that's a good, that's a good thing. But I think, how can we help? Like, because I, I hear you and then, but then I also hear the person who's listening to this, who's at maybe a va, you know, a bigger company. Maybe it's atlassian, maybe it's ServiceNow, maybe it's, you know, HubSpot, whatever. And it's like, I hear you, but like, I'm kind of a couple layers removed from what I'm doing. And like, my job doesn't always necessarily tie to sales. And so maybe I'm the community manager, the social media person, or I'm on the brand side. And it's like we're supposed to create good things that get attention and awareness for our company. And. But it's very hard to be like, how do we, you know, how do we know that like six people ended up buying from that conversation? And I think it's an important discussion because I think we need to talk more about how marketing is not this perfect science of like, step one, step two, step three. If you're maybe in a more junior role in the company and, or you, you have a job that's not, you know, demand gen or very directly tied to revenue, how do you tie that back? I'm sure there's a way to do it with a story of some kind, but how would you coach somebody on that?
- [13:58]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, maybe there's a way to tie it back, but maybe there's not. So in my opinion, I don't think we always have to draw a direct line from using your example, the social media posts that we did, or whatever it is to revenue. You don't have to draw a direct line to that. What I'm saying and suggesting is you just have to care about it. You have to care about the outcome. You have to hold yourself accountable and have the mindset or embrace the mindset that I care about revenue or whatever, I'm using that as a proxy. But whatever the outcome it might be that your business cares about in this given quarter or year, you have to care about that because then I think it will encourage you to make the most optimal decisions towards that ultimate outcome versus whatever the metric is that is right in front of you or Whatever the task is that you happen to be doing today, I think it's more of a mindset than having to draw the wrap line from your task to revenue or whatever it is.
- [14:59]
Dave Gerhardt
I love that because it. That's a perfect example of, like, the nuance in marketing. And it's like, not everything that we do is meant to be direct response. I used to work with this woman. Her name is Kate Adams. She's a CMO at, I think companies called Git Kraken now. But anyway, I worked with her at Drift, and she would be in a marketing meeting, she'd be like, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. Everybody's gonna talk about what they're working on, and then I'm gonna ask, like, what, why and how that ties back to revenue. And it was perfect because it was like, oh, yeah, the creative person who's making a video. Of course we don't think that, you know, five people are going to watch the video and then buy our product. But she asked the video person. The video person was like, well, the thing that I'm working on supports the product. You know, the product marketing team's launch for this campaign next week. And it just was just hearing how, yes, not everything's directly measurable to revenue, but how. Hearing how everybody on the team is aligned towards, like, you know, small pieces that add to this bigger thing. I thought that was like a really helpful way to do that.
- [15:49]
Matt Divincentis
I think that's spot on. I think if that mindset, if everyone embraces that mindset, you'll crush it. And don't get me wrong, like, you need to measure all of those other things. You know, all of those are leading indicators. They're good input metrics. You know, the last thing. We measure a lot of things. That's important, but you have to have that mindset of owning the outcome, not the task.
- [16:08]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, this is a good one for you. I got some back channel secret intel from my producers here that. Well, first let's just confirm this fact because I've gotten caught before. Were you a firefighter in a past life?
- [16:19]
Matt Divincentis
I was a firefighter in the past life, yep.
- [16:21]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay. Was that before you got into tech or what? I need the backstory there first.
- [16:25]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, it was before, and then I ended up being a volunteer firefighter for more than 10 years while I was working full time as well. So did it for quite a while.
- [16:34]
Dave Gerhardt
Nice. Well, huge respect to you. I thank you for doing your part and giving back. It also put. Must put into perspective your job. You're like everything, anything that I'm working on. Two of my best friends are both first responders and I'm like, anytime I have a bad day because like something somebody wrote on LinkedIn or something, I'm like, well, he had to deal with some real shit.
- [16:52]
Matt Divincentis
So yeah, I find the same thing. Like first responders, veterans, these folks have just got like a different perspective.
- [17:00]
Dave Gerhardt
They're like, I'm sorry somebody told you they don't, they don't like what you said on your little marketing podcast. I'm sorry. Sorry, Dave. Yeah, so anyway, so okay, this is, this relates to this. So firefighter. Okay. One thing I'm thinking about is, you know, there's a lot of busy work that comes up inside of a high performing marketing team. And I love this idea. Hey, we're going to do all these things, we're going to all be aligned together. But stuff just piles up. And I think one of the hardest parts in marketing today, where, you know, everything is marketing is sometimes everything feels like a fire drill of some kind. And I'm just curious to like, how have you kind of taken that mindset and adapted it to marketing? It's gonna be a great post for you one day. By the way, 10 lessons of being a firefighter taught me about B2B marketing. Yeah, but I've heard that you're one of the good leaders on the team for figuring out like, you know, how to decipher what's a priority and what's not. Maybe you can talk us through some of the. That.
- [17:47]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure. Well, firstly, I think a lot about my firefighting experience now that relates to business and marketing and I think there's a lot of lessons there across leadership, decision making and yeah, certainly dealing with fire drills. So firstly, from a fire drill perspective, I mean, it's, it's, it's inevitable, like fire drills will happen. I think first and foremost is just like in firefighting, you have to respond. Even if you think it might be a false alarm or whatever, you should still respond and you should take every fire drill seriously. With that said, you know, I think triaging is also really important. So, you know, not every fire drill needs to be a P0. And as a leader, part of your job, I think is to respond, but then triage and filter. So you don't necessarily need to pass down every fire drill to your team. So one of the things that I try and do as a leader is, you know, get in the middle of that lead from the front, but then filter any fire drill that's Coming in. So I have the ability then to, you know, pass down what's important, what's real, or, you know, potentially filter out and ignore something that perhaps isn't.
- [19:00]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, maybe. And even like, you know, some things are. There are some fire drills, like something is broken. Right. Or whatever story actually is. One time the CEO, and he sent a couple of us as early in the early days of the company, sent a couple of us to go play golf. He. He didn't play golf, but he was invited to this tournament, this charity tournament, and he sent me and three other people on the team to go to this golf tournament. Meanwhile, the same day, the website's broken. So while I'm at this thing, he's messaged me on Slack the whole time. You need to come back and fix this. I'm like, what should I do? Do you want me to be. Did you want me to be at this thing that you sent me to, or do you want me to go and fix this problem? So we, we fix it in Slack and it's all good. But it's not always about the fire drill. I think it's about also there's just so many ideas like, hey, we could do this. Hey, check this out, Check this out. And I'm. I'm the biggest, you know, culprit of this. How do you balance, like, all the things that come in marketing's way? Because you want to be. I think you want to be open across the organization. And I think smart people know that, like, we're. Marketing is not the only smart people at this company. We have everybody. We should be getting ideas from everybody. But it can be too much when you're just getting ideas from left and right. Do you have a way to, like, prioritize your work? Think about what some of the stuff that comes in. How do you balance all the ideas that come in, especially as you get into a larger company?
- [20:11]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, I think prioritization is key. Like, you touched on it. But I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they think that prioritization is the process of putting all of the things in an order, right? From, you know, whatever one to a hundred or whatever it might be. What I actually think is important about priority prioritizing is figuring out where you draw the line and what is below that line and what are the really important things or the really great ideas that we're very intentionally not going to do. Like, that is real prioritization. And so it's a hard thing to do because what you're basically saying is, yeah, that's a really important thing, or that is a really great idea and we're not going to spend a single minute thinking about it. And what that you don't get to.
- [20:57]
Dave Gerhardt
Do that unless you've clearly defined the things that you're not going to go spend time on.
- [21:01]
Matt Divincentis
Right? Yeah, for sure. And then I think, you know, part of that is figuring out, well, what is going to move the needle the most? What do we think is going to have the biggest return on our time, on our money, all of the other resources that we have available to us. But I think people make that mistake a lot with prioritization, where they just put things in an audit list and still attempt to chip away at all of them. I think what's most important is figuring out where you draw that line and very intentionally not doing very important things.
- [21:28]
Dave Gerhardt
Nice. Okay, I want to, I want to shift back into the topic of leadership a little bit. So then you go to Palo Alto Networks and you rise to VP of Marketing there. What's the difference in your career? Getting promoted to vp, becoming a VP of Marketing at a, at a company of that scale, how do you articulate what you're responsible for and how that's different in, like being more of the IC early in your career?
- [21:50]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, that's a good question. I know there were like a lot of steps along the way there, so it's not like such a sudden jump where all of a sudden it's a whole new world.
- [21:58]
Dave Gerhardt
But I think, yeah, I guess, I guess the thing that I'm trying to tap into is like, for those who have ambitions to be a VP of marketing, cmo, leader of marketing in a high performing organization, I want to just, you know, since you are, that I want to unpack, like, what's the mindset that's different? Not necessarily asking, like, how did you get there, but once you're there. For me, I got promoted to VP and it was like, oh, yeah, all the. You're not doing all the things that you did anymore. Now you have a team, there's 30 people on the team. You're expected to do this. Your peers are the CEO and everything. And I'm just curious to hear that evolution for you.
- [22:29]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah. There's probably two things that immediately come to mind. First and foremost, and I think this, regardless of whether you're a vp, director, senior director, I think this is an evolution over time where as your team begins to scale, your job as a manager or a leader in that particular instance is less about doing the work, being Good at the craft executing and more about your ability to lead and inspire the people around you to, you know, essentially rally and follow you and help you to execute against whatever the vision or strategy is that you've laid out. And so your ability to inspire and to motivate people, I think that is your number one priority as a leader. Again, whether it's director, senior director, vp, cmo, whatever. As you get further and further in your career and your organization scale, I think that becomes increasingly more important. So that's number one. Number two is, I think, you know, at that kind of level, VP plus in a marketing role at a company like Palo Alto Networks or Atlassian, you need to start thinking about the whole company. So you still may be responsible for, you know, just one product line or just one business unit, but you need to think like the CMO or like the CEO and be able to make decisions that are in the best interest of the entire company. Now, sometimes that might be suboptimal for your product line or business unit at this specific point in time, but I think it's really important as you elevate in your career to have a broader perspective that is beyond your own remit or goals or whatever it is area of responsibility and start to think like the CMO or the CEO about the whole company.
- [24:08]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, love that. That's such an important lesson because easier. I can think of myself early in my career being like, I just don't understand why my boss won't let us go do X. And it's like, oh, that's because she sees like three other moves that you don't know because you're not. It's all confidential inside of the company and it's like, oh, this person's about to get fired. Or like, we're about to acquire this company and there's just so many moves that you don't, you don't see. But now you have a seat and you have to see around everything else.
- [24:33]
Matt Divincentis
Exactly. Exactly.
- [24:36]
Dave Gerhardt
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- [25:54]
Matt Divincentis
So you have been doing some background digging there. Kudos to you. A Strengths Find us. That's an interesting one. So my executive coach who I've been with for years, she is an amazing woman, very, very helpful, kind of introduced me many years ago to this idea of strengths based leadership. So basically I'll get the strengths finding here in a minute. But it's this idea that we all have strengths, we all have weaknesses. If you can turn your strengths into superpowers, something that you can be best in the world at, you're going to have an impact that's exponentially greater than someone who's able to improve their weaknesses slightly. And so, you know, I've embraced this mindset at work, through my personal life, at home. And I think it's just a really powerful way to live. It's like we're all good at some things, we're all bad at some things. For the things that I'm bad at, I've got other people around me in my life and at work who can fill in those gaps. The things that I'm uniquely good at. Man, I'm going to make sure that I'm the best in the world of those things and I think think that will enable me, and I've seen it, to have a greater impact than otherwise.
- [26:57]
Dave Gerhardt
If you could give me behind the scenes a little bit, not personally, but as a marketing leader, what is one of those strengths? And just curious what one of those.
- [27:05]
Matt Divincentis
Weaknesses is for me personally, you mean? Yeah, yeah. So I think one of my strengths and we'll get to Strengths Finder again in just a second is self assurance. This is a strengths finder strength. In fact, let me talk about Strengths Finder for a bit. It's. It's a program developed by a company called Gallup. Many people might have done it. You know, you do this assessment and it essentially, you know, tells you the things that you are strong at and not so strong at. So one of the, one of my strengths is self assurance. So in other words, I am maybe overly confident, maybe when I shouldn't be. Perhaps I describe myself as like underprepared and overconfident. But effectively what that means is I have a strong belief in myself, where we're going and some of these sorts of things. And so that is one of the ways that I'm able to help inspire the people around me. You know, people that are not too sure, maybe a little bit stuck, need a little bit of that extra kind of push. I bring them along with me, give them the confidence that we can go get it.
- [28:01]
Dave Gerhardt
And so you see that, you see that burning building over there. We're all going in, we're going to save them. Let's go.
- [28:07]
Matt Divincentis
Exactly, exactly. I think that's one of the jobs of a leader, is to inspire hope when everything else has been abandoned. It's like, you know, you can lead the way. So I don't know. That's one of my strengths. You know, from a weakness perspective, I'm just trying to think there are so, so many. I won't give you a strengths, find a weakness. But look me as a marketer, I am not terribly visually creative. I'm terrible at making slides, terrible at making helping to provide guidance and decisions on creative. For 11 other things. I need good people around me that are creative like that, visually creative. I think I'm creative in other ways. I know that about myself. I could spend years trying to make that better and I might make a 1 percentage point difference. Instead, I'm going to invest my energy in the things that I'm good at and turn them into superpowers.
- [28:53]
Dave Gerhardt
That's.
- [28:53]
Matt Divincentis
That's how I live.
- [28:54]
Dave Gerhardt
Love that you can be better. Now I feel like I'm the same way, but now I can like go to chat GPT and I can say, here's something that I like. Can you explain this in terms that a designer would use? And I could be like, hey, you see this?
- [29:05]
Matt Divincentis
There you go. By the way, you know who I think streamed this up for all of us? Who? And I have a lot of respect for him and all the rest, but like Kobe Bryant, amazing player. Love that guy. He has these 10 rules. I don't know if you know about this rule. Number three is work on your weaknesses. I just think that's wrong. I think that's the wrong approach. And certainly earlier in my career, I spent a disproportionate amount of time working on my weaknesses and really getting nowhere when I fit that mindset, turning my strengths into superpowers, man, it was a massive unlock for my career and my life.
- [29:37]
Dave Gerhardt
So I got it through. When I was at this company called Drift, I worked for CEO David Cancel. He was my mentor and he was like, he put me on this book early by Peter Drucker called Managing Oneself. And it's like short 40 pages. And I have this one page highlighted in there. And he basically says that, like, he says what you're saying, like, don't work on your weaknesses. He's like, take the area that you're already good at and become great. And so if you are a great writer and you're like a B plus writer, become an A plus writer. And the gains from being like the A plus writer are going to outperform anything thing versus, like, let's say you're trying to up your, up your creative game. You're like a D in creative. He's like, you're only going to be able to elevate that to like a C or a B. So double down on your strengths. And that, that was a point where like, I was really into writing and storytelling, but I was obsessed with all the, this was like 2015, you know, Silicon Valley era. I was obsessed with like growth and growth hacking and I wanted to get in that world. He's like, dude, he's like, you're. That's not your muscle. Like your thing is writing and storytelling. He's like, I promise you your career, you will 10x your career if you just double down on this area. And it was just, it was so liberating to have somebody tell me that because I feel like, yeah, we're always told, like, gotta be well rounded, you gotta work on the, the thing. Like, maybe, maybe if you're Kobe Bryant, like, and you're. And you play basketball, then yes, you kind of, you gotta be able to use your left hand or something. Right? But I think in the, in the business world, I love that and I think it's, it's even more important now, like, what is your thing? Like, can you. Instead of trying to be okay in all the areas, what is your thing? So it's, it's refreshing to hear you say that for people.
- [31:04]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, absolutely. And look, when I'm building high performance teams and I'm hiring people. I look for extreme strengths versus looking for a lack of weakness, if that makes sense. I actually think it's a really powerful concept.
- [31:17]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay. Oh, the other thing I wanted to ask you related to the strength finder thing. So is this something that you go through with your team? Is it like, you know, disc or kind of one of these person. It's not a personality assessment, but is it something that everyone goes through together and you kind of get a read and figure out how to better work together?
- [31:32]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure you can. And I do. I use it for all of my teams, certainly my leadership team, sometimes my entire organization. I've done that in the past as well. So yeah, it's an assessment that people can do, similar to disc. But the thing I like about strengths is it just like it's so positive and optimistic. It's about the things that you're good at and how as a team you can be greater than the sum of your parts if you all understand each other's strengths and use them together.
- [31:58]
Dave Gerhardt
What's been the benefit of having an executive coach?
- [32:01]
Matt Divincentis
That's a good question. I mean, it just seems so obvious to me. Like, you know, in sports, if you want to be a high performance athlete, you need coaches. Like the thing I think about all the time is like, you know, Steph Curry, like greatest three point shooter that's ever played the game, still has a coach, he's got multiple coaches. Like, we can always get better. And I think sometimes, I don't know, it's hard to sort of see yourself from the outside and having that outside perspective and someone who can, who can observe and provide guidance and just help you work through situations maybe that you've never seen before. There's just so many benefits to having an executive coach. I encourage anyone who's in a position to do that to take advantage of it.
- [32:40]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, it's like, hey, you're in product marketing at a $5 billion revenue company. Go make the plan for next year. You don't. But you don't talk to anyone outside of your company about that. It's crazy.
- [32:49]
Matt Divincentis
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [32:50]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay. I've heard that you guys have a internal goal. I don't know if this is true or a rumor at Atlassian, which is to be the best marketing team anyone's worked on. Is that from Atlassian or a previous job from Atlassian?
- [33:04]
Matt Divincentis
It's actually that's my team's goal this year or one of the many goals. Of course, we have some business goals as well, but that's always my goal as a, as a leader of a team. I've been fortunate to be part of many amazing teams over the years at work, in sports, in firefighting, and it's always my goal as a leader of any of those teams. But this, to be the best team and the best experience that anyone's ever worked on or anyone's ever been part of. And yeah, absolutely, that, that is my goal. You know, once you embrace that mindset and have a goal like that, then it's. It's on you to figure out, well, what are the elements that we need to make this the best team you've ever been part of? And it's different from team to team. Different teams need different sorts of care and feeding. But yeah, that's my goal.
- [33:49]
Dave Gerhardt
I love that. It sets the tone, it sets the culture. I like when the. I like when there are goals beyond just the, like, very measurable business goals. Like, you know, our job is to deliver X number of leads or pipeline. It's like, I don't know, coach my son's little league team. And the number one goal is have fun. And it's like, that seems so dumb and silly, but it's like that is that, you know, you need other things. Like, what are we. Why are we going to show up for this job every day? Like, let's build an awesome team that we're all proud of. And 10 years from now, they were like, oh, you worked on Matt's team at Atlassian. Like, that was amazing.
- [34:19]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I could coach my kids little league team as well. And I think that teams over the years that I've seen perform well in Little league are the ones that have fun and enjoy doing it. Yes, the rest of it will come. And so if we relate it back to work, like, if it's an enjoyable experience, people are inspired. People are working on things that they get, you know, joy or satisfaction out of. The results, the, whatever, the metrics, the business, all of that stuff will come. Conversely, if you have a team that's not having fun, that don't trust each other, none of it's going to work. So, yeah, that's always my focus, number one, first and foremost. And then the business, you know, will take care of itself.
- [34:55]
Dave Gerhardt
What do you think it takes to. I don't want to get like super meta with this, but I just like, what do you think it takes to be the greatest marketing team? How do you push your team to be, to be great? Is it like, go, go find inspiration, be super creative Go for a walk and be super creative. Like, how do you channel that? What are some leadership lessons to push your team to be better?
- [35:14]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, I mean, two things come to mind. I don't know if this is going to be terribly profound, but this is how I think about it. Number one, which is foundational, is you've got to build trust. Like, trust is the foundation of anything as it relates to a team. You know, maybe this comes back to my firefighting days a little bit. Like, man, in that situation, if you don't trust your team and that everyone's going to be performing, that is literally life or death. So, you know, the stakes are a bit higher there in the.
- [35:39]
Dave Gerhardt
I think about this is a huge thing in the, in the marketing sense of like any team that I've been on or when the team has trust of you and they know they're going to like, do something and Matt's not going to be pissed about, like, that's where you can really get the creative freedom and the freedom to do, to, to innovate in marketing. It's. It's a. Teams that have no trust or the CEO is trying to micromanage every little task in the marketing team. It's the ones that they the CEO has trust in or the marketing leader has trust in. That's where the creativity stuff, that's where the creative comes from, right?
- [36:07]
Matt Divincentis
Absolutely. Because then you can take the big swings without fear that you'll, you know, lose your job or your boss is going to get upset or whatever if, you know, you make a mistake or there's a failure. So that's number one, I think trust first and foremost. And then number two. And again, this is not profound. I know that a lot of people think this way, but just this idea of 10x thinking, just like taking big swings, a few big bets that, you know, will really move the needle in a big way versus incremental improvement over time. I think, you know, those two things combined give people the license to think out of the box. Think big, be creative, try things. Know that it's safe to fail if it doesn't work out. But man, when you hit that home run from time to time, you're going to have such a big impact.
- [36:51]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, tell me about product marketing at Atlassian. You, your role there. VP of Product Marketing at Atlassian. Just curious as, like, where that team sits in the company, how many people are on the team? What are you all responsible for? Any. I want to go behind the scenes a little bit.
- [37:04]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure. So let's see product marketing, Atlassian rolls off into the cmo. So it's part of the marketing organization. You know, we don't have separate structural business units like a VMware. You know, we have these business units that had a general manager on each one. You know, marketing, product engineering, all the rest. Atlassian has a functional structure. So we roll up to the cmo.
- [37:25]
Dave Gerhardt
Oh, and by the way, this is where I was going to try to get how do all the products work at Atlassian? Like obviously over the years there's been Loom was the big acquisition. There's multiple other tools inside of Atlassian. Jira, we used to use Confluence back in the day. Is it do all those things roll up into your product marketing like org. The company's not set up by product lines that you're saying it's not.
- [37:47]
Matt Divincentis
So I'm responsible for the core products. So Jira, Confluence, Loom, those core products. There are two other product marketing teams responsible for other products at Atlassian, but we all roll up to the cmo. So it's not like this. Yeah, business unit type structure with separate product organizations. We roll up to the cmo.
- [38:06]
Dave Gerhardt
Okay, all right, that's cool. You got fun products though. Those are good.
- [38:09]
Matt Divincentis
Really fun. Really fun. And I would just say not just product marketing, but work in general at Atlassian is unlike any other company that I've ever worked for or seen. Like the way that, the way that we work is pretty unique, I think, pretty interesting and it's culturally just like an amazing place to be.
- [38:28]
Dave Gerhardt
I mean you gotta sit, you gotta tell me. Okay, you know, I'm saying, I'm saying, well, why. All right, but let's go. Go ahead, tell me why.
- [38:33]
Matt Divincentis
I'm a good marketer, man. I got a whole.
- [38:38]
Dave Gerhardt
That's a good pitch. I'm interested. All right. I could sign a 10 day contract.
- [38:41]
Matt Divincentis
All right, you're on the hook. You want to take. So why is it so amazing? So one of the things about Atlassian and this is something that we, you know, work with our customers on as well is this idea of asynchronous work. So you know, I don't know, sure you feel this, but let me just go out there and say it. Like work post pandemic sucks. Like it really sucks. Like endless zoom calls all day, every day. At least this is what my life used to be like pre Atlassian. I'm sure most people at my level or generally in marketing could relate. Like you have these back to back zoom calls all day and then you've Got to get, try and get your work done. Like in the mornings, at night, on the weekends. Like it's just how.
- [39:22]
Dave Gerhardt
It's insane. My brother in law sent me a, a screenshot of his calendar and it was like meetings from 9 to 5 and then there's like it actually became a meme. Yeah, he sent then like before nine is this open block and then after five is this open block. And that's where you're supposed to do work. But then at the same time, like you're a real person. You have a life outside of work, you have a family, you have kids. It is in insane. I could, I could go for hours on like the why does everything have to be a meeting? Look, for years I actually made an ad. I made my own ad. I'll have to find it like a couple years ago. I just like to make random ads sometimes in Canva. And I made one for Loom and it was like the logo of Loom and, and the, the copy was like for when the meeting could have been a loom or something like that. And it's like, it's so ridiculous. I try to take if I can do it if it's not a thing that I have to be on video for. Even now I'm like, can I, if I have to take a call, can it be a phone call so I don't have to be just sitting here like staring at my screen for it. It's crazy.
- [40:13]
Matt Divincentis
Absolutely. And then you layer in, you know, Slack or Microsoft Teams or whatever your company uses, where you're just getting peppered all day with notifications because people are hitting you up. Because it's so easy to send a message these days, like, yeah, work sucks. Work post pandemic has been hell. So what we're trying to do at Atlassian is change that model where we sort of introduce this notion of asynchronous work, which is where as much work as you can possibly do that is not real time. Like not people sitting on a Zoom call or whatever we do. So what that means in practice is things like instead of having a meeting, like we mentioned Loom, like we use Loom heavily here at Atlassian. For those who don't know about Loom, it's one of our products. This is not a pitch, but like it's essentially the ability to record a quick video and send it out to people. And it's super quick, super easy to record and send out, but essentially replaces the need for a meeting. So you know, there are, is that.
- [41:07]
Dave Gerhardt
Is that a Noun. If I say send me a loom, that's a noun, right?
- [41:10]
Matt Divincentis
Exactly.
- [41:11]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, we say it that way. I say just like, Dan will send me a message. He's like, hey, I know you're out today. I made you a five minute loom with the updates on the metrics from this week. And it's like I can watch that at my own time. I watch it at 1 1/2 x. So it's a 2 minute video. My only beef. This is not a loom beef. This is a people. It does though. You've probably seen this. There's creep, right? It's just like anything else. It's like a 30 minute meeting. Everyone books an hour when everyone somebody's like, I'm going to make you a five minute loom. That five minute loom always becomes like 17 minutes. And so you have to really, you have to put in the work. It's not just like, it doesn't mean like make a shitty kind of fast update. Like I want to put in my work so I can make you a tight two to five minute loom that you're actually going to watch and pay attention to.
- [41:50]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure. But like for example, some of the ways that I use loom. So I don't know, like most marketing leaders, I'm sure we have a monthly metrics meeting, right. Where we review the monthly metrics. It, you know, historically has been like a 30 minute meeting where you'll go through the metrics, blah, blah, blah. It's all pretty boring, 50 people on the call, whatever. I send those out as a loom now. And so a couple of things. One, it then becomes any amount of time that it needs to be. So some months it's like four minutes, other months it's like 32 minutes or whatever. But I don't know about you. I think like normally when we get into meetings somehow all of the time gets filled up. Right. And like you don't necessarily need to. So that's one.
- [42:30]
Dave Gerhardt
Because I gotta talk about your weekend for the first six minutes of the meeting. I'm sorry.
- [42:34]
Matt Divincentis
Exactly. So there's that. It fills whatever time it needs. But then, you know, as you said, you can also play it at like 1.5x like I don't know about you, but I'm a 1.5x guy. Maybe I'll dial it back to 1.3 if it's dense and I need to consume it, but then add another layer on top. I can also do that while I'm at the gym. Or you Know, while I'm commuting to, you know, the airport to go fly somewhere or whatever. Like we don't need 50 people to be in the same place at the same time on that zoom call, you know, Atlassian, like we're a global company like most, but we're headquarters in Sydney. Like half our teams in Sydney, half our teams in the US but like roughly we've got others around the world but like a big chunk of us has flip across pre major time zones. It means that Sydney folks aren't having to get up early in the morning and we're not having to, you know, stay up late. We can just communicate in a very fluid manner asynchronously using loom. It's, it's been a game changer and yeah, it's actually opened my calendar up so I can do work during the day or talk to folks like yourself, which is fun.
- [43:36]
Dave Gerhardt
And, and how do you. So then what should, what should be a meeting? Do you have a criteria on that? Like when should we meet? Because I guess theoretically I could do almost all of my job on basically the main tools we probably use to run our business is slack email Loom.
- [43:51]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah.
- [43:52]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, I could do it all. So what's your criteria? Because sometimes you do have to meet. I understand that there's, there's vibes and camaraderie and some things have to have meanings. Do you have a bar for that?
- [44:00]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, for sure. The vibes of camaraderie though, that should be in person. I'll talk about that in just a moment. That's a big part of how we work at Atlassian. But what should be, you know, a zoom call or, or a meeting like this is something that requires real time debate and then decisions to be made coming out of that. So you know, sometimes the path is not always clear. There's, you know, conflicting ideas or, you know, options or whatever. The best way to resolve those sometimes is just to get on a call, you know, spiral it out, debate, and then ultimately come out of that meeting with a decision. So yeah, we haven't replaced all meetings, but certainly the vast majority of meetings could be a loom and are looms at Atlassian, which then, you know, frees up the time for one focused work or two to have those discussions, like deep discussions and debates, you know, in an actual live meeting you touched on like camaraderie and all that sort of stuff. So at Atlassian, we're very intentional about these on site kind of meetings that we have. So getting the team together, you Know, at an office or whatever. For both team building reasons as well as just getting stuff done together as a team. Whether it's like planning and strategy stuff or whatever we call those ITGs or intentional togetherness gatherings, which is like being just very intentional about everyone being in person one place one time. And we found that a little bit of in person time like that can then sustain you over the next, you know, two or three months through the zoom calls and the, and the looms and then you do it again a quarter later or whatever the cadence is. And that's enough to keep human beings going for the most part.
- [45:32]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah, I think it's super important too. And I think I, I discredited for a while like kind of post, post pandemic. And I think particularly I feel that and just like now there was a stretch of years where I just was working for myself and then we, we hired a team and so I have a small, we have a small team here and I notice a huge difference in, especially with new people coming on the team. How I sound and how I come off in slack and email is completely different once you know how I am in real life. And I think it opens the doors for me to have a sense of humor for me to be real, for us to be. And now that's just me right now, all of us together. And so I think there's, there's that whole level of just like hanging out in person, like sets the proper context for like now I, I know what Matt. First of all, I know what Matt's lower half looks like humor. I know his style. Like you really get a sense of somebody's personality. So I, I do think that's super important. I'm not of the like fully returned to work in office camp. I think that's also silly, especially for people. Look, I think there's a generational like in my 20s, absolutely. Got to go to an office. That's the place to be. But now that I have kids, I have a family, like I'm, I'm not going to go back to an office. And so I think that that's a perfect medium which I'm, I can get down with.
- [46:42]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah. And Atlassian. We're fully distributed. We have no office mandates. And yeah, what you just said comes back to what I was talking about earlier. Just building that foundation of trust with your team. You build that trust. Part of that's being in person, breaking bread with each other. And then you know, when you get that one line email or Slack message from Dave, you know, he's not pissed at you. It's just like, it's just needed to send you a quick message. You trust him already. It's all good. Yeah.
- [47:04]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, let's. Let's wrap up and talk a little bit about AI. As a product marketing leader in particular, I can think of a ton of use cases in my head. I'm curious at. What are you all talking about thinking about at Atlassian inside of product marketing and how AI is going to change what we're doing in marketing?
- [47:21]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, it's a good question. And look, firstly, I'm not an AI expert. I'm, you know, just another product marketing guy. So I'm not sure I'm gonna have any.
- [47:29]
Dave Gerhardt
You know, there's plenty of. Well, look, go to LinkedIn. There's plenty of AI experts. So if you, if you don't. If you can't trust Matt, go to LinkedIn and just. You'll find someone. So we got you. You're not an AI expert. I'm still. You're still on podcast. My. I'm still asking you, though.
- [47:40]
Matt Divincentis
That's fine. Yeah, there's plenty of people who can pretend to be AI experts. I'm not going to pretend to play that game. But, like, my, my belief, though is, I think, like, clearly it's going to be pretty revolutionary in terms of the way that we work at Atlassian, both in terms of the products we're delivering to our customers, but also how we're using AI. You know, I think agentic AI and this, this idea of having AI agents that form part of your team that can, you know, do specific work and tasks for you as an extension of your team. Really, really helpful. The ability for, you know, an AI agent to brainstorm a whole bunch of topics or ideas or, you know, go out there and do some research and bring me back some data and insights. Super, super valuable. I certainly have an optimistic view of AI where I think AI is going to help us just like any other, you know, technology change has over the past, you know, however many thousands of years, it will help us as humans be smarter, make better decisions, work faster, all the rest of it. And I think, you know, if we can embrace AI agents as part of our team, I don't think they're going to replace our jobs anytime soon, but I certainly think they can help us do our jobs more effectively and go do some of those things that we don't either have the time for or maybe aren't particularly one of our strengths. I'm all for it.
- [49:00]
Dave Gerhardt
What about, like, on the Atlassian product side of things, I'm guessing a lot of software now is going to be talking and focusing about AI. One of the challenges is like, everyone's talking about AI. How do you as a product marketer, like, I just see every company now is like, boom, I can't even open an app. I open an app and it's like, try our new AI enabled tools. And I'm like, man, that's cool, but challenging. Time to be a marketer. To like, even if it's true, how do you make people believe.
- [49:26]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, I'm not sure I've got any massive insights here, except it's a very difficult thing to try and stand out in this current landscape of just AI Washington.
- [49:34]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, I'll accept that answer.
- [49:36]
Matt Divincentis
That was a terrible science step, but.
- [49:38]
Dave Gerhardt
He just said, I don't know.
- [49:39]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah, don't need to add any more fuel on the AI fire, to be totally honest with you.
- [49:43]
Dave Gerhardt
Yeah. What are you excited about in marketing right now? It could be specific to your company or just things you're seeing in the market. What has you excited to do this job?
- [49:52]
Matt Divincentis
Yeah. I have always been interested in like, technology as a force for good. I think there's a lot of different, not just technology, but marketing as well. Like, you know, there's a lot of different marketing that we could possibly do. One of the things that I'm really inspired about at Atlassian and what I'm doing right now is we're helping to make. Let me say this in my own words. It's certainly not, not the tagline, but we're helping to make work suck less. Let me say that just going back to my earlier statements about how much work suck post pandemic, you know, in many different ways, our products, the way we're helping our customers is just to improve, you know, the way that we all work and engage with each other. And I am inspired by the idea that I could look back on my career and, you know, back on my life when we get to that point and it's like this horrible thing happened in the world. With the pandemic, everything had changed in terms of how we worked. It was a little bit bumpy for a while and that helped play a role in making that better and bringing some, you know, joy back to work and some hopping to in some way make a difference in terms of the way that we work and just having fun and enjoy and doing it.
- [50:58]
Dave Gerhardt
I could support that. I'll retweet that. Let's make work suck less. Let's have more fun. Let's find our strengths, understand our weaknesses, double down on the strengths. Let's do more Async work and let's, let's, oh, let's be the best marketing team and let's, let's have more fun at work. Matt, thank you, sir. Thanks for coming and hanging out with me on, on our podcast here. We'll link to all your stuff. If you're listening to this, do me. My favorite CTA is when. Which we get them every week. My favorite CTA is when you is when the guest ends up sending me a screenshot of, like, messages. People send them. So I want you to go to find Matt on LinkedIn. I want you to message him and connect with him. Be like. Heard your interview with Dave. Love it, love it, love it. If he gets at least three of those, I bet you I could get like a Atlassian T shirt or something. I think that takes three messages to get a T shirt. I'm just kidding. Well, send Matt much message. Matt, I enjoyed hanging out with you, talking to you. Hope you have a great summer. Let's make work suck less. Send more looms and we'll keep watching what you guys are doing over there.
- [51:52]
Matt Divincentis
I appreciate it, Dave. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
- [51:54]
Dave Gerhardt
All right, man.
- [51:55]
Matt Divincentis
Cheers.
- [51:55]
Dave Gerhardt
Thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, I ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay. If you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will say see you over there in the community. This episode is brought to you by Ztle. We're halfway through 2025 already, somehow, and one thing's clear. Events are back, baby. I'm all in on events. Here I am, big events guy. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, you name it. Everyone's leaning in. I felt this with our business at Exit 5. I talked to a lot of CMOs and marketing people and marketing leaders through Exit 5 wants something to do with events right now. And that's because events are human. We want to get out there and connect with real people. Events are a core part of our playbook. This year at Exit 5, we've hosted two virtual sessions each month. There's in person stuff, but there's also virtual. We do these virtual sessions each month. One large virtual event, one in person meetup. And right now, already we're deep in the weeds planning our drive conference drive 2025, coming back to Vermont this September. And to do it all, we use ztle. ZTLE helps us run a smarter event strategy from driving registrations, manag invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics tracking. Their salesforce integration also makes it simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without pulling in ops. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. It's all about the people. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going. With 12 plus events already this year and more to come. If events are part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, check out check out Zuttle Z U D D L. You can look at Zuttle to see how companies like Zillow, motive, Iterable and US Exit 5 are using ZTTL, the top event platform for business events in 2025. Go to zuttle.com exit5 that's Z-U-D d l.com exit5 to learn more.