← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
The Truth About Your ICP with Hailey McDonald, VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social | Ep. 417
00:49:39
Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:01]
A
If your approvals, assets, context and tasks all live in different places, you need a marketing ops intervention. Get everything organized and visible with Wrike, the smart word management platform. Head to wrike.com TMM to see more. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered convers with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast and today I have a very special guest and she's the CMO of Reich. But she's worked for like some of the coolest companies out there, I would say like Udemy, Bit, Dropbox, Salesforce, leading teams there and now she been at Reich for over two years now, which is amazing. And we're going to talk all, all things. But I'll let Christine introduce herself and let her talk a little bit what Wrike does and then we'll get into the podcast today.
- [01:23]
B
Sure. Well, thank you for having me. So I am the CMO here at Reich, have been here, as you mentioned just a little bit over two years looking at everything brand and demand, all the core marketing and communication functions and really focus on partnering across the organization to drive growth. So Wrike is a platform for complex work and work that gets delivered by humans and AI agents. We've got 20 years of enterprise work management experience and so with that breadth of experience, it really gives us the ability to give organizations governed context rich foundation that they can use to put AI agents to work on their most important workflows. So it's super interesting product. We have marketers as a core audience, so my team gets to use it all the time. But then we also partner with a breadth of organizations. Anyone from manufacturing companies who are looking to figure out how can they bring products to market faster, or marketing agencies that are looking at how they can manage multiple clients. So it's a pretty diverse set of customers, customers that we have.
- [02:35]
A
Before we get into the build versus buy talk, you asked a question that most teams skip entirely. So what's the first thing you actually assess before your team touches an AI decision?
- [02:49]
B
So I think before, before we look at making a decision, I want to make sure I've got the team that has the right skills in place, that the team is structured in the right way to kind of pull this off. So I think some of the most important things are have you set clear expectations with your team on, you know, how you're expecting them to leverage technology in general, how are you expecting them to use AI? And looking at when you're making these decisions, how are you going to measure success? So I really look at, you know, what is the velocity of the work that they're doing, what's the impact of the execution? So if you're looking to buy a tool, if you're looking to buy an AI enabled tool, or if you're looking to build in house with AI, how are you actually driving that increased velocity and better results from the programs? I want to make sure we're running programs not only more quickly, but programs that are more effective because we are partnering with AI or we're partnering with a vendor to make sure that we're delivering the best work possible.
- [04:01]
A
That's like super smart. Because I think a lot of people a year from now are going to look back and say, what was actually the ROI of using all these AI tools? And if you don't have that structure in place of measurement of if I implement this AI agent or I use AI in this workflow and it didn't do anything or did something, we can do something because we. You can overspend on tokens, you can overspend on using it. But what is the actual roi? And I think a lot of marketing teams or a lot of teams are going to start getting asked that question a year. If I'm not, we're in like the test mode of AI, which we only get for a short period of time. And then they're going to come to marketing and be like, all these tools are expensive. You guys are using AI everywhere. What was it actually doing? Are you seeing uplift? Are you seeing roi? What are some things that you think teams should be doing right now who are implementing AI to make sure that they are measuring this upfront? So when they do get the ask the question, what is roi? They're set up for success.
- [05:17]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think you really need to map out your, your workflows and what are the objectives where you're trying to deliver with those workflows. Because the workflows themselves need to be optimized before you are applying AI. You don't want to put AI on a workflow that has too many approvals that you know is going back and forth between multiple teams with unnecessary handoffs. So you sort of have to optimize the core first. Is the way we're doing work today the most efficient? And then look at how can AI automate that even more or pull out more of the tasks that are routine and get those executed and then have a human actually review it. So I think kind of going back to the basics, like, are you working efficiently today? And then how can AI help you be even more efficient?
- [06:11]
A
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think I always said this because I was in marketing operation, like, you have to be able to do a task manually Great. Before automating the task.
- [06:22]
B
Exactly.
- [06:23]
A
And if you don't know what great looks like, AI is not going to tell you what great looks like. You're the taste layer of whatever AI is going to produce. And I think that's such a good point that people just think that AI can solve and I can hire a marketer with AI and they don't know. They don't have a marketer in house and they don't know what good marketing looks like and they hire an agent and the agent doesn't do what they thought it was going to do because they have no filtering process or no human insight there. So I think that's super, super important. I also want to go into, I know this is a big question with all CMOs, but how are you thinking about hiring these days and then also thinking about, like, restructuring your team based on, like, what, you know, I could do for your team?
- [07:19]
B
Sure. So, you know, I think that on. On the hiring piece, from a skills perspective, something that hasn't changed is you're always hiring for curiosity. You want marketers to be always asking the why, always looking at how can they do things a little bit differently for better results. And I think that that is super important. To leverage AI, you have to be thinking about what not only because the pace of innovation that's happening in the market today because there are always new models, new examples, new tools. But I think that you've got to have the curiosity in terms of this is working today, but how could I get it to work twice as well or deliver twice the results? I think on the technical side of things, I feel like many marketers have always been technical, We've always been deep in the technology, but really I think we've got to kind of up our game on the technical side. And again, back to that curiosity. There's a ton of information out there, best practices being shared either within your team or outside your team to actually go and figure out how do these tools work. So, you know, looking for the curiosity, looking for the technical skills, but also looking at, you know, where is it that in, you know, the higher the interview process, the Job description. I can make sure I'm being really transparent about how I'm expecting people to use AI because it is evolving the way that work gets done. And although I think this is changing, you may run across people who you know, aren't able to use AI in their, in their companies. I don't think that happens much in tech, but outside of tech. In that case, are people using AI in their personal life? Are they experimenting with it even if they are not allowed or their security teams won't let them use it inside their company? And what I look at is the first kind of dedicated, I'll say hire or internal transfer that I looked at was I needed someone who could help to drive this transformation across the team and using more AI. And so I actually found someone in our organization who was tech savvy and had a marketing background. So I actually carved out a role within my team, reporting directly to me, an AI and automation marketing manager and have him focus on how can we start to move some of these workflows into more AI enabled workflows. So kind of creating that, that first person to get things started. And then now as I'm looking at any new roles that open up across the team, how should we actually define that role? It probably shouldn't be the exact backfill that we had because now we've got an opportunity to look at how does this, how does this person do work differently? Has the profile changed? Has the way they do work change? And so let's rewrite the job description to make sure it's focused on where we want to go in the future. I think for, you know, for my team, we're looking at it in that way. I do think, you know, other organizations and certainly AI native companies are able to kind of build and say this is our ideal, our ideal org chart in an AI forward world. For us as an established company, I'm looking at how does the organization change over time as we upscale the team as we bring in new team members?
- [11:00]
A
Yeah, and I think both are not different approaches. But I do think that AI is changing so fast that it's hard to just say that this is the set in stone or chart of what AI is going to look like now because even a month ago AI looked different than it did today. So it's like how could you make the decision that we need X when that, when AI is changing. So I also want to go into something, some specifics. I know you've built some cool things internally with AI. Could you get into like, like what you've built internally as a marketing team, how fast it took you to build it, and what were like some of the results of building that.
- [11:46]
B
Sure. So, you know, I'd say last year was a lot of experimentation with individuals looking at how can they create something that's going to improve their, their piece of a workflow. And this year we're trying to move more into scale. And so one of the the key things that, that we've built out has been a content hub for the marketing team. So if you think about all the different types of content, even just written, you know, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, long form, landing pages, ebooks, we wanted to create a tool that would help us to accelerate that, the creation of that, the approval of that. We've extended it to also include visual, so static design elements. And these are really areas where we look at the written content. And the visual content is required for almost every type of marketing campaign. And so this was our big opportunity to create something that would impact the whole marketing team and everyone could benefit from it. So that AI and Marketing Automation Manager created this central place where we have input all of our Personas, our messaging, all of our style and brand guidelines, and built the governance around it too. In terms of how do we make sure that if you're creating a piece of content that is going out on the website, that if there's something we need to adjust, we can update that page. If we're sending an email to our entire database, that is something that is going to be harder to adjust later. And so we're being clear around what are the approval processes depending on types of content. But if you take a look at some of the results so far, we've really seen a lot of very specific measurable gains. And a couple examples, if you think about our SEO article creation, we were able to move a process of creating one article from three to four days that included a full day of SEO research. It now takes seven to 10 hours so the team can get it done in a single day. So we're saving 65% per 65% of the time needed to create an article. And so that is really a 3-4x multiplier for the team. So that same team can actually deliver 25 articles a month versus eight articles a month. So that's just one example where we're able to get a lot more done on the SEO article side of things. It's also impacting other formats. So our case studies that writing has dropped from three days to two, so have seen A meaningful ability to get more of those customer success stories out there. And our email campaigns went from two days to half a day. So a lot of very specific, measurable time saved and time that we can then turn into more strategic work or increasing the velocity and the amount of work that's happening.
- [14:57]
A
That's super cool. I've always said that's one of the biggest wins marketers could have is especially established companies or companies that have been writing for a long time. You have so much words out there and documents out there and articles out there where you could have it stored in one place where AI knows you can create those guardrails. Like you said, the governance, you could create that brand voice. So people could either pull a quote from an article, go find an article, could like create something in the right tone that we want for an email and stuff. And obviously it's not gone to like two hours because you need that human element to make sure that sounds great. Like the links are right. If we ship this, it looks good, but it all. But at least it saves you so much time of that upfront research the upfront looking for things upfront where, where I know I did this interview a year ago where like I find this interview and AI could pull it up. So I think it's. I think everybody needs to have like a content brain that's AI in their company. I think this is a great, that's a great example of efficiently using AI right now. What is that moment where you thought, wait, we just can do this ourselves with AI? Was there like a specific trigger? Because I know a lot of orgs is like AI saved a lot of marketing teams the ability to having to ask a lot of people to do a lot of things. So what it was like that moment where you realize, hey, this is going to save us also like a lot of back and forth with a thousand teams because we're using AI.
- [16:47]
B
So, you know, I think the initial push was we saw the content creation process as one of the key bottlenecks for, for all of our programs. And we knew if we could improve that piece, all of our programs would get more efficient, more effective. And so that problem caused us to first go and look at external tools like we've always done. And we had just brought on our AI and automation manager to join the team. And so as we were taking a look at vendors, we partnered with him to kind of say, hey, what's the special sauce? Is this something that we could build ourselves? Is this something that we could potentially build more customized for our own use cases because we'll be able to integrate it into all the rest of the tools that we're using. We'll be able to integrate it into Wrike. So one of the key points for us was being able to integrate it into Wrike, the product that we use every day to manage our workflows so that we weren't going outside that system. It was something that we could integrate in and make sure that the content that was being created was linked back to the tasks and the projects that the team was working on. And so, you know, that partnership with, with this, this person on my team, he knew what was technically possible. He had a technical background. He also had a marketing background. We pulled him out of our digital marketing team and so he was able to kind of take those two, two pieces of his experience to kind of say, okay, I know what the most important parts are and I know what's possible to build with AI tools in general with our current stack. And the fact that he had kind of that dual expertise gave us the ability to kind of make the call and say, you know what, let's, let's try to build something ourselves and look at how do we take, you know, some of the different use cases that we have and build it into a single platform that we would need rather than potentially purchasing multiple, multiple tools to support the team in their content workflows.
- [19:02]
A
That's awesome. I think like, I know we, there used to be like people used to say T shape marketer, but like having a table shape marketer where you have like someone who can be great at two things, like someone who gets marketing and also is technical can, if you just had the technical side and they didn't understand like how marketing works, you might, it might take 10x as long. But just because he has that and he already knows your marketing team, which is amazing too, so that saves even way more time. I want to ask this question because I think since AI, there's so many cool things you could do and I bet a lot of your team is doing cool things with AI. How are you encouraging sharings of learnings and failures of what AI is doing inside your team? Is there. How has that been done? Because I feel like if someone has a win, it should be shared or someone tried something, it failed. Everybody should know that a maybe, maybe there's a different way to do this or maybe you shouldn't go down this rabbit hole of this AI workflow. Nobody designs bad marking ops on purpose. You just wake up two years in and all your approvals are an email, your assets are in three apps, your Slack is amaze and your Mondays are like one long status meeting. Reich is how you do yourself at It's a smart work management platform with visual collaboration AI that catches deadline risks before they even happen and the structure to let you focus on the real work integrates with everything, aligns everyone used by teams at Lyft Ogilvy Nvidia. Go to right click.com TMM to see how.
- [20:46]
B
So we absolutely encourage the teams to to share, whether that is posting new use cases and learnings on our Slack channels or we have specific time carved off. In my monthly marketing all hands where we take a couple of key examples and have the teams come in and share with themselves what did they build, what tools did they use, what tips and tricks do they have for the rest of the team. And then we've also started to capture a library of AI enabled workflows so that we can kind of create this catalog where people can learn and look at tools that were used. The specific outcomes, what did the process look like before? What did it look like after? So there's this reference library and we're going to be accelerating this in terms of continuing to share those best practices. We want to make sure that we've got kind of regular power hours where people can come in and showcase what they've done and teach other people how to do something similar. I think that peer learning is super important where people might say I'm in a different function or I have a different role but this is the general idea of what this person was trying to do and I can see how I can take elements of that. Or this person is using a new tool that I haven't quite gotten my hands into yet and I want to see how, how, how do they use this tool and how do they actually operate it.
- [22:18]
A
I love that you have like shared wins in the all hands. I think that's a key to make sure that people get us excited of what they're building. And I remember when I was a young marketer I used to like, like am I going to be like mentioned in the all like marking all hands on the all hands. I think it's so cool for like the younger or like the upcoming markers in the team to always get their work shared internally. I also wanted to ask you, we're at like a weird, I think this is like the first time in marketing where we, we can ask this question where like hey, when I want to do something in marketing, like should I build it internally or should I go look and buy it? I think before we were like, like leaning on the side of hey, could we find a tool that someone made to do this? But now there are AI tools that could spin things up that can be really good. And if you partner with engineering and company, you could spin up really fast. So how, how do you weigh that decision internally? You have a, hey, I need to go, let's go buy a new tool to solve this problem, or hey, let's just build it internally because it'll be better for us if we build it internally ourselves because we know how our structure is.
- [23:47]
B
So I think that with AI, it changes the types of questions you're asking when you're looking at how do I solve this problem. I think that internal tools are great for speed, for specific use cases where you say, potentially unique to my company or the way we work or the way we're structured. I need to figure out how to solve this problem. I think when you look at buying tools, you need to look at where do you need to have governance in place and you need to make sure that you've got clarity and tracking around approvals. When you look at enterprise size, customers, where you're really operating at scale, and if something goes wrong, you need a trusted vendor team to support you. So I think the governance piece is certainly key and that's where I would lean more into the external tools where those, those companies have the expertise that I just won't be able to build in house easily. I think that another piece that I look at is, is this workflow touching customer data, our CRM tool, You know, anything in, in our automated marketing stack that might put ads out into the market. As an example, now you're looking at access controls and how are you managing data and managing it in a compliant manner. And that piece is also one where I think as you look at buying up platform, those vendors have security teams, they have all the certifications, they have kind of the frameworks and the support system in place so that you can make sure that you're not giving access to data to people that should not have access to it. And I think another, another key piece is you're, if you think about building out the internal tools, you're building it out with expertise in your processes, how work gets done in your organization. If you think about a more mature platform, those platforms have expertise across your industry, multiple use cases, multiple companies. And as you think about the AI that's being built and embedded in those, those products, it's been shaped by thousands of teams, workflows, customers, edge cases over the years. And so that compounding advantage I think really allows you to kind of provide this accumulated intelligence to customers. And so as I think about kind of those three pieces around the governance, the security side of things and that industry wide intelligence that I, I will want to tap into for certain types of, of tools, that's where I look at, you know, maybe that's something we, we shouldn't be building in house. We should lean on an expert who has spent a lot of time and talked to a lot of customers about this workflow, about this problem and they've solved it and I can partner with them and purchase that platform.
- [27:05]
A
Yeah, not only like they do this, but if you do that in house, you're going to have to have someone managing all those things and how it's like you're gonna have someone managing governance of that tool, the security of that tool, patching bugs of that tool. You can't just build it and that tool just lives. It has to have all those three things. And if you don't have a team who can do that or it's gonna cost more to do that, it might be more efficient just to go with a team that has built it, understands it, has the security like you said, I think that's good. But obviously there's like that low left, the lower left stuff like building a content hub where like hey, I'm not going to go find a tool that's going to help me build a content hub. I could just build my own hub in house and it's secure enough. It's not sharing data with any customers or anything. It's all internal so we don't have to worry about it that much. What's the most expensive just by the platform decision you've ever seen a marketing team make?
- [28:15]
B
That's a good one. I mean I think that off, I think most of those end up being marketing automation platforms that in my experience when I look at my budget and see where it's going, that's, that is kind of where, where a lot of the investment goes. I think that that could be shifting as we look at the impact of, of AI on those tools. I think the importance of, of data is one that is becoming increasingly important for any company and especially for marketers is you know, do you have access to, to the data structured in the right way so that you can apply AI on top of it and be able to automate campaigns and be able to automate and make decisions and do the right targeting, provide personalized experiences for people. And so I expect we might see, you know, those big, big investment decisions shift more on the data side of things. Some of the big data platforms out there that, that you're going to want to make sure you have in place to, to connect your AI tools, whether they're internal or platforms that you're buying.
- [29:35]
A
You know, another question I have too is I know like most of the marketing teams out there are pretty much using like the same few tools that exist that are working. So how, how do you recommend like a marketing team or marketing leaders? Like how do we, how does it, how does one stand out if everybody's using the same tools? Like what do we have to have in those tools to make us like perform differently and do different things if everybody is going to use a clone or ChatGPT or Jasper or this or that as tools that they use every single day?
- [30:15]
B
Yeah, it is definitely something that I am hearing discussed quite a bit in forums and groups that I'm part of, which is if we all have access to the same tools, how do we actually differentiate? And I think that is where the human element comes in. It's where the creative ideas, applying judgment and taste to the output of, of these tools that we all have access to is going, going to be important. You know, how you use them is going to be just as important as using them in general. So I think that's, that's why I am, you know, feeling like there's, there's always going to be a place in the world for fantastic marketers because that is what I think AI is not going to be able to replace. And I want to make sure that I am a marketer who also knows how to, to leverage AI to maximize and get the most sort of benefit out of it I can, if my competition is using it, and then make sure that I'm applying my unique expertise and background to how we're going to use the tools.
- [31:23]
A
Even with your example of your internal hire, I think like expertise is what makes that higher grade and will be able to leverage the tools better than other people because he has internal expertise, he has marketing expertise and he's technical expertise. And I think that's like the trifecta of expertise that needed for that particular
- [31:48]
B
role.
- [31:48]
A
Internally I hear a lot of people asking that question of expertise. And then also the other thing you said there earlier is like, how could we have like the best first party data, the best first party research, the best first party? Because that's also a Differentiator because what AI can find on the Internet, it's not going to be able to. And if you can spit out things that AI is not spitting out, that's also a different especially in like in the content game of marketing or in the ads game of marketing where you're trying to be a little different. A couple more questions. One of them is that the budget conversation, like how are you thinking about AI? And a budget is like in the tool line item, is it its own line item? How do you approach that conversation where what's AI doing?
- [32:48]
B
So I would say right now if I had to bucket it into an existing item, I'd say it's a, it's a tool, it's a technology. But I think that we're, we're probably going to have to carve it out as like its own, its own dedicated category just because I mean the, the it's not a seat based pricing model. It's not something that I can say, I know I'm going to spend this much on it this year, especially in the phase that we are, where people are, are starting to figure out the power of IT and how much we're spending on the usage now is probably going to increase significantly in the future. And so I'll need to work with finance to kind of look at the forecasting element of it, especially for this year. And then as we go into next year, hopefully I'll have a better baseline in terms of forecasting that, that spend. But you know, back to what we talked about earlier, I think it is that what is the impact that I'm getting from that spend and is, you know, the, the next dollar spent on that tool actually returning 10, 20, 50x in terms of impact for the business. And it's all, it's almost like program spend. You know, I'm willing to spend more on a program or paid advertising or an event if I get better ROI out of it. And I think of AI in the same way, if I'm getting better ROI out of it, I'll spend more on it and I'll have the discussion with finance on, you know, how do we forecast that? Maybe we have some buffers quarter by quarter as we see see the spend on that go up. But you know, in the end if the ROI is, is there then I think that that helps to justify the case for, for that becoming a bigger and bigger line item.
- [34:33]
A
And for any marketing leaders or like marketers listening since there's so much going on in the AI space and so much like noise in the AI space. Like how are you like learning AI? Like sometimes there's so much noise that you can have this like decision paradox. Where to start you can have, should I start using like call Cowork? Should I like start using Cloud Coach? I use chat, GB codecs. Should I use this? Should I use this? And it's like I have to learn all these things. So how, where does your starting point go and how, how do you learn AI?
- [35:12]
B
So for, for me personally, I started off with just experimenting across all the, all the tools that we had enterprise licenses for in house and looking at do you know where am I getting better, better kind of answers or results? I don't, I don't think there's going to be one tool that I would center on and say this is the only tool that I use. I think there are going to be different, different platforms that I use for different purposes. What I, what I do want to do is make sure that as we're getting the learnings not only from me, but really from my teams who are, who are, you know, able to experiment a lot across a lot more. How can we center on, this is the right tool for us to, to focus on four content creation or for this particular workflow. I would say, you know, I get my, my personal learnings from various communities that I'm part of. You know, there's some communities who will put on, you know, they'll put on an AI boot camp for CMOs or they'll put on a workshop where they'll say, you know, come in with your, your biggest questions on AI and we're going to brainstorm as a team. So I learn a lot from my peers. I'd say also the big LLM vendors out there, they are invested in making sure you know exactly how and how deeply you can use their tools. So some of them have great kind of ramp ups in terms of here's the set of courses you should take for marketers or here's the set of courses you should take for leaders. So I think leaning on some of the vendors too to capture learning. I know that there are a number of kind of paid resources out there too if you want to get access to, to paid courses. I haven't gone down that route yet, but I think there's probably a lot of experts out there who are trying to construct learning for people who are in different functions or different roles.
- [37:12]
A
Yeah, I think, I mean the peer to peer one is always the one I found best because they're probably in the same shoes as you or have similar problems or similar issues. Last question I have for you because I ask everybody in this podcast, what's a marketing hill you would die on? Oh,
- [37:36]
B
ultimately the most important thing marketing can do is help to drive company growth. Whether whatever attribution system you use points to marketing or sales or partner that in the end that really doesn't matter to me. I just want to make sure we're driving growth for the company and being as helpful as possible. So I look at attribution as kind of like check, we're done, now let's move on to the work. Let's not haggle over credit over certain things. So I really think it is about driving growth for the business and value for the customer because we do want to make sure that as we're marketing, we're, we're getting the right, the right product in front of the right buyers who are going to see value out of it and continued value and be our partners for a long time.
- [38:22]
A
I think I'm glad you said both because I think you can get construed growth is actually value, but it's not always like, just because you're growing doesn't mean you're always like getting the right customers in the funnel that are going to get value out of your product. So I think those are two good things to put together. Lastly, where could people find what Reich's doing, what you're doing, your journey, all that good stuff?
- [38:49]
B
I would say, you know, follow me on LinkedIn, follow Reich on LinkedIn and our various social channels. We always try to share helpful information, examples from our customers, trends, what we're seeing in the market. So sort of all the, all the social channels are a great place to start.
- [39:10]
A
Well, thank you so much for coming on. This has been super helpful and I know a lot of people are going to get some value out of it. So thank you for coming on.
- [39:18]
B
Well, thanks for having me.
- [39:22]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.