All Things Digital Transformation with Jeff Fleischman, CMO of Altimetrik

 

Peter: The next C M O podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies, and we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The next CMO is sponsored by Planful for marketing. A leading marketing performance management solution that automates marketing, planning, financial management, and ROI optimization, and hosted by me Peter Mahoney, an experienced C M O C E O board member and executive advisor.

In this episode of the next CMO podcast, I speak to Jeff Fleischman, the CMO and Chief Digital Officer of Ultimetric. We talk about all things digital transformation, what it takes to do one, when you know you need to do it, who should own the digital transformation and everything else in between. We also talk about Jeff’s book he wrote recently called Advice to My Younger Self.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy the conversation. Thanks for listening. Hey Jeff. Thanks so much for being on the next C M O podcast. We’re really excited to have the conversation today. Maybe to set the table, it would be great if you could give our listeners a little bit of a background on who Jeff is.

Jeff: Well, thank you, Peter, for having me. My name’s Jeff Fleischman. I’m the currently the CMO of Optometric. We’re a digital business and digital transformation company. We’re located in Detroit and we’re global. A little bit about my background because I didn’t start out my career as a cmo. I started out at what’s now JP Morgan in a management training program.

Had various roles throughout my career at am at at JP Morgan, and then moved on to Amex. So for about 20. I was exposed to several different businesses, very different functional areas and all of that came together to give me an overall strong. perspective around business around how companies have to set strategy and really how pieces across the organization come together and work effectively.

About halfway through my career at American Express, I was working in risk management. So up to this point I was primarily finance and risk. Person and my boss comes into my office and I remember this very clearly, and he says you are now in charge of the web for risk management. Go figure it out.

And at the time, What the web was aol that you dialed into and chat rooms. Matter of fact, at American Express, we didn’t even have a website. We were a keyword on aol. So that was really the start of a major changing point in my career. If I look back, That was probably the single most impactful sentence about being in charge of this web for risk management.

And through a course of a couple of very quick organizational changes, I ended up running the web for basically all of the us. Businesses within American Express, so consumer, corporate, small business merchant operations risk. And it became my full-time job and my full-time passion. So learning more about how to execute.

Experiences and leveraging data and technology to deliver on an expectation around engaging a brand became, you know, my, my mission and it was actually a fantastic role at Amex. The web became, and mobile became the single most prevalent customer. I. And so from that point I took a couple of different roles as a Chief Digital Officer and chief marketing officer that led me up to where I am now.

And in those last few jobs, I’ve expanded my skills around public relations. Pr social media and corporate communications among others, and it really rounded me out. So the starting point was the change in direction at American Express, which led me to where I am today as a chief marketing officer.

Peter: Well, that’s it’s a great story and it’s amazing how little decisions along the way can have just this giant impact and set you off on, on a path. And I, I had a very similar thing when I I. Early in my career, I worked for a little company called ibm. And and, and, but after leaving there, I, I went to a small, smallish public company and the, the head of one of the divisions of this company came to me and said, Hey, the head of marketing just quit.

Will you take the job? And until then, I had no job in marketing. And, and it was probably around the same era, you know, it was it was around the early, early nineties, early to mid nineties at that point, et cetera. But it’s interesting cuz the other thing that you mentioned that I think is really powerful when there, there are two things that about your background Jeff, that I think are really compelling for a contemporary cmo.

And one of them is your background in financial matters. So understanding finance and business is actually a really core. Skill that’s required for CMOs. And it’s surprisingly absent from, from a lot of marketing leaders, and it’s an area that needs to be developed a lot more. And the second is in from the very early stages, you were dealing with some fairly complex areas of digital transformation.

I mean, talk about. The, the early pioneering days of creating these customer experiences, which kind of brings us to it maybe round out a little bit more, give us a little bit of background on, on Tric, because that’s obviously some of the business that the company is in. So tell us a little bit about what they do.

Jeff: Sure. So, and just one note on the finance side, you know, having the finance background combined with now my marketing roles has been invaluable and, you know, we start everything from the ground up. We have a keen sense cuz everything now in marketing can be measured. So it, it’s a great combination.

So Tric short answer to Tric, we’re a data and digital engineering services company. Our mission is to help our clients del deliver outcomes or rather, Our mission is to help our customers achieve the outcomes they’re looking for. So we do this with speed, we do it with scale, and we do it consistently.

And you know, this whole concept of digital business enablement has a lot of different meanings for a lot of different companies. Everyone talks about digital transformation, they talk about digital business. But one of the recent studies I saw, maybe not so recent anymore, Was that about 80% of digital enablement projects fail.

And they fall short of expectations. And there’s a number of reasons. I’d say they’re. probably about four or five reasons, but some of them include that there’s a lack of data, so we call that a single source of truth across the enterprise, and that’s lacking. There’s also an absence of a business led approach, focus on driving outcomes.

Typically, a lot of digital transformation and digital enablement projects start in technology and it’s left to technology to solve, but without the business there to understand the outcomes and to convey that. Projects start to fall, you know, fall off from where they need to be. A lot of companies take this big bank approach and you know, what we do is we do the complete opposite.

We take small incremental small incremental approach. We actually do a lot of proof of concepts when we start out our relationships with some of our clients and we build a track record of delivering very quickly. Another challenge is having an agile culture and everyone, you’ll talk to anyone and everyone says, well, we are agile.

Agile, you know, we’re an agile company. They take a waterfall approach and maybe they are agile or they’ve taken a waterfall approach and they’ve sped it up a bit, or they have standup meeting. But really true agility. And DevOps is really a skillset and and that’s been a challenge for some companies is to actually take that agile maturity and bring it into today’s technology environments.

And most recently you’ll hear a lot about cloud platforms. And cloud platforms are pretty quickly becoming standard before people. Companies were apprehensive about pushing stuff into the cloud. Now I think you, you can argue that if you’re not on the cloud, you’re really falling behind. So those are some of the obstacles.

But really for digital business and digital transformation or digital enablement, it really comes down to drive an outcomes, understanding what the challenges companies have and solving for that. So whether you’re a CMO in a company or you work in a company that provides service. to clients. The key is to understand what the business objectives are and having that in mind, you can then leverage data and technology to actually better position the company for success, be able to innovate, grow, infuse data and technology into the mix and really make things happen and get the consistency and the scale and do it faster.

So, We do that we build solutions pretty quickly. We can have results in as quick as eight to 10 weeks in a very cost effective manner. We don’t interfere with current business operations. We do it independent of the business, regardless of maturity, regardless of company size. And, you know, it’s been a very interesting period for us, especially post covid, that everyone, even if they recognized that digital enablement was something they needed to do, It became, we have to do it now, especially with covid changing the way we operate as companies and consumers.

Peter: So Jeff, one of the things that IO is. Identify as a, as a potential risk when it comes to doing a, a big transformation project is the idea of of ownership. These things can be super amorphous, obviously. And, and one of the things that you see from time to time is that they’re people who have a job title like yours, right?

You’re a, a CMO and a cdo, a Chief Digital officer, as well as a chief marketing officer. How important is it for an organization to have a single owner of that sort of digital or digital customer experience to embark on a project like this? And and if, if they don’t, is it even possible to have a successful outcome?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think I would answer yes and. At the same time, and I’ll tell you why. Because as a marketer, and I tell this to folks when they ask me what our marketing strategy is, I reply, I don’t have a marketing strategy. We have a business strategy that marketing has to execute against.

So I think the first and foremost is understanding what the business dynamics are, what customers need to have, how do you effectively deliver solutions, whether it be through data or technology, and really, Customers an experience that they expect or didn’t know they could have. So I think that’s a starting point now from a marketing perspective, you know, we’re maybe at the cutting edge or the front edge of delivering that experience in terms of whether it be web or social media.

Or any type of marketing communications that might go out or how you wanna position a company because there’s awareness around what a company can do. But more importantly, it’s making the right connection at the right time on the right devices in a world that’s gotten far more complex and moves in real time.

So what I would say is that, Having that top level perspective of what the companies geared up to do or wanting to do, it becomes much easier for a marketer to take that and run with it, but do it in partnership. If marketers take a, you know, we’re on our own type of approach, it really does end up having a lot of problems down the road because there could be a disconnect between what the business goals are and what marketing thinks is.

And having that collaboration is really important and that extends into technology cuz technology also needs to understand where the business is going, what’s important. The best way of solving for those issues is understanding what those issues or challenges are. So, you know, that’s been my approach.

It’s been very effective in allowing me to have my marketing and digital organizations integrated very strongly within the company and not be a separate operating unit that’s kind of off doing what it thinks is best for the company, even if it’s well-intentioned, can often fall short of where the company needs you to.

Peter: Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m gonna, I’m gonna fight you a little bit on your marketing strategy comment. The, so I’m, I, I, I’m a big believer in alignment of strategy, so obviously your marketing strategy has to be aligned to the business strategy. It has to be its service to what the overall business is trying to achieve.

But I think it’s important to understand and be able to articulate the specific strategy you’re using within marketing to achieve the overall business goals you’re trying to get to. It may be semantics, and I think we may be saying the same thing with slightly different approaches. But anyone who listens to this podcast would probably would probably give me a hard time if I didn’t call you out on that one because I have a very specific point of view when it comes to to, to these kind of things.

But I’ll. I, I, I want to, I wanna move into the, some of the digital transformation stuff a little bit more because One, one of the things that you see, I mean, you, you can point to some major events, like Covid obviously drove huge digital transformation for a, a lot of companies that we as consumers deal with on a day-to-day basis.

So that’s, that’s a relatively easy catalyst to understand. But what other kind of catalyst, what is the, what is that? That point that makes a company realize that they’ve got a problem, realize that they need to make some material transformation in the business because it’s not for the faint of heart, obviously, to, to fundamentally, and, and I think of a transformation as a fundamental change.

So, What, what are those key points? And, and how do they get decided in, in these companies? And, and to, to pile on even more questions to you, Jeff, I apologize. So what are the catalysts how does this happen and, and what is the role of A C M O and sort of identifying and and and, and really trying to be the driving force for this kind of,

Jeff: So that’s a great series of questions. I’m gonna try to answer all of them, but please ping me. And remind me if I don’t answer all of them. I think the role of the C M O. In helping drive change is twofold. One, it’s the experiences that you can create. Now, every cmo you know, not every cmo, but all CMOs probably have a different range of responsibilities.

But assuming that the Cmmo is primarily responsible for making that connection to an end customer, whether it be through web, but social media, public relations or awards let’s assume it’s a fairly. Broad role. One, the CMO and the marketing organization should be able to understand what the customer experience is telling them.

You know, are they effective experiences? Are people buying products? Are they falling out of the funnel? What content, what information is resonating the most? So when you look at the engagement aspect, what’s working, what’s not working? The second. And maybe there’s three pieces. But the second piece I would say is understanding.

Where the competitive set is, you know, who are you competing against? You know, what’s their positioning? How are they speaking to the same audience? Is there a differentiation between your company and their company? So when you look at that, it gives you some third party perspective. I think there are a lot of companies that don’t invest in looking externally.

A lot of people speak within the company. They have their own language. They think everything they. they push out is easily understood because they understand it. But a lot of times customers don’t get it. And so I think it’s really important to put yourself in the perspective of what else is happening in the marketplace.

And then the third piece to me is the research and working with the business partners around product functionality, product feature. Are you seen in the marketplace where, you know, there is a competitive distinction between the types of products and services you’re offering? Are you helping customers solve the challenges they have or are you helping consumers with their purchase decisions and buying product?

So I, I’d probably put the range around those three things. Now, did I miss anything in.

Peter: No, I, I think you, you were pretty comprehensive in your answer and I realize I asked you a complicated set. So well done, Jeff. What a follow up to that though, is. Because you’ve seen a lot of these transformations, it would be really helpful to understand your perspective of the approximate breakdown.

What percentage of transformations are offensive versus defensive? So here’s what I mean. So you can see companies who are really innovative, who are setting a new standard for the way that customers can experience what they’re doing. And we can probably point to the companies that have, you know, Tesla is an example, right?

That has completely re-engineered the way that you did business with with. Purchasing a car. So that’s something that we can all understand, obviously, and Amazon. And so there are lots of people who are innovative. So that’s what I think of as an offensive transformation. Defensive is the people are trying to catch up who, who realize that the market is changing around them.

So what do you think the split is between those two kinds of transformations?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a really tough question to answer, but. . To put it in more context, if you think about it, you have usually you have the startups that are disruptive and then you have the legacy companies which are grappling with converting legacy systems and processes into the new way of doing things.

And I always looked at Uber and I’m amazed that if you told me that some company would come out, create. You know, a mobile application, almost game-like application where I can order a car service, track the car, see the driver, see the license plate, and you would bypass medallion regulations and taxi and limousine commission regulations and turn the industry upside down.

I’d say impossible, just from a regulatory perspective. So when you look at companies like Uber or Airbnb, it’s a bit easier because if you take a concept and. And execute well. Amazon’s another one where you execute and adjust. Cause Amazon didn’t start out as the company they are today. They started out with books and very humble beginnings.

So I think that’s really important that they can come out and build experiences. And Uber didn’t create new technology. They leveraged data and technology to create better experie. And then the market followed. Then you have the legacy companies and the legacy companies are really in a catch 22 because everything that got them here today could literally be at risk of being transformed or really pushed into extinction to some degree, and you think about financial service companies in banking or investor investment services, wealth management.

There are so many FinTech startups out there that are chipping away at banks, and it’s not that they’re doing things that banks can’t. , they’re free to do what banks typically may not invest in because you have this internal struggle between the legacy systems and now reinventing yourself. And one story I remembered American Express is that in the.com, I did a presentation to a fairly large crowd and I showed the new company and the legacy company, so banking.

Like Newbank, Citibank was, you know, the legacy company. And I went through all these companies and I got to American Express as the legacy company and I said, what’s a startup company? It’s American Express. And I said, the challenge we have is 150 year old company is that we have to now. Shake off some of the things that got us here and challenge ourselves to adapt to the new way of doing things.

And and so that, that became the challenge. So I think for a lot of legacy companies, The challenge is how do you embrace the change? Understand that yes, you might actually have to shut off or coexist with existing processes, but if you don’t do it, someone else will. And if you look at JP Morgan City Bank, they all have ventures, you know, venture.

Company type functions within their company to buy or invest in the startups. So a lot of these legacy companies are coming to realize that if we don’t make certain changes, and I think Jamie Diamond treats his company as a technology company, not a bank, and he’s making some pretty big investments in in startups or FinTech companies to help accelerate change at the bank.

Peter: Oh, it’s interesting. I was just having a conversation over the last. 24 hours about how still as a, a several decades customer of, of American Express, they’re still far ahead from almost anyone else when it comes to the consumer experience around just the, the systems and control and reporting and kinds of things that that you want as a consumer.

To to, to interact with, with a large, complicated bank. And I imagine that that is a really interesting problem because they’re still dealing with lots of, I’m sure, legacy, legacy systems. The, the, the other thing I was thinking of though, Jeff, is that it, it, it’s interesting because we can all. Think of these examples of now household brands like Uber and Tesla and Amazon and Airbnb who’ve made these transformations.

The things that are. The transformations that are most impressive to me are these smallish kind of businesses who’ve actually been able to fundamentally either change because of a market condition or take advantage of a new thing. So we’ve all experienced now a. I can’t believe how many restaurants and retailers have been able to pivot their business to curbside delivery, as an example, has been an amazing change.

I mean, think about not only the, the, the digital change that they had to make, but the, the business change and the labor changes they needed to make to get there. And small manufacturers embracing things. 3D printing for, for parts on demand and things like that. So there are all these, those things to me are really compelling transitions that people have made.

And, and I think that that the advice that you gave earlier about sort of looking externally to what’s going on, looking at the market, looking at the competition, I think is a really important role for marketing leaders because they really need to understand what’s going on in the world. And it may not be directly, hey, There’s a pandemic coming or whatever it may be, a how are we gonna embrace new technologies, whether it’s generative ai, like the chat G p T stuff, or it’s 3D printing, or it’s some new kind of consumer trend that’s going on, it’s gonna infe affect you, whether you’re a B2B or a B2C business.

I think marketers need to, to really get their arms around that and understand it. How, how have you seen. If you look at some of the customers you’ve worked with over the years and, and as a marketer who’s done a digital transformation before, what are the conditions you need to set up as a marketing leader to create that ability to look externally?

Do you have a dedicated team? Do you just have an ethos around doing this? How do you think about that, Jeff?

Jeff: I think there are two or three different ways. One, if we deal with third party vendors, so, you know, I worked with a lot of agencies in my day and I said to them what I need from. is I need to understand what’s happening in the marketplace and you are working with dozens of clients and part of the reason I’m working with you is to help bring that to us because you get a bit insular inside a company.

You have a culture, you have a perspective, but I constantly need to be hit with what’s happening in the outside world. That’s one. Two, I encourage my team to look and spend a portion of their week. Just checking out competitors, doing research, finding a research paper that you might find interesting, what could have an impact on our business and how can we help?

So that is something. , I strongly encourage people to do on a re even now on a regular basis. Just try to understand what you’re seeing in the marketplace, like chat, G P T, right? So just a couple weeks ago I wrote a blog, completely written by chat, G P T, and I said, what is chat G P T? And I posted it with the caveat.

I didn’t write a single word. To this blog and it did a pretty good job. So now I’m telling my team, you know, we have to understand how you can leverage this tool to do some research, to see how it responds to what’s going out in the world. And it’s up to. I empower my, my, my team to take this on as part of their job and I make it a requirement, social media.

I push my social media team to try to understand what you like out there, and I’m constantly sending them things on LinkedIn or via LinkedIn when I see like a nice posting a nice treatment to a, posting, a nice way of accompany telling the message. I’m constantly peppering them with all of these things coming through.

And then lastly, a lot of companies have research teams and I’ve had a couple of companies, had independent research teams within the company and and had some really good success in working with them to help bring some of this stuff to the forefront and for them to tell me things that I need to know.

Or what trends they’re seeing. Right now I work with one of the major analyst companies you know, have Gartner, you have Forest. and these types of companies also can be useful in meeting with the analysts and finding out what are companies that I would want to target? Stressing out about what’s important to ’em.

What are their priorities? So really it’s just a richness of information, you know, and it’s really all in today’s day and age, I always tell my kids, you have the answer to anything you want. You just go into a search engine, ask the question, and like, magic, you get it in my day. That required, you know, A ton of work just to get a simple answer on a question.

Forget about a complex answer on a complex issue. And I really do think as a marketer, people need to always be thinking about what’s happening in the world around me. What’s happening in that could impact my company both positively and negatively. And I will tell you right now, chat, g p t or that AI type technology to create content is gonna make us far more productive.

And with a lot less people than if we had to do a lot of this starting from scratch. And one last thought I’d give you. is that I always think about, you know, apple and Steven Jobs and the iPhone and if he went around asking people, what do you want? Well, when the iPhone first came out, if you’re old enough to remember, the biggest issue people had a mobile device is the calls would always drop.

You’d literally be mid-sentence, it would drop, you’d call someone back, another minute and a half it would drop. And when you got to cell towers, it was just a mess. The and no one said, I need banking. I need to be able to have a car. You know, come to my house and pick me up and take me somewhere, or I wanna do some investments, or I wanna, you know, book a restaurant.

You know, but he saw that, he saw where things were going, kind of gretzky metaphors, where the puck is going, not where it is. And as a marketer, as hard as it is, because you get locked into your day-to-day responsibilities, you really need. To cut out a piece of the day and really focus on, you know, what’s happening around me and who’s my biggest threat.

And your biggest threat. May not be your competitor. It might be some garage based company that just came up with the best idea to transform your industry.

Peter: Well, that’s, that’s amazing advice. And I think the, the idea of carving out time. And one of the things I like to do, and we’re gonna get to your book in a second, but in, in, in, in, in my book I recommend sort of the key meetings that every marketing leader should have. And they should have an organized, sort of focused kind of calendar, and they should have an external market focus. Review regularly is, is a, so you want people to be thinking all the time, but you need to also force that kind of thoughtful analysis of what’s going on in the world to make sure that you’re actually not just you know, Taking little nips at this thing, but really understand what are the broad changes that are going on in, in the marketplace at, at large are important to understand.

So let’s, let’s talk about your book. I understand you wrote a book recently called advice to My Younger Self. Tell me a little bit about what’s the book about and and and why, why you wrote it.

Jeff: So, the book is about advice I would’ve given to younger Jeff. So you. I have a lot of cringeworthy moments in my career. A lot of things I wish I could have done differently, but that’s part of growing up and getting experience. And so I wrote the book because I’ve actually ended up working for some of the best leaders in the world.

Absolutely terrific leaders, and I had my share of not so good leaders. And you learn as much, if not more from an a a bad leader than you do from a great leader. But what I did is I always valued input that was given to me, whether it be one-to-one or within, you know, audience of the type of things that I could learn.

And I always said to myself, if I’m not doing something right, I want to put an end. And fix it. And as I evolved my career, you know, smoothed out the rough edges. And so that’s what I did. And the book was really designed cause I always thought about, oh, if I could only have gone back to my younger self and given myself this advice, now how many headaches and nervous moments would I have avoided?

And how much better would I have been today because of it? . So what I wanted to do is give people an opportunity to learn from my experiences and basically it’s a mosaic of lessons I’ve learned from some of the top leaders. So I feel like I’m just taking those learnings and passing them on. And the book is really good for people starting out their career, mid-career folks.

But also I think it’s good for leaders that have to remind themselves that the people that work for them as part of their team have the same concerns, anxieties that they had when they went in that position. So that’s why I wrote it. I’m probably gonna. Come up with a second edition, and in it I’m gonna have a chapter on advice to my older self.

Because as important as is to go back going forward, you know, you don’t wanna lose your passion. You wanna follow your passion as a young person. You are more idealistic in what you wanna do in your career. And then careers and life get in the way of what your plans are. But I do think that, you know, always having in the back of your head when you’re younger, What you want to at least, you know, stay focused on doesn’t get lost in the mix.

One chapter I talk about, you know, This whole concept of what you’re good at versus what you wanna do. And I put into four box matrix and high, low, high and low, what you’re good at, high and low, what you wanna do. And if you’re really good at something you wanna do that you like doing, enjoy doing. It’s a home run.

But chances are you’re either really good at something you don’t wanna do or you’re not as good as something you really love doing. And so I, I give guidance on when you’re in those situations where it’s not completely. What you need to do to get you on track so that something you love doing, you become good at, or if something you’re not thrilled about, what are things you can do to make that more of a, you know, how do you build more satisfaction around that?

And of course, if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re not good at it, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Peter: That, that sounds like pretty clear advice to me, Jeff. And you know, thanks for sharing the background on the book and, and we’ll put a link in the show notes for more information about the book and how you can get a copy of it, et cetera. So looking forward to to reviewing it myself. And believe it or not, we’re, we’re approaching the end of our time here, but as I warned you, we we ask all of our guests the same question To wrap up and then I’m gonna pose it to you at this point, Jeff, what advice would you give to current or aspiring CMOs?

Jeff: So the advice I’d give to CMOs most importantly be open-minded. You know, challenge yourself understand, you know, from a marketing perspective, have a clear understanding of, you know, what’s important to your company. What are the company goals and everything you do should be aligned to what are you.

question number one. Question number two, why are you doing it? And question number three, what do you get for it? And if you do that and you build the right relationships, cuz marketing is very much a relationship based function. You have product groups, you have business groups, you have service groups, operations, so on and so forth.

And marketing is kind of the glue that brings it all together. So it’s really important to be able to be an ambassador across the company. Take what the company represents, what it wants to do, and then use that as a leading edge. Opportunity to make more connections with your audiences, engage your audience.

You know, you have the marketing funnel. How do you get people interested in the company? How do you bring them in, and how do you pass them on to that next stage, which is consideration and purchase And marketing plays a key role there. We now operate in a real time world. You know, there’s no barriers around devices, no barriers around how you communicate, where you communicate.

It’s 24 7. So really understanding the ecosystem and making that connection back into the business and how you can help drive what’s important to the business is critical.

Peter: Well, excellent, Jeff, and great advice. So thanks for sharing, thanks for sharing your perspectives on digital transformation, on your advice to your younger self and everything in between. Really appreciate you being on the podcast today. If you and the audience have ideas about what else you’d like to hear on the podcast, guests or topics, please drop us a note at thenextcmo@plannuh.com.

Make sure you follow us on all those social media things like LinkedIn and Twitter and all those places. And I hope you enjoyed the show and thanks again for listening. Thank you, Jeff, for being on the show.

Jeff: Thank you, Peter, for having me.