Hey, John, welcome. And thanks for joining us on the next CMO podcast. Love to hear a little bit more about you and trust insights and marketing with coffee and all the things that you’re involved with these.
[00:02:12] John Wall: Yeah, sure. Thanks Peter. I work at trust insights. We’re a small marketing consultancy.
We really focus on mid-sized companies that don’t yet have the budget to have a data scientist. You know, they’re not ready to pay a quarter million dollars to have somebody come in and start running machine learning models for them. We help them get their data in order, help them with their marketing analytics, and then ultimately get to a point where.
Doing marketing programs based on all this data that you’ve got. And so my partners are actually Christopher Penn and Katie Robero they’re the founders co-founders and they had been working together at shift communications in the Boston area, and they were doing so much marketing. That their clients kept saying, Hey, you know, we love this for PR, but we want these analytics for everything else, you know, for the rest of the business and shift them got acquired.
And so they finally decided to break off and just start their own business. Now in the background this whole time, Christopher Penn and I have had this podcast marketing over coffee, which we’ve been doing for 15 years now, which I can’t believe it’s been so, so long we were doing so well with the podcast.
And the podcast has been driving so much business for trust insights that it just. You know, made sense for us to finally make this all official and work together, not just the podcast on the side, but make it one of the marketing programs for trust insights. And so that’s, you know, that’s where it got me to today.
At least that’s why, I’m where I’m at now. It’s amazing.
[00:03:31] Peter Mahoney: So many questions that I have already about this, John, but one, one is I’m going to, I’m going to get into the analytics because that’s really fascinating for me. And hopefully for our listeners. And, but I, I, I want to ask a little bit about the podcast because 15 years, I mean, That has to be there must have been two podcasts back then, right?
I mean, what did the podcast landscape look like 15 years ago?
[00:03:59] John Wall: Yeah. So marketing of our coffee started in 2007. And so by that point it was still early. I think iTunes though did have podcasting in the app. So at least was on, you know, it was available to the world. Most of the world didn’t really know or care about it yet, but Chris and I were.
Very early on. So in 2005, Chris was doing the financial aid podcast. He was working for a company that did student loans. And then I was actually at marketing Sherpa, which only the oldest listeners would probably know it was a lot like, oh my God, I
[00:04:32] Peter Mahoney: must be one of the oldest listeners. Cause of course I know marketing Sherpa,
[00:04:36] John Wall: a fan of Schiff.
So I was at Sherpa in 2005. And a tech mag. I had just read that there was this ability to stream audio and yeah, at this time. So Adam Curry, the MTV VJ, and Dave Weiner, a tech guy out of M I T I can’t screw up MIT and Harvard. You know how that is? That’s like, could, can be shot, but I believe he was over at MIT.
Those guys created the RSS. Dave created the RSS protocol and Adam Curry, the VJ was creating these daily audio files for people to test. And yeah, there was a point where I was. The w was it podcast, alley directory, where there are about 240 podcasts. And at that time I was doing like a Don I must talk show thing.
It was called the M shows 20 minutes. And I was literally ripping off the morning DJ thing, you know, but it was a podcast. So you could listen to it at any time. And it did run. I ended up, you know, being able to get about, I think God would turn around 4,000 downloads an episode, which back then was he, you know, top 5%.
But yeah, it’s funny. I reached a point in to. It was, I was down in Manhattan and I was at a tech event and looking across the street and I saw a billboard for the NBC TV show heroes. And suddenly it hit me. It was like, oh my God, wait a minute. This is NBC. They have millions of dollars in these giant shows and they still have to advertise and promote their show to cut through the clutter.
Like there’s no way I’m ever going to beat, you know, like Joe Rogan. There’s no way I could get to be a Joe Rogan or a mark. Uh, with what I was doing. And so it was right at that point that I was like, okay, I need to find a co-host and we need to start talking about marketing and tech because that’s a podcast that only I can make and do.
And so that was the real seed from marketing over coffee. I had to beg and plead to Christopher Penn to set up a time to talk. And yeah, when we began, we were, you know, we both have. Full on marketing guys meeting at five in the morning at a Dunkin donuts and Natick. And that’s really where it all started.
And yet now it’s, you know, 680 episodes later. We’re still cranking things out.
[00:06:34] Peter Mahoney: It’s amazing. And if anyone hasn’t checked it out, I assume most people must know these days, but if you have, and I really recommend you do, and we’ll make sure we put a little link to the show, to marketing with coffee and in our show notes, and maybe we’ll get you another listener or so gone.
Uh, which would be handy. I remember it’s funny back in the day, I, I remember back to 2005 when, uh, I was at a company then called scan soft, which became, I renamed to nuance back at the time. But. We acquired a company called nuance out of Menlo park. That’s where we got the name. And there was this guy, young guy named Steve
And I don’t know if Steve’s listening today and great to see you or great for you to hear me if, if you’re listening out there, but Steve said, Hey, I’ve got this new concept. We’re really. Focus on podcasting back in 2005 and everyone thought he was insane. And, but he was clearly way ahead of his time.
And it’s amazing that that the medium has come so far. So I could talk about this all day long, but that may not be quite as interesting to our listeners. And I do want to talk about data insights and data science for marketers in general, in, in what you, not only what you do at trust insights, but really sort of the things that drive the needs for what you do at trust insights, I think are the.
That are interesting. So you, you mentioned the idea of, of serving the need for people who need a data scientist, but aren’t going to spend a quarter million dollars on one. So what are those key applications these days that are driving the need for a data scientist?
[00:08:12] John Wall: Yeah, we find that there’s five areas where data scientist is easily applied.
You know, where you can take advantage of machine learning. The first is text mining. Okay. So we see that very often and a lot of tools do that now, but just the ability to have some kind of app or machine that can go through a ton of whether it’s press releases or customer feedback, just any kind of text to be able to grind through that and get insights about.
You know, no, no matter how many interns do you hire, you’re not going to be able to turn through 18,000 articles a day. And so that that’s one of the, the easy wins there, deciding who’s influential, who actually drives business for you. Network graphing is the second tool that is very common that we use.
Just having the chance to dig into, for example, social media, right. And not just look at followers. But being able to see, okay, when this person talks about our brand, it spreads to X number of people, and they may not be the biggest and most powerful accounts, but they are the ones that when things, you know, get on their radar, they tend to run and you get the best spread.
The third one is data clustering. Just seeing how things relate. Death was pretty popular in SEO. We tend to find that certain terms. Bundle up together. So instead of just trying to score for a certain term and be an expert on a certain term, we find that there’s usually a basket of four or five, where if you write content on all of those, you tend to do well across the board.
Fourth one is driver analysis. That’s the CMO level one is everybody wants attribution analysis. They want to see, you know, which programs are driving business and what’s working. Excuse me. And we have some machine learning stuff where we can roll up some of that data to give you a more of a view than you would get just from straight Google analytics.
And then the last one is forecasting, which is, you know, the real shiny object people get excited about, you know, us being able to say, okay, here’s the topics that are going to be hot over the next six months. A lot of that has really taken a real, you know, a real hit to the head from COVID because so much of the way daily.
Just proceeds has changed in the past year, you know, a couple of years, but there’s usually still some predictable stuff that you can dig in there and find it. And just knowing, you know, you don’t need to be a genius to see this stuff like you, as a marketer intuitively know that you should have had all your pumpkin spice posts done, you know, four weeks ago, because now that’s what.
Peaking and just similar principles apply to everything else. So those are the big five fresh for machine learning as far as things to take advantage of. And of course, all this is predicated on having good data, which is a massive challenge. That’s always underestimated.
[00:10:43] Peter Mahoney: Yeah. Let’s talk about that a little bit, John, because obviously.
You, you, you can’t mind what you don’t have. And if you, if, if you have lots of robust bushy data sources out there that you can go through, then that’s fantastic. So what are the key data sources that you think every marketing leader should have as, as an asset within their organization? What should they really focus on on making sure they own and build from a data?
[00:11:14] John Wall: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I mean, it’s constantly evolving. Usually as a company starts out for earlier stage folks, Google analytics is just a great place to have everything, you know, it’s free, you can get it up and running. It doesn’t take too much work to get things going. So that can give you a picture.
At least what’s coming in from the organic and paid side. You pretty much need to have some kind of CRM and some kind of marketing automation, you know, more customer first party data. You can gather as fast as you can. The better off that’s going to be. And then it just gets crazier and more insane as you go up the line, you know, once you kind of hit that middle stage, you know, you start to see places that have 20 to 50 different web based applications that they’re all stitching together.
And so now that becomes really crazy in that stage. It transitions a little bit and you start making decisions as far as like, are we just going to trace the customer and is it going to be all customer touch points or do we have to break and start doing vertical stuff? You know, do we need all the ads data?
And we need all of the events, data, and all of the. You know, I mean, there’s literally, you can use the whole Justin mares, Gabriel Weinberg traction model. There’s like 20 different channels. Like you can measure your PR paid social, all this stuff, you gather data on each of those. And then, you know, at that point it becomes something that does have to have a steward of the data.
You know, you do need somebody who knows where all these things are connected and what’s what, and that’s, that’s really where we can. And get things in order across the line, because the problem is the people that are in there building it are just, you know, maybe they’ve done it three or four other times.
And so having an outside source that has done it 20 or 30 times with the same tool set just makes the learning curve a lot less painful. Yeah. And then at the top end, it’s just, you know, full on insanity. You’d probably end up going data lake or customer data platform or whatever we want to call these things where you have some single, huge repository where you’re throwing everything.
And then the crazy thing there becomes. Making sure. You’re not putting stuff in there that you’re never going to use. You know, you need to keep it lean. And so that it’s still manageable and understandable, but yeah. And that’s kind of a whole, if you have an AI or machine learning adoption plan, you know, once you’ve got the data in order, you’ve finally reached that stage where you’re starting thinking about transformation where you’re like, okay, we have so much data.
Now we can do things that nobody else can do. You know, like the fact that Amazon, I can’t say her name because she will wake up and make noise for us here. But you know, her telling me. Last week that, Hey, this projector you’ve been looking at for your home theater is 75 bucks off today. Do you want to buy one?
Nobody else can do that. And that’s because they’ve, you know, they take advantage of all the data in their hands. So, yeah, that’s the, yeah. Sorry. This is a long answer, but it’s a, it’s a long and moving thing and it’s a, it’s an ongoing process, you know, you don’t just sit down and say, okay, we’re going to fix data hygiene today.
It’s you, you, you’re going to fight with this for the rest of.
[00:14:14] Peter Mahoney: So it sounds like there’s probably an element of having an overall data strategy that’s important. And that sounds kind of highfalutin and, and that’s probably, it’s certainly not the point that I’m trying to make. The point is you need to have a plan and you need to organize what are the data sources that might be important for me and what am I going to do with them?
Long-term and you brought up a couple of things that I think are relevant in. That consideration stack, including the idea of. Do you have the data junk drawer out there that keeps everything and your wife scolds you once a quarter that you really need to empty that junk drawer? Or do you, do you have a coherent strategy about sort of the prioritized data assets that are important for me to maintain?
And the other thing you, you, you of course used a trigger word there a minute ago of about first party data, which. Which makes me ask about the increasing importance of this kind of a data strategy with the upcoming challenges we’re going to have in leveraging third-party cookie data. So I suspect that owning first party data is going to be more and more important, but what’s your view on that, John?
[00:15:35] John Wall: Absolutely. And then it’s, it’s funny. It’s kind of like solar energy. You know, maybe you don’t agree with why you have to do it. Like, you may not believe that the cookies be completely gonna die or whatever, but you can’t argue with the logic that having that data under your roof and having full control of it is just a better and easier way of doing things.
So yeah, you have to be on board with it yet. So we’re seeing, I hear we’re looking at, I guess, in the next week or so Apple’s gonna have. Get rid of a lot of open and tracking data. And so you’re going to lose a bunch of email stats that you used to have. And then of course, all the cookies, you know, third-party cookie stuff, locking dyes.
I mean, I did see that have extended that yet another year. And there’s a lot of challenges with that. But then the other one too, that people don’t talk too much about is the social free for all, you know, organic social used to be a chance to kind of make some things happen. And those algorithms have been cranked down so hard.
And the, the bias against brands and companies is so high that that’s just become a media channel. You know, you, you need to pay to play for most people on the social. We see very few people, you know, the role of some of that is like, if you think you can succeed against. You know, whatever the four hottest podcasts are this week, then.
Yeah. Your content has a chance out there, but if it’s more like, Hey, come check out our next webinar. Like, forget it. You’re not going anywhere with that. So yeah, every company that has any kind of data strategies just needs to be trying to get as much of that locked in as soon as they can. A one cutting-edge one for that, that we’ve been playing around with a bit is just text messaging.
You know, there’s a lot of tools out there now for texts campaigns. Being able to get a more of a two way communication with your customers going, I’ve been using this app community, which is just amazing in that it has some machine learning so that if I send a bulk text out to the group, it will bundle up the answers.
People can reply. And, you know, if I say. Hey, the Jabber seventy-five T earbuds are on sale this week. And, you know, you might want to check those out. And if I get five or six texts back as far as well, how is the battery life on that? I can just say, Hey, oh yeah, battery life is, you know, I can answer that and it will go back just to those individuals.
So yeah, a lot of the stuff is pie in the sky and looking to the future, but we really. Are hoping that with all that first party data, and then the machine learning layered on top of that, you’re going to be able to do a lot more one-to-one marketing, just be able to send relevant messages to the right people at the right time.
And it’s not that you’re able to spam it’s that you’re able to be a more powerful marketer and talk to the people who are the right people to talk to because they have the right interest and you have the answers to the questions that they’ve got at that time.
[00:18:11] Peter Mahoney: That’s a really important. Well, when I say that you made a whole bunch of them there, John, but let me pick a couple of them that you made that I think I’d like to dig into a little bit more.
One is the idea of privacy and trust and personalization. And how, how does this all fit in this world where consumers are now more and more skeptical about. Messages they’re getting from brands or people they think may be posing as a brand. And you brought up the idea of text messaging, which is an interesting channel because it kind of cuts through, but it’s also being hijacked a lot these days.
And in fact, I’ve been getting a bunch of texts from my, what, someone who purports to be my phone company. Who’s saying, Hey, you know, here’s some special deal. And I know it’s not them. And, and I deleted all the time that it comes in. I, I think that it’s another one of those channels that unfortunately is, has the potential to be developed by marketers, but it is often hijacked by these evil doers.
So in the end, you end up sort of ruining another channel for people which I’m concerned with. So from, if you look at from a data. In analytics perspective, what are the things that a marketing leader should think about as they go through the definition and maintenance of their strategy that will help them maintain the trust of their customers and prospects so that they can actually continue this dialogue over.
[00:19:49] John Wall: Yeah. Yeah. That is a great credit. That’s kind of the marketers ruin everything argument, you know, that it just continues to get worse over time. I think adapting that mindset from the, you know, all these tools help us just push more out to these tools, help us put out what is relevant to the right people at the right time and not, you know, just increasing the amount of chaff that’s out there and making things worse for everybody.
Uh, Yeah, Matthew Sweezey has a book out the context revolution. That is a great primer on that. If you want to check that out, he’s over at Salesforce, but has really written a great piece just on how you know, it’s all about the data that you’ve got and how it applies to what people are doing. So all of the data, for example, around all these fitness and tracking apps, like that’s right in line with what that product is and what people are trying to do with that.
So the more data you provide there and can provide to the better. But, yeah, it’s, I dunno, it’s just such a very complicated thing because trust and privacy are totally irrational. Really, you know, they are, I mean, everybody understands like, okay, I trust this person and I depend on a brand to do it, but the reality of it all is.
You know, if you were really worried about trust and privacy, you wouldn’t have a cell phone and you wouldn’t have a credit card. Like everybody’s worried about the, the, the vaccine tracking us. It’s like, no, the chip is already in your phone. Like, we know where you are at 24 7, we have this, but there’s the promise that, yeah, as your phone company, I’m not going to give that data every to everybody, you know, I’m not going to send you.
Coupons when you’re in front of the pizza shop to creep you out. And so really for CMOs and other marketing leaders, spending a lot of time, understanding your customer’s motivations, as far as you know, why they do things, where they go, why they make the decisions they make, and which of those touch points, what kind of data is relevant and important.
And. Matching that up correctly, that’s really kind of the magic of that strategic position is making that all work like a good example on a large scale is T-Mobile, you know, literally their whole battle plan has just been, let’s go down the list of stuff that makes our customers angry. Well, not even makes their customers.
It makes all cell phone customers angry and let’s just chop away at the worst ones. And as they do that, uh, they, they get momentum and make progress. Another kind of the rookie mistake people make with this is going way too far. You know, you can’t just, somebody immediately gives you, it is somehow you get access to someone’s text message.
Like you can’t just start texting them. You really need them to text you and say, Hey, I understand that I’m getting these kinds of messages. Yeah, I am interested in this content. Otherwise start with email or social media or whatever it starts somewhere else, get their interest and you know, all the Hackney dating analogies fit here, you know, go on the first date, behave well, and eventually you’ll get the chance to send text messages, but you’re not doing that from day one.
[00:22:40] Peter Mahoney: Yeah. Interestingly, it’s this idea of social pragmatic. And I spend a lot of time with people who have, uh, disabilities and in sometimes what they need to learn. Some people is they need to learn social pragmatics. So when is it appropriate to say things? And it’s interesting because we, we. Don’t especially follow all those basic rules as marketers.
Like you said, when is it appropriate for you to keep sending messages to someone? If they’ve never asked for any information, it’s just think about it. It’s so funny that, that. What’s often missed is just the basic logic test. Does this make sense? Is this something that your mom would approve of that type of thing?
Is this being polite in normal? I think if we all followed that it would probably be a little bit.
[00:23:38] John Wall: Yeah, absolutely. But that’s the challenge of growing the organization too. You know, when you’re a company of 10 and 12 sitting around, you know, the boardroom table and having pizza, you can talk about, well, is this right?
Or is that wrong? But now when you’re a thousand people and some senior management says, Hey, we’ve got to crank out X number of messages over the next month, then somebody further down the chain. It’s like, well, I guess it’s okay if I hit. Two or three times a week instead of one, you know? And so yeah, kind of creating that whole map.
And I think we’ve seen the explosion of all this customer experience or, you know, the buyer’s journey, all that kind of stuff I think is driven by that exact same philosophy.
[00:24:15] Peter Mahoney: Absolutely. So if we look forward a little bit and say that. The pace of change in new data sources coming out continues to accelerate.
And the, the world of course has changed in the last 18 months, pretty dramatically. And the way that consumers are behaving, the way the companies are behaving, how as a marketing leader, do people keep up. With the continually changing landscape of data sources and approaches that, that are out there so that they can make sure they’re just following the right basic principles and doing, not missing something big at this point.
How do they.
[00:25:01] John Wall: Yeah, that’s a great credit Sundays. I feel like if you could tell me the answer to that, I would really appreciate it because we just spent so much time trying to stay on top of what’s going, but I think it comes down to having a good network of people. And I think like what we’re doing right here is the core of that.
If you have a network of people who are all trying different things, and as long as everybody. You know, is trying one or two things all the time. Eventually that will surface. And yeah, unfortunately I think that’s like a huge loss for us. I mean, we’re right in the core of marketing events season here, and most people agree that like the best part of these events are not that you go to the session and you go to the exhibit floor, but you go out with like your five buddies that are CMOs and VPs at other companies and you go to dinner and you can say, Hey, have you been trying, you know, how’s this work and how’s that working and you trade these ideas and figure out what’s going on.
But yeah, I think that’s one thing. It’s constantly underestimated the level of churn that we have been living in compared to many other professions. I mean, I really get the feeling that if you have a grip of like 15% of what’s going on, like you are six or 7% ahead of the average and the rest of the industry.
Whereas, you know, in other industries that does seem like, you know, the people that have been there 20, 30 years, no, like 80 or 90% of what’s going on. And so. But yeah, the only solution is to definitely have everybody and have this mindset of we’re always testing. You know, you’re always trying out new stuff.
You, you know, we have a spreadsheet, I call it the eye chart. Cause I’ve totally stolen that from Scott Brinker’s MarTech chart, you know, it was like he made this map of MarTech providers and now there’s like 7,000 logos on this impossibly, small to read thing. But I have a list of like, here’s all these different vendors.
Here’s the vertical areas. And at least once a quarter, pick one of those and go in and dig into a vendor or two and just see what’s going on and see how it works. And like I said, this community text thing is on the hot list right now, but, and yeah, ultimately that does fall to the CMOs chair to, you know, if it’s kind of unfortunate and scary, but like the last thing the CML wants is for a board member or the CEO to come into their office and be like, Hey, what’s going on with Tik TOK?
What are, why aren’t we doing anything on Tik TOK and having to go through the. Yeah, that’s just part of the job. That’s part of wearing the badge, but yeah, you want to try and stay in the ultimate goal to that is the SI yo comes in and you say, yes. You know, we did a trial on that six months ago and here’s the data and it didn’t really, you know, it’s not a match for who our customers are and how they behave because they don’t want to watch, you know, 32nd videos of cats or people being beaten.
So that’s not a match for us today, but to stay ahead of that is, yeah, that’s a never ending.
[00:27:38] Peter Mahoney: It’s interesting because you mentioned the idea of networking with your friends. And I find that that for many years, I tried to do that and stayed in touch with a core set of people. And I realized that the people who I was communicating with were one getting older because I am.
Into we’re just really homogeneous and, and that’s an issue. And so you really miss things, unless you introduce a diversity of thought and opinion and background into the discussion. And I, I recently developed a little hack to try to do that. My, my initial thought was maybe I’ll just like, hang out at bars and meet young people.
But you know, my, my, my family probably wouldn’t appreciate that too much. And I’m too boring to do that anyway, so that isn’t too good. So what I started doing is I. I launched this new program. I call open office hours and, and I, I make 15 minute slots available for anyone who wants to talk to a experience, CEO, CMO kind of person.
And I just put it out there and I put it on my Twitter. Profile and in different social settings and I have a full docket and people come all the time. And it’s amazing what you learn from typically much younger people who want to ask questions. And they’re asking questions about things that sometimes I haven’t thought about before and, and I find it.
It’s really amazing to introduce that new thought. Into into the discussion because otherwise you’re literally stuck with the same group of old guys who are talking about the same stuff. And that’s, that’s just limiting, I think, in, in your.
[00:29:32] John Wall: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And we could talk for hours. I’m, that’s just the classic filter bubble problem of what’s going on now, like one group that I’ve gone out of my way, and I have to say the podcast is a huge leader for this, you know, because there’s this whole group of marketers who have come up now who are totally adept at stringing together 35.
Solutions and making that their whole core thing, you know, the, the house list, you know, writing your own sequel thing is, is becoming not as common as it used to be, but yeah, that is a great point in that you really have to work to keep a diverse, uh, The set of sources on that because yeah, everybody, the concrete sets on your tool set and you really, it takes a lot to dislodge that where the people who aren’t tied in and haven’t made those same kind of long-term commitments to tools are definitely able to move you like superhuman for email or something like that.
You know, those things changing your, your whole workflow. There’s switching costs that the younger people do.
[00:30:33] Peter Mahoney: Exactly. Certainly they’re adept at trying new things. And when we’re stuck in the ruts of our old ways, sometimes it becomes a little bit harder to do so now that’s, that’s great. So we’re, we’re getting kind of close to the end of our time.
Believe it or not. Bef before I go into the last question, just help us understand how we can learn more about you and trust.
[00:30:57] John Wall: Yeah, sure. You know, marketing over coffee.com is place one. Stop for the podcast I’m over@trustinsights.ai. We’ve got the site over there gives you the overview of what’s going on and yeah, always on LinkedIn or Twitter, feel free to connect with me over there.
Great.
[00:31:11] Peter Mahoney: We’ll add all those little Linky things in, in the show notes. If you’re, if you have those handy and make it. For you to connect with John. And I recommend that you do all of those things. Marketing with coffee is a, is a great podcast, a great history, obviously, and I’ve learned more and more about trust insights, and it seems like an exciting place.
So appreciate that John, in the discussion and, and that leads us to our last question. We like to ask everyone, which is, what advice would you give to CMOs or those aspiring to become a senior.
[00:31:44] John Wall: Yeah, though, the one answer for aspiring CMOs, it is just critically important that you understand product marketing.
You’ve got to go down the product marketing side, and I would even say that that needs to be your ultimate profession and understanding because there is this whole track you can follow up. If you go down lead gen and advertising and a bunch of these different areas, you can become the kind of CMO that jumps into a company to help grow the business and take it over.
But you’re never going to cross over that line to get closer to CMO or CEO. Or at least get a decent chunk of equity so that you can have a real life-changing event financially. If you kind of stick on that lifestyle where you’re marketing, but you really don’t care what the product is. It’s a lot more difficult to get to any kind of point where you have a real leadership role in your, and I hate to say it in worst case situations, you end up being a human shield for, you know, the VP of sales and the CEO.
You know, you have three bad quarters in the CMOs. The first one. Kicked. And you’ll see that in the retention numbers, you know, over time. So yeah, go down the product marketing track. There’s a bunch of different ways you can do that and understand that. But at one end there’s like pragmatic marketing is a great framework for understanding that, but at the other end is just make sure you’re talking with customers every day, like understand the industry and what the company is doing by getting feedback direct from customers, because yeah, that’s in the longterm.
That’s, what’s going to make more success.
[00:33:11] Peter Mahoney: Well, that’s great, John, and as someone who spent a lot of his career in the product marketing track, that’s great to hear that you think it was a reasonable one. And I feel, I feel a little bit better about my choices along the way. I really enjoyed the discussion today, John, uh, and appreciate staying connected in.
For those of you who are listening. If you have ideas about the guests or topics for the show, drop us a note at the next CMO at Plannuh (Planful) dot com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Please subscribe radar show. If you like it, don’t rate it. If you don’t. I, and I hope you enjoyed the show. Have a great day.
Great to be with you today, John.
[00:33:50] John Wall: Oh, thanks Peter. My pleasure.
