From Sales Operations to CMO with TJ Waldorf, CMO of 1WorldSync

In hosted by me Peter Mahoney, an experienced C M O C E O board member and executive advisor.

In this episode of the next C M O podcast, I speak to TJ Waldorf, the c m O of one World Sync, a product content platform for omnichannel commerce. A former sales and sales operations leader. TJ transitioned his career into marketing about a decade ago and has been making a big impact ever since. His team at One World Sync has successfully made the transition from a single product, single audience organization, to a multi-product.

Multi audience team. They’ve integrated seven acquisitions and continued to drive growth for the company of 500 employees that currently services over 17,000 customers. Here’s my conversation with tj. I.

Hey tj, thank you so much for being on the next CMO podcast. It’s great to have you here, and I would love it if you would help the audience understand a little bit about TJ and a little bit about

One World Sync where you are

currently. Okay.

TJ: Sure. Yeah. So I am the the Chief Marketing Officer at One World Sync. I’ve been with the company, man just a little over three years now. So, it’s been a, it’s been a fun, fun three years. You know, prior to One World Sync you know, my, my career kind of spans over about 20 years, and about half of that time I was squarely in sales.

So sales management sales ops, leadership. All sales. And then the last eight to 10 years, I’ve, I’ve either been squarely in marketing or I’ve been a little bit of a hybrid where I’ve had marketing and then inside sales customer success, field sales technical support. So I’ve kind of done, done quite a bit, especially here at OneWorld Sync.

The company. So we’re in the omnichannel product, content management space, and that’s kind of a mouthful. But the way to think about it is, you know, you have on one side you have brands think of like Colgate, Palm, olive, and PepsiCo, and you know, all these brands that you would think of that have a lot of products, a lot of SKUs, a lot of product content in order to sell those products in store and online and on the other side, you have.

The retailers or the endpoints of where they sell those products, right? And we kinda sit directly in between both of those constituents to help them get their product content and their products to market in an omnichannel fashion.

Peter: is it mostly the the product sort of catalog promotion, or is it advertising or, or variety of things?

Tj.

TJ: it’s it’s a mix of product information and data that kind of powers the supply chain. So think of, you know, the size of a package, the weights and dimensions, and where the PA and where the product’s actually coming from. And that’s kind of where the company’s roots started. And then the other side of that, and the other component of that is the e-commerce element.

So think of the images that you see online, the videos you know, all the, the feature bullet points, descriptions, all that information that powers the, the online experience. So it’s, it’s both

Peter: Got it. Got it. Now, now one of the things that I’m curious about is is if you are a Colgate Palm Molet of as an

example, I mean, I, I know if you know, my content management kind of, kind of world is super simple with what I do these days. And I’m like, all right, I gotta make sure I got a square thing and, and I got a 16 by nine thing.

And I gotta make sure it, it, it fits on YouTube and that’s kind of it. So. What’s kind of the scale of the number of variations that someone like a, like Colgate toothpaste would have to go through to, to make it all the way through all the different endpoints and across all the retail

channels.

TJ: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, Colgate, Palm Olive in particular, they have, you know, 30 brands. And the one that just came to your mind is, you know, is the toothpaste brand. And, you know, I don’t have the exact number of variations, but it’s hundreds if not thousands. And this is, are you buying a single tube?

Are you buying a pack? Are you buying a case if you’re a distributor? So there’s, you know, there’s multitudes upon multitudes of variations that even a single product could have. So you can just imagine if you’re selling that in Walmart and Kroger and Amazon and just every place that you sell.

Here and internationally and, you know, it just, it compounds in a massive way, especially if you’re a company of multinational like, Colgate, Palm Olive. Right. And we, we help large companies like them all the way down to, you know, we’re working with a customer right now. We just did a case study. They’re three or four men.

They’re three or four person shop, right? But we help them scale their operation across 25,000 retailers. So it’s it’s quite the

Peter: Wow. God bless the three person

shop that can get into 25,000 retailers. That’s amazing. It’s a, and have you seen that change in, in your time at One World Sync where, because there’s so many really interesting sort of c creator businesses, things just pop up all over the place. I mean, the fact that a three person business can have that kind of scale and need the.

Sophistication that you all offer to, to manage

all that?

Have, have you seen that as a phenomenon happening more these

days?

TJ: Yeah. And if you think of, certainly in that example and then you also think of the direct to consumer side of this whole equation, right? So, you know, I, I started talking about our platform powering those, those retail endpoints that you would think of, but. We’ve got brands that are also pulling content from, directly from our platform under their direct to consumer site.

So, you can, you can be small and get started quickly and and really scale up pretty fast, which is it’s pretty amazing, right? Especially as you think about it from you know, a, a startup standpoint. And even on the consumer side, just how all this works on the backend to drive the consumer experience that we all see you know, the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world.

Peter: Yeah. So it makes a really interesting sort of i c p challenge for you as a marketer, right? So you’ve got people who go all the way up to some of the largest brands in the world, all the way down to, you know, Bob’s bait shop, it sounds like. So that’s a,

that’s quite the span. So how, how does that impact the way that you go to market and your marketing in general?

TJ: Yeah, it’s complex. I’ll I’ll be very candid in saying that and, and not only the complexity of dealing with smaller shops to larger shops, but you know, I mentioned kind of the company’s roots started in the supply chain and logistics data side of this whole. Content management space. And so we were working with a very specific set of buyers for that, for the last, call it 20 years.

And just over the last three years we’ve, you know, either acquired new capabilities or built new capabilities that serve the e-commerce part of that equation. So I’ve got the scale. Challenge. But then I also have the, we’ve, we’ve been selling to this one specific buying group for, for quite a while, and now we need to sell to the marketing teams, the digital teams, e-commerce teams, sales teams, so on and so forth.

So, you know, it’s a lot of really thinking about how we’re segmenting, how we’re thinking about our data across, you know, our CRM and our marketing automation platforms. And really dialing that in to, to support our teams to go out and, and have the right conversations at the right times with the right folks.

Peter: it’s, it’s, it’s interesting because when you get to that complexity, it just drives a lot of complexity. I guess that’s why that happens. So I, I, I forget what’s, what’s the scale of one world sync? I, I think your, your private company said, don’t be too specific. But w what’s, what’s the general scale of the

business right now?

TJ: Yeah, so we’re we’re actually as of two weeks ago, we are now we are helping 17,000 customers globally. So, So that’s kind of the metric that I use to give a little bit of a picture of size and scale from a, you know, employee perspective. We’re a little over 500 employees. We are a private company, private equity backed by battery ventures, which is pretty well, well known firm in this space.

So yeah, we’re we’re growing. We’ve grown quickly over the last three

Peter: So it’s, it’s interesting because I, I work with a lot of companies who are private equity backed, and, and going through that scale, that, that point where you have to go from, you know, one product or one buyer to multi products and multi-buyers, it just, it starts to add this matrix to the way that you think and, and adds

this new variable of complexity to everything, which is, which is really hard.

And, and we’re. Was that transition that happened, that complexity step, something that happened in in your oversight, tj? Or is it something that you sort of caught

midway?

TJ: So, June of June or July of 2019 is when bat Battery Ventures acquired One World Sync. And prior to that the company was actually owned by a nonprofit organization called GS one. And so really from that, That 2019 point through to today is when I mean, we’ve made seven acquisitions in that period of time and, you know, we, we’ve built a lot of new capabilities as well.

So I would say the complexities started to grow really at that point. And, and the real reason was that we saw that we had this sizeable customer base, right? That that was really only leveraging us for. One thing or kind of a point solution, and we, we felt strongly that we could go, go out and, you know, capture some of these new, new use cases which is what it’s been all about.

Peter: Yeah. That’s, that’s great. And it’s it, it’s a very typical strategy for private equity back companies is once you have the, you, you have the infrastructure to do it. It’s like, Hey, I’m a lunch restaurant. Let’s add breakfast. And it, it just

becomes sort of this, I can, I can use. The customer base, the capacity, the process, and everything like that, but it makes it complicated as you go along.

So tell me about how your organization has evolved to accommodate that

tj

TJ: Yeah. So from a marketing standpoint or for

Peter: From a marketing standpoint? Yeah. Yeah.

TJ: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when, when I joined the company, there was one person on the marketing team. So, you know, we’re, I’ll say that we’re much bigger than that today. We’re not a huge marketing team. I like to think of us as y you know, scrappy.

We’re lean, we’re we move quickly. And but the way that we’ve kind of evolved is we have started to specialize in certain areas around whether it’s product marketing because we do have these two sides of the brands and the retailers or the data recipients, right? So sta starting to think about how do we market.

To the brand side in a way that’s really gonna resonate to them. And then also to the, what we call a recipient, because it’s a data recipient, right? And that could be retail, it could be healthcare, it could be food service. But how do you speak their language as well? So that what we’re, because we’re selling a little bit of a, a different set of capabilities on both sides.

So you’ve gotta structure the team in a way that can, can, can really support that.

Peter: Well, that’s interesting. So I, I hadn’t realized that quite that, that you, you have a go to market motion that includes both the brand side as well as the the, the channel side. So you’re enabling channels. And so it, it’s

almost like, it is almost like an integration thing. And, and is there what, what’s the economic relationship that you have with with, with the digital channels

as an

example?

TJ: Yeah, it’s almost you know, I’ve, I’ve, my, my thinking around this has kind of evolved, but it’s almost like a two-sided marketplace sort of situation where, you know, you, in order to drive brand side adoption, you need the retailers that are saying, this is the mechanism that we want to. Acquire content and data, right?

And so, you kind of have to get the retailer bought in and then that drives the brand or the supplier manufacturer adoption on, on that side, right? And I mean, we, we generate revenue on both sides. But if you think of that 17,000 customers that I talked about, the, the large majority are the brands, which it’s probably, that might be an obvious thing, but large majority are the brands.

Peter: I, if, if there were 17,000 different kinds of channels, I’d be worried that, that’s

even more complicated than I thought it was these days. But I’m sure there are a lot. I mean, it’s just a, it’s a really broad distribution world these days and, and it used to be much simpler. And so I’m, I’m sure you, you, you can see that.

You can see the need, let me put it that way, especially if you are if you are a, a brand in trying to sell products in this really complex world. And,

but I I, I wanted to stay on this idea because I’ve just been talking to a lot of companies lately that’ve been going through this transition that you’ve gone through.

In fact, you know, my, my company was acquired this last year by a company called Planful. They’re now the sponsor. Yay, planful. Every go, please visit them. They’re my sponsor. and,

plan planful is probably about the same scale as, as you guys, there are, you know, about 500

employees. They’re private equity owned and

in Rowan, who’s awesome.

Their CMO just just went through a similar trans transformation where. He all of a sudden, you know, he had one product sold to one audience, mostly to

financial professionals, and then they acquired Plan A and now it’s planful for marketing. Now they’ve gotta sell to not only a new product, but a brand new audience.

So they had to really think

about the transition of their marketing team, and they went to the, this, what they call a pod structure, where they have

basically,

audience owners who, who really coordinate cross-functionally within marketing. All of the marketing to to each of of those. And one of our leads on the marketing side and planet is the pod owner for for the marketing side.

And then they’ve got different ones for different venues. But it’s a, it, it’s a different approach. And you know, I’m wondering if

you’d done something similar. To, to that where there’s sort of a a throat to choke which I know is very graphic, but you get the point. There’s a responsible

individual,

for for each sort of component of the way you think about the go-to-market.

Is, is that one of the things that

you’ve done?

TJ: I think we’re on that journey, like part of part of my overall organization. BDRs also report in and because we serve pretty specific verticals like you think consumer packaged goods or FMCG in Europe. Food service, healthcare, you know, there’s a pretty finite set of verticals. Consumer electronics is another one that, that we really target.

And so thinking about how do I align, I. BDRs with product marketing, with demand gen you know, to those verticals so that we just become, I think we, we become more efficient, which is maybe what you’ve seen and and kind of shape the go to market a little bit more towards that is, is where my head’s

Peter: Yeah, it’s interesting because you get to the point, especially with the complexity, and I know it sounds like you’ve gone through seven acquisitions. My, my last C m O gig we did a hundred which was a little bit insane.

TJ: I’ve heard you say that, which is crazy.

Peter: Yeah,

it was, it was crazy. And, and it’s really hard to sort of maintain your your strategy of your go-to market the right way.

It just becomes cacophony really quickly when there’s a lot of people doing a lot of. Things to a lot of different audiences.

Sot talk a little bit about, with the variety of audiences, talk about what’s the, the one world sync overall marketing strategy to, to to reach all

those

audiences.

TJ: Yeah, so I think like when I, when we kind of set the strategy with the team, we think of four, kind of four overarching pillars are big rocks, and it’s really three with a overlay, which is position, the platform. And when I say platform, I’m really talking about the company overall and how do we make sure that.

When we go to market with our sales counterparts and the BDR team, et cetera how are we making sure that we’re, that we’re segmenting the right way and having the right conversations. The second piece of that is we talk about just putting the customer at the center of everything that we do, which is you know, if I’m talking with customers in C P G, how are we telling their stories through case studies and, you know, reviews on G2 and just every place that we’re marketing.

Expanding our use cases, which we already talked about a little bit. You know, going from that single buyer in the master data or, or data governance space to marketing, to sales, to e-commerce, so on and so forth. And then that overlay component of the strategy is, you know, we just call it measure what matters.

There’s a ton of things that we could measure, but, you know, what are the things that we, that we really need to focus on and measure that. Are going to move the needle. Right. And I think from a, from a North star measurement perspective, just very, very close alignment with with sales and customer success on pipeline and on bookings.

Right? That’s kind of the what we’re all here for.

Peter: That’s great, and, and obviously I know you’ve done some serious time on the sales and sales ops side, so that probably helps with your alignment to the revenue generation side of the business. And I, I like what you said, TJ, about the measure what matters. Because it’s so hard in this world where everything in the world is measurable, and I just see people get lost all the time.

And I’ve been doing a

lot of sort of advisory work these days since I’m since I’m now officially sort of separated from from actually running a company these days, which has been weird and fun. And one of the things people struggle with is that they think about, well, how do, how do I set up my measurement?

What are the things that really matter? And you. Brought up the, I think, the most common correct thing to, to add, which is this alignment with, with sales. The other thing that was was really interesting to me is that is that you, you. Clearly are focused on the number of customers, as an example.

So there’s a really good metric that you pull out

and you know, and, Hey, I know when I crossed that threshold of 17,000 cuz you did it recently. So clearly that’s something else that you, you measure. So if you had to

say, you know, the, the. The kind of metrics that you could pull out of short term memory and come up with a number because they’re just so close to, are there, are there five of them?

Are there 20 of them or, so how, how, how many of those things that are the things that you really just have in in you know, high speed storage as close as possible to your, your

brain.

TJ: Yeah, I’m, I’m thinking of my my dashboard. There’s probably, I don’t know, 15 different metrics, 15 or 20 different metrics. But the way that I’ve tried to almost, I. Bucket them or compartmentalize them are kind of the strategic metrics, which are the, you know, the numbers like pipeline and bookings and things of that nature that when you’re presenting to the board or when you’re having conversations with, you know, our ceo, how finance, whoever it might be, that’s kind of the, the, you know, few metrics that you really wanna focus on.

Then you have operational metrics that are, you know, more discussed between marketing and sales. Maybe that’s m qls. You know, meetings set through SDRs, metrics like that. And then you have, you know, what I call tactical metrics, which are more, we’re just talking about them on the marketing team. You know, what are the, the website page views?

What are the, you know, the, our growth and social followers, things like that, which I, if I’m talking about that to a sales team or a sales leader. They’re probably not gonna care as much about it as the sales team is, but they’re still important, you know, kind of leading indicators to pay attention to. So, you know, I may have 20 metrics overall, but try to segment ’em that way so that depending on the audience that I’m talking to, I’m, I’m focused on the right

Peter: Yeah, I, I, like that schema that you’re using and especially saying, Hey, for finance or the c e o, you’ve got a series of very financially oriented metrics obviously. So, you know, you’re spending, you know, what you’re generating and pipeline, you know, you know you’re a c v and things like that, right? So

things that really matter to to at, at that level.

And the sales side obviously. And it’s, it’s funny cuz some of the metrics that you. You brought up on the marketing side, I hear people refer to them as vanity metrics all the time, but they

actually, they actually serve a really important purpose, which is something that you alluded to. I mean, the fact that, yeah, I’ve got a bunch of social followers and I should be tracking that now.

You don’t want to put that in your board deck because. They don’t care. But obviously it could be a really good way to start to e especially if you start to trend and see changes in those things. Say, Hey, what’s the effect of

my overall, you know, or organic followers? And is my is my awareness.

Changing over time. So it’s, it’s really kind of a, like a, can be a little bit of a canary in a coal mine for you. Some of these

metrics to get a sense for what’s going on. And, and so do you have do you have a, you know, in your, sort of, in your dashboard world, do you literally say, Hey, this section is for finance and I’m gonna go to that page when I sit down with

the cfo?

TJ: You know, if I’m talking to the, to our cfo, I’m, I’m not even, yeah, I’m just gonna have the specific metrics that he’s going to care about. But for, for the marketing team, I have a. Single. It’s basically a single slide where you’ve got all the metrics kind of broken out by awareness and demand, and you know, everything that you would think about just so that when we sit down and have a conversation, hopefully what you see and you kind of, you know, mention this, is what’s that, that that impact for that rollup from all those leading quote unquote vanity metrics to the impact metrics you know, on, on the top line of pipeline and bookings.

Peter: Yeah, it make, makes a lot of sense. And if, if you look at the if, if you look at these these metrics, you know, it’s, you, you’re talking about the sales side, which made me really think about the transition that you made from being a sales leader to being a marketing leader. So, What was the, what was the biggest change you had to make personally when you went from being a sales leader to a marketing leader?

TJ: That’s an interesting question. So I made this just to give a little bit of context. I made the change about 10 years ago where I actually joined a, a startup another PE back company and joined as. The head of inside sales. And at the time one of the co-founders was the cmo, and after about a year and a half, he decided he wanted to kind of focus on other things.

And they came to a decision like, do we go and hire somebody from the outside or do we think about, you know, the team that we have now and, and promote from within? And You know, they, they asked me if I wanted to take on the challenge and I said, yeah, let’s do it. And I think it, you know, if I think back to then the biggest change that I had to make was, you know, you have, as a sales leader, a and it’s just by nature of the gig, right?

You have to have a, I’ve got a number this month that I got a hit, and marketing should be supporting that. But at the same time, you know, I have to be thinking about what the team is doing today that is going to impact results. Six months from now, a year from now, you know, maybe even longer than that.

And I think that’s probably, probably the biggest change. I, and there is an element of that as a sales leader too, but I just think there’s a, a little bit of a, a delta there.

Peter: I think you’re right. I think the, the biggest thing is being able to operate on those different time horizons. And like you said, most really strong sales leaders are thinking that way anyway at some point, but it’s just a little bit more front and center as as a marketing leader, cuz some things just, just take time.

In fact, I was just having

a conversation with. A board member for a company who’s saying, Hey, you know, we, we, we wanna do this big launch and and get results right away. And and we, why aren’t you using the thought leadership strategy and like, okay, well we, we could. Do thought leadership, it could be, but the

reality is that that may take quarters or more to, to

pay dividends.

And and it’s the kind of thing that you, you absolutely have to lay the tracks early on to do some of those things. But you have to be thinking many steps out along, period out. And sometimes that’s difficult

to do when you’re in a. Dynamic environment, like most of us who are operating in these days.

And I mean the

the good news is with, I mean, you guys being battery powered is, is, is awesome because I know they think very strategically, right? They, they think

in like decade plus kind of timeframes. And so I suspect that having the right kind of of investors, the right kind of leadership is really helpful in your ability to, to think.

Very very long term. And,

and how, go ahead, sorry.

TJ: No, I was gonna say it. It totally is. And I think the other part of, you know, that shift from sales to marketing and, and aligning with the CEO on what you were saying is like, what is a realistic time horizon to expect that if we do this thing today, it’s gonna pay results in a meaningful way by X, right?

Is it six months? Is it 12 months? It’s gonna depend on what your average sales cycles are. There’s a lot of different variables that I think you have to set the groundwork. Upfront so that you can do those things and have, have the the runway to, to continue doing them.

Peter: Yeah. Ab absolutely. And, and tell me what’s, how has your lineage in sales helped or maybe hurt your relationship with the

head of sales? At, at One World

Sync?

TJ: I think it helps a ton. And in fact so our, our C R O joined in October of last year. Her name’s Kathy Lord, she’s fantastic. And, and prior to her joining the inside sales team and the customer success team also rolled into me. So I, I had that. Part or that piece of the business in my organization.

And you know, when she was, when she joined, I was happy to say, you’re, you know, you are stronger in this area than I am. No doubt. I, I can tell, but based on the conversations and you know, I’m here to see the company successful. So let’s, I need a great partner. Let’s partner together and let’s, let’s make an impact.

And I think. You know, over the past, whatever it’s been, eight months or so since she’s been on board, I feel like that’s that’s come to fruition. So, and, and a lot more to do. But I think that it’s helped because I also have, I have a deep sense of empathy for what she has to do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and her team as well.

So I think it’s helped.

Peter: So I sh I should bookmark that, that last comment you made about. About giving something up, by the way, organization and cuz that’s something I think especially for some of the, the listeners who may be a little bit earlier in their career it’s really, really an important thing to understand that sometimes the best thing to do is not, you know, hoarding organization and power and budget and things like that.

It’s actually doing the right thing for the company and it’s a great

sign of, of a real mature leader. That you see that, hey, the best thing in the world to, to do here is to, is to, is to move this in this direction that that may not be empire building for me. and,

and and it’s hard because I’m sure you’ve seen examples where people don’t do it that way.

And it can be, it can be pretty negative, obviously, and,

and create a real problem.

TJ: Yeah. Well, and I think the, you know, the comment of maturity I think plays a big role in it. Like if I was to think back even to my own career, let’s say 10 years ago, I probably did to some degree, measure my success on how big the team was.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

TJ: I. And, and just over time, right? I think that that’s it’s become more and more clear that that’s not the measures of success.

The measure of success is the success of the business. And it doesn’t necessarily matter how we’re getting there.

Peter: Yeah, the, those, that’s absolutely correct, TJ. And and, and I think the, the world has changed so much around around how things get done in an organization, and we’re about to go through just a major disruption in how everything happens as as the, the real day-to-day application of AI technologies is are start to, to come in.

And how, how, how do you. See those that new wave of technologies changing sort of your, your world order at one, world

sync.

TJ: So I think of it in a, in a couple ways on the. Just from a marketing standpoint, like I’m, I’m currently, and this could change over time, but I’m currently in the, the co-pilot sort of mentality where, you know, I think that there’s certain things that, that generative, generative AI can just help us do a lot faster, right?

Like I can write a six sequence BDR email cadence right in a matter of a minute or two versus if I was doing that manually, it’s gonna take me a lot longer than that. When I think about like our business and product content and everything that, that, it could impact there, I think again, there’s efficiencies that can be created, but at the end of the day, I.

You know, we’re, we’re not just in the content creation business, we’re in the distribution business, we’re in the sales optimization business, so adding value across that entire, call it product, content, information life cycle for, for me, and I think for the company, that is ultimately the key in the answer, right.

Peter: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I like the idea of being a, of this technology, being a co-pilot. And because, because it is very much, I, I think where you’re gonna see and, and it’s funny, having spent time in the earlier days of AI technologies, we, we liked the concept of the amplification of human intelligence.

So

the idea of being able to take you in, it’s almost like robo copying you. Wait, which sounds

because Robocop turned evil and killed people. Right. So maybe that’s a bad example. but the, the, point is that there’s the, these are tools that when applied correctly can be really powerful. It, it was interesting cuz I, I’ve been writing a lot more lately since I’ve you know, become an independent human being again.

And. And I started playing around with with chat G P T and some of the similar technologies to everything to ideate and things like that. And, and it’s funny because I, I, I, I, several times I’d say, Hey, gimme some ideas on this and. And I just fundamentally disagreed with it, which was kind of interesting. so I, I, I, I, I suspect it will get better and smarter over time, but it’s also, it’s also derivative. It comes from other stuff that’s out there. so it’s really hard to, to create original new thought and.

With, with this kind of stuff. And so I think the role of original thought is interesting.

But there are lots of other applications and, and as now sort of a, a a, an owner of a one person business, of the business of myself now I, I’m leaning into this stuff and it’s been a lot of fun to, to learn about

some of these technologies and, and how they might help

me, be sort of a, a solopreneur kind of person and, and trying to Be more productive and, and seem bigger than I am.

So all

good.

TJ: Yeah. Well, and I, I think just to one, one other comment on that, the, the human piece or the creative piece, you know, in, in many ways comes from the questions that you’re asking it and how you’re prompting it. You hear this term prompt engineer, right? Like, so there’s, there’s value that’s gonna come and whether it’s new roles or just new processes, where you’ve gotta have somebody that’s, that knows how to ask the right question to get the right output and how to.

Train the model to get you the right output.

Peter: Yep. A absolutely. So, I, I think I, I think we probably we’re not all gonna be sitting around drinking margaritas having chat G b t do all of our jobs for us anytime too soon. So, we’ll, we’ll see. Well, believe it or not, we’re, we’re actually at that point where we’re we need to get wrapped up.

That happened really quickly. And before we go, I, I have to ask the question I ask everybody and I know you know this because I heard that you are A, a religious listener of the next cmo. So thank you for being one and longtime first time guest, I think is what it

was.

So, what, what advice would you give TJ to current and

aspiring CMOs?

TJ: Yeah, I had, I did give this some thought and I, I have two. Things that I would suggest. One is I love this idea of being a learn it all rather than a know it all. And I think, you know, that’s been a big help to my career growth is that I’m just, I’m, I’m literally constantly trying to learn, whether that’s through podcasts or through peers you know, networking groups or, you know, in many cases there’s, I’ve just heard somebody, let’s say on a podcast that’s kind of maybe in the same situation that I’m, I’m in or has done something that I need to do and I’ll just.

Reach out to them cold. And I started some really, really fruitful relationships that way. So that will be the first thing. And then the second one is you know, it’s really all about building a great team. You know, finding great people that are stronger than you and their area of expertise and just building a really solid team.

The the CMO of a company called Coupa. You, you may have had chand on the, on the podcast at some point, but. He said, there’s no such thing as a great cmo. There’s only great teams. I think that applies for other leadership roles as well, but I, I just love that, that notion.

Peter: Yeah, ab absolutely. And we’re, we’re connected on LinkedIn. I haven’t had him on the show yet. Reminds me I should ask

him to be on it. So, so all, all good. Well, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom here, tj. Really great conversation. Thank you all for listening to the podcast. Make sure that you follow the next.

CMO in Planful on Twitter and LinkedIn and all those other places where you may find out information about them. If you have ideas for topics or guests including shear and and others you can email us at the next CMO planful.com and have a great day.

TJ: Great. Great. Thanks Peter.

PodForte Overlord: A Pod Forte podcast.