Leadership, Rebranding, and Building Dynamic Teams with Rowan Tonkin of Planful

Introduction
The Next CMO podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward-thinking marketing leaders, from vision and strategy to leadership and emerging technologies.

The Next CMO is sponsored by Planful, a platform to build, manage, and measure your marketing plan, track all your marketing spend, and connect your budget with outcomes to measure your ROI. Check it out at planful.com/marketing. Your CFO will love you for it. I’m your host, Scott Todaro, a thirty-two-year marketing veteran, seven-time head of marketing, and co-author of the book The Next CMO.

Hello. Welcome to The Next CMO podcast. I’m Scott Todaro, just in case anybody’s wondering who the heck I am. My first guest is Rowan Tonkin today, and I’m so excited to have him because not only is he brilliant, he’s a lot of fun.

And so, you know, we’re gonna have a very good conversation here today. We’re gonna cover a lot of great topics. You guys are gonna learn a lot, and hopefully, you get a laugh or two as we go through the process here because I think marketing has become too serious, and it shouldn’t be. So Rowan Tonkin is an unbelievable CMO.

I have had the opportunity to work with him. He’s been on the CMOs to Watch list from Pavilion. So he’s up there as one of the best in the business right now. He’s got other awards.

He’s on the 30 Influential Marketers for B2B Fintech.

His team also won Marketing Team of the Year. So one of the questions I’m definitely gonna ask him at the end of this conversation is, how’d you do it? Right? Because we all try to build great teams, and it’s not easy because, let’s face it, marketing has the most diverse set of skills of any function inside a business, and it’s really hard to get all those people to work together.

Rowan’s Unique Career Path
So I think, Rowan, it would be great to kinda kick things off here and just hear a little bit about your journey because I think a lot of CMOs out there, you know, their journey isn’t clear where they went to college for marketing and then kind of built their career up. You actually took an interesting path to get here, and I think most CMOs out there have taken a similar path. So it’s always good to hear from somebody that didn’t start out with roots in marketing that’s had so much success like you have. So I’ll turn it over to you.

Just tell us a little bit about your story and how you got here.

Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Well, firstly, pleasure to be here, and I’m looking forward to it as well. I do hope it’s fun.

So, if you’re relying on me to bring that, I’m gonna need you to bring it back with me.

So I started my career—and maybe I’ll go back to college. I grew up in Australia.

I spent the first kind of twelve years of my life living in a beautiful coastal town and then, I moved to Canberra, which is akin to, you know, growing up in Santa Cruz and getting shifted into Sacramento. It’s a bit of a culture shock.

And then, I went back to college, on the coast, and I studied a degree in Internet Science and Technology.

This was—I started university in 2001. It was the only degree on this new thing called the Internet, and I got a really balanced education actually at college through that. I did a lot of networking, a lot of computer science, but also a lot of business classes, which I found was a really broad basis in which to enter kind of the technology space. So I was clearly pursuing that, but I also played a lot of rugby as a kid and I ended up having a choice between going and working for a tech company or moving to the north of England to play rugby.

And I think looking back now, I made the right choice.

But, you know, that would have been fun.

So I started my career working for a software company, and we were really focused on helping marketers, actually. My first role was in the support organization.

Back then, you didn’t have self-service support, so anyone who needed their password unlocked or needed help understanding what to do, they would call into a support center, and I’d be facilitating them and helping them.

I quickly then moved into implementations and configurations and kind of not being the lead consultant but being that background person on a project, and worked with some really large Australian organizations, helping run the tool that helped them run their marketing—what today would be considered Asana and monday.com type tools.

And then I moved into Presales.

And for the next twelve years, I floated between presales, customer success, and even had a stint in sales.

Very much my whole career in the early part of my career was focused on supporting and helping the customer, being very customer-facing, and I really enjoyed that.

And then, during that time, I actually moved from Sydney, Australia, over to the UK. I was standing in the UK in 2008, wondering why I had moved when the GFC hit.

Not a lot of people wanted to buy marketing software in the middle of a financial crisis.

But I ended up having a really great time, not only personally but professionally, where we were able to build that business quite well. We helped that business move to the US. We took a lot of our UK and European clients, implemented them, and took them to a stage where they got noticed by the US businesses. And then they kind of started adopting the software. I got to start traveling out here and helping implement and advise those companies on what to do. And then I took my first stint in a marketing role, actually joining a product marketing team where I was looking after sales and marketing solutions, and that was my first entry point into marketing. So, an interesting journey from where I started my career to getting into marketing.

The Importance of Customer Understanding
That’s fascinating. Thanks. One thing I did want—a couple of things I want to point out in your career, I think they’re really important. You started your career out working with customers. And I think one of the things that I’m seeing working with CMOs is that these days, they don’t have a lot of access, especially in B2B, to the customers themselves. And if you don’t understand the target audience, you don’t understand what their pain is by working with them, talking with them, viewing their behaviors—you really can’t do a great job. Because, you know, as we’ll talk more about, you’re a positioning and messaging expert.

It all starts with understanding the buyer. Otherwise, nothing else works. Right? So, that was fascinating. The other thing I wanted to ask you is, do you believe that the best way to get to a CMO, as far as tracks inside of marketing, is through product marketing, or do you feel that there’s another avenue that’s better?

Paths to Becoming a CMO
No. I wouldn’t say that there’s a best way.

I do think it is one of the most cross-functional roles in a marketing department, and so it certainly helps understand all aspects of the go-to-market. And having that background does certainly set you up for a really good cross-functional understanding of what’s going on across the business, for sure. In product marketing, you’re not only thinking about the pre-customer, but you’re also thinking about the existing customers, and building advocacy and helping out with reference programs and analyst relation programs. So you actually care about not just the new business acquisition perspective; you’re also telling the evangelism stories of those customers.

So I do think, coming back to that customer-facing approach, it is one of the more customer-facing approaches in marketing, and that does help you. But a lot of product marketers don’t understand the machine that is new business, the machine that is demand generation, the operational side of marketing, and the dark underbelly, if you will. Some people may say that product marketing has a dark underbelly too.

But you have to be, in product marketing, really curious about the analytical side of marketing.

You can’t just sit there and live in messaging, positioning, and building your three-by-threes, otherwise you’re going to be an unaware marketer.

And so, you know, I think having that broad approach is really important.

But I definitely believe that there’s a lot of value in having some sort of tour of duty in product marketing or a deeper understanding of it.

The Value of Generalization in Marketing
That’s fascinating that you bring that up. You know, obviously, marketing has become very siloed, right? One does product marketing, one does PR, one does demand gen.

Do you think that there’s an opportunity for marketers to become more cross-functional? So in other words, they understand multiple functions, they understand how to message as well as do the demand generation pieces. Do you think that there’s more of a blending that we should have of skill sets, or do you think it’s better to leave people in a specific role?

I mean, there are so many books dedicated to this.

I think the most famous is, obviously, Why Generalists Rule in a Specialized World.

And, you know, I think it’s all about size of team, scale of company, where you’re at.

I could absolutely see a team of generalists doing amazing work in a very small marketing function and relying on specialized agencies where they need it.

And then, as you’re growing and scaling, like, then really maturing into where do I need specialists, where do I wanna outsource a specialization.

I do think it’s important, if you’re an early-stage marketer or someone that wants to be an aspiring CMO and wants to do different tours of duty, that you become somewhat generalist, right? Like, you know, have a major for sure, but go and look at all areas of the marketing function because there’s a ton of value in being a better collaborator, being a better counterpart to your specialized teammates, and having that broad understanding of marketing, and being much more of a strategist, if you will.

You know, if everyone listening has worked with an agency, who’s the first person they introduce you to? It’s the strategist, right?

And that’s because, you know, you’re trying to get that broad understanding of what’s going on with that initiative, that campaign, that program.

So to answer your question, Scott, I do value generalization.

I think it is important that you speak the language of marketing, not just your specialization.

And I really think that there’s a world for both.

If I was out there at a really early-stage company and I only had, you know, three or four head count, I would probably just hire generalists.

But certainly at Planful’s scale, yeah, I have specialists in various roles, and I think that’s really important, and we could talk about why that’s important to teams and how you kind of remove any friction from all of that, but I definitely do value generalization, and I think it certainly helped me in my career having that broad experience across not just marketing roles, but also across, you know, different functions in the business. I can understand the pressure that a sales rep is under to hit their number. I understand what it’s like to sit there and be demoing a new feature that you’re not sure if it’s going to work or not, and you’re trying to leverage the marketing message, right? I understand those people’s pains, and that helps me be a better collaborator, a better teammate, and a better leader for my team, for sure.

Sales Exposure for Marketers
Well, you bring up an interesting point. Should every marketer get exposure to sales?

Oh, I should say on the B2B side. B2C is a different notion, but…

Yeah.

It’s definitely harder if you don’t know how to empathize with them.

I’m not saying you have to.

I definitely think it’s harder, and you’re gonna have to fight harder and work harder and spend more time with your sales counterparts than maybe other people who have had that experience, for sure.

It definitely wouldn’t hurt to go and sit and listen to your SDRs for a week or—something that we do on my team—we have Deal Club where the team follows a deal through the timeline, right? And through the full deal journey. And we, you know, sometimes we do it retroactively, sometimes we’re, like, following it, and then guess what? You know, something happens, and we dissect why. Why did that happen, what happened, and how could we have helped that deal better?

If you can’t get that access, or you know, it’s a tough time out there for marketers, it’s a tough time to go and carve out a bunch of your time to sit with sales. If you can’t do that, find smaller ways of understanding and smaller ways of interacting, and just go for a walk with a salesperson on a frequent basis.

No. Don’t do that. Never do that.

That is—that’s bad, right? Because, you know, when—it’s the funny thing is, I’ve run sales four times. And if you wanna talk to the head of sales, that will be okay because they’re an aggregator of all of the input from salespeople.

But just remember this. So I could—Rowan, I know you’re a great golfer because I played with you and you kicked my butt. It was quite humbling. But what I will say is this: marketing people are supposed to play in the middle of the fairway. Salespeople are always playing in the trees.

I mean, always playing in the trees, right? Because, you know, they’ll—listen. Anybody that’s got a heartbeat and a budget, they’re going after them whether that’s your target audience or not.

So I always say, if you’re gonna talk to sales, talk to all of sales. Do not talk to one or two salespeople because they’ll tell you the deal that they just worked on, which may not be the right person. So yeah.

That’s also part of your challenge as a marketing leader, I would say, is—I actually think chatting to individual salespeople, you’re gonna get more nuance, you’re gonna get more specificity from them.

Mhmm.

You’re going to get more honesty from them about how marketing can help. But it’s also your job to parse all of that and filter out the, you know, “Well, hey, you know, that guy put himself in the trees with his drive, so no, he doesn’t need some sort of magical club that hits the green from the trees.”

He should just put himself in the fairway. It’s your job to do that. It’s your job to be the strategist and understand those elements. But when you do speak to salespeople and they’re talking about what a customer is saying, what are the patterns? And you have to ask those questions: What patterns are you seeing? That’s very different from “What are you seeing in the market today?”

Right.

Right? So you’ve got to be a good marketer amongst that conversation. But the more you speak directly to sales, whether it’s sales leaders or sales individual contributors, I think all the gold actually sits in presales or solutions consulting.

You know, they’re presenting this product every day for hours on end. They have to prove how it works. They’re the ones that convince people to buy, and salespeople just convince people to buy it for more.

Yeah. I think it’s really important that you get that broader view. Now, how do you do that is the challenge when you’ve got all these exogenous forces kind of being imposed upon you, whether that’s internal pressure, macroeconomic pressure, market dynamic pressure.

You have to be able to navigate all of that. But that’s the job, and that’s why it’s fun, but that’s also why it’s really challenging.

Mhmm. Well, you know what ends up happening when you’re off in the trees because, you know, they’ll blame the marketer for giving the wrong club.

I mowed the grass for you. It’s nice right here. Why don’t you play right here? Right?

Yeah.

So yeah.

Understanding Messaging and Positioning
But, you know, one of those clubs that I’d like to talk to you about today is messaging and positioning. Now, I think the first thing you could do is help a lot of marketers out. I mean, because there are some aspiring marketing leaders out there. Just define the difference between the two, because for some reason, when I talk to a lot of marketing leaders, they don’t fully grasp what the nuanced differences are between the two. And so I think it would be great for you to explain what your approach is on this because I think you could help out a lot of marketing leaders as they’re starting to build out that platform.

I actually think that there’s an extra element that’s really important to remind our audience and folks on the call.

It all actually starts with strategy.

So first of all, you need a company strategy, and a vision and a mission. Once you establish those things, then inside of your strategy work, there is a piece of work that needs to be done called positioning.

And positioning is really identifying what your product does, its differentiated features for your target audience, right? And so intentionally, positioning is supposed to exclude certain people.

Positioning is supposed to allow you to communicate effectively to that target audience, to that right fit that has the profile and behaviors and identity of the customers you’re trying to serve with your strategy.

Messaging, quite simply, is how do you communicate all that?

Right? What words do you use? What language do you use?

What tone do you use to validate, support, and convince that positioned audience of all of those features that you’ve identified as really important to your business and your strategy so that they understand your unique value proposition?

I think it is that simple.

Where people get confused is they do the exercise together.

Right? And, you know, there’s a positioning and messaging session.

They’re actually distinct sessions.

Positioning is all about—it’s clear product marketing. It’s who we’re going to serve, what unique value propositions do we have that serve them, and how do we differentiate against our competition, or perceived competition. Right? Wallet share competition, potentially.

Messaging is then, how do I communicate that to that audience? That’s the real clear breakdown for me.

The Rebranding Journey Begins
And tone kind of leads into how you set your brand and the feeling around the brand. And I know that when you got to Planful as CMO, you were tasked, like, within the first thirty days, to have to rebrand Host Analytics to Planful. You went through the whole naming exercise and all the other elements. So talk to me about the nuances of creating a brand new brand—a brand that had some serious recognition.

Lots of customers familiar with it. Talk about that process of having to try to break down the old brand and transition, and the timeline that it took really to have an impact.

So, yeah.

The timeline people might be shocked by. So, firstly, it’s important to understand, like, why would you do a rebrand?

I’ve been lucky. I’ve been part of two rebrands. Some people may say I’ve been unlucky.

And I’ve also been part of brand refreshes.

And I think it’s also important to distinguish between those two things, right? I consider a rebrand a name change of the company, and that’s what we did here at Planful, formerly Host Analytics.

And the key element there was, there was an acquisition of the company by our current owners, Vector Capital.

And what happened there was a strategy exercise that led to a decision, which was to serve that new strategy, we should rebrand the company. It wasn’t just that the CEO said, “I don’t like the name,” or the ownership group said, “We want you to change the name because we don’t like the old name.”

It’s not for those reasons. You should never do a rebrand just around naming.

You should do it as part of an overall strategy decision.

And that strategy may include, well, we’re serving a new market or a different market, and therefore, our old name doesn’t serve us. And so when you think about Host Analytics, you know, we’ve been a company around for a while, and the term had changed around us, around the company. You know, hosting and analytics, you know, people—you would have SDRs calling prospects and they’d be like, “You should be calling my tech ops person because this is not a financial application based on its name.” So it didn’t have any brand value to the audience. It still had brand value in the market, but when you’re trying to reach out to your audience, it didn’t have that immediate recall. It didn’t have that association with what we did.

And then, so, as you look to run a transformation, which is what this leadership group here at Planful has done, we identified that creating a new brand identity—and that includes a rename—was important to the ongoing trajectory of the company. It’s not that we wanted to throw out all the old stuff, it’s that we felt that a brand would serve us better in the new journey, a new brand.

And so we came up with the idea to change the name as part of that strategy.

And I joined almost five years ago, the thirtieth of September.

But who’s counting?

I just know it’s coming up. You know, milestones are important markers along the journey.

I’ll say this. Look, the average lifespan of a CMO is one year nine months. Congratulations.

Yeah, I’m pushing that up. Imagine if I wasn’t in my role.

You’re skewing the data.

And so, you know, we had a really important inflection point coming up, which was an internal event, which was our all-company kickoff. Prior to the leadership group joining, it was only a sales kickoff, and this leadership group wanted to organize the whole company. So we had said, we’re gonna do an all-company kickoff. Everyone flying in. Great.

And so the CEO said to me, why don’t you have the rebrand done by then? So, for those that know, I’m gonna say it: when a company kickoff is and when the thirtieth of September is, you’re not left with a lot of time, right?

But importantly, it was a CEO- and CMO-led initiative, so there wasn’t a lot of politics involved, a lot of consensus involved.

We’d already spent a fair bit of time talking about it during the onboarding process.

So, my second day on the job, I let the team know that we were doing a rebrand, and they informed me that they’d just done one, they’d just done a brand refresh.

And so, you know, that was tough for them because they’d just done all this amazing work, and it was a really nice new brand under the Host Analytics brand.

But it wasn’t what the new direction and the new strategy was.

So it took some convincing there to organize a team around that, brought in some external help, and, fast forward to what was fourteen weeks later, mid-January at the company kickoff—January sixteenth, I remember it fondly.

The whole company walked into a big ballroom.

All their—you know, all the banners and everything were Host Analytics, and the website was Host Analytics.

We revealed the new brand to the company, and they left, and the whole hotel had been transformed to Planful branding.

Oh, cool.

And the website was turned on by the marketing team at the time, and I would never do it that way again.

But—

Why?

It was a lot of stress.

A lot of stress.

And so the whole—that was a really pivotal moment for the company if you think about the journey of the company. You know, two hundred employees walked into a room working for Host Analytics, and they left that room working for Planful.

Psychology of Brand Transition
And so there’s a huge amount of psychology in doing that with your staff, but also, that allowed us to then go and build a new brand and a new brand identity. And you started with tone, and you started with, “What are the key themes of a brand?”

And so, as we went on that journey, we had to not only do just brand, but company vision, company mission, and therefore, how does the brand espouse all of those values? So it wasn’t just a marketing exercise. It was a very collaborative company exercise. And so we went through a whole journey of the company values, company mission statement, company vision statement that then said, “Well, what’s the brand that’s going to serve that and deliver that to the market alongside the strategy of who we’re going to serve? What’s the position of the company?” And then thinking through, “Well, what’s the long-term vision as well?” Because who you serve today might not be who you serve in future, and you might wanna build a brand that allows that space.

And that’s something that we were thinking about at that time as well.

Beyond Logos: The Essence of Branding
And I think one of the things that you have kinda highlighted here that’s incredibly important, and this is important for all new CMOs out there, is you notice Rowan didn’t really talk about logos and colors, right? I know that we spend a lot of money working with design agencies on logos and colors, but at the end of the day, it’s not gonna move the needle, right?

You heard what he talked about. He talked about tone. He talked about message to the market and people’s feelings around the brand and understanding the brand by the name. This is really important for everybody to understand—one of the crucial messages that I think needs to get across.

So, Rowan, thank you for going through that.

So, one thing I did wanna get back to though, and we started to talk a little bit about your team, and you got team of the year. So you came into this company. You had Vector come in and buy them, and we know—I know you can’t say this, but I can since it’s this podcast. As you know, private equity is not super popular when they come into companies.

Navigating Change in a New Environment
It’s tough, right? It’s a tough pill to swallow because they have their own processes for doing things. Usually doing things by the book, by numbers. They have a playbook to go to, and there’s a lot of change for the people coming in.

So you came in after this and adopted a team and had to change that team’s perspective, had to change the branding after they just went through a branding project, and you had to convert all these people. And then basically, four years later, your team is winning Marketing Team of the Year. This is probably one of the most difficult challenges for a CMO: adopting a previous team and getting them to buy in. So tell this audience, how on God’s green earth did you do that?

Yeah.

So let’s talk about doing a rebrand in January of 2020.

You know, all the beautiful campaigning, all the beautiful ideas you had, were just thrown back in the locker and stored there for a while in March of 2020.

You mean people didn’t just want to hear about your rebrand then?

Some of the messaging was far more aspirational and, you know, far more focused on a future that may not have been around in March of 2020. So, you know, I think the important part, and the key here, is recognizing that change is inevitable.

And so firstly, as a leader, you have to figure out how you’re going to navigate that change. That’s something that frankly, I don’t know if anyone was prepared for in March of 2020, to be honest, but I certainly, looking back, was not prepared in a way that I could feel like I have anything to teach anyone about why I was so prepared. I wasn’t. No one was.

Transforming Culture and Strategy
But as you think about that journey, I think first and foremost it was very important to realize that this was a net positive for the organization, the acquisition by Vector Capital. They’ve been an amazing, supportive partner, and, you know, I have to say that, but I’m also saying that very truthfully, very honestly—not many marketing teams get to go through a PE acquisition and do a rebrand and do some of the things that, frankly, this brand gets to do.

And I also realize I’m in a very privileged position sometimes when I get to do some of the things that I get to do, but I also realize that we’ve earned that trust as a team. So when I think about how you go through that transformation, it is about vision and mission, and it’s about setting forth not necessarily the old way and the new way, but more about, “Okay, here’s the journey that we’re going on.” Right? You know, and if you read books like Good to Great and Blue Ocean Strategy and those types of books, you understand that creating culture, changing culture, is just as important as the fuel that you give your company in terms of dollars, right? People and the culture that they bring are fuel for an organization.

And so it’s important for me to bring that fuel myself, also bring new fuel to the organization, fuel that I knew and I believed could help me take this journey together. So there was adding new fuel. We obviously went through a big shift in our strategy too. But if you didn’t have all that mission work, all that vision work, all that strategy work to anchor back to and say, “Hey, when we think about this new mission, this new vision, this new strategy, do the things that we’ve previously done support that?”

And if the answer is no, then you have to say, “Okay, it’s not that what you did there was bad work, it’s that it’s not honoring the new mission, the new vision, the new strategy, and therefore, we should look at how we’re going to honor that all together.”

And so if you do that, then people don’t get as offended. I’m sure people got offended.

But not as offended that nothing that people had done previously was bad work. It was good. It set the company up for a successful business. It was a really strong brand, but importantly, it wasn’t going to set us up to go where we wanted to go. You know, if you go and compete in a new sport, maybe—the Olympics are on right now—maybe you’re a swimmer and you’re really good at freestyle and you want to take on butterfly, you have to train differently. You have to adapt differently. It’s still swimming.

We still do marketing. We’re just doing a different stroke. We’re doing it because the strategy to get there is different.

So a lot of that work really helped with that change and that transformation.

Going through that period of change and uncertainty with COVID and the pandemic and then coming out into what was the SaaS boom and then down again…

You’re navigating a lot of exogenous factors, the macroeconomic factors, but importantly, we anchored that in a customer-first mindset.

And that’s what helped me navigate all of that change: “Well, what are our customers thinking, feeling, and doing right now? How can we best support them?” And so what we did in April of 2020 versus what we were doing in April of 2021 and 2022 were very different things because our customers’ mindsets had changed.

And so really the whole long-term strategy has been anchored in what are our customers doing, where are they going, what are they thinking, feeling, and doing, and needing from a company like us. And that’s all anchored in our mission and vision, which we’re constantly evolving.

Fantastic.

Advice for Current and Aspiring CMOs
Alright. So in the grand scheme of all of this wonderful information that you gave us, I’d like to see if you could give our audience your favorite piece of advice. This can either be for an aspiring CMO or for an existing CMO, but something that you feel passionate about that you think is your best piece of advice if somebody asked. And this, by the way, the one thing I’ll just say is that, sorry, Peter, I’m ripping off your last question, but, you know, I guess imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

So I think we call that brand continuity.

So, no. I’d say certainly for the current leaders, like people that are already heads of marketing, you know, CMOs, I think it’s really important to remember that you’re the ballast of the ship.

And oftentimes you have to personally take the hit and be that ballast for your team, because otherwise they’re getting whiplash. We’ve all been there—executives come in, new idea, new initiative.

It’s really important to be that ballast for them. Course correct with your peer counterparts, with your CEO, with the strategy. Make sure it’s all aligned before you go flip-flopping. I mean, we’re also in an election year and politicians flip-flop and that confuses their audience too, right?

And it gets confusing.

So for leaders, I would say remember that you are the ballast.

And then for teammates and aspiring leaders, think about that. Think about the fact that your leader is often very focused on things that you may not be. Don’t assume that you know what’s going on across the whole org.

There are initiatives that people are thinking about and fantastic opportunities that they’re off exploring that they might never communicate because they might realize, “Hey, it’s not worth doing right now,” or “It’s not something that we want to pursue,” or “We’re excited by it, but it’s a no, not now conversation,” or “Yes, it is, but we need to do more work.” And they’re obviously trying not to distract you from the current mission, the short-term mission, while they’re thinking about what the next mission might be. And so I do think for aspiring leaders, that’s something you’ve got to learn. Figure out how do I get involved in maybe some of those special projects that you’re not hearing about, but also realize that they’re happening.

And I think that’s really important because you often see a lot of challenges in the dynamic of the leader and the team because they’re often operating at different frequencies.

And so you gotta figure out how to get on the same frequency, together. And as the leader, you’re gonna be on one frequency with your executive team and leadership team and another frequency with your team, and really think about that all consistently.

Yeah. No.

It’s very hard to do. And for those of you that don’t own a boat and have no idea what ballast is, it’s the weight on the boat.

So what Rowan’s telling you is don’t get fat. You don’t need to get fat. If you travel a lot as a CMO, you will. And I think Rowan won another award: his frequent flyer award, right?

Haven’t you been, like, everywhere, man? Do you like Johnny Cash? So, yeah. Yeah.

The Importance of Customer Engagement
Well, you’ll see me at events. I like to get out and see customers and meet customers, and frankly, I’m enjoying getting out and traveling. It’s been a tough few years where we weren’t able to see customers but also see teammates.

I do love that I have a very diverse team across the country.

I don’t love that it’s hard to get them all together as frequently as I’d like. And that’s something that I’m always looking for—better tips on remote work. So I’m looking forward to hearing those from various folks.

Good. So if you’re looking for Rowan, you’ll find him in first class.

It’s good. He’s earned it. But anyway, thank you so much today, Rowan. This is a great set of good advice for the audience here.

And I hope everybody takes this advice and puts it into practice. I mean, building out a team is super hard. Adopting a team and trying to build out a team is even harder. You know, think about your positioning.

For those of you that don’t have a positioning statement, make sure that you go out and start with that. And think about the tone and your brand. Think about the important things that your brand is—Rowan highlighted here. These are all incredibly important to telling your story.

Do not get mired down in the tactics. If you notice what Rowan talked about over and over in this, he talked about the fact that you have to stay kind of above the fray, right? And you have to look at the big picture.

If you notice everything that he broke down, he was kinda pulling things together that he saw as he adopted this role and he started to build out his team. So it’s really hard to do. I know a lot of CMOs get pulled into the tactics. Stay out of the tactics. Because once you go in, it’s like a rook of hell.

You’re not coming out, okay? So, but thanks again, Rowan, and hopefully, we’ll get you on another podcast sometime soon. It’s always fun to talk to you, and I always learn a lot.

Thanks, Scott. Really appreciate it.

Alright. We’ll talk to you soon. Thanks. Bye-bye.