Mastering the First 90 Days, Aligning with Business Goals, and Driving Measurable Impact with Nate Skinner, CMO of AffiniPay

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Stepping into a CMO role? Your first 90 days can make or break your success. In this episode of The Next CMO, host Scott Todaro talks with Nate Skinner, CMO of AffiniPay, about how to navigate this critical transition, align marketing with business goals, and drive measurable impact. Drawing from leadership roles at AWS, Oracle, and Salesforce, Nate shares insights on financial responsibility, understanding customers over competitors, and building a high-performing team. They also dive into AI’s role in marketing, key performance metrics, and the biggest pitfalls CMOs should avoid.

GUEST BIO

Nate Skinner is a seasoned marketing and sales leader with over 25 years of experience to drive AffiniPay’s expansion into new market segments. Previously, he served as Chief Marketing Officer at Onfido, where he focused on customer verification and onboarding solutions. Skinner has also held senior positions at Oracle and Salesforce, enhancing B2B marketing strategies and customer experiences. In 2020, he was recognized by Business Insider as one of the 20 most influential executives shaping the future of marketing technology.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome everybody to The Next CMO podcast. It’s super excited today because I have Nate Skinner with me who’s been a seven-time marketing leader. Nate actually has worked for companies you may have heard of AWS, Amazon Web Services, maybe Oracle.

Nate interestingly did two stints at Salesforce, but, now today, he’s, working for AffiniPay.

And, he’s got an exciting, journey here because he just started there. And I think one of the key things that a lot of CMOs struggle with is that first ninety days on the job. And so what I’d like to do is to turn it over to Nate, talk about why he joined the company, talk a little bit about how he’s trying to align with this the business goals that they’ve set for two thousand twenty-five, and really figure out how they’re going to lay that out in a cohesive plan when he’s only been there for about four months. So without further ado, I’m gonna turn it over to you, Nate. Tell us a little bit about AffiniPay and how you’re approaching it.

Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Glad to be here.

Nate’s Career Transition to AffiniPay
I had the opportunity for the first time in my career when I joined AffiniPay to actually create a full time job to find a full time job Because the last company I was with on Fido, we exited to a strategic called Entrust, and that was a good outcome and kind of I went away, in in April or May.

So it gave me the time to really focus on finding the next company that I was really excited about, which is a first for me. I’ve always gone from one place to another being recruited.

And by the way, I love Salesforce. It really changed my life. I tell people this all the time, Scott. I feel like I got an MBA in product marketing being at Salesforce from two thousand nine to fourteen when we went from one product to multiproduct from, you know, mostly US and and North America to global, like, upmarket from SMB and mid-market.

All that happened over those first five years, which is really kind of a a great way to learn, product marketing. So that being said, what led me to AffiniPay was looking at a lot of different companies. In fact, that was twenty-three different conversations I had that we, you know, organically took themselves down. Either I decided no or they decided no equally, whatever.

Ended up with a couple that really stood out. AffiniPay was my ultimate decision and choice, and I’m glad I’m here, for really three reasons. One, the financial viability. This is a rule of sixty five company. In today’s market post twenty twenty two, right, I was very focused on joining a company who knew how to grow responsibly and and with financial kind of, soundness. And so we’re putting, you know, margin to the bottom line as well as we’re growing on the top line, and we’re doing it in a way that we can maintain.

That was very interesting to me and very important as I looked at these companies. The second thing about Afinipe was the comp the people.

Every single individual I spoke to throughout the process just kind of I’m a big fan of, you know, advice to folks is, like, join a team where you’re not the smartest person.

I was constantly amazed by how smart and capable all the people I met were, and I was like, I could learn from this person. I could learn from this person. I could learn from Drew, the the CEO.

So that was the second reason. And then the third was I understood the problem, and this goes back to kinda who is Afinipay. You know, we sell solutions to attorneys and accountants. And if you know any attorneys or accountants, you’d know my dad is one.

When they’re really good at practicing law, they’re not really good at the business that they run. And so what Afinipay does is help them run the business. We help attorneys and accountants run their business in a financially sound way and grow and acquire customers. We’ve been doing that for almost twenty years.

Inc five thousand named us one of the fastest growing companies in the country on their list twelve years in a row. So we continue to focus on this very specific audience of of attorneys and accountants and helping them grow their firms, And I understood that problem. I was like, I get that. I know I know what that’s like.

And because I understand it, I can market it more effectively. And so those are the three reasons that AffiniPay was my first choice, and I’m glad they they chose me.

Aligning Marketing with Company Goals
Oh, that’s fantastic. So you obviously, they have a set of goals if they’re a company that is doing that well. And by the way, you know, a lot of the, marketing, people out there that are aspiring to be CMOs, if you’re looking to get your first job, one of the things that, Nate brings up that’s really important is that gone are the days where you just kinda just blowing money. Right?

There’s a lot more fiscal responsibility now and which really makes you focus on your budget and makes you aligned. And some of the things that Nate’s gonna talk about today that I think are really important is making sure that you’re aligned with the company goals so that the money that you’re spending is actually working really well. And one of the things that Nate brought up that he wanna talk about today was also KPIs. But before we dovetail into that, let’s talk a little bit about some of those company goals that you’re dovetailing with, to make sure that you’re working on the right things, your team is focused, and make sure that that’s blending in with the KPIs that are gonna give the type of responsibility that that hits your fiscal numbers.

Yeah, Scott. I think one of the things that’s, probably a good reminder is is I spent the last couple of years going what I feel like feels like going back to fundamentals and around this issue of financial growth or financially responsible growth. What you don’t wanna do is create a marketing strategy that’s totally unrelated to the business strategy. Right?

Like, I I get this question sometimes, like, well, what are you doing in marketing? Well, what we’re doing in marketing is in service of what we’re doing as a company so that they’re they’re dependent on each other. And, actually, I’ll bring back Benioff. You know, the v two mom model that they have at Salesforce, the visions, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics, that framework that they use to align that entire company is a very good one because it starts at the very top.

Right? Mark and the the exec team describe the values and the vision for the company, and then they describe the top five or seven methods really like strategic initiatives that they’re going to go after for the next year, and then everybody underneath that ladders down. Well, at Afinipate, it’s not any different. We don’t use the VCU mom framework, but it’s the same thing.

We have a strategy we’ve described for going out and getting our space, attacking our market, and and growing our business. And we’re going to do that across a number of initiatives, one of which is actually AI.

Another is, like, how are we looking at, opportunities in the market around acquisition? Yours is there is there companies that we could take advantage of that are little tuck ins that give us an edge or give us an advantage with our customers? And another one is customer obsession.

How do we become the company that represents these customers in a way that they say, this is not a vendor I use, but this is a partner we depend on. So those are some of the initiatives. Well, then it’s like, okay. Well, what are we gonna do in marketing to go get that?

But it becomes very straightforward. Right? We don’t have to wonder if we should go, you know, selling state borders or should we try to go upmarket to large law firms. We know our business is SMB and mid market legal professionals and CPA.

Well, that’s a finite universe. Let’s figure out how we’re gonna grow them. Let’s look at who we have today, what their retention is, which is high, how we maintain that, how we support that, and how we go find new companies. And so, we need to do that in partnership with the business.

And I think that’s a that’s a, what’s the way of saying this the right way? It’s a cliff you can fall off in marketing to go describe your strategy irrespective of what the company’s objectives are. And usually, the ones that you can influence and affect in marketing are related to growth, retention, and acquisition of new customers. And you you mentioned this, Scott, earlier, like, you know, a lot of the the new world we’re in post twenty twenty two of, like, financially responsible growth affects CMOs.

That’s definitely true.

But what I found is if you can make the business case for doing something that drives a five, ten, or twelve x return, most investment firms, definitely PE firms, your management team, they’re gonna be like, let’s do that a hundred times. Right? Like, but if you can’t do that, then don’t be surprised when your programs get cut. And so that’s where we spend a lot of time is describing this is this thing we’re gonna do is in service of this initiative. And, oh, by the way, if we do it to this level, it will generate this outcome. And when we connect those dots for our team, we get unlocked and unleashed to go do our jobs very well.

Understanding the Target Audience
This is becoming one of my favorite conversations because, really, the book, The Next CMO, this is what it’s all based on. And the fact is that, you know, you’re looking at a set of goals, and they’re married to what the company is trying to accomplish, and you’re looking at making sure that you’re doing the right things and everybody has alignment on it. Now the the one thing that I that I tend to find, and unfortunately, today, we’re starting to see less and less of this, especially in b to b marketing. I think for the b to c, marketing CMOs that attend these, it may be less of an issue. But I’m starting to see that a lot of CMOs don’t fully understand their target audience. They don’t understand the market. They’re not doing any research, focus groups, everything in the past.

You know, meeting with customers become you know, they get blocked because the sales team doesn’t want them out there. Surveys, for some reason, they don’t run them to to get some quant. And as a result of it, they don’t fully understand the buyer. And so when you talk about the goals and accomplishing the goals, when you don’t have, a firm understanding of who the buyer is and what they want, your marketing probably isn’t gonna work because you’re just kinda throwing things up in the air.

It’s like a bunch of air balls, that you’re trying to get in the hoop. It’s not gonna happen. So I know that you do some of that work, Nate. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you is what are the some of the things you’re looking at either implementing or have implemented in the past that you have found have worked exceptionally well for pulling in the data you need in order to educate your team on the buyer to make them more effective with the marketing and the messaging they’re putting together?

Yeah. I and I I agree with you. I I see this way way too often. It’s, that kind of that fundamentals thing.

Like, how are you creating messaging and positioning about your company, your products, your solutions if you don’t understand the way customers respond to those things? And it’s outside in, not inside out. And so a lot of times, especially in tech, especially b two b tech, we have a bunch of smart people sitting around coming up with really creative things. We got a great product vision.

We have a huge AI is gonna change the world. Let’s go get that done. And we haven’t talked to a customer. And so, it really starts with customers.

I mean, we have metrics. You asked this question earlier, like key key performance indicators and metrics we measure. One of them for us is customer conversations. And in the absence of a conversation, Gong recordings or trans transcriptions of conversations with customers that tell us what they said.

Because the words they’re using to describe their problem are the way they’re describing the solution to their problem.

That’s the way we need to market. We can’t say we’ve got widgets that do widgets. Like, nobody understands what that is. What in our case, you know, attorneys, a lot of them struggle with bookkeeping. Something as simple as Scott, owes me a hundred dollars and it’s related to case number a, and I need to relate his payment to that case. That seems like a simple problem.

But many attorneys struggle with that that kind of audit trail. Like, I get a payment, and I don’t know which case it’s for. And so I send it over there, and now I got a pile of checks. It seems like a simple problem, but it’s not.

It’s a very complex one when you have hundreds and hundreds of people paying and dozens and dozens of cases. We solved that problem. Now we need to talk about it that way, the way they describe the problem. Right?

And that is the essence of customer research. If you’re not synthesizing what they’re saying, the words they’re using to describe their problems, then you’re not marketing to them in a way that’s gonna be effective. Customers are really good at describing their problem. They are not good at all at describing your solution.

They have no idea. Right? I mean, we don’t have our customers don’t know that we do split billing where we can, like, take a bill and split it in two and have, you know they don’t know that. They don’t they we call it split billing.

They call it, I’ve got two parties I need to get paid. Right? So you have to you have to do it, and it has to be part of your your core inputs that lead to outputs.

If you’re not building in the customer obsession and the customer conversation and the customer research in a real way, not not a bunch of Google searches, not a bunch of Gemini searches, not a bunch of chat g p t transcriptions, but actual customer conversations, then you’re gonna fail. And you won’t know it till it’s too late.

The Importance of Subject Matter Experts
Now to that point, because it’s so difficult to fully understand the buy when marketers are they’re marketers. Right? They’re not, say, an attorney or an accountant. Is it important, do you think, as you’re building out your teams, is it important to put a a a subject matter expert on your team that has actually been an accountant or been an attorney or worked in a law office or or something along those lines in order to help shape a lot of the messaging or help to understand the the the buyer or create content?

Percent. I mean, we have those in our company, and Nikki Black is a famous I say famous because I’m not an attorney, but every attorney I’ve ever met in this job knows her.

So, we have her she’s on our team, and she comes to our conversations around our planning and our strategy and our our campaign creations, and she’ll say, yeah. Attorneys don’t talk like that. Or, you know, attorneys don’t think that way. Or that’s actually not a problem for attorneys, not any that I know.

So she’ll she’ll kind of represent a cohort of people. It’s not a substitute though for talking to the actual humans. Right? So she’s a great representative of the cohort, but it doesn’t mean we get a pass and we don’t have to go talk to customers.

We had a an off-site called Wayfinder right right after I joined, probably October, I joined in September. And we had a four customer panel. And I learned more in that thirty minute customer panel being here for about sixty days than I did in the previous sixty days about our customers. And, like, it came to q and a, and I was like, you know, I have ninety nine questions.

So there’s no substitution for customer feedback and customer the voice of the customer. And I, quote a a a well known industry positioning expert, April Dunford. You’ve I’m sure you’ve heard of her. Your audience definitely has.

She wrote, obviously awesome and the sales pitch. She’s probably the industry go to and positioning. And one thing she said was, you know, we should be competitor aware and customer obsessed and not the other way around. And I could not agree with that more.

I I think we we tend to think, oh, well, our customers are our competitors are doing this, our competitors are doing that, so we should we should this or we should that. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. What are our customers asking us for? How are they talking about the problem?

That’s where we need to focus. And then we’ll take a look at the competitive landscape and say, there’s our opportunity.

Well, you know, it’s interesting because I actually think and and this is no slam on my other brethren, in marketing. But I think a lot of people actually go to the competitive websites and actually steal some of the messaging.

And, you know, the the thing that that bothers me the most on that is that the only way that you’re successful is to differentiate. And the only way to differentiate is to fully understand your audience’s problem. Right? And build that product.

And that’s another thing that really bothers me about CMOs these days is they’re not getting involved in product development. Right? If you go out and you see over and over again, this is what our competition’s doing, and I could literally take our offering and put it into their messaging, it’ll be the exact same thing. How How are we gonna differentiate?

Well, the only way to do that is to fully understand the market. And if the marketers are out there talking, like you said, Gong calls, of course calls, and they’re seeing them in aggregate over and over again, they’re starting to pull some of those key elements out, that it that’s a great thing to approach. So what other things on it for your team? As far as building out your team, you’re I’m sure you’re inheriting a team with the size of the company you’re at right now.

Building and Shaping a Marketing Team
And the other companies you work for, you were not employee number one, so I’m assuming that you inherited a team there. How do you go about refining and shaping a team? And what are your key hires that you feel that you need to get into the mix in the early days in order to make the thing run?

Yeah. I mean, this is I’ll I’ll answer the question, but also add a caveat at the beginning, which is every customer every company is different. So what I hear a lot, especially when I went through my summer of, full time job was finding a full time job, I hear a lot that the people that they were that I was being interviewed to replace had made a mistake.

As I, what mistake did they make? They kinda ran the same playbook. They they brought their playbook from x company and went to b company and said, let me run that again. Or they went from, you know, Salesforce to Oracle and or Oracle to Salesforce.

Let’s run that again. You you can’t do that. And I’ve seen that a hundred times. What you have to do is that experience you’ve created, that experience in my case that I’ve got, I get to bring to bear for every company I engage with in a unique way.

It’s like all the ingredients of this particular pie. This Afinipe pie is gonna taste a certain way. It’s gonna be a little different than on Fido and Salesforce and Oracle. But I’ve got all the ingredients.

Now it’s like a question of which ones do we need. And I just preface my answer by saying there is no play you cannot rerun the same playbook. That’s the fastest way to watch everybody run out the door.

That being said, I have a a kind of mechanism or a kind of framework I use, which is what what is the company strategy?

What do we need to do? And then do we have the people and the capacity and the skills and the resources to do those things? And then marry them up. It’s like a almost like those you know, when you trace the line to the line, and then you run out of lines.

That’s where you know, you know, I I need to hire a blah or a blah or a blah. Or we’ve got a lot of lines up here and not not nearly enough down here. For example, you might have a content issue. Like, we we have a content opportunity here around reaching our audience across all of our skews.

We have products for immigration attorneys and private, personal injury attorneys and family practice law. We have got lots of different solutions for various types of law firms, but all of them represent a content opportunity. But we have very few content comparatively in size of shape of of team, very few content folks. So we need more content people.

Right? Meanwhile, we have all those products and all those various solutions, and we only have, like, three or four when I got here, three or four product marketers. That’s that’s probably not enough. So you start to look at what do you need and what do you have, and then you blend them together and all the lines should connect.

But I I I gotta add this last bit.

None of that should be done separate from the company strategy. What are we trying to do? Because if I came into Afinipay and it was all about retention, we wanna get, you know, our our retention rate to a hundred and four percent net net revenue retention. Right? Like, let’s say that was the goal.

Then the skills and the team and the shape and the size would be very, very different than if it’s about new customer acquisition, which would be very, very different than if it was, like, we only have twenty enterprise companies in the world that we need to sell this to. Let’s go get all twenty of them. That’s a different thing too. So that’s why I I preface it by saying every company is different, and you have to take the time in your first ninety days to understand the nuances. Get into the details, understand what you’re trying to do, and then start to execute your plan.

Adapting Marketing Strategies to Company Goals
I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, I like you, I’ve run marketing seven times. All seven times I’ve done it different ways, and it’s because, you know, the business you know, the if you’re an accountant, right, accounting is kinda done the same way. Because if you get creative in accounting, you go to jail.

But in marketing, you know, you really have a blank slate. And what’s filled with that blank slate is the is the research and the input that you pull in. So you were talking about the market research. You’re talking about understanding the buyer.

Those are the types of things that are going to shape exactly who you hire on your team and how do you go to market. So I love how you’ve approached this. So other things that people are talking about these days are all about, what am I gonna be doing with technology? And it’s, you know, we all talk to CMOs and like, well, how many technologies do you have running?

Well, I got sixty two. Right? Like, half of them they’re not even they’re paying for, not even using. And so we talk about digital transformation.

It’s a term that’s been around for a long time, probably about seven or eight years now, maybe even longer, as people try to move everything they have online for accessibility.

Now the question is, what’s the next wave? Right? Where are we investing in technology? Are we investing in technology as much?

Is AI now starting to be, a dominant force in the way that we’re gonna go to market? What are you seeing on your end, Nate, with the experience that you have? Yeah.

So I have a a pragmatic answer and a kind of, future, you know, our direction answer. The pragmatic answer is back to the point of fundamentals and financial viability.

You don’t have unlimited budget anymore. So this day of, like, add a widget because it does a thing and add another widget, the next thing you know, your program budget is blown on tech.

You we need to be thinking what exactly does that do, and can it do something better than something else we’ve got? So our approach, my approach, is if we go to replace something, we should replace two things with one. Let’s try. Let’s try.

Right? I don’t know that we can, but let’s look at all the stuff we’ve got, and if we’re gonna go buy something new, can we replace two things with that new thing? Because there’s just so much out there. Right?

You see, ChatGPT has Sora for video. Is it called Sora? Yeah. Sora for, like, AI generated video.

Right? You got Claude. You’ve got, what’s this? Midjourney for content creative. You’ve got all these different technology layers, AI powered technology at our fingertips that literally one year ago, many of these did not exist.

So today, you inherit like, in my case, I inherited a stack of technology that was here before I got here. It’s probably out of date. Like, the this thing is changing every month, every week. And so the the one side of me says, well, upgrade all of it. And I’m a very passionate AI fan because I’ve seen what it can do to for our our velocity.

Without adding a bunch of heads, without blowing the marketing budget, we can create massive velocity with AI powered technology. But it has to there has to be people that know how to use it. We have to have a clear and, well defined objective for it. And, ideally, it replaces at least two things we already have.

And, that probably is not something I should say to a CMO audience out there that’s, like, probably a bunch of CMO friends of mine or vendors that sell this stuff to each other. But the truth is, there’s just no reason to have all these things when the technology is moving that quickly.

The Importance of Performance Metrics
I I I I can’t agree with you more. I mean so that kinda dovetails a little bit into the performance metrics that you mentioned at the beginning, and I’d like to kinda explore that with you because I think a lot of CMOs are still struggling with performance metrics. How do you get a team that has primarily been focused on some of those vanity upstream up funnel metrics to focus on what the end goal for the company is and really make sure they’re doing the right things to drive those numbers?

So, Scott, I what I remind my team about is those the metrics that matter are the inputs that lead to an output. That that’s it. So in our case, in marketing, we care about traffic and leads and MQLs and SQLs and all the traditional marketing funnel metrics, not because of them themselves, but because of the end that they need. Right?

If we know historically, let’s just for the sake of this conversation, one thousand MQLs converts to and to me, that’s marketing qualified doesn’t mean anything to anybody. But sales qualified does, and the board even cares about sales because it’s qualified pipeline. This is, like, real opportunities that we’ve decided are worth working on. Right?

That’s the definition. If you just boil it down, forget the acronyms.

If if one thousand MQLs leads to five hundred SQLs, then we can do the reverse engineered math and say, how many do we need to get to five thousand? Right? And so marketing needs to drive that, and we need to care about that because that’s the input that leads to the output. Assuming no other changes, we our win rate doesn’t drop. We don’t bloat it with a bunch of paid crap. If we do the right thing and drive a strategy that generates ten thousand MQLs, we will get five thousand SQLs, and that is a meaningful change in our business.

We care about the MQL, the board, and everybody else cares about the SQL. And so we just need to remember that. Right? And and I I think the the golden rule here is, it’s like when you show your homework. You know, I’ve got two older kids. My son, who’s who’s gonna hate me if he reads watches this, but he always got c’s and b’s, and he barely ever did the work. And he’s long graduated high school now.

But I always wanted to see the work because I didn’t believe he was doing it. Right? His grades showed that he got c’s and kind of low b’s, sometimes even worse, and so it required inspection. I would I wanna see the work.

My daughter, on the other hand, who’s now a freshman in college, never got less than an a. I don’t care what she could have been out all night drinking freaking Bud Lights. Right? It didn’t matter to me because she got straight a’s.

I didn’t need to see her work. That applies in our business. If we’re blowing the numbers out of the sky and we’re all on the upper right, you know, trajectory, and there’s all green arrows and no yellow and red, nobody cares about the inputs that lead to the outputs.

Why we care so much in the last three to five years is because everybody cares. Because the numbers aren’t green. They’re all yellow and red for almost everybody. And so that requires you to show your work, not just in marketing, but in sales, in product, in engineering, in in CS.

Every organization is responsible at this moment in time and probably will be for the next, you know, two to three years to show their work. And that’s the only time when the marketing inputs, MQLs, leads, traffic, that’s when it actually matters. In our board decks, we’ll put that in the appendix. Right?

We we have the work to show what we’re driving. Now for us, we’re driving this kind of growth in a responsible way, so most of the arrows are starting to turn green. And for that reason, we don’t have to show a lot of the work in the context of the conversation. But I just, that’s a long way of saying there’s a reason people are looking for the things that you nobody seems to care about is because they wanna see the work.

They wanna know that you’ve done it. You said it earlier, influence metrics or whatever. Right? And if you don’t understand how they’re generated, then you shouldn’t show those.

You should not talk about them. But if you understand the drivers for MQLs, the drivers for traffic, the drivers for the conversion rates between those things, and ultimately the driver to pipeline that people care about in the sales, marketing, and leadership team and board level, then you should be prepared to talk about the work that you did to generate those. And otherwise, stop talking.

You know, one of the things that I’ve been in over forty board meetings in my career, and the one thing that I noticed over and over again, earlier in my career is that when I presented some of those upstream metrics and the major initiatives that we we set out, we accomplished, I got two reactions. Right? I either got the first reaction was total boredom. They totally checked out. I was basically talking to myself and a scared looking CMO a CEO, sorry. While they’re sitting there hoping that I don’t watch this in some capacity. And then I would leave the room and nobody would say anything and it would just be like, oh, I guess I dodged a bullet.

Then I realized with a little more engaged board that sometimes that turned into an ideation session. We’re not sure that you’re doing the right thing. Have you thought about doing this? Now that’s usually coming from a guy that spent his whole time in finance, and he sits on another board and he heard some other company saying it, and he’s throwing it out to you.

It has absolutely nothing to do with your industry or anything else along those lines. It’s a total waste of time, but because it’s a board member, you have to engage with it. One of the great things that I did in my career is I started tracking true ROI. Right?

Went to get figuring out on using your margin rate and everything else. And I I was bold enough to go into a board meeting with just one slot, and it said marketing this is we completed the year. Marketing created three point six five gross margin adjusted ROI. Are there any questions?

Now here’s the amazing thing that happened. Could you instead of boredom or being attacked or ideated on, Literally, I’ve watched all the board members look at me and go and then they turn to the CFO when they’re like, hey. Every time we give him a dollar, he gives us three dollars and sixty five cents back. Why aren’t we giving him more money?

Right? And that’s when they became the board instead of becoming either a nothing burger for me or becoming an endurance or a time waster, they actually became an accelerator. And Yes. And that’s where you need to get to, I think, overall.

Advice for Aspiring CMOs
So this has been an awesome conversation, but I wanna jump jump into one key question for you because I think you have a great one here. Nate, if you had a CMO sitting in front of you or somebody that was aspiring as CMO, what is the best piece of advice or two piece of advice that you think you could give that CMO to put them on the right track?

Yeah.

I think that the the days of sitting in some sort of ivory tower and, like, casting down upon people decisions is gone. I think we all know that. At least, I hope we do.

My advice to any aspiring CMO or CMO who’s about to go do the second thing or the third thing is to get into the details. Take your time.

Understand the the problem at its at its root. There’s a great book called Upstream. I forget who I thought I might have it on my bookshelf.

I think it’s Dan and Chip Heath, but I could be wrong. But it talks about, like, tracing the the core of a problem all the way to its source.

And what that really tends to turn her into in in business is why. Always asking why. Well, but why. But why?

You know, with conversion rate at this level to this level is twelve percent. Why? Well, you know, the product, road map shipped, or sorry. The product deadlines shipped, slipped by three months.

Why? Like, getting to the heart of why ultimately leads to GOLT. I mean, it’s absolutely, like, where the rainbow ends. And we don’t do that enough.

We take a couple things people say, and we move on. Right? We’re too we’re too busy to to bother with the details. So my suggestion and this was an Amazon principle that I I love.

It’s one that they’ve got, like, eleven leadership principles, and one of them is dive deep. Leaders dive deep. And I believe that. I think that’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten, without getting it directly from a human being.

I got lots of advice from a lots of people, but that’s one of my favorites because if you dig into the details, it’s not micromanagement. It’s an understanding that can let you focus on the things that really matter the most. Because getting distracted by a bunch of things over here doesn’t necessarily drive an outcome. Like you said, when you say three point five x ROI, if you wanna get to that level, you better understand the homework that went into it.

Because if you go into that board meeting and you say that and you’re wrong, then you’ve never gonna be able to do that again. Right?

But if you understand it and what drove that and you’re like, why aren’t we giving this guy more money? And they give you another million, and you turn that into three. Now you you’re gonna get unlimited budget, unlimited time, and that’s where you wanna be. But you have that requires a deep understanding of the details, and that’s the advice I would offer.

Get into the details. Not every single thing matters as equally. Right? The the prioritization is number one is number one, and number two is number two for a reason.

But I could not emphasize enough the best advice ever gotten, especially for new marketing leaders, is do not avoid understanding the problem at its core, and that usually requires getting at the details.

Advice for New Marketing Leaders
So I one hundred percent agree with that, Nate. And in fact, usually, for CMOs that are taking you their first job or they botched their first gig because they were focused on lead generation because some head of sales yelled at them on day of one, and they started scrambling the jets to try to create leads without understanding the business. I always tell them there are two things you needed set straight before you even take the job. The first thing is you will have no impact for six months.

K? Expect no changes or improvement for a full six months here at the company. The second thing is is that you’re going to take two months to do a business audit. Right?

And that’s the details. That’s the point that you’re talking about, Nate. Really understanding the business. You need to talk to customers.

You need to talk to prospects. You need to talk to losses. You need to talk to industry analysts. You need to talk to all the stakeholders inside the company.

You need to understand the dynamics of what’s going on. You need to look at the numbers. You gotta look at the strengths and weaknesses of the people on your team. And there’s no way you can develop a plan without doing that.

Conducting a Business Audit
Right? And so that’s gonna take you a minimum sixty days if you’re diligent.

Then you can start building a plan over the next thirty days based on what you found. And by the way, after you collect all that data, here’s my big big big recommendation to you. Actually, share it with the executive team. Sit down and run through it.

You all these people that are working at the company all these years, you will never have any more credibility than coming in for two months, organizing all the data, coming up with recommendations, and sharing that with the executive team. They’ll be like, woah. This CMO is actually on on top of things because you think everybody thinks they know all this, but they’re not thinking about it all the time. And when you organize it all together because, remember, you’re supposed to be looking at the market.

That is a big opportunity for you.

It’s huge. So Yep.

You could get off on the right foot. And that’s why I believe in everything that you said here today. So critical. Guys, you gotta start with the goals and the company goals.

Aligning Goals and KPIs
Build your KPIs off those company goals. Focus your team. Build out the people that are right people on the team just as Nate went through all of this. Right?

Look at how technology can help augment your team as opposed to it just being kind of a mainstay. We gotta have it because everybody else has it. Another great point by Nate is don’t look at your competition first. Start with your customer and understand that.

Figure out your differentiation after. You might have an understanding of what the needs are of your audience. Just really great points by me today. I wanna thank you, Nate, for taking the time.

It’s been an amazing session. I think you hit on a lot of key points for everybody out there. Keep plucking along. Keep focused on the points that Nate made today, and I think you’ll find yourself in a much better situation come December thirty first of this year.

So Thanks again, Nate.

And Yeah. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it. It was great.

It was great having you on. And for those of you, go up to the Nextiva community. Tons of content up there, templates and other things to help you get up and running in making your process a little bit easier. But look forward to seeing you on the on the next, podcast, and hopefully, Nate, we’ll have you on in another time.