Peter Mahoney: [00:00:00] Welcome to the official podcast of the next CMO hosted by Plannuh, makers of the first AI-driven marketing resource management platform for quickly and easily creating winning marketing plans, maximizing budget impact, and improving ROI. The next CMO is a thought leadership podcast for those who are CMOs or want to become one, my name is Peter Mahoney.I’m the former CEO of Plannuh. And welcome to the next CMO podcast.This week, we are thrilled to have Nitzan Shaer the co-founder and CEO of Wevo on the podcast. Nitzan is an active angel investor, a frequent speaker on digital marketing, mobile commerce, and product and innovation. And I love this part. He was also named, 40, under 40, by the Boston business journal.I was wondering if they have a 60 under 60 neat sun. Do they have any of those? That’s great to meet you by the way.Nitzan Shaer: [00:01:07] Peter pleasure to meet you. Thank you for having me today. I don’t know if they have a 60 under 60, but I will tell you this, the 40 on the 40, I just made it under the cusp. I think I was one of the oldest people in the room.Peter Mahoney: [00:01:21] that’s okay. That’s okay. You want to maximize what’s out there and know that sounds perfect. I have to hurry up because then I’m going to be vying for the 70, under 70, before I know it. It’s funny how time moves, right? Tempus fugit. Get, as they say. I’m really excited to speak to you today, Nitzan, because, the, I’ve heard a lot about Wevo and I just loved the concept and I had a lot of questions about, the general space of sort of optimization and digital marketing, because obviously, it’s top of mind for a lot of people right now.
But maybe to set the table, it would be great. If you could tell us just a little bit about your role background and then maybe weave it into the Weebo story. How’s that sound? Beautiful. Beautiful.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:02:04] so Peter we’ve as, the fourth startup, I started or, joined on early on. I guess I keep on doing it because I enjoy taking on the challenge with the team.
and probably because I have enough. Amnesia to forget how painful it was each time. but one of the things I like most about startups is just learning every day. I feel I have the opportunity every day to discover new things, and take on new challenges. so I was born actually in Israel, came to the U.S. for my graduate studies, and after living in six cities, over a period of 12 years, my wife and I decided to settle down in Boston, with our two sons and our English Cocker spaniel.
the idea for Weebo came while I was at Skype. we were marketing, and had customers in over 143 countries and territories around the world. and it was a challenge to understand what’s working well in our product and what isn’t, how people used it differently. We had grandparents speaking to their grandkids.
We had business people using it. and I just, we couldn’t find a tool that would give us that feedback, and help us basically, improve our product in a rapid manner. it took time until I found my co-founder Janet Muto, first CMO of constant contact.
Peter Mahoney: [00:03:27] Yeah. Oh, certainly Janet by reputation.
So you got a real star there to co-found the business. And obviously with the. Constant contact a history of a great practitioner of, digital marketing at scale. .
Nitzan Shaer: [00:03:42] She happened to see the same challenge in small companies that she was selling to of how do we bring that voice of the customer in, on a regular basis and can truly identify what their biggest challenges are.
so that’s how we started on the path of Riva just under four years ago now. That’s great.
Peter Mahoney: [00:04:01] It’s very exciting. And, so one of the things that you highlight in at least your marketing is the concept of pre-life testing of things, which I love the concept. So just a little bit of background I’m not sure we didn’t talk about this in our intro, but.
along with spending time as a CMO at my last company, I was the GM of a large scale digital business, the dragon software business. And we did a lot of, email at scale, as well as digital product. And I can tell you, there are certainly are a lot of times where I wish. I had the ability to test some things before we put it out there.
Because even if you just release some of these things into the wild, you realize sometimes there was a pretty bad mistake. It was out there. But, so was that part of the motor vacation in, in, building Weebo, is the idea of finding problems before they hit humans?
Nitzan Shaer: [00:04:58] Peter you’re spot on.
I have, many friends who’ve launched new campaigns, new products, new companies, only to see them with shortly after crash and burn. and it doesn’t make the front page of the wall street journal. By the way, we only hear about the successes is true. and giving, given how much, guests work goes into a new campaign.
we sit around the table and debate amongst ourselves. What’s going to be successful. it’s not, Wonder why the CMO is the shortest tenure in the C-suite right. it’s so much it’s up to guesswork versus, developer the tests, the code before launching it. I’ll share with you just an anecdotal story on failed launches, CMO of a large East coast.
Based thing, shared with me. but she spent $50 million on an agency to redo their brand, redo their entire online experience, their online presence and with big fanfare, they launched, this new, that new name, the new brand, the new, experience, and shortly after they saw a drop of 70%.
In their online conversion,
Peter Mahoney: [00:06:07] seven zero
Nitzan Shaer: [00:06:08] seven dash
Peter Mahoney: [00:06:09] zero. Oh my
Nitzan Shaer: [00:06:10] goodness. To say that agency did not continue working with this bank and many people, are not there any longer. the bottom line is this right? We launch, we hope for the best. because in many cases we didn’t have, or didn’t know anything better.
and we spend there and just millions of dollars are lost in this process that we slowly try to improve the online experience. and we lose a lot of customers along the way. Great.
Peter Mahoney: [00:06:39] Yeah. Yeah. I definitely see that and see that a lot of people don’t have this discipline of testing and just to Provide, maybe some description and simple words about we’ve, what we vote is right, because we didn’t really get there. so you, you offer a subscription service that sort of packages up the, at scale and at ease, it sounds like the ability to test digital experiences, whether it’s a campaign or it’s a product, et cetera, and test it before you actually release it.
Is that a fair summary? Maybe you can. Add a little bit more to it.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:07:16] that’s a very accurate, sorry, actually selves. we’re a consumer experience company. We focus on being the fastest platform to pinpoint why people aren’t converting. so our claim to fame is to pinpoint that area of what is the main challenge customers are facing.
And we do that on live websites, and we’re probably amongst the only ones that do that also on the prototype level, on the concept level. That way, when you launch your ready in a much better place, send the optimized as we call it, then you could have been otherwise basically reducing the risk of launching of new campaigns and shortening the time.
Until you reach an optimized experience. So
Peter Mahoney: [00:07:58] if you think of, but the concept of testing, it’s one of these things where if you say to any marketer, it’s a good idea to test before you launch something or test to improve something. They’re going to say, of course it is, but nobody does it.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:08:11] So
Peter Mahoney: [00:08:12] there’s so little actual testing that happens.
why is that?
Nitzan Shaer: [00:08:17] So true. if I would tell you have to, walk four hours to get to your favorite restaurant. I w I would question, how many times are you going to go there? and what happens is this the sad story of the current state of the industry is there are no good tools out there that quickly at a low cost give you reliable information.
On testing before you go live and that’s the crux of the need, for every good startup you need a strong need. That is the strong meat. There’s just no solution out there. You can do AB testing. After you launch, you can do usability studies, focus groups, surveys, before you go live. But there’s no good tool.
That’s going to give you an, a cheap and quick way, reliable information. When we put, we vote together, we, that was the need we were going after. And what we did is combined a few disciplines together, said we’re going to take from the survey world, the ability to glean information from consumers, we’re going to take from the AI world, the ability to be predictive.
And actually translate what we’re picking the signal. We’re picking up to something that translates into what’s actually going to happen in the real world. And we combined with all of that, this qualitative information as well to really get to the crux of what is it. that’s preventing people from taking the next step.
th
Peter Mahoney: [00:09:40] that’s very helpful to understand the detail. And one of the things that you mentioned, your AI capability, and one of the things I like about your approach is you use human-assisted AI for, for these problems. And I like it probably because we do too. And we’re big believers in the idea of AI as a.
I it augmented intelligence for humans. it’s a, an accelerant for humans, and humans are really good at some things. I imagine if you put all the data in the right place and organize it and have a human do that last mile, as an example, looking at the results, you can have an expert. Analyze a campaign at scale or in analyze a result at scale, is that the basic concept behind your human in the loopers or something additional,
Nitzan Shaer: [00:10:26] that’s exactly right.
Humans are really good at identifying patterns, especially for visual patterns and patterns related to cognition. to ask a computer to understand if something is appealing or something is credible or something is inspiring. With all due respect to AI, we’re not going to get there for years to come.
so we let humans do that part. And then we leverage the AI to take that input from humans and now predict what’s going to happen in the future. we didn’t invent the system. It’s that approach right. Facebook uses today in order to identify what is hate speech or what’s terrorism-related speech, They use humans. To do some of the work and they use AI to augment the work that the humans do. And I think that model is a very powerful model to bring the best of what human recognition is, and to let the computers do the crunching.
Peter Mahoney: [00:11:20] So by doing that by adding in this intelligence layer, it sounds like what you’re doing is your you’re bringing to people who may not be able to afford.
Expertise as an example. So if you’re in a big company, if you’re at back at Skype where you were as an example, you probably had some research teams who could do some of this stuff. The challenge is of course doing, doing it at scale, and in, and doing it when your scale is low. So for instance, if you have.
Every once in a while, you’re going to do a product launch and it’s really important, or you’re going to do, some regular campaign stuff, but you can’t quite afford a research team. Is that the sort of the place that you play in? Because I certainly can see that there’s a big gap there.
so how do you think about. How do you think about the best target for this kind of approach? is it people who can’t otherwise afford the expertise or is it really anyone who needs the scale?
Nitzan Shaer: [00:12:21] Yeah, I think as disruptive technologies go, the answer is the answers. we work predominantly with fortune 500 companies, think very large banks, very large brands.
and we provide that they have the money to do, to do market research if they want to. And many of them do, but we provide them a solution. That’s now at the tips of the fingers of every marketer, every designer, every product manager in the organization that can in five minutes, literally five minutes, it takes to launch a Weebo.
collect feedback, from the target audience that the study has to be in field for a few days. and then very quickly in five to 20 minutes, get all of the information that they need about the landing page, about the product page, about the ad, about the online experience. If it’s an entire journey.
so it’s very quick, very easy to use, very low costs, dramatically like order of magnitude faster and cheaper than any other, solution. And it adds the ability of the predictive. Now. Clay Christensen when he talks about, disruptive technologies, one is coming in cheaper and faster. The big thing that he always got excited about is non-consumption non-consumption is the second example that you gave, right?
That I can now use a product where before I couldn’t even use it. Because it was too expensive or because it wasn’t cheap and it’s not that I’m reducing my cost. I’m just suddenly given access to it. The classic example, being a mobile phone in the land of in the time of landlines. Suddenly I can talk when I’m in the car or on the road. When before I couldn’t even do that. And what we’re seeing with our clients, they start to use us because it reduces their costs. They continue to use us in scenarios that they never before got the opportunity to have the voice of the customer in the loop.
Peter Mahoney: [00:14:13] Yeah. I can imagine that just the inertia involved, even if you’re a decent size company of spinning up. a research project, as an example is difficult. And if you have the ability to package up and do this at scale so that you can do on demand on the fly, research questions, when you’re gonna use it a lot more and, in to, you’re probably gonna get some insights that.
You may not have been able to get before cause you do it while you’re developing the product. I can just see the value of really the embedded nature of this. So if you start to think about building the idea of, of near real time research, Into the, development process, whether it’s product development or a campaign development process, it just it’s, I assume good would have a really big impact on the end result, whether it’s user experience or conversion, depending on what your objective is.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:15:10] Yeah. Peter, the many of our clients tell us, especially in the large corporations that they can spend. Hours days and sometimes week and internal debates on it should be this. It should be that headline where
Peter Mahoney: [00:15:24] I’ve been in that meeting, you know what I’m talking about.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:15:27] Yes. and the reason that those debates rage is because it’s my opinion, versus your opinion.
and the truth is we don’t know what the right answer is. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have or easier to bring the customer into the room and save. Concept a is going to outperform concept B, which is what, which is exactly what we vote does. So we enable you to do that AB testing before you go live.
And not only that, we also tell you what the challenges is. to improve it, we may be getting to this in a moment, but I just have to share, I think one of the biggest challenges, we face as marketers. Is our own bias. we are all biased. Just
Peter Mahoney: [00:16:12] absolutely.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:16:15] recent, not a recent, this is an age old, study of the percentage of people in America that think that their, intelligence is above average.
Peter Mahoney: [00:16:24] Exactly 65,
Nitzan Shaer: [00:16:25] 65% above average. and if something we learned over the past year, through this election and through COVID is how hard it is for us to understand the other clan. We can understand why are they thinking that way? Why are they choosing that way? If this year has taught us something, it has how bias we all are and how ingrained, how hard it is to break that bias.
I think the classic example is in with Daniel Cannon, the Nobel Laureate in economics, when a brilliant man by all accounts, when he, was, about to publish his book, he stopped and he shared it with dozens of friends and colleagues to evaluate. And so they could tell him if there’s anything worthwhile in the smoking, if it’s worthwhile publishing it.
You recognize that his bias, because he wrote it was way too strong to give that evaluation.
Peter Mahoney: [00:17:27] Yeah, it is. it’s amazing where you see bias creeping into, lots of decisions. and I see it every day, where. People in my team will come back and say, do you like this? And I’ll say, yeah.
and, ‘ I’m not the target audience, I’m a recovering CMO as I like to say. and, but we should probably run that by some other people to see if we can get some feedback and some other areas. The other thing that’s really interesting that, you, the idea of bias. Reminded me about is the issue of changing perceptions and changing views on behalf of your target audience?
as an example, we had a great discussion back on our podcast back in the last month or so with the CMO of the AARP. and it was incredible because she talked about how the, over 55. audience is constantly changing, right? It’s just changing all the time. their perceptions are changing in, if you look at, any consumer, group that’s out there, not only is the demographic group sliding over time, but their views are changing all that to say that I think it’s important to understand that you can’t just test once.
and it has to be just, a built-in, a built-in part of the way that you do things to continually test and evolve things. another simple example is on more on the campaign side is that, we’d been running a very successful campaign to promote our new book, the next CMO, a guide to operational marketing excellence.
I always find a way to put a plug for my book and my podcast. I guess it’s my podcast. I could do whatever I want. And, and then, we were running a very successful campaign and, we saw the creative start to the conversion, starts to slide down over time. And it’s interesting because our head of UX, of course had an idea and he said, change this design.
He changed the design and changed the primary color in the ad. And of course the performance went up again. so it’s. Either you can have an audience, that’s tired of seeing a message, or, you can have, some other factor in the background, changing how things work. I guess the point is that you can’t stand still.
and, in most people do, when it comes to testing things, because you can’t. Test all the time. it’s been a challenge,
Nitzan Shaer: [00:19:51] to think about, what type of market, and, we are in as marketers. Just think, thinking about the big picture here. there are two broad types of activities or games you can be playing in the one.
Is the race to zero. For instance, when we were in Skype, we were reduced, you seen the cost of international calling down. And when you ended at some point, we’re going to hit zero and that’s it international calling is free and game over. it’s very hard to compete if you’re competing on price and the price is right.
So that’s a game that has a, the scenario, which is everybody’s equal in the end. however, marketers do not play that type of game. Marketers play the warfare game, which is the moment I have an advantage over you. In my website’s conversion, you have to do something different in order to get a leg up over me.
Otherwise I’m going to grow and grow and that battle is never ending. That if there’s, it’s very hard to predict the future, but most likely hundreds of years from now, we will continue to come up with new campaigns and new ideas and new solutions because it is an ever ending competition of grabbing the attention of a user and finding the right solutions.
For that user. and that’s why I’m not worried at all. some investors I’ve met a couple of investors. It’s only aren’t you worried that everybody will have a great experience website and it’ll be over. I said, yeah, I am not worried at all about that because you have a great website. Your competitor is going to have to do something innovative and different.
and that’s to exactly, to your point, the world is continuously changing. If 2020 taught us something, it is the world is in continuous flux behaviors and flux expectations is in floods. One of the things we do in the, one of the lenses we look at in the product and we vote when I said we assess a website, is we look at the hopes and concerns.
That people have before they even stepped foot on that website, the hopes and concerns related to, finding a telltale, tele-health doctor, to, deciding which university online to go to and those hopes and concerns. Again, as I said, it’s, before you even see the website and we see those hopes and concerns continuously change.
So within a year, we can see those hopes and concerns for the same product category change. And then we evaluate to what extent you’re meeting those hopes and concerns. That’s one of the three lenses we look at. That’s definitely right there changing
Peter Mahoney: [00:22:21] fascinating. And I am, I’m sure that the hopes and concerns change pretty dramatically in the last year.
So if you were, as an example, your decision criteria. For sending your kid to school is going to be wildly different. we just talked about this in our prep, for our kids, it’s a, it’s about the safety of the environment. so safety is critical and communications and those things are gonna pop up in the short term.
And I assume finding some way, to, to promote. Whether you’re in the healthcare business, or if you’re in retail and you’re trying to attract consumer making sure that the consumer believes that they can safely experience your brand or your, their child can safely go to school. There that’s gotta be, a pretty significantly important, factor in the decision.
And ultimately in conversion I’d suspect.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:23:16] that’s exactly right. it’s so true to be attuned to those needs. Peter, a second lens that we look at, on the page, on the experience is what we call the geographic lens and the geographic lens. we’re looking at it to what extent are certain images, headlines, content, to what extent people are attracted to them and they like them, or to what extent they actually pose hurdles to conversion and here too, we observed changes.
You can have a very similar image than in one period of time. Is absolutely fine. Neutral people say, okay, that’s cool. But in another time, given how our culture is changing, the news cycle is going that same image now has context that may be offending me, or maybe reminding me of something that is difficult for me.
And our response to that very same image, the very same headline, the very same is suddenly bears completely different contexts because of the news cycle, because of the books that were published in the past year because of cultural changes. and that’s a hard job for marketers too. Continuously take all of that in it’s a real burden.
I do that. Did not end feed the average day marketer today. That has to be on top of all of these changes as they’re occurring and to respond to them. Yeah,
Peter Mahoney: [00:24:36] it’s interesting. It reminds me of, I think it was probably, it was shockingly recent when this happened. I think it was within the last two or three years.
It was Cheerio’s I think had a national TV commercial, and they had a mixed race, couple. As there the, as the couple of the characters in the story of the ad. And it’s amazing to think that any would think that. That’s not typical, but it was for the time and incredibly, incredibly that was quote unquote brave thing for them to do, to put out there that, Oh boy, they’re couples can come from different races and you can look into the upcoming white house.
Of course, with the vice presidential family is a good example. but that’s probably an example of an image where if you’re a big consumer brand, You probably were. We’re going to avoid that kind of image five years ago. And these day that these days, that kind of image of courses is totally fine and acceptable, and maybe even creates a, a brand perception that is valuable for you as the brand, because all of a sudden you feel like you’re inclusive and thoughtful.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:25:51] I’ll give you another example that , may seem benign taking some biases. we’re working with , a large financial institution and they put on their main checking account. a page, a picture of a nice, of a lady driving a Vespa.
she was holding a map. She had sunglasses, she was smiling. and, you can guess what context they wanted to go for with this image. W they ran it through Wevo and they discovered, the people really took that image badly.
So Wevo zooms in and helps, what is the hurdle that is the biggest hurdle on your page. And that image turned out to be the biggest hurdle on the page, by the way, there were a few others, but that was the biggest. and people responded like this. They said one. You’re trying to convince me that you’re a digital bank, but she’s holding a paper map.
Like who in their right , mind holds a paper map in the year 2020, bad. Two, she’s smiling, but it’s obvious that her hair is covering her eyes and she can’t see the map. Like you’re on a Vespa you’re trying to look at the map, you get to see the map and you’re smiling. this is completely fake, staged.
Don’t like it. And finally. In 2020 to be in a Vespa, it gave like the context of maybe Greek islands, Wrong timing guys.
Peter Mahoney: [00:27:03] Can’t I can’t travel there. It would be nice, but I can’t do that. Yeah. it’s amazing. and it’s yet another thing where you look at it in the rear view mirror and you go, of course, that’s silly.
It doesn’t make sense. And I would never make a silly mistake like that. You tell yourself, but the reality is that we all have
Nitzan Shaer: [00:27:21] so T
Peter Mahoney: [00:27:22] tell for our listeners, are there a couple of things? That, based on what EV every marketer is likely doing when it comes to creating hurdles. For their, for their campaigns or their experiences.
Are there some common things that you say now I’m asking you to give free advice, but that’s part of the cost of being on my podcast. So what are a couple of things that people for our listeners that they should really look out for that they may be creating? unbeknownst to them.
They’ve got some hurdles they’re putting up.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:27:53] Yeah. Peter, there piles of books on how to create a great user digital user experience, explaining about the layout and the space that needs to be between them. there are additional books on how to create a compelling headline, and to write content that is.
trust is Woking. there are many disciplines that going to writing, and I think by the way, it’s completely underestimated by executive teams in companies, across industries, how much work CMO and the creative team have to put into writing something that is compelling and clear and trustworthy.
it is really hard work. It’s a multidisciplinary effort. They’re further. I would say what, one of the things we were discovering more and more is that different parts of the population respond differently. So as you’re trying to personalize for, high income versus low income people in this geography versus that geography people that are predisposed for these products versus the last product you actually need to do fairly different things.
so the mistakes that come up are very, diverse. I will go back to what we were talking about earlier, the most common phenomena, if to do it with one brush across all of those categories is self bias. You see the people as we are presenting as we’re, they’re going through the results, do this aha moment of how didn’t I notice that.
How didn’t I think of that because I was Excited about my own creation. if it’s a design or if it’s a layout, or if it’s the copy itself. the time and time again, I think we, it boils down to that self bias and the importance, the critical importance of asking others for feedback.
Yeah. I think that was a long, no, that was perfect. that was
Peter Mahoney: [00:29:48] a little Weasley. But because you’re you, but it was the right answer. Let me put it that way. I can tell you, we recently ran into my own self bias, and, and, I was proven wrong with data pretty quickly where, we were.
Putting together some new ads for Plannuh. This was probably four or five months ago now. And I had this quote unquote brilliant idea to improve performance. And, and, in finally, Kelsey, my digital marketing manager said, we’ll test it. And of course we tested it and it just didn’t convert it all.
It was amazing. And I thought it was the best idea in the world. but one thing you brought up that was interesting is. It is the idea of not only modeling ethically understanding whether performance is going to improve, but understanding the subtleties underneath and which sub-segments are going to perform how and what really matters.
And I often tell people, I spent time early in my career working on personalization technology. And it’s the biggest barrier for people back then in now, is that they don’t understand the basic segmentation of their audience. let alone, have enough diversity of offers and creative to build a map of a build on all your cells for personalization.
So does the approach that you use at Weebo does that help develop that understanding of your audience around and help you discover not only how performance overall is going to work, but what are the sort of different segments underneath there that are performing better?
Nitzan Shaer: [00:31:25] Yeah.
yes is the short answer, but Peter, I think you raised in touching on the area of personalization, how it’s gone through a hype cycle. I don’t know, a gardener will say exactly when it reached the peak of hype at sometime in the past, three to five years. and then in implementation, it was seen how difficult it actually is to do it at scale.
But I think underlying was the bigger problem of. Yeah, sure. I want to personalize for all of my subs micro segments, but what do they actually need? What do I need to personalize by? Is it the image? Is it the headline? Is it the context? Yeah. and on, as this is easier to do, right? Because you can just generate your very best and just test that.
That’s fine. But when you’re talking about it user experience, or when you’re talking about multiple, web pages, then the number of variables. is so high size and content and imagery and layout that it’s very hard to use those tools. And then you, as a marketer, need to decide what it is you’re going to change for each one of those.
We, those contribution here is to say how different segments of your population are reacting and if there’s any difference. So we did a project for a large online university. very big uptake, as in online education in the past year, in, and they identified that a bunch of segments that they thought behave differently.
In that case, it was income. It was actually no difference between them. They responded the same to different concepts. but they did find, in, it was people that were looking for. And advancement in their workplace. that was their goal to progress in their workplace, to have a higher income and move up the ranks.
That’s why they want to higher education versus, versus people that were about balancing work life while their studies, that was a different need and segmenting those two, that led to a whole lot of opportunities. So I think identifying which segments as you said exactly right. Peter, to identify which segments is something that, that we vote can contribute to and take away.
Peter Mahoney: [00:33:34] Yeah. And that’s great. Cause I tell you that is the most important part is understanding what may be at the beginning. Completely non-obvious segmentation. you may, Nate, you may think in these pure demographics and, because that’s the way that most marketers have been taught to think about these things.
And the reality is there’s a very different way that your customers break down by some underlying desire in your case, or motivation, which is really interesting. that’s fascinating. So I think we’re actually getting close to the end of the time that our audience will stay with me.
it’s me. It’s not you. this has been a fascinating discussion. I have, maybe one last question for you, that we like to ask everyone is whether you have any specific advice for either current or aspiring CMOs.
Nitzan Shaer: [00:34:29] there’s a lot to learn, for a CMO. It is really a multi-disciplinary job, especially in this day and age, but I’d say a couple of things, first of all, recognize your own personal biases.
try and learn more about what. Where you were predisposed to think and where your team is predisposed to think and try and bring that multiple multitude of approaches, as well as input. That’s external to you to balance that bias. maybe in a summary beat, be humble. the second thing I would say, and this actually idea comes from Nate silver on being a Fox versus a hedgehog.
I don’t know if you’ve read his recent book on the topic, but the core idea is. Instead of going gang ho on one idea, hedgehog has one way to protect themselves and it’s all out on that, Instead of just promoting and digging deeper and deeper into your own idea, I think as a CMIO, you would need to be what he calls a Fox, which is take in information from multiple sources, continuously question your own assumptions.
And if you do that well, you will get to the right answer at the end.
Peter Mahoney: [00:35:41] that is fantastic advice. I really appreciate it. I, and last w where can people find more information about Weaver?
Nitzan Shaer: [00:35:49] so we will conversion.com is the good place to start. there, examples there, of how we’ve, works and a few, tests that we vote has published.
that are available to learn more about, and I hope you have a chance to, to check it out.
Peter Mahoney: [00:36:03] Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes, if you’re looking that way and otherwise, I wanted to thank you so much, needs on for a great conversation. as usual I learned a lot. During these sessions and I hope the audience did too.
so thank you. I really appreciate it. And for the rest of you, make sure that you follow the next CMO and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn and other places. You may find us if you have ideas or topics for guests. or other things that we, you think we should be talking about, go to our website, at planet.com or email them to us thenextcmo@plannuh.com and stay tuned.
Cause we’re working on a really new, exciting, new community that we’re launching soon. So have a great day.
nextcmo
25 Jan 2021
