Episode Notes

TheNextCMO’s latest podcast is with Kate Adams the VP of Marketing at Drift. Kate has over 15 years of Mar-Tech experience and currently heads up Drift’s demand generation efforts. Kate is essential to growing the brand and acquiring new customers. This podcast discusses the evolution of the marketing and sales roles, how Drift has moved its major event, HyperGrowth to a quarterly virtual event, RevGrowth, Drift’s plans to expand its community, and how conversational marketing has impacted the world of marketing. 

Full Transcript

Kelsey Krapf 0:00
Welcome to the official podcast of the next cmo hosted by Plannuh. The next cmo is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS or want to become one. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I’m the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:15
And I’m Peter Mahoney. I’m the former CEO of Plannuh and welcome to the next cmo podcast.

Kelsey Krapf 0:32
This week we have Kate Adams, the VP of Marketing at DRIFT. Kate heads up DRIFT’s demand Gen efforts and is essential to growing the brand and acquiring new customers. Kate has over 15 years of martech experience so we’re thrilled to have her on the show from another Boston based company.

Unknown Speaker 0:51
Okay, Kate,

Kate Adams 0:54
I’m great guys. How are you? Thanks so much for having me.

Kelsey Krapf 0:57
super happy to have you can you just Talk to me a little bit about yourself and you know what you do at drift?

Kate Adams 1:03
Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I am VP of Marketing here. And Kelsey, as you mentioned, I’m focused on demand generation. And so from a demand Gen perspective, we think about it in really three centers of excellence. The first is a center of excellence around campaigns and integrated campaigns. The second is a center of excellence around digital marketing. And the third is a center of excellence around sales development. So SDRs

Peter Mahoney 1:32
that’s great. I’m glad you incorporate sales, that the str function that’s a off often debated topic, Cade is whether SDR should be in sales or they should be in marketing. So I, I take it that you’re a they should be in marketing a part of the role. What was the consideration that you all had adrift? For for that?

Kate Adams 1:54
Yeah, great question, Peter. I think so the last day that I saw, it’s about 6040 60% of the time. They live in sales and 40% of the time they live in marketing. And why we believe that they belong in marketing is because I really own the pipeline number from a demand Gen perspective. And so SDRs are a critical component of pipeline and pipeline creation. And so that’s why they they sit here adrift.

Peter Mahoney 2:22
Yep, that makes a ton of sense. And and I think you’re seeing more and more of that. Let’s back up for just a second to Kelsey and i and i think most of our audience know a lot about drift in certainly we may have our own perspective of what drift is, and but drift has done a lot over the last couple years in particular, just give us a quick view into what drift has been up to and in who the target audience is for drift these days. Kay?

Kate Adams 2:50
Sure. So drift started about five years ago, our founders, David can sell and ilias Torres really saw Need in the market, what they saw was that in e commerce there is this emergence of chat providing chat providers in that space. And they saw that that was really transforming the e commerce experience, right. And they said, this is this need is actually even more pronounced in b2b, because in b2b it was it’s always fill out a form and we’ll get back to you later. And there’s little to no ability to ever be able to get a hold of a b2b company in real time when that person is at their point of highest intent, which is when they’re on your website. And so really, that’s how how drift emerged. And in at that point, that’s really where we started building or they started creating the category conversational marketing, and the concept of your as marketers, you’re spending all of this time driving people back to your website. And spending all this time driving people to your website for the first time only to greet them all with the same generic experience regardless of who they are. So regardless of if they’re your top accountant that you’ve been dying to get into, that your CRM would literally salivate if they know if he or she knew that they were on your website. Or if it was a company that wasn’t a good, ideal customer profile fit for you. And so that’s really what drift is all about. How do you use conversational marketing to engage those people greet those quality accounts when they’re on your website, and they’re at their point of highest intent? And then, recently, and what we realized is, over the last five years, what we’ve been doing is not just conversational marketing. It’s the joining of conversational marketing and conversational sales together, right? Because it’s most often that sales development team are the sales team that are actually having those conversations. And so how’s marketing engaging them. And then how is sales, executing on those conversations, and really bringing those two things together to do to accelerate revenue? Right. And so over just over a month ago, we made the big announcement that, you know, what we’ve been talking about how we’ve been talking about ourselves is far too small. We’re not just conversational marketing, we’re really a revenue acceleration platform.

Peter Mahoney 5:26
Well, that’s great. And I certainly saw the the expansion of your vision, and I’m sure it was David and Elise’s vision from the beginning. And it’s just now just starting to be realized. That’s, that’s, you know, part of what happens in still earliest stage companies, of course, is that you, you define sort of this big, broad vision and then you take some steps in the beginning to get there. So it’s been amazing to see a rollout and I know with recent launches of things like video as an example, and more social selling kind of capabilities that are integrated into the platform. And one of the reasons it makes it makes this conversation so compelling is that not only are you someone who is sort of at the forefront of technologies that marketers use for demand, but you’re also the practitioner of those and other technologies, which is pretty exciting.

Kate Adams 6:20
Yeah, Peter, it’s one of the things when I so before I actually joined drift, I was a customer. And I saw the impact that the platform actually had on our business. And as a result, I quickly realized that this was a company that I wanted to be a part of. And really, that was really the compelling point that along with the team as I met more and more members of the team throughout the interview process that made me think, Wow, I’ve got to join this this team. One of the things I didn’t take into account at that point was how much I would really enjoy being the our real end customer at the end of the day and how much I would really enjoy being able to get to speak to other marketers each and every day marketing to marketers. It’s difficult because because marketers don’t love to be marketed to and if you do something wrong, they’ll certainly call you out on that. But also, it’s the most fun because it’s pushed me to be a better marketer over these last just under two years.

Kelsey Krapf 7:30
I couldn’t agree with you more marketing to marketers is such a challenge, but it’s a challenge that you want to bring on because it makes you a better marketer and you learn really what makes someone you know, have that intent to buy. Um, I want to go back a little bit to the conference on marketing, because this has obviously changed the way that companies you know, communicate or go to market. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and how that’s been impacted that drift.

Kate Adams 7:56
Sure. So, in terms of in terms of how it impacted how marketers are thinking about this. So there’s constantly and I know that that both of you will, will get this right off the bat, which is there’s that constant back and forth between marketing and sales, right? marketing says, Hey, I have all these leads, look at all these leads I created and sales says yeah, but there’s not enough of them. And they, the quality of them stinks. And it’s this constant finger pointing back and forth about Hey, how are you helping us marketing? How are you truly helping me get to quota get to our number, right? And for too long, it’s always there’s this gift of a FedEx Delivery person and he takes the box kind of out of the truck and then Chuck’s it over the the gate and leaves it there. And I think for too long, too many marketers have been doing that with leads, right? We have made everything into an acronym so Now we have mq ELLs for marketing, qualified leads, sales, qualified leads SQL. We put those acronyms into our other acronyms with our CRMs and our ma PS marketing automation platforms, right? We’ve got tofu, mostly both like everything is an acronym. Unfortunately, we have forgotten that all of those things that we’ve been chucking over the gate, they’re actually people, and they want to have a conversation with us. They’re trying to educate themselves. They’re trying to talk to us. And we’re saying Thanks, but no thanks, or thanks. And we’ll get back to you when it’s convenient for us. Well, that that’s not how it works, right? That’s not the experience that people are having in their consumer lives. Right in my consumer life. I can pick up my phone, go to Amazon and have a package at my door in 36 hours. It’s amazing right? In my consumer life, I can pick up my remote, go to Netflix and watch or or Prime video or any of these other things, and watch a library of millions of different forms of entertainment. And, and, and so everything has been built on the consumer side for now. But still too many b2b marketers are built for later, right? And so really, that’s how we’re thinking about or how we’ve transformed the overall journey and customer experience of our customers, right. It’s broader than just generating more leads. It’s about creating an amazing customer experience that fortifies your brand. There’s this quote from Maya Angelou, which is, people may or may not remember what you did, but they will always remember the way that you made them feel. And that is true in b2b as well. Right? If you make somebody feel like they don’t matter to you by delivering them the same generic form experience by not getting back to them quickly and showing that you want to earn their business and that you have a solution that can meet their needs. That says a ton about your brand and your customer experience. I think the other thing is not to just think about this from a new business perspective, but also thinking about this as a broader lifetime value perspective. So not only do you want to grow your company and get more customers, but you need to have that same experience in order to increase the lifetime value of your customer set. Right. In fact, we we run a conversational marketing in our application. So for customers where we know as Peter mentioned, right, our portfolio has increased dramatically. So we now have drift video, that sales development teams and as a prospect into their accounts, we have drift email, that demand Gen marketers and marketing ops folks are using to increase the hygiene of their database and get to lead Faster using email bots. But we want to make sure that our customers are aware of all of these offers as well. And where else we can help them, right? We’re helping you on your website and having a great experience. But we can help you even more through the additional products that we have as well. So really thinking about it not just as a customer acquisition strategy, but as a longer lifetime value strategy.

Peter Mahoney 12:27
That that makes a ton of sense. And it’s it’s great that you drink your own champagne, as they say, right, which is, which is good. It could be non alcoholic champagne. I don’t know if that’s controversial to use that these days. One of the things I was going to ask you, Kate is, is about the fact that you’ve, you’ve created a new category, and certainly there there have been elements of what drift has done or does in other areas, but still bringing it to being bit b2b in in creating the broad category of conversational marketing is it’s a big lift for a marketer to do and for a company to do. So how do you think about the marketing strategy at the highest level? So what is drifts marketing strategy if you could encapsulate that briefly to so that people can understand what’s a good marketing strategy for category creator like drift?

Kate Adams 13:27
Yeah, Peter, so we created the category of conversational marketing. And as crazy as this may seem, we are now creating another category of revenue acceleration, right? And we we know that we fortified the conversational marketing category, we wrote the book on it. And guess what now folks are thinking about what is your conversational marketing strategy. And then also and then also, other vendors in the space are calling themselves conversational marketing vendors as well. So when you hear that being said, when the The market says it back to you. That’s when you know that you’ve been successful in that category creation process, which is no easy lift. We’re about we’re doing it again. Because we don’t follow the normal playbook really have anything drift. But I think when you ask about our broader marketing strategy number one brand is everything. And this was done well before I ever joined the company. But it has created an amazing brand. And we think about brand as it’s not just this, this thing that only marketing does. It’s branded every single touch point that you have with our entire company. And it’s every single time you run into one of our employees on the street. It’s every single time you see a LinkedIn post from one of our employees. We are all every single member of the team is responsible for the brand. And I think more broadly, our overarching marketing strategy really goes back to David Cancel our CEO and founder really brought the idea of give, give, give, give, give, and eventually it will come back to you. And so that’s really how we think about our brother, actually, how are we giving? How are we helping you be a better marketer? How are we helping you be a better salesperson? And if we do that, right, and we do that enough times, it will, it will become undeniable that you need to buy draft right. So it’s okay. We have this concept of, we call all of our prospects future customers, right. We don’t talk about mq ELLs at all, we don’t talk about Sq O’s. When we talk about opportunities, we call them future customers, because we believe that whether you are a customer today, six months from now, or six years from now, you will be a customer because if you get left behind and you don’t have this experience on your website, where you’re greeting people, when they’re at their places. highest intent that you are going to be left behind, because you will be stuck with an antiquated system and an antiquated experience that that just doesn’t match your buyers expectations.

Peter Mahoney 16:13
So yeah, in you can feel that with interacting with drift and obviously, it emanates from David who’s an incredibly charismatic guy. And, and you can see how that and he he’s the kind of guy you think of as a very generous leader too. So, you can see that sort of seeping into the brand in a very direct way. How would you then think about connecting the dots from that broad brand first kind of strategy to to sort of that next level art now what do I do right so I can create the greatest brand in the world. Now how do I activate that? How do I connect that brand to to the the needs and desires The target audience to to get them to, to actually do something that ultimately makes them take a step closer to drift and being a customer.

Kate Adams 17:09
Yeah, so we connect those dots. And it’s my job to connect those dots right in demand generation. And so we connect those dots with, how are we getting people to, to consume all of the amazing content that we create, whether it’s in a podcast, or books, or attending one of our back in the day when you do in person events, attending whatever in person events, and now attending one of our virtual events. We think about that as how are we how are we delivering content that is helping people in a way and then amplifying that content? So you’ll see that through our digital ad strategy, right? We we don’t just run ads just on Hey, you need drift. In fact, the first ad that you are most likely to see from us is about an educational opportunity. So whether that’s through one again through one of our many books, I am so fortunate to work with one of the most talented content marketing teams, I think that there is out there that just creates this unbelievable content. Right? So one of our, one of the first interactions you’ll likely have with us is, and you’ll see an ad about one of our books like perhaps the mq L is dead. Right? More, perhaps you’ll see an ad for rev growth, which is our, which is our new virtual experience and virtual event, right, where you can hear from speakers like the musical director of Hamilton or Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight from the office, right? We are passionate about creating educational experiences that not only educate you, but also entertain you. And then how are we able to nurture those folks, and help them understand that we have a solution to their problems and we can help them.

Kelsey Krapf 18:53
You mentioned obviously, the virtual events and you know, if you live in the Boston area, it’s no surprise that you have hyper growth, I’ve actually had the pleasure of going to one of those events before and I’m just curious, how are you adapting to now this virtual world and, you know, there’s so much energy as something like hyper growth, and you can really feel the energy when you’re, you’re at a conference like this. So, you know, how has that changed? How do you think the dynamic of virtual events are going to change in the future? You know, what’s, what’s going to be the the movement from the physical events?

Kate Adams 19:26
Yeah, I mean, that’s a multi million dollar question for pretty much every marketer there is out there. And so for us, what that looked like was, we were really sad because Kelsey, as you mentioned, hyper growth is really one of our Pinnacle events really has been a pinnacle event, we’ve become known about that experience. And so it was the beginning of March when myself like every other demand Gen marketer out there got the barrage of emails that Every single trade show that you weren’t going to attend or speak at had been canceled. And so after I got done having a pity party for myself on the train ride home, trying to come up with how I’m going to make up that gap in in pipeline, and what we were counting on for those events. One of the marketers on our team talked about, let’s, why don’t do why not do our own event, our own virtual event. And if we are having this, this challenge, there are two things. If we, as a company, we’re having this this challenge around events than all the partners in our space, everybody in this ecosystem was also going to have this challenge. And then second, like all of these events, they’re great for for pipeline generation and chosen, they all have the value that around that, but they’re also the professional development opportunity for all of these for all of these attendees, right like This was Kelsey when he went to Peter and said, Hey, Peter, I want to go spend 1500 dollars to go attend this event. So I can be the best senior marketing manager on the planet, like you just lost out on that opportunity. So we were able to send an email to about 30 of our partners and said, Look, now is the time that we need to surround our community. And we need to provide them with an educational opportunity, like they have never seen before. And that’s really where Reb growth was born, I think within within, so I sent that email, I went to bed. And the next morning, I had 25 different responses from all the partner saying like, yes, we’re in. And from there, we got to work and it was six weeks from that time that we that we held that first grab growth virtual virtual event. I think you asked more broadly about what the future of virtual events so since then Reb growth has become a quarterly staple within our demand. Integration activities. In fact, next week, that’s when you’ll you’ll see rev growth, which is all about virtual events. It’s rev growth, virtual experiences. It’s all about virtual events. So we’ll be talking about all these things. We have the editorial director for 10 women talking about how she took 10 women to a virtual experience. And, you know, the reason why we have the musical director of Hamilton is because they did exactly that. Right. They brought Hamilton to Disney plus. And so we think the best lessons for b2b marketers are actually found in the b2c market. Don’t go emulate what’s happening in b2b go emulate what’s happening and be the see and align to those experiences. Right. And that’s fundamentally as I mentioned before, how our power business was born. And so I think that tons of folks, we’ve been currently over the last six months I believe, we’ve been going through this exercise of, Okay, I need to pick up too many more. have picked up what was going to be there in person experience and tried to put it down virtually right and pulled in the same that the same formats, all of those things. I think we haven’t hit that the peak of innovation in virtual events yet, because I think a lot of the platform’s themselves have also been dealing with such a surge of demand. They’ve been trying to deal with that surge of demand mat rather than innovating, you know, getting to the to the peak of that innovation curve and really rethinking it. And I think now, I’m seeing more and more companies completely rethink it, not just pick up the analog version and make it virtual, but really rethink what does a virtual experience really mean? How do I make this into an outstanding experience as opposed to asking somebody to sit on a zoom for 12 hours?

Peter Mahoney 23:50
Yeah, it’s funny that you bring up that that Kate because I think there’s this trend in virtual events toward the skeuomorphism approach, which is basically I want to make my virtual event exactly like my physical event except virtually and, and I think it’s a huge mistake. And you leave a ton on on the table a ton of opportunity by by doing that. And in even even worse is the whole idea of sort of these. see a lot of people try to do these virtual tradeshow kind of things. And they try to introduce the things that people don’t like about trade shows into a virtual environment. So completely rethinking. And I liked the idea too, that you you’ve done a few things with with your events that I think are really compelling. First of all, they’re true to your brand and in so your marketing the marketing experience to a future drift customer, if I get that right, is extremely coherent. And I think there’s there’s a ton of value in in doing that. It is it feels like drift, it feels like it’s part of the journey that you’re going going on etc. And this, this approach of learning from the consumer world and bringing that into into b2b is it’s an important trend that that b2b marketers marketers are doing and you’re really leaning in and accelerating them. And then the last thing that we’ve seen a lot of shift toward with, with our listeners and our customers is, is the the integration of sales and marketing. And when you think about how many people have growth teams instead of sales and marketing teams, how many people have rev ops instead of sales ops and marketing ops. So leaning into that, and in helping to accelerate that trend, I think is is really smart. So if you step back though, and say, say obviously you’ve got these signature approaches you mentioned, you probably Do a fair amount of digital, you do a lot of content marketing, because you’re about educating the users, you’ve gone to this virtual event model. Talk to us, at least at a high level map out what’s your mix look like? It drift. So if you if you said, here’s the broad, the broad marketing plan for for 2020. What what’s the general mix that you you would use in your plan?

Kate Adams 26:28
Yeah, so great question, Peter. So our mix really looks well no surprise to any of us here. It’s now completely digital. It hadn’t always been but it is now. And our mix really looks like again, very heavy on the content side. So from a digital advertising perspective, how are we getting people to consume our content, then it’s also heavy on the event side. We’ve we have participated in and sponsored a number events. And, Peter, to your point, like, it is not the virtual tradeshow experience that is making me make that investment. It is, how are we able to amplify our message? How are we able to get in front of the audience at that event? Is there a speaking slot available? How are we able to educate again, going back to it? How are we able able to educate the attendees of that event that really gets me to move in terms of driving the sponsorship. And then we’re also heavily invested in increasing our footprint organically. big bully, I’m a big believer of going to meet the buyers where they are and buyers right now more than ever before, are in Google searching for solutions to their problems. And so we are invested heavily in that. And then the last part and

Peter Mahoney 27:51
when you say that to I’m gonna say not to interrupt but to interrupt. Does that mean that you’ve invested heavily in in SEO And content, or is it or, or sem in general, or expand a little bit more about what you mean with meeting them at Google.

Kate Adams 28:09
It’s both. So we are invested in SEO. And then we also complement that with our sem strategy and PPC so. So again, so you’ll see us like digital advertising on social like Facebook, Instagram. And that’s also quite honestly, where a brand comes into play so heavily. When you see one of those ads, it doesn’t feel out of place on what you consider like a b2c platform. Because the creative that we associate with our books feels like oh, it’s okay. Like, I want to consume this marketing book, even though my mindset is I’m checking in on my friends on Instagram and checking out their stories, right. So, so that’s a big piece of that and then from an SEM perspective, yes, while we’re working on organic and content and and optimizing our pages, to make sure that we are meeting those buyers, for their queries organically, we’re also going to make sure we are there in a paid fashion as well, making sure that we’re in the top, the top of those search results as much as possible.

Peter Mahoney 29:15
Tell me a little bit about, about how you measure performance. Because you obviously have a one a brand first program into a deeply integrated program, which makes it challenging Of course, to to measure the overall performance. So how do you approach that adrift?

Kate Adams 29:35
Yeah, so we are visible customers, which is in the Adobe family. So biz was for those folks who may be listening that don’t know marketing attribution software. And so that really enables us to look at the full customer journey. And when I say that, I mean from the very first time I’ve ever seen you all the way through to measuring your how we’re influencing your expansion opportunities. So as it relates to new business, there are five key milestones we’re looking at and understanding how each of our channels is influencing that. The first is that first touch, right? How are we driving you to actually come to our website the first time ever? The next is lead created. So how have we influenced you to actually provide us with your information in exchange for some of the educational opportunities I talked about earlier? The next is how are we getting you to actually understand the value of why you’d want to take a meeting with us? So how are we getting to that first meeting with you? And then the next is how are we getting to opportunity creation or future customer creation, right, where we’re using that opportunity object in Salesforce and like how, what are the things that we’re doing to get you through there and we look at each of those channels and can understand the value of how each of those channels this contributing across that entire journey.

Peter Mahoney 31:03
So you think about it from a channel perspective. Do you also map to that a campaign perspective?

Kate Adams 31:11
Yes. So our hierarchy, his channel, and then campaign and then offers within that campaign,

Peter Mahoney 31:19
wise channel the top.

Kate Adams 31:22
Because I think how I’ve organized the demand Gen team is, by channel I’ve a d-ri or owner of each of those channels, and how I run my demand Gen meeting every week with that team, as we look at, I have my team forecasts exactly what they believe they’ll do from acquisition to scheduled conversation, which is what we call, which is what other organizations would call an SQL right? And then all the way into future customer which again, is opportunity, right? And not and again, we don’t call them leads, we call them interested people adrift because I want I want the Peters in the Cal seas of the world to remember that these are people on the other end, not just leads when you don’t follow up, or you don’t provide a great experience, we want you to understand that it’s Peter that you let down. And it’s Kelsey that you let down. So the demand Gen team forecasts for each of those things. And then we go and we’re dig deep every week and say, Where are you according to your forecast? If you’re upgrade, why, and how can we double down? And if you’re not meeting your forecast, why and what are we going to do about it?

Peter Mahoney 32:35
So how would you think about then? Because you you’ve got I think that you’ve got campaigns across those channels. So of course, you know, as an example, your your revenue acceleration effort might be part of a broader thematic campaign. Do you think about that in how you think about one what is the what is the total and It must be large as you start to spread that across channels. And and then how how do you look at attributing the the value that the overall value? What’s the business impact of this revenue acceleration approach that you’re taking?

Kate Adams 33:17
Yep. So, so we can roll it up in channel and then go into campaigns. But we can also just look at it from a campaign perspective. And if we’re not, if we’re not using every channel available to us for each of our campaigns, we’re doing it wrong. So campaigns are what unify those Center of Excellence I talked about at the earlier part of the combo. The campaigns are what bring the integrated campaigns team and the digital team together to really execute on on our core metrics as well as the SDR team right. SDR team is aligned to our campaigns because they’re using all of the offers and assets within each of those campaigns in their outreach every single day. And so that We we we roll it up on the campaign side as well. And in fact, we have a cross the entire marketing team campaigns has been how we have unified the entire marketing team, from sales development, to creative to web development to demand generation. Everybody to the content team, right? And we identify those themes, identify what they’re going to be for the quarter, and then the team comes together and says, Okay, great, what are the core offers that we believe will resonate with our audience as it relates to these themes? And then from there, demand Gen goes in and creates a forecast for what we believe the business value will be of each of those campaigns. And we’re constantly assessing that.

Peter Mahoney 34:45
And do you have a campaign leader for each campaign? Is that how you organize it?

Kate Adams 34:50
Yes, we have a campaign we are for each of the campaign’s that that executes on it.

Peter Mahoney 34:56
All right. I will fight you later about this, but I think you should organize and campaign At the top, so we’ll take that for another day, Kate. So I think there’s a it’s a Crips and Bloods thing I think that I don’t think we’re gonna resolve today but but it’s probably a good it’s a good discussion over a chocolate milk. So that’s, that’s great. So tell me a little bit Now, speaking of campaigns, is there sort of a single campaign that you can identify as the most effective thing that you’ve ever seen to drive the growth at drift to date?

Kate Adams 35:33
Yeah, our, our most successful campaign to date has really been it was doubling down on digital was what we called the theme. And it was pandemic related, obviously, because that’s what everybody was was worried about was how do I get more out of these digital channels now, and so from a theme perspective, that really was One of our most most successful campaign themes to date. Within that campaign, there were a number of different offers that have that were, were really trajectory changing for us. One of them was the MPL is dead ebook, which is, I believe, really any easy, anything is dead, and it’s pretty. It’s pretty inspiring to people. It’s why you see so many headlines, emails that everything’s dead all the time until it’s not. And then then we also had a campaign that we did. That was earlier days, which was really about antiquated systems. So, back when everybody was in the office, we did a direct mail component to this campaign, which was we actually it was dynamically print the numerically printed out asset where we actually brought in the persons a screenshot of the person’s form from their actual website. And so we were able to dynamically print that into the asset. And also then said, you’re still not using this image of a rotary phone or we had I believe we had the image should

Peter Mahoney 37:19
have chiseled their form into a stone tablet.

Kate Adams 37:23
That maybe that’s next. But so that and then we brought in a picture of like the first Apple Computer and said, you’re still not using these, why are you still using only this? And the response from that and how dynamic it was and how personalized it was? was outstanding for us to

Kelsey Krapf 37:44
Kate, I want to switch gears real quick here because I know the one thing we haven’t really talked about is the drift community. You guys have done a phenomenal job, you know, bringing Marketing Leaders together and sharing expertise. How has your marketing strategy then to you know, rode the drift community to what it is today.

Kate Adams 38:03
Yeah, so I think there’s some really exciting things to come on the community in the next couple months, and I can’t talk about too much of it. Otherwise, come on, you can

Peter Mahoney 38:15
do it.

Kate Adams 38:18
But yeah, so drift insider has become our community. And it really we launched it with like, I think there were two videos and the first one was about Steve job president Steve Jobs, presentation styles and breaking it down and, and helping marketers to understand how they could use it. Right.

Peter Mahoney 38:34
You know, there was an amazing guy who did a presentation about how to build your marketing budget. That would that was me. I don’t know if you remember that. Well, back in the day,

Kate Adams 38:46
it’s only because we look for the best of the best.

Peter Mahoney 38:49
That’s right. Thank you,

Kate Adams 38:50
that we have in there. So

Peter Mahoney 38:52
all right, your honorarium is on the way

Kate Adams 38:56
so we are bringing but you know, I I Say that not just, we are looking for the best of the best marketers to come in and create this and help us create this library of talent. And again, it goes back to that give, give give component of educating you. Because if we can help Kelsey be a better marketer at the end of the day, it’ll come back to us in another way. And so that’s really what insider is started with a few videos since then we now have added like, the library of videos is astronomical at this point. We’ve also added in the community component where we’re folks can connect with one another there. And then there’s, there’s just so much valuable content. There’s no filter, where we talk with CMOS and leaders, similar to what you all are doing, and talking about them with about business stuff and personal stuff, too, and bringing in that personal component. And so that’s been huge for us. It’s all there’s also a ton of educational content on how to be successful adrift for our customers there. And that’s been huge. But I think soon it will become even bigger than ever before we’ve got you’ve also got the certifications in there. Don’t forget, like you can become conversational marketing certified, conversational sales certified, and there’ll be even more certifications to come. But that’s a huge component of everything that we do.

Peter Mahoney 40:25
Great. So we’re running out of time, but I do want to ask a couple of quick additional question questions if I can squeak them in Kate says so one is your your book strategy. So you may know and plug for our book we just released our the next cmo, a guide to operational marketing excellence, get it on Amazon or get a free copy if you go to our website, blah, blah, blah. And it’s been great for us when really exciting, but tell me what made you decide To write a book and now a series of books in in how does that sort of ladder up into your overall strategy?

Kate Adams 41:07
Yeah, so the book predated, I had just joined when it when we’d actually published it. So that that project was well under the well underway when I got here. But the the underlying component of why we created that book was if we’re going to create a category, and we’re going to be the experts in conversational marketing, we better have written the book on it. And as the market was repeating back to us conversational marketing and and other vendors were coming up and saying, oh, we’re conversational marketing mentors to we needed to be the ultimate experts on that. And this was such a net new concept. There really wasn’t anything else out there like it in the market. And I think that really helped us fortify our place. It was a big component of creating the category on conversational marketing and fortifying our place there for sure.

Peter Mahoney 42:01
Great. Well, I think we probably have time for one more question from Kelsey. And it’s our favorite one to ask every everyone who comes to the show. So go ahead, Kelsey. Ask your your last one before we wrap here.

Kelsey Krapf 42:14
Yes, Kay, obviously, you know your VP of Marketing for a big company and is well known in the marketing brand and marketing world. But what advice do you have for you know, those that want to become CMOS or those that are CMOS to be, you know, better marketers and better at their job?

Kate Adams 42:32
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the the biggest thing for me as it relates to that is always be learning. So no matter how long I have been doing this marketing thing, which is close to almost 20 years now, I am constantly telling my team that they need to we need always be learning and I want to learn each and every single And a big component of learning is testing. And sometimes you’re going to fail in those tests. And I think it is paramount really important to instill the idea of psychological safety within your teams that it’s okay to fail, as long as you can talk about why you failed and what you learn from it, and how we will be better as a result.

Peter Mahoney 43:23
That’s, that’s great advice, Kate, as I expected, and Kelsey reminds me of some of the, some of the, one of the chapters in our book where we we ask people to marketers should act like scientists, right? They should be truth seekers, they should be about running experiments. And if they experiments fails, you learn something from that, right. So it’s all about sort of elevating your knowledge and elevating the knowledge of the company in the organization you’re trying to trying to work with. So with that, I wanted to thank you, Kate, for a great conversation, as usual, and Kelsey Why don’t you take us out?

Kelsey Krapf 44:02
Yes, thanks so much, Kate. We really, really appreciate your time you know, learning about how marketing and sales have changed how conversational marketing is now you know the evolution of what marketing’s become so really appreciate your time and make sure to follow the next cmo and Plannuh on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to thenextCMO@plannuh.com. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks

Transcribed by https://otter.ai