Navigating today’s digital world is daunting, especially for businesses. There’s no shortage of tactics to leverage–emails, blogs, videos, webinars, podcasts, ads–and a seemingly endless supply of apps and platforms to execute those initiatives. So, how do you break through the noise and get your company noticed?

For Cory Hogan, CRO of Lob, the key is revenue leadership. Whether you’re helping build a community for your employees or offering potential customers a personalized ad experience, your job as a leader is to meet people where they are. And taking a unique approach might just help push your brand over the top.

In this episode of The Modern CFO, Cory explains how Lob is connecting the digital world with the physical one, what it takes to provide the right environment for hybrid employees, and the strategy of today’s CROs.

Show Links

Check out Lob
Connect with P. Cory Hogan on LinkedIn
Check out Nth Round
Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

7:15 – Cultivating an entrepreneurial, organizational spirit
The ambition and motivation that comes with being an entrepreneur have been a part of Cory’s DNA since childhood.

“I can't take too much credit again for any of that success. Right place, right time is definitely a theme in my career. I think there's a lot of people who are both harder working and smarter than I am and have, or have not, had those types of events and exits in their own past. I am, to your point though, risk-loving. For better or for worse, I think that appetite and even that desire to go and find increasingly risky but exciting opportunities has just always driven me. Whether that was like, ‘Hey, I'm going to start this little company. I don't know the first thing about what I'm doing here, but this sounds like a really exciting opportunity.’ The ambition that comes with it; the motivation has always just been part of my DNA. I can tell you childhood stories of going around town and picking up rocks, throwing them in my wagon, and selling them door to door believing that somebody would buy them. That level of entrepreneurship and ownership and accountability that comes with the risk side has just always been part of who I am.”

9:17 – Making the most of your ad spend
At Lob, the goal is to connect the digital world with the physical one through a tech-first approach to marketing.

“Our mission, at the highest level, is to connect the world one mailbox at a time. The premise is in the digital world the most powerful connections can be found human to human or on the physical side, even within the mailbox. Both modern marketers and their audiences, are getting saturated with the ubiquitous, expensive digital ads that are out there. Our phones, our searches, our inboxes, they're all full of ads to which most of us are increasingly numb and oblivious in spite of some really serious and significant investments behind them. I think all of these modern marketing methods will continue to evolve, but Lob is finding surprising success as we bring in this tech-first, digital approach to the direct mail category, which is a $75 billion [industry] that is not going to go away anytime soon, in spite of what might happen in the macro-environment. Effectively, we're replacing what we call junk mail with intelligent mail. Think of highly-personalized content arriving at your home at the perfect moment. You have no choice but to actually open the mailbox, whether you want to or not, and look at all of those pieces and give them at least a couple seconds of thought, which is more than a lot of the messages that come in our inbox.”

10:45 – Personalize your marketing
Personalized, timely, and physical marketing tools get your customers’ attention, and Lob’s clients have seen on average 19-times better returns than some other digital-only marketing methods.

“We work with a large, leading retailer on what we would consider an ‘abandoned cart’ campaign, similar to what you might see, or not see, in your inbox–Leave an item unpurchased in your e-commerce shopping cart, then tomorrow, here's this beautiful, personalized piece [of mail] in your mailbox. ‘Hey Andrew, we see you were interested in this particular patio set yesterday. There are three others just like it.’ You scan this QR code, go hit a personalized landing page with the discount and some other options available we've curated just for you. And that level of a personalized, timely, extremely relevant message, it really gets attention. It gets results. And without technology and the Lob approach, it would have been aspirational but extremely difficult to pull off when you think about all of the content and the fulfillment that's required for that type of a use case, but it works. So customers are seeing on average 19x better returns than some of these other digital-only marketing methods. And today, Lob reaches one in two households.”

13:18 – The strategy of a modern CRO
The modern CRO must learn how to master both the art and the science of a revenue system in order to get the best results.

“The modern CRO, to your point, is more than just a glorified VP of Sales. The modern revenue team includes all of those customer-facing motions, both sales, service, marketing–the entirety of the customer experience. That's where a lot of my background has been in that customer experience space. So, it's really about revenue leadership. That includes things like customer segmentation, the value proposition, engagement motions, channels coverage, direct versus indirect, organizational and job designs, sizing, deployment, talent and enablement, something we're talking a lot about here recently, metrics, quota, performance rewards like revenue operations, all of that. So I think today the modern CRO needs to master both the art and the science of a revenue system. Strategically and tactically, you have to develop that three-plus-year go-to-market vision and strategy. And then simultaneously jump in the trenches, send that email to close the deal this month or this quarter.”

14:30 – Provide the right environment
The remote/hybrid work model of today makes it difficult to create a cohesive workplace. Leaders must work extra hard to create a safe, creative, and productive environment.

“When we talk about the cultural aspect of that, particularly the modern remote/hybrid environment or whatever this is we're all going through right now. I think one theme I'm seeing consistently is that the boundaries–really between professional and personal or work and home–have forever been softened, if not entirely eliminated, destroyed, obliterated, for better or for worse. And I think as leaders, our responsibility is obviously to provide a safe environment, but also one that is collaborative and creative, and of course one that promotes productive work. Zoom has its limits. We've all experienced that just as the office does, too. So I don't think it's one or the other, and the future might even be the metaverse, but I don't think that’s today. I think for the next few years, a lot of our success will be found around the edges, like in the hotel lobbies and the coffee shops and the basement offices, occasionally in the corporate office, sometimes on the balcony or the back deck–not to mention the co-working spaces and the conference rooms. I think it's a very shared and flexible and distributed model ve...

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