Marketing Trends

Predicting exactly how much growth to expect (or strive for) in your business can be tricky to forecast. This week we look to Amy Cook, CMO of Simplus, Amy has grown, scaled, and been a part of many merging teams throughout her career. Their growth has been rapid and expansive, which definitely required great leadership. “Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had]  a growth rate of over 300% year-over-year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept it all together with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”Regardless of the size of the team or the title on your email signature, Amy is all about finding the best marketing solutions to her questions. Her success in marketing can be attributed to her openness and collaboration. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Amy dives into, scaling and growing a marketing business to enterprise size, and as a part of that keeping the marketing part of the business integrated with the whole organization. Prepare to benefit from Amy’s optimistic and collaborative attitude about growth and best marketing team practices up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysScaling Well and Growing to Enterprise Size: Focus on culture when merging two companies; the larger the company, the more important being able to integrate both teams becomes. Keeping a strong line of communication to the whole organization about the mission and vision is critical to help everyone work together more effectively. Looking around to see what other companies of the same size are doing can be helpful. Replicating the best methods and practices you see in their organizations is a big time-saver. Agencies Can Help if you’re Struggling with Retention: If you lose someone on your team, or can’t scale the team as quickly as you need, agencies are a solution to your problem. It’s still best to keep the heart of the marketing department in-house, but farming out smaller portions of the marketing mix that can be executed by an agency can help you address bandwidth issues on your team. Marketing as an Integral Part of the Whole Organization: It’s important to stay closely connected with the rest of the company in the marketing department. Alignment across departments spans more than just sales and marketing. Siloing yourself off in a bubble will keep you from valuable insights that the rest of the team could impart. Building relationships at every level internally and externally can help you reach more customers with a message that solves their problems.  Key Quotes“Simplus was doing a few million and had just barely done a series A. [We had]  a growth rate of over 300% year over year. I attribute so much of that to our CEO who really empowered each team member on the executive team to do the very best that they could. And then he kept altogether with his vision and focus on culture. It was really an amazing opportunity; since then [in] the past 18 months we've been acquired by Infosys. That has been another humongous learning curve to learn how to be part of a massive organization of 250,000 people.”“ [Agencies] work really well if you're having trouble retaining people, then an agency can give you that unlimited support. You can fire your agency at any time if they're not performing well for you with no consequences. At the agency, we go by the hour. And so there's a hundred percent utilization out of your team. So if the price is low enough and the utilization is a hundred percent, there's a really good case to fill in some of those gaps“When marketing [takes on] more of an ancillary role, then you lose a lot of the positivity that you can have from marketing. I have finance meetings with the team each week.. Not only do you have to connect internally [with teams], but you also need to connect with your partners with your customers and do joint co-marketing with your partners to reach the same customers. It's a whole lot of relationship-building, even more than I would have expected when I just started doing marketing deliverables all those years ago.” “I know that I'm only going to get event ROI if I empower sales leaders to lead the event. And [sales] knows that [they’re] only going to get marketing support if those salespeople [are] accountable for the event. So there's a really great understanding of each other.”“Every sales leader is a little bit different and you have to be adaptable. Marketing has to take a support role, aligned behind the sales leader,  and say, ‘I'll use your playbook. What does your playbook look like?’” “I approach marketing [believing] everybody's got good ideas; the delivery team's got amazing ideas; our legal department gives us great marketing ideas; we can all flow together and collect our marketing knowledge.” “As you [grow] more into the enterprise you can see what other lines of business are doing. For us, a 30% growth rate is now what we're achieving, or what we're desiring to achieve because the account sizes are so much larger. So when you're a little company, you can expect an insane growth rate. And then when you're in an enterprise your growth rates are going to be more like 30%. When you're forecasting, [do] some underwriting on what other companies like you were doing and setting your goal, maybe 10% higher, so you can crush your competition.” BioAmy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., is the Chief Marketing Officer of Simplus, an Infosys Company. At Simplus, she led the marketing efforts from Series A through acquisition, helping the company achieve a 3-year growth rate of 1,578% and acquire seven companies before being acquired by Infosys for $250M. Amy is also the founder of Osmond Marketing, which has been named one of the fastest-growing businesses in Utah by MountainWest Capital for five years in a row. She is an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Hawaii and has taught business and communication courses at BYU, University of Utah, and ASU intermittently for the past 25 years. Amy is a columnist for the Daily Herald and a regular contributor to Forbes, the Orange County Register, and other publications. She received her doctorate from the University of Utah in Organizational Communication, and her research interests, informed by Critical Theory, include organizational identification, communication ethics, and gender dynamics in the workplace. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Let’s go to the moon!’ ...is a great and lofty goal, but it doesn’t mean much if you or I say it. Why? Because, just guessing, you don’t have an actual plan for how to do that, or the means, for that matter. Point is, you need an actual plan, with real numbers and defined goals, and set time frames in order to achieve your goals. My guest this week, the CMO of GTMhub, Jeremy Epstein gets this and is passionate about the usefulness and importance of OKRs in the marketing department to help teams build plans to get them to where they want to go“Google is usually held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs, because in the in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called ‘measure what matters.’ John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based on Peter Drucker. By my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some form or format by the end of this decade. They are that game-changing capability-wise from a strategy execution perspective.” And changing up the game is exactly what Epstein is best at. In this show we’ll get into some of the lessons Epstein learned during his time at Microsoft and Sprinkler, discuss some best practices for managing a remote workforce and unpack some key principles of great leadership in marketing. Don’t worry, we’ve already invited him back on the show. I can’t wait for you to enjoy this episode about the simplified and data-driven marketing methods of marketing guru, Jeremy Epstein.Main Takeaways:Evolving Leadership Process: A great leader is one who can take feedback and alter course to stay on the best track for the business. Becoming a leader will demand a new skill set and an ability to look at the bigger picture. Thinking about the work and the mission with a broader perspective will help you keep everyone moving in the right direction. The Role of OKRs in Business: Companies in the future will all use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. This method of precisely defining the goals and providing clear data is maximally effective. Setting forth a simple and easy-to-understand plan to accomplish a difficult mission is the first step to succeeding, and that’s what an OKR does. Future of Blockchain in Marketing: The Apple cut-down on cookie use is just the beginning of the end of marketing with PII or Personally Identifiable Information. When more and more people get on and start using and trading in new markets, and for different purposes, you’re going to need to find a way to reach the right people. ‘No more cookies,’ is the way of the future. Document Processes: If any aspect of your business hinges upon one link in the chain, your whole business is at risk. Every role should be so well documented and laid that a new hire could come off the street with no prior knowledge of your business and be able to understand the job. Also, when you have everything written, there is a source of truth. Things get said in meetings and promptly forgotten. Documenting what was said in a meeting and immediately sharing that with the attendees can help move action items forward and create productive meetings. Key Quotes:“I got some really, candid feedback along the way from that my style for a lot of people was not working. It was too micromanage(y). It was too overbearing and people didn't like it. The best player doesn't always become your best coach. I needed to make that shift from player to coach. And I had to think about the game if you will, in a very different light. It's still a learning journey. And fortunately, I've had some great teachers along the way and most importantly, I tried to create an environment where my team feels safe and comfortable to tell me what a total screw-up I am on a regular basis.” “Marketing is all about differentiation. hat's the core, the single best book I've ever read about marketing is called ‘Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd Book by Youngme Moon’. It's about being different. My CEO at Gtmhub said it to me best when I came into the role he said, ‘You have to have infinite patience with people.’ If you get 1% better every day, by the end of the year, you're going to be 97xs better.”“It’s not about me being ‘the chief’. I almost reject that name. I’m the marketing enabler. I'm just trying to support everyone and make everyone better. I've asked almost everybody on my team, ‘what's your long-term career goal?’ And I view it as my responsibility to help them get further.”“Google is usually is held up as the poster boy/girl/non-binary person for OKRs because in the Bible of the OKR industry is what's called measure what matters. John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google. OKRs have this deep history going all the way back to Andy Grove at Intel, based foundationally on Peter Drucker. So, yes, I have skin in the game but by my calculation, OKRs will be embedded in every successful organization in some form or format by the end of this decade, or else, those companies may not even be around. They are that game-changing capability-wise from a strategy execution perspective.” “I'm a maniac about documentation of processes on our confluence. I call it, ‘what if you get hit by a bus document.’ If you get hit by a bus, Yes, I'll be sad but the business needs to continue. Someone else off the street [should be able to] come in and read your document [and] know how to do this person's role.” “In a web 3.0 world, you know nothing about your customer, aside from what their blockchain address is, what their wallet contents hold, and their transactions. There is no such thing as PII (Personally Identifiable Information.) This world already exists and you have to market to this world where that's all you know about the person. [This is] where we're going to end up anyway.”“How does the function and discipline and strategy around marketing evolve because of the arrival of this disruptive technology? There'll be expectations that customers co-create and co-own the brand with you. Why don't they have a stake in it when you have Bitcoin, you own one 21 millionth of the network. So why not own a part of the brand? And you could decentralize that and you can decent and you can co-create assets and, and not just give them a $2,000 award, but give them provable cocaine that represents 1% ownership in, you know, diet, Coke, vanilla cream, cherry pie, whatever kind of thing.”Bio:Jeremy Epstein is the CMO of Gtmhub. He has six years of corporate experience at Microsoft and has experienced high-growth marketing during his time as VP of Marketing at Sprinklr as they grew from a $20mm Series A valuation to a $1.8 billion level over 4 years.He has worked with top minds in blockchain, crypto-economics, smart contracts, and decentralization as an advisor to Open Bazaar, Zcash, DAOstack, SingularityNet, & Dapper Labs. He has keynoted Fortune 50 executive-level events on topics including social media, blockchain, and A.I. Jeremy shares his thoughts at blog.neverstopmarketing.com To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Do you notice the minutiae details in everyday life? For example, have you ever recognized the way that other people hold their cell phones? If you do, your mind works similar to that of Jeffrey Nicholson, the CEO, and Co-founder of Tracer. This level of attention to detail has helped him throughout his career, particularly when it comes to picking up some of the latest trends, which he told me about in this episode of Marketing Trends.“I start with natural curiosity. I still, to this day, will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”Under the tutelage of media giant, Gary Vaynerchuk at VaynerMedia, Jeff and his co-founder Leighton Welch, built Tracer with the plan to launch separately once the development was complete. Leighton developed the structure of the software while Jeff was operating the customer-facing side, servicing Vayner clients and using the software. VaynerMedia is still a client of Tracer and more companies every day are realizing the value it offers in solving complex data equations. Excited for you to glean some real nuggets of wisdom from this marketing leader. Up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Developing Good Talent on your Team is Exponentially Beneficial: As your team grows, the more people you have that are closely aligned with your business mission, vision, and execution expectations, the better that will help everyone stay on the same page. Scaling a team up in the right way might take a little extra time, but the investment upfront will pay dividends later. Curiosity Leads to Excellence in Business: As a CEO being curious is critical to keeping a good view of the big-picture. Developing a natural curiosity around your work can lead to you discovering some basic but important ways you can improve your business operations. As you go through the customer-facing experience of other brands and products, notice the sticking points, the areas you could improve upon, and learn some potentially hard lessons the easy way. Designing Teams around Individuals with Various Skill Sets: Every member of your team brings a vast array of talents and skills to share with the company. Think about who you already have on your team and what other roles you could use support for when hiring to build out the most complementary team. Key Quotes:“I start with natural curiosity. To this day, [I] will do my own research and Google brands, and go through their experiences, and understand what other people go through. When you look at the consumer research on people, they use eight apps or less; they [have] very specific behaviors. I used to look at people's phones and [could] tell very quickly just on their layout, how they operate with phone position and thumb position. You have to start with curiosity, no matter who you are, from analysts all the way to CEO. You've got to know what's going on.”“I'm a big believer in talent and making sure that talent breeds talent and I think about it as a pyramid. Typically you're starting with your co-founders. The reality is that every level of that pyramid is imperative to the success of your business. I'm a big basketball guy. You need a power forward, you need a shooting guard, you need everybody to have different skill sets. That's going to be complementary to make you win. So you're a good communicating and functioning team… I've spent probably more time than most of the people I know in regards to just recruiting and retention because I do believe that, you know, people are the difference between winning and losing.”“I underestimate how difficult it is to be responsible for other human beings. As an early manager, I got some good advice and bad advice and you're just learning on the fly. I think now I feel a lot more comfort in being a leader in dealing with things.”“I spend a lot of time on [my work] because I care and I want to win. And honestly, I want to make sure I don't let anybody else down on the team. It's an easy motivation to keep yourself motivated, to make sure that we make the right decisions and spend as much time as I can researching and recruiting and, and doing the things.”Bio:Jeff Nicholson is the CEO and Co-founder of Tracer. Nicholson has been innovating in the media and tech space for 15 plus years. Before joining Tracer, he was the first Chief Media Officer at VaynerMedia, where he spent five years scaling the business globally. He has also served as the Head of Ads at SocialCode, which was the largest spending agency on Facebook in North America. Prior to that, he was VP of Ads at LeadKarma, which sold to BankRate for $30MM. Currently, he sits on the advisory boards of Roku, Pinterest, and NextDoor. He teaches at universities including Babson College, New York University Stern School of Business, University of Virginia, and Miami Ad School.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

When there’s a problem, the sooner you know about it, the better. And this doesn’t just relate to high-level problems. The quicker you can identify that something is an issue and rectify it, the quicker you can get to making a meaningful difference towards your end goal. This is the case for email marketing. If the subject line of your email is causing a trend towards a lower than usual click rate, you’ve got to improve that in real-time. To do this, Cynthia Price, the VP of Marketing at Litmus, focuses her attention on good content marketing. How does she do this, by analyzing and reacting to data based on real-time campaign performance? The end result is a content marketing campaign that originates from high-performing blog posts.“Over the course of the past three months, that campaign that started as a blog post turned into a giant revolving door of great content. We've now done two webinars that map up to it. Sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. We hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.” Untangling complex email campaigns and getting the most you can out of them is imperative in today’s marketing world. In this episode of Marketing Trends, Cynthia explains to me why email continues to prove its value in the marketing mix, how marketers can maximize its ROI, and you can turn those declining open rates into success. I’m excited for you to learn more about how to stay on the cutting edge of email. Let's get to it!Main TakeawaysContent Marketing and Thought Leadership: If you can put your mind to the task and address the new problems that no one has addressed before you can assume a role of thought leadership while focusing on some of the broader issues the industry is seeing. Don’t wait for someone else to be the leader on how to address new industry changes, industry regulations, and any unforeseen circumstances. Outline a reasonable roadmap of solutions and create an entire content campaign around it to achieve the ultimate marketing goal, giving real value to your audience.Strategic ABM Marketing: If you’re going to try to tap into the powers of ABM marketing you need to be very selective about the scope of customer you’re targeting. Use data, not feelings to make the best list of prospects. It’s okay to have lofty goals on your client prospect list, but stay focused on the size of businesses that you can best serve. You’ll both be getting the maximum benefit out of this relationship.Bringing Community to the Scattered Email Marketing World: If your company can be a leading voice in your industry, that’s a big win. The way things were designed for email marketing campaigns wasn’t like the way they’re done for web pages or really anything else. The email world was a bit scattered before Litmus brought marketers together, creating community, bringing resources, and giving a definite answer to things that there was a lot of confusion around before.Key Quotes“Over the course of the past three months, [this] campaign started as a blog post; it wasn't really a campaign per se. It turned into a giant revolving door of really great content where we've now done two webinars that map up to it. We've got a big downloadable piece of content and sales is consistently sending updates to prospects. hen we can react to what's happening in the world around us and really provide some value, we certainly hope everybody who touches that content becomes a customer, but ultimately we see the value in sort of the bigger picture of just providing something to the industry  that is hard to untangle in order to figure out.”“One of the reasons I joined Litmus is that Litmus did a really good job over the years before I was here of being a leader in the space and being a voice. Email marketing is such a complicated, weird world to live in because the people who are designing emails know this inside and out, but mail designed for email is different than designed for the web. It's somewhat archaic. There are over a hundred email clients that they're trying to design for. There's just all this confusion. Litmus had done a really good job over the years of finding a place for that community to gather together both virtually and in live events, finding resources for them that really speak to things; there wasn't a definitive answer on a lot of these things out there and let us sort of help ‘uncloud’ some of the murkiness there.”“We went back to the drawing board and let the data inform who should be on that list [of prospects]. You look at your close one report from the last year, and we're only going after those industries. We're only going after those size companies. Start really small, as small as ABM will allow you to go and then build from there and, and still have some of those wishlist customers on the list, but the bulk of the list needs to be informed by data.” “We made the critical mistake of 1.) doing a lot of building before we tested anything out and 2.) we didn't put a solid marketing plan together for it, nor did we have a plan to iterate for it. We wanted it to have a bigger impact  on marketers than it did. And I think part of it was that it was, it was fun. It was quirky, but it probably wasn't providing a value on the back end for them to share it with their friends and, and think about it in a bigger way ...Also, we didn’t really have a plan B.““We just put out an email engagement report that looks on the backend of everything.  It looks like open rates. We always say, don't take this and everybody send an email at 8:00 AM in the U S because then it breaks [down]. [There’s] interesting trends where, first thing in the morning is the best time in the US for open rates, whereas 3:00 PM is the best time in the UK. That's just behavioral information about people. I think as we get further and further down this A.I. path, depending on what third party data does or doesn't allow us to do, we're going to get a lot smarter about those kinds of things as well.”BioCynthia Price is the VP of Marketing at Litmus. Her team grows and supports the Litmus and email community through content marketing, demand generation, and events. She has been in the email marketing industry for over 10 years, previously as VP of marketing at Emma, an email service provider. She has a passion for authentic communications and the power of email at the heart of the marketing mix.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.    Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

A good company is built with good people and as simple as that sounds, when it comes to finding the right person for the right job, sometimes you have to look beyond what’s written on the reume.. With her decades of experience at companies such as eBay and Skype, Michele Don Durbin, now the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Evernote, knows how to get the most out of herself and her team and that all stems from her emphasis on culture building“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your time, your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use, I don't know, less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” On this episode of Marketing Trends, Michele gets into all things marketing and takes us on a deep-dive into her strategy for hiring, she also unpacks the paid media strategy at Evernote, and shares a fun story about her work launching Skype with Oprah Winfrey. This episode is packed with great advice from an engaging leader. I know you’re going to enjoy this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysA Good Team and Culture Lead to Good Idea Execution: Good ideas abound, at least until you put them to the test. It takes a team that can implement good ideas well to succeed. You need a team of doers around you, not just high-minded theorists. The people that you hire and work with on your team need to be the kind of people who can show up every day with enthusiasm to get things done. The energy and power of a good team isn’t just setting the company culture, it’s setting yourself and your company up for success. Flexibility over Plans: You need to read the data, and decide from there what your plans are, but always remain flexible with your marketing campaigns. There is real value in being able to shift, pivot and adapt to new data, and reactions to ongoing and new campaigns. Re-Focus Your Attention on Customers Already in the Funnel: Sometimes we get so excited and focused on getting more emails in our systems that we forget to maximize the spend of all those contacts we already have. Focusing on serving your customer base can lead you to innovating new products and solutions for them, also driving outside buy-in to your product. Key Quotes“There are two things that jump to mind immediately that I remember from the eBay days. The first one is that nothing got funded without data. We had an incredibly efficient process for prioritizing resources. Ideas are great and people have ideas all the time, but the team allocating the resources wouldn't even consider something until a reasonable set of assumptions, for a clear understanding of what success looked like was presented. And that is really important because ideas are one thing, but if you have no way to execute those ideas and you don't know what success looks like, you don't actually know when you've arrived and you don't know when you failed and getting the funding for something meant pulling together that use case that business case what you expect it to happen. And it's a good exercise that I continue to ask all my teams to do today.”“I was tapped to move over to Skype; it was an internal transfer at that time and I started helping run the marketing team. We had only 13 people to run all of the Americas. The things that we got to do were, as you said, in the beginning, I was very lucky to be at the right place at the right time, because it was just outstanding.”“You're certainly going to be judged on what you get done, but how you get it done is just as important. When you spend your career, surrounded by driven ambitious people who are always trying to do more and have the next best idea and make more money, whether it's self-imposed because they're real smart and ambitious, or it's part of a larger culture, there are some people who will use less than ideal tactics to get things done. And I really appreciated the idea that eBay said, ‘It's not just what you're getting done. It's how you're working with others. It's how you're taking the community to account, it's what your colleagues think of you and how you're really helping the business overall.” “It all comes down to this idea of a foundational marketing principle that great ideas don't really mean much without great execution. So it's not that I don't value ideas, but I don't worship them. I think I'll get more out of a good idea, executed ruthlessly than a great idea that's executed adequately.”“It’s about being flexible in what you think you're going to be able to do. So make plans, back those plans with data, put really good people in charge of those plans, and then be prepared for those plans to change, and that's one of the reasons why Evernote was so interesting for me and why I'm still there.” “The biggest channel that we have for new users is our existing base and that is how it has always been. This is why the community is so important to us. What we're doing, now that we have the apps and infrastructure rebuilt, is we're really focused on providing education in real life use cases and packaging that up into snackable portions.” “We got this call from somebody on the production crew of the Oprah Winfrey show. And she wanted to host the largest ever book review for her book club. And she wanted her audience to be able to talk to her....so we did this partnership with Oprah Winfrey and we [would] get this call. It'd be like, ‘You need to ship a laptop and a camera and a microphone and a headset to this address. And it needs to be there tomorrow.’ And we had tech guys on contract who would actually go to somebody's house and help them set up their equipment so that it would be high quality for Oprah. And we did this for, I think it was six or eight weeks. She loved it so much.” BioWorking with a mission began for Michele Don Durbin years ago, when she helped small business owners and start-ups build their own global businesses and create communities on eBay. Later, as the head of global customer acquisition for Skype, she turned my passions towards connecting the world via video calling — reuniting friends, keeping families close despite vast distances and helping companies build global teams to achieve their goals. As the VP of Marketing for Inflection, Don Durbinhelped transform its small, quiet background check company, GoodHire, into an industry-recognized, award-winning challenger brand. But it was Evernote’s deeply held belief in the infinite potential of any idea, big or small, world-changing or personal, that intrigued her most. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

You may have some fear or feel a sense of resistance when you hear the phrase “affiliate marketing.” Especially if you had ever been burned by this form of marketing in the past.. Like most sectors, a lot  has improved in the affiliate space and that development has stemmed from the creation of tech tools.  On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin Osborne, the Senior Vice President of Client Strategy at Acceleration Partners, gave us  the low-down on how affiliate partnerships can be thought of as more than a last-ditch effort to milk remaining dollars out of the market. Management, implementation and fraud resistance are all areas of modern affiliate marketing that have vastly improved as of late. “People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” But a successful affiliate marketing strategy is’ more than just having the right tools, or the best new gadgets. A big part of the value that Acceleration Partners brings to its customers is by providing guidance on best practices as you roll out your program. Kevin and I dove into how using data, tapping into tried-and-true marketing channels, and reducing friction on the back-end have given modern affiliate marketing the power to be a key tool in your marketing mix, not just an afterthought. Main Takeaways:Old School Affiliate Marketing Systems are Out: The time and labor intensive old school model of affiliate marketing was a big lift, even for bigger companies to pull off successfully. Now with evolving technology, the launching and management of a profitable affiliate marketing program is much more cost effective and less staff intensive. The affiliate system is now more efficient and scalable. Direct Mail can be an Affiliate: Don’t limit yourself to the old way of thinking about affiliate partnerships, even in terms of where that initial impression comes from. With some businesses, such as the restaurant industry, direct mail can be the most effective affiliate lead tool. Re-engaging with existing customers: As you think about reigniting that affiliate marketing program, look at your existing customer base as the first well to tap into. Re-engaging with existing customers through affiliate marketing can bring them back to new products or services you offer.   Key Quotes:“We look at brands that are trying to acquire subscribers, sign ups, sell shoes, whatever it may be, and at the end of the day, affiliate is simply a channel that's able to pay partners once an outcome takes place. Once a sale takes place at the end of the day, I think a lot of marketers are trying to get to that final accountable metric, which is, ‘does this drive sales?’ “You could use this tool, partnership marketing and the different players that are involved in it to drive any part of the consumer journey that you want. You can drive awareness, you can drive engagement, you can drive conversion.”“People tend to pigeonhole “affiliate marketing” as the last mile. Get that last click drive, that last sale. But again, we really encourage these bigger brands that have a broader perspective on what this channel can do and how it can operate across other traditional media channels already running.” “There's some sophisticated technology platforms out there that are great at looking at these deeper analytics. Whether that's attribution, whether that's certain measurement systems based on the partner type, whether it's different commissions based on the interaction that a customer has with the brand, that technology enables us to actually push forward a lot of these new strategies that encompass broader marketing.”“One of the key elements of our services partner development.  We have guys that are going out there and forging new relationships based on a brand strategy. We worked with a food delivery app that was trying to acquire new restaurants. There's certain ways that those restaurants engage with media and take action, and direct mail was actually one of those. So working with direct mail service to actually get that brand's message in front of those restaurant owners was really effective.”“One of the spaces that's most interesting, that's been growing the fastest, is B2B, especially the SMB. They have these teams that are business development teams and business development. And that universe is pretty old school, right? It's guys with a Rolodex that are calling up certain partners or certain individuals that might run an accounting firm that are trying to get people to sign up for QuickBooks. And it's pretty disjointed and it's a big world, right? Some of these firms have 20, 30 people on these business development teams and they're willing to invest because they're really efficient, right? These partners can really drive a significant amount of sales for a pretty reasonable cost.”“As far as the industries that are growing the fastest within affiliate marketing there's these traditional, direct to consumer These guys were living off social and SEM for years.  They were maximizing those channels. They were driving new customers. They were doing it really cost efficiently.fn the last year or two years, it's become inefficient There is a point of diminishing returns where your bids have to go up and the value goes down. And at some point you need to explore other channels. Over the last three, four years, we've seen a huge adoption by those specific companies coming into a failure because it provides scalability, cost efficiency and new audiences that's where we've seen massive growth with those companies moving into affiliates and really changing the landscape and bringing on new innovation.”Bio:Kevin has served in a variety of sales roles at renowned companies, including AOL, Openbay and IAC. He has received numerous accolades for his leadership, sales training, and mentorship along with his digital industry expertise. His passion for startups and entrepreneurship has led to his working with some of the best and brightest companies in the startup space. Through his passion, charisma, determination and win-win approach to problem-solving, Kevin consistently earned the trust and respect of his clients.Prior to his successful career in sales, Kevin volunteered as a teacher with Citizen Schools and played professional hockey in Paris. If you catch him in the right mood, he may even tell you his favorite French expression.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Through time, some of the strongest relationships have led to the biggest successes. Cory and Shawn from Boy Meets World were a dynamic duo, Turk and JD from the television show Scrubs are the traditional sitcom-bromance most friends envy. But what happens when friends become business partners? A powerful co-founder relationship is not just needed but relied on — especially when you leave a successful career to do your own thing. You need someone you can lean on, trust, and go to when things are rocky. That’s what Courtney Baber did when she launched The Route Beauty with best friend and now co-founder, Nancy Pellegrino. Courtney left a successful career with some of the biggest beauty brands in the game, Sephora, L’Oreal, and Urban Decay to bring her own skincare solutions to the counter in a big way. “When Ulta said, ‘yes, we want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do; it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”Featured on Oprah, promoted by Khloe Kardashian, and sold on HSN, The Route Beauty is making big moves in the beauty world, now available on the shelves of big retailer, Ulta. I’m excited to bring you the story behind Courtney and Nurse Nancy’s beautiful and thriving partnership as co-founders of The Route Beauty, up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Test out New Tools: There are so many new marketing tools and channels to get your message out there to the right people. Be creative by testing out new platforms. Not all of them will be here to stay, but the opportunity to be first on a new platform could be a great advantage for an emerging brand.Pivoting to Fill the Needs of a New Business: Think through all of your business options and have a sense of where you can take things if something happens to plan A. For example, you may find yourself needing to shift your plan from selling or marketing  B2B to D2C suddenly, or retail to online… complications occur for a multitude of unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes you get caught behind some insurmountable roadblocks and you’ve got to have a sense of where you can turn to keep the business thriving.Getting It Perfect: Especially as a new brand, with a limited number of skews on the market, it’s important to take the time to get every little detail of new products perfect before putting them on the market. You only get one first impression and making a good one is worth the extra time so don’t be afraid to push back on launch deadlines to get things dialed.Key Quotes:“I hit a point after we sold Urban Decay to L'Oreal -- I stayed on for four additional years as their head of marketing and merchandising -- and I was passionate about what I was doing, but I was tired of building dreams for other people, and I wanted to try to do it for myself. That's really why I took the leap of faith.”“I would have probably never done this by myself. I have a BFF, my skincare BFF, my BFF in life, “Nurse Nancy.” I've been her patient for over 10 years. And we always, when I would be visiting her to help fix my skin, And it was with these medical grade products and she would always talk about it. She always wanted to work together. And we both hit the same point at the same time. It was kind of this magical moment where we said, ``Well, let's do something together.”“When they said yes, when Ulta said, ‘We want to launch you.’ I can't explain that feeling. I just laid down on the floor of my daughter’s room and kind of just started gyrating, I don't take anything for granted. I built strong relationships in my career and people believe in what I can do, it's all about working hard and giving the retailer and the customer something that they need and they want.”“I couldn't be happier with the partner that I chose, but you really have to find that yin and yang and in a partnership like that, it's no different than a marriage.”“We’re going to test a new platform called Comments Sold  later this year, which is really interesting to me. It’s live streaming to your social channels and people can buy right then and there. It’s like Amazon live, like HSN, but it's really more targeted at your unique followers.”“It's kind of a challenging world, the influencer world. It’s gotten very hard to play in that space without spending a lot of money. When I was at Urban Decay we could get people to do things for us by just giving them early access to a product. You can't even talk to somebody without first paying the agent. So what we've decided to do is go kind of a much more micro route and really kind of build relationships at a grassroots level. And then also we've really built this group of what we're calling our “Routies” they're really are true brand devotees who have been with us from the beginning and they are influential. They're not millions of followers because but this group of individuals, we kind of have an affiliate program where they get some kickbacks from us. They love the brand, they love talking about it, but we also want to reward them for continuing to do that. So it's a small group of people like that. And then we're really how we were really growing our awareness and following and email list through working with like-minded brands that aren't skincare brands. They're hair brands or they sell chocolate that is high-end, or one wine brands  -- we all want to scratch each other's backs and all win together. And so that's been really successful.”“I'm not looking a lot at what other people are doing. I'm looking at what's right for our brand and what is innovative in other industries and the medical world. And because that's how we're going to be able to stand out and have a point of difference.”Bio:With more than 25 years of experience, Courtney Baber has built brands for some of the beauty industry’s top heavy hitters like Sephora, Urban Decay, Estée Lauder, and more. Courtney’s passion for skincare, makeup, and fragrance has led her around the world to help evolve the face of beauty—literally. She pioneered the path to debut up-and-coming beauty brands for Sephora internationally and was behind the global roll-out of Urban Decay to 30+ countries.She is a former Miss Ohio USA, and her mom was also a beauty queen. For Courtney, competing in Miss USA was about so much more than winning a crown, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that helped instill independence, perseverance and self-confidence. It pushed her outside her comfort zone—she believes if you are uncomfortable, you are growing.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Having the right elements and the right design is critically important to reaching the right people the right way. Detria Williamson, the CMO of IDEO, has years of experience working with clients to create meaningful impact through design, and throughout that time she has seen the world of design shift and the buyers’ needs change. To meet those needs, Detria says it’s all about listening carefully to what customers are saying. “The new design buyer, they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're Chief Diversity Officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. Articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities. On this episode of Marketing Trends, I was excited to hear more about what it takes to actively listen and respond in today’s world. Plus, Detria and I got into how  she is helping to not just create more inclusivity, but allow it to become common practice across the industry. Detria has a revolutionary way of thinking about building her team of designers, seeking maximal creativity and diversity of ideas as the primary focus, and she explains it all in this episode. All this up next on Marketing Trends! Main TakeawaysInclusive Customer Experience: Break away from the idea that it’s only important to focus on diversity and instead think more about inclusion. You can fake diversity but true inclusion is harder to imitate. The New Design Buyer: As design has become more democratized and the design-buyer has changed, it’s more important than ever to tune into what they are asking for. Some of the leaders in these positions may not even know about the resources available to them, so there is an educational part of the process as well. Don’t Over-stack: The explosion of MarTech tools means that marketing solutions are abundant but it’s important to maintain a healthy balance in your budget to  ensure that you have the people and the resources to put it to use. Make sure you are constantly evaluating your tech stack based on what is performing and what is not. If something isn’t performing, get rid of it in favor of a tool that is a driving force for your business.  Key Quotes“The most well-known digital tool that I created while I was there is called inclusive customer experience. It really fell out of a design-thinking workshop that we were doing. So again, design-thinking has always been this kind of three-way savior.  I would say through my career, it's a safety net.”“Diversity can be engineered, but inclusion can't.”“There are so many CMOs that don't have the luxury, the privilege, or sometimes even the awareness to have design built into their budgets. So when you say design for inclusion, that requires intention and requires you to allocate financial resources and team resources behind it. What you gain from it is beyond imagination. Having a more inclusive brand and a more inclusive experience has to be designed for.”“The new design buyer they're CMOs, they're CEOs, they're CTOs, they're chief diversity officers. So we really needed to make sure that we were expanding our listening ability and in terms of, you know, sort of making sure that our services were known to other leaders across the C-suite. So articulating all of our communities and deeply listening internally and across all those communities.” “Three things from a design perspective: One is designing for inclusion. Two is designing for privacy, and three is designing for experience. CMOs have to do that.”  “You can't hire your way through [inclusion]. I don't think that that’s the only, or the quickest or most agile way to solve for CMOs answering to big challenges. Designing your way through them is the way forward.”“[I’m] not just looking at diversity in terms of gender diversity, in terms of ethnicity -- those to me are table stakes. When you hire radically inclusive leaders, those things just happen. They should happen automatically. But diversity in terms of, you know, how they gain their skills. If you go, and you actually recruit everybody out of San Francisco, that's grown up the same way that's come out of the same type of households. It's had the same track through the UC schools, — no knock against UC schools or the schools there — You're probably going to get people that approach a problem that come day to daya with the same sort of approach, they come with the same stories, the same way they attack problems. “You have to stay inspired and stay nourished. Because our agendas are wicked. They're just crazy. So that's one thing. It sounds again really simple, but if you want to stay confident, then you have to stay nourished. You have to stay inspired in order to maintain and sustain inspiration to your teams.““Make sure that your infrastructure is in place so that you can use MarTech to really align sales and marketing. It doesn't matter if you are a company of 20 or a company of 200,000, there's a stack out there for every size company. And MarTech is really the answer to aligning.” “There's new software platforms, there's so many, I call it the spaghetti stack. I think when you are trying to make that [MarTech] choice, it's really important to make sure that you have the support that you need from the new software tools. Make sure that you have that through line, especially I would say for smaller mid-sized companies.”BioCombine the outlook of a visionary with the rigor of a high-performing athlete and you’ll begin to get a sense of IDEO CMO Detria Williamson. She has spent more than 20 years as an innovative brand experience marketer who gives companies a brave push forward, bringing the discipline and mindset needed to create new brand ecosystems while building on the resonance and value the brand already has to its audiences.It’s an effort underpinned by two core beliefs: that focusing on diversity and having a growth mindset are important but far too narrow alone, and that inclusive experience is the center of gravity for a brand. This has led Detria to create the ICX (inclusive customer experience) approach. It’s a way to integrate all elements of the customer experience—how people are targeted, how products are designed, and how audiences and communities are shaped and formed—and to make sure the thinking is inclusive.While you are likely to hear her quip “we’re good to grow,” Detria believes a change mindset is the true requisite for new-age marketers. It’s one that is fixated on openness, not daunted by curveballs, and totally liberated through things that are new. How that has come to life: As Global Business Director for Emirates Airlines, Detria spearheaded transitioning their multi-million-dollar sports sponsorship budget from the time-tested practice of logos on jerseys to cultivating global sports communities using the power of media, video, digital, and sports celebrities.She joined IDEO as CMO with an outlook shaped by her experiences living and working in the US, London, Singapore, and the Middle East. It has given her a strong basis from which to build international teams with a global mindset, enabling brands to reach audiences and form communities across geographies and markets. With a proven record of developing high-value, high-impact brand experiences, as of 2020, Detria has grown over $5B in brand equity for clients across a variety of industries and categories, including Google, Capital Group, Discovery, and AT&T.To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Online shopping has exploded in the last year and with so much to choose from at the click of a button, many online merchants are finding the need to help consumers narrow down the options and find what they really want. Saksham Sharda Creative Director and CIO of Outgrow is here to help consumers with decision fatigue, while at the same time helping vendors get to know who is looking at their website.No-code tools such as Outgrow are valuable in social commerce. With consumers looking for answers at all hours of the day, chat-bots and other questions that lead you down a path towards what you’re actually looking for help remove the decision fatigue many consumers are facing as they just try to simply find what they want.On this episode of Marketing Trends, Saksham and I go deep on the relationship between developer and marketers, and how a cohesive relationship can get products to market faster. Saksham also explains how traceable campaign testing is helping marketers level up their strategy. Enjoy.Main TakeawaysTraceable AB Testing: Creating campaigns that allow you to test which ads or copy people to respond to is very helpful. Taking that a step further, using advanced software to track people where they went in your funnel will tell you what’s working, what’s not not working, and where you should be experimenting.The speed and usefulness of no-code tools: Waiting for developers to create the visions you have in your head as a marketer can be frustrating, and sometimes the time delay can be so great that it renders the findings less useful. No code, or low-code tools, are providing marketers with the ability to spin up tools more quickly and efficiently.Keeping Attention and Making Choices Easier is the Goal: The interactive nature of taking a quiz, short, easy and relevant, on a website does two things simultaneously. For one, surveys keep the users engaged with the material on the page and it can help them narrow down possible purchase choices. For the marketer, collecting more data about the way your consumer is thinking will help you provide for their needs more effectively. Key Quotes“No-code and A.I. is basically just telling you, [that] you don't really need to know much about coding. You just need to know the basics of building something.” “We have allowed people to make calculators, allowing businesses to make these tools easily that tell you an estimated cost of a thing, or a quiz that helps you choose. There's so much choice paralysis when I end up on someone's website. So as a podcaster, if on your website, I put a quiz saying, which of my episodes should I listen to first? And then you also have a particular question about the industry and then you give them two or three episodes. You’re making choosing easier.”“No-code allows you to see marketing differently and to see the entire marketing game differently and to understand that it's a game.” “Any marketing you do, 60% of it is going to be based on luck and only 40% of it is going to be based on all the hard work you put in.”  “The hardest part of the job is negotiating with developers. One thing to understand, especially in marketing, is that the market does not favor your coding skills or how great a developer you are. What the market favors is creativity.” “What you can easily do is get a bot template to customize it. [You can] add your own questions, et cetera. As no-code works, there's a very simple function called duplicates. You just duplicate that chat bot into three chat bots and you put three of them on your website and different instances. Then you measure which one is working better. The analytics part is such an important part of the software, because you can keep constantly improving on what's already there.” “When I think of Omni channel marketing, I mostly think of how I can recycle the stuff that's doing well on one particular channel to other channels.” BioSaksham Sharda is the Creative Director and CIO at Outgrow. Throughout his career he has specialized in marketing and web development, particularly in relation to interactivity and data science. Interactive experiences designed by Sharda have been featured on TrendHunter, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, Alibaba, TechCrunch, and Digimarcon Silicon Valley. He is also the host of the Marketer of the Month Podcast which has featured guests including the co-founders of Wikipedia, Forbes influencers, and Pulitzer Prize winners. He has also contributed to The Huffington Post, Borrowers and Lenders, and Shakespeare Bulletin. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.  Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

On the show we hear over and over again that marketing and sales need to find alignment and that data needs to be a big part of that. Kevin Tate is the CMO of Clearbit, a company that is taking an entirely different approach when it comes to data quality and coverage.  Clearbit is a tool for marketers to use to better understand customers, identify future prospects, and personalize marketing and sales interactions. And if there is one thing Kevin knows, it is the importance of quickly aligning the marketing team’s vision with the customer perception and the needs of the business.  I was curious how tried-and-true marketing pillars have influenced the way Kevin runs his marketing department, so I asked him…“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market and here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Kevin and I go deep on why static or stale data is leading marketers down a precarious path when it comes to their data management. We also touch on how Clearbit is not just another data vendor, but a company that’s doing radical things when it comes to empowering marketing. I hope you enjoy this episode. Main Takeaways:Combining Sales and Marketing Knowledge: There can be challenges related to aligning the marketing vision and sales objectives. Often there needs to be some time spent reframing with the client to guide them towards mutual interests. The marketing department has objectives for reach, the sales team has goals for moving the product, and the client on the phone has needs that you need to service. All three of these things need to work in concert. Content Marketing to Marketers: Content that is useful to your clients can be a great marketing tool. Blogs, eBooks, how-to guides, and reports are all good tools that can add value to your customer or prospective customer.   Funnels are Dependent on Good Data: To be able to hone in on what changes you need to make in your marketing mix requires that you have immediate and good data about your potential consumer. Especially with Product Led Growth companies the funnel that you build needs to have the most accurate information about what consumer are responding to and what they need. Connection Between Your Email Efforts and Ad Efforts: The most valuable thing you can have is a first party mechanism that will give you the most accurate data about the way that your email marketing campaign is supporting and working with your other marketing efforts. All of your marketing channels need to work together for a cohesive and effective marketing strategy. Key Quotes:“There's two parts to Clearbit, there's the data -- and we have data about every company with a website that we collect from hundreds of public sources. Then there's what you do with the data, which is the platform we have to put that data to work in your ad campaigns. Personalizing your website, shortening your forms, enriching all your other systems. We're trying to remove friction. Then on the operations side, having rich real-time data from the front to back of your revenue operations, that ends up mattering a lot. That's what people are doing with Clearbit.” “Clearbit is getting pulled into a company that is implementing an ABM strategy and needs the data and more importantly, the integrations to put that data to work at all the different points in that marketing and sales funnel.”“Product Led Growth companies [have] built funnels that depend on really good data to know of all the people trying [the] product and all the people giving intent signals, and all the people experiencing the product through its life cycle. ” “ The value that a company creates is linked to its product roadmap. You can extend the value beyond that roadmap. One is building things on top of it, and that's what we're doing in the growth engineering team.”“One of the things I've learned being on both sides of the sales and marketing equation is that there has to be a balance between marketing's vision for how we want to be viewed in the market. And here's how we want people to think about and value what we do. Then there's the sales reality of [being] on the phone with this person, and they're asking for X, and there has to be a really close alignment between how do you help reframe or guide where you can the conversation, but how do you also understand and listen to what that customer is asking for?”“We're using marketing technology to sell marketing technology technologists. First from a market perspective, I think we're fortunate to be in a really interesting and fast moving time where almost anyone would agree that the B2B funnel switching toward digital and online buying has really raised the importance of data and understanding. Now that much of the sales experience is mediated through these touch points/  Maybe it's chat, maybe it's email, maybe it's the website, all those need data to perform the best they can. A lot of times that comes down to how can I reduce friction or increased speed or increase the relevance of that, of that app based interaction.”“There's apps that are doing all those interactions, and then there's the data that's providing that foundation and making sure everything is as smart as it can be when it's doing that. That's the world we see on the horizon. Trying to be really thoughtful around growth, how do we make sure that we're creating and capturing value in the most important ways in that landscape? You can do a ton of things with Clearbit, but what are the things that are going to have the most and the most lasting impact on our customer's pipeline, on their ability to predictably create revenue.” “If you've got a first party mechanism to understand the connection between your email and ad efforts, and what's happening on your website, and then you can tie it back to a data platform with Clearbit, that makes a huge difference.”“Part of what Clearbit does is we have eBooks, we have a lot of blogs, recipes, and how-to guides. We have things like the Visitor Report that provides insight as a free to use tool.So we learn a lot by seeing who is engaging with those things, in what way, and where does that suggest they might be on their journey. I believe that one of the things that is invaluable about the shifts we've seen in B2B buying is that they are going to be in control of their own journey, right? They are going to learn how they want to learn, and they're going to raise their hand when they're ready. We try to be as attuned as we can to where they are in the process and where we can help.”Bio:Kevin Tate, the CMO of Clearbit has amassed 24 years of Sales, Marketing & Product leadership experience with firms serving G2000 brands and agencies. Kevin has led go-to-market for Software (SaaS), and Professional Services and Hardware-enabled SaaS companies. He is a sales and Strategic Marketing executive with deep domain expertise in Enterprise SaaS, eCommerce, Digital Marketing, Social Media and IoT. Kevin is a graduate of Stanford University. To learn more, click here: {{URL of detail page on found on www.mission.org}}---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.   Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.