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Collective Wisdom is where the best demand gen marketers go to learn what's working right now. The Demand Collective team brings on the very best demand marketers we know to talk about everything demand in a no-fluff, 100% real environment. You'll leave each episode with actionable and tactical tips you can use to drive better results and get promoted faster.
Have questions like:
How do I crush my first 90 days in a demand job? How do I get promoted faster? How do I do more with less? How do I run better paid ads? How do I report to my ELT? ... and more? We have answers.
Brian Strauss: Welcome to another episode of collective wisdom by demand collective to day. I'm joined by Ben Staley, senior director of marketing operations and promotions at vendor a. B, 2 BS. Buying platform that enables the world's fastest growing companies to purchase sass without friction and at a fair price.
Brian Strauss: Ben has over 13 years of marketing experience. He focuses on crafting and implementing emerging data, driven B 2 B marketing and got to market strategies as well as technology and processes for fast paced high growth companies. Thanks for joining us, Ben, how are you doing today?
Ben Staley: Hey? Good, Brian, thanks for having me.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, man, super excited to have you so we'll just dive right in. You began as a marketing coordinator at work right uniform in 2010,
Brian Strauss: and at that time you had the opportunity to work on some pretty important projects to the company like reworking their salesforce instance helping to launch the updated website and driving event initiatives.
Brian Strauss: How were you able to insert yourself into these projects so earlier in your career? And what were the results? And how was that early experience really shaped. How you market today.
Ben Staley: Yes, I actually left there in 2,010. I started there in 2,007 for those of you who who is probably everybody who's never heard of that company before. Ni, neither had I before I went to work there.
Ben Staley: But II studied marketing in college and knew I wanted to be in marketing. And it's interesting. I feel like a lot of the textbook. Marketing is a lot more kind of ad agency and creative type of marketing. So
Ben Staley: when I joined work right as their marketing coordinator the company is a trad, very, very traditional
Ben Staley: work. Wear a manufacturing company. They specialize in flame, retarding clothing. So our customers were like petrochemical refineries and fire departments and utility companies for their utility line workers.
Ben Staley: And so we primarily sold
Ben Staley: at trade shows and through a direct regional sales force who would like leave brochures at people's offices back in 2,007. So I never. I never imagined that this world would have existed. And
Ben Staley: my hiring manager, who was, has been a mentor to me throughout my career. Had an amazing onboarding experience since I was just out of college, and she sent me to trade shows around the country with the sales team, and it completely opened my eyes to working with salespeople and actually getting to talk to customers rather than the marketing that I had studied in college.
Ben Staley: And so that was just a really cool jumping off point for my career that was very influential in shaping my passion for demand gen specifically, and being really closely tied to sales teams.
Ben Staley: the technology portion. Oddly enough, I got to learn at work right as well. So when I joined the company this was relatively early days of salesforce, and they had hired a consultant to come in and help them move from, excel spreadsheets, forecasting, and everything to managing a sales, pipeline and salesforce
Ben Staley: and so I got to sit down on some of those sessions, and then, after the consultant left, they kind of left the company holding the bag with salesforce instance.
Ben Staley: and given the very traditional nature of the company. I was probably like the youngest person in sales and marketing by like 20 years. And so PE people just were kind of like, Hey, young kid, do you wanna like manage this technology, though? I taught myself how to be a salesforce admin we had some
Ben Staley: processes with product development, who manufacture the garments with sales that were all paper and files, and I learned how to build custom objects, and like transition those paper filing processes into salesforce so we could report on them.
Ben Staley: So that's what kind of led me down this path of
Ben Staley: marketing career that intersects with sales
Ben Staley: collaboration and technology and process. So my, the next couple stopped in my career, we're very specifically geared toward identifying companies and roles where and I'll date myself a little bit here where I could go learn email marketing and then learn marketing automation. As those became sort of the emerging thing, but really the foundation of that initial
Ben Staley: passion was me having to teach myself salesforce. Oh, I know I totally get you. That was a similar situation for me early in my early in my career, learning Marketo and Salesforce
Brian Strauss: so may maybe run me a little bit through your work right now with vendor. You talked a little bit about your background, teaching yourself all of these sort of technical components. How did you get from point a you know, at work right where you are now.
Ben Staley: Well, lots of stops and lots of great mentors. What we're focused on at vendor is a super cool inflection point for the company. We're series B, and we raised our series. Be in, I wanna say, July of 2022. So
Ben Staley: a a year and a half ago.
Ben Staley: we had acquired a platform back in
Ben Staley: January of that year. roughly to sort of transition from a services based company to a product company that had a platform to build your procurement process.
Ben Staley: so fast forward to now. We are further evolving now to be a product led company rather than a sales led company in terms of our go to market strategy. So last year, when I joined the company was very focused on demand generation
Ben Staley: create. Like, as everyone is probably really familiar with right building, that funnel of marketing, qualified leads or target accounts that get heated up Bdr's work, generate meetings for a use, etc. And now we are
Ben Staley: like evolving and rebuilding some of our processes and marketing
Ben Staley: strategies and tactics to focus on driving self service sign ups into the platform for a free version.
Brian Strauss: Yeah. And so when you have those conversations like right now, what is it? What is your structure for the team? Look like
Ben Staley: we're we're a small but mighty marketing team of 5. So we have a marketing and corporate strategy leader, somebody over Brandon, Comms creative director, and then myself and my team of 2 3. If you include myself, I've got a growth marketing manager, and then we have a like marketing engineer, if you will. So he's essentially like a principal level architect.
Ben Staley: But instead of building
Ben Staley: the product he's building and architecting, our got to market systems and all of our data.
Brian Strauss: Nice. And when who are you currently reporting up to? Right now.
Brian Strauss: our head of marketing and corporate strategy. Okay, gotcha gotcha. So that's when you're having these conversations, you know, that's a huge pivot right to pivot towards like a plg product led motion, like what are some of the distinct changes you had to make? And when making those convers, having those conversations, how did you weigh in in terms of what direction you thought it should take.
Ben Staley: Yeah. so very simplified.
Ben Staley: I would say, for those of you listening who are demand Gen. Marketers that are used to working hand in hand with Brds or Sdrs and a sales organization.
Ben Staley: For me the change in thinking is frame it as that same sort of traditional and air quotes, if you will, sales and marketing partnership is now a marketing and product partnership. So the same way that I would develop my marketing targets in partnership with sales, and there
Ben Staley: goals and forecasts.
Ben Staley: Now I'm working to align my goals and targets with products, and sales is still very much in the conversation. But that's how I've mentally, kind of reframed who my primary stakeholders are, how do I work with them on a daily basis.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, that's that's an interesting like dichotomy there, because you go from such a sales centric motion to really just like elevating that product as much as possible for people to self serve right. And I assume product led. It is a largely self. Serve. Function is kind of what the new move looks like.
Ben Staley: Yeah. Self serve premium version with also a lot of life cycle marketing. Right? So using our marketing infrastructure, you know. Sort of
Ben Staley: I would think of it as almost
Ben Staley: much more sophisticated and active lead nurturing right? So rather than maybe lead nurturing of a couple of years ago, it's like, think of all of the different triggers that you could have when someone is using your product that would then trigger a nurture or a life cycle journey
Brian Strauss: right? Right? Right? Yeah. So I imagine throughout this whole process. managing up becomes like a really big challenge. Right? You run into. You know, there's the
Brian Strauss: the the things that matter to you as a marketer, and the things that manage that matter to the Elt right or it. How do you shape those conversations and kind of. At what point did you realize you had to frame a conversation a certain way for it to make sense to the Elt level versus what's relevant to you and your team.
Ben Staley: Yeah.
Ben Staley: I would say definitely, during my time.
Ben Staley: I would say at Rackspace, maybe even prior at Zeros, because I had quite a bit of executive level interactions, especially at 0 if it was a smaller company. But then at Rackspace, as I grew my career into leading teams.
Ben Staley: one very obvious way is, you get a lot of questions that give you an inclination that somebody doesn't understand, and so pretty so pretty quickly. You didn't learn that you have to reframe how you are
Ben Staley: dis.
Ben Staley: basically teeing up conversations or your decisions or your asks for more support for help on something
Brian Strauss: yeah, that's in my experience. At least, that's one of the the
Brian Strauss: tough lessons I think a lot of marketers have to learn is we all have to manage up right.
Brian Strauss: But the component of
Brian Strauss: recognizing, why should this member one give a shit about what we're talking about? How does it impact the broader business?
Brian Strauss: And 2. How do you make it so that your marketer to have a seat at the table needs
Brian Strauss: to understand where it fits into the broader piece. How do you contextualize your conversations to meet that need? How do you basically make marketing relevant to the Lt.
Ben Staley: yeah, that's a good question.
Ben Staley: I think of managing up
Ben Staley: as enabling other people to advocate for me and my team.
Ben Staley: So
Ben Staley: I think with a broad definition thing, it's thrown out a lot. It can kinda help to explain or frame exactly how I think of it.
Ben Staley: And I didn't always think of managing up in that way right like sometimes
Ben Staley: conversations I may have had with folks on my team, and
Ben Staley: they tell me what they think managing up is, and it's sort of like I'm doing the leaders job for them, or something like that, and especially in bigger organizations. I think it's much more about
Ben Staley: how do I enable
Ben Staley: my direct leader to work with their leaders and advocate for the needs of my team. so that we can perform our best
Ben Staley: So
Ben Staley: may I ask you to ask the question again since I started with the definition, and I lost the question, oh, you're good. You're good. I was basically just asking, How do you contextualize these conversations to be relevant to the Elt.
Ben Staley: Yeah.
Ben Staley: But part of it depends on how much exposure you have. Obviously, if you're a marketer.
Ben Staley: that's a direct sitting member of Elt, and you have that direct exposure. It's different than maybe, if you're one or 2 layers removed.
Ben Staley: if you do have, maybe the blessing and the curse of being a direct sitting member of Elt. I think one thing we, as marketers
Ben Staley: understand, maybe inherently or through our training, and the fact that we're marketers is II look at Elt as a whole, and specific members, as marketing to different personas right? Like a lot of us do in our day to day jobs. And even if you've got a side hustle, each each member of Elt or Elt as a body tends to sort of have
Ben Staley: very specific things that they care about unique needs. And so
Ben Staley: building relationships with them or their leaders is really critical. Right? Where I think marketing.
Ben Staley: Well.
Ben Staley: 2. One area that I think, makes marketing mean really unique compared to other functions is everybody experiences marketing right? Everyone is marketed to in their lives. So people experience good and bad marketing and therefore has an opinion about it. Right? It's different than maybe finance or product in in that regard.
Ben Staley: And but I think that makes it really important for us as marketers and marketing leaders
Ben Staley: when you are navigating your career and moving up
Ben Staley: to really focus on relationship building with cross functional peers, so that you understand the needs and goals of other departments.
Ben Staley: And even their frame of reference for marketing, so that you can tailor your conversations. And how you're talking about it at the leadership level how you're talking about marketing so that it resonates with your audience.
Brian Strauss: yeah, that's
Brian Strauss: cross functionality. I agree, I think is a really important component but also you made an interesting point about marketing being unique right. And I think
Brian Strauss: on 1 point, yes, you're correct. It is something that everyone experiences. I think the other thing that makes marketing unique is. I think it faces a scrutiny as a cost centre that other departments don't nearly as much right. No one ever goes.
Brian Strauss: How much is support costing us? How much is sales don't get me wrong. You're looking at those numbers and then scaling. But like.
Ben Staley: but there is, there's a lot more gray area with marketing where yeah, people intrinsically understand that it's customer facing.
Brian Strauss: Yet, you're not typically interacting directly with the customer. And they go, do we really need to invest in that? We go? Well, yeah, that's you know, that's what's bringing in the deals. And it was interesting. You know, you brought up all the events, and it's I think. There is a big inclination for a lot of marketers to feel like there is a go to playbook.
Brian Strauss: and I think executives like to hear that as well. When they hire right they go. We wanted hire someone who's done it before, who's done? 5, 10 million x amount of times. How do you do it, and it's
Brian Strauss: I think it's it. Hearing about your journey as a marketer, I think, really speaks to the variability of the field and the variability of how dynamic it can be across industries and company types.
Brian Strauss: But going the question around managing up. what are some? You know, some examples of
Brian Strauss: bad. You know, Elt, that you've that you've seen where you've been like. That's not the way I would have done it, or any sort of what you would recommend against doing.
Ben Staley: That's a great question.
Ben Staley: II do think there's a balance of understand trying to understand your
Ben Staley: executive level peers or audience so deeply that it comes off as deferring to them.
Ben Staley: And this is an area that frankly has tripped me up in in my past as well. Right like you you want to do, especially me and my personal personality type are the reason why I love marketing and demand. Gen. In particular is the collaborative nature internally.
Ben Staley: but what area that's tripped me up in my past, I think, is
Ben Staley: sort of working to understand each of the functional leaders.
Ben Staley: perspectives and what they expect of marketing so much that it almost seems like you're deferring decision making to someone else. Right? And at the end of the day it's also really important.
Ben Staley: If you have the visibility at that level, then you also recognize that you are the expert and that they're looking at you to make decisions and also be really transparent about some of the risks and help you might need in order to accomplish the decision that you're recommending.
Brian Strauss: Hmm! That's a that's a great call out, the you know, be the expert. That's what I remember an early loss of mine told me as I walked into it. You know I was gearing up to do this big presentation. He goes. You're the expert, be the expert.
Brian Strauss: and that like stuck with me. And it's you know what what kind of advice would you give to someone who feels? And I think most marketers have been through this.
Brian Strauss: where
Brian Strauss: that sort of deferment is pressed upon them where they aren't being given the autonomy to make those decisions. How how do you recommend that they they act within that?
Ben Staley: That that's such a unique scenario. And
Ben Staley: my. I'd say leadership style with my own team
Ben Staley: and coaching that I've received
Ben Staley: in my past as well. Right is.
Ben Staley: if you. if you feel like that level of autonomy is not given. Then.
Ben Staley: like, how can you go create that right? And maybe it's
Ben Staley: start with a smaller scope. Or maybe that's an indicator that you haven't built enough trust and strong enough relationship with the person that you believe is the giver of that autonomy. Right? But I.
Ben Staley: I try to always be mindful and frame my own thinking as much as possible of like I'm in control of my own destiny here. And
Ben Staley: yeah, I would caution like frankly, and I know this probably isn't what you intended. But if I had somebody on my team or another marketing peer that came to me and said
Ben Staley: so, and so you know, CEO, or whomever it's just not giving me the autonomy. Then I would ask them a lot of questions about why they think that that
Ben Staley: is it the case and what they can do to to gain back some control. Yeah, cause I'll often time like a lot like a lot of things. And I experienced this about budget, and I always use will tell my teams about budget. Right? Is like everything is a little bit of a negotiation, so it may, maybe that perceive sense of no autonomy is just being told. No, once which one of my former bosses have
Ben Staley: said, do you remember the exact thing? But it was essentially like the first. No, is only the start of the negotiation.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, with marketing. It's it's always a negotiation. How do you? How do you navigate those conversations where you know going speed like spill on the topic of negotiations and going back to that point about cost centers.
Brian Strauss: We understand as demand marketers that all of these pieces go, and they're the sum, the sum of parts right? That's the marketing strategy.
Brian Strauss: How do you convey that? Something's not just a cost center, even if it won't quote, have immediate, attributable roi like, what's that conversation? Look like to. You
Ben Staley: think it really highlights the importance of as a marketing leader building a really close relationship with your finance partners. I think I think that's an often
Ben Staley: under discussed and underutilized resource.
Ben Staley: Within marketing.
Ben Staley: What?
Ben Staley: One of my former Cmos used to caution
Ben Staley: our marketing leadership team as like step, not wanting to be, or needing to be, wary of being becoming naval gazers.
Brian Strauss: In essentially like, only caring about our own metrics and looking internally. And
Ben Staley: I think
Ben Staley: if you can, as a demand, Gen. Leader can be, build a strong relationship with your finance leader, team partner and get them speaking a common language with you
Ben Staley: that will go
Ben Staley: a super long way. Into
Ben Staley: budget conversations, annual planning things like that, and just getting a broader executive team on board with your recommended approach. Of how do you measure marketing's effectiveness and impact?
Ben Staley: but conversely, if you don't do that oftentimes, it's the finance leader who's the first to derail any marketing conversation at the executive level.
Brian Strauss: You know you you, as a marketer, to be effective at that level, you have to be cognizant of the businesswide metrics. Ltv. Cac payback time acquisition cost on its own right as well as the margins, which I think is something that really doesn't get talked enough about. Enough
Brian Strauss: is okay. Your acquisition cost is X, the payback time is Y, but ultimately is the business sustainable. And we know you know you just before we hopped on here we were talking about
Brian Strauss: how the industry of tech sas etc., is all shifting so quickly. Right? And you're seeing all these layoffs. You're seeing fundamental business models shifting from growth at all costs to profitability and sustainability? Right?
Brian Strauss: How do you think?
Brian Strauss: Yeah. How do you think a marketer takes that on and learns. And what steps would you take if you were new to this right? If you were teaching someone, what steps would they take to educate themselves and to become knowledgeable in that way.
Ben Staley: It depends on your learning style. I love my learning through collaborating. So if you're asking me that question directly, I would say for myself, that's where I would go, partner, with my finance team partner with my Cs team, especially right when we under to understand lifetime value, really understand how different parts of the business are measuring their own functions
Ben Staley: so that you can learn all those different pieces.
Ben Staley: For other people that may look like
Ben Staley: joining a community or doing some self pace coursework that is probably out there for this stuff.
Ben Staley: But for me, I always just by nature of my personality. But I think there's also a strong career growth.
Ben Staley: recommendation in there again, just building those relationships and getting to
Ben Staley: know your internal stakeholders and experts better. That's the route I would go.
Brian Strauss: Umhm. Yeah, they lot of different learning styles for that. II agree where
Brian Strauss: I'm also like a collaborative learner, you know, the quicker we can just dive right in the quicker it is to to figure it out. Trial by fire. we looks like we've got a question from Kelly in here.
Brian Strauss: So, Kelly, do you want to read your question?
Kelly Arndt: sure, yeah. I was just wondering. I'm sure there's plenty of times where you are having strategy conversations, and you have an idea that you really think needs to be considered
Kelly Arndt: but what happens like, you know, if an Elt maybe like doesn't think it works based on their prior experience, or even like watching other Co companies do it, or, conversely, like, if they're pushing for something that you kind of think doesn't really work anymore.
Ben Staley: Yeah.
Ben Staley: think we as marketers all have experienced the latter.
Ben Staley: I'll start with the former, though. So my my first question would be a a assuming this is a real life scenario, or if we're just even, you know, in a hypothetical one, if somebody
Ben Staley: were coming to me asking for guidance, saying, Hey, Yelt, you shot down my idea.
Ben Staley: I would ask them
Ben Staley: if they did the necessary pre work with some of their key Elt peers to get their buy in before the meeting, or if they just did, you just walk into that meeting and
Ben Staley: give your idea and hope that everyone was. Gonna take it
Ben Staley: for those who
Ben Staley: like outside of demand on just broader leadership development. I'm a big fan of the author. Patrick led Sioni and he's got some
Ben Staley: great books. One of my favorites is called Silos politics and turf force. But he also has this concept he introduces, and some of his books called the first team, and it's something that I had heard about at a previous company, but didn't know until I started reading his books.
Ben Staley: But basically, the idea is like, if let's say, you're the head of marketing at a company. Your first team, or the team that you're most responsible for is not actually your direct reports. But it's your team of peers. So you. You are not part of the Ceos first team. Their Ceos first team is the board the Elt minus the CEO, is their own first team.
Ben Staley: And so if you think sort of with that paradigm in mind to me as a leader, it's a very powerful framework for thinking about
Ben Staley: the work that you need to do to build, buy in before walking in to certain meetings? Because
Ben Staley: sometimes. And I've seen that I've experienced this firsthand right. If a leader walks into
Ben Staley: an Elt meeting.
Ben Staley: and the CEO can tell that this is everyone's first time
Ben Staley: of hearing about the thing that they want to do.
Ben Staley: There's no way that thing is gonna get done. The CEO is looking for that leader to have checked the box
Ben Staley: and circulated their idea, gathered, input. etc. with their first team of peer leaders. And if it comes across as like a collective idea.
Ben Staley: then I think your chances of success increase exponentially.
Ben Staley: Conversely, second part of the question.
Ben Staley: somebody pushing for a strategy that you think no longer works.
Ben Staley: On the one hand, I'd love to say that, you know. Just show them the data which is probably answers we've all heard. But I think we've also all experienced
Ben Staley: doesn't always work.
Ben Staley: And so when I've a as I lead teams.
Ben Staley: That's something that is in my the back of my head. Just you know that at some point somebody is going to come and make an ask that you just need to go try it whether it's been tried before or not. And so how do you manage the capacity of your team's time so that those don't feel like
Ben Staley: this is just one more thing amongst a bunch of other things. But okay, we've got time for this, or we've got a framework in place as a team where we can test this.
Ben Staley: And it's not gonna become the straw that brings the camels back, for everyone's wellbeing on the team or their own engagement.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, yeah, how do you handle some of that blocking and tackling really, just like shaping the prioritization of your team.
10.
Ben Staley: II wanna say, off top my head. That's almost like priority number one for a leader, right for for those of us who sign up for leadership.
Ben Staley: Typically, you're not signing up for the
Ben Staley: execution work of the team anymore.
Ben Staley: and so I think it's a good mental check-in for yourself
Ben Staley: of how are you balancing your time? And if you find yourself doing too much execution, and maybe that there's a correlation between man, we're just getting tons of requests from other stakeholders, and I'm doing a lot of execution
Ben Staley: that can just be a good check in with yourself to say, maybe
Ben Staley: maybe I'm not doing enough
Ben Staley: one on one with my other peer leaders, and maybe it's a reflection of folks not feeling
Ben Staley: like they know what's going on in marketing. And so the assumption is, we need to give marketing more work to do because we aren't aware of what's going on in marketing. Right? Sometimes it's a vacuum of information. And people
Ben Staley: fill that vacuum of information with their own narrative
Brian Strauss: right, or you know one of the other, you know, sort of common mistakes, I see is
Brian Strauss: one either peep. Other members. Cross functional department heads don't know what marketing is doing, or if they know what marketing is doing. They don't understand the why
Brian Strauss: right? Where does this log fit in this event fit in this XY. Or Z tactic? Right? How do you pull those pieces together to express the Y,
yeah.
Ben Staley: I think having a really well established goal and activity framework is important. Whether that's okay, ours. And I know, especially if you're at a smaller company. There's not a big annual planning process because things move fast.
Ben Staley: But
Ben Staley: that's where for me, as a leader, typically having one to 3 slides in my back pocket of here are 3 big goals for the year.
Ben Staley: the big rocks that we're focusing on as a result.
Ben Staley: and a little bit of who's doing what? Just so that when I have one on one's with other leaders, or I get the opportunity to speak at an all hands or something
Ben Staley: I have content that's prepared. That gives a really quick snapshot of
Ben Staley: like. Here's why marketing exists at the company this year. This is what this is, the business value we're driving.
Ben Staley: or that we are accountable and gold on driving. And then. as a result of having experts on the teams here, the areas of focus, like
Ben Staley: either programs or tactics.
Ben Staley: as as a result of what we're trying to achieve this year.
Brian Strauss: Umhm.
Brian Strauss: nice? Well, that's great feedback. I think maybe now we'll if there's any other questions we can open it up. Kelly, Diana Kendall. Any of you have any additional questions you'd like to ask, Ben, while we're all here.
Brian Strauss: feel free to drop them in the chat or just unmute.
Kelly Arndt: Yeah, I have a question. Do you? Do you? I mean, I think earlier we talked about like, you know, whenever there is an initiative that might have
Kelly Arndt: fuzzy attribution, or it might be difficult to talk about like the roi of it.
Kelly Arndt: When it comes to like Elt. I. You know certain personalities are want. The data. Certain personalities are kind of more interested in the the why or the vision behind it. And I'm kinda curious, like
Kelly Arndt: from your seat. How do you kind of mitigate those 2 different kinds of conversations where it's like.
Kelly Arndt: you know, trying to prove the impact of something that might not be totally measurable. And maybe, if you have an example to to connect those dots to you. That'd be helpful.
Ben Staley: Yeah.
Ben Staley: I think even the way the question is framed in my experience. If the ask is to prove the value of something. then someone's opinion has already been formulated, and marketing is playing defense
Ben Staley: right? So
Ben Staley: to me. What I see time and time again at the heart of that those types of questions is really a desire to understand.
Ben Staley: How does marketing make decisions about what to do and not to do, and where to invest money
Ben Staley: right? That ultimately Roi is a part of that
Ben Staley: but if you're getting into roi of a specific tactic or a specific channel. That's a losing battle. And I think we all, as marketers know
Ben Staley: by and large, specially B, 2 B, right, maybe some B to C. This may not be true, but B, 2 B, especially. There's no one silver bullet activity or channel or touch points.
Ben Staley: That is the thing to triple down on to
Ben Staley: Skyrocket, the business, right? It's gonna be a combination of channels and tactics.
Ben Staley: So that to me is where that partnership with finance to set the stage on.
Ben Staley: Here's how we are going to establish marketing Kpis. Here's how we view success. And here is also why we don't measure the Roi on.
Ben Staley: Pick a tactic that's very top of funnel, right? Like I would say, programmatic display. We are generally like that something that in in my past and even current like
Ben Staley: conversations with finance. We're not gonna measure the direct attribution Roi on programmatic display. Right? Like that's not what it's designed to do. So
Ben Staley: frameworks where you can articulate
Ben Staley: the user journey through the funnel. And then maybe, how tactics map to that. And then what is the measure of success for a tactic or a channel. If
Ben Staley: pipeline generation or revenue is not the success metric
Ben Staley: being proactive to say. And here's how we measure that which also goes back to something, Brian said earlier in the conversation. Right? Like
Ben Staley: Cac and Ltv.
Ben Staley: Actually think marketing moving more into those conversations is a great thing, because that's like an aggregated view of marketing spend and how it impacts acquisition costs and profitability rather than scrutinizing.
Ben Staley: What was the Roi on that sponsored webinar you did but that requires a shift in language and relationship building with partners who
Ben Staley: maybe.
Ben Staley: you know, especially again, for folks who aren't in the marketing discipline every day. maybe coming in with oh, at my past company we measured Mq. Ls, and this is what our funnel look like. Right? The modern customer journey and funnel is probably very different than a lot of non marketers frame of reference. And that just requires a lot of education.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, they I think one of the things is like so many marketers learn
Brian Strauss: X in school. If they go to school for that right? They learn why, somewhere along the way we lose sight of
Brian Strauss: the broader business strategy there, right? No one really teaches you that you kind of a lot of time get thrown into the pit, and you end up having the conversations with the Cfo. Or the CEO, or just working directly with those teams. You end up having to either sink or swim, you know.
Ben Staley: Yeah.
Brian Strauss: But any other questions Kelly, I know.
Brian Strauss: Diana and Kendall both said they were good.
Ben Staley: all good, sweet. Well, II think real real quick, Brian, if I can. There was a question up in the chat
Ben Staley: earlier from Kelly about
Ben Staley: folks pushing for things that no longer work that did spark a thought in mind as well like we talked about managing up, I think the other thing to to learn and get comfortable with
Ben Staley: operating at the Elt level
Ben Staley: is openness and transparency right? One thing that can lead to eroded trust of marketing
Ben Staley: is feeling like, Hey, we're only hearing good news all the time, and being honest about what's not working, or the need to change a strategy and asking for help, I think, is
Ben Staley: like that. Transparency and vulnerability is something that can be hard to break through for some people personally, but I think really opens up the support of an executive team, and just like the confidence as well, that oh, okay, this person is this marketing leader is
Ben Staley: looking at the business and doesn't have total rose colored glasses about their function.
Ben Staley: And is proactive as well. Right, we don't feel like, we have to go to them and tell them what to do and what to change?
yeah, they
Brian Strauss: that
Brian Strauss: is a great call out, and it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the why right like be transparent about? Why. about what is it working? But also make sure you include the why, like
Brian Strauss: one thing I've seen
Brian Strauss: on skos decks things like that, right? Or or just sort of recaps where they'll do like a marketing by the numbers right?
Brian Strauss: And they don't connect the dots to y.
Brian Strauss: Something is being pulled right? So like at surface level, Apis might look great right? Maybe click through. Rate is good. Maybe impressions are good.
Brian Strauss: but they don't explain that. Actually, all of the inbound leads who are coming from these channels, or who are being influenced by these channels, are garbage, or they take too long to close right or the deal sizes. You just say, Hey, we're getting rid of this cause. It's not working. Okay? But why all the sales guys love it? Because it quote brings in a ton of lead.
Brian Strauss: So making contextualizing so important.
Ben Staley: Yes.
Brian Strauss: But a great, a great final point. There any other things you, any final thoughts you'd like to share before we sign off, or any shameless plugs.
Ben Staley: No, it's been great. Appreciate getting to meet the folks who jumped on from the community.
Brian Strauss: Yeah, we we're super. We're super glad to have you, Ben. This has been a great conversation.
Brian Strauss: To everyone listening. Thanks for joining us for another episode of collective wisdom. Thank you, Ben, for being our guest today. Really look forward to seeing the great work you continue to do with vendor for those listening. If you're a demand marketer looking for a tight knit community of demand, and experts, be sure to apply to our community demand collective at Demand collective I/O. Thanks everyone and have a great week