Connect To Market

Is your brand sounding exactly like everyone else's because AI made "being everywhere" too easy?

In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Brett Van Buskirk, VP of Marketing at TrueML, to explore how marketers can connect to their market by staying human and accessible instead of hiding behind the same AI-polished, on-brand talking points as everyone else. Brett argues that AI has erased the old distribution problem, so scale and speed are no longer differentiators. What's left is authenticity: leaders and brands willing to be curious, show up in person, and represent themselves as people rather than repeating company lines.

Brett walks through why "sounding like a robot" is now a liability, drawing on his time visiting small businesses at Intuit and building one of the first digital mortgage apps at Blend, where his team assumed loan officers wanted to manage deals from their phones while out of the office, only to learn they'd rather just call their team back at the desk. It's a sharp reminder that even well-researched personas can miss how people actually want to work. He also makes the case for taking bigger creative risks since most of them carry less downside than marketers assume, and shares how he's applying AI internally for competitive intelligence while still insisting that curiosity and direct customer observation can't be automated. The conversation closes with Brett's non-linear path from consulting to product marketing, and his advice for giving yourself permission to grow at your own pace instead of chasing every trend on LinkedIn.

In this episode, we cover:
  • Why AI has removed the old distribution barrier and made "sounding like everyone else" marketing's biggest new risk
  • How real customer observation, like watching a shopkeeper manage inventory or seeing loan officers actually work in the field, surfaces insights research alone won't
  • A three-move, no-budget framework for connecting to market: authentic social presence, mining your own customer intelligence, and getting close to product decisions
  • Why marketers systematically overestimate risk, and how to build a career and a brand around calculated, uncomfortable bets


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Connect To Market is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/ 

Creators and Guests

Host
Casey Cheshire
Producer
Erica Weser

What is Connect To Market?

A movement of B2B marketers who realize direct connection with buyers is the foundation of all growth.

CTM - Brett Van Buskirk
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Brett Van Buskirk: [00:00:00] I think that's why you have to make sure that you as an individual, as a leader, as a person, accessible to the market. And you can't just be a robot repeating what the company lines.

Casey Cheshire: Right

Brett Van Buskirk: And you certainly shouldn't be... I mean, I wrote, I wrote something on LinkedIn, like, if you're, if you're representing yourself and you sound like a robot, you're gonna be replaced by a robot, full stop.

Welcome to Connect to Market. I'm Casey Cheshire. Join the conversation with the marketing leaders driving the fastest growing B2B brands. We're sponsored by Ringmaster, building B2B podcasts and communities to reconnect you with your audience

Casey Cheshire: The number says one and then two, then three. That means we're going. That means we have launched. We are, we are on liftoff right now, and I'm excited to get started on this, this episode, this conversation. Uh, the person that I'm gonna be introducing you to, he's awesome. I've had a chance to meet him, um, traveling different events and like, "Hey, [00:01:00] he's in town.

Let's go say hi." He's a brilliant guy, and I want to tell you all about him. Well, tell me, Casey. Stop, stop with all the silliness and tell me about him. All right. All right. I will. I will. Seasoned marketing leader, thought leader, an active voice in the CTM community. 15 plus years ex- uh, with, of experience scaling companies, helping them get from hypergrowth to IPO, you name it, building category-defining brands, and that seems to be one of the brands of him.

He has expanded TAM in one organization by a billion dollars. Hello, who wants an, a TAM expanded by... I do. Expand my TAM. Expand it. Maybe that's his future brand. High velocity GTM, revenue engines, category creation, product marketing. What does he not do? VP of marketing at TrueML, Brett Van Buskirk. Welcome to the show, sir.

Brett Van Buskirk: Thank you, Kasey. Happy to be here

Casey Cheshire: Let's get to this first question 'cause people are like, "What is even going on?" So the first [00:02:00] question, in order to ask you, I need to enlist the help of this giant blue foam finger so I can ask you, in all seriousness , Brett, what is the number one thing that marketers need to do in order to connect to their market?

Brett Van Buskirk: I'll be honest, I think it's changed, and I think it's changed in, in really meaningful ways. I think we see, we see everything all around us with AI, with how companies are trying to expose themselves, how companies try to relate themselves.

And honestly, what I see when I take a step back is everything sounds the same. Everybody sounds very similar. There's sort of this towards some, uh, median. Hopefully, that median is raising all ships above where we used to be. But, you know, where you used to be able to have a headline and, and have a claim, and that claim would last for a quarter, it lasts for two days because somebody scrapes your website daily and understands what you're doing, and they [00:03:00] model it up, and they follow it. So what I'm gonna say sounds simple. It's hard.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: be honest, I've been working at it for two years now, I can't say I'm great at it. I can't say I'm always proud of how I do it, but I do it,

Casey Cheshire: Yep

Brett Van Buskirk: that is being accessible. I mean, part of this is as a leader, you as a business, need to find ways to authentically meet with your market where they exist.

And I'll give you a couple of examples. Right now, think you see some really amazing examples of companies doing this on LinkedIn. You think of the Lovables and the Clays. They have built armies around them. They have built within their companies that have incredible followings, and they are highly hyper-accessible on LinkedIn. They're on there all the time. They're talking about what they're building. They're talking about what they did on the weekend. They're talking about all sorts of things that make them human and someone that I want to hear [00:04:00] from. And certainly, they slip in what they do and how they're building out their services. But it gives it that connective tissue that doesn't just seem like a sales pitch. And so trying that too. I'm trying that on LinkedIn. trying that in local communities. I think one of the things that we've certainly seen a little bit of a resurgence on is like, "Hey, how do you actually get in front of people and see them face to face?"

Like right now, we are all so inundated with Outreach and cold outreach and phone calls and emails, and maybe you're lucky enough to get gifts. I don't quite yet get those. I would

Casey Cheshire: Yeah, no

Brett Van Buskirk: But, uh, you know, I think we all get numb to all of those things. And so we need to find ways to identify individuals and identify companies that are giving us something different. And that can be in a digital context. That can be in a physical context. I mean, way back in the pi- in the past, I used to go visit small businesses with Intuit. That was our way of connecting with our [00:05:00] market. And some of them were businesses that used our products, some of them were businesses that didn't.

And we would sit and we would help them do everything. I remember one business, I helped them restock their store shelves. Had absolutely nothing to do with small business operating software and accounting. But what it helped me understand is how do they do inventory? And then I could bring it back to our product team, and I could talk about our inventory management system and how I saw one local shopkeep manage their inventory in a way that was surprising and in a way that, quite frankly, broke what we had built on the product front. is what I think connecting to your market is. It isn't just doing the sales pitch. It isn't just ensuring that your ads are everywhere. You kinda have to do some of that stuff anyways, but that's table stakes. What really differentiates you is how do you connect to them at a human level, which seems like at times is all too fleeting these days.

Casey Cheshire: Why do you think it's so fleeting? Why do you think it, it can kind of move to the back burner?

Brett Van Buskirk: I joined a webinar and I heard something from someone that had me thinking [00:06:00] about, um, about this a little bit differently. I think for the longest time, the challenge for marketers and for salespeople was distribution. do I get in front of people? And, uh, that was-- that had two of simultaneous friction points.

The first was: how do I make sure to just have the channels, right? How do I... Whether it's a budget or whether it's driving organic, how do I just have access? The second, honestly probably the more challenging component of it, was: how do I have the time to do it all?

Casey Cheshire: Right

Brett Van Buskirk: I say on one channel can't be the same as what I do on another channel, and I need those to be authentic and unique to those channels and the expressions of our brand on those and blah, blah, blah.

It's a magnification problem that we all used to struggle with, whether I was at a Fortune fifty company or at a Series A startup, right? Everybody struggled with how do we get-- how do we [00:07:00] be everywhere for everyone? With AI, that's becoming really easy. And I think that ease has given way to people trying to do what we were always told we needed to do. So we're all doing it Some more successfully than others, but now

Casey Cheshire: True.

Brett Van Buskirk: It,

Casey Cheshire: It's true

Brett Van Buskirk: we can all do it scalably, and we, we can all do it somewhat easily. And that, I think, is making us all sound the same, right? I, I was having this conversation with someone-- with another fellow marketing leader about redesigning a website, and I was like, "Hey, I'm using Claude.

I'm using Claude Design. It's fantastic. It can build out whole HTML things. I'm struggling with components of it." And then one of the leaders asked a question which I had asked our design leader a couple of days ago of like, "Are you okay with your brand looking like everybody else's?" And I said, "You know what?

I don't know." said, "In the past, I would've said no." I would've [00:08:00] said we wanted our own visual identity. We wanted our own visual narrative medium. But if I'm honest, as I look at the analytics of our website and the vast majority of the traffic coming from bots, does it matter? I don't know if it does.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: And that's-- That I think is the deeper question of like this is where we are as leaders, as, you know, when we embrace this type of technology is it is such a leveling factor for much of what we do, which is fantastic. Competitive intelligence is easier. Understanding what your competitors are saying about you and how they're representing their success is-- can be done at a stroke of a, keystroke. One keystroke. Not typing in fifteen different URLs, but like a single keystroke because you have a skill that you have built or you have an agent that is constantly running. It's simple, it's easy, it's cheap to do all this stuff, and so we do it It'll be interesting to see if it matters. [00:09:00] And I think that's why you have to make sure that you as an individual, as a leader, as a person, accessible to the market. And you can't just be a robot repeating what the company lines.

Casey Cheshire: Right

Brett Van Buskirk: And you certainly shouldn't be... I mean, I wrote, I wrote something on LinkedIn, like, if you're, if you're representing yourself and you sound like a robot, you're gonna be replaced by a robot, full stop. I can find-- I can build out agents that are a quarter of the cost of team members if I choose to do that. I don't. I don't necessarily always think that's the right way to go about it. if I have a team member that isn't performing or isn't doing original thought, or I'm not doing original thought myself, I should fully expect that a rational human being above me, which we all have them, make the rational decision to say, someone that's not doing original thought.

They're not doing anything more than I can ask Claude or I can ask ChatGPT to [00:10:00] do. They're out." That's the bar. It's not other people in, in a lot of cases. it's, it's fascinating when I think about this journey that we've been on for like talent sourcing, right? We went from was in the United States when I first, you know, came out of college, and it was every, uh, you know...

And then we went into, okay, big globalization and everybody was searching for talent arbitrage and, you know, cost arbitrage when sourcing talent from all corners of the world. You had a dev team in Eastern Europe, you might've had one in South

Casey Cheshire: Far shore, near shore. Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: Yeah. I mean, and, and now we're at the point where it's like though we still do some of that, but it's like, you know what?

Do we even need to do that anymore? Because now we can do that with, you know, data centers in the United States. We can do that with our AI agents. It's, it's wild. It's, it's exciting. It's scary, but I think that is the thing where, you know, no longer are you looking over your shoulder to necessarily some person.

You're probably [00:11:00] looking over your shoulder to some machine and say, "Hey, I gotta beat that thing in some dimens- in some meaningful dimension

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. I do, I do worry about like entry-level marketing, um, for some of the things like this because I, I feel like the-- maybe it doesn't, you know, replace the strategy overnight, but, or the synthesis of that. Um, but certainly the, the basic level things

Brett Van Buskirk: Yeah. Well, the job changes.

Casey Cheshire: The job changes, yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: some of the early entry-level marketers, you know, what are they doing? They're writing responses to creative briefs. They're looking at competitive and, you know, competitive research. They're, interviewing customers. They're interviewing prospects.

Like, that work is still being performed, but it's increasingly not performed by a person.

Casey Cheshire: Mm-hmm.

Brett Van Buskirk: And how do you learn that stuff if you aren't doing it hands-on? I-- That's the struggle I have today is, you know, I have kids. I'm thinking about how are they gonna-- how is [00:12:00] their learning journey gonna be impacted by some of this?

And

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: I-- gonna be gaps. Are those gaps gonna be sol- addressed elsewhere with additional ways of doing it that you and I never had to experience? Probably.

Casey Cheshire: Probably

Brett Van Buskirk: But what those look like, I don't know

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Hmm. It's like, yeah, people become just like AI trainers and engineers and, uh, conversation.

Brett Van Buskirk: I mean, I was-- I walked in on my 10-year-old the other day, and she was having a conversation with the Amazon Echo, so the Alexa device in her room about her wardrobe. And all, you know, the stuff that we... I remember, what, what was it? Like eight years ago when Amazon came out with that camera thing, and it's like, "Try on your clothes with Alexa."

And everybody's like, "Wow, that's really creepy. There's no way in hell we're gonna do

Casey Cheshire: Super creepy

Brett Van Buskirk: know, you now have, you now have stores, big stores, like Gap is doing it, like massive chains that are having those A-- you know, augmented [00:13:00] reality try on, you know, our clothing type of experiences. And like my daughter was living that in real life.

She was having a four-minute conversation with Echo about the, the changing weather patterns and about she had to do something during the day, so how do I plan it out? And it's, it's a very different mindset and workflow than I ever would do. I mean, the most I ever ask my Echo for is like, "What's the weather tomorrow?"

I don't my daily schedule to it to help it define what I wear. Maybe I should. I should ask her how it goes. But like this is again, where it's just a changing, a changing model that you have to continuously adapt to.

Casey Cheshire: It is. It is. Um, man, and I, I was gonna say the thing that is harder to replace is that going to that small business and seeing how they did their inventory, you know? Or, or,

Brett Van Buskirk: think you still

Casey Cheshire: yeah.

Brett Van Buskirk: that.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: of the things that I was [00:14:00] always told, um, you know, I, I was a consultant for a while, and one of the things that individuals always used to tell me is, like, you can't-- One of the things that makes people stick out, and these were senior leaders when I was a much more junior individual, and they go, "You know, you can always tell is when people are curious." And he goes, "And it doesn't show up in the ways you might think." Like, it doesn't, it doesn't always show up in the most direct paths, but it's the person who, you know, walks into a line at... I mean, there's a lot of common adages, right? You walk into the airport and there's a weird line, and you're like, "Why is the line constructed this way?" Or you go to Disneyland and you're like, "I wonder why part of it's outside and then part of it's inside, and then they go back outside." And it's those types of healthy curiosities, whether they're technology assisted or not, I think will continue to help people and talent differentiate. And I think that's where, you know, if I wanna really get back into connecting to the market, like you [00:15:00] need to figure out-- you need to be conscientiously curious all the time about it, because where your market is is shifting who you're selling to.

I was just having this conversation with our president of as we're building out an embedded solution, like we're not gonna sell to the NPNL owners at all times. We might sell to CTOs, and I've tried to make that move between selling to a business owner and selling to a technology owner, and it is a dramatic sea change your company.

But the only way you get there is by being curious and by being, you know, accessible to them and figuring out how to represent yourself authentically in a way that to them

Casey Cheshire: It's a risk what you're describing, and it feels like the best marketers are risk takers. I mean, we are technically even just taking the job knowing how long marketing tends to last in some organizations. But, you know, historically we- we're the ones that [00:16:00] try, you know, like yeah, may- maybe the, maybe it's a sweet spot, maybe it's an oasis of revenue switching up that buyer from business to tech or vice versa, and you're not gonna know unless you try it out.

But,

Brett Van Buskirk: Now at

Casey Cheshire: you know, and go out there and listen and have conversations and connect

Brett Van Buskirk: Well, and I think one of the things that has always struck me, and certainly as I've, uh, moved on in my career, is like you need to understand the risk you're willing to take. And I, I think more often than not, we as humans are-- tend to be risk-averse, whether it's our own money or our business's money, we tend to be risk-averse, right?

I have numbers I need to reach. I'm going to get that. I'm gonna work towards achieving them in the most confident way I can. then if I have a little bit of opportunity to take some risk, I'll do so. But that is our mental model in most cases. And what I tell my teams and what I, I think at times I have embraced, certainly at times what I've shied away [00:17:00] from, is we tend to overestimate the risks that we're willing-- that we're taking on.

And I think at times we don't always make as big of swings as we could. And that's where, you know, looking at whether it's a piece of content or a, or a campaign or even just a product experience, like what is the actual risk that we're undertaking here and weighing that appropriately because most of the time it's not that high

Casey Cheshire: No, it isn't, right? But why does it feel like it is?

Brett Van Buskirk: Change. Change is hard.

Casey Cheshire: Is hard

Brett Van Buskirk: that's part of it. I think some of it is it's just, it's something we're just not used to. Like, we, as marketers, we like to think that we're risk, we're, we're risk-taking individuals, but marketing for so long has been more science than art,

Casey Cheshire: Hmm

Brett Van Buskirk: much more science than art, that I think we are We're kind of sight of that risk appetite and that artistry that goes into some of it. And [00:18:00] I mean, I'll be honest, I'm not the most artistic person on the planet, so this is ... I am probably the wrong individual to be speaking about this and really proselytizing it, but that's something that I look at of, you know, it's this weird dichotomy of we see people go viral for these really creative campaigns or really outrageously interesting things that they've done and, you know, we get leaders that are like, "Well, why can't we do that?"

And then you lit- you list off a litany of reasons why we couldn't have done that exact same thing, and it's like, no, that's the wrong way to approach it. Now, I'm not saying everybody should aim to go viral. That's a very, very, very quick way to, uh, probably not produce anything. But I do think it's try to do something that feels like it fits you and your market and that honestly at times makes you uncomfortable

Casey Cheshire: It's uncomfortable, uh, just like, you know, getting out there and connecting and visiting someone at their business can be uncomfortable. Can be awesome, but it can be uncomfortable. But

Brett Van Buskirk: I mean,

Casey Cheshire: yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: going to a conference and [00:19:00] grabbing people off the floor. I heard someone, someone on a, another conversation I was on was talking about they were at a conference and they had, uh, to get people to sort of bring people in, they rented a little like, I don't even know who made it, but like the little robot dog that followed them around and kind of like gave them a talking point, and you put a little sign on it and that's it.

And it's just these other, these little things where it's just like, you know what? Find a way to be, be interesting to people. And if you need a little toy robot that follows you around or you need a sign flying in the air, you need to give away free coffee, sometimes that's worth it

Casey Cheshire: I remember that, um, big Dreamforce conference and we were giving out-- This was dated, people, so don't judge me. We were giving out, um, uh, wristband thumb drives.

Brett Van Buskirk: Oh yeah. Oh yeah

Casey Cheshire: So like cool [00:20:00] looking with our logo on it, and if you unclip it, you can plug it into your computer. What? Um, and maybe they were not cool, but as people would walk by, I would say like, "Do you want the power of the gigabyte?"

You know, or something like, 'cause they're like a gig in size, which, you know, for someone

Brett Van Buskirk: back then, that

Casey Cheshire: back then, you know.

Brett Van Buskirk: hell, right now that's a big

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Honestly, yeah. Yeah, totally.

Brett Van Buskirk: Have you seen memory phrases?

Casey Cheshire: Oh my gosh. Yeah. So yeah, but like, and that just made us interesting. Come talk to us. It's data migration. It's not very interesting. But you know what? We made it interesting for a second, and it was uncomfortable.

And honestly, the peppermint patties we gave out were probably more interesting, but either way it was something

Brett Van Buskirk: But you didn't have-- The peppermint patties didn't earn you a conversation. Like, the, the, the thumb drive's at least interesting 'cause it's kind of related to what you're doing in data tr-

Casey Cheshire: Right.

Brett Van Buskirk: and data transmission. And so it's like, know, there's, there's at least a thread to pull there.

You could put something on them potentially. Now you couldn't

Casey Cheshire: we did. We put all of the [00:21:00] specs on there, the spec sheets and everything. Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: you know, I mean, it's, uh, I think that's where, like, you can take the easy way out at events or at other things, and you can sort of have, you know, you can have the crowd-pleasers, right? You can have water at, like, maybe you can be a little tongue in cheek here in Vegas, like water and Agile.

Always a crowd-pleaser, but does it really connect to who you are, and does it really give somebody a reason to talk to

Casey Cheshire: Right

Brett Van Buskirk: you can find other ways to do that.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah, fair enough, man.

Brett Van Buskirk: On your goal.

Casey Cheshire: It,

you know, and they can be too good

Brett Van Buskirk: to give them your email, sometimes that's the goal,

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: there's lots of easy ways to do that

Casey Cheshire: You know what? Uh, shout out to RSA who had the, uh, old fashioned booth open at like 9:00 AM, uh, pouring old fashions all day long. Um, yeah, that-- But it was interesting to your point, it was, it was human. So I, I, I hope that those things continue as everything else gets more and more fake and more and more automated and, and AI [00:22:00] driven that we, we continue to index more on the human side because it just matters that much more.

Brett Van Buskirk: Yeah. And I think, I mean, it matters how you work. It matters in ultimately I think most of what we all derive passion and pleasure and interest from, and I think it helps differentiate brands. Like

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: you know, if, if we look at who's winning in the marketplace, even in the AI space, like the brands that have interesting people express themselves as a brand in an interesting way seem to be winning in the market.

Well, how long that'll last, I don't know. But like, you know, I think there's a pretty big difference, right? If i- in, in very hyper-competitive markets, if you look at Lovable versus Replit, like two exceedingly positive brands that are doing some really interesting things, but they're both very, very AI-centric and techy.

I would say one is a more appealing brand to me. I don't, you know, [00:23:00] I... And that's, I, I think that is represented in their growth rates.

Casey Cheshire: 100%.

Brett Van Buskirk: And that isn't a take away from either of them. They're both doing incredible work, but is to show you that there's multiple ways of building a great brand and industries that continue to grow, and I think that is where all of us have an opportunity.

Like, I work in, you know, debt management to a large degree, like not the sexiest. It's kind of like the backwater of the backwater

Casey Cheshire: Right

Brett Van Buskirk: And do we have the most engaging, exciting brand and where I would ultimately like to be? No, not yet. But like we have a really meaningful trajectory to get there, and I think a lot of it re- revolves around helping people when they need help and ensuring that that is brought to the forefront.

And will it be brought to the forefront by the technology that we build? Yeah, probably. That's the hope. That's the bet. But like that is where need to make sure that our brand is a representative fact of where we wanna be going and, [00:24:00] you know, building, making sure that all of us, myself, but certainly not limited to me, are showing that and embracing that in the marketplace.

We have leaders that are posting on LinkedIn. We have individuals that are going out and courting new clients. We have, you know, opportunities to meet with our market on a near weekly or bi-weekly basis. We have opportunities to work with our legislature all the time. Like it's-- that's where I think it's thinking through all those opportunities and viewing your market pretty broadly.

The market is rarely as narrow as we all make it out to be, especially if we think about all the factors that influence it

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Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Yeah. Totally, man. This is perfect. This is the perfect segue into the challenging question, w- which we call the framework. Are you ready for this?

Brett Van Buskirk: I'm ready.

Casey Cheshire: All right. Brett, if you had to build a connect-to-market strategy from scratch, no budget for ads, what would your top three moves be in order to get in front of and build trust with your ideal buyers?

Brett Van Buskirk: Yeah. uh I, I think I mentioned the first one, which is let's do the easy stuff first. Let's make sure that you are somewhere on social media that is relevant to your market. Could be LinkedIn, could be X, could be Snapchat, et cetera. Let's make sure that you're out there.

Casey Cheshire: Got it

Brett Van Buskirk: it doesn't always-- Again, it doesn't always have to be out there with the business line.

It [00:26:00] needs to be out there, what, what's driving you? What are you curious about? are you challenged with? Why do you do the things that you do? And yeah, weave in some business stuff. So that's the first one. The second one that I would make sure to do is we all have a tremendous, generally speaking, we all have a tremendous amount of intelligence within our own apparatuses at our companies that we probably are becom- be- getting better at mining, but we're not very good at it.

Sometimes it's hard. You know, production systems are hard to of standardize what we're looking at and derive insights from. But take the easy wins. Look at Gong, look at Salesforce, look at HubSpot. Like, take the easy wins, use some agents to apply, uh, some queries against it and figure out, you know, you can go from very, very simple sort of keyword spotting to something that's much more sophisticated to understand how your market is perceiving at least you as-- when you reach out with them.

So that's the second thing. The third thing [00:27:00] is I think as a marketing leader, and this is probably showing some of my bias, you gotta find out ways to reach the market in the product or the service that you deliver. And so getting close to your product team, why are we building things the way we're building them?

What is that-- What does execution or interaction with certain capability or component tell us or not tell us? That is, I think, the third way to do it. So you q- sort of are building out this, almost this three-sixty way of viewing the customer life cycle. You have the very sort of highest of high, top of funnel, very early stage interactions that are largely unguided and sort of untargeted when you're putting yourself and putting your thoughts out in the ether. You then have when they finally connect with you, what can we learn from and how do we, how do we standardize it, and how do we sort of use those to drive goodness in our marketing and our product development? Then you have, hey, when they eventually sell, you know, when we sell them, when they [00:28:00] engage with our product, what are we learning from them through those actions?

And I think that's-- those are the three things that I would do on-- insofar as a framework if I had very limited means to reach the market. There's other stuff I would love to do. I'd love to travel, to visit a customer or go see how our product is used. I don't think you can ever replace the learnings that you get from just watching somebody use your thing,

Casey Cheshire: Oh my gosh, yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: technology thing or a hardware thing. How do they do it? When do they do it? I mean, I've seen them do it from accounting software to software to mortgage software to, you know, banking services. It, it's hard to beat watching somebody live their life and seeing how your little widget fits into that.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah.

Brett Van Buskirk: that's hard to do sometimes

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. But like, so, so helpful because who knows what you'll observe, the little small thing that they do that, that [00:29:00] might be the key unlock for everything else.

Brett Van Buskirk: Well, I was gonna say sometimes you, you know, we all think in our product and service, we tend to view our users and our market as rational actors, and they're not, right? We're selling to people, we're selling to people that have shit going on in their lives that, you know... I, I, I remember when I was back at, um, it was after Intuit and we were at Blend, and it-- which is a, a software company in the mortgage tech space, and we were one of the very first people who did, who built out the digital mortgage, and we sold it to First Republics, which now doesn't exist, but Wells Fargos, et cetera, of the world. Um, and we built a mobile app 'cause, you know, we had this image in our head of these loan officers wanted to do-- wanted to check in and maybe progress a loan application, you know, while they're on the golf course, right? They're building... These are high, high-achieving individuals. They're building their book [00:30:00] of business while out and about, right?

They're just not sitting behind a desk. sounded smart to us, right? We've-- W- that sort of fit the archetype of these individuals that we had in our heads, and we were young twenty-year-olds, so we didn't know much better. Um, we built the thing without, honestly, without a whole lot of customer research. Um They are out and about.

We were right about that. Wanna know what they don't wanna be doing when they're out and about? Playing on their mobile device. So wanna know what they did instead? They just called their team back at their office to do something for them. And so that's a really interesting nuance that we had no idea existed.

They still got the work done, and so that's what we saw. We saw the end product, and we saw sort of the destination, if you will. We didn't see the fact that what we built was totally orthogonal to the way they wanted to work at that time. That's why you gotta get out and see your market. You can make some really smart decisions, and you can just miss little things that can be [00:31:00] instrumental for s- success or failure

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes it is really just the little things, and it's, it, the, it's the little brush strokes that make the masterpiece. Yeah. Happy trees. Happy trees for everyone. Brett, you and I have hung out, but I, and I'd love to know the answer to this question, and I'm sure everyone else does, too. Who are you?

Who are you? How do you know these things? I, I... The experience and the wisdom is, is coming through. Take us back in time, little Brett days. Did you know you were gonna be a marketing leader, all that goodness?

Brett Van Buskirk: So I, always thought I'd do something in business. My dad was in business. He started off as a teacher, but f- you know, when I was old enough to remember and see what he was doing, he was always in business. And so I always thought I'd do something there. Um, marketing, honestly, I kind of fell into it, if I'm fully honest.

So like I... And this is gonna sound really naive, but [00:32:00] I went, I, I started my career in sort of consulting, and I wanted a, a fast-paced environment with a variety of things to do because I was a, a high-energy young man, and I wanted lots of experiences, and I wanted the opportunity to travel, and so consulting fit a number of those boxes. went to grad school, which was always something that was of interest to me, um And I think, you know, for me, I, I still went back into consulting even after grad school, and I'm like: You know, I wanna do something else. Like, I, I... There's a, a wealth of these skill sets. I've seen a lot of these patterns.

Like, I wanna try and-- I wanna have a degree of permanency. The thing that didn't strike me is, uh, or always challenged me in consulting is you could affect work up until a certain point, but it was always out of your hands. Like, the end delivery or the value reception, or even whether the thing stuck or not, was always out of your hands because you would get to a certain point, and that [00:33:00] was the duration of your contract, and you would be out. And so I went internal, and I did a little bit of that internal too.

Casey Cheshire: Mm-hmm.

Brett Van Buskirk: And I was at Intuit at the time, and they had a centralized corporate strategy and corporate development team, which is, was a, a nice landing spot for sort of re-recovering, if you will, consultants and investment bankers. So it'd be a...

It was a team that would work across all of Intuit's businesses. but it was a team that was, at that time, constructively a-and sort of purposefully designed to be a short-term landing spot for talent. It would be a place where people would s- land for a year or two, do some good work, see the entirety of the business, and then go out to the business and sort of bring those skill sets and experiences directly into the business. I had a choice at that point. I could go be a product manager, or I could work in product marketing at the time. And I... Honestly, I kinda fell into product marketing, and this is gonna sound really stupid. Um, but I chose [00:34:00] product marketing because my, uh, naive perception of product management at Intuit at the time, and I-- maybe it was an overly exaggerative, uh, way of viewing it, was at Intuit, I didn't want to be responsible for the file menu in QuickBooks. Like, that was what I didn't wanna fall into.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: And I realize how dumb that sounds, uh, but, like, that was my perception of I was looking at breadth versus depth. And for me, marketing always had the greatest breadth Mm-hmm. increasingly selective depth. But I, I found sort of product marketing for me, like, I was a kid who tore apart my Apple IIe multiple times and rebuilt

Casey Cheshire: Hell yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: that, you know, w- did-- built out programming languages and one of the... You know, I remember doing stuff in C and having sort of small jobs at local... I was a, a technician. I was sort of a technical person over the summer at a local police station, which, hilarious [00:35:00] stories, um, doing that in the '90s.

But, I mean, I, I did all that sort of stuff. And so for me, I was like, I, I still wanna be close enough to the product. I wanna be close enough to the individuals using it, but, like, I wanted to have some broader influence over the direction it takes. And product marketing, for me, fit that mold. So young Brett, I think I did him some justice by I took-- I gave myself some time to try a whole bunch of different stuff.

I worked at companies as large as Bank of America to companies as small as, you know, uh, much more recently in the small double digits. Um, and for me, it's always been, you know, the couple of times where honestly I've struggled with the job that I've been doing is when I didn't choo- didn't pursue something that was, that either academically interested me quite frankly spoke to a passion.

Like, a lot of the reason why I've been in fintech my entire career is I had grandparents who I saw, you know, one grandparent have the [00:36:00] benefit of, access to capital and another set of grandparents that didn't, and their lives were dramatically different

Casey Cheshire: Really?

Brett Van Buskirk: And so a large majority of my career has been focused on how do I ensure that our financial system is more open than not? And some of that has meant, you know, adapting to technology changes, mobile devices, making things available on mobile. Some of that has meant working for big banks to build out new product portfolios and evaluate and understand what their upcoming consumer and their markets needs. Some of that is now where I'm at right now, which is to make sure that delinquency management and the, you know, whe-whether we wanna call it a virtuous cycle or not, but the debt cycle works because if people aren't paying back money that they're lent, we will not continue to lend money.

So is where, like, some of it is follow your passions, and I think it's challenge some of the, uh, of the [00:37:00] things that you hold, that you hold dear, but that you kind of look at academically. I think there were some things in my past where I kind of made the book smart decision, but the, uh, the life dumb decision and, you know, you learn from those

Casey Cheshire: Yeah, the, the book smarts. Like, oh, this, this, this is supposed to work out perfectly on paper.

Brett Van Buskirk: Or, or not. I

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: was, you know, I, I mean, shit, uh, I... When I was in grad school, I mean, we, we went through the financial crisis, and I

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: and I came out, you know, during that, which was not an awesome time to come out during it.

Casey Cheshire: No

Brett Van Buskirk: you know, I was looking at the stock market, and I was like, "I got, you know, I got some capital.

I should throw a whole bunch in." And I was looking at companies I know, and I'm just like, "On paper, it looks like this would be a sure bet," because, you know, I, I was looking at some of the financial companies, and I'm like, "They own land that's worth more than their, actual stock, their actual enterprise value based on their current stock price.

So like, this is a sure bet. I should t- [00:38:00] throw $10,000 into it." Or even, know, even something as ear- early Bitcoin when, you know, early, mm, I don't know, 2012, 2014 when I first heard? Like, early stuff like that where I kind of look at it and I'm like, "You know what? I should do something." But then the academic person in the back of my mind's like, "You know, that's kind of risky.

You don't know much about that market. Like, what if it dies?" Like, sometimes you just gotta kind of take that risk, and you gotta give yourself permission to fail, and you have to just learn from it. And yeah, you wanna fail within a protective area, but sometimes it's okay to, to try to take a big swing and miss

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Yeah. It, and I think whenever we can f- create spaces that are like, uh, I don't know if it's the incubators of college, there's different places. School sometimes is that way, and certain jobs that are able to be incubators, that's where we can really test the [00:39:00] wings and help others test theirs

Brett Van Buskirk: Yeah, and you know, increasingly, and this is something I'm sure I'm gonna have to challenge and battle with my children, is like you go on LinkedIn and everybody is doing incredible things, or at least they're saying they are, right? And it's, that's where like what, what matters to you doesn't necessarily need to matter to the broad market as you evaluate yourself versus others.

And that is something where It's hard. We get so many signals in our lives these days of what

Casey Cheshire: We do.

Brett Van Buskirk: like and what good looks like and what we need to be or what we should be or what we could be.

Casey Cheshire: Mm-hmm.

Brett Van Buskirk: And I think having the opportunity to evaluate those against what you really need to do for yourself at this moment, and at this moment may be a short-term horizon. You know, I talk to a lot of people who real- over the last few [00:40:00] years, like the job market's gone from great to awful, right?

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: part of where, part of where a lot of people are having a whole lot of success is during the awful times is, and this has been my coaching to some of the individuals that I've spoken to, is go do something fun and interesting.

Go do something that makes you unique.

Casey Cheshire: Mm-hmm.

Brett Van Buskirk: And that might be building something, that might be traveling, that might be going to live somewhere else in the world. Like go do something will give you, give someone else a reason to talk to you. Coming back to what we first started off with, like

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: to be interesting to your market. You need to be to yourself, and you can't do those things if you aren't pushing yourself in some dimension

Casey Cheshire: Where are you pushing yourself these days?

Brett Van Buskirk: Having two kids is enough.

Casey Cheshire: Um, yeah, I, I, I can agree to that, and that's

Brett Van Buskirk: I, I mean, [00:41:00] I think, you know, this is one where I, I am battling hard, and this is where I think a lot of people are having these little side hustles of like, how do you stay up to speed with everything that's going on and deliver for your job and deliver for your household, um, your family? And that is-- Man, that's a tall order.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah.

Brett Van Buskirk: is so much going on in marketing, in AI, in the world of the, the world in

general, but the world of business. Like, how do you make sure-- how do you narrow your aperture enough to feel like you are learning what you need to learn without being overwhelmed while still, you know, coming home and being, being what you need to be for your family, being what you need to be for yourself?

Um, and so, you know, for me, I'm, I'm trying to find ways to kinda challenge myself and challenge my team [00:42:00] on what h- what type of tech do we wanna be testing, how do we wanna be testing it and structuring it that way.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: some of this is also, like, giving yourself permission to not be the person doing the first thing on LinkedIn, right?

Uh, if,

Casey Cheshire: Yep

Brett Van Buskirk: LinkedIn or if you're, you know, talking, if you're in forums, like, you're hearing people do some incredible stuff. God, I wish I could do all that stuff, but I can't.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: And it's okay to be where you are sometimes, and you have to kinda give yourself grace and give yourself permission to be in that space.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: Like, I can't do all the things I wanna be doing with AI and what I would love to be automating because my underlying infrastructure and data layer is not in a situation where I can get it there. So we've been doing a lot of work there. that super sexy, fun work that I can scream from the hilltops about on LinkedIn?

No, it's not. But if you talk to [00:43:00] somebody who's been in the trenches trying to do it with a company that's 15 years old, they get it.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: And that's where don't lose sight of what you need to be doing for you and your world, your role, your family, your company. Like, we can all chase bigger, better, unique things, and there is a time and a place for that, but you also need to make sure that you're not just doing that to keep up, you know, keep up the appearances. So I think that's what I'm constantly struggling with, if I'm honest, of like, I'd love... I wanna be doing all that stuff. Doing that stuff's fun. Doing that stuff's exciting.

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: that stuff brings your name up in lights, right? But,

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: is that what I need to do to succeed as a, as a parent, as a marketing leader? Not really

Casey Cheshire: Yeah. Well, sometimes with kids too, we realize, hey, this, this is probably the most important mission I have right now. This is [00:44:00] my challenge right now. Um, and then, you know, as soon as they're off to school or whatever they want to do, then now I'm gonna full send on some like absolutely innovative marketing human AI cyborg, you know?

Brett Van Buskirk: Just making sure that you, you pick your time and place and you give yourself permission to,

Casey Cheshire: Yeah

Brett Van Buskirk: accordingly

Casey Cheshire: Permission. Yeah, that's really important. Um, I like that you said that. It's, there's an intentionality to what you're saying in, uh, in giving yourself permission. It's like, it's okay. In fact, do that. Please do that. Yeah. Well, cool, man. Well, hey, where can people go if they wanna connect with you?

Brett Van Buskirk: LinkedIn, LinkedIn's best. Uh, if we get, you know, email, accessible via email, um, you know, give my company's Truaml to record a follow too.

But, uh, yeah, LinkedIn's great. That's where I with a ton of, uh, that I learn from, that I support, that I, [00:45:00] uh, get, get sort of energized from seeing what they're doing. So that's, that's the preferred avenue

Casey Cheshire: Okay. Awesome. We'll definitely link to that. And, um, yeah, shout out to Erica who makes these things happen because e- you said

Brett Van Buskirk: easy

Casey Cheshire: dude, you said like so many, uh, amazing like soundbites. Like there, there are marketers who, who string along 30 words and then like four... But, but you had these like sound... I'm like, oh my gosh.

And almost each and every one of them I go, "Whoa."

Brett Van Buskirk: Well, we'll

Casey Cheshire: saying so-

Brett Van Buskirk: mean,

Casey Cheshire: like I can't...

Brett Van Buskirk: we'll s- we'll, we'll show that out, I

Casey Cheshire: So Erica's gonna mute the hell out of me while you're talking,

Brett Van Buskirk: I'm

Casey Cheshire: like I couldn't help it. I was like, oh my God, that's so true. That's so true. So dude, thank you so much for coming on here. I feel like this has been, um, like it's been fun and a masterclass at the same time.

Be accessible, authentic, the, the, the Intuit trips, like [00:46:00] getting in front of the customer. Ah, there just, there's just so much here that's been fantastic. Your framework is a scary question that you just absolutely crushed. So I just wanna thank you, dude. Thank you so much for coming on here

Brett Van Buskirk: My pleasure. I, I love this stuff. I think we can-- So much to learn from everybody, and if I can do just a little bit of what-- pass on a little bit of drop of knowledge that helps somebody else do bigger and better, all for it. Love that

Casey Cheshire: Hell yeah. Hell yeah, man. And, and for those listening, if you learned something, and I freaking know you did 'cause I literally have

the notes over here, front page and back, then share this with someone else. One person, two people, three people who's particularly disconnected from their customer. Maybe they need a little link to this episode to kinda... Hey, next time you get bad marketing in your email, just like reply with a link to this episode and maybe we can just school them up, get them in front of Brett and just like teach them what's up.

If you get an email that's completely just, it just absolutely tells you that they have no idea who you are as a customer, just rep- [00:47:00] no words, just reply back with this URL. Maybe they'll learn. And if not, at least we get a click and that works. Works for everybody.

Brett Van Buskirk: it. That's right

Casey Cheshire: Oh man. And with that, Brett, thank you again, sir

Brett Van Buskirk: Thank you, Casey. Happy Friday, my friend

Casey Cheshire: and hey, this has been a really cool, really fun episode of the Connect2Market pod. We will see you all next time