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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 3,500+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:01]:
All right, so I got a great guest today. Shane is the CMO of Webflow. We're now running the Exit Five website on Webflow. So there we go. It wasn't my decision. It said be way beyond my lane of where I'm comfortable.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:30]:
But Dan, who's my business partner, was like, when we make this change, we're updating the webflow and everybody's been raving about it. So that's awesome.
Shane Murphy, [00:00:37]:
That is great to hear. Thanks, Dave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:39]:
Yeah, we were talking briefly offline before about more enterprise type of marketing. I'm curious to talk about what the opportunity is at Webflow. You taking the CMO job there. What was so exciting about that? It seems like awesome company and product to be doing marketing for from the outside. I actually first got put onto Webflow. I think they had a bunch of these like viral ads or something. I feel like I remember from back in the day. So that's put me on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:04]:
But just the opportunity as a company, what drew you there as a cmo?
Shane Murphy, [00:01:09]:
Yeah, there are two big things. If I think, first off about the space you want to be the company that has potential to have long term momentum. And if you think about marketing technology and particularly the website tech stack, it's still pretty. It's very co dependent and outdated. It's really it. Talk to anybody about updating the website or building the website in any sort of scale business, it is a nightmare. We have customers before they move to webflow. It would take them like two months to get any change done.
Shane Murphy, [00:01:37]:
And so obviously with the development of low code tools and AI, that completely changed. And Webflow is like, we're a visual development platform, so we allow people to build all the power of code, right. But in a visual interface so designers can use it. And so it's just to me clear that kind of like electric cars, that ultimately this is how we would build for the web in a way that the people who actually wanted to do the building were empowered to do it. And so big, big space that we could go and attack, which has been born out in the time I've been there. And then more personally, from a CMO perspective, I kind of, I started in consumer marketing and then moved into b two B. My last job was very much like sales led, more enterprise led marketing and my sweet spot. And what I love about webflow is it's real end to end marketing.
Shane Murphy, [00:02:27]:
Right. From a go to market motion perspective, we have a very, very large self serve business. It's about 80% of our revenue, we've got an enterprise or sales led business. We connect the two with like product led sales motions, all that lovely stuff from a growth perspective and then more from like a brand perspective. We have a CEO and really a founding team who care deeply about building brands. So it's not just by growth, it's also about brand. And so as a CMO, that's first off, it keeps me up at night, right? The number of balls I have to juggle is like blows my mind, right. But that's the excitement of it, right.
Shane Murphy, [00:03:02]:
Being able to think creatively one moment about brand activations and then next moment you're in talking about SEO strategy and next, when you're talking to the sales team about enablement, like it's just every day is like a different adventure. And I think, you know, as I know a lot of your audience are thinking about cmos, I becoming a CMO at some point and finding that lane for yourself I think is important. And this one really kind of like taps into all the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:31]:
I think thats the most fun opportunity in marketing. Now theres plenty of people that listen to this that come from the enterprise side, but it is fun also. It seems to be more of the modern way of customer acquisition. Today you have a product that people can use for free or for 15, $14 a month all the way up to large enterprises running their site. And that just feels like, it feels like there's much more opportunity to do creative marketing when you can have some. You don't have to spend half of your day justifying the value of content with this type of business, right?
Shane Murphy, [00:04:05]:
100% for me. Selfishly, I started my career in consumer marketing and consumer tech. And so marketing always had a seat at the table. Marketing was always the revenue owner, always had to be creative to cut through the noise when you're marketing more at Mass. And then when I joined b two B, I realized, oh, b two B is quite different. And to see the evolution of b two B to become more like BTC marketing has been really exciting but then has also played into a lot of my experience. Whereas if you're coming up in a true enterprise b two B world, maybe that is what excites you and that's great. There's loads of great companies you can go work for for that.
Shane Murphy, [00:04:44]:
But this really sort of tapped into both sides of my marketing brain, the consumer side and the b two B side. So fit for me, if that makes sense.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:53]:
So I want to get back to a couple of things. I take a bunch of notes. So we'll come back to this. I got a couple of things I want to circle back to, especially the founder CEO who wants to build brand. That's a great one. We'll dive in there. But what I think is interesting is you have these two funnels, right? You have the free, you have the free, you know, product led funnel. But then you have this enterprise funnel as a marketing leader and building the marketing strategy for this business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:14]:
How do you do that effectively? I worked at a company when we were just going up market. I dont have a lot of experience here, but we were just going up market. And one of the things that I struggle with was how do you feed both parts? Because the things that might drive acquisition on the lower end dont always drive acquisition on the higher end. It is two different motions. Id love to go inside the webflow marketing strategy and figure out how you feed both funnels. How are you thinking about that?
Shane Murphy, [00:05:41]:
Yeah, well, the way that we think about the world is in three pillars. And there's a risk that I get too technical here. But the first part of marketing is like generally how do we go and build a brand around, you know, webflow being this kind of visual development platform and that's supposed to raise all boats, right? Like that's supposed to get companies of all sizes who have those pain points into either funnel. And then that's sort of like you kind of have to have that bedrock, I think, of your marketing. And then underneath that, we have, historically, we actually had two separate growth teams, one on the self serve side, which was responsible for much more of the scaled acquisition programs like Search, for example. Search is very broad targeted. You cant pincer in at a CMO at a large company on search. So certain channels were clearly going to drive more mass market into the self serve funnel.
Shane Murphy, [00:06:38]:
And that was one team who was doing that and very much through the website convert. And then we had a separate team, which was our enterprise growth team, whose job it was to be much more focused places like LinkedIn where you can be a lot more targeted content, syndication, strategic events like Im going to Gartner next week, where we know our upmarket audiences at those places, we can generate them qls and push them through the sales funnel. Thats how we were set up up until this year. At a certain scale, those two things being an island starts to cause a lot of pain. And also those funnels are hyper connected because youll end up getting the perfect lead in through the self serve funnel. And so weve now combined them under one growth leader, and a lot of the work that were doing right now is connecting those two funnels.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:28]:
That's interesting because I feel like what can happen is then in the first example, you end up having misaligned incentives. And so it's like a good fit comes into one funnel, but that team's not really incentivized to work that lead and then the whole thing breaks. So you're combining them, which is super interesting because I was going to ask you about, like, I've done this on a smaller scale, but like, one thing I struggled with was like, the shared resources. And it's like, well, this part of the creative team is only working on this part of the business, and you, how do you create this? And so hearing you align these all under one growth leader seems like it would make a lot more sense strategically and just for the sanity of the team. Right?
Shane Murphy, [00:08:06]:
I think that's exactly right. And just for, I think our accountability up to the CEO, like ultimately, the board and the CEO care mostly about the overall growth of the business. And if I'm coming to the table with very much like, these two isolated targets and approaches, that doesn't resonate with them. Right. And I will say that the best way to drive up market growth efficiently is through customers you've already acquired in self serve. Right. They're kind of free. You're not going to have to pay for an MQL.
Shane Murphy, [00:08:35]:
So, yeah, there's a lot of efficiencies there. We're obviously early days in it, so find our feet. But it's been a big benefit so far.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:42]:
And then do you think about, I want to, we're going to get back to team structure, too. I want to talk about that. One of the questions that I see come up a lot in the Exit Five community is like, hey, we're selling to multiple Personas, which you can do behind the scenes with email and targeting, but with things like the website, the content, how do you appeal to multiple Personas and how do you think about that in your marketing? And how do you not spend all of your day arguing over what should be on the website for this Persona or that? How do you do that?
Shane Murphy, [00:09:13]:
Yeah. So it kind of depends on what part of the funnel you're in. When we're thinking about the top, top of the funnel, the brand, we think about the Persona that we're targeting as not necessarily like an individual job title, like the CMO at a certain size of company, we call them pro website owners. And it's a more kind of diffuse definition of a customer that has certain common pain points. And so if you're a pro website owner, when we say pro site, we mean like these larger, more complex websites. Your head of design could see themselves in that Persona if they're responsible for the website. So can you head of growth and so can your head of engineering if they're managing the website. And so what you try and do is find these common pain points for those folk, create this aspirational customer in the top of the funnel and then communicate that so that a more mass market can see themselves in it, even if it isn't like a specific job title.
Shane Murphy, [00:10:07]:
And so we've done a lot of work on like, what is that core Persona for the top of the funnels? You said, that's probably.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:14]:
So I got to post this link later because literally yesterday there was a comment about somebody asking for examples of they're doing a website redesign and they want solutions. Solutions navigation. And I'm on your site right now and it's a perfect example. So you have like the main site, you have the product which goes through the different features of the product. But then if you go to solutions, it's very clear, like, oh, I'm a freelancer, I'm going to click on this. Here's the product marketing for freelancers. I'm a startup, I'm an enterprise, I'm an agency. I think this is a great example.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:41]:
So I'm just shouting this out because I think it's one good way to do it. It's like literally taking people through and say like, yes, webflow can work for almost anybody. But here are the specific use cases. And if I go to the freelancers page, I'm seeing copy and messaging and things that are specific to me. And I can relate to that verse. If I go to enterprise, I'm going to see more of the things that enterprise might need.
Shane Murphy, [00:11:00]:
Exactly. And so we would consider our website more middle of the funnel. Right. So at that point, you're definitely starting to target for different Persona types. The other thing that we're starting to do, we recently bought intellimize, who are a website personalization company.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:15]:
Oh, sure, yeah.
Shane Murphy, [00:11:16]:
So that's a big opportunity for us. And we were about to dog food that ourselves to really start to test on the b two b context how we can personalize for those different audiences. So if it's a returning customer, for example, we already know that they've been on the freelancer page shift, the homepage to much more talk to them. And so there's a big opportunity there for us to better personalize the experiences that come in. But yeah, as you get lower funnel, that's where like very targeted messaging per Persona is needed.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:44]:
All right, can you dig into your team structure? So there's you, how many people are on the team? What does the marketing look like right now?
Shane Murphy, [00:11:52]:
Yeah, so we're about 80 people, which for our scale is on the larger side. But I think it's due to what I spoke about before about the surface area that we cover and speaks to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:01]:
Your founder and CEO. Believing in marketing, maybe there's not so much scrutiny over having a bigger marketing team in that world.
Shane Murphy, [00:12:07]:
Right, exactly, exactly. At a company like Webflow, we're pretty much almost 100% inbound, both on the sell side and obviously on the self serve side as well. Inbound. So big machine there to get that done, we're structured and I recently reorged the team. So we have a central creative team who are responsible for supporting the whole of marketing. And that creative team is video, motion, design, copy and web. So obviously for Webflow, our web site design and build happens within the creative team. So we're pretty self sufficient, which is great.
Shane Murphy, [00:12:42]:
And that is a central resource that supports everyone.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:44]:
For each one of these, let's talk about like is there a team leader? So is there like a creative director or someone that runs creative that then reports to you? Give me each one of those people love this.
Shane Murphy, [00:12:53]:
Yeah. So I have a senior director of creative who reports directly into me and she runs. We have one leader, a director for web and design, one leader for video because that's a very specific skillset. One leader for copy. Yeah, that's right, that's right. One of my mission and then obviously ops, she has a dedicated ops team within her team. Then my next pillar is the product marketing and brand team. I have a senior director of product marketing brand.
Shane Murphy, [00:13:26]:
That was a change that I made. I brought together product marketing and brand used to be separate and I brought them together under one leader. The reason for that is I think about its really important that our messaging scales all the way down from our mission and double clicks all the way down to a product feature and then that our campaigns are all thought about in a consistent way from the brand level all the way down to a product launch. Putting those teams together under one leader was critical for as we're starting to invest heavily in the brand this year. And so yeah, that's my next one. Then I have growth. So I mentioned that I used to have two growth teams, now I have one. So I have a vp of growth that joined last year.
Shane Murphy, [00:14:08]:
And then finally we'll maybe talk a little bit about this. But our agency, what we call our agency flywheel, is hugely important to webflow. So that means that freelancers or agencies will sign up to webflow and they'll bring clients to us. They're a massive acquisition channel and customer. So we have a dedicated team within marketing who are responsible for our OKR, which is build a thriving partner channel. So that's everything to do with attracting agencies, enabling them to sell webflow, incentives, all that stuff. So that's kind of the third one. And then lastly operations.
Shane Murphy, [00:14:42]:
I actually have an open role for head ops. And then shar, I should say the last, last one, which is an individual, is our PNP director. So pricing and packaging reports directly into me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:54]:
Oh, interesting.
Shane Murphy, [00:14:54]:
But he's an IC right now, so he isn't like one of the core pillars of the team. But critically important given like pricing and packaging for a company like ours is just critical. So summarizing that, backup creator, product marketing, brand growth, our agency, team ops and PNP.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:11]:
Beautiful. We got to make a clip of that. This is great. So I got a couple of follow ups on that. Let's talk about how you think about brand because you have a creative team, but you also have brand and product marketing and brand are together. Can you articulate the difference for people and how you see those two roles?
Shane Murphy, [00:15:25]:
Yeah, 100%. So in our brand team, within product marketing brand, their job is to define who is the audience that we're trying to go after. Concept of pro website owner, what are the key stories that we want to tell them and what is a campaign roadmap that we would take to market to do that. So, for example, in July, we're about to invest a couple of million in San Francisco out of home. And their job would be to come up with the strategy for that. Write the brief like, okay, great. They would then go to our creative team and say, hey, Jose, this is what we want to achieve. Creative team will go, great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:05]:
Okay, got it.
Shane Murphy, [00:16:07]:
Let's consider like how we can bring that to life with a creative concept. Let's think about how we can bring it to life with different activations. It's a great partnership there and a lot of the time, obviously, as the creative team, pick at it, we'll refine the brief and there's a lot of back and forth there. So that's how they play together. Very similarly to how a product manager would as well. If a product manager had a product launch Zoo, the product marketing manager would like to find, here's the audience for this launch, here's the story you want to tell for the launch and then go to the creative team and say hey, can you bring this to life in a product launch campaign? So that's why we combined brand and product marketing is because effectively they're very very similar processes and ways of thinking just at a different altitude of our marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:49]:
I think that's a great example because I think in the past where if you just say hey creative team, we want to do this campaign, then they're like, they're missing the strategy of that and it frees the creative team up to be creative and not worry so much about like yes you want to know, you want to care about the business outcome and be involved but when you have the brand owner, I love that. And then also when hearing you explain that way, it makes total sense that you have product marketing and brand together because if you're going to exit, if you're going to create this out of home campaign, well then damn it better be aligned to the overall messaging and fit in that strategy, right?
Shane Murphy, [00:17:22]:
Exactly. Yeah its been great so far. Obviously any change? We only reordered this way at the start of the year and so were ironing out the wrinkles but its been fruitful so far.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:32]:
Okay, so we got creative product marketing brand growth ops agency Flywheel which is the partner program here. And then you have this individual contributor who does pricing and packaging. Have you owned pricing and packaging before? Its always a bunch of companies ive been at. Its kind of this weird marketing sometimes owns. It depends on who, what the skillset is like. You don't want me owning that, I can tell you that. It might live in product, you own it here. How did that come to life at Webflow?
Shane Murphy, [00:17:59]:
This has been a journey, Dave. I'm laughing because and what kind of.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:04]:
Crazy man would raise his hand and say I'll own pricing and packaging?
Shane Murphy, [00:18:07]:
I started my career in b two b. Like pricing and packaging and consumer wasn't really anything like it isn't b two b right. It's so much more simple. But started my career b two b and ad role where pricing and packaging wasn't really a thing, where we were selling ad space essentially. So we just had a margin on top of the ad space that we sold. First day at Intercom. Thank God you're here. Our new head of marketing.
Shane Murphy, [00:18:27]:
Our most important project is pricing and packaging. And I was like what the is pricing and packaging. So I go on the Internet, I'm reading everything. I'm like, I got it. I got it. Luckily there was somebody internally who was running that project who was like a lot more experienced and smart than I was on it. So we muddled through it. But it gets kind of funnier because then at zoom info, I didn't own it.
Shane Murphy, [00:18:49]:
And back in webflow and I own it again. I spent a lot of my time in intercom thinking about this. But intercom, when I joined that extremely confusing pricing, and I don't think it was my first time go at it. I don't think I'd helped. I actually think that I probably made it worse.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:05]:
Well, it's a tough.
Shane Murphy, [00:19:06]:
It's tough.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:06]:
Like, you know, we had obviously a competitive product at drift and like other, I think pricing. The reason I asked about it is because it's like, for products that scale up and down depending on usage and different use cases, it's a crazy thing to unpack and like, it is. It's art. There's definitely science to it and you got to make it right. But there's a lot of art to it, too. And it really is a hugely nuanced thing and it can be such a hard thing to balance. And so, like, I don't envy that exercise. At intercom, like at drift, we had a guy who was like a former NBA VC type of role and like super, like, his job was pricing and packaging and there was nobody better to do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:44]:
And I was like, let him own that. But it can be a really tough thing to unpack.
Shane Murphy, [00:19:48]:
It is so tough. I'll end the story on this one. But. So I've been working on work for a couple of years and we rolled out. Prices changed the end of last year. Somebody tweeted, it looks like the person who's responsible for intercoms pricing is now responsible for web browse pricing because it's so confusing. And I was like, oh my God, I could not believe it. I was like, I had to share it right until I was fair to me, to be fair to me, it is extremely difficult.
Shane Murphy, [00:20:19]:
To your point, and the reason it's difficult is that particularly as companies like ours, we scale up market effectively on the high end of the market. You have extremely high willingness to pay. People are willing to pay $200,000 for their website and then the low end, much lower willingness to pay. And so how do you, like, thread that needle? It's really, really difficult.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:39]:
You just won me over, man. Like, for the humility. To be able to make a joke about that and laugh on it on this podcast is like, may just turn me into a fan of yours. Like, yeah, man, this is hard. That someone found that and posted about it is amazing.
Shane Murphy, [00:20:52]:
It was a pride moment. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:55]:
Just curious, like, to kind of put a bow on this. The role of pricing and packaging. How do you see that? We talk a lot about how to be a great marketing leader. You got to influence change across the organization. I'm assuming you got to get pricing and packaging buy in, but not consensus from product engineering. Your customer team, what does that look like? Making changes and, like, shopping that around and working with those other teams. So, like, yes, it lives in marketing. You own that, but you got to really bring everybody else in, right?
Shane Murphy, [00:21:21]:
Yeah, I think that's right. Like, I think the first change that I made when I joined Webflow was getting really clear on who is responsible. So we had used Daisy, you know, the driver sort of improver, all that stuff, and really tighten that up. There was way too many voices in it. And I agreed with the CEO that ultimately, like, I would be the approver at that point and that, you know, I'd have a council of people inputting, but ultimately I can make the call. And so I think being, and that Daisy's changed now, but, like, I think being really clear on tightening who has a opinion that, like, has weight versus just like, hey, take this on if you can, is really important. And I think that's true of, like, pretty much any complex decision is making sure that you're as tight as possible and separating what might be a counsel who's giving you advice that you then take on to make a decision on versus people who actually have an approval or not is critical. I'll then say the second thing is particularly for pricing and packaging.
Shane Murphy, [00:22:21]:
David, who runs our pricing and packaging, is a uniquely skilled person in the both customer insight and data, so that when you go and try to get sign off on these different decisions, you're able to back it up both in data and also in like, hey, here's five calls I made to customers or the survey that I did to make sure the customer's got this so that most of your opinions are not like, opinions are backed by evidence, which then supports the answer. But I, it is extremely difficult, particularly when youve got different people on the exec team with different incentives. Your head of sales wants you to obviously maximize market growth, and maybe your founder wants to change the world and so wants scale. So I think just making sure that as I said, those decision making roles is locked in is really important.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:12]:
All right, I want to talk about a little bit how you operate. So you mentioned youre doing this out of home campaign. You used the term campaigns before we went over team structure. How do you operate as a marketing team? Do you believe in are the monthly cadences, quarterly things? Are you launching something every month? Are you doing campaign planning? People often ask about this and I'd love to try to unpack how you do things. You're obviously going to have the always on stuff, search, digital display, all that. But let's talk about campaigns a little bit.
Shane Murphy, [00:23:40]:
Yeah, honestly, I've gone on such a journey on this. I will say that operations is probably an area of development for me and so I really need to lean on people who are stronger on the ops front. But here's how we do it at Webflow and I actually think that we've got a lot better at it. So on an annual basis we agree. What are our top level okrs? What are the goals? And so the Webflow market team is three. One is become a WXP, which is our category that we're going to become for pro site. So this is the brand of PMM OKR. How do you reposition the company? Two is accelerate growth up market.
Shane Murphy, [00:24:11]:
So that's all the self serve and enterprise growth to go and increase our acquisition of market. And then the third is build a thriving partner channel, which is all of agency stuff. So we've got those locked in and on an annual basis we'll review those and we'll set the actual metrics that we need to achieve to go in and do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:28]:
Let's pause on that. Actually, I love the way you have those goals laid out. People often ask about setting the marketing goals and I think it's very easy to set the pipeline goal. We know we need to generate x, but I like how you have these phrases of like company pillars that we need to do. We need to establish web. I'm just making it establish webflow as x. And I love the idea of setting those like as three to five bullet points going into the year as your strategic objectives and the metrics follow. Right? Am I hearing you right on that?
Shane Murphy, [00:24:57]:
That's exactly right. Each of those and have multiple action metrics that we need to hit. Yes, growth are the easiest to set metrics, but on the brand side we can set things like product adoption of our new products that are related to the category you want to become or branded search conversions, growth at a certain scale you start doing the surveys, right? The awareness and surveys and sentiment surveys. We're not quite there yet. I think you need to at a certain scale to have the data come back to be meaningful. You can set goals across all of those and those are the metrics. And now we've got our north stars for the year. Great.
Shane Murphy, [00:25:32]:
We then coming into the year break those down into well, what's the work that we need to do to hit those? Those are what we call our initiatives. So each of those OKRS has a set of initiatives. So for example on our brand and PMM team we might have build our brand with ICP content. So that's the whole content roadmap. It's like we want to launch podcasts, we want to ebooks, all that stuff, right. Those initiatives are set at the start of the year, but do we do change them in the middle of the year? If we need to like kind of flex on that. But they're, I would say they're probably 90% locked for the year. We know the high level work we need to do.
Shane Murphy, [00:26:09]:
Then on a quarterly basis we define what are the deliverables. If build a brand with ICP content is an initiative in that quarter we might say we want to launch this ebook or we want to launch this podcast. If it's our strategic event initiative, it's got a Gartner symposium. Let's go to forest or b two b summit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:30]:
Nice. Do those ever change or are they pretty much set for the year?
Shane Murphy, [00:26:34]:
No, quarterly. Now we're at the quarterly level. So those get lot. We, we riff on those quarterly and honestly given that we're fast moving, they riff mid quarter as well. Right. Suddenly there's an opportunity to do something. We add, we add in an extra deliverable. So we do need to be flexible, but we try as best as possible and to plan that upfront in the quarter so that particularly when we have teams like our creative team, they need some visibility, right? They need to be able to resource plan and all of that then on a monthly basis.
Shane Murphy, [00:27:00]:
So we've gone annual. We've gone quarterly and now on a monthly basis I have a monthly check in with each of my, which each of the OKRs where we look at what's our progress against the actual outcomes that we were supposed to achieve. So the metrics, how we're tracking against that, how are we tracking against the initiatives? So what did we say we would do if we actually done that work? In some cases we'll have done all the work and it hasn't moved the needle and we might go, okay, well, good effort. But like, we're clearly got to change our approach here. And so that we do, we do that on a monthly basis and then on a weekly basis. Obviously I have my like one to one the team meetings, but we have this concept in the team of a move mountain project where if it is of such a scale and importance that it's not just like captured day to day in the monthly check ins of the okRs, we now have a weekly specific project with a project plan that I check in on a weekly basis. For example, right now we're just kicking one off for what we're calling our road to WXP. We're going to announce it like our actual, we've seen it in market that this is our vision.
Shane Murphy, [00:28:05]:
We're going to announce it later this year. And there's a ton of work to get that ready for announcement. Like got to redesign our website. We got to do like a cons plan around it. We got to do event, we got all this. So there's a work back that's of such an important that I'm not just going to let that like, hey, I'll check in once a month and see how we're doing to, and that's got to be like weekly. Where are we? Much more hands on project management, quick decisions and all of that. So that's kind of the cadence of, yeah.
Shane Murphy, [00:28:30]:
Annual quarter month and then week that we go through. And we've been doing this now in this rhythm for, since the start of the year. And it's been great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:40]:
Very nice. I wish you could see my notepad right now. So that's great. Okay, that's good. You answered that question for me. Let's talk about reporting to the CEO. Something we get a lot of questions about. What's your relationship with the CEO? What do they care about? What do you share with them, what's their involvement in marketing? And maybe along the way, any lessons you've learned about managing up and the relationship between the CMO and the CEO?
Shane Murphy, [00:29:06]:
I will say that I have both in my journey either according to the CEO or into like a president, and flipped around between that. When reporting to the CEO, typically the CEO's I've reported into have been founders. They've been very much the visionary. And I think when reporting into a CEO like that, you have to realize that this is their thing. Typically the brand is them. At Intercom, the brand doesn't own. And because they've built these incredible brands, they're clearly, like, I'm going to use a music analogy. Incredible songwriters, they're actually great marketers.
Shane Murphy, [00:29:42]:
They've written this awesome song. The challenge is when the company was small, they wrote it and maybe it was on the guitar, maybe there was some drums, whatever. Now you're stepping in and you've got to manage this thing at 80 people, whatever. You're now a conductor of this massive orchestra. There's a big chance that you don't really fully understand the melody or the tempo that really got the company to where it was going. I tell that analogy to say that it's really important to get so close to that CEO that you can hear the music. And I've struggled with this and I think I've got it at some points and then I'm like, oh my God, I thought they'd like this, they hate it. And you're like, oh God, I still can't hear the music.
Shane Murphy, [00:30:24]:
But the more you can leverage that, I think the better. And so that you build that trust because sometimes you will actually have to say no for this audience, your music is not right and they won't trust you to do that if they don't think that you understand the core of it. And so I think it's just like really getting close to them and appreciating the fact that they're probably really good at this and that they just have like ten years of insight in the industry that you should not try and leverage that, but also, but not over, like just do what they makes them happy. Build that trust so that you can say, no, we need to go and do this other thing. Maybe ill give an example like bringing back to PNP pricing and packaging. About a year and a half ago we hadnt changed our prices in about seven years and there was a big need to change the prices and actually increase the prices in one way. And Vlad was very nervous about it. He wants to change the world.
Shane Murphy, [00:31:21]:
He wants to make sure its affordable to everybody. Luckily id built enough credibility and trust with him that he said, okay, go for it. And it ended up being very successful. And anyway, I just think it's building that trust with the CEO is so, so critical.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:36]:
It's kind of this double edged sword and that you want to work with the founder. Like the visionary founder who has great ideas for marketing can also be like a huge pain in the ass. But you'd much rather work with that person than the CEO who's like has no interest in marketing, doesn't want to be involved, just looks at you at like a number and wants you to just, you know, report on those metrics. Is that a criteria that you would look for? Like if you're someone who's looking for a VP of marketing job or wants to be a CMO, like how high is that on your list of criteria for like evaluating companies? How much the CEO has a vision for and is involved in the marketing?
Shane Murphy, [00:32:11]:
It's extremely high on my list that the company cares deeply about marketing for all the reasons that you said. And I also think that it's really important that you're back to the music analogy, that your style somewhat aligns with theirs because you're going to have to play this music and if it doesn't, that's ultimately not going to be successful. And what I've appreciated at Webflow is that I generally almost all the time agree with Vlad's input. I actually now report it into the president for a bunch of reasons around bringing go to market closer together, which are the right reasons, but keep a really, really close connection with Vlad on the marketing side, given how important it is to him, which I think is dead right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:56]:
How do you stay sharp today? You've built a great career. You're running marketing at a successful company. You have a really interesting job. You still have to find time for learning. The best marketing leaders that I know are still always curious. They're tinkering on their own stuff. They're not just, you might run a team of 80 people, but you're still a marketer at heart. I'm curious as to how you stay sharpen.
Shane Murphy, [00:33:17]:
Yeah, I will say this definitely atrophied. Maybe last year, there's a lot going on at work and I found that I wasn't really keeping on top of other things. And so one of my newest resolutions, which I've actually stuck to, is I get up now at 06:00 a.m. and my kids get up at seven. So I have an hour in the morning where I make myself a coffee. If it's not snowy, I go sit outside. And that's the time in the morning where like, first off, I get ready for the day, right? Get my to do list, get the calendar, all that stuff. And then typically that takes about 15 minutes.
Shane Murphy, [00:33:48]:
And then I've got 45 minutes where I might listen to some gong calls or I might listen to podcasts, I might do some reading, some research. And so that hour in the morning has been just game changing for me just to have some focused time before the chaos of the day hits. And so I would encourage anybody to find what that time is. It doesn't have to be the morning. It could be any time of the day. But having like an hour of the day where you're just like taking a breather, having a coffee, and doing some step back thinking is really important. Jeff?
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:21]:
Yeah, there's a great book. I think it's called the road less stupid. Yeah, the road less stupid by Keith Cunningham. And he just talks about, it's written for founders and CEO's. But I think what you said is really relevant and related. You have to make time for thinking, time for yourself. And if you don't block it in, it's very easy to just hop into the day and just react, react, react, react. And so I love that you intentionally blocked that out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:42]:
Specific things that you read or listen to, people are always asking. They want to know what you're reading, what you're listening to. Where are you getting information from?
Shane Murphy, [00:34:51]:
Yeah, like from a book reading perspective. Right now I'm reading Claire Hughes Johnson book scaling people, which is an excellent book. It's very, very tangible and a lot of like, kind of exact how they did it at stripe. And then I'm around here looking at about loads of books on sales management, like what sticks. And just any book that I see come out that is interesting, I'll read it. And then probably there's books and then there's podcasts. The CMO podcast is a great one. I obviously used to listen to your previous one.
Shane Murphy, [00:35:23]:
I didn't realize Exit Five existed until I was interviewing here. So I'll listen to this one as well, which is awesome. Ad week of good marketing podcast, too. And so the Kip and Kieran's HubSpot marketing against the grain is a great one, particularly as you think about keeping on the forefront, you know, really leaning into AI right now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:44]:
That's actually what drew me in. I actually spent the day with Kip today. We played some golf this morning, Kip and I, and I was pumping him up. I'm like, damn it. I'm going to give you lots of compliments right now. I've been listening to your podcast a lot because I do think they, they're doing a good job of, like, talking about. There's just a lot of interesting stuff happening in marketing right now. And this show we don't really cover, like, news stuff as much.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:04]:
They're like chat GBT 40 just came out and I was going to go and read all these, like, nerdy articles, but it's way above my head. I was like, ahh. I bet you kip and Karen will do a podcast on this. Of course they did. I listened to that. They caught me up to speed. And so I like that you mentioned books. A lot of people will say, I don't have the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:21]:
One thing that I do with books is, like, especially when they're about a particular topic, like, I don't put the pressure on myself to finish the book. If I just pick up the challenger sale book, right? Somebody gave me that book. If I just go and grab, like, one or two chapters from that and treat it like a blog post, I just feel like you have to just always be sucking in interesting ideas from everywhere, you know? And. And I like to hear you talk about that.
Shane Murphy, [00:36:42]:
And that's right. The other thing I do is, a lot of the time, I will scan them. There's a lot of filler content in some of these books. They have one effective idea, and they create a lot of content around that idea. So you can sometimes skip through and kind of zone in on the more bits that the chapters that maybe are more tangible.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:01]:
All right, we're going to wrap in a minute, but what's exciting to you? What new. What new innovative stuff is the webflow marketing team doing behind the scenes that you can share?
Shane Murphy, [00:37:10]:
Yeah, I think that this is going to be so boring. Maybe this is an innovative. Oh, God. I think the most exciting thing for me right now is you're good.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:19]:
You've over delivered. Whatever you say now is, okay, you're good. It can't all be, like, ten out of ten pricing and packaging.
Shane Murphy, [00:37:26]:
The thing that's most exciting to me now is that now we've defined this thing that we want to be, which is a WXpen, and we want to go after the DXP category ultimately. And there's just a lot of, like, focus in the mind of creating a story around, like, more of a category. And I think you've been through this. In fact, like, with conversational marketing, I know you did all this incredible job of it, and then all of the things that flow from there. You know, I'm excited this year. And again, this isn't, like, necessarily innovative, but going back to the basis and doing, like, classic brand building, I'd invest in and out of home in comms and analyst relations. It's like, I think what's most exciting to me as a CMO is when you have this very clear destination you're trying to get to. For us, it's like this WXP and all of the things now are humming together.
Shane Murphy, [00:38:13]:
And so I think that that's what's getting me out of bed in the morning most. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:17]:
I'm not bored with that answer. What that answer tells me is that no matter how much is new, it's like we're just in with these cycles of new stuff and, like, the timeless, it's like product marketing is always going to be relevant messaging, strategy. You know, you now are, you do have to play the analyst relations game as you're at a certain level of scale. And so, like, that is new for you to have to go study and unpack. Right?
Shane Murphy, [00:38:42]:
Yeah, that's exactly it. Sometimes the classic marketing is the best marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:46]:
Yeah. Was it fun to take a new CMO job, too? Like, I think it's for me, when I, when I left drift and went to privy as an example, like, I'd been there for four and a half years, and I went to go take a new CMO job, and it was like, oh, mandy, man, you kind of get, like, a fresh start even though the company already existed. But it's like I get to take all the things that I learned, the mistakes that I made, and it just made me realize, like, when I was younger in my career, I don't think I appreciated enough, like, how much experience does matter. And I don't want to, you know, lower the, I don't want to, like, set a bar for people that says, like, you know, you just gotta. Some of it is you just do have to put in work and put in time, because you need to learn. You need to have made mistakes at Intercom and mistakes at Zoom info and whatever you did in the past to, like, figure out what the right plays are. I for webflow? Do you know what I'm trying to articulate? Like, the more reps and time that you have, the better you're going to get. And so I just wanted to, like, leave people with that thinking, to just push them to be okay with failing and making mistakes and messing up at the current company that you're at.
Shane Murphy, [00:39:43]:
Well, look, marketers are the shortest serving execs by some distance. The industry is littered with inverter commas, failed cmos, and so you kind of have to become comfortable with it. It is a fit thing. And I know we're always the time, but, like, certainly after my experience at Zoom Info, which is an incredible company, just like, we weren't quite the right fit for each other. And I think about it like, so big soccer fan, right? And Chelsea, when I was growing up, managed by Jose Mourinho, their whole strategy was like big, strong, fast players direct football, like smash the ball into the goal and then you had Barcelona who were like, let's just tap the ball up the field, very strategic, and score a goal. Both teams were exceptionally successful. You want to make sure that if you're a Chelsea style football player, you're on Chelsea and you're not on Barcelona because you'll be extremely unsuccessful. And so I think the big thing for me is in marketing, just making sure that you find that fit and that you have some humility and that you're able to say, hey, I'm not great at everything.
Shane Murphy, [00:40:50]:
I've got a lane. And not to try and I suppose bs it or whatever, to try and get like a land the gig.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:56]:
Yeah, I feel like the smartest people that I've worked with. It takes a dose of humility and be like, all right, at this point in my life and in my career, maybe this is not the right fit. However, while I'm at this company that is very sales led, can I at least learn about this motion and get smart about this so I can then, like bring that with me? I think multiple times in my career, I got hired. I got hired over. They hired three vps over me before making me vp. The first one was very hard, but after that I was like, you know what? Like, screw it. I'm just going to learn. I'm going to make this person like my best friend, I'm going to treat them as my mentor, I'm going to learn as much as I can from them.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:29]:
And I think, I do think that mindset, like, helped me so much in my career. So even if you're listening to this right now and you're at the wrong company right now, doesn't mean just go jump ship. Like, is there a pocket that you can learn in the next twelve to 18 months and acquire some skills? Right?
Shane Murphy, [00:41:42]:
Totally. Like, the amount I learned Zoom info is the most incredible go to market sales machine you ever seen in your life. It is just incredible. The amount I learned about how marketing support that and how automation can drive that, it was just incredible. And so I agree with that. And I would say back to your original question on is it nice taking on a new gig? It is. But it's kind of like, it does feel good, right? Fresh, freshly. But it feels like, kind of like those.
Shane Murphy, [00:42:10]:
What is not empty calories, but those calories aren't as deeply meaningful as when you've been longer at a company and you've been able to have big impact on something that's yours. And so as I look at this year, webflow, I think that we are going to do some big stuff like when we get launch our WXP in market. That's just going to be huge. And you know, a lot of our work has been building up to that. So there's kind of like more maybe dense calories that you can. Yeah, I live on longer.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:38]:
All right, here's my final question. Throughout your whole history in marketing, your marketing career, if you could have one wish and solve any one marketing problem, some nonsense that we have to deal with, some magic thing like, I wish I could get podcast emails for every. I wish I could get emails for every podcast subscriber. I wish I could perfectly measure attribution or something. What's Shane's one wish? One snap your finger, solve any marketing problem, what would it be?
Shane Murphy, [00:43:03]:
Yeah, it is attribution and I think that is, oh, I was at ad roll ten years ago. We were writing ebooks on attribution where last click is dead. And here I am and everyone's using last click and it's like it's such a challenging thing to solve for, but it's kind of an obvious answer. So maybe if I give another one would be just on the website, knowing who's on your website. And I think that we've got a lot better at that. And that is something that companies. I can telemise that we just bought a. A bill companies, right.
Shane Murphy, [00:43:31]:
So that is more solvable, I think. But yeah, knowing who's on your website would be huge.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:36]:
All right, awesome. Shane, thank you for joining us on the Exit Five podcast. Maybe at the very least we turned you into a listener, even if it's only this episode, to just listen to yourself back. If you're listening, do me a favor, go find Shane on LinkedIn. Connect with him, send him a message, tell him you learn from. I took a bunch of notes. I've been furiously writing notes. It's a great episode.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:54]:
I learned a lot. I love doing interviews like this. Great to actually meet you and connect. Go find Shane on LinkedIn and go check out Webflow. I think they're doing a great job. Specifically, I see a lot of questions in the Exit Five community about product marketing, selling to multiple Personas, having the two sales funnels. I think you all are doing a great job. So keep up the good work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:12]:
And Shane, I'll see you around, man. Thank you.
Shane Murphy, [00:44:14]:
Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:24]:
You exit.