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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, Ruth, thanks for coming on the podcast. Love the name Ruth, by the way. That was my grandmother's name. It's my daughter's middle name.
Ruth Zive [00:00:20]:
Nice.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:21]:
We were gonna name her that, but we didn't. So it's nice to have a Ruth on the podcast.
Ruth Zive [00:00:25]:
It's a very grandmotherly name. I get told that all the time that somebody's grandmother had the name Ruth.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:31]:
I. You know what? The second I heard that coming out of my mouth and I'm like, no, she's totally going to take this the wrong way.
Ruth Zive [00:00:36]:
But no, no, I'm flattered.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:38]:
It's a great name. Bring back. Bring back more Ruth's. You know what? We're going to get some messages from people that listen to this that also.
Ruth Zive [00:00:44]:
Have the name Ruth, but let's get that trending.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:47]:
I call my daughter. I call my daughter that all the time. It's very endearing to me. So you're the CMO at live person. We're going to talk about that when I have a CMO on the podcast. Like I said to you backstage, before we do these podcasts, we either like to kind of go deep on a topic, AI SEO ABM, or if I have a marketing leader, kind of do a conversation, hearing about what it's actually like to run marketing, what your looks like, what do you do, how do you set goals? So that's what I'm going to dive in on this episode with you. But first, before we do that, just give me quick backstory. You've been at live person for a little over a year, but what's your marketing leadership journey? A little bit of your career story is helpful.
Ruth Zive [00:01:24]:
Yeah. Well, I've been at this for a few decades now. This is my third turn as CMO at live person. I've been there. It's actually going to be two years in about a month. But like a lot of CMOs, this wasn't a straight line journey. I actually had a decade long career in the nonprofit world, doing mostly fundraising and marketing. Fundraising, I always say, is basically sales.
Ruth Zive [00:01:48]:
You're just selling goodwill instead of goods and services. So I did that for a while, especially while my kids were young. And then through happenstance, I got asked to start doing some freelance writing for a software company, and I caught the bug. I just loved the fast pace of the software world. I loved learning new stuff. I loved that I kind of had some autonomy to make my own decisions, unlike the nonprofit world, where every decision was made by committee. And that engagement, really, I parlayed that into a full service agency. I launched a full service marketing agency.
Ruth Zive [00:02:27]:
I left my nonprofit job and most of my clients in that agency were in the software space. I did that also for about eight years, and then one of my clients coaxed me in house, a software company, and I really enjoyed that. Spent about five years there, moved up through the ranks into the role of CMO. I think I started with a director level title and inside of two years or three years maybe was promoted into the CMO spot. Then I was headhunted out of that job into a smaller startup company called Ada and joined as that classic startup title, head of marketing. And that kind of evolved into a CMO role. And then live person came knocking about two and a half years ago, eventually convinced me to join and that's where I've been ever since. So it wasn't a straight line and a few moves along the way, but that's kind of my 1 minute summary.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:26]:
It's interesting, I talked to a lot of people who maybe were at an agency and then there's a client or something and seems to be a path where like you end up going to work for a client and that brings you in house.
Ruth Zive [00:03:39]:
Yeah, you know, agency life was great. I learned a lot. It was very cool to build my own business and I was CEO there. And so I touched a lot of parts of that business and I was proud of what I had a partner, I was proud of what we did. We grew that agency. But it's really hard. It's really hard to have your mind spread across so many different brands as a marketer. And it just was taking a toll.
Ruth Zive [00:04:07]:
And the idea of being in house and being singularly focused on one brand, one team, one process, one budget, that appealed to me at the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:19]:
Yeah, that's like the agency story. Everybody kind of gets to that realization at some point. There's definitely career long agency people. I do feel like that's the pitch. I don't have nearly a similar story, but I worked at an agency for two years. It was my first job right out of school and even I felt like, man, I got six clients. It's hard to be really, you can be knowledgeable about an industry, but it's hard to do this. I was doing pr and I ended up going in house for a software company called Constant Contact.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:50]:
And I remember just doing pr for one product line inside of one company. Man, I felt like I'd been bench pressing with three plates on the bar and I was able to take all the weights off and just really focus. And that was a really fun feeling you mentioned in passing. And I didn't plan on asking you this, but you mentioned something about, like, your kids were young, the timing and everything. Like, you think you could take this role now, CMO of a public company with young kids. It's something I think about a lot, and there's obviously a lot to unpack there. And I also think me coming at this as a man and not somebody who actually has kids, like, I have kids of my own, but I didn't give birth to them, is a completely different scenario. But it's a topic that I think a lot of people want to kind of hear from.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:37]:
So I'm just curious if you. If we could kind of dive into that for a second.
Ruth Zive [00:05:40]:
Yeah, sure. It's a great question. So my answer is that I personally don't think I could. I don't think I could do this job that I do today. If I reflect back 15 years, could I, 20 years, because I have kids that are in their twenties, could I have done this job back then? And I don't think I could have. But that's not to say that another woman under similar circumstances might not have been able to. I made a choice. The nonprofit industry suited that choice.
Ruth Zive [00:06:14]:
It was much slower paced, very flexible, no travel pay wasn't as good, candidly. But it was a time in my life, given my circumstances, especially where I really did need to be much more focused on my children and available to them, I wanted to be. And the demands of my job today are such that I don't think I personally would have been able to do that and would not have felt good about it. I posted about this on LinkedIn recently. I do think as a woman, when you give birth to children, and honestly, as a woman generally, there are certain physiological considerations that even inside of the most accommodating understanding company, do make it very difficult to devote yourself to the job at hand in the way that it requires, I think, to execute effectively.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:10]:
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, this is a little bit of a side note, but, like, my kids are seven and five, and my wife and I will often talk, like, recently she's like, man, I'm just starting to feel like myself again.
Ruth Zive [00:07:22]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:23]:
However, you get, like, three months off or something insane, and then you're supposed to go back to work and, like, you might not be feeling great. Who knows what's going on in your mind? Like, there's just so much happen I can't even imagine.
Ruth Zive [00:07:34]:
Yeah, you're probably not sleeping. You are likely breastfeeding. You give up, you relinquish your body for often two or more years to the person that you've brought into the world.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:46]:
It's insane. And then you gotta hop on a one on one with John on your team who feels like he should be getting a raise. And you're like, I don't wanna deal. How am I gonna deal with this right now? This is insane.
Ruth Zive [00:07:56]:
Yeah, fair. So I don't want to create an impression that it's not possible, but for me, it wasn't preferable, let's put it that way. I don't think I could have done this job justice under those circumstances at that time in my life.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:10]:
Jeff, it kind of comes down to, I guess, understanding what the role of a CMO at a public company or how many employees are at a live person.
Ruth Zive [00:08:20]:
About 1000.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:21]:
Okay, so CMO of a thousand person company, I think if you throw out the emotions of, is that fair? Is it not? Like if you just separate that and it's like, well, that just kind of is what that job is. What that job is. And I remember having a conversation with my boss at the time of, like, I had, I had young kids and I really wanted to not work as hard and I wanted to be home a lot more. And I wanted to leave the office at 04:00 and pick up my kids. And my boss was like, look, please don't take this the wrong way, but, like, it's going to be hard for you to be CMO here, coming into the office at 930 and leaving at four. And that wasn't personal at all. It just was like, the reality of it. And so I think everything comes in waves.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:02]:
But now you're at a point in your life where like, yes, this is the perfect time for you to take this job. And I just think it's a, we often talk about the tactics in marketing, but I think you have to be able to zoom out and look at the, you know, the 50,000 foot view of your career and say, like, okay, what chunk of time am I in right now? Is this, you know, five years, ten years? Like, it doesn't mean no, never. Just like, for right now, maybe I got to find a job that's more right for me during this time of my life.
Ruth Zive [00:09:28]:
This season of totally Randy Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister actually wrote a book called Pick Three. It's on my shelf there somewhere. And I'm actually referenced in the book. I knew her at a time and we used to have regular phone calls because she was ahead of marketing. The premise of the book is that there are, I think, five or six different priority areas in anyone's life. You know, there's family, there's health, there's friends, there's work. I forget what all five or six of them are, but the premise of the book is that at any given time of your life, to really be effective in all areas, you need to pick three. The idea that anyone can do everything to its full potential at any given time is a fallacy and sets us up, I think, for disappointment and failure.
Ruth Zive [00:10:16]:
And you have to prioritize. You have to pick three or two or whatever makes sense for you, given your disposition and the time in your life. And so, yeah, so at this time in my life, my work is definitely a top priority. My children are, too. My family is as well, but they're less demanding of my time and attention.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:35]:
I think even just having that framework, it's freeing to be like, oh, yeah, I'm putting all this pressure on myself to be like an a in every area, and that's just not possible. And so, like, let's just limit the decisions a little bit and focus on one or two.
Ruth Zive [00:10:47]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:49]:
Do you work out?
Ruth Zive [00:10:51]:
I do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:51]:
What do you do now that is.
Ruth Zive [00:10:53]:
Also, you know, ebbed and flowed at different times of my life. But for the last year or so, I've prioritized that. I walk a lot. I try to walk about 2 hours a day, and I'm fortunate that I work from home. So I get up early and I go for a walk for an hour, and then I try to go one other time, either during a break or at the end of the day. And then I do strength training, and I go on the peloton once a week, and I try to do once a week yoga. So I mix it up a bit. Nothing extreme, but it's important to me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:24]:
Important in what way? It's a topic that doesn't get covered enough, and I just think it's so important, and I just want to hear you say, why?
Ruth Zive [00:11:31]:
So it's time just for me. So that's probably the number one reason why it's important to me. It's, I'm not doing it for anyone other than me. It's not because of my job or because of my family or my friends. Even though I, you know, there's a value to me from those experiences. This is just me. Nobody else is involved. And at this stage of my life, I think a lot about sustaining good health into this next phase of my life.
Ruth Zive [00:12:02]:
I imagine in the next decade, hopefully I'll retire. And I want to be healthy through my retirement. And it's been important to me to establish a rhythm and a lifestyle that is conducive to that. So what physical activity can I integrate into my life that it's really sustainable in the long term? Walking was the number one. Strength training is important to me to diminish the likelihood of injury. And so it's really important to me. Just as I think about this next phase of my life and maintaining a.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:30]:
Good sense of health, I think this is an area that I would like to see more leaders talk about and lead by example. I know a lot of people who have been really successful in business at the, I don't know what the right word, I'm lacking the word at the mercy or at the trade off of their personal relationships, their physical health, and somebody who has run an amazing business, but just, like, looks like shit, looked like completely, you know, and I don't, I don't even, I'm not even a character, but, like, it's not a personal slight to say that. Just like, you can just tell they're not eating right, they're not sleeping right, they feel terrible. And I just think it's so important you only have your body, you only have this. This is your job. Like, the number one thing is, like, to take care of yourself and to be in a good mood and be in good health. And I was a young marketing leader, first time marketing leader, and I had somebody on my team, and she was, like, amazing designer, like, top talent on the team, and she had been at the job for, like, a year. And she told me that since working at the company, yoga was her thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:32]:
But she hasn't hadn't felt like she'd been able to get to a yoga class in a year because she was grinding so hard on work. And I was like, man, that's so backwards. And, like, how do I enable this person to, like, facilitate that? She's like, I just feel like I can't leave work at 05:00 because someone is going to, like, judge me for leaving the office early. And I'm like, man, I can. How do we create a culture where that's never the case anymore? Like, because you leaving work at 05:00 to go and take that yoga class and prioritize yourself is going to only make you a better person at home, a better employee at the company. And it's just, it's a topic that I'm just have become really passionate about now. And I want to see more leaders like prioritize, like showing their teams. Like, I think it's for your team to hear you say like, yeah, she's up early in the morning, she's walking 2 hours a day and she's strength.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:18]:
I think that's a very underrated, important part of like leadership. And your team is going to mimic those things and I think that it's contagious inside of the company.
Ruth Zive [00:14:28]:
Yeah, I agree with you. I think it speaks to this broader notion of work life balance. And if you go back to this pick three framework, perhaps exercise isn't at the top of everybody's list at all times, which I think is okay. I agree with you that prioritizing your health and your fitness is important and makes you more effective in other areas of your life. But so is making time for friends, making time for family, having hobbies. And I as a leader, it's definitely important that you lead by example on that front and reinforce a message to your team that like, you are a whole person. And sure your job is an important part of your day, but you need to make space for the other things that are important.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:11]:
All right, let's talk about marketing. We could do Dave's therapy hour for half the day.
Ruth Zive [00:15:16]:
Fair enough.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:17]:
Which is. No, no, this is my doing. This is me. I let it this way. So talk about the marketing. So Liveperson is a thousand person company. What does the marketing look like? Let's start there.
Ruth Zive [00:15:29]:
Sure. It's the usual suspects. So product marketing, content, comms, design, revenue marketing or field marketing, growth marketing, which is demand and marketing ops, and then at live person. And in fact, in all three of my turns as CMO, the SDR organization also reported into marketing. So those are sort of the sub functions.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:57]:
Do you think that can work regardless, or do you think that because you've managed the sDR.org before, it makes sense? There's usually a lot of back and forth on this. I've kind of seen the playbook of like, if the CMO has experience doing that before, it makes sense, but oftentimes it lives in sales. I don't know if you have a strong opinion on that in one way or the other.
Ruth Zive [00:16:17]:
I do have a strong opinion on it. Selfishly, I think overseeing that function makes me a better marketer. It gives me more skin in the game, deeper into the pipeline, makes me more accountable to what it is that I'm handing over to sales. And I think makes the entire marketing team more accountable. So I suppose if the marketing leader doesn't have experience doing that, yeah, it wouldn't make sense. But my argument would be that marketing leaders should aspire to learn about that function, and I believe it will make them better marketers if they embrace it and have a willingness to take it on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:52]:
All right, so you roughly laid out the team, the roles. I should have asked this part first, but how do you articulate the overall marketing strategy of the company? We have inside sales team, we have enterprise. We're product led ABM. How do you articulate the go to market strategy that marketing is responsible for?
Ruth Zive [00:17:11]:
Marketing is responsible for a lot of things, but I bubble it up to two strategic imperatives. The first is that marketing is responsible for delivering and influencing qualified pipeline for sales to hit their revenue numbers. That's imperative, number one. And all of our strategy is tied to that imperative. Or I should say all of our activities are tied to that imperative. And then the second imperative is to grow brand awareness and reputation so that within the context of a sales cycle, prospects are more likely to do business with us. And I see that as kind of air cover to the pipeline strategy. From a go to market perspective, Liveperson is the world's leading enterprise vendor in digital customer conversation solutions.
Ruth Zive [00:17:55]:
That's kind of how we position. So we do focus on enterprise. There's some vertical specific orientation, some geo specific orientation, and the segmentation of the go to market strategy is very tightly aligned to the sales strategy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:12]:
All right, so this is enterprise focus. Great. This is great. I've recently talked to more of bottoms up type of companies. So what are the best marketing channels and what does it look like to drive qualified pipeline when selling to the enterprise?
Ruth Zive [00:18:28]:
So the best performing channels are the ones that are optimized on three fronts. And when I look at channels, I'm talking about like where is the pipeline originating? Like what channel is it coming through? There are inbound channels, digital channels, SDR could be a channel. And of course partnerships can also be treated from a channel perspective. I'm looking at three variables. One is the volume of leads coming through that channel. Two is the quality of those leads. And the quality would be measured by virtue of conversion to pipeline and then ultimately conversion to close one business. And then the last variable is cost.
Ruth Zive [00:19:04]:
And the best channels are the ones that are optimized on all three fronts, although that's rare. But you're always looking at those levers. What can you pull the best optimize? So you might have. SEO has often been a high performing channel, fairly low cost once you figure it out and optimize pretty high volume of leads that come through, and they converted a pretty high rate pipeline. But you might have high cost channel like events. Events are very high cost, or paid ads are very high cost. But if they're also driving a high volume of leads that are converting at a healthy rate, then that's an investment that I'm willing to make. So I'm scrutinizing all channels on those three fronts.
Ruth Zive [00:19:47]:
At Liveperson, I would say we have a strong SDR outbound motion insofar as it drives a lot of qualified pipeline. But these are not the handraisers necessarily. So those tend to move a little bit more slowly through the funnel and maybe with a slightly lower close rate on the inbound front. Events do really, really well for us as a measure of influence. We host a lot of events to influence renewal. Opportunity set to close in quarter, or existing pipeline set to close in quarter. And we find that those events, having facetime with those prospects is really effective. But from a strictly first touch sourced pipeline perspective, strangely, email works very well for us at Liveperson.
Ruth Zive [00:20:32]:
SEO works very well for us. And then we use our own product, which is a chatbot, on our website. And while that's not necessarily a first touch, because the leads that come through the chatbot originate from email or ads or other inbound channels, but when they go through the chatbot, we see a higher velocity, and we believe that's because it's sort of a mini product led growth motion where prospects are kicking the tires.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:58]:
Nice. This is really good. I got some notes and I want to just circle back on some of those things. So the first touch inbound, what's working? Is it content? Because there's this narrative today that lead generation is dead. You sell the enterprise, you should only focus on 100 target x number of target accounts and don't do any lead generation for you. Lead generation is a big part of this enterprise business. So I'm just curious about the specific channels and offers. Maybe if you just have an example or two about what a good first touch type of lead generation playbook would be, because theoretically you could just go get an outbound list of the companies you want to sell to and just try to email them to death and try to get them to talk to you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:40]:
But I bet you're talking about something different.
Ruth Zive [00:21:41]:
Well, in an enterprise sales cycle, it's not a straight line. Those things are all connected. We do target priority accounts for sure, like that. That goes on, and then we tailor ads and email and events to those accounts. We're trying to drive some brand awareness, but then by the time the leads come inbound, to me, it's all about qualification at the top of the funnel. So are we qualifying based on sort of firmographic information? Is it an account that is the right size? Is it a contact that's the right contact for our purposes? Is it in the right geo or the right industry where we're best suited and really doing that scrutiny right out of the gate when the lead converts and then also scoring for behavior and using that as a measure of qualification. What are they downloading? Are they going through our website, chatbot? Are they asking for a demo? And the leads that perform the best, the ones that really have great velocity, are the ones that we have correctly qualified as being suitable for our purposes from an ICP perspective and also are indicating strong buying intent. Now, that said, I dispute this idea that you want to separate inbound and outbound.
Ruth Zive [00:23:00]:
It's not real. In an enterprise sales cycle, you can have sdrs very effectively outbounding a particular account, and it's crickets for months. They get nothing. And then you hit up that account with an ad, and the contact that you put the ad in front of is like, oh, yeah, I remember I got an email from somebody and they click on the ad and then it's counted as an inbound lead. But you can't discount the brand equity of having a strong outbound motion as well. So I really just believe so wholeheartedly that inbound and outbound in an enterprise sales cycle are inextricably linked.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:36]:
I love that. Very good. All of that. That's how marketing should work, right?
Ruth Zive [00:23:40]:
Yeah. And then add to that the influence of a partner network, because you can have the same argument. Does this get attributed to the partner, or is it the sdR? Is it an inbound motion? The best opportunities are the ones that have been touched by all of those.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:54]:
So you must be all aligned at the management level because it is this simple. It's challenging in that I think I like to type notes in my slack while we do this. But like you said, enterprise market, like I paraphrase, like enterprises enterprise, you know, sales and marketing is not a straight line, and that's true. The challenge, though, is like, we marketers and sales team, we want credit and so we want to get the straight line. And so you've obviously done this a bunch in your career. How do you set up the company to be successful? So, like, yeah, we don't care if it's inbound outbound, partner, event, whatever. We're all one team. We're all trying to measure this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:36]:
Like we just want to win deals together. How do you get everybody to be in the same direction? I've worked at one company where literally the sales team was fundamentally like pitted against marketing. Because if it was marketing source, then it wasn't sales source and we were misaligned. And my comp plan as a head of marketing was not aligned with the sales leaders comp plan. And so we would clash all the time over this. If you're set up like that, what you're talking about, while it makes ton of sense, it's never going to work. So what goes on inside of the company strategically to be aligned around this?
Ruth Zive [00:25:05]:
Some of it is comp and just KPI's. And so my marketing team is not held accountable to leads or mqls. They're held accountable to pipeline outcomes. And the sdrs are held accountable to pipeline outcomes and even have skin in the game on closed one business. So I do think complan matters. I don't think marketers should be held accountable to leads. I think that takes them too far away from the sales process. Some of it is culture though, and I do think that's top down.
Ruth Zive [00:25:35]:
And I think that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if we're hitting, as long as we're hitting our revenue targets and we can validate that the contacts associated with these opportunities are interacting with marketing assets or activities, then that's a check mark for marketing. No matter who sourced the deal. These turf wars over who sourced it are absurd and they tend to be most contentious when you're not hitting your numbers. I think that the CEO sets the tone here and there's always going to be some tension between marketing and sales. Marketing is always going to say sales isn't appropriately nurturing and following up the opportunities that we're delivering sales is always going to say marketing isn't appropriately qualifying the opportunities that they're sending our way. I think that tension is necessary. It holds us, both teams accountable. But the real challenge is in ensuring that the leadership on both teams is aligned to addressing that tension in a way that serves the business.
Ruth Zive [00:26:41]:
That's what matters at the end of the day is are we addressing it in a way that serves the business? So we actually document what constitutes pipeline readiness, what constitutes a first touch, how do we attribute, how do we measure influence? So cracking the nut on that front, and I don't proclaim to have solved it all together, but I do think if you can represent influence and not just attribution, then you can make a different kind of claim from a marketing perspective.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:10]:
Yeah, well, it's interesting because also, don't you feel like, I don't want to come back to this later, but you mentioned your efforts to build your brand and reputation, right? In a world where sales might go outbound to somebody and book a meeting, marketing might not get credit. But what if somebody knows that live person exists because you have built a great brand, then outbound, but it's not this perfect funnel. And so, like, if you're getting this tip for Tac credit game, well, no, no, I want credit because I helped build the company. I helped build the name of the company. The reason that this worked is because you're reaching out to them with our content. But if you're not set up to be measured on that, the whole thing breaks.
Ruth Zive [00:27:46]:
Yeah. I like to distinguish between sort of business as usual activities on the marketing front, which are more so about brand awareness, reputation, third party validation, content assets and true pipeline creation activities. And I actually allocate my budget along those lines as well. I think about how I distribute my budget on both of those fronts because I do think they're just as important. Now, I will say that if your pipeline and revenue aren't growing in a healthy way and you're continuing to invest to the same measure on the brand and reputation front, you need to think about whether or not those investments are working. Because I see the brand and reputation investments as air cover for your pipeline and revenue growth. And if you're not growing from a pipeline and revenue perspective, well, then you have to wonder whether or not you're really having impact on the other side of the ledger.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:42]:
Can you talk a little bit more about that? Actually, just the mix of like, I often see questions in our Exit Five community about how do I think about the budget and like, you know, these brand slash. I like the term reputation, actually. I really like that because it's a longer term thing. You're not just going to do a billboard and get a reputation. But is it like a 70 30 split of budget and people, is it 80? Do you have some type of measure for it? Because I often see like, well, it's kind of like this. It's this weird thing where like you, you need to do these brand initiatives, but if you're so far behind and you can't, you're not even hitting your number for this quarter, you can't really justify those brand initiatives. But if you never take the time to do them. They're not going to pay off in a year or two when you need them.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:26]:
So how do you think about, I guess what the question that I'm trying to ask is like the balance of pipeline building this quarter and like things that will make your pipeline goals easier six months, twelve months, two years from now?
Ruth Zive [00:29:38]:
Yeah, I don't think there's a formula that holds true at all times. I think it's very dependent on the age and stage of your company. So a series a company I would argue should be spending more on pipe general revenue and growth in those earliest stages matters a great deal. And you're not likely going to grow your brand and reputation in those early days in a way that's going to take over the market. And thats the other variable is the nature of the competitive landscape. If youre in a highly, highly competitive space, then bigger investments in brand and reputation probably matter. If youre trying to carve out new ground, then I think that can be a slower burn in some cases. So I think all of those things need to be taken into consideration.
Ruth Zive [00:30:25]:
Currently I probably split around 40 60 between Im spending about 60% of my budget on pipe gen and 40% on brand and reputation. We are an established public company that's been around for three decades at Liveperson, but we're still pretty small and relative to the competition, not nearly as well known. So we want to continue making investments and showcasing our differentiated value in a market that is changing very fast and furious. But pipe general growth is top priority for us as well. So I've distributed a little bit more to that side of the business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:02]:
Any lessons or learnings to those out there navigating how do you allocate budget? How do you think about those things strategically? It's an area where I've made a ton of mistakes and more specifically like not being able to think long term enough. And so like you're so focused on hitting the plan right now, not having enough things to test and learn and scale. And so like, well, next year the plan grew 20%, but I don't know where I'm going to get that 20% from. Just curious if you have any wisdom on that area, the business and the job.
Ruth Zive [00:31:34]:
One thing I'll say, one lesson learned is that the investments that you make today in marketing, and again, this is based on an enterprise sales cycle, so I'm bringing that bias. But the investments that I make today on the marketing front, especially when it comes to pipe growth, are going to impact revenue six to nine to twelve months from now. So if the plan is going to grow, so you have to work very closely with finance, with sales to set your targets three, four quarters out if you want to build a marketing plan and allocate your budget in service of that plan today. And you need to use math there. So if my revenue target is $10 million greater, I need to understand how much pipe coverage am I going to need to hit that number? How many mqls am I going to need to deliver in order to achieve that pipeline outcome? And then I look, channel by channel, what channels are going to deliver the most mqls at what cost? Where? How do I want to distribute my investments? So when it comes to generating new pipeline, I guess my advice would be use math and know that your investments, it's a staggered impact, it's not a flip the switch proposition, takes time for a lead to become an opportunity that's actually going to be won. So that would be one good takeaway. The other would be leave room for experiments because it isn't like a fixed notion. Markets change, processes change, sales cycles change, messaging changes.
Ruth Zive [00:33:05]:
And you always want to have a piece of the budget that's left for some experimentation. And we're a creative organization. At the end of the day, I want the team to feel emboldened, to take some risks and try new things and a b test. So I always try to leave some of my budget for that. And outside of generating new leads and new pipeline, there are other levers that can be pulled inside of the organization to deliver more revenue. How do you increase conversion rates on the sales side? How can marketing support that? How do you grow adoption of the product to drive better expansion inside of existing customer accounts? So the solution to revenue growth isn't always just get me more leads, give me more at bats. There are other ways to drive efficiencies and growth opportunities inside of the organization that marketing can support.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:57]:
Trey? Okay, I wanted to circle back on, on a couple of things here. So you got this overall strategy, you're trying to drive pipeline. Oh, also, this is what I say, what you mentioned there is really important, and this is one of the many mistakes I've made. It's easy to get on this hamster wheel of like, net new. We need net new, we need net new, we need more pipeline. More pipeline. When it's like, well, actually let's look at the whole funnel. And like, this conversion rate in this segment is really low and we're not winning these deals.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:23]:
And so, like, looking at the budget, it's it's not always just going to be more ad spend more events. There's so much like middle to bottom of the funnel stuff that I think you learn. It's like actually a huge investment in sales. Enablement might improve the conversion rate by 20% in a segment. I see you nodding along. Seems like something this is.
Ruth Zive [00:34:42]:
Yeah, absolutely. And especially if you can diagnose stage by stage conversion, you might find that at stage, 360 percent of your pipeline is falling out. Well, how do you plug that hole in particular? Is there a marketing asset or a motion that you could introduce at that stage that will drive better conversion?
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:02]:
Okay, so you got the overall strategy. You're trying to drive net new, you're trying to do some things that help existing deals, renewals. Do you have any routines and rhythms for marketing? Do you like to plan? Something that I think is hard is you have the year long plan, but then you got to operate monthly and quarterly. Do you like campaign planning? Do you have themes? How do you chop up the year into the rhythm to keep things exciting and interesting, but also a lot changes and you need to be able to have the plan for the year and roll it out and see what happens. You're always coming up with new campaigns and themes. I'm curious to see how you run the marketing rhythms quarterly. Monthly.
Ruth Zive [00:35:42]:
The good news is that we do all of that. We do campaign planning around themes. We meet as a marketing leadership team every week and every other week we review our progress against our quarterly targets and those are pipeline targets. And we sort of hold the discussion in the areas that aren't green. And then on the other week just reporting against, you know, our operational activities and what's happening over the course of the next two weeks. As a marketing wide organization, we meet monthly to review our progress against those. KPI's campaigns have pipeline targets. They're tied to product launch at live person.
Ruth Zive [00:36:20]:
I actually love that rhythm. When you can tie your campaigns and your big events to product launch, I think that drives a certain rhythm of the business that's really, really healthy. But what I will say is that it's not always smooth. There are always pivots and changes. Thematically, I mean, when Genai hit the scene, it was like pandemonium. How are we going to adjust our themes? What are we going to launch differently? What are we going to say differently? So it's not always altogether smooth, but there is a regular rhythm that I think holds us accountable to those targets that we set quarter over quarter. And we don't always by the way. Have a year long view.
Ruth Zive [00:36:57]:
I wouldn't say it's that clean. We sort of ballpark have a year long view, but really it's quarter over quarter.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:04]:
Take me into that marketing leadership meeting. What do you do in that meeting?
Ruth Zive [00:37:08]:
Well, we have a document that we maintain. Every leader that reports to me has to fill out every week what their top priorities are, if there are any problems that they want to discuss, and then if there are any asks of anyone else on the team that gets filled in advance of the meeting, and then, like I said, every other week we actually just go through that document, particularly the columns. If there are problems or asks of other folks on the team, we just round robin it. And then on the other week, we address that document asynchronously and we spend our time together talking about our progress against our quarterly KPI's. It's a half hour meeting because I just try to get things done as quickly as possible. Although I will say if anyone on my team is listening to this, just, you know, being honest, we often go over the half hour, but I set the meeting for a half hour and try my best to stay true to that timeframe.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:02]:
I love that. I think it's just very easy to default to an hour meeting, and then it just like, we have a planning meeting, actually, right after this, and it's an hour and it should have been 30 minutes. And if we go over, we go over. But I think an hour, like you get the ten minutes of small talk and introductions and all of a sudden it's, no, no, I. Let's. Let's be efficient here.
Ruth Zive [00:38:21]:
Yeah, it used to be an hour, and then I thought, well, let's see what happens if I have it. And we've been pretty good. I would say if we go over, it's usually not for more than five or ten minutes. So that's what the meeting looks like. It's a little bit tactical, but it holds the team accountable to those KPI's, which, you know, that's what I love most about marketing. I know you've interviewed a lot of marketing leaders. I always say marketing is part art, part science, and I have skills in both, but I am much more comfortable on the science side of marketing. And I just love this idea that you set targets, you track against those targets, you measure your progress, and you use the data to actually inform your decision making.
Ruth Zive [00:39:00]:
As a marketer, that's what we spend a lot of our time doing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:04]:
Okay, I have two questions that I'm going to finish with. One of them is I want to come back to um, I guess this is a hard question to answer in two minutes, but you're going to have to do it anyway. Uh, how do you think about measuring brand? This is, this come up a bunch lately in the Exit Five community? Your LinkedIn headline is like evidence based marketing or something like that. So how do you apply evidence to the brand and reputation? Do you have a simple school of thought for measuring the live person brand?
Ruth Zive [00:39:29]:
Yeah, I do use some measures and I wish I could take credit for this logic. Somebody far smarter than I am shared this with me and I've used it ever since. I use branded keyword clicks as a leading indicator of brand awareness. That thinking being that if somebody is searching for your company by name, that means that they are aware of you and they know your name. And so I hold the brand team accountable to a growing measure of branded keyword clicks quarter over quarter with an expectation that we're growing brand awareness quarter over quarter. We do survey brand awareness both aided and unaided to just see how we're doing again against the competition. We do that, I try to do that twice a year. And then we also look at things that share a voice, social follows, willingness of our customers and Forrester and Gartner to publicly share their good feelings about our company.
Ruth Zive [00:40:28]:
You know, third party validation as a measure of reputation and brand awareness. I know that's a little bit outcomes based like tactical, but those are the measures that I use on the brand awareness front.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:39]:
I love that. I love when things are simple. So branded keyword clicks would be, is this organic or does this include paid?
Ruth Zive [00:40:46]:
Also, it's anytime somebody is searching live person along with any other term or live person on its own.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:55]:
Yeah. Oh, by the way, I just would like to say I'm sorry for asking all these questions. There was one, I got a nasty review, I got a one star review on this podcast and someone wrote it was a guy. It's always a guy, the women are never nasty. And he's like, does this guy even know anything? Like how was he a CMO? He asked the most basic questions to CMOs and I'm like, I don't know everything, you moron. And then also b, I'm trying to ask the questions that someone is listening to in their headphones and they want to know. So I didn't know that. Now I asked the question so let me get that off my chest.
Ruth Zive [00:41:24]:
There you go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:26]:
Okay. Because I was just looking at like Google search console for like Exit Five as an example. We basically have entirely branded search right now because we don't, we haven't done anything with SEO yet. And I can see month over month, quarter over quarter the volume in searches of people literally going to Google and searching for Exit Five. I love that as an indicator, it's very simple.
Ruth Zive [00:41:46]:
Now, it is a leading indicator of brand awareness, but to me it's just very logical. It says that people know your company name and if they know your company name, it must be because you've put it out there in an effective way to be more top of mind. So you would expect that to grow over time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:03]:
And do you do anything like benchmarking your like share of voice versus competitors? Are there ways that you do that?
Ruth Zive [00:42:11]:
Yeah. So like you, I don't know everything. So this isn't my specific area.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:16]:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. We're going to get a net, we're going to get another one star review. Now I have a guest who has been admitting she doesn't know everything.
Ruth Zive [00:42:25]:
I'm a dumb dumb in many domains, but what I'm good at is hiring people that are really, really smart in their area of expertise. So on the social front, we do benchmark against a universe of competitors. Now, share voice, though, is tricky because sometimes it's for bad reasons that you've had more coverage over a certain time horizon. So live person has, like a lot of other brands, had bad press. From time to time you'll see your share of voice skyrocket. So you have to take that measure to some extent with a grain of salt. I also like social following as a measure of brand awareness. If somebody's inclined to follow you as a brand, it's because they're aware of you.
Ruth Zive [00:43:06]:
Now, it could be because they want to get a job at your company, but that's okay. Employer brand also contributes to brand awareness. So none of these metrics on the brand front are perfect. But I do think it's important that we measure because it costs a lot to invest in brand and you want to have some indication that those investments are paying off.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:27]:
Okay, last question. If you had one wish as a CMO and you could solve any one marketing problem that you've seen in your career, could snap your fingers and solve it, what would it be?
Ruth Zive [00:43:37]:
I love this question, Dave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:39]:
Thank you. I write my own questions here on the Exit Five podcast. That's very kind of you.
Ruth Zive [00:43:43]:
I like this one. So. And I'd love it even more if you could make it come true, this wish. So my wish would be that folks treat marketing with the respect that it deserves. As experts in their domain, I think that because everyone can read and write, they have this idea that they all know how to market. And nobody presumes this with finance or with engineering or with so many other functions across the business. But in marketing, everybody has an opinion, and everybody weighs in with that opinion. And often, as a marketing team, you run the risk of becoming order takers to everybody's kind of whim around what they think will work with marketing.
Ruth Zive [00:44:28]:
And I just think crowdsourcing a marketing strategy from across the business is a losing proposition. And we should always be open to feedback, but it's a slippery slope. And I do think that instinct exists that people just believe that they know how to market because they're human beings. And I just don't think that's true. And it's hard to market effectively. And I wish that if I could snap my fingers and everybody would suddenly realize that and treat us accordingly, that that would make things a lot easier.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:00]:
Just let that breathe for a second.
Ruth Zive [00:45:02]:
Catharsis. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:03]:
It is. I've said the exact same thing so many times and use the exact same analogies. Like, because everybody writes and communicates. Like, my least favorite thing in the world is, like, let's pull up the website and let's let our five vps give feedback on the website. Oh, great.
Ruth Zive [00:45:17]:
Yeah, agree.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:19]:
My aunt, like, sells pottery, and I help her with her shopify store. And so I'm qualified to give you opinions on the. On the website.
Ruth Zive [00:45:26]:
Exactly. Infuriating.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:28]:
All right, Ruth, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming. I got a ton of notes in here. This will be a great episode. You're going to get a bunch of LinkedIn messages after this. So go find Ruth. Ziv on LinkedIn. Send her a message.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:40]:
Just tell her you like this episode. If you thought I asked two basic questions, leave me another one. Star review. I need more of them. They fuel me. Thank you, Ruth. Great to meet you. Thanks for hanging out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:51]:
Thanks for coming on this episode of the Exit Five podcast.
Ruth Zive [00:45:53]:
Thank you. This was a pleasure.