Ben Taylor
Appearances
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, if I give them the air cover and the trust that they can sit there for a little bit of time each week and think about these problems, suddenly it starts to change the whole body of work and the whole impact that we're making.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, there's a really... We do design thinking workshops. We do empathy mapping as part of that. And then we tie that in. I mean, we also are an agile marketing team. So we kind of run through an agile design thinking sprint. So if you're talking really the mechanics of it, we have...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
time boxed periods at the beginning of a release cycle that are focused on design thinking and on empathy mapping. It is part of our process. It is not just a loose like sit here and think about it. It is we are going into our next phase of what we're doing to develop against this use case. We are going to have this be phase one where we're carving out this sprint or this time
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
to actually go into that design thinking. And that happens before we start defining our personas, before we go into our journey mapping, before we go into actual content production. That is actually a really distinct part of our plan and how we actually implement it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think step one, you empathize. I mean, if you look at it, there's a lot of different ways to go through this. But for a marketing team, we want to empathize first. And that's the thing I've spoken to. Ideation is what a lot of folks call is the next step. When we ideate, we're sitting there thinking, what are they? And this is where the empathy map does come into play.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We think, what are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they saying? What are they doing? Right. We do this kind of quadrant. You can Google image search. There's 25 different ways to do this. Some say, what are they talking about? But what you're trying to do is get to the heart of different emotions of what people think. So that's the ideation piece of that design thinking.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And then this is where this software cycle comes into play, the test and validate and prototype. I don't care what order the phase is. For marketing, that can be start to create something and go message test, right? The test may be go to a seller, which we do, and go have a conversation with a customer to see if something resonates, right? We will actually...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Build the empathy map, ideate on what we think that they're doing, and then kind of check in with the customer to see if that's actually what they're thinking at that point. Right. Like it's making it real.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No, marketing is more difficult. Right. If you can do design thinking in. where it's heavily used is in like product development. If you're building something, you got a new car, you do design thinking, you get focus groups, you go have conversations, right? Marketing is trying to move the needle on perception on what is somebody's impetus or focus on buying, the propensity of buying.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So for me, it's harder to test because you have this innate sense of, oh, we don't trust marketers. So we're not going to give real opinions. So we may test against our seller audience and see if that would resonate because they're closer to the customer, right? We don't always get to go test that. Another way to test and validate and then come back in that cycle is in market.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And this is something that marketers have been doing forever, right? You do A-B testing. You see where your metrics are at per channel and then you come back. So I think the
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
The most important part about how we implement design thinking is that empathize stage, is that empathy mapping stage so that we have an idea of please put yourself in their shoes and try to understand what they're thinking, they're feeling, they're saying, they're doing at that time.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
All they're doing is testing and validating. Content marketing just tests and validates.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They're skipping that component of it. I mean, it may go into a brief. You may do a content brief, but it's after the fact.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Like it's almost inverted. You know, you're thinking about the what you're landing on.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, that's what I'm trying to do, right?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, really practically when I am in meetings and people are like, I see a hundred different content pieces that are being produced from across marketing at our company, right? And When you sit down and actually look at the briefs, they all kind of feel the same. It's very diluted. It's less impactful. And that was filled in at the end. They already decided the content, the channel.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They've already done some storyboarding. And then now they're briefing on what that persona is feeling at that point. It doesn't make sense to me. Then you're trying to force fit something at the end of it. So again, you're being forced into bad behavior that ends up with bad results. That's the bigger challenge.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah, the content is even further removed, frankly. So if I'm going from end to end, you know, you have your design thinking steps of which empathy mapping is one. The test and validate phase is... We don't leverage that a whole lot, frankly. I mean, what it is, is getting that empathy mapping piece, doing our customer journey mapping. And the customer journey mapping for us is full lifecycle.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So all the way from top of funnel unknown, I don't know who you are, right? All the way down through the traditional marketing funnel. into sales enablement, into the adoption, into the renewal chain, and trying to create by persona some hypothetical routes that the customer will take against a particular use case.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Once we have all of that and have an idea, what you're trying to do is glean customer behavior and customer care about at each point. Persona
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
By persona what their care abouts are then we determine channel then we determine the content and then that all of the brief writes itself at that point you already know the persona you know the stage you know what they're thinking you know what they're trying to accomplish now it's where are they looking for it and trying to land it so some of the practical things we've done are you know.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
what is a default kit? What is a default kit of a marketer? Email, web, social, right? Those three things are the major things you do. And you kind of just do it. You check your box. You say you do the three things. We may not need web. Like a seller may have that conversation that we've traditionally used web for before. So we've changed. We've brought our web presence way or further up funnel.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Whereas we had some deep dives before because we did empathy mapping. We looked and said, okay, our customers aren't really deep diving. on the web. So why are we using it for that? Just because we were checking a box. We've shifted that part of the customer journey more towards the seller. And so we've done some efforts around seller enablement that we didn't do before. We're a marketing team.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
What are we doing with seller enablement, sales enablement? What are we doing with the renewal team? And that's the harder challenge is reaching into other groups and saying, hey, we're trying to connect this all. But for the things we own as marketers, changing the elevation, changing where we're going to do that? Are we going to a third party publication as opposed to owned?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Would we be better spent spending our money on programmatic ad buys or on a fortune.com takeover, for example, right? There's different things that we can do that are informed that all started with that design thinking.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. Well, assumptions based on checking the box. I don't even think there's assumptions happening in content marketing. I think you're just doing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, I really do. I think you're just doing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't know. I've seen so much where people have created, thrown it out in the market and haven't thought about it again. And then they're on to the next project, the next brief, the next production, the next thing. There's no thinking, right? Because there's no permission to slow down and think about it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
80 to 90% of our production stopped when I took over the team. We were spending a bulk of our time in production before we're now spending it in trying to understand what our customers are thinking.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Just because there's more volume.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If you're trying to message test or trying to brand test, maybe. But if you have a sharp idea of what your brand is going to be, all you're doing is now creating a thousand points of intersection for continuity. And the only way, if you've decided what your brand is going to be and you want it to be consistent, and this goes back to old, how tight is brand control going to be?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But if you have an idea of what your brand is going to be, now you're creating a thousand points of failure. You're creating dilution. You're creating more time internal spent towards coordination on those brand components, right? How is the brand marketing going to connect to down funnel marketing if you're sending out a thousand things?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Now you've got these disparate teams trying to do things and you actually have increased brand risk with more volume because there's less control over the brand and that brand equity that you've got attached to it. I mean, Cisco in particular has, you know, brand measurements. Yes. There's quite a few out there has a pretty strong brand has a pretty controlled brand.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's not Apple level, but it's not like this disaggregated sort of thing. It's pretty controlled and pretty calm and it's fine. But when we go out there a thousand ways, you lose that control. And then you start to really risk your reputation and market by doing that because you have so much going on.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think it goes to how confident you are in the brand image that you're trying to convey. If you aren't confident, I can see some benefit to going out there and seeing what kind of lands. I think of another awesome company here, Canva. Canva's got a very distinct brand and they're a startup. And I would say that they are fairly consistent in the way that they go to market. And
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't, if I were them, I wouldn't want a thousand touch points either because again, the risk is diluting. If you have that much content, you have to have a very robust sense of like a brand kit and guidelines and approved agencies and the overhead becomes incredibly difficult for me. So, I mean, I can see the benefit.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I just, if you're asking me to make a decision on it, I think the brand risk outweighs the opportunity to get feedback with that much out there in marketing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Of doing less, if you're saying.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That's more to do with the brand's acceptance of risk than it is to do with the approach, frankly.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, yeah, but it's harder to measure and it's harder for people to understand, right? Like what matters in marketing? Okay, contribution to pipeline and bookings essentially at the end of the day. That's what the business leaders care about in the company is how much are you contributing to revenue essentially.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And the real risk for us internally by doing less is not feeling like we're able to articulate that we're contributing as much to pipeline and bookings, whereas the reality is the dilution I'm talking about is there is a idea among marketers that doing more equates to more bookings and pipeline, yet it's not backed by numbers usually. If you look at actually what impact is, it's really hard.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline. And so for me, it's saying, okay, let's still measure pipeline. Let's still measure bookings. Let's The strategy of how we implement it is way different than the volume equals that yield.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah, it's easier for a company like us that have a longer sales cycle. It's not just, you know, a B2C style floor pop. You know, you've gone out with a programmatic campaign. You get a click, you get a purchase, right? There are arguments to be made for volume and placement having yield there.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
For longer sales cycles with complicated buying patterns, the way that I've done that is just communicated the reality. Like going back to that empathy.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
is sitting there and asking leaders the question saying, okay, we've put out this, this, and that. And we have, you know, 15 different things activated on each of those three threads. Let me show them to you. Do these resonate with you? Do you think they resonate with our customers? And you're kind of putting your own work out there and challenging it for your leaders.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And the responses I've got is, okay, not really. And then you bring them along and say, I'm not trying to do less from an impact standpoint. I'm trying to reach them with higher quality engagements where they're at. And that tends to... change the mind of leaders because you're focused on, you're still focused on impact.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You're still focused on bookings and pipeline and trying to move the needle for the business, but you're just articulating a different vision for how to do that. I think. I don't think a whole lot of leaders have a very, especially non-marketing leaders, don't have this baked notion that more equals more. I think that's more marketing thing than a business leader thing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So if your entire existence as marketer is precipitated on doing more equals more, and that's your existence and that's your mindset, you're going to fail in that leadership move. But if you truly believe that engaging with higher quality content is going to improve that customer experience, is going to improve that velocity of a customer moving along, then you can easily convince somebody.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, it's no different than marketing. You're just marketing to the business leaders in that case.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. I mean, that's the whole we're going back to customer experience. That's the whole idea of it. Right. Relevancy, relevancy, empathy, impact. I mean, those are the things that matter. And stop thinking about the things. Think about the why. Think about the feeling that people get when they engage with you.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And it will drive a lot better behavior for what folks are doing from a marketing sense.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Is it a big topic these days or AI? I didn't know.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think we talk about it daily for that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think empathy needs to be part of AI, but I don't believe that AI can truly empathize. So the real risk there is I don't want people know they're talking to AI. If you have a chatbot, for example, they know you're talking to a chatbot. So empathy is not in language to me as much for AI as it is getting closer to understanding the problem that somebody has.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't care if you articulate that in a very kind of austere AI-driven way that you're very clear this is a generated response. Empathy is a layer below that veneer of conversation. engaging and having this interaction know and identify my problem. And that to me is empathetic by action, not by language. That's way more important.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So if you're focusing on how you're building out AI, if you've got limited resources and you're building a chatbot, you're building something for
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
responsiveness or agentic that is trying to help somebody for whatever the problem is, and you're focusing engineering resources and time towards the interaction layer, the way it speaks, the way it talks, the way it looks, I think that's less important than how accurate is the response that it's giving, no matter how it's communicated.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And people will think of that as an engineering problem and they won't think about it from the empathetic layer, but I mean, what is you're not from the South, right? Not originally.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So what is the old phrase? Bless her heart.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Like an insult with bless her heart. That's kind of what AI is like. If you have this like nice veneer, but it's not relevant. It's like, OK, well, for what reason? What purpose is that? You know, like, okay, you've said it to me nicely, but you have no idea what I'm talking about. So you lose trust. You lose that connection.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I'd rather have my time focused with chatbot agentic sort of development being on getting closer to what somebody cares about. It's no different than what we do in marketing right now.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't tend to use any of them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And it's not for – I'm an early adopter. I'm a geek. I love it. I find right now, especially in marketing, look, it has – AI has purpose in like heavy telemetry, a lot of data sort of distillation. I think it's incredibly useful at that. It has – it's there. For marketing, especially we do a lot of top of funnel kind of thought leadership marketing stuff.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
you're just spending more time correcting what the output is and then I actually ran an exercise yesterday with GPT where I went to my team and I got chat GPT to basically give me three different positions on the same topic with veracity, with a lot of fierce language. And I'm like, so what is it doing right now? It's articulating their thoughts in a different way.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And it can be used to challenge and kind of create as a thesaurus, as a language kind of differentiator or a tone changer. It can have some value. But for that ideation phase, I don't trust it right now to give me something that truly stays empathetic to what people are trying to do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. Well, it mirrors the data, right? Okay. Pre-AI, I'm at a big tech company. You go out there, we're all using the same terms in the same language all the time. It's just this muted noise, right? Okay. Rootless prioritization. I don't know. All these phrases that you hear from big tech companies all the time. That's the fear with AI using it for ideation.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Is somebody else at the other company using the same sort of model, trained on the same information that's bringing you the same sort of language? So there's a level of human engagement, especially on copywriting, when you're doing things at the top end of the funnel that have short, pithy commentary. If you're relying on AI, you're going to lose some of that individuality.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. And then the differentiator is going to be the one who's not using it. I mean, I, this isn't to say that AI doesn't have value in marketing and doesn't have, I think it can. And I think it does in certain ways deployed in certain ways. AI has more value in a lot of, you know,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think heavy, and I said this before, heavy telemetry, heavy dataset, distillation, understanding, especially when it's proprietary or first party data that you're not sharing outbound that you want to kind of get to something faster. I think it's an accelerant for some of those problems that are heavy analysis problems. I don't think it is at the point where you're engaging human to human.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And humans make decisions emotionally. I don't care if they have a veneer of rationality and logic to it. We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. And I mean, the Gen Z term vibes, that's what it is.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that's all it is. Vibe is this generation's language for engaging on emotion, right? Like how does it look and feel? People know that inherently. So why are we pretending that we don't need to address that, particularly in marketing and how we engage? Yeah. I don't know. I'd rather have three things out there that kind of break the monotony than 100 things that reinforce the monotony.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So that's a huge focus for what we do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, we don't focus on the content at all in the empty mapping and the design thinking. That all actually kind of sorts it out. So the content is actually driven by the channel and where they're at. So if we know that they are, I'll give you an example. We have a technical decision maker who is feeling concerned about implementing an AI use case, right?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Maybe they're going to Reddit to look up things, or a practitioner. Maybe they're going to Reddit to figure things out. And if we've determined that, our goal is then to get in front of the individual where they're at. So if it's Reddit, is it a post? Is it social listening? Is it an ad in Reddit?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Is it something about seeing where folks they're using as sources of trust and trying to influence that? It can drive a whole lot of different behavior and activations. It could be an analyst briefing that we do that then trickles down into that engagement. It could be a series of short content, but it just depends on what that persona is seeking at that point that drives that engagement.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So the design thinking is less around the content ideation and more about the ideation of what the thought process is of the customer at that moment. Okay. I really mean this. If you land how people feel, break them down by the stages, their concerns, do that empathy mapping along each of those stages, the content, the channel, they write themselves. When you ask big bets,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I hate that I don't have a clear answer, but it really depends on where that's at. It's almost more precise. It's a scalpel instead of a scattershot to try to hit everything. And that scalpel can look a thousand different ways. So we have to be very flexible team and we've got great agencies and internal teams that we work with to kind of deploy things quickly.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Every two to three months, pretty much. It's almost like guerrilla style. I mean, it's agile. It's agile marketing. It's guerrilla style marketing in the sense that if we're spending six months getting something to market, it's going to be irrelevant by the time it goes into market.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, that is a constant challenge that we've got. So, you know, if we do the work up front to be more relevant and then we're able to turn quickly on something imprecise and MVP 90% of the way, not a precise content that's gone through, piece of content that's gone through,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
25 approval layers and 84 messaging docs, Docker visions, and then finally lands on it, you know, V7 underscore V3 final dot PDF, right? Whatever it is. I mean, you're laughing because we've all lived that and seen that file. I've got three of them on my desktop right now, right? Like changing that behavior and saying, okay,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
legal clear brand clear let's not go throw things out that are going to get us in trouble but legal clear brand clear a message out in market that has had some empathetic mapping to it and is kind of relevant is way better if it's sitting there for three months than something that goes out four months later and everything's changed you're playing constant catch-up so for us
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
know, that's where the agile comes in. We deal with our marketing in a kind of similar to how agile product management teams do it. We have a product and our product is our journey that's aligned to a particular use case. And our releases, we call them waves, but there are release waves.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that wave will have elements of design thinking, elements of content, and then content production, and then publish. So we're not we're not shipping these off to different teams. It is a controlled release of a product. And we'll look at the existing touchpoint strategy or the existing customer journey.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We'll analyze what's changed and then quickly move to what adjustments do we need to make based on that revised design thinking or empathy mapping. Has the sentiment changed in the market? And if it has, what are the adjustments we need to make at those points along the journey? And that is a much quicker cycle than doing a
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
six month plan where i've got these major topics and you go do the strategy work you go do the content you know mix work you go do the production and then we're six to eight months later essentially yeah if not longer or you've abandoned it which happens a lot like you go through you go through strategy you go through the ideation phase you start to plan you start to build and then it's no longer relevant and then what do we go back to if your content marketing
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You now feel that your entire value is tied towards producing something. You spent four and a half months building something. It's no longer relevant. What do you think they're going to do?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They're going to publish it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They're going to publish it. They spent four and a half months doing it. They're a content marketing focused team.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, that's that hidden risk is attrition and burnout and contribution. And for folks that view their work contribution as deep value drivers personally.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If you've now spent four months on something and then you're just not going to ship it, that's a terrible thing to go through. It's incredibly hard to spend that time.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. So what are you going to do? Put it on. We've had situations where folks have completed stuff and it's like, what are you going to do? Put it on a resource page as link number 17.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It hurts. It hurts. So changing the whole ethos away from the content is the lead to the engagement is the lead changes the whole way that the team perceives what they're doing and how they measure their success on that on that day to day work that they do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't know. Does the team ever give honest feedback of that? No, I love my team. And I think that they are... happier for it. I'll tell you, when you shift away from content on specific like offer level stuff and you focus more on engaging a customer against their use case or their outcome or their problem, the other benefit is that changes less frequently.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
How you may like solve for it changes more rapidly than the problem itself changes. So if you talk to somebody about solving their problem, it has a longer shelf life in the first place. So on top of like
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
meeting somebody at their emotional needs from a customer, from a customer experience basis, meeting somebody at their emotional needs and focusing on how they feel and that driving the content means that you have longer shelf life for relevancy and you don't have this quick change all the time that happens whenever you're focused on, you know, a ton of stuff and moving on.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You spend more time thinking about it. It's more relevant. If there's a slight change, it's still more relevant than if you just had thrown out a hundred other pieces before that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So just overall, there's less churn. There's less change, right? You're going faster. There's less change. You're not as burnt out because you're not doing as much like check the box content. You're still working. You're not not working. You're just you're spending more time caring about people.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that that is, I don't know, for most people, that's more fulfilling than spending time doing a revision on something that may never see light today.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't know. I think I'm happier at work and happier in life when I'm doing things that make people feel better or helping solve problems. So for me, it wasn't like a hyper tactical decision to change because that's what the market is saying to do. It was because, well, if I'm going to spend 40 hours a week doing things, I'd rather do 40 hours a week Trying to help folks. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, I'm not, we're not curing cancer, but we're solving problems that cause people to feel fear. That feels good. I mean, for me, that feels good. So I think, I think helping is a natural tendency for me. I think if you can lean into that and find success and impact that way, it just makes everything a little bit easier. Work, personal, all parts of life.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's a broken record, right? I lean into fit and empathy and drive. Vibe. Vibe. I lean into vibe. I mean, pedigree, background, experience, they all matter.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But you can teach skills. You can teach mechanisms. I mean, frankly, what matters in marketing in particular and across the chain of customer experience changes frequently. So really what good is discrete experience on things when it's going to change anyway? So what's more important and what I found to be a greater driver of success is that How do they fit with the team? What do they think about?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And so when I interview them, I give them challenges on how do you feel about this? How do you think about this? What do you think a customer would think about this? Because I'm more interested in how they work through thinking in somebody else's shoes. Yeah. than I am about what they think the right answer is.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If somebody has two hours to devote towards something in advance of an interview, I'd rather them not go to Gartner and Forrester and other groups and IDC and look up the details. We can do that. I'd rather them try to position themselves in that customer or whoever it is in this prompt that I'm giving them shoes because we do projects sometimes. And think about what they're thinking about.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And if somebody can demonstrate to me that they're willing and able to think beyond their own kind of interpretation of things, that's usually a really strong indicator of success for me.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah, I mean, a good example would be we'll take a customer problem. I mean, we still have to be practical in our questions, right? We're a technology company. So if you've got...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
There's stories of me coming out of Wawa at three o'clock in the morning. I mean, that is a, I have to go to Wawa, get a hoagie at two o'clock in the morning. It's equivalent to Whataburger, right? Like having that option.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
a data center that is older technology, it's not set up for AI use cases, and that's one of the big use cases we're driving right now, I would ask an interviewee, hey, how would you think about engaging a customer to address and kind of move the needle on this problem? And I would give them some constraints.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I'd say break it down by who's involved, what they're thinking, and what you would do at that point. And usually I'd ask them for five to 10 minutes of their thinking on So what I want to do is not see like, frankly, hey, I'd go do this. I mean, look, I'm not going to kick somebody out of the room because they lead with content.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But if they lead with content, then I know they're thinking that way. So then the challenge I've got as a leader is, okay, I have to kind of disabuse them of this idea of content being the lead. That doesn't mean that they're not able to do it. It's just that's how they've been trained to think about these things, not how I'm going to engage at what point. We do the same thing with agencies.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
When I go to creative agencies, I challenge them with the same sort of use case and problem that I do somebody that I'm interviewing. I say, how would you guys approach this? And I will tell you that 95, I keep using percentages. These are not real. Like there's no footnote on these percentages.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
of agencies I've engaged with 95% will come back with a menu of content to go just that they can help you build. And like, well, we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this. Like here are the 24 tactics and the piece of content we're going to go do. And I'm like, you didn't give thought to the actual problem of what folks are thinking about at this point.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And, you know, I'm less, uh, What's the right word? I'm less accepting of an agency coming back that way because I'm employing them to have an output.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
More volume doesn't equal more bookings, more pipeline.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No. And actually, the agency selection I've done has been heavily leaning on that piece, which is I don't want to spend 20 hours of my week coaching the agency to how we think about the problem. And there are agencies out there that do this in a way that is more empathetic and think about the problem. And so that just is simpler for me. I don't have to spend that time bringing them on board.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Are you not from? Okay.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That's concerning to me.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
A person that I'm interviewing on the team is a different story because there's a whole lot more that goes into that. It is a soft science kind of art on hiring people. There are some things you can do to kind of weed folks out, but I've had success with folks that I didn't think would be the great fit. I've had terrible times with folks that I thought would be a great fit.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So it's not, it is an imprecise science on bringing folks on board. Caring about them and helping them kind of come along is an easier prospect for an employee than it is for an agency that you're engaging. Sorry, I know you asked that question, but... No, yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Where are you from? You're from the Northeast?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, put yourself in their shoes. If I said... I mean, I'm also not like, this is not a test, right? I'd go back and say, hey, think human. I'm going to help them in that prompt. I don't want them to have this native answer. I think any person in any room with rare exception can be told to think about how it makes you feel and how it would make them feel, and they're able to do that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's just getting them to do that and having them actually like take the time to think no different than my team, carve them out, give them time to think about it, make it part of the process, make it the first part of the, you know, that first sprint in that cycle of that release that we're doing towards devoting, you know, whatever you want to call it, time boxing, you know, giving them space to do that is no different for an interviewee or an agency or somebody that works for me.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You have to. It's the same sort of sense of like, I can get something completely unnecessary at three o'clock in the morning. And that's the joy of it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You've got to devote the time to build it into how you're going about that day to day. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No, I think people want to. That's actually one of the easier things. Giving them permission and saying, think about how people feel and care about things is such a natural human thing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. They want to do it. So that's not the problem. It's the leadership question. It's the hey, this is going to yield results because I'm attached to numbers and numbers equals output equals. It's getting that idea away from leadership and getting the space. So it's usually managing upward for me, frankly, that's more difficult.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's not as much the folks that are actually I'm asking to go do the work and think about these things that way. They're willing and able to do it. Okay. I mean, let's give a real example. What's easier to do? Go tell me how you think that person is feeling and help me validate it and go talk to them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Or give me a very needle moving piece of content that's going to drive revenue on this thing, which is a question that gets asked. It's like, I mean, I kind of know, but let's start to think about it. And it's so much easier to sit and think about how people feel and think about things instead.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, I'm a hundred percent Wawa.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think you need to back it with logic because most people think that, I mean, everybody thinks they make logical, rational decisions, particularly in a C-suite and a boardroom. When what you have to do is articulate, hey, in reality, we make emotional decisions and by addressing the emotional and empathetic needs of folks, we are having that impact.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So it's not so much as saying, hey, be emotional in these places as it is if we ignore it, we're missing the primary opportunity to actually move it forward and showing them, look, this is not a new concept. I was in school and we were reviewing case studies talking about engaging with folks in an emotional way.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's just people kind of build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. And it's just not founded on anything. There's no foundation for that. Like this Vulcan style Star Trek, this Vulcan style appeal towards no emotion being like the highest end of corporate success is a... is one of the biggest con jobs of corporate environment over the last 25 years.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And I think we're seeing some of this rotation back towards, well, until recently, but some of this rotation back towards empathy. So yeah, for the boardroom, for the C-suite, I would contextualize empathy in the way that it can create impact for the company. And then I would defend with passion the Because it's not just about it having good impact, it's an opportunity cost thing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Uh, central Philly ones are different. They're, um, I don't know. I guess my campus was right in the middle of Philly. So I, I, I don't know. I was also probably not the most sober every time I went in too.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
This is going to be better than going after old school kind of set methods of approaching. And I'm comparing those two and I'm putting my bets on the empathetic, less volume approach. Not less engaged, because I think it's more engaged, but the less volume approach to it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We can't throw anything out because it's still a big company and people want to see certain things. So you've got to have it. But I've deprioritized, I think is the best way to frame it. I've deprioritized consumption metrics. So page views, opens, click rate, et cetera. We do it for A-B testing. We do it for resonance testing. Is this message resonating? We'll still look at that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But we've simplified at least my team scorecard to be more about pipeline and bookings and logic on what that sales cycle looks like and kind of just focus on that component. The other challenge we've got with... I mean, you asked a question earlier about when do you kind of get into the tactics and content mix that you're going after?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, because we kind of move fast, that can be wildly different quarter to quarter. So just the sheer operations of measuring something that is like, okay, this quarter, we're going to do a high touch round table and invite certain accounts to an engagement to have a conversation. And next quarter, we're going to do...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Reddit programmatic ads, and that changes so frequently that there's no set standard of measurement. That's another reason we've deprioritized is because I don't want the KPIs to dictate the actions that we're taking.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If your apparatus for reporting is based on page views and email opens and click through rate and shares and likes and the like, you are informing the behavior. So you have to be very careful with what you're measuring that you are not kind of forcing the behavior.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No different than creating a, I mean, I have this argument a lot with leadership where, you know, we look at metrics on like customer stories and the metric, I don't want to be the number of customer stories, some sort of engagement, maybe some sort of, that's a tough one to measure. Customer stories are measured, but there are some consumption metrics.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I'd rather look at engagement or maybe go out and message test and see if you've got a, some sort of response that you can get from message testing. Yeah. But stay away from the production numbers because it drives that behavior 100%. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I grew up in Dallas, uh, school in Philadelphia. I lived in New York for a bit, uh, New York city and Manhattan. And then I was in Houston and I've got family out. So kind of all over, but mostly, uh, Mostly Dallas, Austin, and the Northeast. So Philly and New York.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Is it a big topic these days or?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. I think the one that is most pertinent for me is we are a services organization. That's kind of our revenue drivers, the services component. So professional support services for what we do. And when I took over the team, we were focused on our explicit offers and kind of going to market with a lot of content around those offers, which is fine. It's a great approach.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's kind of that content marketing approach there. And when I sat down with the team and said, hey, who is the persona we're going after? Is this even addressing their problem? What are we talking about? That's where I started. You asked a question earlier. I started to break down. I challenged what we were doing to show impact. We had no real measurement on pipeline and bookings.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We were having kind of minimal impact on pipeline and bookings, yet we were putting out a lot of content offers explicit. So I actually went through... It's like a six to 12 month kind of, and this goes back to the retraining question. And honestly, it goes back to the change of behavior question. But we went through the six to 12 month, shut it down. Is there an impact change?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, I have 40 hours a week from somebody. So am I going to have them keep the lights on on something or am I going to commit to a change? We committed to the change. And that led to shutting it down. You know, the trickle, some of the audience, some of the engagement, that's fine, but we weren't putting any new effort towards it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And we immediately shifted towards this model that I've been talking about, the sympathy mapping, engaging with the customer journey to see where they're at. What that led to is now what we've got today, which is about 18 months later, which is this approach towards we have customer journeys.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We have reached into sales enablement and created content that lands for a purpose at a point towards a persona with impact because that's what we think they need at that point because we did the mapping. And so we've got... We've got email nurture again. We have web again. We have organic social again. But the tone, the tenor, what we've talked about has completely changed.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It is not just this offer centric feed speed. I've got my columns. We've done it. We've put it out there. And we are measuring pipeline and bookings and have seen growth from that because we're more relevant. Right. Like the whole thing has lined up and I won't give numbers, but we have seen growth. of 5X, 6X growth and what our impact is from there.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
People watching?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that is based on starting with the, do they care? What matters? Are we talking in that right way? And so that was really scary for the team. Honestly, that was really scary for the team because they had been- Was it scary for you? I don't know. I'm kind of a risk taker.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
New York. Just because there's more of them there.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So, I mean, I have to be mindful for my team that, and that's where I come in with my own empathy for my team and say, guys, we're covered. I believe in this. I'm committing to this. I will top cover. I will talk up to leadership about what our changes are going to be, but this is the right thing to do and we need to engage this way.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And so that gave them a little bit of sense of confidence that if we're not, I mean, there was a period where, For three or four months where we had nothing new going on, like nothing new going on.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that's a whole step change in behavior on how we engaged. And now I think we are just moving wave after wave, right, of what we're doing from a production sense and not production of content, but production of these releases that are outcome-aligned, empathetic adjustments to our customer journeys that are driving engagement for the business and finding that impact.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
None of them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
jersey no uh because i lived on both sides of jersey so you see a jersey player sorry for anybody who's listening to this and it's from jersey but i don't know they're different i'd say jersey drivers though yeah worse than dallas drivers 100 wow yeah like okay no you get on the turnpike it's no i don't even want to dallas is pedestrian and mundane compared to that wow can't confirm having driven through jersey yeah good to know yeah okay well ben
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, think about what we're doing now. We're engaging more on what the customer cares about. We're going to sales and asking them their opinion more. I mean, to be brutally honest with you, it's not just saying what they need.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If I'm looking at the customer journey, full lifecycle, like I mentioned before, from full marketing funnel into that sales engagement, instead of just pretending that we know and handing off the baton to sales and here's the message, how does what we are doing tie directly into the handoff and then the engagement that sales is having? Yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
we are helping craft sometimes over the top, sometimes supplemental, sometimes all of it, sales enablement collateral for these use cases, these journeys that we've built. And sales loves that, right? I'm not trying to go at them with 17 different things and content and then give them this digest that says, here's the 400 things that we've put out. Here's the noise. Good luck.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
What are you going to find that's relevant for your customer? I'm saying we did seven things around this topic. We've continued and talked to you about what the handoff would look like from that piece. So it really creates less friction in my mind with the other bodies now within the organization. The real challenge is. walking that line because I don't own sales enablement.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't own our customer success motion and our adoption motion. I don't own our renewal motion and engagement from that side. I don't own the other product marketing teams and the other groups within Cisco that are doing traditional marketing. We have to always kind of merge that together. And so there are challenges in saying,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We are coming in to connect, help map what this experience looks like, give our thought on why we think that it should go a certain way, work with the other groups and see what they're doing to find success. And it's about over-the-top additive adjustments or additive components, content, enablement decks, whatever it may be that that team needs.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And if you go to another team like sales and element, they know their audience better than anybody else. They know their sellers better than anybody else. So they know what they are looking for. So if I come to them and say, here's what we've built aligned to what the customer actually cares about. what do you guys have going on for this topic?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
What can we provide that carries through the message that we've tried to establish and the value that we've tried to build in the upfront to then augment and change? So that's where we come in and we're not trying to change their whole process. We're trying to say, can we inform? We've done a lot of work. We have expertise. We have message testing. We have product proximity.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So we have roadmap proximity to the types of things that we're putting out into market. How do we help you with all this work we've done Tie our expertise to your expertise and create one or two things that creates momentum. And then we measure that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Every, every single interaction being empathetic. And I think this is one point I did want to hit on around the theme of customer experience. It has to be the full customer life cycle. How do you have a customer experience and not look at the entire life cycle, including before they've reached the point of sales.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
People think about it from sales forward, you know, from, from close of deal forward a lot of time. And that's just, it's a complete mess. Experience starts well before that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They have preconceived notions of your brand. They've had some experiences. They have folks that are seeing a Super Bowl ad or seeing out of home. We have a big ad in Heathrow, T5 in Heathrow. And you see that. There's exposure that happens to our brand. What we're trying to articulate is our value to you.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And how in the world are you going to build a customer experience practice that is not a combination of marketing, sales, sales enablement, success, renewal, adoption, and renewal? You have to connect those. So that on its surface is not a hard thing for people to consume and say, oh, that makes sense. They'll usually say it makes sense.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't tend to use any of them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
The harder thing is then what does that relationship look like? And to your point, not dictating, coming in and saying, I have some expertise and knowledge in this area. You have expertise and knowledge in that area. How do we start to merge those things together?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think marketing is the most disconnected piece from the customer experience right now. And like I'll pick on marketers instead of the other side of the house, right? Yeah. if you go to a marketer and ask them why does sales enablement exist, they'll give you kind of a top level answer of like, well, they enable sales. They help themselves. I mean, that's kind of the answer, right?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Good definition. But have they ever spent time and sat down and thought about what they're trying to do? Well, why do sellers care? Well, they're trying to feed their families like everybody else. They're trying to make more money. They're trying to be successful in their jobs. So for
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Again, forcing my team as much to box timeout to think about what the other teams are doing means they're going to show up in a sales enablement meeting, in a adoption meeting, in a success meeting. Having some sense of what they're trying to accomplish and being able to empathize with that group makes the engagement that much simpler. It's no different. We're asking people to be human.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We're asking them to be human consistently through that experience. So it needs to go both ways. Post sales needs to reach in marketing. Marketing needs to reach into the post sales side and just make incremental progress, especially the bigger the company, the slower the progress. That's fine. But incremental progress is the name of the game. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Let's go even more surface level. You don't always have treatment that's the same, creative treatment that's the same.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You've got one look at top of funnel and thought leadership that's like this grandiose sort of vision. You've got some cookie cutter BDM deck or at a glance that's great, but has a certain format and style to it. Suddenly you've got this random PowerPoint deck and a sales. You have this disjointed kind of step-by-step experience.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, I mean, it's kind of a statement, but I don't think customer experience is like this grandiose concept. It's just hitting on this theme of empathy. It's important that we engage somebody with that empathy. And so what has happened is you have your consultants and groups that have come in and said, hey, let's define this as a thing and create this sort of engagement.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And I'm not talking about our... We do a decent job because we have tight brand controls. But again, that goes back to the point of if you have a thousand things going out there, You run brand risk because you have a thousand different ways things are.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I have seen so many cobbled together things across that life cycle that it's like if we just spend a little time getting our steps together, that customer experience you're talking about is going to be so much better, even if it just feels the same. Right. The talking points may be. five words different or 10 words different depending on who's talking or slightly different.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But if you talk to anybody at our company and you know you're talking to somebody at our company and you're buying into what it is that we're trying to pitch you from both a relationship standpoint and a value standpoint and a product standpoint, that's just less you have to overcome.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah, tone of voice,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
creative treatment colors type font you know how where you're positioning things what your lockups look like all those but tone of voice is one that probably falls by the wayside more than it should and you're absolutely spot on right i mean i always look to apple because they have such a strong brand but for sure you know when you see apple i kind of know when i see ibm because i'm a little older so i see ibm and i see the typeface and i'm like oh it's ibm i know what they're doing
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And there's these things that, and then it lets you reinforce the brand. It lets you reinforce, and it's not even reinforcing the brand. What is your brand? It is who you as a company are innately perceived. And that means you're not having to overcome that perception.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So if you've got a strong brand that carries trust or carries empathy or look at Southwest for 30 years, they're kind of like changing that now, but look at Southwest for 30, 40 years. They were the heart brand and the love brand, right? You knew them. And that was implicit. You didn't have to figure out who they were. You knew who they were. So that's less work you're having to do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
My whole job is about not creating complexity where there doesn't need to be complexity, not creating a gap where there doesn't need to be a gap of understanding. Let's meet people. Let's reinforce it. Let's be consistent. And let's talk to them about what they care about. Again, none of these are like... novel, crazy concepts. It's just slow down and think about it day to day.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That one kills me. I use that with my team sometimes and I think they roll their eyes at me. Yeah, I say that, but it's true. Like if you don't have I get this a lot. We don't have time to plan. It's the same thing. It's like, OK, so you're just going to like meander aimlessly. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you're you're busy, but busy at what? Right.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Like spend a little time thinking about how the three hours you're devoting on the up front is going to impact the long term overall benefit of that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But the idea of it's not different. So I think if you were to ask the question to me, younger, do you care about how you interact with people? Do you care about how they perceive you? I think most people would say, yes. It's just that now we have this terminology attached to it. So yeah, like, no, as a kid, am I going to get into CX? No, absolutely not.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
What's the old kid deferred? I don't know where you put like you can have one lollipop four-year-old now or you can have like five of them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
What I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience, that's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, Put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this? Humans make decisions emotionally.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
we as adults are not any better at it and it's just in a different context it's like okay you can go put out your blog now or we can spend three hours and then you have you know maybe it's not a blog it's two and a half other things but you have to slow down to do it it's the same concept and that's the buy-in it's like
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
You're going to yield more over the long run, whether that's impact or happiness or whatever it is, by just slowing down and thinking about it and thinking truly what is going to have impact. What do people care about? I wish that customer experience hasn't become so defined as it is. TSIA is an organization.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Like I said at the beginning, loyalty program thing that has now over-rotated into very specific contact center and chat bots and wait times and loyalty cards and all that. it has lost its meaning. It has become so defined in certain senses that it has started to lose its meaning.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And so for me as a marketer, which traditionally people don't fully think of as part of that customer experience component is reattaching it. That's why I'm in that experience. Like Cisco thinks about customer experience as That is the full customer experience. It's not just marketing. It's marketing and purchase. And now you're using your product. Now you know what the product's supposed to do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Are you actually achieving that? That's why the customer success motion is part of it. So we as a company have tried to re-expand that definition to think broadly about it, which... Confuses a lot of people why I'm in marketing and doing customer experience. They just don't kind of get that component all the time.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And so that's the main thing I want to talk about is that connection and try to get folks who listen to this to think a little bit more broadly about what that concept means.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But do I care about the way that I communicate, the way that I impact what I'm doing for our company and what I do personally? Absolutely. And so I think those existed before. It's just now it has a term to apply to it.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It can be a step-by-step strategy, right? But you have to not lose sight of it. And you're absolutely right. Because folks that take a concept, they want it to be successful. They need to share it. They need to create some sort of operational model or organizational structure to how to kind of scale it out. And that's what, to your point, has become this thing. But also to your point,
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It dilutes it. You lose it. And if the person who wasn't there five stages ago who was like, hey, this is the reason we're doing it is no longer part of why you're doing that. You're now in this cycle that why we're having this discussion.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's why I have a design thinking stage and the empathy mapping stage on the front end of what we do on our cycle. That's still a step. That's a process. One, two, three, four. I don't know what the steps are, but that's still a process, right? Like we lead with that and then we build.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No, I mean, yes. It's not like I am a cog in a greater – motion that's trying to do this. I am very much trying to lead this sort of idea across the group, and I've seen different levels of success across that. But you're right. I don't mean it to sound that way, but if you take me out who's trying to heavily drive it, I don't know how long that persists.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And it's their modified version of that, which isn't the worst thing always, especially if they're close to the original meaning. But again, you're relying on them to understand what the original meaning was and what that original intent was.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, I'm trying to get my team to... I am a true believer in the empathy approach to things and all that comes from that. And I'm fully malleable to what that shift may be, but I am trying to create essentially evangelists of that approach because one, it's more natural, more human. I enjoy it more, but two, it's more impactful. And so... if I can make believers out of them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And I've already seen them actually. I haven't mentioned this, but it makes me really proud to see carrying those sorts of questions that I may be asked on day one and seeing them ask those questions when they go to other groups, right? You're creating empathy missionaries to go out into the world and create this idea across different silos and groups in the company.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Well, one of the downsides of CX getting more defined is that it has kind of become over-defined on this post-purchase sort of like loyalty. I mean, you look at CX different things and it's loyalty programs and it's how you have adoption kind of motions and retention sort of motions. When At the heart of it, it is about truly the customer experience.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And honestly, that's the thing that's made me the happiest is seeing people that buy-in and seeing people independently slow down and think about it. And that's so, like, it makes me very proud. Like, if you want to talk about what brings me joy at work, that brings me joy at work. When I see some of that, it's not the results. It's not the impact. Sorry, bosses. It's not. I mean, it's great.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I love my, you know, great. Let's have the company be profitable. That's my objective. But when I see folks kind of evangelizing this idea throughout, it really makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing and doing a good job.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Reaches out and says, hey, this thing. I heard this and therefore I did that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I mean, you've made the whole pitch for why certain consumption KPIs don't matter. I mean, pitch it to the execs, right? If you go into a big company, share that anecdote because that anecdote resonates. Anecdotes resonate at I don't care what level.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
If you share the one that you just did, it's not the same that I did, but it's the same kind of concept of me going into the leadership and having that conversation. It's like, actually sit there and be human for a second. Do you care about this or that? And you care about... Hey, somebody told me that it impacted them.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I'm just trying to do the same thing at scale with marketing and connect through that the rest of the company.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Content marketing is dead. Wow. It is a driver of a waste of time. Success with content marketing is a happy accident.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't think that the mix of in-office versus hybrid plays as big a role in the success of empathy as you might initially think. And the reason I say that is hybrid work or remote work and in-person work can take a thousand different appearances. I worked at a company that was off camera and that created a whole different vibe, back to vibe. That created a whole different vibe on engagement
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
when you're remote and off camera, when you're on camera, you see people when you're on camera all the time and you're coming in t-shirts and shorts and stuff and not like properly dressed for old school environments, you have that trust. And it is very similar to being in office. Yes, you're on the screen.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yes, you're talking to a microphone, but that is closer to a collaborative in-office environment. And I've also been in in-office environments where I'm sitting in a cubicle all day. So I don't think the physical location, is a huge driver of that ability to have meaningful collaboration, particularly around the concept of empathy.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Like stop thinking about what it's defined as and think about what the term means. And that's engaging with the customer. So some of the challenges that I've had is don't just think post-purchase. Don't just think pre-purchase. I'm engaging with the customer. Yes, they're at a different point in their journey, but I'm engaging in marketing with the customer in the same way.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It is more about tone setting with the team, virtual or in person, than it is to do with that proximity of the physical body. I mean, I have to believe that. How am I going to do digital marketing and want to convey empathy without believing that I can be empathetic and have that sort of relationship without being like in a room? Yes, I love being in a room with people.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I love when we do off sites and see folks, but it's not a necessity to accomplish that objective.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah. Then you meet people you see all the time. There's so many variables to that engagement that it's hard. Yeah, I agree. Being intentional on what our purpose is, saying the words out loud.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Think like you're them. Like, don't just expect people to do it. Force people to sit in a room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We get a Miro board and throw a little sticky notes into the empathy map. I'm like, okay, now you are a CISO and you're a chief information security officer. And you've got to think about, you know, threat vectors and all this. And we have marketers.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
They're not doing this all day.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
But it's challenging. And they're like, well, I don't know. What do I care about? What do I feel? Oh, no. You know, I could lose my job if somebody's going to do this.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Kind of. We got a D20 out there. We're good. So it's good. Yeah, we're set. So please don't, gosh. My team already knows that I'm like...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Why is he not here narrating and DMing the conversation? No, it is that way. What is role-playing? Role-playing is just empathy. It's like putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And having a wonderful time.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So, if you catch me outside of this studio.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
With a stick and, like.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And a cape on, you're not going to judge me. Okay. That's good.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I need to care about their experience in the same way. And I need it to connect through to the customer. back half of that engagement in the same way. So I think for me, marketing is integral.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Or like the Wendy's account. Ridiculous.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't think so.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Relevant. Still relevant.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
No, but it's hard to avoid. So that's the relevance to me.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Ridiculous.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I have seen LinkedIn.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
devolve there's still good stuff there and there absolutely is but I have seen some it is a Facebook off tread at times right now so I don't know I guess I'm getting other things in my algorithm but there's there's some elements where I'm like I just roll my eyes I just absolutely roll my eyes and so it's hard signal to noise ratio is harder it's harder to find that's a good point team book clubs right now team book clubs we're pro book club relevant yeah okay is your team are you reading one right now yeah
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
what wait what book have you done but oh i don't even remember the last one we did i'm terrible at it ben's like i'm not reading it and i care about it my wife likes to say i can't read yeah like not just doesn't read but can't read so that's the joke that she likes to say like i i when the problem is when i read i read like 18 hours straight and then it's five o'clock in the morning because i don't want to put it down so i don't pick up a book
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think sales enablement and engagement and down funnel kind of like actual sales conversations, your adoption, your success motion, your renewal motion, all of those are part and parcel to what customer experience should be.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Because I don't want to sit for the next like 18 or 19 hours to go do that, which is a horrible excuse not to read. But I like book clubs because it's not work. It's something that's like forcing you to think outside of it and it's not work.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So that's a terrible answer.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Relevant, not to me.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Relevant, not for me as much, but relevant. I think it is.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So not political?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
November, I think I was getting 400 texts per hour or something.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I might have also shared a text or a phone number of somebody that I wanted to get SMS marketing.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That may be why you're getting the other ones.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I was going to say the exact same thing. Cringe is so subjective. What does cringe mean?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It feels forced. I mean, think of the skateboard meme with, you know, like, hello, fellow kids. Personalized videos.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And I think teams tend to, and companies tend to narrowly define that as just, you know, post-purchase a lot of times, and they don't think about the rest of that customer engagement.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Relevant when it's not cringy. Same answer as the Gen Z slang.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It can't feel forced.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think I'm going with relevant on this one.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
How dare you?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Thank you. It was fun.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So we'll see how it goes.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I love Barley Swine, which is on Burn It. Barley Swine is probably the closest thing Austin has to Austin being non-pretentious, but still that fine dining where they care about you and they're there without being over the top or pervasive in your outing. So for me, it's one of the best experiences. And we've gone there for my birthday every year for the past seven years or something like that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's it's your kind of like American fine dining mix. So you're going to get a steak with you've got like these shiitake, not shiitake. They got these like mushroom dumplings.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's very fancy. It looks like small portions. It is. I've got a really good friend of mine that went to the Culinary Institute in Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, New York, which is for those who know, like one of the best in the country, if not the best in the country and worked a lot in New York.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
So a lot of stuff I did in New York was like finding the dives that were great, finding the high-end restaurants that were great. And the one thing that was through all of them that what made them wonderful was that kind of like caring about the person that came in and covering them up and making sure that they felt warm and loved while they're there at that experience.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
About six and a half years ago.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And that's why I like Barley Swine because to me, they're that they're the closest thing to that in the city. Like there's a lot of great places, but this place is just, you know, step above.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I would love that. It was a great time today. Thank you.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
An opportunity of a particular role to change it up. I was at Dell before and I had a friend that was here, had an open spot in the service provider marketing team. So it's very kind of like heavy handed part of our portfolio, very technical part of our portfolio. But it's just something different. And
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
While I loved Dell, I wanted to get into a company that had kind of a broader portfolio footprint. So nothing other than that, a good opportunity and came over and they let me work remote. So I was okay with that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Yeah, there's a mix of, you know, home and office. And, you know, because of we produce a lot of the stuff that allows you to work at home. So there's folks from all over the country, all over the world that are on my team that are on that I work with. So we go in every now and again, but it's not as much a mandate as much as how do we make this a good experience when we go in?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That's the hardest one to do. I mean, it's what is customer experience? I mean, it's kind of like our earlier bit. It's defined a thousand ways. Now, I am responsible also for the services portfolio at Cisco and the marketing revenue demand generation for services. And so that's usually easier because it's been around longer as a concept. When we talk about customer experience, it can be
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We make decisions based on storytelling and narrative. People build this idea that emotions and empathy cannot be attached towards progress. Force people to sit in a room in awkward silence and sit there and think about it. We have seen 5X, 6X growth and what our impact is from there.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
A bit more difficult to navigate. So I kind of just say, hey, I am there from a marketing sense to engage our customers in a way that makes them feel better. I mean, I know that that's a little oversimplified, but that is how I tend to introduce it and then move on at the dinner party.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I don't know. What's the best way to do it that isn't going to be controversial or is?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Content marketing is dead. I mean, that's the easiest way. Content marketing should be dead. It is... When we talk about content marketing and focusing on the output, it is a driver of a waste of time and a waste of effort. And most importantly, you are detached from what is meaningful to the customer.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
That doesn't mean that you can't land that and become engaging to the customer with your content, but that's not your primary focus. Your focus is on the thing and not the engagement. And that is, it's just a wrong approach in my mind.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I stopped us from doing what we did. And that was a lot of the content that we were producing at the beginning. So I'd say 80 to 90% of our production, I kind of stopped when I took over the team that I did. And you kind of have to validate that. You have folks that are doing things. They're building social media plans. They're building content. They're building email nurture journeys.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
There's a lot of different engagement.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Particularly in marketing, but you see it across enablement. You see it renewal. It's like, let's just put more out there. So for the marketing team, it was a traditional marketing team. It was pre-sales. It was the marketing funnel. It was content production through multiple channels and trying to hit a couple different audiences.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And what I did is I took the metrics of what we were doing and I started to show how we were reaching our customer and it was okay. And I think a lot of people lean on those metrics and say, hey, we're reaching our audience. That's fine. But then I took them a step further back and I said, put yourself in their shoes. Do you care about this?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And I think that was the hardest challenge is saying, do you actually care? And looking at the things that we were doing and did they resonate? Not to us, not from our company out, but from the perspective of the personas we were trying to hit. And it didn't, you know, it partially did. And I don't want to speak ill of the work that we did before. It was good, but it wasn't focused again on
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Does this matter? Are we reaching them in the spots they need to be? We were just kind of populating talking points, feeds and speeds, things that we wanted to communicate without actually stopping to slow down and think, do they care about this at this point?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I think it can. I think, again, if you're focused on it, I think success with content marketing is a happy accident. I don't think it's a process-driven success approach, right? If you're approaching it via the content and you have success, great. But you're not setting yourself up in a way that will systematically get you that success.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
design thinking, on empathy map, on the actual experiential part of customer experience, which is do less, reach folks where it matters, try to put yourself in the minds of what they're thinking. And, you know, I'd say where we were spending a bulk of our time in production before, we're now spending it in trying to understand what our customers are thinking.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
We're going to our sellers and having conversations. We're looking at industry studies of what matters. We're talking to more folks and actually putting ourselves in their shoes, which I think every good marketing organization does and every good customer experience organization does. But I think they tend to look after the fact and not sit there before and think, okay, I have this problem.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
I am so-and-so bank. I am so, you know, I'm in an industry. I have this problem. I have this fear that I'm trying to address or this opportunity that I'm trying to address. What do I want to see? And that's where I want us to meet them, not at trying to yank them and pull them to something that we've created, but where are they naturally going to go?
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And then talk to them in a way that resonates, that they care about, that helps them, right? And that drives everything else. Content, tactics, they all become the last thing that we focus on.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Get out of your silo. I mean, you're right. If you're looking for an ideal customer and you are just sitting in your echo chamber and having a conversation, you're not going to hit it. So you can do desktop research. You can see what trends are. But really, it's about slowing down, imagining you're somebody talking to sellers to reinforce that.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
And to folks that are engaging with the actual customer, or if you have the opportunity to talk to the customer themselves, right. And get some of that feedback that that's people don't a lot of time for that. They take their 40 hours to 50 hours a week. They have production. They have checklists that they have to do.
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
It's a really hard thing to feel like I'm going to devote 10 hours this week to sitting and thinking. It's a scary proposition for a lot of people at work. So for me, it has been about giving them the permission to do that, my team, the permission to do that, holding us accountable to thinking about it and not just holding us accountable to the output. So if you change, I mean...
Experts of Experience
This Marketing Exec Shut Down 90% of Their Content (& 5x’d Impact)
Think about it this way. You're an employee. Think of an employee, like a customer employee experience, right? How do I make them feel comfortable? What are they fearful of? Like you can do the same exact sort of thing with an employee that you can with a customer.