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135: Pranav Piyush: Why multi-touch attribution is broken and what you should do instead
Tuesday, September 3, 2024 • Duration 53:38
What’s up everyone, today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Pranav Piyush, Co-Founder and CEO at Paramark.
Summary: Pranav guides us out of the labyrinth of multi-touch attribution under the clear sky of incrementality and causality, urging marketers to focus on whether their efforts genuinely drive sales that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Early-stage startups can benefit by prioritizing simple methods like geo-based testing over complex attribution models, allowing intuition to guide resourceful experimentation. By understanding the underlying motivations and true causality behind customer actions, marketers can craft campaigns that resonate deeply and drive real results. As businesses grow, balancing intuition with structured analytics becomes crucial. Holdout tests and marketing mix modeling provide actionable insights, ensuring strategies remain effective in a competitive landscape. This approach transforms marketing from a cost into an investment in sustainable growth, making each dollar count. About Pranav
Pranav started his career at well known brands like PayPal and Dropbox
He co-founded Padlet, the popular collaboration app to make school less boring
He’s former Head of Growth at Magento and Pilot.com before becoming VP of Marketing at BILL
He’s also a Reforge Instructor for a new marketing measurement course
And in March of last year, Pranav co-founded Paramark to help marketers measure and forecast the impact of their investments
What’s More Valuable? Analytical Skills or Creative Taste?
Marketing's creative nature often gets overshadowed by the obsession with data. Recently, HubSpot’s co-founder Brian Halligan suggested that marketers with good taste are undervalued compared to those with analytical skills. Pranav agrees, arguing that creativity now drives the most significant impact in marketing. We often question the overuse of the term "data-driven" in marketing, suggesting a shift towards being more "creatively driven." Pranav responds, arguing that data-driven and data-informed are all kind of bullshit. Relying solely on being "data-informed" is not sufficient. He emphasizes that without the ability to discern the success of a creative idea through data, creativity alone falls short.
Marketers face the challenge of making memorable impressions on people they've never met, and this requires innovation and creativity. While data is essential, Pranav notes that many marketers don't truly understand the depth of analytical skills. True data literacy involves grasping complex concepts like correlation and causation, which are often missing in marketers' education.
Pranav points out that the dichotomy between creativity and analytics is overly simplistic. Marketers need to integrate both skills. This blend is crucial not only in marketing but in other business functions like product development. He uses the example of launching a feature and gauging its success. If only 10% of the customer base uses it, understanding the broader impact on adoption, revenue, and retention is essential.
Despite recognizing the importance of analytical skills, Pranav emphasizes that good taste in marketing offers a unique advantage. Creativity leads to building compelling campaigns that resonate more profoundly with audiences. This insight suggests that while data provides valuable insights, it is creativity that ultimately distinguishes successful marketing efforts. Pranav further highlights the importance of rigorous testing and measurement. A successful feature or campaign isn't just about positive feedback; it needs to contribute to tangible business outcomes, such as increased revenue or cost savings. Without proper measurement, the value of creative initiatives remains unclear.
Key takeaway: To truly excel in marketing, you need to embrace a harmonious balance between analytical skills and creative taste. This means honing your ability to interpret data while also nurturing your creative instincts to craft memorable campaigns. Instead of relying solely on data or creativity, focus on integrating these skills. Use data to measure the success of your creative ideas, ensuring they lead to meaningful business outcomes like increased revenue or customer retention. By blending data literacy with creative insight, you'll develop campaigns that resonate deeply and drive tangible results.
Understanding Incrementality in Marketing
We often hear marketers claiming they understand ROI and reporting, yet the concept of incrementality often eludes them. Pranav sheds light on this by differentiating between attribution and incrementality. Attribution, as he explains, is rooted in the idea of cause and effect. However, its usage has been diluted over time, losing its original meaning.
Pranav appreciates our provided definition of incrementality: business results from marketing campaigns or channels that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. He elaborates that if a prospect would have purchased a product without the influence of marketing, then that marketing effort isn't incremental. Conversely, if a prospect's decision to buy is directly influenced by marketing, then that effort is incremental.
He emphasizes the importance of understanding incrementality beyond traditional marketing channels, especially in B2B contexts. This involves considering scaled sales channels, partner channels, and affiliate channels. The essence of incrementality lies in recognizing the true impact of marketing efforts on sales and other business outcomes.
Pranav's insights underscore the need for marketers to move beyond surface-level metrics and understand the deeper implications of their strategies. By focusing on incrementality, they can more accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and make informed decisions that drive real business growth.
Key takeaway: Focus on incrementality to truly gauge your marketing impact. Instead of just relying on attribution metrics, assess whether your efforts genuinely drive sales that wouldn't have happened otherwise. By understanding and applying incrementality across all channels, you can refine your strategies and foster real business growth.
Unpacking Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) often gets hailed as the holy grail of marketing measurement. Many believe it's essential to solve attribution by capturing all touchpoints. However, Pranav argues that the obsession with MTA overlooks fundamental issues, particularly around causality.
When discussing attribution, we need to understand cause and effect. Pranav illustrates this with a simple example: if someone clicks on a Google link and converts, did that click cause the conversion? Sometimes it does, but other times it doesn't. He emphasizes the need to ask, "What prompted the search in the first place?" Without knowing this, we aren't truly understanding causality. We're merely observing sequences of actions without grasping their underlying motivations.
Pranav criticizes the current approach to MTA, which often amounts to behavioral analytics. This method logs sequences like A led to B led to C, but it doesn't clarify if A caused B. This lack of clarity is compounded by pressures on marketing and analytics teams to produce quick results, pushing them towards convenient but superficial solutions.
The martech industry, according to Pranav, has profited from building easy, superficial tools rather than delving into the complex but necessary task of understanding true causality. He believes this approach must change for the industry to advance meaningfully. By focusing on more robust methodologies, marketers can gain genuine insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns.
134: Jacqueline Freedman: Former leader at Grammarly and WeWork on how to become a trusted Martech advisor
Tuesday, August 27, 2024 • Duration 57:15
What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jacqueline Freedman, CEO and Founder at Monarch Advisory Partners.
Summary: Jacqueline straps on her jetpack and invites us to soar through the martech skies, teaching us how to navigate the journey of becoming an independent martech advisor. From hands-on execution tasks strategy and advisory projects and assembling a futuristic composable martech stack, we cover a lot of air miles. We navigate the build versus buy decision in martech, the realities of composable CDPs and embracing user-friendly modern marketing automation tools.
About Jacqueline
Jacqueline started her career in Account and relationship management before joining WeWork where she would eventually settle into a Global Engagement Marketing and Operations Manager role as the fifth marketing hire during the company’s hyper-growth
She later joined an email and lifecycle growth agency as the 2nd team member and built out their NYC office where she worked with startups ranging from seed to series C
She then moved over to Grammarly as the founding Marketing Operations hire where she built out the B2B MOPs team and led their marketing technology stack to support their transition to a B2B2C company
And recently Jacqueline strapped on her jetpack and went out on her own as a solopreneur founding Monarch Advisory Partners, a full-stack Marketing Ops and Martech consultancy
Why Introspection is the Secret Weapon for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Jacqueline, reflecting on her transition from Grammarly to entrepreneurship, reveals the depth of her decision-making process. With a family history rooted in entrepreneurship, Jacqueline always envisioned herself running her own business. Observing her father and grandfather, she felt like she had a front-row seat to an MBA. This early exposure planted the seed of entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t until she recognized her unique skill set that she felt truly ready to take the plunge.
The decision wasn’t impulsive. Jacqueline emphasized the role of introspection and reflection in her journey. She spent a year contemplating the right moment, fueled by her natural tendency to overthink. Through late nights and early mornings, she assessed her career achievements, from scaling WeWork during its prime to steering Grammarly’s shift to B2C. These experiences solidified her belief in her capabilities, leading her to recognize that she was ready for the entrepreneurial leap.
125: Michele Nieberding: Customer data infrastructure and server-side data processing
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 • Duration 50:24
What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Michele Nieberding, Director of Product Marketing at MetaRouter.
Summary: Michele takes us on a broad journey across job hopping, learning technical martech products, preparing for the cookie apocalypse and diving deep into the world of server side data processions and tag management. Her transition from sales to product marketing sparked new growth, blending her enthusiasm for learning technical martech products with practical strategies to improve sales outcomes. She emphasizes the importance of ethical marketing practices, like enhancing first-party data and focusing on consent management, crucial for building consumer trust. Michele also explores the benefits of server-side data processing, such as using systems like MetaRouter for real-time data handling, which improves site performance, data security, and compliance. This technical shift supports her broader view on the integration of marketing with data science, stressing the need for solid data management to navigate the complexities of modern marketing and data privacy laws effectively.
About Michele
Michele started her career in sales at Cvent, a meetings and events management software provider
She later had a short stint as a marketing consultant at Fishbowl a restaurant platform
And then joined a CRM company called Merkle as a Digital Marketing Manager where she wore a variety of marketing hats
This made her boomerang back to Cvent, but this time as a Product Marketing Manager where she would spend another 2 years with the company
She later took on the role of Senior PMM at Qualtrics, an online customer experience management platform
This led her to an exciting role leading Solutions Marketing at Iterable, where she was eventually promoted to Director of Product Marketing
Michele is also an Executive Mentor at Cornell University
Today she’s Director of Product Marketing at MetaRouter, a Customer Data Infrastructure startup
Why Job Hopping Can Be a Green Flag
When asked about the recent commentary from a CEO criticizing frequent job changes and claiming that you need to stay at a company at least 4 years to achieve anything worthwhile. Michele offered a compelling counterpoint that challenges old school views on career progression. Her journey in the tech industry illustrates the value of embracing various roles across different companies, especially in wild sectors like martech. Michele believes that the innevitably rapid advancements within tech demand adaptability and a willingness to tackle new challenges, which often means moving between jobs.
35: Email marketing audits part 2: Confirm, welcome but don’t sell too early
Tuesday, May 25, 2021 • Duration 25:54
Hey everyone, this is part 2 of 3 on marketing email audits. Whether you’re in-house or you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service, our hope is that you can level up your email game.
In the last episode, we covered research tips and questions you should ask yourself before the audit. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the actual audit and what to look for, tips and tactics.
Next week, our last episode of the series will cover what email improvements to suggest and experiment with.
Alright JT, let’s get to it. There’s three crucial things I want to make sure we cover today as part of any email audit.
A theme that you’ll hear throughout today’s episode is timing your emails around your user’s journey, and not selling too early or to users that aren’t ready to buy.
But let's start with the confirmation email and the welcome email.
Regardless of what you're auditing, those will be part of the starting journey for all new users right?
Confirmation email Depending on the scope of your audit you need to decide if you’re going to audit individual emails or more high level improvements. I prefer the former. I go email by email, not starting with the Welcome email but the confirmation email. That’s really the first email touch point.
We want to maximise the chances that this email reaches the inbox. To do that we want to keep it short and simple with a single CTA, confirm your email. We don’t want too many images or text or links.
We need this to land in the inbox and get through most spam filters.
Such a balance of beautiful design and impact versus sneaking past email filters. Too much HTML gets caught.
Welcome email We had a full episode dedicated to really making this email stand out, and that’s the core goal of this email.
Everyone expects it. Most companies have a huge fancy HTML template with heavy brand and a bunch of helpful resources and links to get started.
34: Email marketing audits part 1: For the love of understanding your audience
Tuesday, May 18, 2021 • Duration 20:58
Educational series, product onboarding, upsell sequences… regardless of where you look in your funnel, there’s marketing emails to be audited.
Like any investigation, an email audit combines thorough observations, deductive reasoning and extra points for style and bold decisions.
Our hope with this 3 part series is that you can add another feather in your detective hat. Whether you’re consulting and want to offer email audits as a service or you’re in-house and you want to level up your company’s email game.
We’re going to cover research and questions you should ask yourself before the audit, what to look for in your actual audit, tips, tactics and finally what improvements to suggest and experiment with.
Today’s main takeaway is: Users have ideal paths to discovering your product or service, understand these moments deeply and use email to guide users along this path.
Alright JT, email onboarding is close to my heart, I’ve built many of these in-house but I’ve also had the pleasure of consulting and auditing the onboarding series for a few SaaS and tech companies.
It’s fascinating to get to see all the different ways you can welcome users to your product via email.
Before we talk about what order to tackle things, let’s talk about great email onboarding.
What’s great onboarding?
Great email onboarding consists of guiding/helping users through a series of “aha” moments as they interact with your brand and product. Users receive units of value for each step as they gain confidence in the product’s ability to complete their jobs to be done.
In a product-led company, this should be corroborated by the product/ux team. What wow moments exist in the ideal path, and use email to guide them along this path.
Data is part 1, story is part 2 and where marketing shines. What are some examples of aha moments?
I’ve been thinking through what an “aha” series of steps might look like for a free Convertkit user:
33: What is async work and is it truly attainable?
Tuesday, May 11, 2021 • Duration 40:16
Back to office, staying fully remote, flexible hybrid setup. Global pandemics gave millions of knowledge workers the taste of remote work. And a lot of them are never going back.
A global distributed workforce means access to untapped talent but it also means time zone and synchronous meeting challenges.
Getting everyone from your local Toronto office to show up to the same meeting at 10am EST is pretty easy. Running the same meeting with a team spread across 5 time zones makes this much more challenging. Especially if you want to promote autonomous and flexible work schedules.
The solution isn’t less meetings or hybrid meetings. The solution is asynchronous communication.
In today’s episode we’re going to cover what async means exactly, being able to say “I’ll get that done on my own time”.
We’ll dispel some of the misconceptions and dive into the stages of transformation towards autonomy.
Hopefully you’ll be better positioned to encourage async in your day to day, whether you're in-house or freelance adapting now is key for leading any teams in the future.
Intro
Hundreds of companies declared themselves remote first and digital first last year. A lot of them are massive corporations too. This transition will be excruciatingly slow and painful for big orgs.
These orgs are studying companies who have been doing this for decades. Remote work isn’t new for everyone.
Convertkit, Close, Basecamp (60+ actually much lower with recent policy changes), Helpscout, Clearbit, Buffer, Doist (100+) and Zapier is 500 people, remote-first all smaller, very little funding, innovators in the remote space.
There’s also the bigger teams too.
Automattic, the people behind WordPress are 1,000+ global distributed team and have been from the early days.
InVision is fully remote, 1000+, GitHub is 3,000+.
Something all of these distributed work pioneers talk about is over-communication in the written form, but specifically, asynchronous communication.
32: Is the future of Martech no-code?
Tuesday, May 4, 2021 • Duration 23:08
We're going to argue two main points:
First, no-code is absolutely the future for marketing and that it opens up exciting possibilities (aka, democratizes digital marketing)
Second, what really qualifies as a no-code tool is much more narrow and potentially useful than you might find elsewhere on the internet
Is marketing hijacking another development trend and bending it to our own purposes? Is this an attempt to fit in with the cool kids by being part of a trend?
Is the future of Martech no-code? Has it always been no-code?
What does no-code really mean?
Have you ever been half way through building something, a new campaign, a landing page you’re really excited about... but you hit a technical hiccup.
“Oooh, might need a script for that” or “Damn, if only I could code”.
As marketers, we’ve all felt this roadblock. We had a full episode dedicated to this-- episode #24: why marketers should learn to code.
No-code is not using that excuse. Can’t code? Don’t know how to build scripts? No problem, there’s a no-code solution for that.
Is Canva a no-code tool? Did you use code to create images in Photoshop or Illustrator? This is what tripped me up in the beginning — but Canva is one of the hottest tools today and it’s absolutely considered in the same breath as other no-code tools.
While your typical definition of no-code would look at the ability to create software applications with a user interface, I’d argue that marketing’s use of no-code is a bit looser. I’d define a no-code solution as one that lowers the barrier entry to the point that you only need to use a user interface to complete your objective.
No way am I going into photoshop - someone tried to teach me photoshop before and it was terrible. I’m not layering stuff — but Canva, I can get something good enough in minutes.
These are pretty murky waters for us to be wading into — but such is this fascinating trend.
31: Marketing Artifacts and the website of doom
Tuesday, April 27, 2021 • Duration 24:13
Who built this? Why did they build this? What was the purpose of this?
Sometimes, marketing can look a lot like archaeology. Unearthing ancient relics, reverse engineering them, and trying to understand how they were used by your ancestors. Like an ape discovering a tool for the first time, you look at them with a mix of bewilderment and awe. I didn’t know we were so advanced back in --- 2011.
You’ve discovered a marketing artifact, and the internet is full of them. Form submits that go to legacy email automation systems, blog posts written before the last ice age, and strategies for a trend that went extinct long ago.
As marketers, we need to be experts at carefully extracting these artifacts, evaluating their worth, and deciding whether to revitalize them or put them in a museum.
Honestly, you’ll encounter this more in your career than you’d probably like, so we’re going to chat about how to work with marketing artifacts
In the world of tech startups, a lot of marketers only last a 12-18 months before they move on to their next position. They make a bunch of content, then move on, someone comes in to fill their role. This type of inheritance is super common in all areas of marketing. Why is this a problem?
No one joining a marketing company wants to inherit someone else’s mess. It’s like renting an AirBnB and finding the dishwasher is still full of dirty dishes.
At least, that’s the perception.
The problem is that marketers love to create net new content. We’ve been programmed to think content is king -- and have responded by creating mountains and mountains of content.
Most of us in marketing come from some form of content creation background -- it’s literally our instinct.
Nothing sucks the wind out of a new job like cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s easy for the content side to sweep things under the rug. But for tech systems, it’s way harder to clean up.
You get this perception that tool X sucks or tool Y sucks. I know you’re deeper in the ops area -- how often do you hear a new CMO or VP start looking to migrate off of marketo or hubspot or whatever?
30: Be productive, stay sane and healthy
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 • Duration 26:36
Jon and I are both pretty busy dudes.
Jon
a father,
he works for Klipfolio,
he’s a podcaster,
he’s a consultant,
he’s learning to code and
he manages a community of marketers.
Despite all that, JT still finds time to unearth the best UFO threads on Reddit and the dankest GME meme stocks.
Phil is
a husband and dog father (lolz)
I work for Close,
I’m a podcaster,
I teach a post grad marketing certificate,
I mentor local marketers, and
I’m an avid member of several marketing communities
Despite all that, I still find time to run a fantasy hockey league and binge all the best TV shows on Netflix.
So how do we do it while staying happy and healthy (for the most part).
Alright, I want to start by breaking down our weekly schedules by putting everything into 6 priority buckets:
Family and friends
Health
Learning
Work
Chores
Escapism and hobbies
Being productive and having an effective routine gives you room to fit things from all 6 buckets into your week.
Sunday nights are for time blocking I like to plan my week on Sunday nights, that’s where I finish blocking time in my calendar. Might be controversial because of weekend but sometimes I have too many work things going on in my head before bed on Sunday, so planning my week before going to sleep is a great way to put my mind at ease.
Go through the list of priorities, break them up into 1-2 tasks and block time in my calendar for it. As much as I can, I like to theme my weeks with 1 big thing I want to do. What’s my #1 focus.
Key here is not over blocking. Leave some flex in there to move things around as things pop up during the week.
29: Diet SEO for lean gains 💪
Tuesday, April 13, 2021 • Duration 22:23
What is the most important skill for an SEO? Technical, content, analytics, project management?
Use google search to start - really look at results, what’s being displayed, what Google is automatically serving up => your job here is to intuit what Google thinks your users want.
SEO is extremely competitive. I remember back when we worked together our competitors seemed to be running your playbook at the same time, and it made things tough. What’s your advice for competitive SEO?
Look at the structure of the top few results on Google — What on-page elements are they using? What can you glean from the information architecture?
I know you’ve tried or used most of the tools out there. For our listeners on a shoestring budget -- what do you recommend for analytics and reporting?
Google Search Console and Google Analytics => This is a great feature and I’m shocked at how few people actually take the time to set this up. So many quick tips -
Set a filter to see things on second page. Sort to see top converting pages (tsk tsk set up goal tracking). Sort to see CTRs. Drill down into pages to see keywords.
What about technical SEO? Everyone talks about it, but it’s I don’t think many people know how to improve this area of SEO.
Google Page insights. Enter your site and see how it performs on mobile device. It gives a great print out of action items - such as sizing images, painting content before things load up.
Lighthouse: Chrome developer tools and gives you a super technical review of your site.
How do SEOs on a budget prepare for the future of search?
Voice Search and Voice Utility.
Mobile is king of SEO, and Voice is the next generation of search (still up for debate).
If you ask Alexa or Siri or Google for an answer, voice search is at play. Structure your content for voice and you’ll be rewarded.
Jacqueline’s courage was also bolstered by her practical approach. While at Grammarly, she had already begun advising several founders, driven by her passion for problem-solving rather than monetary gain. These conversations not only honed her skills but also provided a soft landing into entrepreneurship. By the time she officially launched her business, she had a lineup of clients ready, thanks to her reputation and the support of colleagues and partners who championed her abilities.
Her journey highlights the importance of strategic preparation and the value of building a strong professional network. Jacqueline’s story is a testament to how a combination of introspection, practical experience, and a supportive community can make a significant career transition smoother and more successful.
Key takeaway: Use introspection to identify your unique skills and career achievements. Reflecting on these aspects will not only boost your confidence but also clarify your readiness for major career changes, like transitioning to entrepreneurship.
How TV Dramatization Barely Scratches WeWork's Reality
When asked about the accuracy of the WeWork TV show "WeCrashed" on Apple TV, Jacqueline offered a candid perspective. Having watched all the content related to WeWork, she noted that "WeCrashed" starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, came closest to capturing the essence of the events. However, she emphasized that the series only scratched the surface of what truly transpired.
Jacqueline explained that while the series contained a kernel of truth, the actual events at WeWork were far more intense. Everything depicted in the show was amplified tenfold in reality. This amplification was very much in line with WeWork's brand, known for its high-energy and sometimes chaotic environment. She described her experience of watching the dramatization as somewhat PTSD-inducing due to its accuracy in portraying the underlying ethos of WeWork.
Despite the dramatization, Jacqueline found it fascinating and somewhat validating to see the story unfold on screen. The series succeeded in conveying the core truth of WeWork's journey, even if it couldn't fully encapsulate the extremities of the real-life scenarios. For Jacqueline, revisiting those memories through the show was a mixed experience, balancing between validation and the resurfacing of intense memories.
Her insights underscore the dramatic nature of WeWork’s history and how media adaptations, while engaging, often have to simplify or condense reality. For viewers, it’s a reminder that behind the scenes, the stories of such companies are often more complex and multifaceted than any series can fully capture.
Key takeaway: Jacqueline noted that while "WeCrashed" captured the essence of WeWork, it only scratched the surface of the true events, which were far more intense. The dramatization, though somewhat accurate and PTSD-inducing, validated the chaotic environment of WeWork. However, she emphasized that media adaptations often simplify the complexities of real-life scenarios.
How to Become a Martech Advisor
Balancing Hands On Execution Projects vs Strategic Advice
Jacqueline addresses the nuanced demands of clients in marketing operations (MOPs). While she shares a passion for every facet of MOPs, she acknowledges a point in her career where hands-on tasks like copywriting and sending emails no longer align with her long-term vision. This shift towards focusing on advisement and strategy is something she enjoys, and it's about setting clear expectations from the start with clients.
Each client’s needs vary, which Jacqueline finds exciting. However, it necessitates clear communication about what she offers. When clients require extensive lifecycle or demand generation email execution, Jacqueline is upfront about her role. If it's a short-term need, she might handle it, but for long-term commitments, she refers them to trusted partners. She mentions firms like Modular Marketing and Ragnarok, highlighting her strong relationships with these agencies. This symbiotic partnership ensures clients get top-notch service while allowing Jacqueline to concentrate on strategic advisement.
By focusing on strategy, Jacqueline can provide high-level insights and direction that impact her clients' overall marketing operations. She values the ability to step back from the minutiae and look at the bigger picture, helping businesses navigate their marketing landscapes more effectively. This approach not only suits her professional growth but also ensures her clients receive specialized, high-quality execution from her partners.
Jacqueline’s journey exemplifies the importance of evolving in one’s career and recognizing when to delegate tasks that no longer fit one’s vision. It’s about leveraging strengths and building a network of reliable partners to deliver comprehensive solutions. Her ability to set expectations and offer strategic guidance is a testament to her experience and foresight in the marketing operations field.
Key takeaway: When transitioning to a more strategic consulting role, clearly communicate your focus and delegate hands-on tasks to trusted partners. This allows you to leverage your strengths, provi...
Michele argued that the notion of needing several years to make a significant impact in a company might indicate deeper issues with the hiring or role alignment process. In her experience, impactful contributions don't necessarily require long tenures. She shared an anecdote from her last position where she was promoted twice within just 12 months, underscoring her ability to drive meaningful change swiftly. Her success stories reflect her high performance and dedication to progress every day she's at work.
This perspective brings into question the disparity in the traditional view of loyalty, highlighting that while businesses often tout long tenures as signs of allegiance and even liken their teams to families, they frequently fail to uphold their end during challenging times, opting instead to cut numerous lower-level positions rather than making reductions at the top.
Michele highlighted that nowadays the real value lies in how much an individual can accelerate growth and bring about change, rather than how long they remain in a position. This approach benefits the companies that embrace such high-performing individuals.
Her stance suggests that companies should rethink their hiring strategies and the attributes they value in employees. The focus should shift towards flexibility, quick adaptation, and the ability to deliver results efficiently—qualities that are crucial in a sector as fluid as technology.
Key takeaway: Companies need humans that can adapt quickly and make significant impacts in relatively short periods, not half a decade. Michele’s experience shows that job mobility can be a sign of a high-performing individual capable of driving innovation and growth who’s looking out for themselves and owning their career paths. Companies should value flexibility and quick adaptability as much as, if not more than, long-term tenure.
Making the Leap From Sales to Product Marketing
Michele's career shift from sales to product marketing at Cvent is a perfect example of how adaptable skills can propel your career forward. Starting in sales, Michele thrived by meeting challenges head-on and solving customers' problems effectively. Her success wasn't unnoticed; she was a top sales rep, deeply involved in every aspect of the products she sold. However, Michele knew she wanted more from her career. Unable to transfer from sales to marketing internally, her ambition to explore beyond sales led her to an agency role where she broadened her marketing expertise.
Despite enjoying the creative rush at the agency and wearing all of the hats, Michele felt something was missing. She could suggest marketing strategies but rarely saw how they played out, missing the direct impact of her work. This gap led her back to Cvent when a product marketing role opened up. It was a new territory, but she knew the product inside out from her sales days, which gave her a unique edge.
Stepping into product marketing, Michele fell in love with the strategic and creative elements of the role. She was right back at solving problems, but this time she was crafting the narrative and directly influencing the product's market journey. It was different from sales but used many of the same skills in new ways.
Today, Michele can't see herself doing anything else. Her story isn't just about a job change; it's about finding your niche where you can use your talents to the fullest. She took her in-depth product knowledge from sales and seamlessly integrated it with the marketing skills she honed along the way, proving that the right move at the right time can redefine your career.
Key takeaway: Michele's switch from sales to product marketing shows how valuable it is to apply your skills in new contexts. For marketers looking to keep their careers vibrant and impactful, consider how your current skills can open new doors within your field. It’s not just about climbing the ladder; sometimes, it’s about stepping onto a completely different one.
What Do Sales and Product Marketing Have in Common?
It's not always intuitive, but one fundamental commonality between sales and product marketing is the requirement to deeply understand your product. Michele’s strategy for mastering new martech tools showcases just how critical this understanding is, not only for personal growth but also for making significant contributions to her team and the broader company objectives.
When Michele joins a new company, she immediately seeks to connect with colleagues from sales, customer success, and technical teams such as solution architects. These relationships are crucial as they provide a wealth of insights into the product's real-world applications, an invaluable resource for anyone in product marketing. Michele’s early days in any role are spent actively engaging: participating in calls, attending demos, and using the tools herself as much as possible. This hands-on experience allows her to view the product through the eyes of a user, which is essential for crafting messages that resonate with potential customers...
The danger with overloading users too soon Something that lives rent free in my brain when I think email onboarding is Val Geisler’s dinner party strategy. When you host people over for a dinner party--be it a backyard BBQ or a fancy social event, the evening itself has many tracks.
You welcome guests,
Take their coats, introduce them to others
You take their drinks order and show them to a seat
there’s the appetizer round,
a main course,
side dishes,
and dessert,
and then you invite them back.
If the Welcome email has 10+ links to tutorials and courses and help articles, it’s almost like your guest’s arrive to your house for the dinner party and before they can take their coats off you shove the main course sprinkled with dessert in their face.
I like this dinner guest analogy a lot. I think it's also a lot about coordinating with product. Combined, you set the ambience. The smell of food, the setting, the dress code -- email needs to blend in to the decorum. Seeing how the product<>email experience jive is a big opportunity.
Instead of overwhelming users with links, Welcome emails are great starting points to train users to open the next emails. This can be done with storytelling and standing out.
We should be training users to open our next email and pushing them to 1 specific moment of delight back in the product.
Consider a stronger CTA to push users to finish their onboarding. They could try "Add your first subscriber" or "build your first landing page" instead of "Log in".
There's an opportunity to tell the Convertkit story instead of just welcoming them to the family. Users starting an email tool are also trialing competitors. So they are getting similar emails.
Selling too early Early in the journey we want to nudge users to complete steps in the product that nudge them to moments of delight and getting value from the product.
You don’t want to turn off users and start selling to everyone, especially not users that haven’t done much in the product yet.
The best way to get users to upgrade to a paid plan is to let them try the product and reach success. Instead of talking about the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan right away, we should be telling users how and why Convertkit is their best choice.
We want to be delighting the user and making sure they are accomplishing tasks in the product. Working on the user's timeline rather than asking them to upgrade right away.
Mindlessly forcing people through a user journey is bad. The idea that you need to be everything to everyone is equally bad. Segmentation is key, behaviour based triggered emails are also key.
That’s actually part 3/3 of our series.
We covered what to do before the audit in part 1, part 2 was the actual audit and the most important aspects of the first two emails in your sequence and part 3 next week is what you should be suggesting as part of improvements.
We’ll specifically be touching on segmentation and behaviour based triggered emails. Chat then.
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-- Intro music by Wowa via Unminus Cover art created with help via Undraw
Aha moments example
A close friend recommends Convertkit as the ideal place to start for my newsletter
I have a quick read through backlinko’s guide to convertkit and get a real good sense of what the product can do
I’m able to quickly signup and import my subscribers from Mailchimp
I’m able to build my first signup form and connect it to my WP site
I watch a 20 minute video tutorial on intro to advanced automations in Pro plans
I successfully connect my signup form to my WP site
What email onboarding should and should not be Ultimately, great email onboarding convinces users to stick around and boosts overall engagement and retention.
Email onboarding should be used to:
Tell the company’s story
Answer questions/objections
Demonstrate how the product solves user’s pain
Nudge users to specific common conversion actions
Show the art of the possible
Tie what the user has done in their account
Email onboarding should not be used to:
Get everyone to buy immediately
Send the same call to action
Seem cold and impersonal
An extension of your brand and product
Coordinate with product experience to be integrated with it
Doesn’t trip over the feet of product-based emails or sales emails
Build trust/rapport
Be referenceable down the line when user needs info, point of contact, etc
Understanding your customers and users Before diving into any email audit, it’s important to get into your users’ headspace.
Obviously this differs whether you're leading this audit in-house or as a consultant.
Often when you are contracting, you won’t have a ton of customer research data available to you. In spite of customer research/interviews and jobs to be done insights, here’s a few places to spend a bit of time reading:
Review sites on G2, capterra
Tutorials on getting started with the product from the community
Searching on twitter @company threads
These spots really give me a sense of the language used and what problems are being solved as well the steps users need to take to be able to “hire” the company for a specific job.
Gimme some JBTD examples with something like Covnertkit?
Jobs to be done example Users signup for Convertkit probably because they want to grow their personal brands, sites and businesses. Not because they want an email marketing tool.
Some of the common themes and jobs that were highlighted throughout reviews and tutorials were:
How to build an email list
Send automated email reminders
Sell services/contact or products/ecommerce
Build a personal brand, start an audience, build a web presence
The predominant themes and categories of use cases were:
Artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers
Athletes, coaches, influencers
Marketers, bloggers, podcasters, makers
Youtubers, streamers, musicians
Diving deep into a few tutorials highlighted a few prerequisites for hitting what are likely common conversion actions or moments of delight in the early web building journey:
Having a subscriber base
Having a form connected to your site to accept new subs
Share a link to your new landing page on social
Send a broadcast email to subs
Understanding the customer pain point precisely the moment before they start looking for you.
So we just covered part 1 of our 3 part series on email audits, we talked about what great email onboarding should and should not do, we gave you spots to look for user research when there’s a whole lot to start with, and we chatted a bit about jobs to be done and user pain points.
Part 2 next week dives into the email audit itself, specifically what you should be looking for in the first two emails.
Catch you next time.
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-- Intro music by Wowa via Unminus Cover art created with help via Undraw
In the world of most marketers, and knowledge workers for that matter, very little of your day to day tasks are emergencies, or require immediate action.
The nature of async can be summed with a short sentence: I’ll get to that as soon as I get the chance, or on my own time.
Async is sending a message and having a common understanding that an immediate response is not expected. Email is usually async. You send it and you expect an answer in a day or 2 or more. Recipient opens that email on their time and responds when they get the chance.
Synchronous communication is sending a message and the recipient needs to process and respond in real time immediately. In a meeting with your team on Zoom, you say something, your team members receive and respond right away.
When you take the time to think about it, most of what you do in your job could be done with a 1-way written update sent to a single person or a group of people, who can respond as soon as they get the chance.
Obviously there’s times when there’s emergencies, or sometimes the nature of your work requires real time collaboration like live support teams or front line sales reps, and there’s different ways of tackling those situations than async.
Examples
Instead of saying: hey do you have 15mins to chat today About this project?
Async is saying: here’s two questions I have regarding the last update you made on this project.
Instead of saying: here’s an invite to a meeting where I’m going to walk you through a project update and I’m mostly going to be doing the talking, everyone will be seeing this for the first time and I’ll be asking for your attention for 1 hour and immediate feedback.
Async is saying: here’s a short summary of a project update followed by a detailed overview of a problem I’m having and specific questions I’d like guidance on. Here’s what I’ve done so far, here’s when I need an answer by.
Benefits
Deep work / flow state A huge % of your workforce is introverted and perform better when they’ve had the chance to think before they are asked to give a response and give more space for flow/deep work.
Tons of research shows that increasing response times allows people time to reflect and remove emotion from the equation thus making better decisions.
Human centered way of working As one CEO, Sudeesh Nair, of ThoughtSpot, very active on Twitter about async, one of my fav quotes from him is:
“…the ability to let people in whenever they want to work, however long they want to work in a day…that’s what asynchronous is about. If you think that way, you have to make more intentional changes in the work process, collaboration process, to enable every one of those people to come into the workforce.”
Productive night owls Many people are night owls. We’re all wired differently to be our most creative and intellectual during specific parts of the day, commonly, early morning and night.
This is derived from chronotypes, our preferred sleeping patterns.
But imagine forcing a pure night owl to work 9am to 5pm. And then giving this same person the ability to work 11-3pm and 9pm-11pm.
The opposite is also true for ultra early risers like JT.
Async teams give everyone way more flexibility to get their work done when they are more alert and productive.
Just gotta strive for some overlap, you can’t NEVER have in-person meetings.
Misconceptions / passing baton is too slow / project management tools suck
Passing the baton with project management tools This might be hard for folks who are used to making decisions in a single room together and talking it out. Or if you’re used to getting answers to questions right away instead of spending time solo and figuring it out yourself.
Consider this: globally distributed teams, who work async and master ‘passing the baton’, can get three times more done than a local team relying on everybody to be in an office between 9am and 5pm.
This is something that Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO and WP founder has pointed out in a few podcasts.
A local centralised company that runs on real-time noisy office environments with plenty of all too common consensus-seeking meetings cannot and will not survive in the next few years.
Project management tools such as Asana are key to helping you run an async ship. How many sync/update meetings have you had where people go around the room one after the other updating everyone on their asana tasks when everyone knows they could’ve read up on those updates without a meeting.
This requires diligence and it’s not for everyone.
Project management tools often drive tennis games of back and forths.
Avoiding tennis games of back and forths
One of the biggest knocks against async is that it slows things down and often times, what could’ve been a simple pre-game discussion turned into a marathon tennis game of back and forth.
Tips to avoid this:
Give context, lots of context, make it skimmable
Give action items, deadlines when possible
Levels of autonomy / How you can help change your org Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/WP founder often talks about his levels of autonomy, it’s modeled after the self driving car level of autonomy.
5 levels:
0 - Coffee baristas, construction workers. You need to be in a physical location to do the work.
1 - Not remote-friendly, old school but in seats, company space, company time.
...
So there's a cool difference between tools to build products and tools to sell products and run companies.
no-code building / app development
no-code martech / selling products
Sometimes the tool to sell a product like a podcast (promoting or ads), might also be the product in some case, like us, not monetizing, just creating content.
Example, Convertkit is no-code email marketing tool, unless you know css/html and you can totally customize things behind the scenes.
Is Convertkit a no-code tool to sell a product/martech or is it building a product? Convertkit is is more than just an email marketing tool, it’s what newsletter creators use to build an audience and connect with fans, it’s an email designer, a landing page builder, a form builder and they are just diving into ecommerce.
Isn’t every marketing tool a no-code tool?
I’ve been using Marketo or HubSpot my entire career - turns out I’ve been using no-code tools my entire. But before I start congratulating myself on being on the cutting edge of this trend, I think it’s important we really sharpen our focus here.
No code isn’t about using user-interfaces to accomplish a job — I think in the marketing context it’s about breaking the dependency on technical experts as well as subject matter experts.
The idea of Canva as a graphic design tool may drive some designers crazy — but it’s borne out of a marketer’s need to get good enough now and not perfection later.
I love this idea of breaking the dependency on technical and subject matter experts. This has been fascinating to watch in the indie maker community. Some call this the creator economy.
Think there’s a lot of newsletters and podcasts already? Think again. Worldwide pandemics have accelerated remote work but they also motivated millions of people to become creators. More and more writers, teachers, film makers, photographers, artists all go DTC-- direct to consumer.
Categories:
Workflow automation — tools like Zapier allow you to configure automation without knowing any python or how to connect to APIs
Web development — tools like Wordpress or Webflow allow folks to create websites without getting mired in CSS or JavaScript
Analytics — create reports and dashboards without being an analyst or having to fight with APIs — cough cough Klipfolio
The no-code category needs to be narrower to be relevant. I see lists all the time saying that tools like Slack or HubSpot are no-code. They are awesome tools — but no marketer is coding databases and setting up scripts to send our instant messages or emails — no developer either for that matter.
Instead, to be relevant, no code martech tools need to replace or substitute the need for technical or subject matter expertise.
Is no-code anti-code?
The no-code movement is borrowed from development and is most certainly not anti-code. In fact, the no-code movement could be said to be pro-code!
In development land, the idea of no code is to remove redundant and repetitive tasks from the coding process. For example, if you’re application requires online payment, you don’t want to get bogged down coding an payment system from scratch. You’d just plug into Zuora or Stripe.
No-code is about reusing components that solve common problems so you can focus your development efforts on your secret sauce. I get a sense sometimes from marketers that we mix this up — no-code isn’t anti-code! You need code to build to build these tools.
Developers don’t worry about no-code taking their jobs — in fact, most I’ve talked to love them because they can focus on writing dope code instead of solving redundant problems.
Is marketing hijacking a development trend?
Marketing loves technology. The CMOs budget has grown exponentially in the past 10 years, and this trend continues. The rise of Revenue Operations puts a mission behind all this software — and imbues those operational activities with a mission — to enable revenue generation.
These twin trends supercharge marketing when it comes to getting exposed to new products and technologies. Naturally, marketing has picked up on the no-code trend and the question is whether this really applies. Is marketing hijacking a development trend?
This is an interesting question. As someone who has dedicated a lot of time to learning to code, at first I felt that — yes, marketing is borrowing a buzz word so we could fit in with the cool kids at the lunch table.
I’ve been digging in a lot deeper on this, though, and I’ve refined my perspective. I believe the no-code trend absolutely applies to marketing.
The future of no-code
Martech is definitely heading into the no-code waters. I don’t think it’s a transformative force per se, but rather a rapid evolution of applications to make those jobs to be done easier, faster, and better.
I don’t think folks working near marketing need to be worried -- marketers want to spin up a landing page with a form almost as fast as they want to tear it down and rebuild it. I think the benefit of no-code to experts who support marketers is they’ll work on more interesting, nuanced projects. Don’t build a landing page -- let’s build a custom product page or home page.
I do think one potential downfall is that quality may drop in some areas. You can’t replace a great graphic designer with Canva -- the skills required to do this work are still important and are the difference between an Apple-esque brand and your friend’s yoga studio. But that’s the point -- it allows all of us the opportunity to build and sell our stuff on the internet.
Even advanced no-code martech will still r...
Yea very often. Senior leaders come in with the tools they are familiar with and demand a migration in the next year haha
I’ve had the experience of building on a fresh underutilized instance of Pardot
Configuring and managing the Marketo beast you gave me the keys for at Klipfolio. Funny enough, now that you’re back at Klipfolio, you were stuck uncovering some of the webs I tangled.
I’ve also had the migration side of this as well, while I was migrating out of Hubspot, you were migrating to Hubspot.
Martech artifacts are everywhere! The maretch landscape of doom is growing everyday, and each of these vendors can easily be a failed trial. If it’s a free product, then you could be using it forever. One thing that really gets me is how underutilized existing software is before we start asking for budget for the next thing. I was the type of kid who had to finish each portion on my plate before I moved on to the next thing -- I’d eat my broccoli, then my potatoes, then my chicken.
In marketing automation especially, you get players like Marketo / HubSpot that have so many features available out of the box. These features sometimes, however, aren’t as powerful as you can get from other tools. I noticed this with web personalization and forms.
Hubspot has a blog CMS, they have email automation, they have forms, they have a CRM… they have something for everyone… That’s a really great way to make a mediocre tool. Everything is average to please the average user.
We use 4 tools instead of Hubspot and they all give us features and powers that hubspot alone cannot.
We moved our blog to Ghost which has a beautiful UX and writing experience for my content team and they were pumped to get out of the clunky HS CMS
We moved email automation to Customer.io, honestly my favorite email workflow building tool. Super intuitive and fast.
I’m a huge fan of convertflow for forms, DriftRock a UK startup is also doing cool things with forms. No one wants to use a crappy tool.
And obviously we use Close for our CRM.
These 4 tools cost us less than hubspot alone cost us.
Totally. Also, we all like shiny objects:
I think the key is to identify areas where you want to bring in a new tool. Check your toolset out, and see if they have a version of that feature.
Run a test or experiment, and validate your approach.
Speaking of forms, what about the web form that submits to nowhere?
When I migrated out of hubspot forms, Close had like 200+ ebook and gated content forms that I needed to re-create and map to a download link and a resource.
Lots of companies don’t manage this well.
Yeah, customer’s hate this -- it’s right up there with online chat that doesn’t connect with a live agent.
This happens so often -- it’s not even funny
It’s actually really hard to find things like form embeds on a website.
I use a tool called screaming frog which has a custom extraction tool which allows you to specify different selectors to crawl your website
The other way to do this is to look at forms within your system and pull them out that way -- only works if you know all the systems at play
You’re giving me PTSD. Enough about marketing automation and let’s talk about the website.
JT, I know you spend a lot of time in SEO land -- from talking with you I know you’re really big on updating existing content instead of just creating new content. Walk us through the advantages of that.
Years ago I ran an experiment where I started updating existing content to see if I could improve traffic and rankings. What I found is that I could consistently move pages from 2nd page and beyond to the first page => this gave something like a 200-400% lift on conversions.
SEO is like gardening. You don’t just toss a bunch of seeds in the ground and expect them to grow. You need to tend them and nurture them in order for them to grow
What about when the garden is overrun with weeds and the last gardener has skipped town?
Resist the temptation to clearcut! There are often very valuable plants in that garden.
As an SEO, you need to get good at determining which pieces of content are distractions and which pieces of content are really valuable
Use search console’s GA plug-in to see conversion rates and traffic
What types of problems do you see when trying to clear out the garden?
Outdated messaging, positioning
Language
Trends that have died
JT, is there really value in updating and managing all this content? We live in such a transactional society, it’s almost always easier to create new.
Heck yes it’s easier to start from scratch. I resist that temptation all the time -- it’s hard to look at a web page that is ranking on second page, figure out why it ranks, and how to preserve it’s ranking.
There is a ton of value in this, however. I’ve seen first-hand how often a simple update can yield a big result. It’s way easier to improve the performance of a 2nd page asset than get a new asset all the way to 2nd page.
I feel like it’s a skillset that you really need to work on. In my own career as a consultant and in-house marketer, I’ve almost always seen or been a part of website migration projects. I think this...
Daily walks with my dog I split between 3 modes, 1 is podcast, 2 is music, 3 is just silence.
Monday nights 1 hour of shitty TV if I’ve worked on the cast.
Tuesday and Thursday nights Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually blocked for reading. My wife is part of a book club and is an avid reader, so we try our ebay to turn the TV off on Tuesdays and open a book.
I alternate between a book on Tuesday and on Thursday I learn something, right now learning Segment.js but have plans for SQL and deeper API.
Wednesday nights I usually plan a friends or family zoom call on Wed nights, I usually have no meeting Wednesdays so I’m happy to get some social time in the second half of the day.
Something we want to try is everyone picking the same recipe, we open Zoom and watch each other chaotically build a recipe and eat together.
Sometimes I’ll host a Zoom with friends and we watch a bunch of hockey games over screenshare.
Friday nights Most Friday nights are reserved for my wife, we’ll usually order in and watch TV or a documentary.
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