Andrew Baird is the VP of Marketing at TierPoint, a leading IT infrastructure national provider, helping organizations drive performance and manage risk. Andrew’s path into B2B marketing was untraditional, previously working in various industries, including product development and financial services. Before TierPoint, Andrew contributed his expertise and knowledge to Digital Realty as the Head of Marketing and at Audible, Inc. in Product Marketing. Andrew holds a BS in marketing from Rutgers University.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Andrew Baird shares his career trajectory
- What inspired Andrew to pursue a career in B2B marketing?
- The role of a B2B marketing team and how it’s evolved over the years
- Creating a harmonious working relationship between sales and marketing teams
- Why product marketing is essential to the organization
- Customer experience (CX) versus user experience (UX)
- Andrew’s must-reads for marketing professionals
In this episode…
Sales and marketing play vital roles in brand awareness and lead generation. However, relationships between these teams can sometimes be contentious. What methods can leadership take to unite the departments harmoniously?
The first step is to foster a relationship between marketing and sales through communication, collaboration, and camaraderie events such as happy hour. Seasoned marketing expert Andrew Baird affirms that it’s vital to team dynamics not to discriminate between parties involved with the customer experience because they’re all working towards a common goal. Nonetheless, a positive rapport between the teams starts with leadership, so Andrew suggests developing a committee of department heads representing all functions. This panel would be responsible for designing a plan or agreement that outlines mutual goals, such as customers’ needs and KPIs, and appointing a designated enabler. An enabler’s primary focus is to keep the sales and marketing teams on track and remind them of the intended plans. Upon achieving the desired results, Andrew advocates for celebrating successes to boost morale and encourage teamwork.
In this episode of the Tailwind Marketing Podcast, Carlos Corredor chats with Andrew Baird, VP of Marketing at TierPoint, for an informative conversation about B2B marketing. Andrew defines the role and evolution of a B2B marketing team, shares strategies for bridging the gap between sales and marketing, and explains why an organization’s product marketing is vital.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Carlos Corredor on LinkedIn
- Condor Agency
- Andrew Baird on LinkedIn
- TierPoint
- Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
- Strategic Marketing Management: A Means-End Approach by Mark E. Parry
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Condor Marketing & Staffing.
Condor is an ROI-driven digital marketing agency built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.
Our expert team helps clients identify and execute initiatives focused on business growth. We aim to democratize digital marketing with proven strategies and measurements that guarantee a return on investment by leveraging innovative technologies and the support of our Latin American office.
We provide strategic digital marketing advice, website development, content generation, SEO, performance marketing, social media marketing, CRM and email automation, web analytics and BI reporting, video production, and staffing services.
To learn more about our execution of ROI-focused marketing, reach out to us at CondorAgency.com or email us at support@condoragency.com.
Episode Transcript
Transcript
| Time block | Transcript |
| 7:06 – 7:51 | Carlos: Hi, Welcome to Condor Tailwind Marketing, and this episode is brought to you by Condor Marketing and Staffing Agency, are you generating pipeline like it’s 2023? Most marketing team of IT companies struggle to drive sales, we help them leverage data and technology to make the most with their budget and the credit and respect from the rest of the organization And you can learn more at condoragency.com Today I’m here with Andrew Baird, welcome Andrew, Andrew is the VP of marketing at TierPoint, a provider of cloud collocation and managed services and disaster recovery services, welcome Andrew, and why don’t you tell us a little more about your background? |
| 7:52 – 9:44 | Andrew: Thanks, Carlos. Thanks for having me here, I would definitely dive into my background. It’s not traditional, although I don’t really know if anyone has a traditional background anymore. I came from a marketing type of schooling, So I went to Rutgers University in New Jersey, to learn about marketing and then I ended up going into product development and product management and, which is usually something that you might see someone who has an engineering background would go into, and so I spilled into that and then ended up weaving back into marketing. And so I’ve been in the tech business mainly infrastructure, communications, and data. So i’m in a data centre company now, and that’s where I’ve more or less been for the last 20, 15.. About almost 20 years. And before then I had some time in the financial services business, when I worked at Oppenheimer Funds which is now called InvestCo, so I, that I did a lot of costumer service related work there and then did a little bit of work on the sales side of things getting people to buy funds and stocks with the proper dealer after that. So most of my experience has been really working with costumers in some sort of format or another, and it’s just shifted, wether it went from sales, or to product or to marketing, but in the most recent years, linked the years it’s been tech related, and B2B specifically, so yeah it’s been a lot of fun and it’s something that still keeps me interested. |
| 9:45 – 9:52 | Carlos: and how and why did you get into marketing and in particular B2B marketing in the first place? |
9:53 – 12:49 | Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question I remember when I went to Rutgers University and I was studying marketing it was definitely a new concept to me about how B2B worked and I always thought that I was gonna do something more B2C related. I thought maybe I would go into advertising because I lived close to the New York City Area and that’s where a lot of my classmates went around off. But I didn’t really find out that I was in B2B until it started to happen and I got my first job out of school when I was doing product analyst work and I realized that I was working with different businesses and serving businesses, and so that became something quite comfortable for me and I thought that that was a better suited place for me in the sense that I could treat businesses as if they were individual costumers so there’s similar methodologies so far as how you market to someone so there’s very similar structures on how you map journeys out, wheter it is individuals or… I mean cause it’s individuals that work at those businesses those are the individual buyers and they’re making decisions just as much as a consumer is making those decisions so it’s not drastically different but it definitely just happened, so it’s something that I feel more comfortable with. And then if you get into any B2C shops, and I did, I spent some time as a marketer working at audible and you get to see a little bit, which is part of an amazon company, you get to see the makings of what an organization is that serves a costumer versus business. That’s different, that’s incredibly different and the methodoloiges that are used… of the greater methodologies that are used to go after a consumer are much bigger and a lot more investment I feel in some ways goes into that versus what you see in B2B, although there’s a lot of money to be had in one transaction in B2B, probably more of course than you would see with an individual transaction, sometimes you don’t see a lot of investment in marketing in B2B as you might see in B2C, but it’s interesting nonetheless that there are some foundational things that are very similar and that is that you’re really trying to get to your costumer and you’re trying to serve them and their needs that they have, versus something maybe 8 years ago where people would develop something and they just trynna sell that without really understanding the costumer and if they ever needed it, so those things are very similar in B2B and B2C. |
| 12:50 – 13:01 | Carlos: It sounds like you kinda got into it by coincidence almost and then you just felt comfortable there and gained more experience and simply, you know, created your path in that route… |
13:02 – 14:50 | Andrew: Absolutely, and I feel like in B2B you get to develop more relationships than you do on the B2C side, so you get to go to more conferences in the sense that when you’re trying your business with another entity and another company, you’re definitely having to respect the fact that they’re trying to do the same thing too, so you’re trynna build this relationships with them and they might have costumers where they’re doing something that’s B2C, or maybe that’s B2C again so there’s a lot more than an opportunity to work face to face with people in that sense that you’re treating them as a business and they’re treating you back as a business and so there’s a little bit of a different way of understanding one another versus if you’re trying to serve an end costumer who might be a little bit more immediate so both entities are just trying to make coin at the end of the day, they’re trynna meet their revenue targets, so there’s little bit of a more mutual respect in that regard to, and so I liked that and I thought that when I got into the B2B space, in particular at that time was more for tellco carries like voiceminutes, that’s what I was doing when I first started, there was a lot of international businesses that I got to see when I was talking with different companies all over the world and different individuals representing those companies all over the world and I was really fascinated, so I really really enjoyed being in that space where I get to talk to different businesses around the world and understand their mechanics and some of the things that make them different than what you would see here in the United States. |
| 14:51 – 15:17 | Carlos: and, you know, you mentioned it’s been around 20 years working in the industry, what would you say, I mean it’s a basic question but you’d be surprised how many different answers you get, right? What would you say it’s the job or the role of the marketing team in a B2B organization and how do you think that has changed in those last 10, 15, 20 years? |
| 15:17 – 17:41 | Andrew: Yeah, at the end of the day, in simple terms I feel like a marketer really needs to be cognisant of brand awareness, and lead generation. That’s really the two main things that I think a marketing team should be striving to accomplish, and that has not changed and, you know, the idea of being able to have your brand out there and people understand it and develop a way for lead flow to make their way to the sales teams… that really hasn’t changed but there’s many other concepts that have blossomed a bit more, so understanding that funnel and really mapping that out and then developing programs along that funnel and sales enablement, for example is something that is a function that is relatively new and it has many new ounces to it, and there’s a lot of overlap with marketing. So it’s really a matter of now trying to get the lead and understanding that there’s more science behind it from the very beginning through awareness to the point where you’re doing dimension related activities to the point where you’re moving it through and now maybe you’re doing it through ABM count based marketing related type of activities and really trying to accelerate those leads through working with sales enablement related work to help all teams understand the buyer more, so they can speak with them better and get it through… And then once it’s through, you’re not done. Then they’re a costumer and then there’s a life cycle behind it as well. And so I think this concept of costumer experience is something that’s a bit newer, relatively speaking and understanding that journey of a buyer till they become a costumer and really trying to optimize that experience throughout so that you maintain that costumer. I think that’s really what’s changed is optimizing that experience and it’s still very new at the end of the day, awareness and lead, and I think that what brings sales and marketing together is revenue at the end of the day. What are we doing in order to make our revenue targets? And if both sides are at the hip when it comes to that, then I think they’re more likely to be successful. |
| 17:42 – 18:22 | Carlos: I think when I started working in B2B I was surprised of the friction between sales and marketing because of, you mentioned it, the purpose is the same, right? And I would love to hear your thoughts about how to, what you can do to have sales and marketing work better together. But even before that, I would like to hear why do you think… first of all let’s start understanding, right? The problem of having empathy on both sides on the reason of that friction, and then how to go about fixing it. |
| 18:22 – 22:45 | Andrew: Yeah, it’s… it depends on the organization that you work for frankly, and how it’s organized. I think that’s a big step in the direction. If you have sales and marketing reporting to the same head, it makes those problems nearly vanish. Specially if you have someone who respects both sides and will go to batt for both sides, understands that relationship, that can really be optimized when sales and marketing work closely together. So if you work at an organization where you have achieved revenue officer which is typically what you see of someone who owns both sales and marketing, then you’re probably in good hands. If you work at an organization where marketing is going in one direction and sales is working on something else, it doesn’t mean that won’t work, it just means that they’re gonna be some challenges because each of those teams would have most likely a different set of KPIs they’re trying to get towards, revenue probably is one that’s shared but at the end of the day they have different goals sometimes and it’ll more and more difficult for the two of them to get together and of course celebrate their wins together, too. When you have one under the same group, under the same leader, and the same leadership they’re echoing more and more how all of these teams can come together and be successful and they have that platform where they can see their problems together, they can solve them together and they can celebrate them together. If they don’t have that, then it just becomes more and more of an issue. And I’ve worked at companies before where I’ve seen sales and marketing separated in two different sides and leaders, and it just, it doesn’t work out, and it doesn’t mean again that it can’t work out, it just means it’s going to be tougher so that’s number one. And, you know, why? Sales people are sales people, and they’re dripping by money, and they’re fantastic for that, and marketers, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not looking out for the costumer, it doesn’t mean that they’re evil people, so I don’t wanna perpetuate the fact that sales people are monsters that marketing hates, sort of that, you know, the marketers are the sensitive people that sales people we don’t do anything to really help them so none of that’s true, what is true is that both sides are motivated to serve the costumer and make money for the organization, so how do you come together and understand that in a way that’s gonna fit not only your business but especially the costumer? And I think when the two groups come together and they have that unifed role with one another, they’re far more likely to be successful. So like, where I work today, we have that set up, and what I’m starting to see now and it’s happening here as well, where more and more organizations are having kinda the centre for revenue and that might be another example where another organization may have a side marketing team and a side sales team, but if there’s somewhere where they either dotted lined or someone who has authority that’s focused on revenue, then that can be quite successful as well, where we’re all trying to make money for the company so how are you going to do it? What are some of the programs that help with that? It almost seemed like before saying that you’re trying to make money was like oh don’t say that, like it’s not, it’s not very nice to be able to say that at the end of the day that you’re just trying to make money, and makes the team cold, it doesn’t really say like it works when you’re trying to optimize your relationship for a costumer, but truly your business is trying to make money. So if you address that, and you make sure that the organization is aligned accordingly with that, and you keep in the costumer’s top of mind, and what you’re trying to offer them and have that feedback to your product, team or whatever when you’re generating your products, then you’re in a better spot. So I would say your organization, number one, is gonna make that successful. |
| 22:46 – 23:10 | Carlos: And then, you know, when the people that are listening, I mean they’re in the organization that they’re in, right? Like, what can they do as a VP of marketing, or even the VP of sales or one of the heads of the two side or maybe one below the head, right? What approaches do you think, have you seen or applied that have been successful in aligning those two teams? |
| 23:10 – 25:46 | Andrew: Yeah, you should have a common setting goals, and maybe you’re gonna need to have some governance or you’re gonna need to develop a committee where you bring a few different heads that represent the different functions and you build up your own charter together and you have your almost, your agreement of what you’re going to do with each other in order to be successful, and if you don’t have that then you don’t, you’re kinda shooting in the dark, you don’t really have a sense of where you’re all trying to go to, and so, sure if you don’t have that alignment naturally with a go-to-market plan, that’s kinda top down and then kinda fed from the bottom-up, then build one. And the first thing to do is to get those teams together agree on what you want to accomplish, what is your plan? Where are your KPIs of success? And then from my perspective, is a go-to-market, is building out this is what we’re gonna do to make that top line number, this is what we’re gonna do and this is how we’re gonna work together to do it. And there’s a lot of new ounces that come with that and I think sometimes people hear go-to-market and they think different things, but if you at least say go-to-market and then you start understanding how those various components can work together, you’re already in a better place because that really unifies the commercial teams to make sure that everyone understands each other’s plans and priorities and how they’re gonna work together. And that can bring in the product for the organization as well, that can also bring in the costumer service organization, anyone who touches the costumer in any shape or form, they really should be in this go-to-market because they ar representing the company, they’re talking with the costumer, it’s always an opportunity whenever you talk to the costumer to improve that relationship, understand their pain points and perhaps sale to them, and so, and serve them. So you definitely wanna make sure any one of those branches that is touching the costumer is part of your go-to-market and I think that’s really where a lot of companies fail, or they’re missing these opportunities, it’s when they take a look at anyone who’s talking to the costumer and optimizing those touchpoints, and if you have a plan to optimize all of those then you’re in a better spot. |
| 25:47 – 25:59 | Carlos: And you mentioned the KPIs, you think… either the selection of the KPIs or the actual measurement of the KPIs is an issue? |
| 25:59 – 29:11 | Andrew: Yeah, it is. It’s hard to start. It’s easy to kinda conceptualize a couple of things that you don’t wanna get behind and that’s probably the best thing to do, it’s just start somewhere. The nature of analysis is it leads to paralysis or it can, so you start somewhere and the beauty of once you start to see the numbers is you have questions you say oh, why is that that number, and then it became this number, what happened? And then the analysis continues: well, we’re probably gonna need to look at this number now, okay, and so it just starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And anyone who’s working on trying to put those numbers together, which I have been that person before, that was one of the first things I did when I became a product developer is I needed to on a daily basis show numbers to people, sales people, that needed to be able to understand the mechanics of the product and then go to costumers, but then I needed to send those numbers to finance, and they needed to record face off of it, so that part can be really tough and daunting if you don’t have an organization that has a strong analyst or a strong marketing ops of any kind of reporting function, anything, if you don’t have a B.I tool, you don’t have anything like that… that’s really really tough, and then you have your finance team who’s probably very burst at numbers and they need report on, and they’re gonna require the rest of your organization to kinda get in line, and so you wanna make sure that whatever you’re reporting is gonna satisfy them but also satisfy the rest of your organization to make decisions on how to optimize costumer relationships and generate and build in more revenue. So yeah, I think that’s tough. We came actually to Condor because we needed help on that front, we only had one person who was struggling a lot of different functions and marketing ops was one of those where we needed a little bit more help in, so we’ve matured, we’ve actually brought someone inhouse and we’re still working with Condor to help us, that’s a big piece of what we do at marketing, is the marketing operations function, and that is just us, there’s a whole other side of sales operations and they question the business’ operations, too. There’s like three different groups that are really focused on numbers so those teams have to understand each other’s numbers and data sets and data sources, and the technology behind it is as well a whole other subject if you don’t have the technology to really help you be able to manage that data, that can be quite difficult as well. So, yeah, it’s a pain. But it’s really cool once you got numbers, those questions start coming, you start making decisions based on them, and it just changes everything for the better. |
| 29:11 – 29:28 | Carlos: yeah, and I, you know, I worked for a product marketing, but before starting I wanted to ask, is there anything else? You know, any other recommendation that you have for the, you know, to solve the challenge or to align sales and marketing? |
| 29:28 – 32:22 | Andrew: have fun, don’t forget to have fun, you have to celebrate. And I think that’s sometimes missed as well, having enablement can sometimes help with that and whether you have someone who is doing the enablement or your marketing is definitely gonna play a role in it, and you’ve got to figure out that part too as far as who’s that person or those persons that are gonna be responsible for helping to enable the sales and marketing team to understand again the goals and the wins than have some success along the lines. I don’t know from my experience if every B2B organization does like a sales kick-off, but every organization that I’ve been in has had one and so that happens every year, usually at the very beginning of the feasible year august and january, and this year is coming again and I know the sales kick-off, you know there’s marketing too that’s gonna be there and there’s others that are gonna be there but it’s definitely an event that brings everyone together and it’s surrounding the idea of a go-to-market, what are we going to do to align everyone? And that’s a time to celebrate and it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t celebrate every one within the sales and marketing organization. Do not just celebrate sales people, don’t forget the marketing people, don’t forget the other functions that are in there whether you’re the technical sellers, maybe it’s your sales support people and then the rest of the people that are along the branches too that help, could be your legal team, for example, someone in your finance team who helped with deals that get through. So don’t forget to celebrate all the people who’ve helped to make something come to light. And I know sometimes marketing or product management can be unsung heroes because they’re doing the work in the background but that’s not always true, there’s definitely some marketers who are closer to sales people like field marketers for example, those people working at account-based marketing and then anyone who might be in product marketing who’s doing some training or putting some documents together and chatting one on one with the salespeople, so there’s a lot of different heads there that deserve the applause so anyway that you can insert fun and bring that go-to-market to life throughout the year whether you have your all-hands meetings, you wanna make sure you’re creating that camaraderie and keeping that relationship alive inside and I think that will really make things better. So it’s not just: okay everyone we got a plan, let’s do it, we didn’t do it, or we did do it, or let’s do it again, you wanna avoid that, you want it to be a little bit fun as well. |
| 32:22 – 32:49 | Carlos: Yeah, I mean you, at the end of the day you’re working with people and then, you know, you need to treat them as such. I always make the comparison of a coach, he has to motivate his team wether that’s the quarterback or the people the defensive line protecting the quarterback, one cannot win without the other, so I see. I completely agree |
| 32:49 – 33:15 | Andrew: Yeah, people have feelings, so you gotta address it, it kinda can be really easy to get into your job and really trying to hit your numbers and do your tasks, do your job and clock out for the day and have your work-life balance that’s also very important. But yeah, at the end of the day, you know you’re working with people and so you should try to honor that. |
33:15 – 33:24 | Carlos: Yeah, in terms of product marketing, Andrew, you know, why is it so important? |
| 33:24 – 42:01 | Andrew: Oh yeah, it is really important. That’s one that I don’t know many B2B organizations understand and some of the more advanced ones do and once they understand the amount of work that a product marketer does or potentially can do, then they begin to respect a little bit more the work that goes into it. So I see product marketing sometimes fit underneath a product organization that’s not all sales and marketing, I see it sometimes fitting in marketing, and my point of view is that I believe it should sit on the product marketing organization. The product marketing organization is fundamentally responsible for the message, and there’s a difference of a brand message and then a product message, there is some overlap but product message needs to be translated from what we call speeds and feeds and it’s the not simples of the product to how it really benefits the costumer, what are the outcomes that those costumers are looking to achieve, and what are the personas inside that particular business that you’re trying to serve. So in our case we’re going after a CIOs, we might be going after VPs of IT, we might be going after analysts or developers, and so, or might be talking to the CFO, these are all different personas that want to do different things and they have some shared common goals but there’s specific new ones, and this is what I love about marketing and product, is that both have this idea of a persona. When you’re developing a product, you usually have a persona that you’re building so you wanna stand your costumer, same thing with marketing, you usually have a persona and you have to understand how to market to them. So I definitely think the product marketing organization comes in handy because they sit on both sides and they understand that, so they’re helping bring the message together, they’re the ones that are really understanding the new ounces of the product onto the point where they can develop the slicks, the fact sheets, the messaging that you will see maybe in white papers, the messaging that you will eventually see in blogs… They are looking at a lot of different words that are going out there and making sure that your content marketing team isn’t saying a lot of garbage that’s untrue, you wanna make sure that they’re keeping the SEO people in line too so they’re not trying to get your organization to optimize for a term that isn’t something that you sell, that’s really where a product marketer comes in handy that they gotta know what that really is that you’re selling at a technical level but being able to transcribe that into a marketing message. There’s a lot more that they do, too. They’re the people responsible for product launches, so if you’re a product heavy organization that does a lot of enhancements, your product marketing people is going to be the person who’s going to build out a marketing requirements documents, an MRD, and there’s plenty out there when you’re building products, hopefully you’re working at an organization where everyone who’s developing products they have some type of, something called the life product development cycle, the PDOC process where you start with something that’s like an ideation and then there are gates that you go through that process where you have to stop yourself and say are we actually going to continue and build this product? And it’s usually by community in some sort of regard where people are viewing the status of that product before you move on to just launching it. Because the worst thing that could actually happen is that your product organization launches a product, doesn’t work cross-functionally and then you get a knock on the door and they say: where’s my press release? Why haven’t you told the market ab out this? Why do you tell the training people about this? I didn’t even know you were doing this product, that’s horrible misalignment. You should see that product coming a mile away and have already started to build a kind of marketing requirements document, which really has a whole sense of what this product is, why is it important for the buyer, understanding the competitve set, so who are you competing this and how are you going to get the message against them? And then how are you gonna bring this to market? How does it make sense to go to different kinds of buyers? different types of personas. What are the tactics? When is it going to happen? All of that stuff is really really important. A launch can be sizeable and can take quite a bit of time in order to bring something like a new enhancement even of a product to market, so you really wanna make sure that your product marketing organization is empowered to do that and they’re responsible for working with the product management organization and the rest of the commercial team, which can be your sales, sales operation team, and maybe extending over into legal and anyone else that type of market requirements deems as important for a successful launch, costumer service as well, everyone has to know it, and they are those people who are talking to the costumer, needs to be in that. So a product marketing person is really really important and I think sometimes organizations just don’t realize just how important they are. I mentioned competitive analysis, that’s something else that a product marketer those, is that they take a look at the market place and they understand who your buyer is going to talk with other than yourself, and you can have your product marketing organization call battle cards which gives your salaries, your sales team, a better understanding of the product that you’re offering, some of the messages are not gonna resonate with the buyer, some of the competitors you’re likely gonna meet out there in the field and some counter messaging that you might wanna be able to offer, too. So there’s a lot for a product marketer to do and I have found in our space they’re really really important to your organization, just as important as other pieces within your marketing organization, that one’s really really important. And of course I’m bias because I came from that side, and I started as a project manager, I did some product marketing and then became a marketing leader and I always champion product marketing just because of the amazing oversight they have. You can start in my opinion a marketing organization with a product marketer and no one else, and because they touch so many different things, eventually they’re gonna run out of fuels and they’re not gonna be able to do everything. I mean, I had to do that when I went to audible and I launched audible’s very first B2B product, and it was called audible for enterprise and became audible for business, and we were trying to sell audible to different businesses that the HR teams were wanting to give their teams something to have for them to get various different purposes but I was the only marketer, that was it. There was a huge team of marketing at audible and they’re pretty much focused on B2C and I was the only B2B person that was in there, and I had to build out emails, I had to create partner streams, I had to be the face with the creative team, I had to build of course my go-to-market out and I had to do the competitive set and I had to be involved on internal events and there was understand what we were gonna do with the SEO so there was only so much that I could do but it was enough to get started. And eventually I left there but I know that they’ve continued on, but that’s certainly something where I think you could start a marketing organization with someone who understands the product and has the discipline as a product marketer but eventually they run out of Steam and you’re gonna need to invest more in that, but initially you could start with a product marketer. |
| 42:01 – 43:07 | Carlos: No I agree and perhaps it is, perhaps you’re bias but I’m bias on the opposite, right? I’m on the agency side and I’ve been in other agencies as well so, yeah I could say you know you don’t need the product marketer, the agency can take care of everything but it’s completely opposite, I a 100% agree not only that the first person should be a product marketer but that that’s the last one that you wanna outsource, the last role that you wanna outsource, or you don’t wanna have outsourced at all. When you, you can have a great agency or group of agencies doing great work and if they don’t have a good product marketer it’s just gonna, the results are not gonna be there. And the opposite, you can have a mediocre agency but as long as the product marketing team on the client side is good, that’s gonna drive some results so I couldn’t agree more. |
| 43:07 – 43:48 | Andrew: Yeah, I’m a super fan of all of our marketers here, I do have a small bias towards product marketers because I used to be on and I understand the complexity that they have and they do need to, and for me I think it’s really fun to launch a product and to build a plan and to see it come to life, that makes me really happy so I like doing that part probably the best of of anything that I do in the marketing organization is building something… And being able to work with different functions in order to bring something to life, that’s definitely my favorite. |
| 43:48 – 43:57 | Carlos: How’s that tied to UX and CX design, how much is that, are those two related? |
| Andrew: So, I think CX can be and should be owned by the entire company, and you might have someone in your organization who is tasked with CX, and you need a champion. They don’t have to be in product marketing, they don’t have to be in your client services group but you do need someone who’s gonna champion that. Because it touches everything, and I think that’s something that more and more organizations are getting keyed into and understanding that there’s a science behind CX, when you actually go through the CX engagement with a partner, usually an agency because they do it all the time so they’re really good at it, it’s hard to do it alone if you haven’t actually done it yourself or worked with an agency, it’s new one. And it’s really really cool to go through it because you see like when you build out a map all the different touchpoints that you have with the costumer where you can optimize that experience, that then starts to open your eyes at wow, okay we just turned up optimizing the costumer experience and there’s all sorts of different things that you can do to really have that come to life whether its an email that should maybe happen at that time or before the time of renewal that you have with the costumer, or if you see a costumer does something on their end so they opened an email or they’ve made a transaction or they’ve done something with your system and your product and you start to measure that in mass, maybe you start to learn something about that and then improve your product you can improve the experience because you understand what the costumer’s going through through their journey, the costumer journey. UX when you’re building a product you really wanna get into the users’ mind frames and their behaviors and you should be doing that type of engagement really before you go build a product, you might have an idea UX can try to prove it out or it might just start with a UX engagement and you might find the product that comes out of that. It’s incredibly nuance and I think you see more so UX on the product side when you’re building something out, you can certainly have some user experience for any kind of interface media that you want to make available to a user’s set. Maybe you’re developing an internet and you wanna be able to get a user experience designer to come in and help you be able to really understand what are the things that a user comes to expect on their internet homepage and you interview them, and you do a little fidelity mock-up or something and they interact with that and then you make it higher fidelity and then they act to that and you test it, you test, it, you do all the things before you hand it over to development. There are some other methodologies as well where maybe you can do something there and then hand it over to. But a users experience design team is essential, I believe when you’re gonna build products. CX is important once you have an understanding of how you wanna work with the costumer and marketing can certainly be involved with that as any other functions that are in there in the mix of touching the costumer. But I think that for marketing’s perspective, if you think about marketing experience, you think about the buyer journey, you think about how did they come across your brand and how’s their experience when you do that, all the way to the point where they go through the sales funnel, what does that experience look like? How can you otpimize that. Again, UX, CX or marketing experience they all have personas, they all have maps, they all have journeys, very very similar type of approach so I think if you understand the nuances of how UX, CX or marketing experience work with a journey, then you can easily understand a little bit more the nuances of UX and CX are, but I think you gotta really get to that point of understanding there’s a journey that people go through and you can optimize all of the different touchpoints through that, whatever it might be and I think if you get an organization that is using UX disciplines to build UX products using CX disciplines to build and maintain costumers, and they’re using some kind of marketing experience to optimize that journey that your buyers go through to the point that they become costumers and they stay costumers, again I think you’re gonna be in a good place if you adopt that methodology throughout your organization. And really champion them and empower them to bring that methodology inhouse, and don’t be afraid to bring in someone like a Condor or another agency that does experience design, let them in your house, let them come in, let them get you all in a room and let them show you how to build out these journeys so you can start seeing some of the data that your costumers are going through, It would really change the way that you operate and it will bring a lot more of an appreciation of what the costumer is going through and it will align everyone real quick, o I’m a huge fan of that. | |
| 49:19 – 49:56 | Carlos: well hey, you know Andrew this is some bits of wisdom there from product marketing to sales enablement and UX and CX, what… one of the things I’d like to ask towards the end of the episode are what books, mentors or references would you recommend for people in particular in B2B marketing but in general, it could be a person, something that made a difference to you and help you become what you are today? |
| 49:56 – 53:34 | Andrew: Yeah, well. A couple things that I would like to recommend… most recently I read a book by Donald Miller called Story brand which is the idea of making your costumer the heroe and it goes back to messaging so if you’re a product marketing person or otherwise, it’s a really important read because it really gives you the sense of making your message simple and how to construct it in a way that empowers the buyer to be the hero of your message, so I recommend that. But some are related, and this is some that I got a while back and I have it here, it’s kind of like I knew you were gonna ask me about this section, see it’s here. I’ll tell you what it is, it’s called strategic marketing management: a means-end approach by Mark Perry. Means-end theory is something that really got me when I was in school and it was a class called strategic marketing or marketing strategy, and that was a methodology of again it’s kind of like overlapping with UX and CX, it has this interview capabilities when you’re asking someone why they like something, as an example why do you like this car? Oh, well, it looks good Well, what about it looks good? Oh, well, the windows are nice Oh, okay, what about the windows is nice? Oh, they’re tinted Why do you like tinted windows? Oh, because it gives me a sense of privacy Oh, okay cool So you’re building this thing called the ladder, essentially, you’re trying to get up to these tropes that are always the same thing that always ends and all of these ladders that almost everyone has that they’re trying to attain. Which could be security, it could be a number of different things that we have fundamentally as humans that we’re trying to get to. And when you can map your product or your service, in a means-end approach, and you can get to those fine lines at the end of the rainbow, at the end of that bridge, those are nuggets that you can use to make your messaging and your advertising really impactful, because you can start to take those elements like if it is security for example, or a sense of belonging or something like that, you play with that to make that the key thing you see in your message, it just makes it stronger and it resonates. So you’re starting to get now into the psychology of how a buyer behaves and you’re getting close to how they have associations to certain words, certain images, those are things that really start to make your brand flourish when you’re starting to understand that. So for me that was super cool because I started off, again really really liking parts and pieces of words, morphemes, I actually studied English as well at records doing psychoanalysis and so we were analyzing text and so that kind of really gets to me that I understand that you, you can work with associations with people in general to really elicit a reaction so if you can build products and build experiences for people that they optimize the way they wanted, then you can use some of these fine tuning things where they can really have an elicit response to your message, then you’re doing really cool stuff. So I really love that means-end theory and that means-end approach theoretically I think it’s pretty cool. |
| 53:35 – 54:02 | Carlos: it’s kind of like strategic thinking, I went into school I studied communications, I was gonna be a lawyer and I switched last minute, but I would say if I could turn back time I would study psychology. Because I think it’s fascinating, it applies for marketing, for life, for relationships, for everything. |
| 54:02 – 54:15 | Andrew: I agree, it was one of my first classes I took when I went back to school and I was like Oh, damn this is cool and I can see why a lot of people get into it, but yeah you can apply that to just about anything, and in marketing there’s definitely a place for it too. |
| 54:15 – 54:37 | Carlos: for sure, well I kind of like I went through a phase of behavioral psychology, books, like thinking fast and slow and those type of books and I think it’s fascinating. Andrew, anything else that you’d like to share that we haven’t got to that you think might be beneficial for the listeners? |
| 54:37 – 55:10 | Andrew: Yeah, take your vacation. Life’s short, have a work-life balance, make sure that you aren’t burning yourself out, definitely have some work-life balance. If we’ve learned anything, through the pandemic and just through some of the crazy times that we’re going through in this world, remember to have balance with your family, your friends, with the planet, so treat yourself well and others around you, that too. |
| 55:10 – 55:20 | Carlos: well, Andrew thank you so much, it’s been great and I’m sure the listeners are really happy that we’ve got you on the podcast. |
| 55:20 – 55:30 | Andrew: well thanks Carlos, I really appreciate the opportunity |
