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Bridging the Gap: SaaS CEO and CMO Perspectives on Marketing Success
172 Plays7 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Blaine Mathieu, a seasoned CEO and marketing leader, shares his unique perspectives on the evolving relationship between CEOs and CMOs in the B2B SaaS industry.
He discusses the challenges of balancing short-term results with long-term brand building, fostering effective collaboration, and navigating the impact of AI on marketing.
Blaine's extensive experience in both roles provides valuable insights for aligning expectations, embracing innovation, and adapting to the rapid change in the marketing landscape.
Recommended
Transcript
CMO Tenure and Market Pressures
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark. Here's a troubling industry statistic. The average tenure for a chief marketing officer is 41 months or just under three and a half years. This number has steadily declined in recent years amid pressure for quick wins and results, the ever-changing marketing landscape, corporate realignments, and often the volatile relationships between CEOs and CMOs.
CEO-CMO Partnership for Success
00:00:36
Speaker
It's a problematic trend for senior marketers. It's like walking on eggshells when they should be taking a short and long-term approach to marketing success. For CEOs, it leads to a lack of confidence in marketing and its ability to make it for difference and drive growth.
00:00:53
Speaker
This episode of Marketing Spark will explore what makes for a strong CEO-CMO alliance and how both roles can be structured to drive immediate and long-term success.
Introduction to Blaine Mathew
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm excited to have Blaine Mathew, who has a wealth of experience as a B2B CEO and marketing leader. I'm looking forward to Blaine sharing his insights on how the roles of the CEO and marketing leaders have shifted over the past decade, especially in the fast-paced SaaS sector.
00:01:22
Speaker
I'm also looking forward to hearing about his experience and how he navigated challenges as a CEO and marketing leader. Welcome to Marketing Sparkling.
00:01:29
Speaker
Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. I've been listening to the podcast and following your email newsletter for years now. So great to finally get on the podcast. Thank you for being a loyal reader and listener. Why don't we start by having you give a quick overview of your experience as a CEO and marketing leader. It's an interesting combination because often you don't get marketers becoming the CEO. I'm originally a Canadian like you, although I live in the San Francisco Bay area now and have for the last 25 years or so.
Blaine's Early Entrepreneurial Journey
00:01:58
Speaker
As you mentioned, through my career, continually flickering back and forth between CEO roles and CMO roles, primarily, although in many cases, when I was a CMO, I was also a CPO or in charge of product. Started my first company, my first CEO gig, I guess you could say, when I was 12. Started a software company in Canada that wrote and sold fixed asset management and accounting software to large enterprises across Canada.
00:02:24
Speaker
After spending most of my teenage years sitting in front of a computer writing computer code, I realized it was actually on the marketing and sales side that I was more interested and excited by versus spending the next 20 years writing computer code. I did an undergrad degree and eventually moved to Silicon Valley when Gartner brought me down as one of their first internet analysts at the sort of the dawn of the internet revolution.
Career Path: From Adobe to Startups
00:02:49
Speaker
did that for a few years and then moved to adobe in san jose ran market intelligence and strategy for a few years and then since then as i mentioned i've been primarily at early to mid-stage sas software b2b software companies
00:03:06
Speaker
and bouncing back and forth between CEO roles and CMO, usually CMO slash CPO roles. Currently I'm CEO at an early stage industrial focus software startup. And given my heavy marketing background, I'm actually, I do have a marketing associate helping me with some tactical execution, but I'm actually wearing both hats today. I'm wearing the CEO hat and I'm wearing the CMO hat.
00:03:34
Speaker
And maybe one other, because it's very hard to put these hats down once you've started wearing them. And just one other thing about my background through that career that I mentioned, I've been both at, as I mentioned, early stage startups, all the way to larger SaaS companies like Adobe. And one of my previous CEO gigs was actually as a public company CEO of a NASDAQ listed company as
Teenage Business Ventures
00:03:55
Speaker
well. So I've been the entire gamut back and forth. And that's my story in a nutshell.
00:04:00
Speaker
So let's go off script here. I had a list of questions I was gonna ask you, but you threw a spanner into the works when you mentioned off the get-go that you started a software company when you were 12 that was selling software to accountants.
00:04:16
Speaker
I cannot let you continue with this interview without stepping back and saying, so what's the deal there? Tell me about what you did and how a 12 year old comes up with a software product and how did you turn it into a business and what happened to that business as you got older and use that to pretty lightly. As I got to 18 even. Yeah, it's an interesting story and I won't make that. I'll tell you the short version because the long one is also even more interesting over a glass of wine.
00:04:41
Speaker
But basically this is at the dawn of the PC revolution in the early 80s. I ended up through luck and that's the longer story of one of the first Apple II computers actually in northern Alberta where I was from originally. And even before I got that computer, I was writing computer programs on paper before I had anything even to type them into. I've been a computer geek since almost before computers, one way or
Early Tech Innovations
00:05:07
Speaker
another.
00:05:07
Speaker
The town that we lived in, the local accountant, also was an early computer geek, and he got some of the first IBM PCs that were ever produced into his office, and he literally called me down, and I rode my bike down to his office, and he said, Blaine, I got these two PC things. What could I do with them?
00:05:26
Speaker
Because I was the town's computer geek, right? And I looked up on the wall and I saw these giant sheets of paper that he recorded his client's assets on. These are literal spreadsheets. This is where the concept of a spreadsheet came from. And I said, your computer could do that, I bet.
00:05:43
Speaker
and so he gave me one of the computers to write the first application on and of course with feature creep and everything else we ended up with a pretty rich system which I then took to market and and sold to large enterprises and accounting firms all across Canada all through high school and into my undergrad degree actually put me through my undergrad degree and that really began my
Pre-Internet Marketing Tactics
00:06:06
Speaker
my focus in business, entrepreneurialism, marketing sales, and was based on my geekness, I guess you might say. You must have been quite the salesperson and marketer because it sounds like you're a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old, and you're selling to adults working at enterprise companies. Did your accountant act as your sales front or did you do the sales yourself? That sounds like an incredible story.
00:06:33
Speaker
No, I did it myself. And the funny thing was, of course, this is before the Internet, before you had web pages and order forms. And where you could do all this is sort of remotely on the Internet. Nobody knows you're a doc, right? This was before the Internet. I took out print ads in the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail and national publications that Canadian business people would read, little three, four, five hundred dollar tiny print ads.
00:06:59
Speaker
with my home phone number on it. These accountants and executives would call my home. My mother would answer the phone and say, Blaine, it's somebody about the fixed asset management system. I'd run down and go take the call, get the person's info on the phone, mail them this set of floppy disks along with an invoice. They'd mail me back a check. And that was literally the pre-internet days of doing sales and marketing, I'll tell you.
00:07:26
Speaker
At the end of the day, what happened to the business?
Transition to Internet Era
00:07:31
Speaker
Let's say the code base started to get pretty aged by the time I was in high school or by the time I finished my undergrad degree. And by that time, I saw that another thing was just starting to come on, this internet revolution.
00:07:46
Speaker
which was the next level, you might say, of the PC revolution that my first business was based on. I saw that the internet revolution was going to be something that was going to make a huge difference to the world of business and marketing and everything else. And so I ended up creating a website, it was really a blog before blogs existed called killerstrategy.com.
00:08:07
Speaker
the latest analysis of what businesses could do on the internet, these new emerging business models. I used to do a lot of writing about Amazon.com back when they were just beginning. And in the same week, I got a call from the head of marketing at Amazon, actually. They only had about 100 people at the time asking me if I want to move to Seattle to work for Amazon.
00:08:28
Speaker
And I got a call from Gartner Group in San Jose asking if I wanted to go and be one of their first internet analysts working for Gartner. And they were getting killed by Forrester and Jupiter and some of the analyst firms that got the internet. And I said to my wife, so Seattle or San Jose, what do you think? She said, absolutely, we're not going to live in the rain.
00:08:47
Speaker
And there was another reason too, being a PC geek and an Apple computer accolade from the early days, actually moving to Silicon Valley was certainly always one of my goals, moved to San Jose and the rest is history. Let's get back to our regular programming. We were here to talk about the dynamic relationship between CEOs and marketing leaders.
CEO-CMO Dynamics in SaaS
00:09:09
Speaker
Given your, and I would say I'm probably understating your background, but your unique experience as a CEO and marketing leader, can you share your insights on how the roles of CEOs and marketing leaders have evolved in the B2B and SaaS industries over the past decade? Because certainly there seems to be, if not antagonism, there's an interesting
00:09:34
Speaker
dynamic. It's whether you want to describe it as volatile or ever changing or I don't know the word, but there seems to be marketing leaders and CEO seem to be at war with each other as opposed to being allies and partners. So I'm very interested in your taking your perspective, given the fact that you've done both roles at the same time and you've done both roles separately. It's, it is very interesting and
00:09:58
Speaker
I think first of all, when I, you said the stat earlier about 41 months being the average tenure of a CMO, I was shocked. It was that high. And I think that's because as you see, my background is mostly in earlier stage companies, not the big giants, big large enterprises where 10 years do, I think tend to be somewhat longer and they're more stable. I come from a background where these things I think are, they tend to be less stable and much shorter.
00:10:25
Speaker
In fact, I've rarely had a job in my life that was 41 months in 10 years. I think the reality, especially in a lot of tech businesses and small to medium-sized startups, is actually much shorter than that in my experience, in fact. And maybe we'll get back to this, but one thought that immediately occurs to me is I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
00:10:47
Speaker
Okay. Because it could be characterized as a war, the CEO and the CMO at war, or it could be characterized as you have to have the right skillset at the right time and the right place for the development of the company that you're working at. Maybe in a large enterprise that's evolving very slowly. There's not much, there's not that much evolution happening, but in the startup world and in the technology world, that evolution is happening at breakneck speed.
00:11:14
Speaker
Right? And it's very possible that the CMO, and this doesn't just apply to CMOs, it could be CROs and almost any executive, including the CEO.
00:11:25
Speaker
is not the right person for that time and place. If you can get two or three years of really good valuable service from that person, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Having said that, I think what we have to answer your question, what we've seen over the last couple of decades is, and your listeners know this as well as anybody,
00:11:45
Speaker
is a just a massive rapid advance of technology, penetrating marketing. The Martek stack is becoming more and more complex and marketing over the last 20 years really or so has moved out of the area of opinions and egos and moved into something that can be
00:12:07
Speaker
productized and systematized in a way that it never could before. We'll probably talk
Rise of Fractional CMOs
00:12:12
Speaker
about Gen AI later, but now that's even going to go to another level. So that has really been, I think, the overall sea change as CMO, CEO relationships have evolved. You've got this whole underpinning of technology, which is evolving rapidly around it. Do you agree with that, Mark?
00:12:32
Speaker
I certainly agree with that and I see it and I feel it when I work with B2B staff companies, but a side conversation here and picking up on your comment about why short tenures for CMOs may not be a bad thing. In the last year, certainly the last six months, we've seen the rise of the fractional CMO.
00:12:52
Speaker
And there's many reasons why this is happening. Among them are marketing professionals being laid off and reinventing themselves as fractional CMOs as opposed to marketing consultants, which is certainly not as sexy. But I think one of the interesting threads is that
00:13:09
Speaker
A fractional CMO can be, they can come in different shapes and sizes. They can have different skillsets, but it gives companies the flexibility to get the right type of marketing leadership at the right time without any commitment. So you can work as a fractional CMO for three, six, or 12 months. After you've taken a company from point A to point B, they can shift gears and hire another fractional CMO or a full-time CMO. And it just gives them the flexibility
Balancing Quick Results and Brand Building
00:13:37
Speaker
to scale and to get what they need when they need it. And I think that may tie into your hypothesis about why CMO tenures can be short and not be a bad thing.
00:13:50
Speaker
Thank you for reminding me about the fractional CMO thing because I was one of those as well. I went through a three year period where for about a year and a half, I actually started my own sort of single shingle fractional CMO service. And then I gradually realized over time that that's tough because you're spending all your time
00:14:10
Speaker
marketing and selling yourself while also trying to work for clients. It's a tough business. So I ended up actually joining one of the national fractional CMO organizations also for a year and a half. So I spent about three years doing exactly that business. And I agree with you
00:14:25
Speaker
is given again the pace of change that's happening right now i think it's a very viable option that a lot of companies should consider again especially if they know they're there in a space where they're gonna be undergoing so much change the odds of. Having the right person two years from now that they hire today is low so they might want to consider that option absolutely and i'm considering it actively for my company now in fact.
00:14:53
Speaker
As I mentioned earlier, many B2B and SaaS companies, there seems to be a tension. I described it as antagonism between the CEO's need for quick results, especially in this environment where leads and sales are front and center. And the marketing leaders need the time and the runway to experiment and build long-term brand value.
00:15:19
Speaker
What are your thoughts in terms of balancing these seemingly conflicting goals? Because on one end, you've got a CEO who wants results right now. On the other side, you've got a CMO who's trying to structure, trying to build a marketing mix that, yes, focuses on short-term results, but also builds long-term value. How do we balance the two? It's a great question. I guess one initial reflection is,
00:15:45
Speaker
I've always tried extremely hard not to ever set up an antagonistic relationship with my boss, with the CEO, but a collaborative relationship. And maybe it's because I'm a Canadian at heart and where I was trying to get along with people. But I do think that's really important. And one of my mentors, long time ago, a very extremely successful global executive from companies you guys would all know, retired now, said he was second in command. And he said,
00:16:15
Speaker
What you got to do every once in a while is get in the bear cave. And what I said, what's the bear cave in the bear cave? There are no titles. There's no, uh, there's all there is just the truth. Because the only way you come out of the bear cave is if you're really, you know, lay it all out there. And I've taken that to heart and use that as a method to ensure that.
00:16:37
Speaker
I'm aligned with my boss, in this case, the CEO.
The 'Bear Cave' Approach to Collaboration
00:16:41
Speaker
Now, he's a similar thing with my chairmen and some of my board members, but in this case, when I'm CMO, collaborating with the CEO. So we go in and we're not, I make sure we're not in a mindset where I feel like marketing is competing for organizational resources.
00:17:00
Speaker
And the CEO is the decision maker and sales is going to get it or marketing is going to get it or products going to get it. No, in the bear cave, I'm actually not the CMO and he's not the CMO with the CEO. We're just two people who are, what are we going to do to make this business successful? Okay. And I've been in bear cave sessions where we cut the marketing budget down by 20% because I honestly believe that was the right thing to do. Right.
00:17:26
Speaker
I've also had bearcave sessions where the CEO left with a much clearer understanding of why are we doing this? Why are we engaging in this blogging initiative and doing this business on the edge video series? It's very hard to prove ROI. And often what I find is CMOs, they do a lot of things.
00:17:50
Speaker
hoping that it'll be recognized by the CEO as the right thing to do because they can't prove it. It's very hard to get metrics around a lot of this. And that hope is almost always dashed. Eventually, the CEO comes up and says,
00:18:06
Speaker
I've let you, I've let you run with this thing for six months now. It's a waste of time as far as I can tell, move on to something else. And that can be avoided if you and the CEO really find a way to have a mind lock on the things that are hard to validate and prove. And then of course, for the things that are validated, validatable, have a set of metrics that is success metrics that you agree on.
00:18:32
Speaker
And if it doesn't work out, don't be defensive. It's not about failing. It's about the organization is failing and you have to come up with a new approach. And so anyway, I packed too much into that answer, but that's one way to think about it. I often say that one of the keys to success between the CEO and the CMO is creating partnerships.
00:18:56
Speaker
from the get-go where you're both aligned in terms of goals, expectations, how things are going to happen, when they're going to happen. I'm interested in your experience as a CEO dealing with marketers or as a marketer dealing with your CEO.
00:19:14
Speaker
How do you make sure that both parties are in lockstep? Because expectations can be different, priorities may be different. The CEO is obviously where growth and valuation, CMO has their own priorities. But how do you make sure that when you come to the table, when you move forward, you can move forward together and that
00:19:36
Speaker
Well, success is always a good thing that there's room and latitude for experimentation and failure because marketing is sometimes things don't work and they can be spectacularly unsuccessful, but that's how an organization can optimize and move forward. What are the dynamics? What are the key success in making sure that
00:19:56
Speaker
You've got a partnership as opposed to these people who are grinding together and being maybe it's almost like a competition in a sense or a rivalry in a sense. That's another lesson I've learned in my career a few times when I've been wearing my CMO hat on is I've had some spectacular failures, wasting millions of dollars in marketing budgets that weren't that big on crazy ideas.
00:20:20
Speaker
And I learned some real lessons there from my CEOs who didn't just immediately fire my ass. And because we had, we had a level of trust and a level of collaboration and understanding. And we knew that some of the things I did were going to be mistakes. Now, after one of these egregious mistakes, he said,
00:20:41
Speaker
blame, you owe me a really nice bottle of wine after this one. And I did give him a very nice bottle of wine because I probably should have had my butt fired. But if you have that level of trust, and then you said another thing, which I think is important, I make sure whether I'm the CEO or the CMO, it doesn't matter who's but the mindset needs to be.
00:21:03
Speaker
You're only going to hit 70%, maybe 60 to 70% of your goals, of your targets, of your objectives, okay? For in your go to market. If you're hitting a hundred, then you're not trying hard enough. You're not doing the innovative things that need to be done to really move your company up the inflection point. So if you're happy with slow growth and steady as she goes, okay, set goals that you need it a hundred percent of. But if you want to hit an inflection point,
00:21:30
Speaker
then you have to assume there's going to be failure there. And I make sure that's not the unspoken truth between the C-level executives. That's the blatant stated objective. We're going to have a scorecard, and 7 out of 10 of those things are going to be read at the end of the quarter. And if they're not, then we didn't try hard enough in setting these things.
00:21:54
Speaker
I don't want to lose this one other point your question brought to mind.
Role of Chief Revenue Officer
00:21:58
Speaker
We're talking about CMO, CEO collaboration and effectiveness. But of course, we all know there's the third dancer in that party and that's chief revenue officer, commercial officer, whatever you want to call it. And that relationship is just as important for CMO success and for company success as the CEO relationship is.
00:22:18
Speaker
And depending on where the CEO's mind focus is, because some CEOs are very go-to-market focused. In that case, CMO needs to be really aligned. In some cases, they're more product or technology focused, especially in startups. But the CRO-CMO collaboration, I wish I know is not the topic, but is just as important. Because if that's not aligned, then you know who really has the CEO's ear. That's the person who holds the sales quota, who keeps the CEO from getting fired.
00:22:48
Speaker
When you go into the next board meeting and the CEO either hits or doesn't hit her number for the quarter, that's where the rubber really hits the road. So make that collaboration really effective as well.
Aligning Quick Wins with Long-Term Strategies
00:23:01
Speaker
Of course, I need to talk to you about AI and, but before we move on from that, I did want to ask you about the dynamic in which a marketing leader is trying to build brand, trying to establish
00:23:17
Speaker
the company as one of the options in for consumers, but you've got a CEO who is demanding quick wins and quick results. They're impatient. They want the CMO to be doing things that move the needle. And often there's conflicting priorities when it comes to who wants what to happen, when, how do you navigate long-term
00:23:47
Speaker
growth goals and plans with, I need to see leads right away because I see it all the time and every one of my engagements, there's an initial honeymoon of probably last
00:23:58
Speaker
a couple of weeks and then they're saying, okay, what are you gonna do to get me leads and sales? And I'm like, I just started, I just trying to build a plan of attack. And this obviously happens when you're dealing with a full-time CMO. So as a CEO, what are the rules of engagement when it comes to making sure that both sides get what they want and there's no disappointments along the way?
00:24:18
Speaker
A couple of things come to mind. I've been in the situation multiple times as a CMO, every new CMO gig. It's the same thing. You've got a window of a honeymoon where you can update the website and start a new blogging initiative and do some brand building stuff. And then all of a sudden the sales CRO goes to the CEO and says, I'm going to miss my number this quarter. And everything starts to be about leads, right? Leads. One way you can do it is to implement an account based marketing program.
00:24:47
Speaker
And that'll distract sales for about six months while you think you're really collaborating tightly on a joint effort. And then you can keep doing whatever you want in the background while you're distracted by ABM. That's one method, but I probably, I've tried that a few times. It doesn't work in the long run. It works in the short run, but doesn't work in the long run. I would, I do recommend ABM, but I don't recommend that as a distraction tactic. First of all, I think.
00:25:15
Speaker
If your near term tactics are not also aligned with your longer term brand building, then you've got a problem. You're not thinking about this the right way as a CMO and you're going to have a hard time justifying this kind of work to the CEO. And that's one thing I've learned over the years is
00:25:33
Speaker
The ground cover and the air cover or the ground war and the air war should not be thought of as two different wars. They are the same war. They need to be supporting and with each other and your CRO and your CEO need to believe and understand that.
00:25:49
Speaker
Like the reason you're holding this podcast video series is because you are specifically leveraging that content in your lead gen campaign, which is then used to increase your conversion rate from 1% to 3%. Okay. If you can't tie these things together, then you're going to have the problem. Eventually the honeymoon is going to wear off.
00:26:11
Speaker
And I think that's probably the main piece of advice I'd given that these cannot be thought of as got this brand stuff here and you got this Legion stuff here. They need to be understood. It needs to be understood how they are connected to each other and one makes the other one more effective and vice versa. The Legion stuff contributes to the brand equity, right? And you're evolving brand. They're not two different things.
00:26:38
Speaker
When we started thinking about this conversation, I was not going to talk to you
AI's Impact on Marketing and Hiring
00:26:43
Speaker
about AI. Everybody is talking to everybody about AI, but I wrote a LinkedIn post this week about whether AI would replace content writers and got an email from you talking about
00:26:57
Speaker
the post and you had some thoughts in terms of how AI is impacting not only marketing but business. Perhaps you can elaborate on your thoughts and how a CEO these days
00:27:11
Speaker
can navigate the impact of AI or get the organization thinking about the impact or ready for the impact of AI because everything is obviously going to be disrupted. And I can only imagine the challenges are enormous. I'm having this conversation a lot lately because of my mind. I've got a large network of marketing executives and mid-tier marketers as well, and a lot of sales executives and CRO colleagues and former sales colleagues.
00:27:41
Speaker
who are all dealing with the same thing right now. And one thing I've learned from talking to them recently and some of your listeners know, no doubt, it's a very tough market out there for sales and marketing professionals that are looking for opportunities. There are jobs posted on LinkedIn that have 500 marketing and or sales leaders applying for them. That was, it's a sea change from what it was a few years ago.
00:28:06
Speaker
And there's a lot of things in that, raising interest rates, higher cost of money, push toward profitability. There's many variables. But from talking to other C-level executives and CEOs, there's no doubt in my mind that this upcoming AI, generative AI revolution and transformation is a big part of why companies are becoming conservative and hiring right now. They've realized that the smart leaders are realizing that
00:28:36
Speaker
the kind of people they used to hire, the kind of practices they used to implement, the stuff that got them there that were successful, the things they did before and the people that did them, that is not the way they're going to be successful in the future. It's going to be done a totally different way. And maybe some of your listeners have heard about this campaign IBM and Adobe did recently where they use generative AI to instead of
00:29:00
Speaker
creating one image to be used in an ad campaign, an online ad campaign, they created a thousand different versions of that image. Generative AI did because no human team could ever do this in any reasonable amount of time. And they increased the conversion rate by over 50% for that campaign. That's just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg of the change that's coming to marketing and go to market in general, sales and marketing, not just marketing. And so this is causing a lot of paralysis by hiring managers in the market.
00:29:30
Speaker
They're scared. They know for sure that what they did before is not going to be the thing that does it in the future. They don't know how. And they know most of the people they're talking to don't know how either. They're not even beginning to try to figure out how. And this is what I'm telling the people that I talk to giving career advice is
Marketers and AI Skills
00:29:51
Speaker
Become a prompt engineer, figure out, develop a thesis on how Gen AI is going to radically change your job. And then the next time you go to talk to a CEO or a CMO or a COO, tell them your thesis. Nobody knows what the right answer is, but everybody knows something's happening.
00:30:08
Speaker
and we've got to get ahead of it. In my current company, we are not only that CEO who's trying to figure out how to use AI in our go-to-market, but we're actually creating applications based on generative AI. It's part of our solution set. I will tell you that our engineering team and some of these guys are true guru-level engineers in AI for a long time.
00:30:35
Speaker
Nobody can keep up with this. The level of change is happening so fast. The technical development that the engineers on my team that are trying to build systems and solutions based on it, one week later, everything they did is now out of date because there's a new, radical new approach that's 10 times better. So back to marketing.
00:30:56
Speaker
If you're a marketer, I highly advise to think through your hypothesis for how your job, whether it's content marketing or campaign creation or event management or whatever it is, is going to be impacted by this and then develop a thesis, begin to learn to use the tools and technologies. And I, your blog post is right today.
00:31:19
Speaker
where it's not like AI is going to come in and write every blog post and create every website from scratch and terminate all these people. It's not there today. But when I see the rate of change that things are happening, I'll tell you, two years from now, within the next two years,
00:31:36
Speaker
it's going to be marketers and salespeople who understand these technologies that are going to survive the transformation that's coming. I've been talking for a long time, especially with the ups and downs of the market and how marketing departments expand and contract, that marketing departments will be heavy on strategy, critical thinking,
Strategic Focus with AI and Freelancers
00:31:59
Speaker
creativity,
00:32:02
Speaker
trying to come up with ways that companies can outmaneuver the competition. And a lot of the tactical work, especially the grunt work, the stuff like a lot of the grunt stuff that you hire people for, you have low cost talent that does it. Increasingly we use Fiverr and Upwork to make it happen. A lot of that stuff will disappear. So you'll have small, smart marketing departments strategically thinking using an army of contractors, freelancers, and of course AI.
00:32:29
Speaker
Is that the future of marketing within companies? That's going to happen. It is happening. As you said, AI is replacing some of that tactical, tactical execution work. But in my honest perspective.
00:32:41
Speaker
Like I use GenAI every day, chat GPT primarily and a few other tools. And for me, it's almost all on the creative side. It's helping me come up with ideas, create, go to market plans. I'm giving, I gave a speech in Stockholm last week that it would have taken me two hours to think through.
00:33:00
Speaker
the ideas, the points that they could have made, and the thoughts that chat GPT gave me in five minutes. Now, so to some degree, it's the opposite. It's going to be a while before a robot is able to stand up on the stage and give it an engaging presentation like I gave last week. But could AI think of the key points?
00:33:19
Speaker
in much more quickly than I would have done it. There's no question about it. So I don't, I would not assume that it's only the tactical execution that AI is going to take over. Obviously it is doing some of that and it's having a big impact on the creative side of marketing as well. So both ends.
00:33:38
Speaker
It's a volatile, exciting, challenging marketing landscape. You and I both have our hands full trying to navigate it, but this has been a great conversation. Love the idea that you've been an entrepreneur since you were 12 years old. Love the idea that you've been in the CEO seat and as a CMO, which gives you a unique perspective of the marketing landscape. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to these days?
00:34:00
Speaker
Please do reach out to me on LinkedIn and connect with me and mention that you heard me here because I'm not the kind of guy that just links in with anybody. But if you listen to this podcast, you're probably the kind of person that I would want to be connected with. And also check out my company, Protect.com, to see if our solutions might be relevant to what you're doing today.
00:34:21
Speaker
Thanks, Blaine, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and of course, share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company with one to five million dollars in revenue and you're looking for traction and to scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor. Reach out via email, mark at markevans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.com. I'll talk to you later.
00:34:51
Speaker
you