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How to Build a Dynamic B2B Marketing Team: Mitch Fanning
45 Plays4 years ago
It's one thing to do marketing; it's another thing to build a cohesive, collaborative, and productive marketing team.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mitch Fanning provides insight into what it takes to build a team that drives marketing success.
One of the things that Mitch likes in a marketing hire is "grit", which is the ability to get the job done even when things are challenging.
Mitch also talks about how to create a partnership with a CEO to ensure that marketing gets the support it needs, as well as his marketing HR priorities.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes or less.
00:00:10
Speaker
As the intro suggests, I'm interested in talking to marketers who operate in the trenches, people who build, operate, and optimize marketing engines to drive growth in competitive markets.
Mitch Fanning and RentSync's Marketing Focus
00:00:21
Speaker
Today, I'm talking to that kind of marketer, Mitch Fanning, VP Marketing at RentSync, which provides marketing software and services for the multifamily industry. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Mitch. Thanks for having me on there, Mark.
00:00:34
Speaker
Maybe we can start by telling me a little bit about how long you've been at RentSync and what RentSync does. Uh, so I've been at RentSync for about a year and a half. And, uh, as you've, you've already kind of, uh, mentioned, uh, RentSync provides marketing solutions for the multifamily. So one way you can think about it, one way the listeners can think about it is that it's multi, sorry, it's HubSpot for multifamily.
00:00:59
Speaker
but just with services. My big role is not only to help shape product strategy, but to formalize and execute on the go to market and scale operations.
Understanding the Multifamily Sector
00:01:09
Speaker
So what is multifamily? Just to give us a little bit of color on what that involves.
00:01:13
Speaker
Okay, so this is interesting because my background is not on multifamily. So multifamily is really the owner operators, the investors, the property management firms that essentially buy, manage, and essentially invest in apartment buildings. And what's really interesting to me at least in this space
00:01:36
Speaker
is that this industry, when it comes to marketing, it's kind of where the B2B space was like 10 years ago. And what I mean by that is when it comes to technology, when it comes to their technology stacks and the things that they're doing, they are just kind of catching up to the B2B space. So it's almost like history is repeating itself.
00:02:01
Speaker
So as a marketer, if you're dealing with customers who may not be terribly tech savvy, does that mean that a lot of your marketing is around education? Because you've got people who may not be using a lot of technology at all. Do you have to win them over to the fact that technology is a valuable and useful tool and then convince them that your software is something that they should consider?
00:02:26
Speaker
I think just like I would say any industry or any situation when things are ahead of its time, I would have said that was the case maybe three, four years ago. A couple of things have changed that. Number one,
00:02:45
Speaker
you're getting into a situation where you're finding a lot of young people are running these marketing teams in multifamily and to COVID. People have had to change the way they've done business. And I know that's probably a reoccurring theme on this podcast, but multifamily is no different.
00:03:09
Speaker
So over the years, you've held a number of leadership marketing roles at a variety of companies. And I think it's given you some really interesting perspective on the marketing landscape and how it's evolved over the years.
The Role of CMOs in Early-Stage Companies
00:03:24
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the role of a CMO at an early stage company because
00:03:28
Speaker
It's a really important job but often it comes after the products been developed it comes after a sales team has been created and sometimes the marketing person is late to the game for release for speaking so what is their role and. And how do they establish themselves so that they can have a seat at the table.
00:03:53
Speaker
This is a great question and we probably could probably talk a lot longer than 15 minutes on this one particular subject. I would say, first of all, if I'm being, if I'm being honest, you, as a marketer, you really need to be honest with yourself. And when I, what I mean by that is you really have to ask yourself, am I a builder or am I a farmer?
00:04:19
Speaker
And what I think that means, at least to me, is not everyone is designed to be in an early stage tech environment. And that also includes anyone else outside of marketing. It can include product, et cetera. But if you are that person, the one thing I would say is
00:04:38
Speaker
you need to be really good at standing things up and that's everything from the technology, that's everything to do with the programs, et cetera. But I think you also need to be really good at understanding the business. And I think one of the things, and I would say that no matter what stage of the business you're in, but
00:05:02
Speaker
I think a lot of times early stage marketers come in as individual contributors and they get stuck there. And the problem with that is they get siloed and they're not able to connect what they do to business results.
00:05:19
Speaker
So I would say that's number one, but I would also say you have to really understand other functions outside of your own. And I don't think a lot of marketers spend a lot of time understanding business in general, whether it's SaaS, understanding what SaaS means, the business model behind that, the metrics that investors and CEOs actually track. And two, they don't spend enough time outside of their own discipline. So what do you mean by that?
00:05:50
Speaker
I think what I mean by that is they, so here's the thing. When you go from a individual contributor to leading marketing,
00:06:02
Speaker
The toughest thing beyond the things I just mentioned is managing up and educating internally. And I don't necessarily think it's something that just marketers have this infliction over, but I think it's just a hard thing to train yourself to do. In other words, continually trying to communicate what the vision of the company is, what marketing is doing externally, but also internally.
00:06:33
Speaker
One of the things that I've written about recently on LinkedIn is the ability or the necessity for early stage mark marketers to establish a partnership with
Building Effective CEO Partnerships
00:06:45
Speaker
the CEO. Because if you look at the evolution of early stage companies, it's usually the founder who is the jack of all trades early on. They drive product development, they drive sales, they drive marketing.
00:06:56
Speaker
And over time, they'll give up some of those responsibilities. So it could be product development, it could be sales, but marketing is always very close to their heart because it's their company, it's their vision, it's their story. So when a marketer comes on, there's a dance that the CEO and the marketer have to go through because they've got to not only
00:07:17
Speaker
delineate, okay, this is what I do. This is what you do. This is what your responsibility responsible for. And this is what I'm going to own. But the lines are blurred when it comes to marketing. So from your experience, how do you establish a partnership with a CEO, with the founder, the person who's very vested and marketing can be very close to the heart. And it does put a lot of pressure on marketers because they have to perform, but they also have this other stakeholder that they have to dance with at the same time.
00:07:47
Speaker
Probably the answer I'm gonna give is not, it's obvious, but it may not be the one that people want to hear. Number one, you should know, you should ask really good questions before you get into that company around that particular subject and get a sense for is that CEO actually going to essentially give up that function and let you kind of run it. And if they don't, don't go there.
00:08:11
Speaker
Two, if you see that that's happening early on, that's a red flag and it's probably not going to change. One thing I would say is if they're not like that, I would say definitely you need to show them, you've got to build a relationship with them. I mean, this is something that we all know, but again, just like educating, communicating internally to the company at large what marketing does and what the company is doing as far as where it's going.
00:08:41
Speaker
I think it's just something you have to do and work at first. You've got to show some early wins, of course, and then you've got to build out that strategy and start to think long-term.
00:08:53
Speaker
On the flip side, and I'm talking from personal experience here, is what happens if you run into a situation where you have a CEO, they declare, definitively declare that they want to do marketing. They believe that the time is right for marketing to help scale and accelerate growth. But when push comes to shove, they don't give you the engagement that you need. They don't want that partnership. So you're trying to tell their story, reflect their vision, do with the things that
00:09:21
Speaker
They believe in or they believe should be done, but when you do them that you get pushback because apparently you did, you did the wrong things. What you didn't get from them was engagement. So you're left to your own devices. So what do you do in those situations where you want a partner, you want someone to contribute and, and go on, go with you on the ride and that's not happening.
00:09:43
Speaker
This is what I would call the hard things about the hard things, right? I mean, it's the things that you don't actually read in a marketing book or any type of marketing resource or marketing podcast. Like how do you actually basically effectively, it's change management, right? And so these situations are hard and you're not going to read that in a book. I would say, again, go back to rule number one, meaning
00:10:08
Speaker
You have to understand that if they're not going to be the type, if they don't see the value in marketing and they're not letting go of that function, or in a way, again, we can go down this rabbit hole, but in a way,
00:10:31
Speaker
interrupting or again, not letting that function go, that's a red flag. But at the same time, when you bring them something, you have to be willing to take that constructive feedback. It's not an easy answer for sure, but I think people know
00:10:51
Speaker
When they're in that situation, the problem is just like a lot of times, and this has to do with everything, not just marketing. It's the inaction. We don't act when we're in those situations. We don't make a decision to leave that situation. And I think that's really what it comes down to. It's the inability to act and remove yourself from that situation.
Team Structure: Grit, Resilience, and Roles
00:11:16
Speaker
Assuming that you've found yourself in a good situation, you've got a relationship with the CEO, there's terms of engagement that have been established and you start to build out marketing. So you put together your brand position, you've got a marketing strategy, you want to make things happen and you come to that really sticky
00:11:37
Speaker
juncture or the really interesting juncture or that challenging juncture when you've got to build a team, you've got to figure out who do we hire internally because a lot of functions are being secured from third parties these days. And do we hire someone from ops first or do we go with analytics first? How do you put together that marketing HR plan? What are the things that you need to consider and are there any sort of common beliefs or common approaches that a marketing leader should take?
00:12:07
Speaker
Again, what I would say is my personal hiring philosophy is hire for grit first, everything else is secondary. What I really mean by that is, again, a lot of people are attracted to that high growth startup or tech company because it's romantic. What they don't understand is every year,
00:12:31
Speaker
sometimes every six months, not only does the company change, but they actually have to change within the company. And that's not for everyone. You need to have a growth mindset. And that really is what I mean by grit. Someone who's passionate at really evolving as a person and they're persistent, they've got perseverance, they're willing to do the hard things.
00:12:49
Speaker
When it comes to building a team though, I mean, it really depends on what the, what the business is looking for. So I always think about it as the OKRs. What's the, what's the, what's the, what's the objectives? What are the strategies and then build the team structure around that to actually execute. But if you were just asking me point blank, what, how would I go about building a team structure? Number one, if it was just like a blank slate, ops and analytics first.
00:13:17
Speaker
You need, at the end of the day, you need metrics, you need someone owning the tech stack, and that's what somebody in ops would do. If it's obviously software, it would be the product marketer. That would be the second person I would bring on. And the reason why I'm in that order, and then obviously from there, it's comms or brand and demand. And the reason why I would go in that order is, again, tech stack, right? It's the engine.
00:13:42
Speaker
The product marketer is important because what happens is you start doing demand. And the first thing you're doing is you're creating original positioning, you're creating original messaging, you're creating it. And, and the demand person is doing that all the time. And what happens with, if you get a product marketer and you get that, that positioning, that messaging in place, then they can just use that content to fuel their programs.
00:14:08
Speaker
Rand Fishkin, who runs a company called Spark Toro, recently wrote a blog post saying that companies should outsource as much of their functions as possible to agencies or contractors. As someone who runs marketing, as someone who's an internal marketing leader, what's your approach to that? How much can or should
00:14:30
Speaker
a early stage company outsource so that they can be cost efficient they can drive productivity and they can allocate the resources in the most efficient way. I definitely wouldn't outsource ops i definitely wouldn't outsource product marketing when it comes to demand it depends i would say you need.
00:14:50
Speaker
You need someone who's running demand, but when it comes to building out or as you grow, you're going to have specialties on that team. So for example, I'm looking to have someone who's just going to own paid channels or paid advertising. Now we're looking at actually outsourcing that position. So someone actually who is going to fit into that position, who's a specialist, sure, in that situation. And also too, it's also because we're not sure of the actual
00:15:20
Speaker
essentially the bandwidth for that position.
00:15:24
Speaker
I think when it's very specialized, sure. I wouldn't outsource thought leadership, again, so brand or content. So our comms and content person does essentially thought leadership, and that is essentially brand. I wouldn't outsource that. You want somebody within the company who can be a domain expert or several, and you definitely don't wanna, so I guess at the end of the day, if it's specialized,
00:15:53
Speaker
sure and you're not sure if they're going to be a full-time position, that's probably how I would approach it. And that's actually how I am approaching it.
00:16:06
Speaker
Now as the marketing landscape has evolved, it's almost like there's two sides to the marketing landscape.
Balancing Brand and Performance Metrics
00:16:12
Speaker
On one side, you've got the brand experience, brand content, people like myself who are focused on brand positioning and messaging and thought leadership and all those good things. On the other side of the house, you've got the data geeks.
00:16:24
Speaker
You know, the people who are running the numbers, who are trying to optimize everything. It's all about little tweaks and watching the data and making data-driven decisions that drive sales and marketing activity. I understand and I recognize that metrics are a necessity, but here's the question. Here's the $64,000 question. Should everything be measured? Does everything have to be measured just because it can? And what are the perils of relying too heavily on data to make marketing decisions?
00:16:53
Speaker
I love this question. So here's how I would answer that. So number one, I think everything can be measured to some degree. I would even go as far as to say brand can be measured. The way I would look at this though is,
00:17:08
Speaker
The way I initially look at it is demand subsidizes brand, meaning performance metrics, performance marketing needs to be measured 100%. But that piece of the marketing org or the marketing engine can, to some degree, subsidize brand marketing. The way I would kind of think about this though is you need to first nail your category.
00:17:33
Speaker
because that's the context and who your best fit customer is the the analogy i give is you know mark if i were to ask you do you want to go out for dinner tonight you know what do you feel like your first initial thought would be well do i feel like italian do i feel like chinese those are categories then if you nail the category of said let's go for chinese
00:17:56
Speaker
then we'd started to think about, well, what are the best Chinese restaurants? That's brand. Now, if I looked and I told you, wait a minute, there's a two for one deal on Facebook for this particular restaurant tonight, and that would happen to be the second best Chinese restaurant in Toronto, we'd maybe end up going there. That's demand. You have to look at the fact that not everything can be measured. Sure. But if you don't actually
00:18:25
Speaker
go through that framework and nail all the components, you're going to be hard pressed to actually make the metrics work for you. Now, going back to brand, I will say you probably can measure it. The way we're looking at measuring it is by a proprietary metric called Reach. I won't get into that, but the key here is the way we're going to do it long term is
00:18:48
Speaker
You basically do an aided or unaided brand awareness study at the end of the year. You basically ask, and an unaided brand awareness study is this, or sorry, an aided would be this. If I said to Mark, which one of these software companies do you like best or do you recognize Coke or Pepsi, you would rank them one and two.
00:19:14
Speaker
Now, from a perception point of view, that's the other side of how you can measure a brand. If I said to you, what's the sweetest one or the two, you would say, well, Coke is the sweetest. And maybe that's the positioning that Coke is going for.
00:19:29
Speaker
And then you basically just do the same study year over year and see if you've got a lift off those two metrics. So the point being is you can, but should you do it early? No, sometimes it's, you know, sometimes again, early stage, not everything has to be measured right away. You've got to build into those type of metrics.
00:19:50
Speaker
One of the questions I'm asking marketers these days, especially B2B marketers, is that with the evaporation of conferences, the places where you connect with prospects and customers and those serendipitous relationships that are built simply because you sit beside someone during a panel session, those are not going to happen. I don't think there's going to happen for a year, at least a year. And that's just my own view of
Maintaining B2B Engagement in a Changing Landscape
00:20:16
Speaker
the world.
00:20:16
Speaker
How do B2B companies spark conversations with prospects? I'm not talking about a chat bot or somebody reaches out and on a contact box or fills out an ebook download, but real conversations where I get on the phone and we're talking to each other and we're connecting and we're beginning to establish a relationship. I think a lot of brands are having a hard time doing that. Any thoughts about how you can make that happen? Is it the approach that RentSync is taking to address that challenge?
00:20:48
Speaker
It's not an easy answer for sure. Probably the answer I'm going to give is going to seem like it's a cop-out, but it's doing the things you should have been doing anyways. So for us, we're providing thought leadership in the form of a podcast and rental or industry reports through LinkedIn organic and
00:21:14
Speaker
The tactics that are involved in all of those initiatives can vary. One thing my CEO and I got to give him credit for is he's willing to go the long play. So again, get the right company with the right leadership team, the right CEO, because they see value in the long play and that's content.
00:21:35
Speaker
In the meantime, we are running our demand gen. We're going account based because that's the play for us in our industry. But I don't really think there's a silver bullet. I think you need to have that air cover and you need to run demand and you need to do a combination of both. At the end of the day, it's usually about figuring out what works best and that's just experimentation. So it's more about the process you're going through and are you improving than it is, what is that silver bullet?
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah, I wish there was a better answer. I wish there was a more definitive answer. And it's a very tough question to be asking these days because it's a new marketing landscape and we're all trying to adapt and we're all trying to figure out ways that we can differentiate ourselves and really get those conversations going. Mitch, thanks for coming on Marketing Spark today. If people are looking to find you online, where do they find you? Are you on LinkedIn? Do you have a podcast or website? Let us know the information about where you, where you can, people can learn more about what you do.
00:22:36
Speaker
I mean, you can just Google Mitch Fanning. I think I'm going to be the first that shows up. I run a podcast called Built to Scale, but yeah, LinkedIn is always the best place to find me.
00:22:48
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Mitch, visit marketingspark.co. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. Talk to you next time.