Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
In-Depth with Mitch Solway: Navigating the B2B and SaaS Marketing Landscapes
248 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans talks to Mitch Solway, a fractional CMO for startups, about the volatile and ever-changing B2B and SaaS marketing landscapes.
We discuss marketing leaders' challenges as they strive to attract prospects while dealing with budget pressures.
Recommended
Transcript
B2B and SaaS Marketing in 2020-2021 vs. Today
00:00:08
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. If you were a B2B or SaaS marketer in 2020 and 2021, it was like attending the best party ever. Digital transformation had massive momentum, people and companies were enthusiastically embracing online services, and venture capital was flowing into fast-growing companies.
00:00:34
Speaker
For marketers, it meant healthy budgets and the ability and freedom to invest in core activities, but also allocate money to experiments and nice-to-do projects.
00:00:45
Speaker
Well, today, the B2B and SaaS marketing landscape is dramatically different. Amid more challenging economic conditions and the venture capital taps being closed, many companies are pulling back on marketing. Budgets have been reduced, employees have been cut loose, and every marketing dollar is being scrutinized.
00:01:07
Speaker
Rather than big swings, companies want to fill gaps and focus on marketing that moves the needle. On today's podcast, I'm talking to Mitch Solway, a fractional CMO for startups and a coach for senior marketers. Mitch's track record includes leading marketing at companies like Lava Life, FreshBooks, Vidyard, ClearFit, and FunThru. If anyone understands the ups and downs of marketing, it's Mitch. And welcome to Marketing Spark. Hey Mark, great to be on the show again.
00:01:36
Speaker
As I mentioned in the introduction, many companies are cautious and hesitant about marketing due to reduced venture capital, volatile economy, and slower sales growth. It's like they're afraid to do marketing and at the same time, they're afraid not to do marketing. How do all the factors that we point to impact the B2B and SaaS marketing landscapes?
Impact of Economic Changes on CEOs and Marketing Strategies
00:02:01
Speaker
When I think about it,
00:02:03
Speaker
It really, everything sort of starts outside of marketing because there's been this big shift in everyone rethinking their business model. You know, a lot of CEOs are going through a lot of change and they're dealing with a whole new environment they haven't dealt with. And that's going to ripple down to their leadership teams. It's going to ripple down to each functional area. And I think the real thing that's changed more from marketing landscape
00:02:28
Speaker
was just the whole financial landscape has kinked. And so as companies start to rethink and readjust, for example, if I was planning on doing some kind of Series A or Series B in the next 12 or 24 months, I probably can't bake that in. And I'm actually hearing from a lot of companies now that are trying to figure out these paths to profitability. And that causes quite a seismic shift in how they're going to operate and what the metrics look like.
00:02:55
Speaker
And when then it comes down to the marketing group, it can have an equal sort of shocking factor for these groups. And now you have to really rethink how you're going to build your entire sort of marketing model and practice so that it fits back into what the company needs. And that mindset is probably the biggest, I'd say the mindset is probably where the biggest impact has been for people. Just shocking them out of how they used to operate and then wrapping your head around, okay, now how to reorganize all my thinking in these new models.
Balancing Strategy and Tactics in Marketing
00:03:25
Speaker
Now I mentioned earlier that a lot of companies are looking at marketing and they want anything they do to move the needle. And many companies are leaning hard into tactics. What's the balance between strategy and tactics at this stage? Strategy is obviously awesome. You plan the work and you work the plan and you have a roadmap for success.
00:03:51
Speaker
But some companies look at strategy and say, well, it actually gets in the way of actually making stuff happen. And as a long-time marketer and someone who spends a lot of time focused on strategic planning, how do you see that balance? Is it a bit of a fight between two sides? What's the perspective that many companies are taking right now when they look at these two levers?
00:04:14
Speaker
in terms of strategy and tactics. So I always like to say, you know, plans and tactics are just plans and tactics. And they're really, the context is the strategy. And I think at the end of the day, I think what was pushing a lot of companies and you actually mentioned earlier, and I don't know that I addressed in my first answer is like, they kind of want to do marketing, but they don't want to do marketing. And I think a lot of companies are because they have to rethink, you know, what is their, you know, what's their path to win?
00:04:41
Speaker
And how are we going to win in the market that we're in? And it's so funny, like in these moments of truth, you know, you, you go and you, you know, you, you look to the skies, you look to the heavens like, what am I doing? Why am I doing all this? And to be honest, those are more than strategy, more than anything else. It's like, call it like touching the rock. It's coming back to like, why did we start this business? Who is it? You know, what was the problem you're trying to solve? Who really cares about us? What's meaningful for the market out there? Do we have something unique?
00:05:11
Speaker
different story or something unique to offer to the marketplace. Beyond strategy, I think, strategy and tactics will still fail if you don't really have that kind of stuff locked in. And then once you've got that locked in, to be honest, in my experience, the strategies and tactics just fit together. It's like, okay, now, okay, all right, remember what we're trying to do. We may have fewer resources to do those things, but if we reground ourselves in
00:05:37
Speaker
What are we in business for? How are we going to win this market? Who are we going to win it with? What really matters? We can then look to strategies. For me, the strategies just come and say, OK, well, this is what we're going to do. These are probably the 10 things we're going to do because we can't do 10 things anymore. These are the four things that we're going to do that fit within the financial constraints, but also line up to the winning formula. And then the tactics play out of that.
Agile Positioning and Differentiation
00:06:04
Speaker
I think if you start, though, at the end with the tactics, without the bigger framing in mind, we're seeing a lot of companies sort of spinning as they're trying. They're taking this agile approach to testing and iterating, but it's not really anchored in this big winning formula and how they think they're going to separate themselves from everybody else.
00:06:24
Speaker
I was going to ask you about brand positioning later during the podcast, but the fact that you mentioned the importance of focusing on the fundamentals and truly asking yourself, why do we exist? Who do we serve? What's the problem that we're solving and how do
00:06:46
Speaker
what we do align with what customers want. Do you think positioning is a place where many companies should focus on, maybe take a step back and answer those questions, revitalize or refresh or rethink the way that they position themselves in the market in terms of how they serve customers and as important how they compete against bigger and smaller players?
00:07:09
Speaker
It's been a core tenant of how I've approached it with when I was full-time VP marketing and even with a lot of the fractional clients just, but I would even say you should always be doing that. And I don't want, I know we want to cover a lot of ground here in some of the tactics and strategies and people aren't buying into strategy. All I'm saying is it doesn't even need to be this big thing, but it's just revisit. I'll give you a specific example where just a quick revisit of like, what are we doing when in a shocking moment,
00:07:37
Speaker
back when I was working at ClearFit and the ClearFit had two main capabilities. One is it could automatically publish job postings to multiple job sites. So, and then bring all the responses back to one place. But then we had, what was unique is we had this ability to rank and sort the candidates based on who was most likely to succeed. And we were, we were running, I was very successful running these radio campaigns and things are humming along really, really well. And then ZipRecruiter,
00:08:06
Speaker
Announced a big fundraiser at the time. It was probably like 80 million dollars and they were also from radio and we're like, oh my god What are you gonna do? Because these guys actually started out spending us 10 to 1 on radio So, you know where it was a little bit even more even before and they're telling a story about you know finding and hiring the right candidates and all that kind of stuff so what was happening was our message was getting lost plus
00:08:32
Speaker
We were getting just outnumbered, you know, into an outspent. I don't have any more budget. You know, I've got commitments to revenue. I'm like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? We just, I just took a moment, take a beat and go, well, what could I be doing here? What is, what's my winning formula? Where am I going to win versus zip recruiter? Cause we still believe we had something. And what we started doing was I said, well, you know what, how can I.
00:08:57
Speaker
Leverage their massive spend now to my advantage so they were out there promoting how many resumes they could get in your inbox like that quickly we went back and completely rewrote our ad campaign and our campaign talked about
00:09:14
Speaker
posting job boards and finding the right candidates and organizing things. But we completely focused on the key point of difference where all of a sudden our radio ads went from saying, you know, nobody likes hiring to when it comes to hiring, the last thing you want is a huge stack of resumes to pile through.
00:09:32
Speaker
So we reframe the problem from it's really hard to hire people and the whole process is broken to saying, well, how do we re contact set against this big competitor down create some differentiation? So we're saying like, the last thing you want is zip recruiter, because they're gonna fill your inbox with like 1000 candidates. And now you got a stack of resumes to go through while we did say course
00:09:53
Speaker
We're going to find lots of candidates, but we're the only platform that will automatically let you know which ones to follow up with, which actually was ended up being a much better framing for our product. And it actually performed much better than our previous campaigns. So here's a situation where.
00:10:12
Speaker
We didn't really need to change anything, but there was a shock to the system that forced us to really come back and rethink where we're going to win, what makes us different. And we were able to reframe our message against a really big competitor and sort of leverage their message to say, actually, this is the last thing you want. What you really need even more is what we bring to the table and end up being really successful. So I think that's what I think a lot of companies need to work through.
00:10:38
Speaker
That's a really interesting story because I think it illustrates a couple of things.
Adapting to Budget Cuts in Marketing
00:10:43
Speaker
One is the idea of agile positioning, that you respond to what competitors are doing and you do it in a very rapid way rather than taking a huge step back and then thinking, well, we have to go through this whole positioning exercise. The other thing that it suggests is that differentiation doesn't always have to be dramatic.
00:11:07
Speaker
It's important to stand apart from the competition, but you don't have to stand a mile apart. You could be a foot apart, but as long as you can rally around what makes you unique, that's one of the keys to success.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, again, it comes back to my point about like, how are we going to win here? And in some cases, it could be around support and service, like, you know, the last thing you want when you do this, you know, you go buy a car, the last thing you want is like, or whatever you buy a piece of software is no one there is, is there to answer and help you out. So whether it's support, but it's really important to know what your difference is. And here's an example, we didn't change our positioning.
00:11:40
Speaker
And our messaging was a little bit tweaked, but what we just, we just changed the context in which we were delivering the message to be hyper, hyper relevant against the competition. So we needed easier for people to know why you actually should reject them. And we were close enough to our customers to also know that they hated everything with hiring, like dealing with a ton of resumes. Like a lot of them didn't even care the fact that we were ranking them in terms of quality. They just liked that something was there to say, talk, call these 10 people first.
00:12:10
Speaker
right? We just really leaned into that. But yeah, it doesn't have to be a big thing. But you also have to create mental space for yourself to think these things through. Because if you just react, react, react, react, and then I think the most important part of my message earlier was to take a beat, take a beat, take a breath, get out of the craziness that you're dealing with. And maybe you go for a walk, take a couple days, figure it out.
00:12:35
Speaker
I think you can find a really elegant solution a lot of times and just sort of lead into what makes you different.
Balancing Short-term and Long-term Business Needs
00:12:42
Speaker
From the outside looking in, when I look at how B2B and SaaS companies are doing marketing right now and how they're pulling back on marketing, some of it feels like panic and the idea that their world is falling apart. And the other sort of angle is that they look at marketing as low hanging fruit or an easy target. So when times get tough,
00:13:06
Speaker
The easy place to start is by hacking away at marketing because you don't want to hack away at sales or product development. Wondering about what you see as some of the common mistakes that companies make when they do pull back on marketing.
00:13:19
Speaker
I don't know that there's common mistakes. I think it's just a diversity. I don't even know that's a mistake. I think the mistake is before they make the cuts. The mistake is that somehow maybe marketing hasn't demonstrated it. It's not clear within the organization the value that marketing is bringing to the table. Because sometimes it's just not a mistake to cut marketing. We cannot cut marketing and we can run out of money. I think the toughest part about the making cuts
00:13:49
Speaker
Is making the cut is deciding and then you know Most of my experience has been working as part of the leadership team And a lot of times like i'll sign up for making cuts and then maybe we need to let some people go or maybe we need to You know find a way to to just you know, I got to turn back whatever You know, when is it lava life? We're spending 20 million dollars a year at marketing and I was told okay, mich We're gonna have to cut your budget in half and for me
00:14:13
Speaker
You know, where a lot of the shock happens is like, I think a lot of marketers experience that. My first reaction is like, what? You know, it's impossible. I can never make it happen. And then the mistake is just getting stuck as a marketer in like getting stuck in all the negativity and in rather than saying, okay, look.
00:14:34
Speaker
There's maybe mistakes before I didn't do a good enough job or maybe I did a great job explaining marketing's value and it just needs to get cut. So mistakes could be that the company doesn't understand the value of marketing in the first place. And so they're just in a bad situation and they don't know what to do. So they're just going to cut it. But whatever you're left with is still about picking up the pieces and saying, okay, well, if I only have half the budget and half the team, again, it comes back to my point earlier about the biggest shift, I think the biggest
00:15:02
Speaker
The challenge now is just refactoring your own brain to say, now what am I going to do? At Lava Life, I had been thinking about our mix between actually print and television. So it dates it. But we had a heavy, heavy print investment. And it was just steady, steady, steady. And at that point, I'm like, again, you take a beat. And then got over. I let it all out. I was like, oh my god. It can never happen when you guys are crazy. But I had to say, OK, I understand why we need this.
00:15:30
Speaker
And I ended up dramatically shifting our mix of media out of print and more into television. We ended up doing just fine. It actually ended up being a great thing for us. Print was on its way out, and this was just sort of the kick in the ass that I needed. I'll say, as good as I was, we're all pretty good at what we do, but there's all kinds of blind spots that we had and moves that we don't make that enlisted gunners to our head.
00:15:53
Speaker
gun comes to your head and you're like, it's really gonna force you to make some really important decisions, whether it's a competitor like Zippercooter coming in and outspending it like crazy or getting your budget cut. I think the biggest mistake is just panic and just getting, still being stuck in the woe is me state. And legitimately, if there's nothing you can do and you really feel your hands are tied and you can't be successful, then, you know, go find another place where you can be successful. At the same time,
00:16:20
Speaker
Just like, you know, a founder will tell you their journey is crazy. It's follow ups and downs. And there's win big wins and big losses. You know, as a marketing leader, use this as an opportunity to come back and tell a story of how my bucket was cut in half. And we figured it out or a competitor raised a ton of money and was outspending us, but we figured out a way to make it work. Because inevitably, you're going to face these things. So remove the emotional component or get it out of your system and then come back and bring your smart marketing self back to solve the problem.
00:16:50
Speaker
does illustrate the reality that change is hard. We get stuck in habits. And what we've done, we think that we'll always do. And sometimes change is self-motivated, and sometimes it's forced upon you. And I think that's a really good perspective. Amid uncertain times, companies often think short term.
Pivoting Marketing Strategies with Brand Consistency
00:17:11
Speaker
When I look at what CEOs are talking about, the focus is on leads in sales, leads in sales, leads in sales, they're not
00:17:19
Speaker
terribly interested in building brand or brand awareness. I do wonder how B2B and SaaS companies can use marketing to position themselves for long-term success rather than focusing on their immediate needs. Admittedly, that's a challenge because when you're an entrepreneur or CEO and you've got to pay the bills every month, you need money coming in the door and you need to do things that move the needle, that attract customers,
00:17:49
Speaker
Expand your business, but at the same time you also have to have that long-term perspective that there is more to business than the here and now and What you're trying to do is make sure your business is well positioned so when the tide turns you're ready for it you're prepared and hopefully you've done a better job of outflanking the competition or making sure that you're ahead of the competition in terms of getting ready for what's next and
00:18:18
Speaker
What are your thoughts in terms of the balance between the short-term and the long-term? If you're being asked for short-term results, you need to understand why. You need to make sure you're clear because, again, sometimes it's just survival, right? It's like we need to generate revenue. There's demands and there's necessities. Someone is demanding that you get more short-term results
00:18:43
Speaker
Then that's a different conversation. It's like, like, why do we need this? Like, listen, if we're hitting our targets and we're doing whatever, like I can get you more today and less tomorrow, or would you like enough today and more tomorrow? That's one conversation. But if it comes down to the business, just saying, you know, hopefully you've got a leader or someone that says, look, Mitch, here's, here's the thing is like, I know.
00:19:04
Speaker
We don't like to think short-term, but we need to generate this amount of revenue in the next 12 months in order to, sometimes long-term success is getting through the short-term markers. We need to survive, or we're gonna have to let a whole bunch of people go, and then you're gonna have to rethink all over again. So I think understanding, once you come to terms, again, so much is mindset, once you come to terms with what it is you're really trying to solve for, sometimes it's not about short-term results, it's about I'm solving for a bigger issue.
00:19:30
Speaker
I think that can be helped. That can certainly help. I think where also marketing can help is marketing is usually just one part of the whole machine. So there's been so many times when in order to get short-term results, we've had to ramp up change in process. Maybe we've tried to push more, more sales through our customer service team, you know, a clear fit. We, again, another example where we had a short-term need to drive revenue and we're like, what do we do is like, well,
00:19:57
Speaker
You know, someone came up with the idea of selling bundles. We had a lot of customers that would buy these job postings from us like one at a time, like, well, let's just like, will they buy five at once? And like, we went out and we, we fixed it and had nothing to do with marketing, but, and our customers loved it. They say, you know, we gave them a price break. We got the money upfront and we started, you know, put the cash into our bank accounts.
00:20:18
Speaker
For business and that really helped another time i'll use clear fit as another example cuz i came in at a time where they were just spending gobs of money and they weren't getting anywhere and so much of it wasn't marketing. You know we had a sort of trial.
00:20:34
Speaker
motion where you would one out of every three candidates you could see. And what we're finding is they're getting so many candidates that if I got one out of every three, I didn't need to pay for anything. So we shifted from this free sampling model to a money back guarantee. It wasn't a marketing solution, but we looked at the business. So we looked at other areas of the business that where we were losing money and maybe try different things. And what happened is when we shifted away,
00:21:00
Speaker
from one model to another model is we saw a dramatic increase in conversion rates to purchase so we were subsidizing a lot of folks so i think you can look at all areas of the business if you're a strong team and this is gonna be my final point that i'm gonna get to if you're a strong team you're gonna look everywhere
00:21:16
Speaker
to see, because you're kind of in this together. And if it's just like, one's just looking at marketing to solve the problem, I don't think that's fair. And I don't think that's right. I just think it's irresponsible. Even if you run marketing, just to stay within your walls of saying, well, what's possible? What can we do? You're going to talk to sales, you're going to talk to product, you're going to talk to customer success. Are there opportunities where you can work together? Because really, you're all in this together to find revenue.
00:21:40
Speaker
And the last thing I think you can do, to be honest, in terms of long-term success versus short-term, it's still, at the end of the day, long-term success is going to come down to having really good leaders and really good people at your company. At FreshBooks, there was a scenario where we had expected a fundraising to come in and almost last, and we were set to hire a whole bunch of people. We had all of our plans built.
00:22:04
Speaker
And we actually had hired a bunch of people and the funding fell through at the last minute. Like, what do we do? Like, and it was a moment of truth for us. And we just sat down and we said, what are our principles is like, we want to keep all of our people. We have some really, a really great team and really good people. And we all just kind of came together as a group and sort of calmly mapped out our priorities and.
00:22:24
Speaker
I figured out a way to keep all our really good people in place and happy and productive. And we cut down some plans, really worked for plans. But at the end of the day, if you don't have the right leaders, you don't have the right people in the right roles focused on the right things.
00:22:38
Speaker
And you're never going to get long-term success anyway. I think those are three things to think about in particular. And I think, again, get your mindset right. Understand what is the problem you're solving. Look everywhere in terms of the short-term results, because every dollar matters. I talked to someone the other day, and they're going to have to do some layoffs. I said, look, there's probably already people on your team that were halfway out the door anyway. And she was saying, yeah, and there's probably a couple of people on my team that weren't as good as they could be.
00:23:07
Speaker
So again, it's a kind of thing to catalyze some action that you probably should have been taking anyway and to sharpen your pencil. The theme, if there's an undercurrent to this conversation, is that change is constant. And sometimes change is something that you can embrace and make happen. And sometimes change is forced upon you. And I think a lot of companies have had a marketing recipe that they followed for many years.
00:23:37
Speaker
It's a marketing mix that has generated leads in sales and established them as leaders in their marketplace. But the landscape has changed and customers want different things and there's new competitive threats. What are some of the things that companies should be doing to pivot their marketing strategies in response to changing market conditions?
00:24:03
Speaker
while at the same time maintaining a consistent brand image. I think about the idea that you may have to do, like as you mentioned, entirely different types of marketing, like Lab of Life, you abandon print for television. What's that mindset from not only the marketing leader, but the management teams in terms of thinking and saying and doing? We have to operate differently and we have to make it happen. How do you make that happen when change is so hard sometimes?
00:24:32
Speaker
Well, you need a good, you know, you could need a good CEO and that I'll be honest, like that also key to long term success marketers will come and go, right? It's going to be a strong founder, particularly in startups, a strong founder or co-founders that are going to have the fortitude. They're going to be locked in to what matters and what's important. And I'll get back on track, but I know.
00:24:54
Speaker
founders are getting a lot of slack for a lot of flack for all the layoffs and things that they've done. But man, these are tough decisions for them to make. And they just have to, if you're them, you're gonna have to make the same decision. You can hate them for, for laying off these people. And there's really no good way to do it. And maybe there's nice ways and better ways, but there's just a lot of tough decisions that you need to be making.
00:25:16
Speaker
But overall, in these kinds of conditions, change is hard, change is inevitable. And I think you just need, you just need to, you can't get lazy. You just gotta keep pushing. Good marketing leaders and good marketing organizations. Obviously, you know, if the CEO is always asking me to do things, I'm going like, what are you talking about? I can't do that. Like they're way more bold than I am. And my team is like, mix, you're way bolder than we are. But we're not,
00:25:43
Speaker
unreasonable. If you create an environment in your startup where there's always some level of push, there's always some I'll call it positive stressors and pressures for people to continue to continue to drive and strive for better results. And if you combine that, to be honest with
00:26:01
Speaker
creating good collaboration and the right people and good culture and environments where people are encouraged to do that and supported to do that. This is where success can happen. Like I said, change is always going on. It's just the degree. Sometimes there's these big sharp changes. But if you're not changing and you're not advancing and you're not rethinking,
00:26:21
Speaker
all the time. I think I wrote a post on LinkedIn once that said, you know, at least once a quarter, I would sit down and ask myself two key questions. It's like, is what I'm doing, does is what we're doing still make sense? Right? Because I knew it made sense when we decided and then and then what are we not doing? You know, what of looking for a head for the next year or two years? What do we need to be doing now that we're not doing it?
00:26:46
Speaker
And you've got to keep asking yourself these questions. You're just going to get caught behind and caught chasing. I think that kind of mentality and creating good cultures, good environments, having a good strong founding group and leadership team that will keep pushing in a positive way will always put you in a position to have more resiliency when things come up. In some B2B and SaaS organizations, there's the tension between marketing and sales.
Aligning Sales and Marketing for Growth
00:27:13
Speaker
Sales says to marketing, you're not
00:27:15
Speaker
doing the right type of marketing. You're not generating leads. The leads that we're getting aren't properly qualified. Marketing turns around and says, you're not using our to sales and says you're not using the collateral and assets. You're not telling the right story. You're the ones who are dropping the ball. So obviously in well run organizations, marketing and sales alignment is critical.
00:27:39
Speaker
How can B2B and SaaS companies ensure a partnership and seamless collaboration between these two functions to drive revenue growth, even when they're facing economic challenges? Yeah, it's so funny how many times when you, particularly in my fractional roles, when I come in and, you know, lead the marketing group and I'll hear whoever, maybe the CEO or the founder or some other leader, maybe B2B revenue saying, oh, by the way, and can you help us product and marketing aren't getting along?
00:28:08
Speaker
or sales and marketing aren't getting along. And like, can you help us with that? I'm like, of course. Almost every single time that sales and marketing aren't getting along, I say, you know, it's broken at the top, broken at the bottom. It's some misalignment or it's about those who's ever leading marketing and leading sales, not being in alignment. It's just unfair to expect your team to figure it out on their own when the leaders haven't got it figured out. It's just, it's just inverted.
00:28:33
Speaker
The reason I say, yeah, we can figure that out because it almost always happens in a conversation. Marketing and sales have to want to work together in order to be working together. Again, this is another mindset. If you have this underlying resistance to working with sales or for sales to work with marketing.
00:28:49
Speaker
then you can't fake working productively together. Because I work with a lot of early stage companies so much for my time, I like working at the beginning when we're just building because there's nothing to go and untangle, right? It's not like we've been doing this for 15 years and it's a mess, come in and untangle it. I've had a couple of those situations.
00:29:07
Speaker
you can start to build those foundational elements. And one of my fractional clients when I was building the marketing team, one of the co-founders was leading sales and she was building the sales team at the same time. We decided together that she'll build the sales team, I'll build the marketing team, but we want those teams to actually work together as one growth team. While I was looking to hire for the marketing team,
00:29:29
Speaker
part of the criteria in the interview process was looking for people that had a bias, a positive bias for working with sales. It's like, yeah, I love working with sales. And the same thing on the sales side is like, I really enjoy working with marketing. So we were able from the beginning to find the co-founder and myself, we're already like, hey, let's build a, you know, we're gonna have to learn really, really quickly.
00:29:49
Speaker
And we need to understand what's happening through the sales process to figure out marketing and if marketing is any good and what is sales learning and marketing learning and so we just need to work together. So it starts with the decision at the top to say, you know, let's work together. And then, you know, how do you organize your people around that to make sure that it works? And even internally, sometimes you have to untangle things.
00:30:11
Speaker
It's just having a conversation with your team and making sure that everybody can just get all negative baggage out and is just like clean and clear to move forward. If you want to work together, just work together. It's not that difficult. We just need to get ourselves out of the way. We're usually the people of the problem. It's not sales and marketing. Have some empathy, but also have some leadership in there. And if people won't change and sometimes people will resist is
00:30:38
Speaker
If you can't work with the other group, then they're just not going to be there anymore and just start to replace people that won't work together with people that will work together again.
00:30:47
Speaker
It's all about change. Some of it is painful, but always necessary.
Rapid-fire: Fractional CMOs, Twitter, and AI in Marketing
00:30:51
Speaker
I like to wrap up podcasts with a rapid fire around. Are you ready for this? Are you ready for short answers to some very short questions? I will do my best for short answers. So a couple of years ago, I rebranded myself as a fractional CMO. You're a fractional CMO. And I was waiting for the, the
00:31:12
Speaker
bandwagon to really start rolling and have only just started to see it. What's your take on fractional CMOs and one of the biggest challenges facing companies when they're looking at hiring one?
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's just so many now that doing all kinds of different things is just like any recruiting process. You've got to have a good understanding of what you need, so you make sure you hire the right fractional CMO at this point. The good news is there's so much talent doing so many different things. The bad news is you need to think, with so much choice, you need to be a little more clear on what you need to make sure you're hiring someone that solves the specific problems that you have.
00:31:48
Speaker
Twitter, otherwise known as X, and whether it still matters to B2B and SaaS companies? Probably. I've been off Twitter for at least six or seven years now, so I don't know. It's just not part of my lifestyle, but it matters if it matters. If you don't know if it matters, then it probably doesn't matter. And there's only so much you can do. If you're worried that it's going to go away and you've got a lot of business there, then you just need to figure out where those people are going to next.
00:32:15
Speaker
Facebook threads, which a couple of weeks ago was the ball of the ball and I guess I'm more than 100 million people signed up. Any thoughts on that? Nope. I haven't downloaded the app. I'm not on it. I mean, it wasn't on Twitter and wasn't on threads. It's just not, it's not where I spend my time and where I'm going to add any value. And I don't really thrive there. LinkedIn is my platform and that's where I thrive. And that's my community. Maybe it'll be something one day, but it's just not really registering for me right now.
00:32:44
Speaker
We talked a little bit about it earlier, brand positioning and its value amid difficult economic times and fierce competition. Yeah, I'll go back. We talked about earlier whether it's it's repositioning or coming back and reaffirming how you're going to win in the market is
00:33:01
Speaker
always critical, especially critical to really ground you again, if you need to retool and rethink all your strategies, just go back to first principles of like, how are we going to win this market? Who are we going to win it with? And what makes us different? And that will, that should everything, everything will just magically fall into place. And finally, content marketing and the impact of chat GBT and generative AI.
00:33:22
Speaker
So all I would say here is good marketers are good marketers. Good marketers find a way. So if I'm in content marketing and I know what I'm doing, I'm just going to figure out how to use CatQPT to be more successful. I think the people will figure it out. I don't know that.
00:33:39
Speaker
The AI is going to figure out the people. I think it's going to be the other way. And I'm just going to trust the really smart people that sort of lean into it and are really curious to find their way to use chat QPT to your best advantage on content and not destroy brands, but actually enhancing.
00:33:55
Speaker
Good job on the rapid fire and great job on answering all my questions about the volatile, fascinating, interesting B2B and SaaS landscapes.
Connect with Mitch Solway for Further Insights
00:34:05
Speaker
Where can people learn more about you and what you do? I mean, the best place is on LinkedIn. Just look for Mitch Solway and you'll find me.
00:34:14
Speaker
You can go to my website, there's really not a lot there at thinkmixthink.com, but LinkedIn is the best thing. And don't be shy, feel free to connect, send me a message. You know, I love meeting new people. It's probably my favorite thing to do. Feel free to reach out if you've got any questions. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe by Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company looking for more sales and leads, but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk.
00:34:43
Speaker
You can reach out to me via email, mark at markevans.ca. I'll talk to you soon.